‘O!’
‘Like it?’
‘Lovely.’
‘Recognise it?’
‘Dunno. Vaguely familiar.’
‘Come here.’
We got up. He led me to the edge of the garden, where, standing behind me like he used to when I was a little girl, eight or nine, with his hands on my shoulders (but now the top of my head came up to his chin), he said,
‘Look over there … bit more to the left.’
‘O, yes! There it is!’
And there it was. Three or four miles away. Not black on white, as on the postcard, but white on the sun-bleached blond of autumnal grass, galloping along the hillside, the figure cut, I guessed, out of the turf so that the chalk of the downs showed through.
‘The White Horse of Uffington,’ Dad said as if reciting a poem or a holy text. ‘Three hundred and seventy-four feet long, one hundred and ten feet high. And at least three thousand years old. What d’you make of that, eh?’
‘It’s beautiful, Dad. Truly beautiful.’
‘This new boyfriend of yours that you’re so keen on—’
‘He’s called William Blacklin, as you well know.’
‘This William Blacklin of yours wants to show you something old that matters to him. Well, today I’m showing you something really old that matters to me. And to you. And it’s not some old tree that just happened to grow somewhere. But it’s something man-made that’s survived as long as any of William Blacklin’s old trees.’
He kissed the top of my head.
As displacement activity, I said, ‘Man made?’
‘Okay, yes. I’d say there were certainly women involved. But we don’t know. It’s prehistoric. No one wrote down how they made it because no one could write in those days. Didn’t know how. Except … They did. In their own way.’
‘Meaning?’
‘It’s a horse, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘But, at the same time, it isn’t. It makes you think of a horse, but in fact, it’s just a few, kind of … lines. See what I’m getting at? It’s Michelangelo and Picasso, it’s Raphael and Matisse. It’s representational and it’s abstract. Both at the same time. It’s as old as old and as modern as modern. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
He chuckled. ‘This is not a horse.’
‘So what is it?’
‘A signature.’
‘Someone’s name?’
‘When you were little and painted a picture, can you remember what you always drew on it when you’d finished?’
‘My name?’
‘Your name, Cordelia, in big letters. The biggest thing in the picture sometimes. All little kids do that when they draw pictures. They want everybody to know that they made them.’
‘And you think whoever made the Uffington horse – what did you say? – three thousand years ago? – were kind of signing their name on the hillside?’
‘The signature not of one person but of a people. We are the horse people. This is our place.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘That’s my girl! It’s just my theory.’
‘Well, Dad, it’s a nice theory. I like it.’
‘Bet your old Shaker doesn’t have anything to say about it.’
‘Not as far as I know.’
‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are met with in your philosophy, my Cordelia.’
‘Oo! Hark at him! So you do know some Shakespeare.’
‘I went to school too.’
‘But why does it matter to you so much? The horse, I mean.’
‘I’ll tell you when we get there.’ He pulled a pamphlet from his pocket. ‘And on the way, you can do your homework. Read this.’
The White Horse of Uffington lies one and a half miles south of Uffington village on the Berkshire downs, now part of Oxfordshire. 114 metres long and 34 metres high, it is constructed of trenches about a metre deep and two to four metres wide, filled with chalk. The horse is visible from 20 miles away, and can be viewed close up from the top of Dragon Hill, but is best seen from three or four miles away.
The oldest hill figure in Britain, until recently the horse was thought to be Iron Age. But a new technique, optical stimulated luminescence dating (OSL), which can reveal how long soil has been hidden from sunlight, used by the Oxford University Archaeological Unit, indicates that the lower layers of the chalk in the trenches of the horse’s figure have been buried since between 1400BC and 600BC, and thus shows the horse to be of Bronze Age origin.
The figure would not survive if it were left unattended. It requires frequent cleaning, or ‘scouring’, to keep it white and to prevent grass and other vegetation from growing over it. All down the ages semi-religious ‘scouring’ ceremonies have been held, during which entertainments were arranged such as fights with cudgels, horse races, cheese-rolling competitions and other such crowd-pulling attractions. Nowadays, however, the site is a protected monument and is cared for by English Heritage. The Uffington horse has inspired the making of many other white horses on chalk downs, but none is as beautiful and impressive as this.
