My Time in Space Read Free

then, is where the possible and the impossible meet. Did it also impress me as an all-encircling threat? For otherwise I cannot account for a painting from my mid-teens, called ‘A Man Cut in Half by the Horizon’. The man staggers towards one with terrifying or terrified hands raised above his head; his midriff is missing and in the gap one sees the dwindling road behind him and a low horizon between desolate heath and a luridsky. Splashes of dark red along the roadside perhaps owe more to my defective colour-sense than to thoughts of blood. I showed this work to the physics master of the small provincial grammar school I attended. Why him, of all people, the representative of a version of reality compounded from blackboard-chalk and stale pipe-smoke, in the dragging gravity of which the school clock ran slow, who for year after year had reduced all the fantastic and precise ‘Properties of Matter’ to half a dozen experiments of mortal tediousness and indefinite outcomes? If I wanted to shock him I did not succeed. Instead of fulminating over the impossibilities of my scene, he merely asked why I didn’t paint something beautiful , such as a sunset; nobody, he said, could even imagine a painting called ‘The Ugly Sunset’.
    That grammar school was in Ilkley, Yorkshire; the horizon of my fantasy was the skyline of the plateau above the picturesque crags and winding walks of Ilkley Moor itself. It is one of the Pennines ’ dark moorlands underlain by millstone grit; the next, north of it, is Emily Brontë’s, and then come heights of the more luminous grey of limestone. I spent much time up there, sometimes with my younger brother and his small friends whom I coerced into scouring miles of heather for elephant hawk moth or oak eggar caterpillars, or with schoolfriends of my own, looking for golden plover nests or trying to rediscover a shallow pond we named Swoopers’ Tarn because we were once driven off from it by diving seagulls and which lay in such a level expanse of bog that with our small statures it was difficult to locate from a distance , or alone, seeing the two gaunt pylons on the highest point of the moor – disused radio-masts from the war years, I think – as elementals, giant embodiments of nature’s forces, stalking the edge of the world.
    Cities were invented to protect us from the terrors and temptations of horizons. Façades stare down the would-be-wandering eye, direct it along perspectives that terminate in monuments to the centrality of the places they occupy. And the rebellious urge of some citizens – myself among them – to overcome these constrictions drives us to the tops of whatever poor heights the city’s bounds enclose. In London my urge to drink space and inhale distance had to be content with the views from Hampstead Heath and Parliament Hill. Constable could look out of London from there, into the countryside beyond, but now it is impossible to see the city whole. Nor do these views have anything of the map about them; they reveal neither the grand theorems scored by the Enlightenment nor the knots left in the grain of the modern city by the medieval villages it has grown around. The subject may occupy 180 degrees or more of the visual field horizontally, but hardly five degrees from top to bottom; we see the city edgeways on, an expanse almost without volume, a crust.
    Pining for horizons, I used to walk through London so far as possible as if I were in open countryside. The site of my ‘ University of the Woods’ could have been Hampstead Heath, but was in fact, or in imagination at any rate, a scruffy bit of parkland by the Welsh Harp reservoir, beyond Cricklewood and Neasden – beyond, that is, from the point of view of West Hampstead, my village when that piece of fiction was written – across which I used to ramble, until the body of a youngster from a delinquent family we knew of was dug up there, and it no longer seemed a safe landfall from the sea of chaos growling