Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall Read Online Free PDF

Polaroid camera as I did, taking one snap of the knobs on the front of the gas cooker, a second of the fridge door shut, a third of my hand holding the front-door knob, a fourth of the blur as I pulled it to, a fifth of my hand pushing it to confirm that the latch had sprung. Nor did I see anyone stopping, as I did, halfway to the tube and shuffling through these shiny squares of recency – but that doesn’t mean they weren’t doing it, does it?
    All the walls of my writing room were tessellated with Polaroids, and the shiny tide was creeping up on to the ceiling when I bought my first digital camera. What a relief! Now I need only pause in front of the urinal, in the empty youth hostel on top of the Downs, to confirm that the world and I were continuing to coincide. It helped – a bit.
    Coming down off the ridge over stiles and between fizzing pylons, the Adur appeared, flowing sluggishly between curvingbanks. A derelict cement works stood on the floodplain, its dirty chimney giving the finger to the overcast sky. And in the hazy mid-ground loomed the spiritual aircraft hangar I was bound for: the massive chapel of Lancing College. Its rose window was the biggest in England, its nave higher than that of Notre-Dame. Had the chapel’s tower ever been built it would, at 350 feet, have rivalled those of Chartres.
    My ancestor had insisted that, despite the scarcity of funding, one end of the chapel be raised to its full height at the very start, lest he or his successors ever waver in their ambition to build this very big thing. And now his bronze effigy lay in a tomb lodged in one side of the soaring nave, like a fishbone caught in the deity’s gullet – although a very High Anglican he had been a smallish man.
    I crossed the river by a footbridge and walked past a fishery where miserable men sat on hired jetties, their rods dangling in a bilious pond. After a flurry of phone calls, I met up with Sherman and Baltie in a chalky hollow. The Range Rover lumped away, its thick tyres white-walled with clods, leaving the two of us to snap and crackle through the autumnal undergrowth towards the hypertrophied house of God.
    We emerged from the woodland into the teensy paddocks and chicken-wire enclosures of the College’s farm.
But if 350 feet high why not 35, or 3,500?
There were recently shorn alpacas that looked like Dr Seuss’s therianthropes. There were also a couple of motos in a fenced-off wallow. As ever I found the motos’ nuzzling baby-faced muzzles repulsive, but Sherman lisped away happily with them; then, while he took a call from a Milanese brassière manufacturer who was sitting beside the drained infinity pool of his Ibizan villa, he caressed their jonckheeres.

     
    We were expected, and an amiable youth met us at the headmaster’s office then guided us around the flint-knapped quads. He was possessed of sufficient sangfroid not to react to our oddness as a couple, while I found myself unbearably affected by the large spot on his neck to which a concealer had been uselessly applied, and also by the Windsor knot of his school tie. By the time the lad had itemized the crests and memorials and was leading us back through swags of drizzle towards the chapel I was openly weeping.
    ‘Buck up!’ Sherman snapped.
    Inside the chapel the organ pipes were wrapped in translucent plastic – it was more than a century since Canon Woodard’s death and still the biggering continued. I found his tomb and pressed my ear to his bronze breast, beside where his marriedhands rose, the keel of this capsized prayer boat. Sherman took a photo with his iPhone, and said, ‘Very good.’
    Afterwards Baltie drove us into Brighton and dropped us on the edge of the Lanes. Sherman and I walked through the quaint zone to English’s, the fish restaurant. We ate on the second floor, sitting side by side with our backs to the window, and observing the sole other table of diners as if they were a repertory play – which in a way I