Our journey is almost over. We can sense the coast and the sea getting closer, and the skies getting vaster. Dungeness power station now looms in the distance, silhouetted by a vermillion blaze of sky behind, with the pylons strung out across the marshes.
We drive down the track and stop outside Derek Jarman’s last sanctuary, ‘Prospect Cottage’, which he stumbled across in the late 1980s when filming the suitably titled The Last of England:
Between the tumbledown shacks succulent sea kale sprouts like wreaths from the stones; broom blown flat by the wind hugs the ground. Not much grows in this stony ground and what does is blown into sinister druidical shapes like the ancient holly woods, watered by the salt spray that the wind whips from the waves … We knock at the door of Prospect Cottage, a tiny wooden fisherman’s house displaying a ‘For Sale’ notice, which tosses and turns in the gale. The view is shingle and sea, no fence or garden to cut it off. From the back a wide empty expanse of scrubland with the nuclear power station … Dungeness was so silent. Only the sound of the wind. ‘Does the wind ever stop?’ I asked the sweet lady who owned the house. ‘Sometimes,’ she replied.
Even in the dusk, illuminated by the car’s headlights, we can see the last miracle that Jarman created – the garden which he conjured from the shingle. Circles of bushes and sea holly, obelisks of driftwood, banks of wild poppies shaking in the evening breeze.
As we crunch over the shingle beach looking towards the lights of Hythe and Dymchurch, I tell Alice and Stefan about the filming of The Garden here, and the incredible impact that work made on me as a young man in the late 1980s – the combination of rage and beauty – ‘I walk in this garden / Holding the hands of dead friends / Old age came quickly for my frosted generation / Cold, cold, cold they died so silently / Did the forgotten generations scream? / Or go full of resignation / Quietly protesting innocence / Cold, cold, cold they died so silently.’ My God, how we could do with his spirit in our times now – kicking against the pricks and outraging public decency and castigating intolerance and prejudice. A few months after the film came out, I found myself sitting alone in the tiny upstairs room at Maison Bertaux in Greek Street, Soho (where, at that time, it was still quiet enough to go and write). I was so absorbed with my journal that I didn’t notice that anyone had come up the stairs, but when I looked up a few minutes later, I saw Jarman at the next table, also alone, also scribbling away in a little sketchbook. We then carried on writing and drawing, but on my way out a little while later, I paused by his table and said: ‘Thank you for The Garden and Sebastiane – they meant so much to me.’ He smiled, rather shyly I thought, ‘Thank you. That’s very kind of you!’ and bobbed his head in a courtly bow as I left.
We drive on down the track to the lighthouse at the end. Alice and the children are bewitched by the landscape, ‘outpost territory’, as Alice calls it, this bizarre conjunction of the power station and the little wooden shacks below. Stefan tells us that Jarman is buried in Old Romney churchyard, and that he remembers coming down here a week after Jarman died and posting a poem he’d written through the letter box of Prospect Cottage. We drive back to the pub on the main road, and order fish and chips and ice cream, a partial reward for the children’s exceptional patience today. We’re not sure most young teenagers would have put up with our visits to graves and churches, our talk of trauma and suffering and death. But they seem fine about it, teasing Alice, saying, ‘Oh, with Mum we’re used to doing things like this!’ ‘What, even on your summer holidays?’ – a question which provokes a few raised eyebrows and some more gentle laughter. Over generous plates of haddock and chips we talk about books from our childhood that have stayed with us – John Burningham’s work, especially Borka, and Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, and then I’m amazed to discover that Alice and the children also knew, and loved, Hilda Lewis’s The Ship That Flew. We talk about the power of that particular story, and the impact it had had on all of us; I’d had no idea that it was even still in print.
It’s a warm evening, gentle summer breeze, none of us are in a rush to travel back, so afterwards we walk across the shingle to the water, which seems to be retreating. ‘The sea is calm tonight. / The tide is full …’ But no moon yet. I’ve never really agreed with Matthew Arnold about the ‘melancholy’ that he hears in the ‘long, withdrawing roar, / Retreating, to the breath / Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world.’ That sound of the sea repeatedly drawing back the shingle on a beach, for me, is a sound of absolute equanimity. It always stills troubled spirits, and reassures utterly.
As the children search for unusual pebbles, Alice asks me about the seeds of all of this work, and where the original impetus had come from. I tell her about an inspiring young tutor at university, who I only got to meet in my final year. He’d told me that the Tragedy paper in part two of the tripos could be interpreted in many ways, not just the traditional Greek or Shakespearean form. For instance, did I know the work of Primo Levi or Jean Améry? Or that a remarkable book, The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, had just been translated into English for the first time? ‘Here, you can borrow it; let me know what you think next week. If you’re interested I can draw up a reading list …’ Then, a year later, the sheer, overwhelming power of seeing Shoah for the first time. Another decade on, the moment of revelation, reading Sereny’s remarkable work on Speer.
But I’ve only realised recently that, however important all of these stimuli were, they would only have seeded if the soil had been there in the first place. And that soil was Mark, my father, and the devastating experience in Korea that he could never find the words to describe. And the way his silence haunted me as a child, sensing the suffering he would never speak about. The healing that lies beyond the reach of a child. The wound that never completely left the body. Yet his silence still communicated to me, as powerfully as a letter opened after death. Urging me to do the searching that he could never do, into the minds of those who cause violence, into unspoken histories and places of darkness. All that he spent the rest of his life running from, I would spend most of my life running towards.
I’ve never spoken to Alice about my father before. She’s very shocked to hear about his death, killed in the fire on the fields where he’d grown up. Fifty-three years old. Stefan is looking at the sea ahead, reflective; his mother also died shockingly young. All that comes with us. The baggage we always carry. I hear myself saying something I’ve never articulated before, wondering if there’s a relationship between my father not publishing and the strange feelings I have about finishing this work. I know it sounds curious, but, in a way, the act of publishing seems like a kind of disloyalty to Mark. And, inevitably, when I think of his rich and remarkable mind, his knowledge of so many worlds that I will never inhabit, it makes it harder to see my own work clearly, it makes me doubt. Alice and Stefan disagree passionately, saying it’s precisely these kind of tensions that are critical to anything worthwhile – the internal dialogues we all have with our parents, alive or dead. But they’re both sure that my father would be happy that I am moving into territory which he could never reach himself. I turn to look at the lapping waves in the moonlight, seeing them distorted now, through blurred eyes. The children are skimming flat stones, trying to get them to leap from one wave to the next.