Author: Ivor Starkey. Ivor is an undergraduate studying Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. Last year, he came first place in the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation’s Essay Contest in the 6th form category. 

‘In his desolation he wrote a poem on a palm which he transplanted from the land of his ancestors – for, like most Andalusian Arabs, he was something of a poet – in which he compassioned the tree for its exile: “Like me, thou art separated from relations and friends; thou didst grow in a different soil, and now thou art far from the land of thy birth”’

Stanley Lane-Poole, The Story of the Moors in Spain

In the early morning, the countryside is dark. Fields and hedgerows and forest, the rolling hinterland of England, all lie beyond village boundaries and wait. The darkness wraps itself around farms and fireplaces and the few people waiting at the train station. Their train – the 6-o clock– hasn’t yet arrived. In a few short hours, they will all be in London, flowing along that great network of stents and bypasses that prop up the nation’s oily heart. By the time they empty out into the Capital, the Sun will have risen upon a regretful world.

Not even 6 o’clock in the morning – there are only a handful of commuters at the station, sticking hands and chins deep into pockets and scarves.

One of these figures, having just finished his first cigarette of the day, throws the butt away and coughs into his arm. He watches the flame a moment before stamping it out. The smoke and chemicals pour in and cool his mind, he tilts back his head to count the stars in the sky.

He had woken up two hours before, dreams of vines, hourglasses and houris spilling away. Breakfast was a glass of instant coffee. He had driven down the empty slanting lanes, past the cottages and hedgerows and avenues of trees. A fox had leapt from the darkness, breaking his meditation. He had parked his car on the high street and paid for the day.

Now on the platform, he considers the day ahead. She – his girlfriend, his lover, his woman – had promised to meet him on the other side. An imperfect image of her appeared in his mind – it had been weeks since they had seen each other, and he struggled to piece together the various shards of memory and colour left from that last night.

They had lain in bed, murmuring to each other and watching the sun rise through the curtains. The light had inched higher and higher, throwing itself upon posters and photos and books.

“You honestly see nothing wrong with it? You see nothing wrong with torturing an animal?”

The night’s debate had been on bullfighting.

“The bull has the chance to defend itself, it’s respected as a combatant, it gets to die a glorious death…”

He had been struggling in vain to communicate the aesthetics-ethics of Hemingway’s Fiesta to her. She in turn had been trying to get those intoxicating visions of tradition and glory out of his mind and get him to focus on the suffering of the individual animal.

“So torture is glorious now?” She interrupted. “An innocent bull is provoked and tortured to death, and it’s glorious?”

He tried to formulate a response that didn’t require the words nobility and culture, for these had been banned in the last debate on foxhunting.  The hilarity of her anger, the hilarity of arguing about something neither of them had ever seen, reached him, and he had begun to laugh.

“Don’t laugh at me. What’s so funny? It’s just I’m very passionate…”

He’d stopped laughing but continued with a smug grin. She noticed this and began to chide him again.

She had a smile that split the darkness.

He put down his book and looked out of the window as the Sun rose, throwing down brilliant glass beams of light. The contours, frames and mistakes of the landscape were revealed. England flew past him: farmhouse, horses, meadow.

Beside him sat a man checking his cryptocurrency wallet, murmuring in satisfaction at the latest forecast. Others in the carriage were sleeping, reading the newspaper, nodding along to their music. A woman looked up from her phone and caught his eye. There was that wonderful, constrictive moment as two human beings recognised each other.  She smiled. She probably thought he was older – everyone said he looked older.

An hour later, the train pulled into the station.

He took the tube eastward. Pretty girls laughed and charmed in Spanish.  It had been years since he’d last been in London, but the contrast between country and city had surprised him less than he’d imagined. Here it was, the Reichskrone of the nation, supposedly vigorous and dynamic. With every stop the tube’s cast of characters was replaced, new faces, new creeds, new lives.

Jumping off, he made his way through the icy subterranean caverns of the station and made his way up the escalators.

He walked down through graffitied streets, past vintage shops and bookshops and a latter-day Boethius writing poems -on any theme- for £5. Posters advertised self-driving cars, concerts, and silent discos.

