Landmarks (22 page)

The old men say their fathers
told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike … No fields, indeed, remained, for where the ground was dry, the thorns, briars, brambles, and saplings already mentioned filled the space, and these thickets and the young trees had converted most part of the country into an immense forest … By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path.

Grass here – as so often in eco-apocalyptic literature – is the concealer and healer, greenly unwounding the damaged earth. Only a few humans have survived the scarification of their species. Mad-Maxish tribes of ‘gypsies’ and ‘Bushmen’ roam the land, divided along ethnic as well as self-interested lines. Jefferies’ book follows its lone hero, Sir Felix Aquila, as he navigates the landscape and tries to find a way to re-establish a viable community that might mature into a worthwhile civilization. Early in the novel, Aquila crosses a vast inland lake to reach a noxious swamp, which he eventually realizes is the site of
‘the deserted and utterly extinct city of London’
, now lying under his feet. The capital is granted no reprieve by the punitive Jefferies; Aquila is present to witness its total vanquishing by nature.

Nature near London
contains the seeds of
After London
. As he wandered his edgelands, Jefferies’ eye was often caught by signs of nature’s irrepressibility: the desirable ease and swiftness with which it might return to absorb human structures. He notices a ruined barn, on whose
‘old red brick wall
… mosses have grown … following the lines of the mortar’, and on which ‘bunches of wall grasses flourish’. He writes approvingly of
‘the great nature
which comes pressing up so closely to the metropolis’. Nature near London is waiting patiently for its chance to claim back its territory – the humanized landscape predicting its coming obliteration.

In 1887, a decade after moving to Surbiton, Jefferies died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight. He was buried in the Broadwater cemetery in Goring, then a suburb of the Sussex town of Worthing. At the time of Jefferies’ burial the cemetery was in open country, but Worthing has since spread and its edgelands have converged around the site, which now looks on to a car park, a flyover and two schools. Trees – yews, hawthorn, ash, sycamore and oak – grow thickly over the cemetery’s thirty-four acres, though, and the area retains – at least in daylight – an atmosphere of calmness and natural life.

Jefferies’ grave is marked by a ziggurat headstone of white marble, set into a marble-bordered plot. The inscription on the border reads, in heavily serifed black lettering: ‘To the honoured memory of the prose poet of England’s fields and woodlands’. The interior of the plot has been filled with earth, in which now grows a profusion of weeds and wild flowers: ox-eye daisies, daffodils, agrimony, lady’s bed-straw, wild mignonette …