The Darent is high, fast-flowing after recent rain. Our path is clearly marked. We spot a kingfisher. By tall hedges, through fields and golf courses, we track the river to Shoreham. The young Darent clears debris to work a passage through the chalk. What seems to be a random sequence of twists and turns is no such thing. Rivers, so Kit Hart (of Islington’s Hart Gallery) tells me, demonstrate a ‘fundamental relationship between mathematics and science’. (Kit was quoting from Fermat’s Last Theorem .) The length of a river (as walked, from source to mouth, following every meander) is three times the distance as the crow flies. ‘The ratio is approximately 3.14… the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.’
Indulging every whim of the Darent, putting in those extra miles, will remind us of the motorway orbit. Whatever we attempt, it will always feel three times as far as we expect. Distance is stretched to achieve a more satisfying sense of time.
It comes as a shock to find Shoreham where it is, so close to London. I suppose, with confused notions of Blake’s Felpham (a suburb of Bognor Regis), I’d always assumed that Palmer’s Shoreham was hidden among the South Downs: that Shoreham was in fact the Sussex Shoreham, Shoreham-by-Sea. Domesticated, after the Bloomsbury style, with a touch of Eric Gill’s community at Ditchling. A morning’s drive away. Shoreham was an exportable fable, an idyll; suspect, fraudulent, magical. Fixed at the equinox.
Nothing of the sort. Shoreham rubs shoulders with the Swanley interchange, with Brands Hatch, Orpington. Shoreham is just a wheel-spin off the M25. Staying on the road, you don’t notice it. It doesn’t register. No theme park, no shopping mall, no imprisoned animals.
Samuel Palmer was more perceptive; as a child, accompanying his father (another Sam), he tramped through Greenwich, Blackheath, Dulwich. Long excursions, hand in hand, by two troubled humans seeking out hinge places, transfiguring experiences. There were no angel trees in Palmer’s Dulwich. The golden light was always in the next field. The Palmers knew the area between Greenwich Park and Dulwich as: ‘the Gate into the World of Vision’.
The bright, sickly child (asthma, bronchitis) who had to be regularly braced at Margate and the restless man (bribed by his family to give up trade and behave like a pensioned gent) wandered for miles, eager to escape the gravity of London. The Valley of Vision was identified — as a moral landscape out of John Bunyan. Raymond Lister, the Palmer biographer, opens his study with a quote from Pilgrim’s Progress .
Yea, I think there was a kind of sympathy between that Valley and him. For I never saw him better in all his pilgrimage than when he was in that Valley.
The orthodox account of Palmer is: precocious child, brief period — in the wake of his meeting with William Blake — of achievement at Shoreham (an Eden of light), marriage, visit to Italy, long decline into production-belt pieties.
There is truth in it, but the conventional picture (visionary succumbing to dreary domesticity) has led to the decline in Palmer’s reputation: he’s tagged as a follower of Blake, a proto-hippie who got religion. But Palmer, as premature psychogeographer, deserves reconsideration. Some of his letters to fellow Ancients, Richmond and Frederick Tatham, are as wild and freewheeling as Neal Cassady. Everything of Palmer’s present, his now , had to be squeezed on to those pages. The Shoreham postman becomes a messenger of fate, waiting to bear away every compulsive communication before its argument can be concluded. The sheets of paper, so his correspondents felt, must have been torn from Palmer’s hands.
He was never prepared, even when his father-in-law John Linnell pressed him, to make an accurate record of natural forms, the scene that stood before him. In his sketchbooks, Palmer allowed forms to become archetypes. He scribbled in the margins, talked to himself:
Note that when you go to Dulwich it is not enough on coming home to make recollections in which shall be united the scattered parts about those sweet fields into a sentimental and Dulwich looking whole No but considering Dulwich as the gate into the world of vision one must try behind the hills to bring up a mystic glimmer.
Shoreham is still a removed place, a cleft between close hills. We felt its shadowy, covert nature — dark cottages, tangled orchards; it was damp, folded in on itself and its history. Otford was more exposed, caught at a sharp angle between two motorways, M25 and M26. Shoreham was hidden. A sudden turn, a drop in the road, and out of nowhere we’re up against the church and the river.
The old High Street was dead. Victorian shops kept their shape, but no longer had a purpose. There was nothing to sell. In 1914 there were twenty shops in the village, now there is one. The only active concern is a small house that, from May to September, doubles as an Aircraft Museum. Relics from the Battle of Britain. The operators have a box of leaflets at their door, soliciting ‘aircraft parts, uniforms, eye witness accounts of any aircraft shot down over Southern England during World War II’. The Paul Nash moment is always a possibility in the Kentish woods and fields: the shattered fuselage, the opaque cockpit containing a skull in a flying helmet. A wristwatch around bone.
Renchi has found someone to interrogate: a man (with unnaturally black hair) wearing a light blue shirt and dark blue, sleeveless sweater. A uniform of sorts. Renchi, who lives in the country, recognised him as a postman. In Hackney, we’ve forgotten that such occupations still exist. Even here the post office is a private house, its ancient logo another heritage decoration. The postman points the way to Palmer’s cottage.
Although it looks the part, and we invade the grounds to fire off a fusillade of photographs, this is not Palmer’s cottage: SAMUEL PALMER SCHOOL OF FINE ART. The house, Reed-beds, is where Australian artist Frank White set up his school in 1958. Timber-framed, lead-windowed, with cross beams, panels of blackened flint, the school is altogether too much: Palmer’s life as it should have been.
Renchi won’t buy it. Usually the first to invade any property that comes our way, he stays in the road. ‘Arty,’ he growls — when I photograph the heavy, moist apples that hang low in the orchard behind the house. The whole set is a commentary on Palmer, and Palmer’s Shoreham, and nothing to do with the man or his work. Teaching was the bane, the anguish of Palmer’s married life: it was the only way of generating a small income, hours of drudgery. It saw him banished to West London and Redhill. Letters, from now on, would be about bills, money, American stocks: ‘the kind of people we are obliged to associate with — and from whom I get pupils’.
Palmer lived in a dirty and dilapidated cottage known as ‘Rat Abbey’. And then at Water House. When he came with Tatham to the Valley of Vision in the spring of 1826, it was an escape, a chance to play at being ‘Ancients’. As with Pre-Raphaelites, Arties and Crafties, hippies, the paradigm was lost in the past: medieval, Gothic — without plagues, torture, hunger and ice. Discretionary poverty. Cider. Bread. Cheese. Nuts. Green tea. Optional peasants bringing in the hops. Poverty which, in Palmer’s case (as with so many of Notting Hill’s countercultural elite of the Sixties), was underwritten by a small private income and a property portfolio. A legacy from his grandfather allowed him 5 s. 2 d . a week. His Shoreham holdings included: ‘a Dwelling House Two Tenements… another Dwelling House… containing Seven Apartments and Pantrys, and Seven Sleeping Rooms above; also sundry Timber Built Sheds and a small Barn and Stabling’. William Yates, a wheelwright, paid a yearly rental of £ 21 — ‘of which Samuel Palmer always returned One Pound, and this in spite of the opening of the London Chatham and Dover Railway in 1860 with possible developments for the Shoreham Valley’.
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