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We’re walking down the edge of the Teign... the signs say
this is the Templer Walk, but I'm not convinced this is
anything... have we lost the track? We're just on the river
bed and we’re lucky it’s low tide. Anjali's with me - she's
an Indian-born actress - she's just come from touring New
York with the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of
Midnight's Children and I’m dragging her along this
damp, slippery river bed, pointing out where I think the
Bishop's Palace is on the other side. Underfoot its very
slippery and a bit soft... and the rocks are covered in dark
green seaweed... there's a dead crab here and there... and
another... and another.... there's lots of them. I hadn't
noticed them at first, they're green shore crabs... good
disguise in the weed, but once we see one we can’t help
seeing them, shell after shell – like when you learn a new
word and then you see it everywhere - and the crabs all
seem to have been eaten very efficiently by something,
1
hollowed out from the back so the shells are
left…perfect… untouched except for a little hole behind the
legs. I say to Anjali that it must have been the herring
gulls...
2
next to Number 1 Warehouse. I had to shelter in doorways
and against walls and gravestones as my paranoia circled
overhead, or perched itself on gutters and gargoyles. I made
for the unusual shape of St James the Less, hugging the
walls of the houses.
3
was about ten. And for a couple of days I’d live in off-
season limbo, the bits of town not shut would be eerily
quiet – I think that’s why I loved those old TV programmes
like The Avengers when everyone in the world but the
heroes fall asleep and there’s free shopping everywhere…
and those George Romero zombies take over the world
movies – Dawn of The Dead - because they make the
world a playground again, they make shopping centres into
landscapes, they make it my off season in Paignton in 1965
again. In the film of Dean Koontz’s Phantoms there even a
line about being “out of season”. Tarkovsky’s Stalker that
I saw re-enacted in a Budapest studio theatre, inside a
wooden box, us, the audience, peering through large slats
into a shifting dune of sand. And last year the herring gulls
– I thought were trying to eat my brains. And, though I
didn’t feel like enjoying it at the time – I was doing that
world as playground exploration thing, but with the fear, as
if the zombies were there too, this time. Anyway, the walk
was about finding those precious feelings again, and the
place where I felt them.
It’s only as I write this
that I notice that I chose
to walk in the summer.
4
large hotel that I remember as sandy red and magical, like a
fairy castle… in fact, it’s not red, but it’s called red… it’s
the Redcliffe Hotel, though I think – from a painting that’s
in there – that it was once and briefly red… and the reason
it’s magical is that it’s a wormhole to India, the design of it
is all based on Indian buildings from Delhi – the Red Fort,
the Qutb Minar, the Jami Musjid - and that’s why Anjali
was with me, because I wanted to travel not just across
time, but also across sensibility.
5
house - he was as paranoid about everything as I was of
herring gulls. A quiet man, a deaf man. At the end, his best
friend was the local policeman who’d blow his whistle
through the letter box to get him to answer the door. Oliver
Heaviside guessed that all round the planet we live on there
must be some kind of ionised layer that radio waves would
bounce off when we broadcasted them rather than just drift
off into space. It’s now called the Kennely/Heaviside
Layer. It’s up there, all the time we’re walking, exploring,
above the layer of herring gulls, our thoughts and messages
bouncing off it and back
down to us again.
6
you see this shape and get this feeling there’s always
something extraordinary just beyond. When we get there
it’s like a magical grove, you’d miss it in a car – like you’d
miss that silvery place in the rain along the New North
Road just before Taddyforde Gate, it’s almost too scary to
stay in, like they built a motorway through Stonehenge and
you broke down in the middle of it. We find a pub in the
next village – Stokeinteignhead - appropriately the Wild
Goose – because we’ve been chasing it without knowing
what it is! It does wonderful food - and we sit out in its
back garden, with the church, and there’s sheep in the field,
and these shed-like cranky lean-to’s, and Anjali tells me
that the day has taken her back to childhood in Bangalore,
reading Enid Blyton adventures.
I eat the faggots – they are so rich and fatty, they are
overwhelming. When I was a kid faggots to me meant tins
of Brains Faggots and I wouldn’t eat them - I thought they
were made of brains. We had an image of Ganesh on our
wall at home. My dad brought it back from a business trip
to Calcutta in the late 1970s, but I remember it all the way
back to much younger days. I’ve projected the memory
backwards. Ganesh gets his head cut off, but rather than
have to carry it to a shed, he gets a new – elephantine –
prodigious appetite for memory.
Was that what I was doing? Because the more I walked the
less I could remember anything about these places I’d been
to as a child. And yet I really wanted to get back to those
feelings I’d had.
7
When my Pop died my Nan said: “he loved you, you
know” – and that wasn’t a word generally overused in our
family. I missed that feeling of returning through the mist
to Paignton Harbour – just me and Pop and the fisherman –
feeling safe in the mist, wrapped up as warm in that as in
my old rust jumper. I suppose I still miss my Nan’s
pancakes in the shapes of any animals I wanted…
elephants, mainly, and strange mutant shapes, patterns,
would appear in batter,
spreading out across the
pan… and then the sugar
and lemon… those were
the feelings I wanted to get
back… the sugar and
lemon of being a kid, the
stick of rock and the sea-
smelling crabs in a bucket.
8
inside you curl round the stairs into an inlayed wooden
floored music room, the shape of a Hindu swastika in the
centre. When I got out at Dawlish Warren, the first place
I’d intended to go and visit, maybe knock on the door – the
old wooden station house – was a pile of charred beams
and ashes. There was a sign: “Arson. 5 am at the “Old
Station”.
