A nice birthday gift: I’m officially and proudly now a Blake Cottage Trust Ambassador. Do take a moment to read about our work!

In honor of this occasion, here’s a bit from the chapter-draft-in-progress about my first visit to Blake’s cottage in Felpham this July.

Conclusion: Felpham’s Vale

On a hot July day in 2026, I visit Blake’s cottage at Felpham for the first time. My host is Doug Nicholls, chairman of the Blake Cottage Trust, which has been leading the restoration of this place – one of Blake’s only two homes that are left in their original buildings. (John Riordan can tell you all about the last one!) Last year, in the nick of time, the Trust secured funding for a new thatched roof and, miraculously, the proper variety of thatch and a master thatcher to perform the work. The thatch (native reed straw, endangered by climate change) came from Hampshire, on a farm less affected than others by the drought because they’ve been tilling with manure for 40 years. The walls, which were bowing outward as the old roof sank down, have now been stabilized. All this work cost a lot of money. To finish restoring the interior and garden, remove a crumbling 1960s addition, and build a modern visitors’ center, we need a lot more. The walls of the cottage and its small garden, as I stand in the narrow street, look so sturdy, studded with rows of small flints, or spalls, pushed into the mortar between the bricks in an orderly pattern called galleting, believed to strengthen the walls and ward off evil spirits. But it’s so easy for a treasure to be lost. For walls to crumble and fall. For evil spirits to tramp on in, like Schofield the Accuser into the Blakes’ Eden.

The village of Felpham is quiet today, drowsy in what is now England’s hottest summer ever and its third drought in five years. Only the trees shading the old vicarage next door are green. To the left, up the street, valiant baskets of pink and purple petunias decorate the door of the Fox Inn. To the right, the street stretches down to the beach (an arrow helpfully indicates To The Sea), past the neat houses that now fill what would have been the largely empty space between the Blakes and the sea. Each has a garden of heat-tolerant plants judiciously watered; if there isn’t a hosepipe ban here, there will be soon.

Doug unlocks the wooden door in the high brick wall (I lead you in at the narrow gate, jangles my brain, built in Jerusalem’s wall) and leads the way into the former garden, in which Blake claimed to have seen the poet Milton, “cloth’d in black, severe and silent” descending down a staircase “paved with precious stones.” The rectangle of walled ground where they would have tended their plants and the white kitten (I like to think) would have joined Blake in stalking imaginary beings is now a rubble of building materials and cleared-away dirt, including giant heaps of Sussex flints, large as my hand. One catches my eye: chalky white outside, its split-open heart sparkles with geode crystals and floating pale circles like the moon. Father, the gate is open. The air is thick with omens here. My head fizzes with peacock colors: bright as a flame of precious jewels. Or a meteor, like the big knobbly rock my sister and I once found in our Alabama pasture and lugged home in our red wagon. Or Milton in the form Blake experienced him, sizzling down like a falling star to strike Blake in the tarsus of his left foot and ricochet up through his whole body. Or the sparkle of a geode, hidden until a plow or shovel brings it to the light.

Circuitously, we make our way into Blake’s cottage. And then we are in the heart of the original building, passing through a kitchen chamber with a bread oven in the wall (which the Blakes would have used.) It’s obviously a work in progress, with holes in the walls and construction rubble everywhere. Yet over our heads, orderly rows of new ceiling beams – put in as green wood so they could cure and crack and settle into place – glow white (they’ve been lime-washed, as the Blakes’ whole cottage interior would have been) against a bright yellow fireproof barrier, still temporarily in view. “Insurance insisted,” Doug says dryly. Conservation carpenter Joe Thompson, who teaches at nearby West Dean College and the Weald and Downland Museum, has replaced these beams in the pattern Blake would have known them, as established by dendrology: oak, elm, ash.

“Those are the original stones in the floor,” Doug adds, casually, as we progress to the next room. “Blake would have stood on those.” Of course, I go to stand on them too, hoping for some Miltonish shock (and did these feet…) What I hear instead from the house next door – close enough to touch, if I reached out the window – is a baby crying. Remnants of swallow nests cling to the walls. The Blakes would have had neighbors, babies, animals, all sorts of creaturely village noise going past their door, to and from the sea. This was their home. They were not necessarily thinking of returning to London after a set period of time. When they came to Felpham, they brought everything. They meant to stay. In this place, here.

