A Boxing Day Letter from Elsewhere

Dear friends,

In that week between the celebrations of Christmas and the coming of the New Year, it often feels like a good time to stop for a while, take stock and think about all that has gone and all that is to come. We do this on a personal level and we also think about Elsewhere, this project of ours that began at the end of 2014 and which has seen us publish five editions of the print journal and countless articles, essays, stories and reviews online through the blog.

We have big plans for 2019, both in print and on the website, but before we begin we need a little break. So there will be radio silence from Elsewhere HQ over the next couple of weeks as we relax, walk, think and prepare for all that is to come. We will return at some point in late January with news of the next steps and how you can get involved. We hope that you will continue to join us on our journeys to Elsewhere and that you have an excellent start to 2019.

Ever onward!

Paul and Julia,
Berlin & Hamburg, December 2018

Beacon Bound, Part V: Equilibrium

Since Spring 2018 we have followed Nicholas Herrmann as he walked the length of The Ridgeway, an ancient road stretching for eighty-seven miles across chalk downland between Overton Hill and Ivinghoe Beacon, in memory of his grandfather. With this final installment, Nicholas’s journey is completed. You can read all five parts of his walk here.

Tiredness threatens to fell me like a storm-damaged tree. It squats in my skull, crawls down my body: tightening tendons, tying muscles into knots. My back is rigid, my legs are locked, and the ankle injury that started in Uffington has spread to the ball of my foot. I feel semi-petrified, almost stone. At the Ridgeway’s eastern extremity, I step from the car stiffly. I might have forgotten to stretch this morning, or I could have a cold coming on, but maybe this is what seventy-three miles feels like – an accumulated tiredness, the journey catching up with me, the way adding weight. It’s the eve of my thirtieth birthday, and I feel old.

I just have to make it another fourteen miles, today only half: Coombe Hill to the hamlet of Hastoe. We arrive to mud and wind, the night’s rain wiping the world of colour. A short walk along a road and across a field takes us to the lip of the scarp, which we traverse like trapeze artists, balancing high above the Aylesbury Vale. Shortly, we reach the Coombe Hill Monument: erected in memory of the men from Buckinghamshire who died during the Second Boer War. The huge column has on top a torch of gilded flame, with four stone orbs positioned on plinths around its base.

It marks the Edge of the World. This is where, on Sundays, my grandparents would bring the children to run off steam when they lived in nearby Chalfont. I can see why they gave this place such a striking title: sitting on one of the highest spurs of the Chilterns, the monument marks a precipice, transforming the hill into a battlement. With my neck craned, I circle the column that has twice been damaged by lightning since it was first erected in 1904. Before pushing on, I look back the way we’ve come, searching the horizon for the scrawl of the Berkshire Downs. Gradually, the sun pushes through the tangled sky to illuminate the landscape, bringing back words from another Ridgeway memorial: Light after darkness. Hope in light.

The path eases us on to Bacombe Hill, the last chalk hill before the Wendover Gap, and down into Wendover. We stroll along the main street past the town’s many pubs, resisting the siren song of red lions and white swans, opting instead for take-away pasties to warm our wind-bitten hands. I scold my mouth on the cheese and onion filling, as ahead of us clouds shroud the hillside, Wendover Woods becoming Fangorn Forest in my mind.

Then, through a small park and past the burgeoning Wendover Memorial Community Orchard, planted for the fifty-nine men from the Parish of Wendover who died in the First World War. The River Misbourne joins us for a way – a charming chalk stream that runs clear and shallow. Once more, the path slopes gently upwards and away from the town, the ground yellowing as we trample the last of autumn into the earth. We’ve walked all the way to winter: the trees are skin and bone now, bark and branch. Old chalk pits riddle the hill like ancient craters from a meteor storm. As we approach the summit, a sudden gust of wind eviscerates the clouds, the sun hurling our shadows into the trees and igniting the forest.

We reach the car as the world grows dim, vapour trails skating across the glacial sky. Back at Coombe Hill, we walk out to the Edge of the World, its torch now dark. On a cold bench we drink the last of our coffee, as the lights down in the Vale – Wendover, Oxford, Aylesbury – shiver into life.

