MR MOORE’S COTTAGE
A few weeks back we drove down south to East Kent to visit Emma’s 94-year-old grandmother. She was anxious to see Reuben & we’d postponed the trip a couple of times already. After the family schmoozing had been duly photographed we found we had an hour or so to spare before needing to insert ourselves into the London orbital traffic jam called the M25 motorway. My birthplace was only 20 minutes further south – a tiny village called Horton Kirby. Right next to it was the narrow, winding country road called Hockenden Lane alongside which my late grandmother’s cottage lay. I knew that the terrace of five cottages had been sold by the farm that owned them long since. I knew too that they had been gentrified & now housed well-heeled commuters who fancied a breath of rural England in the morning & evening either side of hitting the nearby A20 to London & their places of work. But what intrigued me most was whether the small group of old barns, cow byres & sheds that stood between the garden of number 1 Hockenden Cottages – my granny’s house – & big neighbouring house was still standing.
The lane was unaltered. Only the small groups of houses – all once farm labourers’ tied cottages – were changed. Roof extensions, conservatories & Audis & BMWs in the drives indicated the demographic shift that had taken the labourers away to factories & the big housing estates next to nearby towns & replaced them with the solicitors, surgeons & city wizz-kids. But a sign bearing the name ‘Albert Vinson & Son’ declared that the big farm that had employed my grandfather as a motor mechanic was still in business. And to the left of the hairpin bend the old oasthouse, whose conical roof had been sheered off by a crippled Spitfire during the Battle of Britain, had been restored.
We took the last bend & climbed the steep, short hill that briefly concealed the row of cottages. Granny’s was barely recognisable. It had sprouted a span of mullioned windows along the front of the obligatory roof extension & a multi-panelled conservatory squatted where once the Victorian-style kitchen garden had stretched to the edge of Vinson’s orchard. Only the end cottage – number 5 – remained defiantly unmodified, even retaining its brown, unpainted pebbledash exterior & the 1920s door with its oval stained glass window.
We pulled in & I got out with my camera. Feeling simultaneously furtive & proprietary, I took a series of shots of number 1 & of the whole row. Then, in some trepidation as to what I would see, I turned away from the cottages & took in the vista of brambles & fencing that now separated Hockenden Cottages from the house next door. There was no trace of the two adjoining barns that had housed a pair of hay waggons & my granddad’s ancient Riley 9 tourer. The old apple shed – a long, low building inside which the cooking apples from the orchard were stored in wooden crates (whose scent permeated the air every autumn) – was gone. In fact, the entire orchard had been taken out & now a vast, flat field stretched away to a new horizon.
But next to the lane one dense clump of brambles still remained, clinging to the bole of a squat, spreading beech. I climbed across old familiar timbers blackened with insulating tar & through high nettle beds & I pushed my way into the tangle of thorns & branches. And there within, retained by the hoops & arches of the blackberry bushes that had pulled it down, was the lintel & door of Mr Moore’s tiny two-room lean-to cottage. Mr Moore had died 50 years before & only my grandparents had attended his funeral. But my memories of him were vivid & specific & now they came rushing back from a world long vanished.
MR MOORE'S WALL-CLOCK
Mr Moore lived in a lean-to shack
(two-roomed and shingle-boarded) at the back
of the barn where Grandad kept his car.
Clad with roofing felt and thick with tar
which bubbled in the sun, it shrunk
into the lee of the outbuildings, sunk
deep in a reef of marigolds and nettles,
like the shipwreck that tilts and settles,
shapeless and unnoticed. In the long days,
we children wound our orbit round pathways
of cinders, followed the beaten circuits through
bluebells and cabbage-patches, flew
back to the cottages like swifts at sunset.
And the world was one green hill, the sky a net
that trawled us through the seasons. Time
was a circle dance, two hands in rhyme,
turning, trapped, around the Roman face
of Mr Moore's Prince Albert watch. Period and place
conspired: early summer, watch chain swinging
in the sun, a crowd of heads inclined to hear the singing
of the wheels. Snapping the brass lid shut,
he muttered, "Tempus fuggit", and withdrew. Cut
free from the web, we reeled away
around the orchard tracks. And then, one day,
one June, I crouched inside his smoker's bow
beside an empty grate. Outside the undertow
of low clouds hissed against the single pane,
damping dust, rattling nettles, a long rain
from the east. Granny plumped his pillows, twitched
the patchwork counterpane his wife had stitched
in the days of the old queen. Now he lay
log-still, dream-bound and seventy years away
along the parabola of Vinson's paddock, chasing
Painted Ladies with his cap. Granny ministered, replacing
flowers unnoticed (willowherb and foxglove), winding up
the lamp-wick, slipping the sill of a china cup
beneath his Kaiser Bill moustache. And I lay coiled
in the cage of the hearthside chair, breathing oiled
darkness, ghost fumes of black tobacco,
calcium tang of lime and plaster, scent-echo
of caves, primeval places. And behind the chanting
of the rain, a tenor voice called time, counting
down the seconds: Mr Moore's old hanging clock, walking
across the wall on one brass leg, soft-talking,
like the messenger whose tale is too important
to be shouted loud. Not this harbinger's way, to rant
about decay, the end of worlds. So, doomed,
I watched and heard the hours unwind, consumed
by the oldest story. Mr Moore slept and I dreamed
for the last time. How brief the story seemed -
the fable of the wheel that turns from light
into shadow, from my midday to Mr Moore's midnight.
1:39:23 AM 
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