My Battle of Hastings XIAOLU GUO
‘Magnificent,
brutal and poetic’
IAIN SINCLAIR
My Battle of Hastings
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XIAOLU GUO
My Battle of Hastings
Chronicle of a Year by the Sea
Chatto & Windus
LONDON
Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published by Chatto & Windus in 2024
Copyright © Xiaolu Guo 2024
Xiaolu Guo has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 penguin.co.uk/vintage
Typeset in 10.6/14.5pt Minion Pro by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784745370
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For Moon, a child who has come to know the ebb and flow of the tides along the English Channel and the sands without end on the coast of Normandy
The island Britain is 800 miles long, and 200 miles broad. And there are in the island five nations; English, Welsh (or British), Scottish, Pictish, and Latin.
The first inhabitants were the Britons, who came from Armenia, and first peopled Britain southward. Then happened it, that the Picts came south from Scythia, with long ships, not many; and, landing first in the northern part of Ireland, they told the Scots that they must dwell there. But they would not give them leave; for the Scots told them that they could not all dwell there together.
ANGLO -SAXON CHRONICLE
AFTERWARDS
Battles produce corpses, multitudes of them. In a mass killing like the Battle of Hastings, almost a thousand years ago, hosts of living humans were transformed into corpses, bodies were strewn across mud and grass. Men believed in God then, and there must have been profound fears after the battle about what to do with these bodies. Mutilation of the victims was normal at that time. The rituals of treating the dead a thousand years ago are not entirely known to us, but certainly, if we have to, we can visualise shapeless body parts scattered over the fields. Hacked-off legs and arms, a chunk of flesh torn from the loins, the cleaved-open skull of a soldier, or disembodied guts above which dance a murder of crows with their dagger beaks. Some body parts might have been identified right after the massacre. For example, a half finger which might have belonged to King Harold, or an ear from one of Harold’s brothers. All lifeless, bloody, smeared with the black soil of East Sussex. A layer of acidic earth enveloped those bones and those strips of skin, still slightly warm after being torn from their hosts. But soon these membranes, the soft and hard tissues, lost their integrity in the cold rain. Rats would have run around in ecstasy feasting on the fragmented flesh. Cats, foxes, weasels, boars, squirrels, worms, birds. Yes, birds, migrant birds or non-migrant ones. It must have taken some time for the birds to figure out how they should proceed with the human remains. Were they aware that there was no need for them to fight for their prey, at least not for some weeks or months?
In those days, some eagles were large and strong enough to grasp a child in their talons and fly off with it. One might find the body part of a foot soldier hundreds of miles away, in the north of England or the border around Wales, thanks to a large eagle. But wherever the corpses were, it must have taken years for them to completely decompose. Long after soft tissues had been leached away, skeletons or at least bones would remain, no longer recognisable as belonging to any individual. The wife could not find her husband in a pile of bones, nor the daughter her father. One cannot rule out that some feature in a whitened skull remained, allowing identification. The decomposition would depend on temperature, humidity, insects, animals around the bodies. And of course, water, and not just the English rain. Water would be a factor in deciding the pace of the decomposition, especially in the land along the English Channel. These moist lands are not like deserts where bodies can be preserved, or frozen wastes where a body can be dug up thousands of years later, still revealing its death agony.
On the battlefield, there would have been countless dead or injured horses, once well-trained Norman horses. They had made the horrible trip across the sea from Normandy, and survived the chaotic English landing, their solidly shod hooves cracking on the shingle beach, muzzles dragged and roped, their bulging eyes wet and glinting. I hear these animals crying in the thick of battle, stabbed by spears, hacked by axes, then collapsing under armour, or bolting riderless through fields, their flanks oozing blood. I see a grey stallion, a war saddle strapped on its back, its left foreleg bleeding, its hock damaged and its gaskins smashed. It runs but gradually slows down, then falls onto a broken branch by the edge of the fields. I search for the animal among the bushes. I see it again. Despite these wounds, its mane is totally intact.
After the battle, the Norman army was dispatched to other parts of England, and eventually marched towards London. William the Conqueror knew how to go forward on the back of success. Dead
Anglo-Saxons were left on the hills of East Sussex, or in time pushed into massive ditches by surviving locals. Yes, I imagine the locals would have had to do that, in order to avoid disease and plague. It must have been days after the battle, after rain and mist. The survivors, probably not many of them, mostly women and children, had to drag and push those bodies into mass graves. They must have been terrified doing this. These days the field of the battle is serene and seemingly untouched by ancient agonies. It slopes gently down from the old abbey that was constructed on the top of the hill years after the slaughter. At the bottom of the hill are villages and farmlands that lead to the sea. There is a desolation here even though it is bathed in soft light and green hues. This desolation probably has little to do with its tortured history. When we find a place to be desolate, sad or abandoned, is it the place itself or us projecting our inner state? Or can we really separate the two?
Relocation
I am an immigrant. I am an artist and a woman. Being a woman does not entirely define me, being an artist describes more my way of living. It is true that I see myself as a writer and a film-maker first. I am old enough to say this, with a certain clarity in my mind. Since I left China, I have wanted to live life fully. I have wanted to explore, geographically and spiritually. I became a British citizen some years ago, before Britain left the European Union. I had been living in London, in my partner’s flat which he owns. I never had my own place, and I didn’t mind. Having left China, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to settle in England. This changed when my parents died of cancer, first my father, then a year later my mother. I gave birth to my own child during that time and briefly went back to China with my newborn baby. My brother and I managed to sell the family house where we grew up. All the memories associated with that house, occasionally joyful but mostly sad, seemed to evaporate in the sale. I would inherit half of the money, and when I returned to England, I thought, finally, I could have a place of my own. Once uprooted, now I could root myself again. But London had become so expensive, I could not afford to have my own place, not even a shed if I wanted to live in central London. All my life I wrote in my kitchen, because I never had my own workspace. Where could I find a room just to write, and to think by myself?
I thought about growing up by the East China Sea, and how we watched the waves every day on the littered beach. My grandfather was a fisherman, and spent all his life on his fishing boat, though none of us followed his path. My father loved the ocean, and painted seascapes all his adult life. I thought about the claustrophobic nature of London, and how much I missed the salty wind, the contour of shorelines, and the ceaseless changing waves in the viewfinder of my eyes. I decided to get a place by the sea, along the English Channel. I stopped visiting Europe and China. Instead, I put on my raincoat and wandered around by the English coast. Some days I went to Brighton and Southend, others I walked on the hills of Folkestone and Worthing, or rode buses around Margate, staring into the sand. And then I went back to Hastings. I still remember the first time I visited, right after I had left China. A friend of mine in London said she would take me to visit ‘famous deaths in obscure locales’. This friend was a fan of the rock band INXS and the lead singer Michael Hutchence, who committed suicide in 1997. Though Hutchence did not die in Hastings, his lover Paula Yates, the TV presenter of Big Breakfast, had bought a seaside house in Hastings before their deaths. So there we were, wandering in the Old Town and looking up at a three-storey Georgian house where the rock star and his lover had fleetingly entwined their lives. It was an ordinary building with white walls and peeling paint. It was already owned by some other residents so we could not enter or see the garden in the back. Hutchence died by hanging himself and Yates died of an overdose. The impression of Hastings from that first visit was strange: a rain-stained dilapidated town with old people shuffling along on the pavement and a few homeless men hovering in street corners or sauntering by. During that trip I also learned that the occultist and magician Aleister Crowley had lived in Hastings for the last few years of his life and had died there. Back then I hadn’t linked Hastings to the most famous battle of British history. An obscure place where the formerly celebrated went to