scarcely to be discerned, were the gentle slopes of the inhabited land; to the north and south, in flashes of silver, gleamed the muddy bed of a dead arm of the river, through which now, at low tide, only a meagre trickle ran; and ahead lay nothing but destruction. From a distance, the concrete shells, shored up with stones,
in which for most of my lifetime hundreds of boffins had been at work devising new weapons systems, looked (probably because of their odd conical shape) like the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. My sense of being on ground intended for purposes transcending the profane was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas,
which seemed quite out of place in these military installations. But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe. To me too, as for some latter-day stranger ignorant of the nature of our society wandering about among heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery, the beings who had once lived and worked here were an enigma, as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings inside the bunkers, the iron rails under the ceilings, the hooks on the still partially tiled walls, the shower heads the size of plates, the ramps and the soakaways. Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words. All I do know is that I finally walked along the raised embankment from the Chinese Wall bridge past the old pumphouse towards the landing stage, to my left in the fading fields a collection of black Nissen huts, and to my right, across the river, the mainland. As I was sitting on the breakwater waiting for the ferryman, the evening sun emerged from behind the clouds, bathing in its light the far-reaching arc of the seashore. The tide was advancing up the river, the water was shining like tinplate, and from the radio masts high above the marshes came an even, scarcely audible hum. The roofs and towers of Orford showed among the tree tops, seeming so close that I could touch them. There, I thought, I was once at home. And then, through the growing dazzle of the light in my eyes, I suddenly saw, amidst the darkening colours, the sails of the long-vanished windmills turning heavily in the wind.
9. The Temple of Jerusalem — Charlotte Ives and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand — Memoirs from beyond the grave — In Ditchingham churchyard — Ditchingham Park — The hurricane of 16th October, 1987
After Orford, I headed inland travelling on one of the Eastern Counties Omnibus Company's red buses, going through Woodbridge to Yoxford where I set out on foot in a north-westerly direction along the old Roman road, into the thinly populated countryside that lies to the south of Harleston. I walked for nearly four hours, and in all that time I saw nothing apart from harvested cornfields stretching away into the distance under a sky heavy with clouds, and dark islands of trees surrounding the farmsteads which stood well back from the road, a mile or two apart from each other. I encountered hardly any vehicles while treading this seemingly unending straight, and I knew then as little as I know now whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure or a pain. At times on that day, which I recall as being both leaden and unreal, a gap would open up among the billowing clouds. Then the rays of the sun would reach down to the earth, lighting up patches here and there and making a fan-shaped pattern as they descended, of the sort that used to appear in religious pictures symbolizing the presence above us of grace and providence. It was afternoon by the time I came to the lane which leaves the Roman road across a cattle grid and leads through a meadow to Chestnut Tree Farm, an ancient moated house, where Thomas Abrams has been working on a model of the Temple of Jerusalem for a good twenty years. Now in his early sixties, Thomas Abrams has been a farmer all his life. He took to model-making soon after he left the village school, and like many of his kind he would spend the long winter evenings glueing little pieces of wood together to build all sorts of barques and sailing boats and famous ships such as the Cutty Sark and the Mary Rose. This pastime soon developed into a passion, and together with the interest he had long taken, as a Methodist lay preacher, in the factual basis of Biblical history, it gave him the idea, one evening towards the end of the Sixties, just as he was bedding the farm animals down for the night (so he told me), of recreating the Temple of Jerusalem exactly as it was at the beginning of our time. — Chestnut Tree Farm is a silent and somewhat sombrous place. Never yet, on my many visits, having come along the lane and crossed the little bridge over the moat to go up to the house, have I found anyone about. Even tapping with the heavy brass knocker brings nobody to the door. The big chestnut tree in the front yard, which must be several hundred years old, is motionless. Even the ducks on the water in the moat do not stir. If one takes a look inside through the window, it seems as if the mirror-bright dining table, the mahogany chest of drawers, the armchairs of burgundy red velvet, the hearth, and the ornaments and china figurines set out on the mantelpiece, had been drowsing there undisturbed for ever, so that one might well think that the owners have departed or died. But just as one is about to turn away, having waited and