Non-Fiction
Silverwood / Davina Quinlivan
Image by the author.
An excerpt from Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration, forthcoming with Little Toller Books
Beneath the exedra, Silverwood. The trees breathe and I inhale the forest from its living underside. Respirare mi hai tolto la parola di bocca (you took the words right out of my mouth). Into your tunnel, my words fall out of me. Accented English and Asian syllables. Burmese and Anglo-Indian, too. Tongue behind the teeth. Rolling the vowels like a cinnamon leaf between my mud-soaked fingers. You make your own chatter, through the jingle-jangle underground. And the whoop-whoop call of half flightless birds. You, another continent. Avenue of ancient myths and dead Roman poets. So, I give you my Carthage, my Dido, my Aeneas, lime water, a looking-glass on your walls:
My father’s hands take out a packet of custard creams from a woodchip cupboard painted white and the pools results on the telly. My mother strains the rice over the sink and shakes Oxo cubes from their blue Tupperware box. My aunt’s wrists above her head, hanging out her washing, her flannelette nightie on the line, and a plate of samosas for the guests when my uncle’s fingers check the tax disc on his car, for the very last time. My father plants a rose for him, and then one more for my father when he goes, too. My aunt is a house, is a home, so no rose. Yet, still, someone mows the lawn where you all stood. A black-haired daughter of Saturn, arriving off the bus from Guildford. Waiting for Virgil to offer up some new kind of apparition.
Even a daughter of Saturn breathes differently in the woods. The air is alight with dirt-track dust, beetle wings and even dragonflies. This is a faery enclosure, a William Morris tapestry, a Stan Brakhage film. Brakhage’s avant garde masterpiece, Mothlight (1963) is made out of the wings of insects whose long-dead limbs are brought to life, resurrected by the movement of the celluloid, and are thus seen to be animated against the ‘light’ of the projector.
We lived in Surrey for a year, more or less, while my father was ill and dying of lung cancer. When he passed away, we settled into our first rented house in Peaslake in the UK’s Surrey Hills. Further south west out of Middlesex via the M25, this 32-mile journey from my family home to a house I shared with my husband was incomparable with the kinds of migration my parents had endured, but a migration nevertheless. I walked and watched it all through the eyes of a curious observer. It was like a living picture, no, a living museum of Englishnness.
Peaslake has a notable link with the suffragette movement, which Jenny Overton writes about in her book A Suffragette Nest (1998). While Emily Davidson was knocked down by the King’s horse at the Epsom derby, protesting for women’s rights, just 16 miles away in the Surrey Hills, a small village was proving an appealing gathering place for the suffragettes in the early 1900s. Edwin Waterhouse, a founder of the famous accountancy firm, observed from his house in nearby Holmbury St Mary, that Peaslake was becoming a meeting place for suffragettes in 1912 and there were at least fourteen other inhabitants of the village with suffragist inclinations. Amongst the yews and the bracken, these women were making Surrey entirely radical. Walking amongst the footsteps of the suffragettes, my view of this place sharpens. I search for the index of these radical thinkers, their ghosts amongst the yews and the sloes, the dip in the valley where the air stills. I look at this film set of pretty cottages and country houses and realise that it is another world, a gilded exclusion zone.
Out walking between Albury and Peaslake, I meet an Indian painter in his mid-sixties, Hoshi, who lives in a cottage in Shere with his English wife, and they invite us in one morning after we see them clearing leaves from the gutter in the roadside in winter. We are touched by their generosity. Hoshi tells me he used to walk into the privately owned parkland on the estate we live within. Years ago, he would walk up to the house by the moat, trespassing with his little daughter, easily able to pass through gaps in the hedgerows surrounding the 150 acre estate. As if by magic, they would enter the private parkland via a tunnel beneath the woods. He shyly admits to this act of trespass. For people of the diaspora, it is doubly transgressive.
In The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (2020), Nick Hayes calls the private ownership of land, from as far back as the first act of Enclosure in 1235, an exercise of power and social, as well as literal, partition: a fencing-off of rural equality. For Hayes, the act of trespass is one of solidarity and dissent. For me, it is also a physical awakening: to cross one boundary and enter another, to orient oneself differently, speaks of the nature of orientation and its very shaping of our lived experience. My friend, Hoshi, tells me his daughter, now grown up and about the same age as me, used to love playing near an entrance to a subterranean room, a miniature Roman bath at Albury. He and his daughter would enter via a tunnel which cut through the hill in a place at the highest point in the parkland called Silverwood.
What if I now passed through this tunnel? Would it also act as a time-travelling portal?
Would I emerge as a small girl by the water, my father at my side?
