of the ancient mill now stands the famous Dulwich College, founded, like the local public art gallery (the oldest in England) by the same Alleyn.
Despite the continual recession of reality, history keeps its grip in Dulwich in the old names of places. A road skirts the hill near Dulwich College and the upmarket sports and riding clubs (one of which is even named the Old Club of Alleyn) and runs into Lordship Lane next to the Harvester pub. It used to be the only road to London. Even this road recalls in its name Dulwich Common, the time when around Dulwich spread only fields of oats and barley and pastures for cows and sheep.
Cereals once sent up their fruitful stems in fields all over south London. Take, for instance, Peckham, not far from Dulwich, where before the railway era people grew rye, which is why the green expanse of the local park is still called Peckham Rye, and once stretched all the way up the hill to Honor Oak. That oak, in turn, gained its fame because in Shakespearean times, the Virgin Queen Bess, Elizabeth I, honoured it with a picnic;14 so even a lone tree, growing on just another hill amongst the fields, has etched its way into the life story of these London suburbs.
And in Dulwich College, set up by Alleyn in 1619 as a school for twelve poor children, are kept ancient court archives from Dulwich’s history, including some documents that seem rather funny today, like the one describing how, in 1334, one William Hayward ran off with the wife of commoner Richard Rolfe, taking not just all her jewellery but a cow worth ten shillings. And it’s not only family dramas that are recorded here. It should not be forgotten that in 1333, poor William Collin was obliged to fork out three pence because his pig had the unheard of audacity to wander into the oat fields of his local feudal lord.
So, I think, what is history, when even a damned pig is not forgotten, and nor is Julian Farrow who was dragged to court by the scruff of the neck in the year 1440 for missing a day’s work on his lord’s fields? What is history, if not a mirage or a fantasy, in which you have to imagine there really once existed Edward Alleyn, Shakespeare’s chum, and that other about who we’d never know – and so wouldn’t have existed at all – if his pig hadn’t strayed into someone else’s field.
But let’s get back to reality, where the time was certainly the present, and the English spring really was happening.
At night, from beyond our windows in the wooded ravine overgrown with elderberry and brambles came the hoarse, hysterical squealing of foxes, while in the garden that morning I saw baby squirrels in the tall tree. In the fresh green leaf buds, in the singing birds and blue-pink primroses spring was indeed rising and coming to life in the tangled woods of Dulwich that climbed, as I said before, the stepped slope of Sydenham Hill right up to our house.
So as not to forget spring in the mountain forests of Karlovy Vary, I had adopted the habit of walking through the restorative green of the woods both on my way out in the morning and on my way back in the evening. I could get a bus to work right by the house and that was the logical, conventional way to go, but that’s what made me sick of it. There are always other ways, unnecessary ways it would seem – but it’s these needless deviations that lead you to that longed for balance in the soul. As long as I stayed on damp and muddy paths, it seemed to me that our home, with its surrounding woods already preserved for five centuries from financial pressures, existed beyond the starkly painted vicissitudes of fate.
Despite the obvious benefits, the decision to abandon the bus stop three minutes from home to hike through the woods wasn’t made easily. It meant I had to leave half an hour earlier, which entailed not just tearing myself from my sleep but from writing – I didn’t have, and still don’t have, any other time apart from that early time in which to follow this obligation of the heart, and I was greedy.
Yet there is a silver lining to every cloud, and the extra half hour’s walk gave me time to reflect, and to develop a sense of the wood – which, as it turned out, I had for five years lost in the fevered dash for the red double-decker bus on which, ensconced on the upper deck, I could for 45 minutes hungrily read sources for another historical book about Islam in Russia. But I realized that for these letters to another room there is only one dependable source – that is me, myself – and so there was no need to scrape and cram: what will happen will happen.
There are many paths through the Dulwich woods to the more distant bus stop, but by taking three little tracks down from the crossroads, I could find my way along the sparsely grassed gravel bed of a disused narrow-gauge railway. Whenever I set foot on that long-abandoned track, I had a sense of my own long-forgotten narrow tracks from the past.
One of these once led me and my father to the August hunt in Tatarstan – in the chilly white predawn mist on a high crest that rose, silvered with dew, above our Tatar meadows, with their knolls of knotted willows entwined with brambles, stubbornly blooming wild roses and hops with their clusters of pale-honey coloured cones. But all of this, you will see later, when the sun rises …
You know how it happens: unbearably beautiful, it pours into the world fresh and newborn, pale gold and soft
brilliance, and then, becoming hotter and shining with devout, intense clarity, it melts away the haze and greyness of the dawn smoking above the meadow glades and illuminates the dew on grasses and branches, and its joyful brightness washes all the intermingled colours of the invisible rainbow of life, knowing no boundaries in breadth or height, earthwards and skywards, and goes on forever, inextinguishable.
But I recall that morning, just before dawn, on to the open meadow there darted the daftest rabbit, loopily sitting upright for a moment, staring straight at us, before bounding away into the pale mist.
Another narrow track from the past, this one carpeted with wilting grass and yellowing pine needles, with my brother Almaz, in our first youth, when with limitless enthusiasm we vanished into the virgin forests of our homeland. Once we walked all day through the November taiga with heavy rucksacks to reach the sacred lake. At night, the frost was bitter, and in the tent, pitched on the shores, it was so utterly freezing that we spent the whole night huddled next to the fire. It was the first time I was ever awake to experience the gelification of the lake waters as it happened. The chill, exposed thickets by the lake basked palely in the light of a vast moon, which cast shifting, glittering spars on the surface of the lake as the water froze, later accompanied by a startling, starry crunch and crackle, like distant gunshot, as the ice formed out beyond the shallows. Long, lightning bolts and zigzags of moonlit crystals spread, like the brilliant cross-cuts on fine Moser crystal, yet continually changing direction. Enchanted flames of icefire sprang from the twigs of pine and birch and found their echo in the glowing embers flying vivid orange into the dark sky from our fire, with the resounding crack of the present.
The Dulwich narrow-gauge track comes to an abrupt halt nowadays in front of the welded iron gates and thick rusty cage that bars the entrance to the old tunnel, from which padlocked and mysterious darkness always blows a scent of fungal dampness and desolation. The mighty arch which thus forbids entry rises in the wood’s twilight as a citadel, fortified like a Czech castle or the Pope’s Palace in Avignon. Up the steep brick slopes, creep and swarm besieging strands of dark and ancient ivy, marking the end of the line and the beginning of oblivion.
In Victorian times, the ornate red-carriaged, copper-handled trains of the Express Electronic Service company whisked smartly dressed people from Victoria station in central London to the modern wonder of the world – the glass pavilion of the Crystal Palace, which dazzled the grey-bearded Camille Pissarro as he wandered among these trees with his easel. But the smoking chimneys of trains have long since diffused into the past and the carriages no longer jangle through the dark tunnel, even as ghosts. And the great transparent palace, constructed entirely of glass and cast-iron tracery by Joseph Paxton in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, then dismantled and rebuilt near Sydenham, burned down entirely in a single night in 1936, and photos of those infamous flames decorate the walls of the local pub, the Dulwich Wood House, designed,
