It was New Year's Eve and I was nineteen, and filled with the Bird-God myth. I crossed the river Trent by ferry-boat at Barton ferry and walked through Barton-in-Fabis in the dark cold night. On the crest of the low hill I turned to watch the New Year in. It seemed a mystical experience. I felt some kind of awakening. Later that year I wrote an imaginative version of my journey, stone cold sober. Here it is . . . .
As I walked, there were people walking with me. I could sense them breathing, and feel the movement of their minds. Yet, when I turned to look, there was nobody with me in the chill night air. I was alone and walking towards another year: it was New Year's Eve this night, with an ice and a slight hill fog.
" I want to see the new year in, by myself, on the top of the hill across the river. I want to stand and let the newness pour into me like a blood transfusion. I want to feel the tenderness of birth, the new skin, the warmth and excitement of firstness. I want to hear the sirens wail on midnight, the engines in the marshalling yard sound their whistles, the dance, the song, the festivities, the wandering worthwhile and cleansed, the shout of voices across the slopes, the horses galloping black in the crisp fields, from corner to corner, stating their territory for new intruders. And then in the green blackness that sinks on the year I want to stretch my hands into the sky and shout "Oh moon, thy drowning is no sorrow" ; to bow my head and cringe then from the fullness of its watching, and let the overwhelming force of Nature lift me to sublime reaches where Man is a pagan to the ant once more, where the roll of steel wheels on the rail do not kick and thud in the dark hissing recklessly, and do not blunder among the rioting growth to find a nowhere that is January the First".
This is what I meandered through my mind whilst walking. The road seemed endless, and the sodium lights so bright. Half an hour to midnight, and the world waited. I passed into the dark of the river road. The traffic swished in the big road, a small but sudden scream came from the running ditch, then a sound of whistling feet in the mud. Electricity bristled in the air and climbed the sky towards the shining sixpence moon hanging there.
I heard them moving in the thick undergrowth; they were surging with me, in an animal rhythm. I saw a hare bound across the road and go, into the river fields. It, too, had a rhythm: it did not jump, but made a rhythmical sliding glide and landed with a heartbeat. There was a steady pulse of my heart in my brain, in my ears, and in the very fields. A compulsion, a moving tempo, steady and unremitting, an earth-core sound. I felt the world then; I touched the nerve spot, the unimaginable centre of activity. The indescribable jarring thud became the pulse of a boil, an abscess on humanity. The fear-feeling overcame in waves and moved me towards the river. Get off the earth. Get off the land.
As I came down to the river there were many splashes and it seemed the water was being threshed by the wind. I felt unsteady, and dropped to my knees on the bank. Behind me the old wooden ferry-hut fell melting away into the writhing reed-fronded overflow pond at its back.
There was activity all around me now, and I had a sensation of people moving round me in that self-same rhythm, beyond doom, exultant, filled with a new year liberation.
I boarded the ferry-boat and began rowing. The river seemed like oil or molasses. for the oars stuck and crabbed in the thick depth. All at once I was in the current and I let the boat drag downriver and steered it across. There was no human sound now, but I impulsively turned to look back at the far bank. I could see it clearly in the moonlight, and it was lined with many people, young and old, standing with their heads upraised and eyes cast skyward. They had just reached the river's edge and now they were wading into the water in unison. I had a strange feeling that the maimed were healed, and all were equal.
The boat swung away downstream as I jumped ashore to run in the knee-high fog, up the hillside. I passed a village with its church bells coughing muffledly, then one by one the sirens and whistles began their hailing of the infant year.
It was only a felling inside my brain, all within me, this noise, this naturality. In reality there was only the slosh of the moon splashing in the foaming firmament, and nothing more.
And then only the shell of me was walking. I could see myself, white and pallid in the moon glare, rhythmically stepping out over the broken fields. The shell of me stooped to pick up a snail from amid the furrows, but it was only the shell of a snail. However, my walking self cherished it and put it inside his pocket. He then began to fill his pockets with these animals, snails and slugs and other creatures of slow movement. They were all oriented towards the hill and travelling at their fastest rate. My other self made a Boy Scout sign and ran on, headlong, blindly compelled, up the slope.
I lingered in the air, stunned and confused. I looked back again at the struggling hordes of determined people. They were wet from the river and shivering, splinters of fog-wet dripping off them in the rippling coldness.
The sirens wailed on, the hooters and the whistles and screaming, the ringing and whining and pealing and dark singing, the cacophony of a singular midnight.
I watched myself reach the hill crest and scatter my remnants over the ground until nothing of me remained. All my skin was shell and my blood had long since flowed away.
She will make me scatter my ashes from myself, and free me from my bondage. She will call me from myself and my dust will ride across continents of air.
Of course my brethren rose in unified dignity, soaked as they were, and they too watched their cleansing. The brittle scent of January was all-pervading, and it was the smell of sweet cool thinness: and the dead plane fell away . . .
The hill was now my dignity, and our dignity too, and as we clung to her wings we sang a song of disgrace. As she flapped gigantic and slow into the night, all my heart was a void and all my soul was a bird.
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