Many legends are associated with the Uffington horse. Some people, for example, believed the figure represented, not a horse, but the dragon slain by St George on the nearby Dragon Hill. But the oldest and strongest legend, and the one most likely to be based on fact, is that the figure represents the Celtic horse goddess Epona, who was worshipped for her powers over fertility, healing and death. Because of this it was claimed – and is still by some people believed – that a woman who spends a night lying on the eye of the horse will conceive a child. Similar horses are found on Celtic jewellery as well as on Iron Age coins.
As we drove along narrow, high-hedged lanes, do-si-doing with tractors and four-wheel-drives, I said, still disturbed by his possessive birthday kiss, ‘Dad, are you jealous of Will?’
He smiled. ‘All dads are jealous of their daughters.’
‘But I mean seriously.’
‘To be honest, I am a bit worried.’
‘You don’t like him?’
‘Hardly know him. Haven’t seen much of him, have I?’
‘What then?’
He drove for a while before saying, ‘You’ve got it bad. First time. Knocks you out. I remember.’
‘So?’
‘It’s affecting your school work.’
‘Is it?’
‘According to Ms Martin.’
‘What!’
‘She came into the shop the other day to book a holiday. Tripping off to France for Christmas. Naturally, I asked about you.’
‘And?’
‘Nothing much. A joke really. Love distracts the mind. That sort of thing. What a good student Will is, what a lovely kid he is.’
‘He’s not a kid. Neither am I. And I don’t believe Ms Martin would call him that.’
‘Well, no, not her word exactly. But she did say your work is suffering a bit. Yours and his. Neither of you concentrating the way you should. Other teachers say so, not just her. She understands. I understand. But …’
Mouth clenched. Throat blocked. Wanted to cry. Like when you’ve been gently told off for something you didn’t know you’d done, or didn’t know was wrong. But worse than that, I felt somehow Will and I had been invaded. It hadn’t occurred to me that other people – grownups – teachers – were watching, observing, judging, talking about us behind our backs. We’d been so careful not to be all over each other in school. I’d felt without thinking about it that what was happening to me – what was happening to us – was something between Will and me only – was private. And that what was happening was good. Now I was being told it wasn’t private, wasn’t just between Will and me, wasn’t good, and was being told off for it.
When I could, I said, ‘Is that what you really wanted to say to me today? Is that why you’re taking me out? Is that why you made me put Will off?’
We were pulling into a car park shielded by trees on the side of the downs. Dad stopped th
e car. We sat staring at the bushes in front of us.
Then, ‘No,’ Dad said, sounding as full up as I felt. ‘You raised the subject, not me. I wasn’t going to mention it. Not today anyway. I’m taking you out to celebrate your birthday and to show you something important to both of us. I wanted it to be just you and me for a change. And a pleasure.’
Another silence. Why at times like this do your thoughts collide with your feelings like runaway trains? And why is it you say things you don’t mean, or say what you mean badly?
‘But you don’t like Will and you don’t like me going with him and you want to split us up because you’re jealous of him.’
Dad took a heavy breath. ‘That isn’t it at all.’
‘Well, if you really want to know – I mean I might as well tell you – I don’t like your girlfriends, I hate them as a matter of fact, and I don’t like you drinking as much as you do when you’re with them, because it makes you disgusting and makes me ashamed of you, and I think all that’s bad for your work as well.’
There was now a long frozen hot fraught silence. During which I felt horrible angry hurt guilty defiant, and like a cruddy small child.
‘And anyway,’ I couldn’t stop myself from adding, ‘Will makes me feel better about myself. He gives me confidence. He makes me feel attractive and he makes me feel wanted. And that matters to me a whole lot more than my school work. And I won’t give him up, I don’t care what anybody says. Not you or Ms Martin or anybody.’
Dad sat beside me wax pale and rigid, like one of those mannequins you see in films of experimental car crashes. I half expected to see him fly through the windscreen the way the mannequins do when the car hits a wall. But we were in the middle of an emotional crash, and not experimental but actual. The car windows steamed up.
