Square and Compass, Worth Matravers – Night

Surreal Girl nudges the car along unlit roads. The world seems empty. We are the traffic.

Free from the taint of sodium orange, this is moon country. Silver gilds the landscape, makes water mirrors, alchemises glass into precious metal. Lets us flow along shining lanes.

Corfe Castle grabs the horizon with dramatic stabs of rock. Black teeth against the spilt bruise purple of the sky. Its starving spectres and assassinated dead using the dark to make their escape.

Even the best of places often have a different feel at night. Vital energy, caught between polarities of stone and sea, breaks away when the sun is not around to watch the drama of a view. Enchantment exits when the light gets switched off. Everything changes when the night watch clocks on.

The village falls away. A hamlet splutters out. With it goes the last artificial glow for a couple of miles. From now on, we twist and climb through the dark towards our destination.

The Square and Compass in Worth Matravers is one of England’s most magical pubs. Coming from someone working on The Grimoire of London Taverns, that is not a glib statement. It is not housing the genius loci, it has become it.

From the languid creek of the pub sign to the comforting spill of light coming from the windows, the place is so archetypal it almost becomes unreal. As we walk towards it, I cannot shake a vague feeling of walking onto a film set. Have to banish the thought of several films. Raise hope that we are not going to opening the door to a Slaughtered Lamb welcome. We have drifted across a liminal border and into England’s own dream of itself. Its vision of what a rural pub should be.

Inside there is a chalk board listing the ales, home-pressed ciders and perries. Imagine the shipping forecast areas replaced by names of potential pints. Firebox. War Horse. Dark Star. Priory Mild. It reads like poetry. An irregular ode to an alternative fluid Albion.

My beer is the Chilli Plum Porter. Strong, rich and dark. Autumn poured into a glass.  From the first sup, my mouth falls in love with it.

With traces of Masonic graffiti and fossil ghosts trapped in stone, The Square and Compass needs no faux trappings to generate a sense of history. Its museum of local finds is eccentric character, not a manufactured stab at heritage.

Pint in hand, I can psychometrise Roman rings corroding out of time. Touch giant ammonites. My fingers bridge a gap of 150 million years, flow across the shape of a creature extinct, but not vanished.

The temporal echoes of decades of laughter and talk bounce off of the wood, bounce off the Purbeck stone. You can feel the collected tales of the past swirling around. The Square and Compass has become part of the narrative of the landscape. Part of the English Dreaming.

One pint becomes two. I am drinking in more than the heady kick of the Chilli Plum Porter. My head is a crowded house of spirits. More than a century’s worth of landlords, assorted members of the Newman clan and drinkers pour their stories into me.

A third pint has to happen. One for those who have gone before. One for those here. One for those yet to come. Tonight you cannot help but feel that you can read the future in beer froth, divine a line of fate from your beer dregs.

Surreal Girl and I go outside. Above us is an explosion of stars. A map of past moments of light. The sky as both space and time. Unfolding, traveling into the now.

We look up. Our hands curl together. We walk back in the glow of the highest magic.

The Square and Compass, Worth Matravers – Day

Summer has staged an unexpected comeback. Determined to go out with a suicidal explosion of heat, it gives us a gin bottle blue sky untroubled by cloud. This is the final passionate kiss. A goodbye to remind you what you will be missing as your love leaves the hemisphere.

Crippled, all I can do is let my ripped flesh warm in the sun. Sit on stone so soaked with memory it holds a thousand stories. I try to numb the pain with mind-blurring strength perry. A taste echoing back to wilding times.

The Square and Compass is built on a special spot. The perfection of English feng shui. Sea to the front of me. Hills to my back. Wind warped trees to my sides. Vital energy riding the wind. The place recharges me.

We have arrived in the middle of a pumpkin festival. Giant, bloated orange balls of concentrated sunshine have colonised every available space outside the pub. Mutant squashes tumble down the side of the Fossil Museum.  

Chickens tumble around me. There is a constant dance of sparrows from the trees to the ground to scrabble for pasty crumbs. A local with a Catweazle beard wheezes down the lane on a bike which is clearly more corrosion than dependable metal.

White walls. Painfully blue skies. The last gasp of tree green. A hundred shades of orange from Princeton to safety to burnt marmalade. This is an English autumn coloured with a Disney palette.

I cannot help but feel as is I have stumbled out of the mundane into an archetypal England. Some higher mystical form of the land usually only ever seen reflected in art. English dreaming manifest.

My body may be broken, but my soul is healing.

Chapman’s Pool

When I fall, I hear not only crack and crunch above the breaking waves, but tearing. I cannot get up. Any attempt at movement produces a surge of nausea. My hands flail, hit black rock and clench sea-soaked sand.

It is bad. I know it. There is no mobile phone coverage. More than a mile of hard climb back and I cannot walk. To top this layer cake of woe, it also feels as if an invisible hand has phased through me and is now clutching my heart.

Not since my days knocking around with Andy Collins have I placed myself in such a perilous situation through a mixture of clumsiness and blithe assumption I can suspend any chance of something going wrong. There is stupid and king stupid. Fossil hunting at Chapman’s Pool with my current health issues is king stupid.

My scarf becomes part of a splint. Surreal Girl supports me. We begin the scrabble up. Pain splinters my vision. I can no longer tell whether I am hearing the waves crashing or my own blood breaking inside.

There is a tinnitus explosion of sound in ears then only the Petro off-beat drumming of my heart. My body does not know whether to give in to the dizziness or nausea first. Whilst it tries to decide, I push on.

Surreal Girl remains calm. I follow her example. There is nothing to fear, but fear itself becomes my mantra. Focus on the words instead of the agony. Each step recalling those who said it. Trying to silence the internal scream with thoughts of FDR, Sir Francis Bacon. Trying to push out pain with the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

I climb. Recalling Rosicrucian conspiracy theories about Sir Francis. Recalling the plots of old space operas. Looking at my wife’s weak smile. Anything to block out what is happening to my body. History, fiction and Surreal Girl get me through. They always do.