Though we do not speak of it, a few weeks prior to our chat, we had nodded at each other briefly from the deserted roadside, the aura of foreignness in both of us rising up and into a spectral, shivering cloud on the road. We tenderly touched its edges with our smiles. ‘You seem as different as I am and we are both here in this strange hamlet!’, I say through the other side of the cloud, not in words, but as stillness. Like the shadow of an oryx in an orchard.
Like Hoshi and his daughter, I also exist as a ‘foreign’ and unknown presence in the Grade I Listed John Evelyn gardens,which remain privately owned, and my temporary home, albeit shared with a few others. It is thought that the diarist and gardener, Evelyn, built the tunnel, or crypt, which goes into the hillside in Silverwood from an alcove recess, or exedra, as an homage to the grotto vecchia of Sejanus at Polsilippo near Naples, visited while on his Grand Tour. Yet, it was also Hoshi’s tunnel, it belonged to him and his daughter, her childhood secret which was as much a magical tunnel as a portal into an otherwise coded world of privileged ownership of history and knowledge, ‘hers’, forever. To me, there is something very beautiful about that.
As he worked on his designs for the Italianate garden at Albury, Evelyn must have known the story about Virgil, the Roman poet, and his creation of the tunnel in Naples, which is also his last known resting place. In just one night, the story goes, Virgil formed the passage between Naples and Pozzuoli, performing a feat of sorcery. Now, I was at the mouth of the tunnel. I claimed it as my own and it gave me something back, it transported me when I needed it to; it elicited the greatest magic to overcome what could only be described as the end of my world. I had never met Hoshi’s daughter, but I imagined her by my side, about the same age as me then, peeping into that tunnel together and waiting for its magic to spill out words, images, histories and knowledge we had no right to at the time it was created in the 17th century but plundered now nevertheless. Our fathers beside us in this ancient underworld. In my mind, we were not the minor characters in this parkland’s story, we were the only voices and its secrets were ours alone. whispered here in this empty parkland.
***
In spring, I sit high up on the lawned terrace at Albury and mark essays for University College London as a local woman, whose hair was like a halo of white nettles, and her sons in checked shirts and flat caps gather near a sheep fold, readying themselves for the shearing. I imagine the weight of the wool, the soft crevice of their necks and my arms around the belly of a sheep. Fingers deeper into their curls. Their hot breath hangs in the air. (It will be nearly a decade before I hold a newly born lamb, hundreds of miles away in rural Devon.). I sit between the house and the land, looking outwards. Only a few years later and that home will be turned into luxury apartments and the gardens will largely remain closed off to the public forever.
Unlike the humans who are fenced off, or fenced out, sheep are everywhere on this estate. Indeed, sheep are everywhere in this particular part of Surrey, near the strange little river filled with trout (the River Tillingbourne). I have never seen sheep up close like this before and it is mesmerizing. Enmeshed between grass and the bend of the river, they move across the land at a stately pace. A collective, yet loosened wave of obscurity, not white as I had once imagined, but a gauze-gash rhythm of momentary movement and stillness. I slip into a sheepfold and try to climb a gate in a field, hushing them, as I carry a bag of shopping.
The nearest shop is a mile away and part of that walk involves the avoidance of animals. I try to imagine I have simply stepped into a Gainsborough landscape, a giant cinema effect, a technicolour print, which has forestalled my grief and pricked my senses in another direction. I know this won’t work forever, but I swallow the pill, eagerly. I do not want to go back to the house in Hayes. I just want to run. We have to run. But then we keep doing it, we keep moving. Even my mother goes on a coach trip to Devon just after my father’s chemotherapy.
During the holidays, we take over from my mother and settle again in my old bedroom in Hayes with its pastel blue, peeling wallpaper and strange, chalk sketches I had made on the wooden door. We rent a film from Blockbuster and eat a take away. Months earlier, I had been watching Sarah Polley’s beautiful film, My Life Without Me (2003), which tells the story of a young mother diagnosed with a terminal illness, but unwilling to tell her family, instead recording messages to them. We see her little family gather each night around their trailer park home (the mother is played by Debbie Harry), squeezed around a tiny table eating pork ribs soaked in milk. Gone by the time her family view her video, Polley’s character decides to make visible her own absence. In doing so, perversely, magically, she keeps something of herself alive via the video image. The closing scene of the film is a montage of all the places she had been, without her, empty landscapes. This is an utterly heart-breaking gesture which serves to peel back the curtain, the artifice of our small existence. Going back to visit my father was like seeing the end of our film, together, simultaneously ‘here’ and ‘not there’, I had exited that life and I was watching the closing shots, the empty spaces (me off-screen, him, entirely removed). In the bleakest of Octobers, we had started living some of our final days together, father and daughter. ‘Here’ and ‘not here’, a chemical process of reversal, under-developed film, fading and blurring out of existence. It has a thinning coldness about it, this intermediary point, and there is no respite.