9
have said that either. I was quickly on the way to becoming
a suspect… which also only happens in the movies… so I
made my excuses and left.
10
brieze-block on the other, the trees make a portal and the
gate hasn’t been opened in years, it’s a place for useless
ritual waiting, like the gate in Kafka’s The Trial. A place
for darshan. Up the hill, turn right down the lane past
Golden Sands holiday park and there’s a strange doorway
four feet up the bank, hovering. An hour later after finding
my way past the shells of boarded up properties, the ruins
of monumental stones and mini-gardens in metal bowls on
the industrial estate, vacant units like missing teeth, over
the way from the end of Shutterton Lane houses with
names like Deodar and Keranda, every garden a Z World, I
find I’m on the other side of that hovering gateway, inside
the Lady’s Mile Holiday Park – there’s an accidentally
significant pattern in its concrete step, but I can’t remember
what it was significant of and up at the top of the holiday
park, I sit down among the fairy rings - there’s this great
bowling view to these white buildings, it says hospital on
the map, but I still don’t really know what they are, the
kind of buildings you got in Quatermass movies used for
sinister operations, and there’s a big house up there too, but
I’ve never been there… perhaps its connected to the
weirdness up on the top of Little Haldon… all I know is
that it’s called Mamhead House – because it’s built on a
hill shaped like a breast - getting back towards the sea - me
and Tom, the sound designer, walk up to this strange place,
there’s no name, but an odd acronym and a sign that says:
“No unauthorized chemicals permitted on this site” – it’s a
big place and part of it is like a windowless barn out of the
mid-west nowhere bad movie USA, the kind of place where
something grim, but gothic in a scene from Jeepers
Creepers might take place, but it’s new it’s not old, and yet
11
it feels haunted already - it seems to be completely
unmanned, automatic… but there’s a driver delivering
something and he sees us and comes over… sees us
looking… he walks over, a long way: “What’s happening?
What’s the crack?” he says, pretending to be friendly, but
he’s aggressive, interrogating. Just in case we’re terrorists,
set on poisoning the water supply. We’re acting out a little
microcosmic agit-prop of world tension next to a sewage
farm. His last question is “Which way are you walking
next?” But that’s the thing with ‘drifting’, isn’t it? As if he
were going to have us followed.
12
Under the Creep I take a left across the dunes towards the
Warren itself. My red and white walking wand attracts
attention. The Warren is a spit of sand, always changing
shape. The far end of the Warren is a Third Space, the
dialectical synthesis of human effort and nature: and both
of them are missing. So, no binary banality. Almost every
trace of the houses that stood on the sand seventy years ago
has gone. It seems natural on the sand and yet there are
gabions buried not far down, among the bones of sailors
that cry out in the pages of local ‘history’ pamphlets.
History is a ghost here, the sea is a fugitive from justice.
Dogfish turn into the soles of shoes. Some miniaturist
regularly updates a sculpture of driftwood and stones.
Large flocks of birds march and flutter like the letters of a
language not settled upon yet.
13
London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990) Bahbha describes the
mechanism for this so: “the sign of the ‘cultured’ is the
ability to appreciate cultures in a kind of musée imaginaire;
as though one should be able to collect and appreciate
them… to understand and locate cultures … only
eventually to transcend them…” (p.208, The Third
Space.) Bhabha’s antidote to this is “the notion of a politics
which is based on unequal, uneven, multiple and potentially
antagonistic, political identities. This must not be confused
with some form of autonomous, individualist pluralism
(and the corresponding notion of cultural diversity)… (but
made) in that productive space of the construction of
culture as difference…” (p.208-9, The Third Space.)
14
The intention of this particular
fragmenting of the self is not a
“kind of pure anarchic liberalism”,
but rather the “recognition of the
importance of the alienation of the
self in the construction of forms of
solidarity.” (p.213, The Third
Space.)
15
b/ Now one of you becomes a catalyst and moves around
the group changing everyone’s action in the same way -
…till everyone is doing the same new action…
16
mold comes to move, in its collective patterns – without a
pacemaker cell – as its catalysts/counter-catalysts turn it on
and off. (This is what I am trying to do – to create the
equivalent of a BZ reaction that maintains the availability
of ‘free energy’ and resists the collapse into the easy
hybridity that Bhabha ciriticises, the meme-complexity that
is so hard to resist. For a limited, agitated ‘journey’ of
catalyst and counter-catalyst, to hold ‘out of time’ the free-
floated ‘simpler’ memes (a process that in Bunyan’s
writing Robert Blatchford calls “selection”), not real but
ideological origins in a curved field that resists snapping or
disconnection.
Now do that again, but this time as you get closer, become
like one organism…
17
What sort of pattern did that
create? And how did you find that
you were moving?”
18
Heaviside, London: E. & F.N. Spon 1951, first published
1912.)
“9/ now using the forms and patterns you’ve used today,
without any discussion…
a/ make a city…”
19
identity… they are always subject to intrinsic forms of
translation… only constituted in relation to that otherness
internal to their own symbol-forming activity which makes
them decentred structures - … then we see that all forms of
culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me
the importance is not to be able to trace two original
moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to
me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to
emerge. This third space displaces the histories that
constitute it…” (p.209 – 211, The Third Space)
20
the river to graze on the Warren and before that there was a
Royalist fort on the tip defeated and destroyed, but once
you know – then the place is haunted with them; figures as
translucent as the dogfish skin, the last cannibalised houses
rising up around me on the waves, people running up flags
and playing tennis and fleeing from the raging tide. There
are Christmas trees buried under the dunes. The Greenland
Lake, once muddy inlet and then open saltmarsh is now
grassland and scrub, the ghosts of these different ways of
being a place blossom and compete: Californian Tree Lupin
(a garden escapee), Autumn Ladies Tresses and Southern
Marsh Orchids.
