Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

After Shoreham, going north, the fields are damp, footpaths puddled. Patterns of mud combed by tyre tracks. Crisscrossing lines: a desert seen from space. Flinty ground between diminishing avenues of herbs. A low, featureless sky. Everything drips and drags. We have to pull our boots from the suck of clay.

Marc and Kevin, allied by height, by philosophies of the camera, drift back: in conversation. Equestrian tackle is hung, drying, from metal gates. Horse-heads nudge over fences. Not a day for riding.

The approved walk is an illustrated book, better read than experienced. The post-Shoreham landscape is Italian, predicated on an assumption of sunlight. Lulhngstone, tight to the A225, has its castle, lake and Roman villa. Therefore: kids. Teachers, buses.

The villa is kept, for its own protection, inside a shed. ‘Is this a post office?’ one of the children asks. Ghost voices inside the hangar come from audio commentaries. Curators enjoy their Gladiator moment. The river path colludes; farm, fertile valley — with no visible obstruction to contradict the mood, no unsightly industry.

Wildlife display panels are trailers for shy birds who dip and flutter and disappear. Willow and alder and dark oak guide us through Lullingstone Park (golf and deer). We are experiencing hop country from which the hoppers have been banished (the last London hop trains stopped in 1960). Now hopping is mechanical.

Red brick memory-mansions. The gatehouse of Lullingstone Castle has its Union flag (just like a Barratt estate). A taller standard is topped with a model Spitfire. House and grounds are open to the public (FINAL SEASON!). The parish church of St Botolph’s, within the castle grounds, boasts of its noble dead, the landowners: the Peche and Hart Dyke families (with their Tudor pedigrees).

By the village of Eynsford — approaching the mysteries of Junction 3, the Swanley Interchange — walkers are in denial: there is no M25 . We are outside the circuit, playing at a Kentish country ramble. Looking for kingfishers, appreciating fields where grain and vegetables were produced for export to Derenti Vadum (aka Dartford), Durobrivae (Rochester), Londinium. Nothing happened between the Romans and the Tudors, between Samuel Palmer and Pop Larkin. No TV explainer has appeared with a convincing narrative.

South London villains, economic immigrants (of the better sort), like the pedigree: the bleach and polish of these hamlets. The history. The elbow-room. The motorway at the bottom of the lane. Houses can be any colour you fancy — so long as they’re white (black beams permitted on pubs). My golfing umbrella, the only gaudy splash in the landscape, comes into its own. The road at the ford is flooded to the depth of about a foot (according to the measure by the bridge).

Long-horned cattle mope and steam (Landseer-fashion) by the river’s threatened banks. The water is rising, the Darent spreading itself — with the ambition of becoming a small lake. On the gates of ‘Meadow View’ cattle are cloned in wrought iron, all pelt and no legs. Like Scottish comedians who have run out of patter. And taken to Bud Flanagan overcoats. Another high risk property, Bridge House, features a Notre-Dame gargoyle among the hanging baskets; a horned demon on an Ionic column. Two more devils grin from the lintel of the door. Welcome to Eynsford, twinned with Rennes-le-Château.

Atkins is hooded and in dark glasses. As is Moose Jackson. I legitimise them with a flash-photograph. Moose has the cultural reference at his finger tips: Chris Marker’s La jetée . Future dead masked against the horror of the past. Against documentary evidence of bent fictions.

The church of St Martin runs with the theme of heads: detached and poking out of walls. As if these gargoyles, shrunken saints, were abandoning Christianity and reverting to paganism. Eynsford, according to Arthur Mee, has claim to ‘a straight mile unique on the map of rural England, beginning with the site of a Roman house, passing a Norman castle, and ending at the site of a Saxon settlement’. Fifteen chill faces peek from the plaster, measuring their mile, the lost alignments. Green Men, May Queens. The energy is in the stone, the natives can’t compete. They do their best, medieval carvings brought to life (with some reluctance). They move slowly, in case their limbs should crumble into dust. They stare.

We tramp, gratefully, towards the motorway (the M20). At Farningham, on the road’s edge, we discover a bookshop of such transcendent obscurity that it has slipped Driffield’s net: no listing in drif’s guide (or in the orthodox directory put out by Skoob). The now-vanished Driffield, more dedicated than Pevsner, went everywhere. The exiled German scholar was, by Drif’s reckoning, an amateur: he slept at night, sometimes for as much as three hours. Drif lay awake, lights on, radio blaring, licking his pencil and writing up the day’s report, barking at his own witticisms. He succeeded in turning himself into a brand name and then he disappeared. His books, triumphs of crazed scholarship, dedicated misinformation, sledgehammer humour, self-confessed genius, are out of print; treasured by antiquarians who don’t want their quests simplified by the Net. No other information-obsessive, so far as I know, has managed a literary form that so nearly duplicates the sound of his own voice: Drif writes at a bellow. He tub-thumps sentences, rivets puns. He moves across the landscape a little faster than the speed of light. Dosed on black coffee, he polishes his putdowns before he sets out; he’s bored by what he knows. The inertia, the snobbery, the incompetence, the petty corruptions of libricides skulking in their pits. His books are a labour of tough love, the perfect means of ensuring that he has enemies everywhere. The trade is masochistic. They wait, quaking, for the appearance of the grand inquisitor on his annual progress. They can’t bribe him with under-the-counter desiderata, or complimentary mugs of coffee swill. Lacking all scruples (and proud of it), he is incorruptible. He will pocket the bunce, but it won’t sugar his report.

Farningham and Drif were made for each other. It was a charity to step inside this shop; heaped, mounded, treble-stacked with necrotic paper. Bibliographic scrag ends. The slurry of the publishing industry. Titles so undesirable that Oxfam would have left them in a black bag on the steps of Sue Ryder. I was transfixed. The others panicked. They started, as civilians will, to pout like goldfish. To mistrust the air: they’d been landed in an alien environment.

It was a point of honour to walk out of this dump with something, anything. Courteous as a Cossack, I tipped out boxes, ransacked shelves. The best I could do was Miriam Colwell’s Young , a ‘post-Salinger, first-person narrative’ from 1955 (which I tried unsuccessfully to punt to my ageing Juvenile Delinquency collectors). ‘Intimate story of two American teenage girls… blue jeans, cokes & convertibles.’ VG in somewhat rubbed dust-jacket. Yours for a tenner. Postage included.

Renchi, as I feared, engaged the proprietor in conversation. Like all dealers, I treated this man as a necessary obstacle, a palsied hand into which to drop a few coins. Never give them an opening. The only reason the shop existed was to bring the unwary in from the street, to provide an audience for: The Story. The Ancient Mariner experience. Simon’s tale, I had to admit, was one of the best. His special needs, I assumed, were no more extreme than those you’d find in a hundred such establishments: bookdealers, even if they begin as fun-loving athletes, soon crumple into melancholia, horseshoe-spine, life-threatening obesity, shingles, myopia, incipient gangrene, flatulence. Simon had a yarn to pitch that would have subdued a crew with normal human sympathies. His image and his story travelled with us for miles. He became the messenger, the guide for that walk: dead books and a keeper waiting to talk to travellers. The oracle of Farningham.