LITMIR.BIZ

      COMING BACK TO the present day from the past, from Karlovy Vary where the freedom from schedules gave me those mountain walks so good for the heart, spring has arrived at last – and it has arrived on the heights of London, too.

      I once thought of London as flat, like a tourist’s map. But, no, to the south and to the north of the Thames, first gently, then more dramatically, this great city rises to various hills, some completely built over, others sweetening the view with the dark green of mature trees rising above the lighter green of grassy parks and open spaces.

      Hampstead Heath to the north is famous, known for its absurdly expensive mansions and conserved woods and heathland, but I dwell in the south, amongst lesser known hills, with less appeal to tourists. Indeed, so little is their appeal that even the whimsical drivers of London’s black cabs cannot always be persuaded to venture ‘south of the river’. But if you take the bus from Waterloo, as we often do, you find the ups and downs begin even in Camberwell, reminding us continually that to reach the next crest, you must always first descend – so there is no need to be upset when your life takes a downturn …

      All the hills around Sydenham, on top of one of which nestled our house, have their own names: Honor Oak, Gypsy Hill, Denmark Hill, Forest Hill, Norwood. When you’re approaching this domain, already from the crest of Denmark Hill you can see that, alone among the southern hills, our hill, a deep overturned bowl, is entirely mantled in green, and from the taxi home after the night shift at the BBC, you can’t see a single light twinkling on it – as if it was left entirely untouched from those ancient times when all of London’s southern hills were the province of thick forests inhabited by deer and bears.

      But it’s neither down to the English love of nature or divine disinterest that this wooded hill survives barely fifteen minutes drive from Buckingham Palace, and that the village of Dulwich at its foothills looks so historic. The reason, I discovered, is bears – or rather baiting bears for the pleasure of Londoners, arranging which considerably enrichened Shakespeare’s chum, the famous Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn. It was Alleyn that bought the village of Dulwich and then bequeathed his estate to a special trust that has managed all the local land for four centuries, and prevents any unfortunate changes. Alleyn’s name is preserved in the names of roads. At the foot of the hill there is an old mill dam, and on the site of the ancient mill now stands the famous Dulwich College, founded, like the local public art gallery (the oldest in England) by the same Alleyn.

      Despite the continual recession of reality, history keeps its grip in Dulwich in the old names of places. A road skirts the hill near Dulwich College and the upmarket sports and riding clubs (one of which is even named the Old Club of Alleyn) and runs into Lordship Lane next to the Harvester pub. It used to be the only road to London. Even this road recalls in its name Dulwich Common, the time when around Dulwich spread only fields of oats and barley and pastures for cows and sheep.

      Cereals once sent up their fruitful stems in fields all over south London. Take, for instance, Peckham, not far from Dulwich, where before the railway era people grew rye, which is why the green expanse of the local park is still called Peckham Rye, and once stretched all the way up the hill to Honor Oak. That oak, in turn, gained its fame because in Shakespearean times, the Virgin Queen Bess, Elizabeth I, honoured it with a picnic;¹⁴ so even a lone tree, growing on just another hill amongst the fields, has etched its way into the life story of these London suburbs.

      And in Dulwich College, set up by Alleyn in 1619 as a school for twelve poor children, are kept ancient court archives from Dulwich’s history, including some documents that seem rather funny today, like the one describing how, in 1334, one William Hayward ran off with the wife of commoner Richard Rolfe, taking not just all her jewellery but a cow worth ten shillings. And it’s not only family dramas that are recorded here. It should not be forgotten that in 1333, poor William Collin was obliged to fork out three pence because his pig had the unheard of audacity to wander into the oat fields of his local feudal lord.

      So, I think, what is history, when even a damned pig is not forgotten, and nor is Julian Farrow who was dragged to court by the scruff of the neck in the year 1440 for missing a day’s work on his lord’s fields? What is history, if not a mirage or a fantasy, in which you have to imagine there really once existed Edward Alleyn, Shakespeare’s chum, and that other about who we’d never know – and so wouldn’t have existed at all – if his pig hadn’t strayed into someone else’s field.

      But let’s get back to reality, where the time was certainly the present, and the English spring really was happening.

      At night, from beyond our windows in the wooded ravine overgrown with elderberry and brambles came the hoarse, hysterical squealing of foxes, while in the garden that morning I saw baby squirrels in the tall tree. In the fresh green leaf buds, in the singing birds and blue-pink primroses spring was indeed rising and coming to life in the tangled woods of Dulwich that climbed, as I said before, the stepped slope of Sydenham Hill right up to our house.

      So as not to forget spring in the mountain forests of Karlovy Vary, I had adopted the habit of walking through the restorative green of the woods both on my way out in the morning and on my way back in the evening. I could get a bus to work right by the house and that was the logical, conventional way to go, but that’s what made me sick of it. There are always other ways, unnecessary ways it would seem – but it’s these needless deviations that lead you to that longed for balance in the soul. As long as I stayed on damp and muddy paths, it seemed to me that our home, with its surrounding woods already preserved for five centuries from financial pressures, existed beyond the starkly painted vicissitudes of fate.

      Despite the obvious benefits, the decision to abandon the bus stop three minutes from home to hike through the woods wasn’t made easily. It meant I had to leave half an hour earlier, which entailed not just tearing myself from my sleep but from writing – I didn’t have, and still don’t have, any other time apart from that early time in which to follow this obligation of the heart, and I was greedy.

      Yet there is a silver lining to every cloud, and the extra half hour’s walk gave me time to reflect, and to develop a sense of the wood – which, as it turned out, I had for five years lost in the fevered dash for the red double-decker bus on which, ensconced on the upper deck, I could for 45 minutes hungrily read sources for another historical book about Islam in Russia. But I realized that for these letters to another room there is only one dependable source – that is me, myself – and so there was no need to scrape and cram: what will

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