Things change. The warren has only been here 7,000 years,
the remains of a 500,000 year old desert. Like fire things
change.
21
photograph there’s a policeman striding up the wall after
me. Below me to seaward three Christmas trees lodge in
the rocks. On the landward side the spectral outlines of a
chalking competition. It’s not yet 9am. “We’re looking for
a man – 47…” I was 47. “…grey hair…” It’s me! What’s
happened? “Slim build.” I said to the officer: “Well, I’m
47, but even my best friends …” They’re looking for a man
with depression. I look out for, but don’t see this man. Only
more policemen. There’s a bunch of flowers tied to a new
green metal bench. “Donated for the future with loving
memories of the past.” Looking two ways at once. I met the
policeman again: “What a lovely day,” he said, “I can
almost see my house…” and he pointed over to Exmouth.
“Can you see the church, it’s just behind that, in the
haze…” and he waved to it, as if his wife might have been
looking out for him. The Langstone Cliff Hotel appeared up
on my left, nestled in a dip, snug in its modern
endoskeleton, like a hermit crab or a ‘lazy’ lobster. A
misanthropic old railwayman tells me the police have
arrested four lads for the fire at the Old Station House…
maybe they’re the four lads in the 1930s photo. I ask at the
Red Rock Snack bar what the round shape under the water
is? “Dinosaur’s nest…” she says. Time gets mixed up on
this part of the coast. “No, it’s a tower they built to stop the
water washing away the rock… didn’t work… it all fell
down…”
22
railway tracks whirr just before the express explodes. Like
the channa puri Anjali told me about being on sale on
Indian beaches – put into the mouth whole and bite into the
puri bread and the sweet and sour sauce bursts onto your
tongue. The train passes so close it seems to burst from puri
bread through my head. This is where they filmed The
Ghost Train – Arthur Askey running up the track… “I
thang yoooo! I thang yoooo! You’ve been wonderful to
me!” - the ghostliest thing about that film is the plot –
Arnold Ridley wrote it – the old man in Dad’s Army –
“Can I be excused, Mister Mainwaring?” - his ‘ghosts’ turn
out to be gun-smuggling West Country Bolsheviks… is
there something we ought to be told? Did they have a
revolution in the West Country and no one noticed? History
is an odd thing. It keeps changing.
23
In the concrete, someone has written “JUST WATCH OUT
MUSIC LAND”.
24
curved space into attractiveness. Even if you’re walking
uphill there’s no effort in the walking. Because you’re
walking another kind of geography. It’s a kind of physics
of walking… Albert Einstein discovered that gravity, the
thing holding us onto the Earth also pulls everything else,
just enough so that space is bent, curvy. And there’s a kind
of gravity at work here, pulling you towards the good
places… if you know how to feel it… and once you do you
can skateboard down the side of those basins of
attraction…
25
behind me. I imagine them next to the telly in a living
room, I imagine them being buried under sand. The homes
opposite are thousands of eyes. Argus the giant lounging on
the hill. This is a magical spot to see everything – “RUN,
you tart!!” (student performance, Site, Landscape and
Performance module, Dartington College of Arts, 2002) -
the carving up of land, the shape of a town, the
suggestiveness of the hills… to sit and see those shapes
forming inside you.
Eventually I’m too excited to sit still and look anymore and
I set off back towards the centre of town, slipping down the
side of that valley of attraction – the hum of people – there
are foxgloves everywhere – like there was a massacre of
saints – I enter a tunnel of small trees and when I come out
there is the beached whale skeleton of a huge glassless
greenhouse on my right, majestic and pathetic, full of
weeds. Then another even bigger hangar-like greenhouse –
this time glazed, but almost empty. I stand in the doorway,
wondering if I walk in whether all the roof will fall like
melting ice … I’ve walked through glass once… I hit it
with my forehead and it was as if the inside of my eyes
cracked… I stand on the threshold – toppling into the
expanse of sunlit space – emptiness tangible, syrupy…
since I started walking my days are full of these spaces …
another near derelict one alive with chaotic plants and then
another, with missing panes, but in use and full of orderly
plants … the path leads past the owners’ home, but I don’t
call for some reason – perhaps it is too sad – the violet
industry was once a fragrant economy around Dawlish, a
brief trade in scent and colour, the transformation of such
26
delicate things into dead labour, into capital.. the trains full
of violet and the aroma of death, of empire, the purple of
priest’s vestments and damp vestries.
27
big money in eighteen-century India Bonds – they have a
bank in the city that has its own artesian well.
28
In the grease layer just back from the beach there’s the
curdling mix of aggression and helplessness, pushchair and
football shirt. Yet, on the beach with my kids I love this
place. It’s so easy to be here. But, as usual, the working
class get let down – because no one will let them be
exceptional enough. Only on the beach where we’re all
stripped down to trunks and bras – where flags and logos
and clubs are partially voided - does the goodness come
through the fat and ketchup and the warmth is as strong as
the sun. Grandad Smith sat on the beach in a three piece
suit and trilby. He was an RSM in the British Army in
India. We had curry at home long before people went out
‘for an Indian’, my dad despised people who ate Vesta
Curry. One of the carved furniture pieces with swirling
plant decoration that Grandad brought back from India is a
small octagonal table that looks like the church in
Teignmouth.