From his armchair, he watches images of the 2008 inauguration of Barack Obama, America’s first President of African origin. A kind face staring back, waving before the stars and stripes. My father has, at least, lived long enough to witness this. Then, the Olympics in Beijing, Usain Bolt breaks the 100m record in just under 10 seconds; my father sleeps through most of this upstairs and we visit Suffolk and Devon.
Years later, I acknowledge the fact that I was running away from my father’s illness. It was the choice I made: fight or flight, isn’t that what they say? It was a kind of self-preservation, a survival instinct which only grew over time, but originated here. I go back to that room where he sat and I ask myself most days, ‘should I have gone?’ The answer is still ‘yes’. Should I have sought help, shouted a bit louder? I didn’t know how to back then. We had only just got connected to the internet. How was I to know what to do? Our house was not large enough to contain a very young married couple, my mother and my dying father and his Jack Russell called Pepper. Half of us had to go.
Yet, the ‘leaving’ part of all of this is restless and unsteady. We go, then we come back. We visit each Saturday, but I simply cannot remember what we did. I have remembered so much, but these Saturdays are almost completely blank spaces in my mind. We arrived with our Yorkshire terrier, Hockney, and kept him in a dog crate in order to avoid being devoured by Pepper. At one point, Pepper charged through the back of the garden fence which once backed on to an allotment space, but was being developed into some sort of housing project. She had seen a fox. We called out and my father waited anxiously by the back door. A few minutes later, I opened the front door and there she was with her tongue hanging out and paws on the gravel. She had found her way home. I closed the living room door and went upstairs to take Hockney out of his crate. We were all struggling with our connection to this house, but most of all, we knew it was home.
Then comes the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a catastrophic moment that catapults our country, and the rest of the Western world, into recession. This event weaves a cat’s cradle of chaos around us, but it barely touches the fringes of our existence: newspaper headlines, Obama’s victory speech, the closure of Woolworths on the high street. I do not know if anything registers properly with my father at this point in his illness; I finally run out of words and their rivers of meaning. I can’t seem to put my foot down on anything static, real, solid, relatable or relational.
There is a bag filled with cans of empty beer and a peal of rolling blue and gold aluminium rings out as I gather the remnants. A softly spoken, MacMillan nurse from Galway tells me to call AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). ‘He’s not an alcoholic, he’s dying’, I tell them. The old, polished parquet flooring in our living room is all I look at as I wonder what to do, its perfect symmetry steadying, locking and blocking the pinball-like thoughts of disaster in my mind. Everyone else, it seems, is shifting themselves in other directions—the direction of vague acknowledgement and obliviousness. You see, it is not a question of how many months or years, because the nurses cannot say. They will not say. Then, the only question relevant is asked: ‘Where is the cancer?’. I am at the top floor of a car park in Ealing and I am peering down at the floors below. ‘Everywhere’, the nurse says. I am strong-stomached and stoic, my father’s daughter, but when they say the word ‘brain’, I go quieter. He has already had a stroke. I am 27 and I know, then, that my father will not see my thirtieth year. I turn back to the stairs of the carpark, fragments of information detonating in my gloves, my fingertips, as I shove them deep into my cheap, long black felt jacket bought from H&M in Guildford.
Muted and moored in this paling and unadorned life, fatherless always already, I watched his line of breath through his last winter. The open palm of his hollowed hand reached out to me in a hospital bed draped in green sheets. He asked for me with all the vulnerability of a stranger adrift in their own homeland. He was not an overly affectionate man, but I knew he loved me and his final goodbye was a tender reminder that I had always been his baby daughter who had arrived late and shortly after the death of his previous wife. My birth dovetailed his sorrow and now this grief is passed on to me. I was his salve, but what was mine?
His arm on the hospital sheets shows a thin trace of his tattooed red roses and blue-black swallows ascending from his wrist up to his elbow, souvenirs from his long migration on the boat from India to England. Amongst veins and liver spots, skin loose about the bone, the inked swallows make their own migration and a murmuration separates itself from his arm. Stretching out a long, black web of movement over my father’s bed, the swallows are performing their dark aura, their shadow dance, spectral hoops on the ceiling, on the glass hospital monitors. A silent wheatfield at his wrist: the swallows dart one last time. Then, the sound of my skipping rope, over and over, and child’s shoes lightly kicking the linoleum. He gives me red, red roses he has cut in the garden.
He gives me red, red roses he has cut in the garden.