*

The last day starts with a detour. A mile or so from Hastoe is Hardings Wood, a sixteen-acre patch of ancient forest that Richard Mabey bought in the early 1980s, turning it into a community wood project to clear out inappropriate plantings, and free up regeneration. When Mabey’s depression struck, the land was almost lost, saved at the last minute by a local trust set up by two of his friends. It’s a difficult place to find – at first we drive past the coordinates, expecting a sign or stopping place. After consulting the map, we double back to find the entrance hidden beside a narrow country lane. The wood itself is steep and compact, the path barely visible beneath the brambles. It feels untouched, almost forgotten. I’m with my parents and brother for the final day of our journey, the four of us winding our way to the wood’s centre where we unpack our flasks and have coffee in the trees. The bitter steam mingles with the smell of the forest floor: earthy and warm. It’s quiet, the wood sheltering us from the morning’s chill. Above, beech trees bend in the breeze that cannot reach us.

I don’t know if my grandfather ever came here. I never spoke to him about Richard Mabey – I only discovered the writer’s work this year. But something about Mabey reminds me of John; the two seem like kindred spirits – the same generation, the same interests, the same bewildering knowledge. I know my brother bought him The Cabaret of Plants, and he owned a copy of Flora Britannica that he kept on a shelf guarded by dragons. Perhaps John did make the trip here once, or at least imagined he was here, sipping coffee in the leafy quiet beneath a creaking beech as he flicked through Nature Cure or Home Country.

On the Ridgeway, we amble along the tree-lined King Charles Ride – the straight, main path through the woodland of Tring Park. Further on, my mother picks a palmful of rose hips and shows me how to eat them, gently squeezing out the sour orange jam. To me, rose hips aren’t delicacies – they’ll forever be ‘itch bombs’, the stuff my friends and I would put down each other’s backs at school when we weren’t pelting each other with ‘puff balls’, the strange white berries that burst on impact and popped underfoot. I find these beside the path, too: snowberries. My father tells me he used to do the same, weaponising nature in the playground. I picture him tearing around Coombe Hill with a fistful of puff balls, and wonder if John ever did the same. To children, some things are so perfect, they’re obvious. Twenty years ago, the site of rose hips and snowberries would have caused the walk to descend into war, but my brother and I move on, leaving behind the ammunition and continuing into the next field.

We cross over the A41, where from the footbridge I glimpse the Beacon for the first time. My feet feel lighter as we hurry past the train station at Tring – a town famous for a pair of dressed-up fleas at its Natural History Museum, which John loved and took us to see when we were small. We pause on a bench at the foot of a hill to look back at the town. The final outpost before the Beacon.

As we start the last ascent, I feel the familiar swell of fatigue. My family must feel it too – the next couple of miles are covered in silence. We crunch over beech masts and climb through a wood, emerging to turbulence. The end is now in sight. We can feel its pull. Our pace quickens: a race against the dying of the light. Beneath us, a disused quarry floods the landscape with green water. As if to urge us on, a red kite sweeps up the hillside and hovers unsteadily overhead, before pitching and rolling away. Our party continues, floundering along the undulating ridge, the distance between us growing, the Beacon bobbing in and out of site like a life raft.

I wait for my father at the bottom of Ivinghoe Beacon, and together we finish the trail. A trig point and a map are waiting at the top. We trace the path with our fingers, recalling the places we’ve passed through. Then we walk to the edge and look back towards Avebury, finding nothing much in the haze. The wind soars up the slope and swirls around us; in the Vale, the clouds lean on Ivinghoe. The forecast promised rain this weekend, but miraculously not a single drop has fallen.

Before heading back, I whistle across the valley, weee-ooh, ee oo ee oo ee oo, and wait for a reply that doesn’t come.

It’s been twelve months and a cycle of seasons since my grandfather died and we unfolded the map. It’s hard to remember a time before the Ridgeway, and I don’t want to. The path has been a lifeline, a conductor, a tether. It’s allowed me to learn about John, understand the rhythms of his mind. Now I’m faced with the end: in front of me the path stops, cut off by a steep slope, the lights of Leighton Buzzard blocking the way ahead. But when I turn to leave, I realise where I’m standing isn’t the end at all. It’s the beginning of the trail – the old road is unfurling in front of me, eighty-seven miles to the west. It’s all yet to come: the beechwoods and berries, Thames and downs, the castles, chalk and sarsens. On the way back to the car, my father and I start discussing where to walk next, making plans for the new year.

When a star dies, the collapse can create an event of such immense gravitational force, matter is compelled from far and wide, and all light is extinguished. That point in space, once brilliant and warm, turns impossibly dark.