Next day I set off for Teignmouth. On the sea wall at Boat
Cove I ask an elderly angler what he’s trying to catch.
“Anything edible.” Up from the train set model front of
29
beach huts and concrete painted with obvious instructions
(where I’m due to be performing in Summer 2004) I zig
zag up the cliff paths. I’m almost linking up with West
Cliff Road again, but I cut left along the top, past a series of
bricked up and abused shelters and viewing platforms, dead
spaces it’s not easy to sit in anymore, like sleeping on
graves. There’s a limit to how many people can sit in a
shelter and after it’s used up the shelters discomfort new
visitors. T. S Eliot should have written The Wasteland in a
shelter in Torquay, his wife Vivien had convalesced there
from the same kind of nervous breakdown, but Tom went
to Margate and wrote it in a shelter there instead. So
somewhere in Torquay is a seaside shelter in which The
Wasteland wasn’t written.
30
can see the Parson and the Clerk off Holcombe. I climb
down to the beach and once again I walk a winding path
defined by the in and out of the breaking waves.
One day when the Vicar of Dawlish and his Clerk had
finished collecting tithes in Teignmouth they set off back
home by the cliff path… or, no… they were visiting the
dying Bishop of Exeter with hopes of replacing him, after
what they felt was a successful bedside attendance they set
off back home by the cliff path… when to their surprise…
but, wait… sometimes there’s mist in the story and they get
lost despite their familiarity with the route… like a drift,
like the Brechtian verfremdem, the quotidian process is
disrupted and becomes visible… when to their surprise they
saw a house they’d never seen before – brightly lit and
ringing with the sounds of merry-making - and at its door
stood the host, beckoning them to join the party. No, it was
only when they got inside that they met him and even then
they never caught more than a glimpse of his form in
silhouette. The weather was cold and misty and they
accepted the offer of hospitality and imbibed freely from
the drinks they were handed. When it came time to go the
Parson, disorientated by mist and drink, inquired from his
host which way they should take. “I must have a guide even
if it be the Devil himself!” The host smiled and said he
would be their guide, leading them through the mist to a
road that was unfamiliar to the Parson and the Clerk.
Warmed by the wine, they set off at speed until they found
themselves up to their boot tops in water. Suddenly a
demonic shriek of laughter rang out and a great wave
covered them and dragged them out to sea.
31
The crazy house had vanished –
The breakers surged and ran;
And to the flanks of their horses
Clung master and clung man.
A.L. Salmon.
Look out for a house that isn’t there. Something like that
dead-eyed house coming in to Dawlish, ones that fade in
and out of existence: the old wooden shops and the Psychic
32
Hut at Dawlish Warren, the eyeless, burned-out old
people’s home in Teignmouth, the minaret towers of the
Redcliffe Hotel.
33
Dingley Dell – BEWARE OF THE DOGS – note the plural
- and I can see a derelict chalet and an overgrown caravan.
This cliff edge with its barbed wire, high fences and
derelict property is a wild west, a borderland, every wall
just a little bit too high and every gate a little too secure to
be innocent. Maybe the house was here and it’s blighted the
cliff.
34
No relation to Mrs Slocombe’s pussy I hope, but fear the
worst.
35
my small coin: waves of tiny metal stumps massage my
palm for a few seconds.
36
commandeered double-decker bus. The bus driver must
have been a real bus driver because he behaves as if he’s in
a very serious continental film. When the chase was shown
locally it bewildered the audience with its geographical
leaps. I bought the video recently. When Norman alighted
at the station (somewhere else standing in for ‘Tinmouth’)
he leaves the station and reappears at the top of the railway
bridge road walking back towards the station itself. As if he
were caught in a loop. The editor had constructed a map of
time doors and wormholes.
37
your houses opportunism, the refusal to fall for the lure of
theory, of self-reliance and pig-headedness… the thing I’ve
been carrying around and fighting in my head for forty
years…
38
floating far out to sea, still intact, maybe a field of corn
growing in it. Where would it get to? Caught by currents
and Gulf Stream and tides and freak waves, would it
finally come to wash up alongside the Teignmouth
Electron, in the shadow of a never completed futuristic
Bubble House on a Cayman Islands beach? A wooden
bucket of accidental agriculture. Up the course of this
stream a party of Dawlish tradesmen, armed with guns and
bludgeons, traced the Devil’s Footprints through a February
night in 1855. Anjali is puzzled by the Devil, though she
was educated at Convent School near Bangalore she is
perplexed by a fallen angel with no redeeming features at
all. Total evil in one figure is something alien to the Indian
pantheon of gods. Rama, Vishnu and Shiva are three faces
of a shifting imagery in which destruction is all a part with
preservation and creation.
39
village there. Ashcombe is the only Devon church
dedicated to him. An altercation with two robbers led to his
head being lopped off, at which he picked up his head from
the ground and walked back to his shed - foxgloves
springing up where his blood fell. Today his church is
white and colourless. Anjali is a little shocked by what she
sees as disrespect in the ill-kemptness of the church – but I
think she’s actually responding to something that happened
five hundred years ago, when Protestantism ripped down
all the images and whited out all the colours. Last year I
was given the Stephen Joseph Award by the Society For
Theatre Research to explore “Street Performance and
Public Ritual in 1830s to 1930s Exeter” and in the cool,
quiet of the Devon and Exeter Institution on Cathedral
Close it was to the complex clash of regional, national,
class and sectarian identity-making in an ongoing
negotiation around iconoclasm that I was continually
drawn. With few grand secular public buildings, with no
coherent vocabulary of dramatic, cinematic or any other
visual local language, the iconography of Devon is fought
over on the fringes of processions, openings and shuttings,
in street behaviour and cardboard antique gates. A leaflet
from the church says that a statue of the Virgin Mary now
appears at services, a remnant of the anti-clerical
destruction of the Spanish Civil War: a strange reciprocity
for the seventeenth century Iberian prayers said for the
nearby Lidwell or Lady’s Well Chapel destroyed by order
of Henry the Eighth. By then they were saying prayers for
an empty space.
