I thought of the book that I was circling around, that I’d been trying so hard to control. It was the problem with having written a few books. You got cocky, thought you were the boss. You thought it was your book, to squeeze into this shape or that. Non-fiction. Memoir. The fictional quester.

How puny and little-minded all those plans seemed from the perspective of this ridge-top, in this vast room made of leaves and air. How presumptuous I’d been, thinking that this was my story alone, to pummel into shape as I saw fit, a story I understood enough to force into the form I wanted.

The breeze had picked up. The bunches of leaves whipped against each other, whipped at the air. The place was speaking. It was a language I didn’t know, but even so I was starting to understand.

How could I know what kind of book this was going to be? My job wasn’t to take what I’d learned and squeeze it into the shape I thought it should have. Before it could be a book this was a story. That story was somehow part of all this—these trees, these rocks full of language that was lost. I didn’t own that story. It had to be allowed to speak for itself. My job was to get out of its way.

PART THREE

PART THREE

22. WHAT HAVE I GOT?

22
What Have I Got?

A friend gave me a clip-on-a-stand that you could use to display a postcard. Into it I slipped the photo I’d taken of the tree with the canoe-shaped scar in its bark. It sat next to the piece of roof tile from the Thames.

I’d come back from Wiseman’s Ferry after that day with Patrick full of a kind of calm energy. I knew what to do now, which was, in a manner of speaking, to do nothing.

First, do no harm. Wasn’t that what doctors promised when they took the Hippocratic Oath? The way to do no harm to these pages was to do them the courtesy of listening to them.

I read the whole lot straight through, without making notes or trying to analyse. At the end of that reading, I decided not to make any more grand plans for the book. No more lists, no more attempts to see the shape of the whole thing. I’d start by making simple categories, and see where that led. I started with the biggest, simplest kind of rearrangement. I made two folders: ‘London’ and ‘Australia’. Then I put the contents of each folder in what I thought might be chronological order.

The London material fell naturally into this structure.

Solomon Wiseman is born in the slums of Bermondsey. His childhood sweetheart, Sophia, is the daughter of a light-erman who takes Wiseman on as his apprentice. Solomon plans to marry Sophia as soon as his apprenticeship is over.