Dad said nothing. Not a word. Not a sigh. Then suddenly got out of the car, opened the boot, put on a parka, took out a backpack and put it on, slammed the boot closed, and started off towards a stile in a fence a few metres from where we were parked. I waited till he’d climbed over and was striding away across the hill before I got out and followed him. What else could I do if I wasn’t to feel worse? He’d forgotten the keys. So I took them and locked the car. When I caught up, I held the keys out to him. He took them without a word.
The horse is about half a mile from the car park. At first you can’t see anything of it. Then you glimpse a white line, and when you’re almost there, white shapes snaking round hillocks and humps ahead and below you. When at last you arrive, all of a sudden at your feet is the oblong of the head with its round eye in the middle and its double-pronged tongue stuck out from the bottom corner, its ear rising from the top corner. Viewed from afar, the horse seems to be drawn on a flat surface. But close up you see the surface is not flat at all, but uneven and humpy. The horse bends and flows and curves around and over and under the swells and hollows, and the figure itself looks insubstantial, temporary, as if no more than painted on the grass and likely to be washed away by a shower of rain.
How on earth, I wondered, did they manage to etch such a picture in such a place, when they couldn’t see what the whole figure looked like as they made it? They couldn’t stand back, like an artist from a painting, to make sure the proportions were right. You’d have to stand miles away to do that. And in those days, without radios or mobiles or anything like that to help them, how could they do it with someone a long way off to instruct them? By semaphore? By sending a runner with a message?
I was awed by the figure and the place. Such a strange, ancient – what? – monument? sculpture? And so alive. This is what struck me the most. I felt the horse was ‘there’. Was a being. That it knew we were there too. That its eye was eyeing us.
There’s a rise of ground, a little hump above the horse’s head. Dad sat down on it, his backpack between his knees. Still not a word said between us. Nothing since the car. I sat beside him.
Beyond the horse the long expanse of the vale stretched away to the horizon, every detail clear in the sharp autumn air, the clouded sky shadowing the sun across the fields, in the middle distance the London-to-Swindon train, like a wire worm, scoring an unseen line through the landscape, and the double note of its horn, C–Eb, sounding a melancholy yodel in the silence.
All the way from the car till now I’d brooded on my upset with Dad. But as we sat side by side, the horse’s observing head at our feet, the long view of the fields and trees and the sky beyond, my mind settled, as if a caressing hand had soothed it, and now the train’s solitary cry noticed the silence of this place. A deep deep quietness. A few other people wandered by, ramblers in their endurance gear, Sunday trippers in town wear, a family with a couple of small boys. Yet they too, all of them, even the little boys, were subdued, as if in a sacred place, a cathedral perhaps. Everyone was instinctively reverent.
And though I know it must seem a silly thing to say, as I sat there I felt myself fall in love with the horse. Not in any sexy passionate way, and not as I was with Will, but a kind of love that I couldn’t then name or understand. There was fear in it too; wariness is perhaps a better word. It was not comfortable or cosy, not even a human kind of love, but a love strangely hard and out of time, and a love with danger in it. Instantly, I wanted to know everything about the horse, every last detail, wanted to walk every centimetre of its being, touch all of its white body, lie down beside it, lie down in it. I’d never felt like that for any thing before. But the horse didn’t seem an inanimate thing, more a force, an energy, a living presence.
I want you to understand that I felt this before hearing what Dad then told me.
After fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour – I don’t know how long – Dad opened his backpack, took out a small square polished chestnut-brown wooden box, beautifully made, with rounded edges, and a little brass key-hole in one side. He set the box down on the turf between our feet.
Still he said nothing. When he’s upset he can never say the first words to put things right. I knew I would have to.
I threaded my arm through his, hugged it to me, and said, ‘Dad?’
He swallowed hard, looking at the box, before saying, ‘Your mother’s ashes. Well. Some of.’
Spell-stopped.
There at my feet in a little box was some of my mother.
And as at such times, because they occur so rarely they take you unawares, you utter mindless things, I heard myself say vacantly, ‘Some of?’
