Land of Lost Content

One afternoon sometime in the early 1950s, the lad who by a country mile was my father’s ablest pupil in his sixth-form French and Spanish class rang our doorbell, and announced that the schoolgirl on his arm had just consented to become his wife. Not immediately, of course, but as soon as both had made it through the higher education which would force them to live far from each other for the next three or four years. That lad was Ted Walker, his bride-to-be Lorna Benfell. The two had met when he was 14, she one year older. They’d fallen urgently in love. Ted wanted my parents to be among the first to hear. He held them both in high regard, and they him – a mutual affection that lasted to the end.

Ted and Lorna ticked off the years, months, days, until in 1956 they were married. All this is recorded in Ted’s first memoir, The High Path, which was reissued as a Slightly Foxed Edition in 2010. There is, however, a sequel to The High Path. For better, for worse, the marriage stayed its course through thick and sometimes wafer thin, down to the years of Lorna’s illness and her shocking death in 1987. The Last of England, Ted’s second memoir – a copy of which he inscribed to my parents, as he had the first, and which, pristine in its dust-jacket enriched by Ford Madox Brown’s celebrated painting, has been handed down to me – is the account of those final years, of pain and of love lost and won. Love between Ted and Lorna, reignited in her decline; love of an England gone for good; the healing love of another country; and love reborn in a new marriage. A few weeks after burying Lorna in their local churchyard, a distracted Ted took himself off to Spain. He couldn’t bear to linger in his haunted house; in fact he didn’t want to be anywhere at all in England. He packed necessities into his little Fiat, locked up and fled. He drove all the way through France, over the Pyrenees, then down to the villa he’d been lent in Andalusia. The idea was to immerse himself in different sounds, colours, smells. He’d swap the mists of England for the pitiless sun and the harsh aesthetics of gipsy music and bullfights that had beguiled him many years before. The rough beauty of the Spanish language, so removed from English, would reopen some forgotten pathways in his brain, and he’d be a changed person. At one point during his stay, his daughter Susan visited, and as Ted sat waiting for her in a bar at Malaga airport, he spilled a little red wine on the white tablecloth. The blot spread, and he recalled the morning when a tiny spot of blood had appeared overnight on Lorna’s pillow. They’d concluded that probably it was no more than a mild nose bleed, and had dismissed it from their thoughts. That morning was in the very late 1970s, around the time Margaret Thatcher began to dismantle what Ted loved about England. I stress England, not because Ted had any disregard for Britain’s other constituents, but because he didn’t feel for them the umbilical attachment he had to England. It was a deep-veined, viscerally left-wing, Billy-Bragg attachment, inherited from his father, a skilled carpenter, who’d motorcycled – his own word was ‘bladdered’, as Ted notes in The High Path – down to the south coast from Birmingham during the early 1930s to look for work.  He and his wife had settled in a small house alongside a trunk road in Lancing, a house which, when I visited it after Ted’s death in 2004, had become so forlorn that it was demolished shortly after. It was there, by the grinding A259, in that least genteel part of Sussex, that Ted grew up, within sight of the Channel, the River Adur and the Downs, all subjects of the beautiful verse that makes him one of the great nature poets of the post-war generation. The dab of blood on the pillow was fateful, the first evidence of the drama building up inside Lorna’s head. It didn’t take long for them to realize that it spelled big trouble, and indeed, after a succession of tests and scans, the grim truth was revealed.  The ‘bud of a dark, diabolical rose’, as Ted calls it, was opening behind the bridge of Lorna’s nose. The cancer worsened remorselessly through Mrs Thatcher’s decade, and necessitated the removal of Lorna’s right eye and part of her upper jawbone before it had finished its grisly work. Ted was mourning well before Lorna’s body gave up. It must be extraordinarily difficult to find the words that match grief, but being a fine poet is a great help. Douglas Dunn, for one, achieves it in Elegies. Ted claimed that the Muse had long since deserted him, but she can only have been hiding. The poet in him is alive on most pages of The Last of England’s carefully crafted prose. To my mind, the book is at its best not so much in the descriptions of Lorna’s ravaged condition as in the evocations of the world that she, then Ted,  were going to lose. Emotions are transposed from the medical horrors, and explode in the remembrance of rural England: the Chilterns, the Cotswolds, the Vale of the White Horse, the Kentish Weald and particularly Sussex, whose loveliness is conjured on to pages filled with ‘blues, yellows . . . delicately pararhyming light greens’ – nuanced tones of the county Ted loved above all others. He writes wonderful sentences on the majesty of beeches; there’s a lament for Chanctonbury Ring’s landmark trees, felled by the Great Storm of 1987; recollections of blackberry lanes and bluebell woods by Elgar’s cottage; enduring echoes of the cello concerto’s rubato melancholy. And one Sussex piece of man-made beauty is admired, unnamed but obviously the King Edward VII Hospital near Midhurst, where Lorna was sent for some hopeless tests, and to which, a couple of years ago, deviating from our route home, my wife guided me. She wanted to show me the Lutyens-style buildings, the Gertrude Jekyll gardens, the view towards the Downs, fillips to her dejected soul during some traumatic childhood weeks there. After Lorna’s death, Ted stalled, utterly benumbed. But his three months in Spain cranked him back to life. He did a bit of writing, he corrected some proofs, he walked, he swam, he drank in bodegas with new acquaintances. Activities that took him out of himself and gave him enough courage to face the future, which involved first of all coming back home. But as he set foot in England again, it hit him like a banderilla in a bullfight that it wasn’t the country for him. Sooner or later, he would have to leave for good. The die had been cast. But then things took an unexpected turn. By a most painful coincidence, two dear friends of Ted’s and Lorna’s had been going through a wretched drama of their own in the final months of Lorna’s life. The wife, Audrey, lost her husband almost at the same time Ted lost Lorna. They became each other’s solace. They wept together, took walks together, cooked for each other, and of course they talked. After a year of soul-searching, hesitation, lows and highs, they decided to get married, and with timely discretion, their several ghosts beat a retreat. The newly-weds reclaimed Argyll House, Ted and Lorna’s last home, in Eastergate, near Chichester, and were living there in 1997 when I met Ted for the second and last time. He’d suggested lunch in his favourite pub, the Black Horse at nearby Binsted. I found him sitting at the bar, finishing a whisky and lining up another (that much The Last of England had prepared me for). He was dapper and urbane, not the rugged countryman I’d expected. He spoke of my father, whose funeral he was upset to have missed as he’d been on a lecture tour of Australia at the time. I conveyed my mother’s warm greetings and her standing offer of tea should he find himself in her neighbourhood. We talked of poetry, his of course. I asked what he thought lay ahead for him. New poems? Another book about Spain? More short stories for the New Yorker? We’ll see, he said, but first he and Audrey had to move. It was high time. They were too close to pain, theirs and others’. Besides, that woman had completely finished England off. Spain beckoned, and not long after, I heard that Ted and Audrey had bought a house a few kilometres inland from Alicante. It was there, one spring evening in 2004, as he was cooking a supper of riñones al jerez, that Ted collapsed, and was rushed to hospital in Valencia, where he died a few hours later. His body was returned to Sussex. He lies side by side with Lorna in the churchyard a mile from their last home. The Last of England turned out to be almost the last of Ted Walker. It’s a letter of farewell to England; and it’s a love letter to Lorna – silent, unheard Lorna, the book’s commanding absence.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 51 © Martin Sorrell 2016