The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape
Alexandra Harris (Faber & Faber, £25)
WHAT can be read from a shadowy depression on a smooth wall? What stories can be gleaned from a twice-lifesize stone head of uncertain origin? What are the chatter-marks saying in a flint wall? In this lyrical, almost dreamlike book, Alexandra Harris weaves her own Sussex childhood with lives long past, walking the chalk paths, venturing into cool churches and wandering the beech woods to imagine what life was like for farmers, clergymen, peasants, housewives, artists and travellers over the centuries, from the Roman guild of smiths revealed through a tablet found in 1723 to the Polish war-time refugees taught in Nissen huts in the woods
of Monkmead. She has delved into letters, parish records and account books to extrapolate the realities of ordinary people’s perspectives and concerns; where the history books concentrate on overarching politics, she looks at local minutiae. Early on, Prof Harris draws upon her own imagination over much. She dreams up the musings of people whose names appear in a record of pews, a woman hefting her ‘red-faced granddaughter’, a shepherd gathering old man’s beard. Ascribing thoughts and feelings to them fictionalises these passages and lessens their power.
The book rewards perseverance, however, and its disparate chapters crowd upon each other in vivid vignettes: the people who built 18th-century Chichester, from the formidable merchant’s wife Elizabeth Peckham to the mason Henry Smart; the efforts to nurture a Canadian moose, painted by Stubbs, at Goodwood; the Arcadian landscapes of Chichester artist George Smith; the Felpham sojourn of poet William Blake, who was accused of sedition. Prof Harris looks beyond these shores, too, following the poverty-stricken agricultural workers who set sail to Australia and Canada in search of prosperity, how they attempted to work with indigenous people without realising that their mere presence was destructive. She addresses slavery, acknowledging the complexities that led the poet and author Charlotte Smith to fight for her inheritance, yet also deplore the horrors of the practice.
This is a jewelled patchwork of a book, sewn together from snippets of poetry, diary entries and furrowed fields. As a portrait of a place, it is hard to better.