40
At the Shed Summit I handed out pieces of modelling clay
– in the way a Hindu worshipper might pick a stone or a
piece of wayside clay and mould a momentary “ksanika
linga’, calling Shiva into it for a moment, then giving him
leave to go and dropping it again - asking people to shape
the clay into something like their head, so they could carry
another point of view with them, in their pocket or in their
hand.
41
public buildings – so why is it here? A mystery. The trees
close over our heads. I can see from the map that we are
walking between ancient graves.
42
“Alien Invader What you need to know. The Law. The
Wildlife and countryside Act has made it illegal to
spread Japanese knotweed.”
(Environment Agency)
43
Luscombe Castle. Close behind were the Honourable
Richard and Lady Florrie Westenra arriving to move in to
their new home in Bishopsteignton. Their planes had blue
fuselages and golden wings. In 1931, worried about lack of
radio contact from her husband’s yacht somewhere in the
Mediterranean, Florrie set out with the local professional
pilot, Bill Parkhouse, in a DH80A Puss Moth, routing via
Farnborough, the Rhone Valley and Montelimar – my Nan
would eat chocolates called Montelimar – until they found
the Honourable Richard in a port on the Riviera.
“Japanese knotweed
44
Fallopia japonica
Case against: Introduced in the early 1800s; spread
countrywide by the 1960s… the Government has
spent millions trying to eradicate it
Case for: Mr Mabey is “relaxed” about the “attractive”
plant… In cities it supports many native insects.”
45
The way down is a path of flints. Like the path of rocks
from Oddicombe. Even on a wet day it speaks of dryness
and bones. The rock exposed here is just under the skin all
the way along the arched backs of these Little Haldon Hills.
The path becomes more and more loaded with dread and
apprehension. A gulf opens up on the left, a parade of trees
on the right. The flints point us into a field of long trouser-
soaking grass. The ruts in the ploughed field nibble for a
turned ankle. We stumble with the ruins in the corners of
our eyes. A couple of iron gates and there is the chapel of
the Mad Monk. And there – in the floor of what was
consecrated ground, the well still remains – the location for
a Japanese horror film – down which his victims were
stuffed and from which their bones, according to the Sites
and Monuments register, no reference to a source, were
recovered, though R. H. C. Barham “who should have
known better” claimed that anything dropped in the well
would slip under the Teign and reappear in Kent’s Cavern.
The tiles from the chapel floor disappeared into the keeping
of Dawlish Men’s Club (founded 1880) which in its turn
has disappeared. The murders, denied by sceptics, were
recovered by Romantics. A single wall of the chapel stands,
like a hungry one-eyed monster. The Monk would lure
women to the chapel, rob them and throw their bodies
down the well. Or he would disguise himself as a traveller
and rob the wealthy. Or he was a child-murderer from
another place. Or a rapist from Gidley. Or he was a clerk at
Lidwell whose ideas became unorthodox, defamed the
Bishop and was declared a ‘satellite of Satan’. Or was
thrown down his own well by a devout sailor who, raising
his eyes to heaven in prayer, saw the monk’s shadow, knife
46
in hand, on the chapel wall above – those gulls flickering
like knives across the pavement. Or he is a jumbled
memory of the violence to the chapel itself – by men of
puritan religion who hated the voluptuous curve of an
image, the rich colour of a symbol, the sumptuous sheen of
an imitation of flesh. Or maybe something older. History
stretching and distorting him like some kind of monster, a
patchwork, catch-all evil. The place is pulled and bent in
the same way – a 1980 photograph of the ruins that
revealed a complete chapel has in its turn, apparently,
disappeared. Stones from the chapel interweave with those
of Lidwell Farm – as if this were a place where certainties
have disintegrated – as if these places of evil cannot hold
their own forms, but borrow and burrow others. In 1894 the
‘Transactions Of the Devonshire Association’ recorded that
“after the suppression of the chapel this well was found to
contain a large number of human bones which it is affirmed
were those of women and young children.” But no
reference. There was never any parish for this building to
serve so was it always, like St Thomas in the wild, a
suppression of an older place?
47
And if they found the bones of the victims, where is their
treasure?
Is it in the landscape?
48
town burn in 1690, where some accounts float the Devil’s
merry-blazing house that entertained the Parson and the
Clerk, the exclusiveness of the golf course and the hostile
suspiciousness defining space by those who are not its
members, a sad pall across the real friendliness of – I think
it was – the Club Secretary who guided me over the course
– and the Mad Monk, child-murderer and thief, who turns
the disguise of an ‘empty’ place into the desolation of
murder and greed, stilled the mouths of children for the
sound of leaves jittering in the wind and the gulping of
water in the well as a body sinks. It is here. It is now. This
is where the Devil’s Footprints lead – right into the hearts
of real people who reached and reach deep down into the
well within them, and twist the most human and 50,000
year old modern capacity to bring one thing to another into
the destruction of human, chattery, wandering, laughing life
by making it a dead, silenced landscape.
