To the River by Olivia Laing

Author:Olivia Laing
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857860651
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

After the sun had dropped and I’d soaped myself thoroughly beneath a lukewarm shower I began to revive. I ate a curry in an empty restaurant and drank a beer down with it. The bill came with a bowl of fennel seeds coated in coloured sugar, pink and white and yellow, and for the rest of the evening the ghost of aniseed lay on the tip of my tongue like a word I knew but could not speak. While the light lasted I went down to the railway lands that lay between the town and the A27, bordered by the river to the east and the train tracks to the south-west. The railway lands had once been the station’s goods yard, and after years of neglect were turned quite recently into a nature reserve. Despite some attempts at landscaping the place had not lost its haphazard feel, and the tangled hedges were full of the last punch-drunk elderflowers and the first green nubs of blackberries. I sat by the water there, watching the jackdaws wheel overhead. Once or twice a kestrel came by, pale-winged, its rusty tail splayed into a wedge, circling the Brooks in search of mice. I could hear traffic on the dual carriageway, and with it the periodic wail of a train crossing the river from Lewes to Hastings and back.

Most of this land, and much more besides, had once belonged to the Cluniac priory, where Henry took refuge before he signed away his kingdom. Though it continued to thrive after the battle, the priory had been plucked down in the autumn of 1537 during the dissolution of the monasteries at the orders of Thomas Cromwell, who employed an Italian military engineer to oversee its destruction, selling off even the lead from the roof and the bells before building the largest house in Lewes, Lords Place, from what had once been the Prior’s lodgings. Three years later Cromwell himself was dead, and the building passed into private ownership and was later destroyed.

When the railway from Brighton to Hastings was built in 1845, it cut right through the ruins of the priory, which had, despite the labours of the Italian engineer, been only imperfectly erased. In the course of their excavations, the railway workers opened up a well filled with hundreds of bodies, which were said to emit such noxious odours that several were too overcome to work and had to return to their homes to recover. The bodies were believed to be the royalist soldiers who had been killed in the later stages of the Battle of Lewes, as the fighting reached the priory walls. So what did the railwaymen do with their find? They dredged out the bones, loaded them onto trucks and hauled them into the marshes, where according to the Sussex Express of 17 January 1846 ‘they were thrown into the mass of rubbish which forms the embankment through the brooks, midway between the river and Southerham corner’.

The embankment was still there. I could see it from where I sat, and tomorrow I would cross beneath it to reach the marshland beyond.

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