Goodbye, England! (For how long who knows?)
A personal mythology recurs in my writing, much the same as poppy wreaths have crept into my films. For me this archaeology has become obsessive, for the ‘experts’ my sexuality is a confusion. All received information should make us inverts sad. But before I finish I intend to celebrate our corner of Paradise, the part of the garden the Lord forgot to mention.
-from Modern Nature by Derek Jarman, 1991.
This summer before I left my life in the UK to embark on my late twenties crisis in a foreign city I decided that I wanted to immerse myself in the Englishness I was leaving behind. I’m not particularly patriotic and I tend to avoid over-bearing, pollen-smeared musings on the English countryside. Having grown up working-class in the aforementioned environment, I always found the bucolic ‘dappled sunlight’ and ‘apples straight from the neighbor’s tree’ narrative nauseatingly middle-class and ignorant of the realities of living where the only escape for some is an expensive and meandering bus journey.
My final weeks in the UK coincided with the re-publication of Modern Nature, Derek Jarman’s diaries written between his London Bankside apartment and Prospect Cottage – his small, tarred-black fisherman’s cottage on Dungeness in the two years following his HIV diagnosis. For years Jarman’s work existed at the peripheries of my knowledge, neglected because I supposed his references to high art and culture would swoop intimidatingly over my head.
I have spent the majority of my twenty-eight years on earth living between small, provincial towns and I’ve always felt vaguely embarrassed by it. Any previous attempts I have made to assimilate into urban environments have ended in exploitative working conditions, financial meltdowns and loneliness. My inevitable retreat from these situations leaves me weak, defeated and forgetful of the parental safety nets and leg-ups that some of my city-dwelling peers benefit from.
From the outside Modern Nature appears to be mired in one of the main things I dislike about rural life: a relatively privileged white man taking up space in an otherwise working-class area. Despite having partaken in a lot of sex whilst living in the confines of the English countryside I had rather narrow-mindedly always thought of it as sexless. My own rural town’s colonization by the wealthy, who have contributed little more than big gates, overpriced organic produce and outrageous house prices made it seem pin-straight and dull in comparison to the lascivious city streets I had read about.
However, Jarman elicits the bawdy, unwieldy and unforgiving temperament of the countryside so perfectly that when reading Modern Nature I found myself temporarily outside of the rigid and sterile confines of the British class system, and for once daring to be proud of having lived outside of cities for so long.
(Prospect Cottage, August 2018)
The Ivy-leaved toadflax by the lifeboat station clings for dear life to the tar and rubble dumped from the roadworks. Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon, the goatsbeard, is out by the kerbside. Though everything is tinder dry, most plants seem to struggle on. I water the front garden.
During a brief break in the heat wave this summer I visited Dungeness and observed Prospect Cottage in my own typically English way: awkwardly and from a distance. In the context of his HIV diagnosis, Jarman’s relationship with the garden at Prospect Cottage becomes painfully allegoric, a place of both solace and cruel reality in which the very notion of Nature is thrown into question. The garden becomes the body, which despite our best efforts to nurture and shield is perilously vulnerable to forces outside of our control and programmed to demise. The space that Jarman created and is maintained in his memory feels bodily and personal despite being fully exposed.
Standing in the rain, I guiltily took one picture on my phone for posterity and turned my back on the cottage. Facing out towards the silt-brown channel, across the expanse of wild shingle dessert I decided to make my own peace with rural England. I’m not forgiving the Tories or austerity or Brexit or wearing a gilet – but I’m cutting myself some slack for hiding away in the relative safety of the countryside for so long. England is a place where I wear my small town identity like a red flashing light; it’s impossible to hide. Jarman’s wind-scorched daffodils, wild herbs, opportunistic sea-kale, driftwood and condom detritus belched up from the channel show the English countryside as the quietly subversive and uneasily sexy place that I know it to be. Not everyone is able to find their tribe in a city, especially amongst violent gentrification, teetering on the edge of poverty in bullshit jobs and precarious housing. I’m leaving the English countryside somewhat heavy-hearted but full to bursting with memories of muddied shoes, bare-arse midnight sea-swims, parties fields away from my front door and the wild, tangling effect of nature on the human body.
I left the UK because I’m scared of everything. I’m scared of remaining broke my whole life and of somehow getting rich; of going out and staying in. I’m scared of airplanes and botulism and death. Mostly I’m afraid that one day somebody will call me out for being a fraud or a phony or a bumpkin and they will be right. Historically I have been drawn to insipid comforts like supermarkets and trash TV that are so readily available at home, especially for the over-worked and underpaid. So propelled by the waves of Brexit and my EU migrant partner I took some German lessons and moved to Berlin. I’m intrigued by what it might mean to be a body in an urban space, how the shift in pace and visibility would feel on my skin. I don’t know yet if it’s going to work out. I’m throwing hot spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. But it’s good to be shaken out into the relative unknown. I hope I can stay a while.