They met under a street sign in Hindi. She smiled up at him, and he lit another cigarette. He turned it towards her mouth, offering.

“Please” she breathed.

They shared it.

“What happened to you quitting?” She asked him.

“Ah, I gave that up.”

Smoking was going to be the death of him, he joked.

Her name was Georgia. He loved the name – to him, it sounded Classical – no, Neoclassical.

They stopped in a bookshop.

 She practically threw herself upon the philosophy section, eyeing up Plato, Augustine and Nietzsche. He made his way over the travel writing. If the colours and instincts that swirled inside him ever became words and paragraphs, he’d decided he would be a travel writer. Looking at the names of ancient explorers, of men his age who had travelled across Arabia and the East, that corrosive sensation began to creep up on him, that anxious desire to be anywhere else, anywhere else except here.

He turned to look back at Georgia. She was still in the philosophy section. Time to leave. Returning the book he had been looking at back to the shelves, he walked over to her.

“Time to leave,” he touched the small of her back.

“Okay” came the distracted response. She replaced the book and took his arm.

It was on their way out that he spotted a green amongst the orange and matt-black book spines. He picked it out (“You have a train to catch remember?”), and looked through, searching for the poem that he had read all those years ago. There it was.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

And as he read, he felt a shiver down his spine. He felt his throat constrict, and then a sudden precipitation of water to the eyes. In the middle of this East London bookshop, he wept slowly and softly into the crook of his arm.

“Freddie, what’s wrong?”

Georgia led him out, consoled him, and stared at him in confusion. Throughout the rest of the day, as they ate lunch and looked at art, he said all the things one has to say: “I’m fine. Really. I’m just tired…”. He looked at the train times and told her that he’d be getting an earlier one than planned. She took the tube back to the station with him, and in her eyes, where he had expected horror or worry, there was only amusement.

After getting off the train home and finding his car, he made his way to the coast. The countryside was decked out in its finery: the fields and lanes were radiant in the Sun. Here were the places and place names he knew so well – combe, barrow, ford.  

Climbing the steps carved into the slope, the drum of memory began to beat inside. The last time he had climbed the Cliff there had been a storm approaching from the East. To the West had been sunny blue skies, and the two had clashed in the skies like furious gods. They had eaten Maltesers under that Titanomachy. All gone, all gone.

Who had it been- his grandmother? – who had told him of the witches’ coven in these woods? And who had it been – his mother? – who had pointed at dust, brilliant gold in the sunlight, and declared it was really fairies, blessing their afternoon walk?

He was coming to the summit now. Chest heaving – the smoking really was catching up with him – he could see the few trees and gorse bushes that lined the cliffside. Scattered and solitary, flat and Socotran, the trees on this highland seemed to belong to another landscape, rather than England. Freddie was entirely alone, apart from some sheep that had been let loose on the heights.

Stood now on the plateau, he first stared out to the South, towards the Sea. Apart from the dark blotches of deep water, the ocean was a sharp blue. White boats moved across its surface, as sportsmen made the most of the rare winter Sun. To the West, the medieval harbour of that seaside town reached out into the ocean – he remembered how he and his friends as teenagers had leapt off its stone structure into the waves, terrifying the lifeguards.

“Watch out for the tides. If the water’s too shallow, you’ll shatter your legs” his parents had told him. He and his friends had ignored their warnings, testing the depth themselves.

That friend group, that koryos, was scattered now, across the country and the world.

The light on the water was dizzying; and so he sat under one of the strange trees and thought about the day. Walkers, an elderly couple, a family, came and went.

The incident in the bookshop. What had happened there? He knew at some point he would have to return to Georgia with some explanation, some reason for his outburst. But as with the bullfighting, there was no way he could begin to explain, to annunciate, to form words out of instincts. There was no answer to be found in the trees and brush, nor the Sea and valleys around him.

What was he doing in this place?

He came down from the cliff and made his way back to the car park. Taking the opportunity before he went home, he took a detour and visited his parents. It was only half an hour’s drive westward.