When I look up, Doug is standing at the Blakes’ press. At least in the visionary sense. In a corner where the ceiling rises high enough to accommodate the spokes of the turning wheel, there is a window onto the street, with a second window higher in the wall above, flooding the corner with light. “This,” he says, with barely suppressed excitement, “is where we think the press would have stood. And just to entertain us –” he points at the wall next to him, where sheetrock and concrete have been torn away to reveal the original limestone – “we found some printing tints.” Two daubs of serene blue, the color of the sky around the Felpham cottage now and in the last known printed copy of Milton viewed in the Blake Archive. Right there on the wall, next to where the press would have stood. Imagine Blake or Catherine at work, edging around the press and putting out their hand to touch the wall – like that. It glows a little with the serene, permanent haze of colors in fresco: Michelangelo, Blake’s hero, mixed a blue like this for the background of his Last Judgment in Rome, locking mineral pigment into plaster. This color has blended with the limestone wall to be an accidental part of Blake’s Cottage for good, hidden under layers of concrete and sheetrock now ripped away. How lucky I am to be here. That little girl hauling the meteor up the hill in her wagon could never have imagined this moment, under this sky, with these artists and their accidental patches of light. The detritus of years can ripped away to reveal the accidentally infinite which was hid. Which descends to strike an ordinary patch of ground. Accidentally – miraculously – witnessed by a human who has eyes to see.

On our way out the door, I catch sight of that rock once again, abandoned on top of the construction pile. Its hidden heart glitters. Doug follows my gaze. “May I…” I ask hesitantly. “Sure,” he says.

The following morning I wake early and go out onto the beach.  I’m nearly the only person in sight. The sun’s just up. The water is cool, the waves soft. All around my feet, dozens of tiny crabs, each tucked into its own spiraling shell, trundle deeper into the surf, then, knocked back by the next wave, tumble, pause, and dig themselves into the sand. Obeying something that says stop here, and wait. What is time to a little hermit crab on this shore? What is eternity? Blake sat here to watch the water, painting a view of Felpham village and his own cottage picked out by a beam of sun. He knew about the scale of worlds and time. To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an Hour, he wrote. These are signs that your vision is clear, that you are doing the best you can with what you have in your imperfect life on earth.

To the west of me, the Bognor Rocks stretch out in a long irregular line into the water. The tide is low, so I can see their rounded, irregular shapes. They are the tail end of the stratum of clay upon which London is built, tapering out into the sea. In Milton, Albion, the groaning giant of England itself, set his left foot upon them and “strove to rise to walk into the Deep.” That’s exactly what they look like: stepping stones for a giant who wants to strike out into the deep, sloshing away towards France. Perhaps the giants Gog and Magog, ancestral spirits of Britain, who, in Blake’s final epic, Jerusalem, are transformed into symbols of state oppression and evil. Maybe even an evil giant needs to go on pilgrimage, striking out to another shore. Like the Blakes, on the artists’ residency they hoped would transform their lives. Like the spirit of Milton himself, descending into Blake’s left foot. Like the young pilgrim I met standing at Blake’s grave, winding up an invisible golden thread of his own. Like my students. Like me.

My own feet are sinking comfortably into the sand, washed by cool water and surrounded by the little live creatures in their shells who are surely ready for me to move on, stop blocking the light, stop compressing the fine mixture of water and silt through which they swim. My backpack sags with my large, heavy, precious Blakean flint, my journal with words I wrote when I went back to the cottage alone in the afternoon, tucked myself into a corner next to the front door, and wrote, sitting on the other side of the wall from the ghost of Blake’s press: what could he and Catherine have seen, looking out onto this quiet village street from the windows right above my head?

In a few weeks, I’ll be fifty-two years old, an impossibly ancient age to that little girl struggling, with her sister, to haul the miraculous Alabama meteor uphill. Whatever happened to all those years? How did they go so quickly? I have another novel I’m trying to sell, this book under contract to finish, a headful of ideas tumbling and tunneling stubbornly against the internal tides of distraction and work and time. I care for and worry about my students, and about what I can do to help them thrive in the AI- and climate-changed-reshaped world they are inheriting without their consent. Time is short. Time is infinite. The ocean in front of me is warming, acidifying. Yet the little creatures all around my feet tumble and scurry much as they always have. Nature’s cruel holiness. Blake wrote those words above his drawing of his cottage in Milton. Perhaps it was the same day, perhaps later, that he went and sat on these sands and looked out at this sea and had his vision of God.

I heft my bag against my shoulders, straighten my back, and start walking.