adventures in solitude (forthcoming noir zombie vs vampire film)

adventures in solitude pt 1: fact

A little after dark I am driving a pale blue Kombi down an unlit country road and suddenly I come to a barred gate. Damn, not such a good shortcut. I swing the Kombi into a three-point turn and while I’m facing an open field my lights go out. The darkness around me is immense, shadowy and silent beyond my little engine. I have the parkers, which on the Kombi are negligible, and I can see only by holding the high beam on. I check my phone: no reception. Steering while holding the high beam against the wheel and trying not to turn the indicators on, I head back to the point where I took the wrong turn, remembering houses there. On the way, I see a house I hadn’t noticed before and pull over. I knock repeatedly on the front door; no answer. I step back down into the yard and walk round one side, dodging bits of farm junk. There’s a light on inside, but no-one’s home. Suddenly I can hear my own rough accelerated breathing above the anxious orange clicking of the hazard lights, and the rustling quiet of the surrounding night. This is how horror movies start. Hn. Better get back on the road.

adventures in solitude pt 2: fiction

She stood at the black dresser in the lamplight, twirling a toothpick round the cone and gazing darkly into the mirror. Casey appeared in the doorway, looking insomniac. ‘Casey,’ she growled, low, slow and husky. ‘Go back to bed. Don’t come out here tonight. Forget anything you see or hear, and don’t come near me till daylight. I’m -’ her upper lip curled slightly ‘- dangerous… I’m in a mood to do some damage; hell, I’m in the mood that will do damage if I’m anywhere near anyone! Please, go back to bed. And shut your goddamn door.’

sissinghurst castle gardens

We cruise through the hedgerowed English countryside, village to village, till we pass picturesque Sissinghurst and turn in along the track to the castle. Well, to the gardens, actually, since the castle, though it has enjoyed various incarnations since the 1100s, is now little but a gloriously solid Norman-style tower holding two writing rooms in which some of 20th-century Britain’s boldest words were written.

Vita Sackville-West and her family bought the ruined castle – a tower, a decrepit Victorian farmhouse and some outbuildings – in 1930, and turned the tower into studies and the farmhouse into a home – surrounded by what the National Trust calls ‘one of the world’s great gardens’. Within a couple of acres, enclosed by a wall on one side and a moat on the other, there is a series of ‘rooms’ – the white garden, the rose garden, the orchard, herb garden, yew walk, lime walk, nuttery, and so on. It’s a wanderer’s paradise, a place of grand gestures and exquisite detail, colour and shadow, encompassing both ancient stability and constant change. Vita was an intimate friend of Virginia Woolf and the inspiration for the central character in Woolf’s extraordinary novel Orlando, and the romantic, heroic atmosphere of that fantastical tale can be felt around the estate.

Besides the garden there is also, among other things, a working Elizabethan barn, a fine restaurant, picnic and parking areas, cafe, plant shop, etc. The restaurant looks out over the fields, including the organic vegetable plots from which diners’ plates are filled. I’ve promised myself that on my next trip to England, I’ll eat there.

Strangely, though I adored the gardens, my greatest pleasure was the tower – the spiralling climb, the individual writing rooms of that fascinating couple, the view from the parapets. And those exceptionally bold words? Vita’s diaries, published according to her wishes after her death by her son Nigel Nicholson in Portrait of a Marriage, give a frank and searching account of her personal life, centring around her bisexuality, her relationships with women and her passionate devotion to her husband. By allowing for publication, Vita did both the women’s movement and the sexual revolution a significant favour.

Driving away in the scented, tinted late afternoon we chose to linger in the High Weald, and stopped at a pub in Goudhurst. A great many pubs in England are almost psychedelically picturesque; this was one of them. The Star and Eagle is all 400-year-old oak beams and leadlight casements, crooked corridors and quaint but scrupulously modern facilities – gorgeous. We had the place to ourselves; ordered coffee and the local apple cake, and sat gazing out a window over soft green, gold and purple hills, the middle distance dotted with sheep.  Across the valley the contours of the weald gleamed under the slanting late summer sun, and in the pale distant sky four hot air balloons rose lazily, one after the other, and floated westward.