The Chalk Giant

THE DANCING MAN

In the summer of my fourteenth year, towards the very end of childhood, I saw something which changed all our lives.

We were out for a walk, Dad, Clara, and I.  I'd gone ahead, half-running, half-slithering down the chalk path which led from the top of Woodcote Hill.  Now I was resting on the stile at the bottom.  My father, equipped with a panama hat, and my sister, who'd just reached that age when you begin to be self-conscious about running down hills, were still making their way down the path towards me.

I remember watching them, just watching them, while whatever the thoughts I'd been thinking receded and my mind grew transparent, like glass.  I seemed to see, not my father and my sister, but two figures whom I'd never seen before, two figures who might have stepped out of an Impressionist painting, the one in a panama hat and the other in a dress of green lawn.

I shifted my gaze to the hill itself.  Now, what is called 'Woodcote Hill' is really three hills put together.  The outer two spurs, which sloped fairly gently down to the field beside me, were patched and dotted with scrub and pine trees, but the hill in the middle, which was steeper, was bare of bushes and trees, being covered only with grass, emblazoned here and there with yellow specks of St John's Wort and Bird's Foot Trefoil, and scribbled upon with the short black stumps of hawthorn trees burnt in a fire a few years back.  It was on this central part that my eyes were fixed.

It had been the driest summer for many, many years.  It hadn't rained for weeks, and in places the grass on the Surrey Hills was the colour of straw.  It was like that on Woodcote Hill.  It looked as though the carpet of grass had been turned upside down, revealing the hessian backing beneath.

So there I was, staring up at the dry, shorn hill in a moment of calm abstraction, when all of a sudden I noticed something odd about it - something exceptionally odd which I'd never once seen before.

The westering sun was casting a wonderfully golden light on the short, brownish grass: a light in which everything seemed much more sharply defined than usual.  Assisted by this evening sunlight and perhaps by my run down the hill, my eyesight became like a hawk's: I saw the hill before me with a clear-eyed, startling intensity.  And what I saw in particular was a shape - a peculiar beneath or on the surface of the golden grass.

It was very faint, and had the sun not been shining at just that angle, and had the grass not been so dry, and had I not been sitting just where I was, alone at the foot of the hill, I might never have seen it.  But I did see it, and the more I gazed, the more distinct the shape became.

There was a sort of huge, jagged circle, and within this circle was the figure of a man, a man who might have been dancing.

I shut my eyes for a moment, then looked again.  It was still there, crystallising before me.  I turned away and glanced across the curving face of the Downs to the right, and then to the left and the thick wooded slopes of the Buckland Hills.  Then I looked back once more.

There was nothing there.

No, wait - there was!  But it was like a puzzle picture, or like a face in the clouds in a picture in one of our school books.  You either saw it or you didn't.  And if you didn't see it at first, it could take you a long time before you did - while the rest of the boys stood around saying, "What, can't you see it yet?  But it's obvious," etc, etc.

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Softcover

£12.49

Softcover

£12.49