Sunday Morning – The Rising Down

“A downe is a lytyl swellynge or arerynge of erthe passynge the playne grounde … but not retchyng to hyghness of an hylle. ”
Bartholeaeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus, trans John Trevisa, 1398

Cover design – Pete Adlington, Faber and Faber

I’ve been enjoying Alexandra Harris’s The Rising Down – Lives in a Landscape. “Never go back, they say,” but Alexandra Harris, a native of Sussex, England, ignored the ir advice, and it “was a revelation.” Alice Albina, in her review in the TLS, says, ” she makes a small part of England sing.” I bought the book because of the review, and so far, that assessment seems bang on. It opens landscape, history, and culture, and imaginatively enters the minds and lives of the area’s inhabitants. If the book reminds me of any other writer’s work, it could only be that of Peter Davidson, one of my all-time favourite writers. Harris has a similar way of touching on this or that aspect of a time or place, considering it, being reminded of something else, following the connections and the tangents, reflecting on where she’s landed, and setting off again, through archives and literature, paintings and personal experience and memory, and making all of it entirely worthwhile. Albinia claimed the book is thrilling in the way things unexpectedly tumble out of their orbits, and into another one, and that, so far, is how the book progresses. I haven’t read enough to give a full account, but have read far enough to express my pleasure in going along on what could feel like a trip in the tardis, with a particularly interesting time and place with a particularly erudite and interesting incarnation of Dr. Who.

” Standing in the lane one day after the walk back from Arundel, wanting the last of the low sun before going indoors” Harris tried “putting her pin in the map of time … A winter afternoon in 1663 – who stood here then?” She was looking at the rectory windows. “Who was at the window?”
In 1662, John Sefton took over as rector of the church at South Stoke, from Henry Staples. Harris takes whatever she knows of Sefton from the Clergy of the Church of England Database, and using it as a starting point, gives us an isolated and bookish man drawing a map of his church, and filling in the names of the occupants of the pews. A map of Sunday mornings in South Stoke church.

“Fourth pew north side: John Cobbie. woodsman. Anne Cobbie, his wife. Joan Martin, my housekeeper.

Joan went to bring in the last bits of washing from where they lay on the hedge. A white hedge, wrapped up like a New Year’s gift. Still damp, but they’d had an airing. Two sheets, six cloths, four napkins. Edges together, halves, quarters. Folding, folding. Standing a minute at the back gate over the brooks, she saw the ferry come across. There was only the dinner to do now, and the feed to take over to the horses at Calves Croft, and she should check whether the boys had done the chickens. And if the shed door was still wedged shut, she should ask Sam to look at it before tomorrow though he’d be tired out. And then she would have another poem.
It was the book Mr Sefton had lent her. Mr King’s poems. Mr King, or his lordship: the bishop. The rector had known him for years and years, since before the wars he said. It was a change from the bible anyway. These poems were very sudden and full and then over.
The star is shot and man forgot: that had happened last night. There were beautiful pictures: a falling star, a flying eagle, bubbles on the water, and men were like those stars and eagles, the poem said: a flash of light and they were gone. Sic Vita.
The wind blows out, the bubble dies;
The spring entombed in autumn lies;
The dew dries up, the star is shot;
The flight is past, and man forgot.

There was a bird up there now over Perry Hill, lumbering into the air on immense, rapid wings. She stayed watching as she realized the size of it. A bustard, was it? Shepherd’s turkey, the old people called it, though sh’d never known a shepherd eat one. Like to the falling of a star or as the flights of eagles are. The damp sheets were cold and heavy.”