With the cool reasonableness behind which we protect ourselves from feelings too strong to bear, Dad said, ‘When your mother died. Your aunt Doris. Wanted us to scatter her ashes in the garden. Of her house. Doris’s house. Their family house. Where your mother and Doris grew up. Doris said that’s what your mother would have wanted … But … Your William’s grandfather, Frank Richmond, did the funeral. I gave him that box. Your mother used to keep her rings and necklaces in it. And told him to put some of your mother’s ashes in it … We scattered the rest in Doris’s garden … Doris never knew. Still doesn’t. And I don’t want you to tell her. Okay? Promise?’
My mother at my feet. Some of.
‘Promise.’
‘A bleak business, death,’ Dad said. ‘Never got over it.’
‘But why now, Dad? Why here?’
He took a deep breath. ‘It was sitting on this spot. Right where we are. That your mother and I decided to get married.’
‘Ah, now I get it!’
‘Hang on. There’s more. You see, I was going to marry Doris.’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t know that, did you?’ A cold laugh. A dry cough. ‘We’d been going together a couple of years. But when it came to it, she chucked me. Bit of a raver in those days, Doris. Didn’t want to settle down. Wasn’t ready. She said.’
‘You were going to marry Aunt Doris?’
‘My first love. Mad about her. Like you and Will. I was knocked out.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Well, this was the late sixties
, early seventies. We were all a bit wild.’
‘The sixties revolution.’
‘Bollox! Revolution, my bum! Load of old bull. Don’t listen to any of that crap. Nothing revolutionary about it. We were self-indulgent, self-righteous prigs.’
‘Really?’
‘Believe me. I was there.’
‘Maybe you never recovered.’
‘What?’
‘Joke, Dad.’
He smiled and squeezed my arm. ‘No, you’re right. But look around you at the people of my generation who are in power. The politicians. The remnants that were the Beatles. Jagger and his gang. To name but a few. Pitiful. You know what they say.’
‘What?’
‘Tell me what you did when you were twenty and I’ll tell you what you will be when you’re sixty.’
‘But you’re not sixty yet. There’s still hope.’
‘Fifty is bad enough, believe me.’
‘So why didn’t you marry Doris?’
‘She contracted hard-core feminism. All men are evil. Only women are good. That kind of nonsense.’
‘Bit of a parody maybe?’
‘That’s what it felt like anyway.’
‘She isn’t like that now.’
‘Not entirely. But you’re never completely cured of a virus like that.’
‘So she chucked you.’
‘She wasn’t in love with me. Not really. Not the way I was with her. Often like that the first time. One of the couple loves more than the other.’
‘So how come you married Mum?’
‘After Doris chucked me I was in a bad way. Your mother helped me through. She was a couple of years younger than Doris. Nineteen. I was twenty-nine, but she was already far more grown up than me, far more mature. Took me in hand. Sorted me out. Then one day your mother brought me up here. Someone had told her about it. She was always interested in history. The more ancient the better. And old customs. Believed in ley lines and astral forces. That kind of tosh. Well, we sat here. Sandwiches. Bottle of wine. Lovely summer day. And out of the blue, no warning, she told me she was in love with me. Had been all the time I’d been going with Doris. Said she always knew she’d have me in the end. And she said, “You make me laugh. Especially when you don’t think you’re being funny.” I said, thinking it would make her laugh, “In that case you’d better marry me and then you’ll have all the laughs you want.” “Yes,” she said, “I’d like that.” I said, still joking, “All right then, you’re on.” And she said, “I mean it. Do you?” I looked at her then. And knew. She really did mean it. I wouldn’t say I was in love with her at the time. I made us wait six months. Thought she’d change her mind. But she didn’t. And me? I’d never really looked at her. She was just Doris’s younger sister. Wasn’t sexy the way Doris was. Didn’t dress that way, either. It was Doris who was all for that. It came over me gradually. Falling for her. Found myself thinking about her. After a while, couldn’t see enough of her. And the more I saw of her the more beautiful she looked. So we married. And it’s a funny thing. Doris never forgave me. She didn’t want me. But she didn’t want your mother to have me either. I never understood it. But I’ve never really understood women anyway. Don’t understand you, either!’