Walking through the Snow-Silence

There had been rumours of it for days, conversations over cigarettes outside of work, proclamations of certainty based on nothing but other rumours and childhood memories. A vague excitement that no-one really believed, because, after all, it never snows in Brighton (even though it did this year, back in January, and the year before, in April of all times,) and anyway, it never snows before Christmas.
I was at the pub on Thursday night when it happened, the first few flakes drifting down from implacable skies. 'It will never stick' someone said, and yet, it did. New Road, where the pub I was at, Fitzherberts, turned into a television set from a Christmas Day special. Half-drunk pub goers having spontaneous snowball fights, ripping off their shirts for 'snow-wrestling', pelting passing taxis with hastily constructed snow balls. A strange sense of glee came over me at this scene of anarachy, at the utter strangeness of it snowing before Christmas.
Had eaten too little that day and had gone to the pub straight after work; ale, jagermeisters and coke, whiskies, conversations with people I barely knew. Walked back along Western Road with Pam, delighted with the treachery of the streets, at the bus stop signs proclaiming 'all services suspended due to servere (sic) weather'. Half-drunk, and verging on nausea I collapsed quickly into sleep, a dreamless deep from which I wakened early the next morning.

Met Andy and Joe at the Meeting House cafe on the seafront. More snow had fallen but was turning quickly to ice. The Meeting House was busy, everyone excited, watching eagerly the people falling over, swapping notes on elaborate snowmen which seemed to have sprung up overnight (sea serpents, figures on benches, dragon-like monsters.)
After a coffee and numerous cigarettes we made our way to Preston Park. I wanted to see Preston Manor in the snow, the pet cemetary, the churchyard, the trees, and pretend I was somewhere far, far from Brighton.

Getting there proved to be somewhat difficult. I didn't remember this when I nwas a child. The sheer difficulty of walking, of carefully measuring every step; one foot precisely placed in front of the other precisely placed foot. A carelessly planted foot could lead swiftly to a fall. I watched other people fall. It all seemed so random. I began to imagine that this is what it was like being old, not being able to walk properly, having to think about every single movement. Reminded me of the flu that nearly killed me, almost five years ago now, dragging myself to the toilet, unable to even stand. I lived alone then as well. No-one knew I was so ill. Halfway through that week, I ran out of electricity. No food, no phone, no heat. Plagued by feverish images of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and medieval magicians, insane theories about temperature controlling the illness, controlling the atmosphere. Took me three months to recover. Over the course of eight days I had lost a stone and a half, and had eaten nothing for eight days.

We finally made it to the manor. Went through the adjoining churchyard, tombs covered with snow, church spire lost beneath arctic ghosts. The area is said to be haunted, the churchyard by a woman in medieval costume (someone found dismembered in Lovers Lane? I can't remember the story), and the numerous incursions of Preston Manor are well documented in any number of local paranormal guides. I spent a night in the church, ghost-hunting, with two friends once, paying a deposit at the local pub for the key. (I would like to say thge church is deconsecrated, but all I know is that the church is no longer used for services. Deconsecrated sounds better though.) Well, one of the people was a friend (an old landlord in fact) and the other was my old landlord's fiddle teacher. he achieved some kind of literary noteriety a few years later on the publication of his history of funerary violinists, a history that was, of course, entirely fictional. We came armed with camcorders, thermometers and all manner of hastily assembled recording equipment. Cold, dark church (we turned off the lights), altar like a sacricial stone, choir pews in which shrouded figures could easily be imagined... and it wasn't even eerie. Apart from it being being cold, (this was January of 2005) it was all quite serene and peaceful. I would have felt quite happy spending the night in there alone.

Anyway. Friday. We passed through the churchyard, looped back on ourselves and finally entered onto the lawns at the back of Preston Manor. They had fenced off the entrance, but this was really no more than a token move to deter... Well, I'm not sure who they did wish to deter really... Whatever, it hadn't worked; the snow that covered the lawns was well trodden, a thousand footprints, packing down the snow, an infinity of paths criss-crossing. An unreadable map of some impossible region. 'The Lawns' are one of my favourite places in Brighton. (if anyone says, 'shall we go to The Lawns?', usually in warm Spring evenings, when the lengthening hours make a twilight expedition through Preston Park a pleasant possibility, it refers to here. The Lawns. A naming. And in naming the place seems to belong more to us.). On summer afternoons, when the sun is too hot, and the beaches are too crowded with holidaymakers and drunken Brightonians on a day off rom work, it is far more tempting to come here, to sit drowsing on the quiet slope of the lawns. A book lying forgotten as you slip into sleep in the half-erotic air of June, and the busy traffic on the London Road beginning to seem almost soporific, the tides of a landlocked sea. If you tire of drowsing, or reading, there is always the overgrown walkways of the pet cemetary, whose inscriptions on tiny tombstones strike a melancholy sombre tone ('killed by poison'), or even back into the churchyard, to drift in the shadows under dark yews.

Not summer though. We are far from summer here.

The three of us took photographs, wondered about the lawns. I took a photograph from very near the place where I took a photograph in October. I couldn't get to the exact spot because the gates to the pet cemetary were locked. This was back in October, and I took a photograph through the gates and onto the lawns. Zooming in the photograph, I discovered there appeared to be a figure stood by the wall that separates the Lawns from the churchyard. A blonde haired boy? Some kind of gardener? It was hard to judge size. I put it down to some kind of simulacra - some stain on the wall, some chance configuration of branch and bush, that formed itself into the figure of a person. There was nothing on the wall, that could have formed the image of a figure. Obviously, someone had wandered into shot that I hadn't noticed, and I had captured his image accidentally. What was he looking at on the ground? What was he doing in the Lawns on his own on an October morning? Questions. Mysteries. Why was I there? What was I doing taking a photograph of a walkway looking into the back ground of a Preston Manor?

The manor itself is a dour building. It is not surprising that it has garnered a reputation for being haunted. Grey walls and forever shut green shutters. Not necessarily forbidding, but it seems closed in on itself, lost in its own thoughts. Victorian seances. Bodies buried and exhumed in the gardens. Lost corridors and silence.
Looking about me; the trees, now totally stripped of leaves, the dreaming, drifting house, the harsh bright sky, fading to sunset tinged evening. The cold. I was glad to welcome the cold, had, over the last, long summer, forgotten what cold felt like. Reminded me of the first page of Jane Eyre, that description of 'raw twilight'.

This was a raw twilight too and I was glad of it.

The rest of the weekend passed without incident; a few drinks in the Evening Star on Saturday night, cups of tea in a pub on that Friday night, coffees on my own at the Meeting House cafe. The latter particularly pleasant; bright sunlight, frozen ground, watchful sea. I was quite happy, smoking cigarettes in the cold, drinking instant coffee, hypnotised by the barely moving undulations of the tide.

I went around Andy's flat last night, watched the excellent and incomprehensible Inland Empire by David Lynch. It was a slow walk back to my bedsit, sometime around midnight. The snow had mostly gone, though the pavements were treacherous and impassable, packed with ice polished by the preceding days passing walkers. I walked down the empty (gritted) road, passed by St Annes Well Park, and listened to the silence, that cathedral-hush of old winters. My footsteps seemed loud, crunching on isolated patches of snow not yet turned to ice. I remember the sky, clear and vast, no clouds, profoundly cold, and the stars and that sliver of a moon, sickle sharp, and clear as if studied under a microscope.
My footsteps, my breathing, the ice, street lamps.

The black sky.

Walking through the snow-silence, wishing, somehow, that I could walk through it forever.