49
feet, luring travellers onto his mare, from which you can
never dismount, but are condemned to hunt a phantom stag
across the moor forever – we watch the closely studied
mutating sandbanks in the mouth of the Teign, monitored
by cameras, their flat images mutated into another
viewpoint at the Coastal Imaging Lab at Oregon State
University where “the application of complex geometry
computers are used to transpose the oblique camera images
into map-like plan views. (Like aerial shots.)”
In the RAF they called him “Crow”. “To the extent that he
was religious, his religion was scientific precision; if a
thing was true, it must be supremely logical. It must
compute.” When Crowhurst stood, successfully, as a
candidate for councillor his election manifesto was in the
form of a computer programme – with multiple choice
questions, the logical answers to which led inexorably to
Donald Crowhurst: “Liberalism computed.” But all this
train timetable logic was struggling with another part of
him – the part that took him up onto a lonely hill above
Nether Stowey mixing blood with a friend, seeking Black
Magic powers. He had “that kind of over-imaginative mind
50
that was always dreaming reality into the state it wanted it
to be.”
51
and transistors that he hadn’t had time to assemble. Wires
ran from gadgets and devices all over the boat to a hole
under the red cushions of Crowhurst’s seat. When the boat
was found drifting empty in the Atlantic, its skipper
missing presumed drowned, the seat was lifted. The wires
ended only in a tangle of themselves. There was nothing to
process all the information. Crowhurst had lost the
controlling centre; but, in gnostic transport, he had no
pattern to save him, no anti-catalyst to right him in the
water.
52
by its duration which in eternity is so short as to be
meaningless.”
53
fantasy journey. But he began to feel that the real and the
false journey were now accompanied by a third.
54
Because of him, we can all walk the journey that he
pioneered for us, without the fatal risks, rather than the
world we can circumambulate an icon of it; it might be a
building like the Redcliffe Hotel, it might be a rock on the
beach, a burned out old people’s home. “…we all spend our
days blithely in the context of the ancient and the distant .
The buildings around us are built from ancient sediment…
The ground that we stand upon is an archive constituted of
the distant past. The evolution of life is embodied in every
face we see… We are the products of processes that are in
general so slow compared to our lives, that it make scarcely
any difference to the way we live if we are totally ignorant
of them … My father, alone in a small boat and struggling
for a metaphysical position, was in a sense lost in time… If
all we do is laugh, we may miss something.” (A practical
approach to mapping time, Simon Crowhurst, in Tacita
Dean, London: Tate Gallery
Publishing, 2001)
55
had hardly got beyond the Ness when his companion,
appalled by both his seamanship and his lack of morals,
jumped ship, like Miss Teignmouth might have, and swam
for shore. In his panic the companion had knocked the bag
of earth into the bottom of the boat and trod the seeds into
it. When the rower saw what his friend had done he was so
upset he cried. And when his tears fell on the half-buried
seeds they sprouted into flowers and before the young man
could row out of sight, beyond the Ness, he couldn’t see
out of the boat for the jungle of plants. He became confused
and began to dig in the earth. He knew the treasure was
buried in there somewhere, but couldn’t remember quite
where it was supposed to be. The last anyone saw of the
young man he was floating far away from the cove that he
had intended to plunder, he was digging fast and furiously,
sure that every spadeful brought him closer to the truth
about everything, expecting at any moment
a sudden rush of revelation that he would
treasure all his life.
56
the cliffs there’s a rowing boat; filled with sand and rubble
by the sea and the crumbling overhang. A man sunbathes
dangerously.
57
A robin flies into the Conservatory Restaurant and perches
on the back of a chair. A spy for the herring gulls. On the
ferry across the estuary I feel like Tippi Hendren. I’m
crossing the route of Donald Crowhurst’s Teignmouth
Electron. I’m always crossing these paths and routes. Up on
the Haldon Hills it’s the routes of the lonely victims of the
mad monk. All the time I weave in and out of the Devil’s
Footprints; appeared one Thursday night in the snow of
winter 1855. Some said it was a German swan carrying a
donkey’s shoe, others that a sea monster came out the water
at Totnes and crawled to the Exe.
Back home on the train. Two men are now erecting a wire
fence around the rectangle of rubble on Dawlish Warren
Station. The shapes in the pancake batter, the imprints in
the 1855 snow, the eightfold geometry of St James the Less
and at Dawlish Warren Station – the ‘Old Station’ house
had become a shape; at first a rectangle of rubble, burned
wood and fragments of personal possessions, each day it
becomes more abstract, like an archaeological record. Bron
Fane (Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe) revealed in a pulp
paperback that the shapes in the snow were made by the
weapons of the ufos of the shadow Negons hunting the
heroes of his novel who, in a space-time craft, had escaped
to 1855:
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Exmouth, Dawlish and Teignmouth… and the heights
above Starcross in the west were visible like the wings of a
settling cosmic predator… “Look out” here they come
again!” shouted Elspeth… The grey white pencil-weapons
raked across the clouds… “we’ve cleared up one of the
world’s greatest unsolved mysteries!” said La Noire… “the
Devil’s Footprints .. Now we know what caused it... those
pencil weapons of the Negons…” (p.150 – 157, Bron Fane,
U.F.O. 517, John Spencer, no date)
The next day I set off back up the Ness, up the steep climb,
skirt the bullocks and, after a week of, for me, hard
walking, super-sensitised, scared of bullocks and paranoid
of gulls, under-hydrated, I felt weaker that I have ever felt
before, except for illness, and I knew I was entering a new
place for me, an unfamiliar sort of weakness… I sort of
know what I’m going to see, but as I climb the hill and my
heart beats faster and faster and my head gets lighter and
lighter, now I’m not sure what limits there are on this
journey and where I come out at what other side.