listened a while and feeling that one must have come at an inopportune moment, one sees Thomas Abrams waiting a little way off. And that is just how it was when I arrived there on foot from Yoxford on that late summer afternoon. As always, Thomas Abrams was wearing his green overalls and watchmaker's glasses. We exchanged a few words of no consequence as we walked to the barn in which the Temple was now nearing completion. Owing, however, to the size of the model, which covers nearly ten square yards, and to the minuteness and precision of the individual pieces, this process of completion is going so slowly that it is difficult to see any change from one year to the next, even though Thomas Abrams has almost given up farming, he told me, in order to be able to devote most of his time to the building of the Temple. He had just a few animals left, he said, and that more out of affection than any wish to profit from them. As I must have seen, the broad arable fields around the house had all been put back to pasture, and the standing hay was sold to one of his neighbours. It was ages since he had last driven a tractor. Hardly a day now passed that he did not work on the Temple for at least an hour or two. He had spent the past month painting about a hundred of the more than two thousand figures, no more than a quarter of an inch high, that peopled the Temple precincts. Then there are the alterations that need to be made, Thomas Abrams said, whenever my research leads to new findings. It is well known that archaeologists are divided amongst themselves as to the exact layout of the Temple; nor are my own often hard-gained insights always more reliable than the views of the squabbling scholars, even though my model is now thought to be the most accurate replica of the Temple ever produced. Thomas Abrams told me that he now received visitors from all over the world, historians from Oxford and Jehovah's Witnesses from Manchester, archaeological experts from the Holy Land, ultraorthodox Jews from London and representatives of evangelist sects from California, who had put to him the proposition that a full-size replica of the Temple should be built in the Nevada desert under his instructions. Various television companies and publishers were seeking to entice him, and Lord Rothschild had even offered to house the completed Temple in the entrance hall of his mansion near Aylesbury, and grant access to the public. The only advantage which had accrued to him personally as a result of the interest created by his work was that his neighbours, together with those members of his own family who had more or less openly expressed their doubts about whether he was of sound mind, were now a little more restrained in their disparaging comments. He could quite understand, said Thomas Abrams, how easy it was to consider someone barmy, who for so many years immersed himself deeper and deeper into a fantasy world and spent his time in an unheated barn fiddling about with such an apparently never ending, meaningless and pointless project, particularly when that same person was failing to look after his fields and to collect the subsidies he was entitled to. While the opinion of his neighbours, who had become fat on the senseless Brussels agricultural policy, had never concerned him that much, the fact that it must have at times have seemed to his wife and children that he was out of his mind was something that weighed on him rather more than he admitted. And so, he said, the day that Lord Rothschild drove into my yard in his limousine was indeed an important turning point in my life, because ever since then even the family have looked on me as a scholar engaged in serious study. On the other hand, of course, the constantly growing number of visitors keeps me from my work, and the work that still remains to be done is enormous. You might well say that because of my increasingly accurate knowledge, the task now seems in every respect more difficult to complete than ten or fifteen years ago. One of the American evangelists once asked me whether the Temple was inspired by divine revelation. And when I said to him it's nothing to do with divine revelation, he was very disappointed. If it had been divine revelation, I said to him, why would I have had to make alterations as I went along? No, it's just research really and work, endless hours of work, Thomas Abrams said. You had to study the Mishnah, he continued, and every other available source, and Roman architecture, and the distinctive features of the edifices raised by Herod in Masada and Borodium, because that was the only way of arriving at the right ideas. In the final analysis, our entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change over the years and which time and again cause one to tear down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from scratch. I would more than likely never have started building the Temple if I had had any notion of how my work would get out of hand, and of the demands it would make on me as it became ever more complex. After all, if the Temple is to create the impression of being true to life, I have to make every one of the tiny coffes on the ceilings, every one of the hundreds of columns, and every single one of the many thousands of diminutive stone blocks by hand, and paint them as well. Now, as the edges of my field of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time.