But after the collapse, the remnants might form something new. Drifting through space to gather together, finding each other, beginning to grow. And maybe, if the conditions are right, infalling molecules will gather momentum to create light from nothing; a blinding equilibrium to eradicate the dark.

Light after darkness. Hope in light.

The farewell was beautiful.

About the author:
Nicholas Herrmann is a writer and photographer based in Bath. His work has appeared in journals and online, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award and Janklow and Nesbit Prize. He is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at Bath Spa University. He is currently working on his first novel. You can find him on Twitter: @NickPSH.

The Library - Babylons on the Black Sea

Fleet of whalers lying up in Odessa port: RIA Novosti archive, image #171693 / Vsevolod Tarasevich / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Odessa Stories, by Isaac Babel (Pushkin Press, 2018)
Black Sea – Through Darkness and Light. Dispatches and Recipes, by Caroline Eden (Quadrille, 2018)

Read by Marcel Krueger:

In the foyer of a hotel in Romania’s capital Bucharest a few years back, I struck up conversation with a group of English travellers. We talked about our travel plans, and when they heard that I was going to the Black Sea coast they told me to ‘watch out for the fireworks across the water’. The year was 2014, and the conflict in the Ukraine had just exploded into full military confrontation. I was saddened by that remark, as it made me realise that potentially a trip to Odessa was out of the question for the foreseeable future.

Odessa. Does that name not have a lovely ring to it? It speaks of the south, of spices and rum delivered via steamer, of gefilte fish and spices, of dark harbour taverns filled with sailors and farmers speaking a lovely mishmash of Russian, English, French, Greek, Turkish. These are all stereotypes of course, acquired over many years of never properly researching the city, only ever imagining what it must be like. To this day, Odessa and the sound of its name to me remains one of the last untainted travel ideals from my youth.

I was therefore delighted to discover that the Pushkin Press was re-issuing the stories of one of the city’s most famous sons, Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel. Babel ( 1894 — 1940) was a Jewish-Russian writer, journalist, playwright and revolutionary and is best known as the author of Red Cavalry, his fictionalised account of his time with the 1st Cavalry Army of the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, published in 1926 . Babel was born in Odessa, and the melting pot on the Black Sea had a lasting influence on his art: his Odessa Tales collection of short stories was first published in Russian in 1926. The stories shine a spotlight on Odessa roughly between 1900 and 1920, on its criminal underbelly and the life of the large Jewish community in the city. The tales gathered in Odessa Stories (a re-edition of Pushkin Press’ 2016 edition) contain the original stories in two sections entitled Gangsters and other “Old Odessans” and Childhood and Youth and also 2 more in a section entitled Loose Leaves that were not part of the original collection. Babel’s juicy prose has been newly and delightfully translated by Boris Dralyuk.   

The collection is Babel’s unflinching but tender look back at his hometown, stories about gangsters, merchants, pogroms and the antics of foreign sailors. The city however always takes centre stage:

In summertime, its beaches glisten with the bronze muscled figures of young men who live for sports, the powerful bodies of fishermen who aren’t much for sports, the meaty, potbellied and jolly trunks of “merchants”, alongside pimply and scrawny dreamers, inventors and brokers. While some distance from the wide sea, smoke rises from factories and Karl Marx does his usual work.

Odessa has a terribly poor; crowded and long-suffering Jewish ghetto, a terribly smug bourgeoisie and a terribly reactionary City Council.

Odessa has sweet and wearying evening in springtime, the spicy aroma of acacia trees, and a moon overflowing with even, irresistible light above a dark sea. 

Reading Babel’s tales today does of course nothing to dispel my ideal of Odessa, and while I will forever wonder what more stories the NKVD bullet that killed Isaac Babel on 27 January 1940 robbed us of, I am thankful that he created this wonderful snapshot of his home.

A fine complement to Babel’s fabulous tales is Caroline Eden’s Black Sea, linking the Odessa and the Black Sea of Isaac’s time to ours.  This travel book follows Eden’s journey from Odessa via Romania, Bulgaria and Istanbul along the Turkish Black Sea coast all the way to Trabzon in eastern Turkey. Her dispatches are interspersed with traditional or contemporary recipes from each of the regions she visits, or literary recipes based on some of the characters she encounters. This a beautiful book. From the lovely shimmering wave cover designed by Dave Brown over the exquisite images of both food and place to Eden’s flawless prose, it was a delight opening it and delving in.

