Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Churchill and Wolfe dominate Westerham; effigies, postcards, memorials in the church. Mementoes and memorabilia designed to tempt us into Quebec House or Chartwell, to remind us of a glorious past that is now largely in the keeping of Americans and Canadians. To move east along the A25, in the direction of Sevenoaks (Brasted, Sundridge), is to progress through an elongated version of Camden Passage, Islington, or the Brighton Lanes: antique shop after antique shop (with, by way of variety, the occasional up-market estate agent). The road is busy and impatient, single file traffic unable to make the adjustment after coming off the motorway. Tourist buses and old folk wrestling with maps. Chartwell, when Churchill motored down, was twenty-five miles from London, from Westminster. These days, as the girl in the newspaper shop so shrewdly recognised, distance has no meaning. Miles only matter to horses and pedestrians. We have to deal in drives measured by the hour. Units of nuisance between pit stops. Road works, accidents, congestion: a geography defined by junction numbers on the M25.

There’s a narrow triangle of ground at the eastern end of this one-street town, a redoubt known as ‘The Green’. It is dominated by two sculptures. They can’t be called art works. They ignore each other, nervous that they might have to defend their position against legions of dead generals. The western effigy, on the higher ground, was erected in 1911; designed by Derwent Wood, heaved into place on an ornamental pedestal of Portland stone. It’s as camp as they come, a Carry On tantrum; weapon raised more in pique than anger. Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey. Major General James Wolfe repels all incomers (aliens, grockles). His sword is up, his three-cornered hat is cocked; his hose clings to slender calves. He’s going to give somebody a fearful slap.

Down in the dumps, ignoring Wolfe’s hysterics, Winston Churchill sags, his back to London. Oscar Nemon’s monument, donated by the people of Yugoslavia in 1969, is set on a limestone block. This bronze looks like a landslide of molten biro caps. It’s oozy, cloacal; a mash of boiled seaweed. Any day now it’s going to collapse, slither from the plinth and clog the drains. The chocolate Churchill knots his fists, sunk in a deep throne; an old man struggling to raise himself. Straining at stool. Near this spot, he received the congratulations of the town. He stood on a cart, his family around him, to acknowledge the cheers. Now he glares, unseeing, across Tower Wood towards Chartwell. The job of these effigies is simple: alert passing trade to heritage properties where they can spend their money.

I returned to Westerham, on the Sunday after my hike with Renchi, with vague notions of retracing my steps, recovering my lost spectacles — and also locating the source of the River Darent. The Darent, anticipating the M25, heads north at Riverhead, and would give us our route, back to the Thames at Dartford. The river rises near Crockham House, in the hills above Westerham, before dropping down through the Hythe beds of the Lower Greensand. A neighbouring spring at Chartwell lent its name to Churchill’s 800-acre estate — which he picked up for £ 5,000 in 1922.

I did the tour, beginning at Squerryes Court. I was too early for the house, but was able to walk the grounds. Gurgles and slurps. The dark mirror of the lake. The young Darent enjoying a little aristocrat patronage before slumming it in Mick Jagger’s Dartford. Liquid whispers from Wealden clay infiltrate the salt marshes of Crayford and Stone: rumours of another life, big houses and gravel drives. That must be where the adolescent Mick caught the infection, his compulsion to join the nobs, metamorphose into a dandy and a gent.

Squerryes Court, privately owned, lets in temporary guests, respectful trippers. Cash customers from the suburbs, from Surrey. The Warde family (who lived here from 1731) put up an obelisk to the memory of James Wolfe. One of those damp mysterious things abandoned in an English garden — as if waiting to catch the eye of photographer Bill Brandt. A fog of heavy grain, a couple of lines of valetudinarian verse. There to be found, by those who need to find it; found and forgotten.

Wolfe, aged fourteen, was hanging around in Squerryes Court when the royal messenger (redirected from Greenwich) arrived with his commission. The route to martyrdom was preordained: the Heights of Abraham or the descent from the High Weald. Wolfe seemed sickly/heroic — like Nelson — a mode the English have always admired. Wolfe was a green ghost.

In psychogeographic terms, the man who introduced Freemasonry into the North American continent plotted a path from Westerham to Greenwich Hill. He confirmed the East London ley line celebrated by Nicholas Hawksmoor. It still runs from Wolfe’s shrapnel-scarred statue, across the Isle of Dogs, to St Anne’s, Limehouse. News, coming from Greenwich, is returned there: obscure Squerryes Court obelisk to much-photographed memorial (via Wolfe Close, Bromley).

Quebec House, where Wolfe lived for his first twelve years (before moving with his family to Greenwich), marks the point where Westerham runs out. Behind the house is the trickle of the young Darent, a puddle you can leap. Wolfe’s former home is a spook show, a sequence of recreated sets in which we are invited to call up the shades of a vanished family. The history lesson, the reason why we are all shuffling through this undistinguished town house, outlines a biography; it ‘explains’ the battles and military campaigns. Muffled oars, assault by impregnable cliff, victory and death. Flags, swords and bloody linen. A memorial industry: ‘statues and songs, paintings and prints’. History is sexy. House detectives, grubbers in fields, tomb raiders: we love them for their ability to make us more than we are. They connect us to a fictional back story.

Winston Churchill, so they say, looked at the street wall of Quebec House and discovered a hobby that would carry him through the years of Chartwell exile, through the glooms of Black Dog depression, the underbelly of his manic energies. In time, he would pick up his union card and become a self-employed brickie: Wendy houses, garden walls, ponds for carp. Water features drawing on Wealden springs.

Chartwell, off-highway (but lavishly signposted), anchors the south-eastern corner of our M25 circuit. Top-dollar heritage. Major attraction. When I turned up, on a dull dank morning, the car park (two levels and extensions) was almost full. Unculled livestock, the descendants of the herd of Belted Galloway cattle that Churchill acquired from his friend Sir Ian Hamilton, dressed the park; huddling together on high ground. There could be no better place to play at being a gentleman farmer (author, artist, bricklayer). Churchill bought Middle White pigs, a dairy herd. The animals, as the National Trust booklet admits, ‘tended either to die of disagreeable diseases or become household pets’. Black swans were a bonne bouche for Kentish foxes. A dove from Bali is laid to rest beneath a sundial. Indulged poodles and pussy cats are buried under every bush.

House and grounds are a dream of benign domesticity, aristocrats playing at being ordinary English folk; country pursuits, hobbies, croquet, games with the kids. This might explain Chartwell’s popularity; suburbanites (unlanded) feel at home with the aspirations. Life as it might be after a lottery win: swimming pool, pets, rose garden, tennis court, an inconvenient kitchen in which vegetables are boiled to death. Chartwell is not impossibly grand: ‘his and hers’ bedrooms, certainly, but many English couples, given the space, would go for that.

There are notable views of the High Weald from the dining room. Windows down to the floor, lovely filtered light. The circular dining-tables and comfortable chairs (with arms) were commissioned from Heal’s — to Churchill’s specifications. The tables are unstained oak. This suburban fantasy is as fudged as William Nicholson’s painting of Breakfast at Chartwell . In reality, the Churchills rarely took breakfast together. Winston stayed in bed till lunchtime, reading the newspapers, dictating memos to the two secretaries who were permanently on call. The sun-dappled domesticity — cat on table, bantam cock wandering in from garden, fond couple chatting over tea and toast — is a fable of the Good Life.