Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

There was a period when architects were responsible not just for buildings but for rivers as well. Christopher Wren constructed St. Paul’s Cathedral but also converted the lower reaches of the Fleet, broadening its borders so it could be used for transporting coal. Yet with time the Fleet ended its life as a path for sewage. And when even those underground sewers dried up, their grand Wren-like vaulted ceilings and arcades became illegal meeting places beneath the city where people would gather during the night, in the no-longer-damp path of its stream. Nothing lasts. Not even literary or artistic fame protects worldly things around us. The pond that Constable painted dried up and was buried by Hampstead Heath. A thin tributary of the River Effra near Herne Hill, described by Ruskin as a “tadpole-haunted ditch,” whose waters he sketched beautifully, exists now possibly only in an archive drawing. The ancient Tyburn disappeared and was lost, even to geographers and historians. In much the same way I believed my carefully recorded buildings along Lower Richmond Road were dangerously temporary, in the way great buildings had been lost during the war, in the way we lose mothers and fathers.

Around us were untranslatable sounds, something in flight, a series of footfalls. I could hear Rachel’s breath but there was no sound from Olive Lawrence. Then in the dark she began to talk, to distinguish the barely heard noises for us. “It’s a warm evening…and the pitch of those crickets is in D….They have that sweet quiet whistle, but it’s made with the rub of their wings, not by breath, and this much conversation means there will be rain. That’s why it’s so dark now, the clouds are between us and the moon. Listen.” We saw her pale hand point near us, to the left. “That scrape is a badger. Not digging, just his paws moving. Really, it’s something tender. Perhaps the end of a fearful dream. Just the remains of a small uneven nightmare in his head. We all have nightmares. For you, dear Rachel, it might be imagining the fear of a seizure. But there need not be fear in a dream, just as there’s no danger from the rain while we are under the trees. Lightning rarely comes during this month, we are safe. Let’s walk on. The crickets might move with us, the branches and underbrush appear to be full of them, full of high C’s and D’s. They can reach as high as an F at the end of summer when they are laying eggs. Their cries seem to fall on you from above, don’t they? It feels like an important night for them. Remember that. Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.” Hers was the calmest voice I knew when I was a boy. There w...

There were all these landscapes within her. She could read the noise of forests, she had timed the rhythm of the tidal slop along the embankment at Battersea Bridge. I am always curious why Rachel and I never ventured into a life like hers and her vivid example of independence as well as empathy for everything around her. But you must remember we did not know Olive Lawrence for that long. Though the night walks—accompanying her along the bombed-out docklands or into the echoing Greenwich Foot Tunnel, our three voices singing a lyric she was teaching us, “Under stars chilled by the winter, under an August moon…”—I will not forget.

“I’ll send you two a postcard,” Olive Lawrence said when she eventually left London. And then was gone from our lives. But somewhere on the borders of the Black Sea or at some small village post office near Alexandria, she would indeed mail us a platonic billet-doux about a cloud system in the mountains that suggested an alternative world, her other life. The postcards became our treasures, especially as we knew there was now no communication between her and The Darter. She’d journeyed out of his life without a backward glance. The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states. Though perhaps not. What did that boy know….

The shade of his one large mulberry tree. We used to work mostly in vigorous sunlight, so now it is the shade I think of, not the tree. Just its symmetrical dark existence, and its depth and silence, where he talked to me long and lazily about his early days, until it was time to go back to wheelbarrows and hoes. The breeze lifted itself over the shallow hill and entered what felt like our dark room, rustling against us. Could have stayed there forever, under that mulberry. The ants in the grass climbing their green towers.

They are accustomed to his roving mind, as when he unearths the John Clare line where “fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn,” or recites a poem by Thomas Hardy about the devastation to small animals on the seventy or so fields where the Battle of Waterloo was fought. The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels, The lark’s eggs scattered, their owners fled; And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals. The snail draws in at the terrible tread, But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim. The worm asks what can be overhead, And wriggles deep from a scene so grim, And guesses him safe…. It is his favourite poem. He reads the passage slowly and gently, as if in animal time.

He puts his hand on her shoulder as they walk into the brown building—the great library of Mazarin, who, he announces, was “the default ruler of France after Richelieu’s demise.” Only Felon, she believes, would use the word “demise” so unconsciously, this man with barely an education before the age of sixteen. The word from a secondary vocabulary he memorized, just as he re-trained his own handwriting away from the coarse script she’d seen in his childhood notebooks beside those precisely sketched molluscs and lizards he would draw from the natural world. A self-made man. An arriviste. Therefore not trusted as authentic by some in the trade, not even himself.