59
within its folds, a circular shape overlaps long ferns in the
ground and once again I wonder how this shape comes – a
goat on a chain, expanding funghi, a ufo landing, an ancient
site? Columns of thistle rise up within and across the
circle’s edge, like a Venn diagram. A pile of shorn thorn
bush branches lies nearby. The whole field is threaded with
animal paths, veins or water gunnels. You could take a
picnic and spend a whole day there, reading that map.
60
Watcombe beach in June is almost deserted. I sit on the
rocks stage right as the deep dread water clunks below me
full of huge monstrous lobsters and crabs, silkies and
mermaids. A guppy fish slithers across a rock. First the
lapping water stirs with urgency as if a great body had
shifted its weight out of view, then water broke on a rock
like the thing had lifted its head. The second time I came,
there were bratwurst and kalamari for sale at the café.
61
bridge on the other side of the bay is an upturned D of rock
in front of a sheer rock face, the empty space is not there.
Vision, cliffs, houses on Dawlish Warren, the flights from
Haldon Aerodrome – they all fade and pass. Everything
turns liquid as I stagger up the hill.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
MR PURSHOTTAM H. BHOJANI 1897 – 1988
MRS. RATENBEN P. BHOJANI 1908 - 1992
62
young woman who is wheeling an aged person of
indeterminate gender who is screeching repeatedly “Mum!!
Mummy! Mum!!” The falsetto is so intense, the emotion is
mythic, archetypal. I’m in a tragedy and I want to do
something – but that’s the point isn’t it?
63
and down the coastal path. We saw a sign for Kent’s
Cavern. The little 1930s wood and brick entrance building
is as much a part of the archaeological record as the bones
and teeth of the hyena, bear, rhinoceros and elephant,
reindeer, wolf, lion, woolly rhino, mammoth and bison
collected in the dark and the damp by the frail Catholic
priest John MacEnery – his find of a man-made flint
arrowhead and the tooth of an ox under two feet of
stalagmite floor, which accumulates at a few millimetres a
century, disproving the literal interpretation of the book of
Genesis. 80,000 artefacts. The mud and rock dug out
become the car park. Some of the rock is wet like offal. The
black on the stalactites is human skin and grease. Beyond
The Long Arcade, at a sort of cave crossroads, our Guide
takes replica bones from a wooden chest. She takes out a
little piskie skull and shows it to the children. Or is it a
memory of the small, dark Picti? Then our guide takes out
the cast of a Neanderthal skull, bigger eyes and smaller
brains, and compares it with one of our party - yet, we
should be careful: for these people were not inferior
versions of us, but parallel evolutions from the same
source, walking the same world on a parallel path,
occasionally crossing ours. We’ve found necklaces they
made and their stone tools have been found in Kent’s
Cavern. They were not imbeciles and but for certain
climate changes it might have been a Neanderthal guide
showing Neanderthal children the skull of a Human and
making jokes about tiny eyes and obese brains. When they
died it cut us adrift. “We are unique and alone now in the
world. There is no other animal species that truly resembles
our own… The birds were cut off from the rest of the
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vertebrates 65 million years ago, when a cataclysm wiped
out the dinosaurs, or rather all the dinosaurs but the birds.
Our own isolation is much more recent.” (p.3-4, & p10,
The Neanderthal’s Necklace, Juan Luis Arsuaga,
Chichester (UK): Wiley, 2003) So here we are – adrift,
alone, Crowhust-like, walking between the bones below
and the dinosaurs above.
65
scallops I ate at the Ness House Hotel. Coming up Kent’s
Lane we rejoin the Babbacombe Road when from Lower
Warberry Road on the right, there’s Oliver Heaviside on an
unsteady bike, his feet on the front fork, trailing unpaid gas
bills and rate demands. Except for these crazy forays on his
“new fangled machine “ he lives like St Nectan, a hermit at
Homefield, with all the wonders of the world in his head
growing like foxgloves. Heaviside Calculus is still used by
pure mathematicians, in those inner landscapes of
abstraction. There are craters on Mars and on the Moon
named after him. The glove of ionised particles around the
Earth bears his name. He won’t hear you if call out to him.
And he probably thinks you’re out to get him anyway. He’s
slightly paranoid. He contests anyone who pooh poohs
maths and equally any mathematician who wants to
disappear into an ocean of only pure maths. For all his
loneliness and isolation, Oliver has gone there to keep
everything together. A Crowhurst with a self-righting
mechanism, setting out to reconcile the mighty forces of
electro-magnetism with the soft caress of gravity, taking
the first trip towards a theory of everything.
66
You will sorrow in time, when all of you find
That I cannot bawl “Crab, crab!” more.”
67
Christie and Archaeology, ed. Charlottte Trümpler,
London: The British Museum Press, 2001) The novel is
called ‘They Came To Baghdad’. At the bottom of
Livermead Hill ‘La Rosaire’ looks empty and ‘house from
Psycho’. I look around for the shelter where Eliot didn’t
seed his anti-semitic wasteland. I cross the road and take a
left down a road signed “cul-de-sac”. Often the
psychogeographic walker slides phantom-like through the
ends of these no-through-roads. Steps down to a beach,
with the arches and castellated shapes of the Livermead
Cliff Hotel on one side, on the other, around layers of
barnacled rock, the water gulps in a gulley, beneath a rude
sandstone outcrop with steps up to a PRIVATE sign from a
world of B movie deserts and guns. Phoenician traders
maybe landed here, taking tin from Dartmoor and leaving
behind the recipe for Clotted Cream. Or was it the
Egyptians? Everything is from somewhere else. The only
sure thing about identity is its uncertainty.