Here Caroline Eden talks about Strandja, the mountainous border region between Bulgaria and Turkey:

Often, the edges of countries are rooted and fixed – a border crossing, a fence, a sea – here, demarcation is unfathomable. All we had were rustling oak woods as far as the eye could see, shaken by land winds and sea gales, all washed with a slightly Turkish climate and a southern, eastern air. It was a beautiful but befuddling landscape, a ‘terra incognita’ in our over-mapped world.

But sadly, the more I read the more I discovered that this book tries to be too many things at the same time, which diminished my enjoyment a good bit. The ‘dispatches’ are wonderful and induce both wanderlust and longing for all the places on the Black Sea that I visited before, but I feel that this is a book that should be stuffed into hand luggage and be read, dog-eared, on a bus trudging from Odessa to Bucharest. But due to format and heavy weight this is out of the question. For a coffee table book there are too few images, and for a book of recipes not enough of those. For me the recipes more interrupted the reading flow between dispatches than enhance it. Ideally, this is a great book for an armchair or kitchen stool traveller; but it sometimes stumbles over its own fragmentation.

That being said, the two books make an ideal pair for a Luftmensch like me: again fuelling my imagination of the Babylons on the Black Sea, their salt air and fried anchovies and kompot glasses. Maybe one day I’ll visit.

Wherever possible, we encourage readers of Elsewhere to purchase books directly from the publisher or via your nearest independent bookshop.

Runcorn Wonderland

By David Lewis:

Note: Runcorn is an industrial town and port in Cheshire, England. The small old town was surrounded in the 1960s by huge housing estates to rehouse people from Liverpool. 

 It is the midwinter visits I remember the most, the hour’s journey on a half-empty bus – always, in memory, flooded with cold sunshine – to the cobbled, mutilated streets of old Runcorn.  As I walked to Windmill Hill along the Bridgewater Canal, the wind passing over the shadowed sweeps of canal ice would make a haunting, unearthly sound, a canal-song, a vague whoo-whoo; especially eerie at night, but fading as the water slowly froze.

My friend Iain was a yoga teacher with a gentle soul, passionate about walking.  We would walk for miles to discover and rediscover strange and unusual things – ice houses, walled gardens, spice factories.  We walked out to scuffed, eighteenth-century pubs, we watched giant container vessels on the Manchester Ship Canal, and often we walked at night.  Here I developed my love of midwinter pleasures – silence, darkness, cold – and it was with Iain in Runcorn that I learned to walk creatively.

On the short winter afternoons we often walked down from Windmill Hill through the edgelands, a silent, watchful place of abandoned fields and unused roads, ribboned by railway and canal; the smoke rising from distant farms added to the faint air of menace. Yet just over the hill was the pretty village of Daresbury, where Lewis Carroll’s church crouched in the yew trees, carved from thick chocolate-red blocks of Victorian sandstone. We often sat for a smoke or two in the cold gloom of the rear porch, staring out at the bare woods and fields, and once the curate showed us the Lewis Carroll window, a gentle riot of Turtles and Hatters and Alice. Afterwards, brandies and bitter beer in the Ring O’ Bells, a polished-wood-and-brass Victorian public house of stained glass windows and bright, cheerful ghosts. The cobbled car park smelled of long-gone horses, straw and flurries of snow.

As the light began to fail, we started the journey home over Keckwick Hill, a fragment of old rural darkness, silently overseeing the concrete tower of the particle accelerator and the industrial landscape beyond. No sunlight reached the woodland floor in midwinter; the frost bubbled and broke the footpath down to the canal.  After twenty minutes of towpath walking - the morose hunch of a fisherman, a startle of duck, the plopping of water rats into the silky blackness - the lights of Windmill Hill rippled on the dark waters.  Street lights appeared.  Stone bridges became concrete ones with Wonderland graffiti, ‘How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual.’  Daresbury’s English pastoral ran beneath the concrete.

Beyond the Wonderland bridge was the Barge, a pub converted from a canal warehouse, warm and inviting.  But we had spent most of the day as hedge-walkers, and were intimidated by the bright lights and the smart early evening drinkers.  One beer rarely led to a second, and with the darkness came an unease about last buses and cancelled buses, about timetables and homecomings, as if the outside world had woken in us once more.  We blinked in the harsh lights of the space-age Runcorn Shopping City, fumbled for the morning’s folded tickets, mumbled clumsy goodbyes; and I spent the long journey home thinking back along dark footpaths through muddy woodland.  

