Chris Larkin

Junction 15 of the M25 may not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of escapism, but for me as a child in the late 1980s, joining the M4 was crossing a watershed. We visited my grandparents in Wales every summer, and not only did leaving the London Orbital mean we were properly on our way, it was also the point at which I was allowed to ask for music to be played. I always asked for The Best of the Beach Boys. (No one objected: my father had loved the Beach Boys since the 1960s, even before his older brother moved to the US.) Their songs weren’t just the soundtrack to a car journey to Wales, but a gateway to an America of the mind.

Audley End, the Jacobean country house near Saffron Walden, was requisitioned by the Ministry of Works in 1941 and became a base for the Special Operations Executive. Codenamed ‘Station 43’, it was a training ground for the Polish section of the SOE, an elite group of paratroopers also known as the Cichociemni, or the ‘Silent Unseen’. 

Visit Flatford Mill today and the scene appears largely unchanged; an English rural idyll. But the area around is carefully managed, not just for the benefit of wildlife and farming, but specifically to maintain the appearance of Constable’s paintings. These aims are not necessarily incompatible, but there is an acknowledged desire to maintain a look that can be marketed as ‘Constable Country’. The landscape is to some extent a simulacrum; a present sculpted around a romanticised vision of the past. And it isn’t possible to recreate the scene of The Hay Wain exactly as it was two hundred years ago. The challenges of doing so offer a glimpse into a future we are already being forced to come to terms with.

Not long before midnight I walked the short way to the top of the flood defences on the river near my house. I could see the stars well enough, but no sign of a comet. I moved a little further down the walls in search of a darker spot. As I rounded the corner, moving away from the lights of the warehouses behind, there it was, hanging above the orange glow of sunset.

I heard a cacophony of gulls, unseated from their resting place on the river. A column of birds rose high in the distance beyond the back fence. And at the top of the spiral, drifting on the thermals, was a white-tailed eagle.