Sometimes I am walking
like the Walking Wardrobe
of Dawlish. Putting on dress
over dress over dress.
Feeling that at any moment I
might open the door and,
through the fur-lined inside,
feel my way back to Narnia.
At the furthest Paignton
beach, Broadsands, Monty Python filmed a gigantic electric
penguin with arms like tentacles terrorising bathers, then a
cupboard with ferocious teeth came out of the sea and
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chased Carol Cleveland up the sands, the spines of cactus
plants removing her clothes one by one (reversing the
Walking Wardrobe). BZ.
69
attended that meeting of the Teignmouth Useful
Knowledge Society in 1853 on ‘Memory’. I wandered in
Paignton and I couldn’t remember any of it. I knew I had a
memory of it, but I wasn’t actually remembering it. As if
I’d never been here, it had slipped away.
But all we need is the odd. I had found all these layers. And
the glow is still there, stratified. Living in the ruins of
utopia right now. A fallen planet you can catch in your
hand.
70
adventure, the safety, the warmth inside the cold out on a
misty, shaky sea. But I couldn’t find it HERE anymore.
Finally, with Anjali, I did go and knock on the door of one
of the guest houses. One last try for memory.
After all, if you believe them, people will tell you that
another Smith – Colonel Smith – had a secret Indian wife
in Redcliffe. Why do they think she would be secret?
71
“O…”
72
another John Cleese, but why is he acting like Basil Fawlty
then?
Even the paranoia about the herring gulls has now become
a parable for the sensitivity to all sorts of things this kind of
walking gives you– at St James the Lesser the bible on the
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lectern was open at the previous day’s reading: Jeremiah,
chapter 15, verse 3: “And I will appoint over them four
kinds, saith the Lord: the sword to slay, and the dogs to
tear, and the fowls of the heaven… to devour and destroy.”
You know, even with those bloody fowls of heaven, I had
begun to enjoy watching their shadows move across the
pavements I was walking on.
74
in the Kennely/Heaviside layer. I felt I could leap like them
and not fear where I might end up.
The deeper one goes in, the more likely one is to pop up
just where one wants to be.
75
monsters: Sea Slaters in their armour, creatures from the
time of dinosaurs, things that I thought were going to leap
at me if I got too close. And they can move with great
speed. In the icing sugar castle I had come eye to antennae
with time before the kind of memory I was trying to recall
and it was living on the walls of a capsule that clanged and
shimmered with sounds like that of a universe ringing as it
is born with no one to hear.
“…we may press our analogy a step further, and ask, since
our hypothetical worm and fish might very readily attribute
the effects of changes in the bending of their spaces to
changes in their own physical condition, whether we may
not in like fashion be treating merely as physical variations
effects which are really due to changes in the curvature of
our space; whether, in fact, some or all of those causes
which we term physical may not be due to the geometrical
construction of our space.”
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An1887 march of working class students from St Luke’s
College - “(m)ost… had come from British or Board
Schools” (p.256, The History of Saint Luke’s College,
Exeter, Fuller, F., Exeter: Saint Luke’s College, 1970 ) -
against the poor standard of the maths teaching and the
disciplining of their leaders, became stalled at the Fore
Street Tavern Assembly Room, the marchers unable to
spread or theatricalise their cause.
77
Mythogeography is about walking a physics of local and
marginal histories. It’s about the trashed angel statue in the
St Thomas graveyard, about the stories as we walk, about
the huge guardian dog that was never made for the spire.
Rupert Sheldrake speculates in The Physics of Angels that
angels might be conscious stars – “Materialists believe that
our own mental activity is associated with complex
electromagnetic patterns in our brains. These patterns of
electromagnetic activity are generally assumed to be the
interface between consciousness and the physical activity
of our brains. Consciousness is somehow supposed to
emerge from these patterns. But the complex
electromagnetic patterns in our brains are as nothing
compared with the complexity of electromagnetic patterns
in the sun.” (p.18, The Physics of Angels: Exploring The
Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet, Matthew Fox &
Rupert Sheldrake, Harper San Francisco, 1996) Encounters
with angels, with the cultural shapings they take, are a kind
of astronomy. We become walking radio telescopes. The
white statues with their great wings roll down the mounds
of space. We come face to face with massive bodies and,
simultaneously, with a gossamer, unrespectable ‘just
knowing’ (the memes of Mercutio’s Queen Mab) -
“…angels know through intuition, according to Aquinas…
and they can assist our intuition… Intuition is the highway
in which angels roam….” (p.2 The Physics of Angels.)
Human identity pleasurably fragments somewhere between
shapely physics, the complexity of the sun and the
boomingly kitsch pseudo-psychological iconography of
angels. In there is a pleasurable space – a
mythogeographical playground - for coming apart and
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spreading around? Where conscious stars materialise, not
just as angels? In Gustave Doré’s engravings for Dante’s
Divine Comedy the angels fragment, atomised, like
electromagnetic descriptions of Near Death Experiences,
the time tunnel the battleship passes down in Final
Countdown.
79
change to cognitive fluidity. And then, 28,000 years ago,
they were not. “North of the Pyrenees, the more modest
canines of the polar fox, even smaller than those of the
common fox, were the most popular. They were perforated
at the root for stringing. The Neanderthals of the Grotte du
Renne and Quinçay used them also. It seems they saw
something special in the artic fox that escapes us today.”
(p.297, The Neanderthal’s Necklace)
Phil Smith
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