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

On visiting the Dylan Thomas Boathouse, Laugharne

By Anna Evans:

Approaching along the peninsula, the town seems to lie at the end of the road, like reaching a final destination. A castle stands guard over the quiet estuary, dramatic and imposing, its battlements slowly reclaimed by the landscape. It is a trip I embark on as much to look for traces of the past, a memory of a prior visit fifteen years ago. Arriving at the hour of dusk in early spring, the town quiet and deserted, the Boathouse already closed for the day. We walked along the street to the pub where Dylan and Caitlin Thomas used to drink together in the evenings. Then we continued our journey into Pembrokeshire, driven on by the time.

I am thinking of a photograph on a beach somewhere on that trip to Wales. Dark clouds and grey sea. There is synchronicity in the image; our faces are together, touching in the half light. When photographs were still like slips of chance on the paper. Thinking about being outside as night fell in the mountains, sharing a bottle of wine; jubilant in the almost total darkness, with no lights to guide us home.

Today I am on time to make the pilgrimage and see inside the house, but I had imagined my return differently, that I would have more time to look around and to absorb the atmosphere of the place. I am distracted, harassed; my mind caught in the argument we had this morning, still unresolved. Family life spinning around us, its currents of confusion. I am looking for clues of something. Thinking back to a simpler time and recalling pictures of my past self, shrouded in the rain-soaked hills and twilight of the Welsh skies. Dylan Thomas is important to me. His poetry resonated with me, the colour of language. He gave me a way to think about death and the passing of time, and about change.

Thomas lived in the town with his family, and for the last few years of his life acquired the Boathouse and the writing hut. It is a place in which he wrote some of his most important poems, and a place that witnessed arguments, the disintegration of his marriage, of his body. A life lived outside convention. The house is understated, leaving scope for imagining life here. I look around, my camera stuck on sepia mode, nostalgia in the recreated drawing room space. A notice explains that this is not the actual furniture, much of which Caitlin sold in response to the ever-advancing demands for money, the unpaid bills.

Family photos on the wall. Dylan and Caitlin in a rowing boat, his deep brown eyes stare into the camera. The exhibition tells me that Dylan would retreat to his writing shed, away from the noise of the children, from the travails of family life. The closed door. I look out from the window at the far-reaching view out into the bay, across the estuary, outwards to sea. Thinking about the precarious balance of art and life, between real life and life on the page, and about trying to carve out a space for one from the other. Thomas is seen in a pure sense as an artist, one who created his art and placed it above all things, the artist as genius, demon angel, doomed to destruction.

I continue back along the path to the writing shed. It is beautifully restored and has inspired many aspiring artists, as the photographs and paintings of it attest. It is overlooking the water, the sweep of the bay and the harbour where boats lie, picturesque, as if cast adrift from the sea. A place to think about moorings and being unmoored.

I am always compelled by images of writing spaces and desks, by descriptions of how and when writing takes place. I think of my own chaotic balance of writing and life, the hasty tidying away of books and paper to make a space for living, my writing is always on the move, from one place to another. A dedicated writing space where things could remain untouched is every writer’s dream. Where, as Caitlin explains, from two until seven each day – often she would lock the door - Dylan would disappear, returning hours later with a perfectly crafted line or two of poetry. In his writing space, the many lists of words he compiled. The possibilities of language, and the meticulous hours spent in constructing a single sentence. Looking out to sea, a retreat away from the domestic confines of home, exposed to the waves and sealed off.

Leaving the writing shed, I begin to walk, thinking to head back into the town. There is a path leading to the churchyard where Thomas is buried, and a sign says that ‘the path to Dylan’s grave can be muddy.’ It occurs to me that I am the same age now, as Dylan when he died. I would like to keep following the path but I am uncertain where it goes and how long it will take. Instead I read your messages, you are wondering where I am, how long I am planning to be away.

Looking back as we drive onwards, the remains of the castle unexplored, the map open displaying the route along the coastline, the town falling away behind us.

Now I see that the road continues.

About the author:
Anna Evans is a writer and researcher from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’. She is currently working on a project on the places in Jean Rhys’s fiction and has recently launched a blog playing literary detective around Paris and London in seach or Jean Rhys and other wanderings, titled And The Street Walks In.