The time has come to put pen to paper. I will now commence my most ambitious (creative risk-taking) non-fiction writing so far. I must tell the story of something that happened in the lockdowns that has left me so shaken that I may never get over it.
Let’s just call him Brian to lighten the gravity. It sounds Pythonesque.
He was the Lord of the Manor of Lee.
To those of you who might read this who have either indulged me on this or even written on this yourself, I dedicate this to you, you know who you are.
One of the things I learned at Albion Millennium Green is to ask “are we thinking in days, weeks, years, decades, centuries or millennia?”
And that is how we must start this story.
I will now use a magic utterance to summon the spirits, thus:
You will click either the link in the post above and start your adventure there or you are reading this some time in the future when this is only the second post in a very long thread and have decided to keep reading this on the forum before you search.
In the second picture, on the hill of Honor Oak Road is some of the then recently built houses that we presume formed part of a development called by the new appellation ‘Forest Hill’.
It’s the sort of (bucolic) verbal imagery used by developers to sell newly built houses.
But we are above that sort of nonsense, aren’t we?
But not all nonsense is non-sense.
In one of those houses was later a school. And in that school was a pupil. And that pupil later had a son. And that son suggested to Agatha Christie that she call her play The Mousetrap after a subplot in Hamlet.
And on that hill just along at a location known to us as One Tree Hill are the limits of The Honour of Gloucester, a sort of feudal boundary that today we call the border between Southwark and Lewisham.
And in a dramatic flash forward, here is the geographical conclusion to the story, a tower in a disused graveyard where Belmont Hill meets Lee Terrace. It’s not that far from Brian’s moated manor house down Lee High Road. I used to pass this tower on a 75 bus on my way to Charlton House a very long time ago.
My school friend Lewis sent me the picture after I began telling him this story.
So why did I write the first few posts in a very unconventional manner?
There is one simple reason, I needed to present some form of chaos, just enough. That way I could relate the unease I experienced as I went through the research process. That way I could frame the fever dream.
I can’t deny I am drawn to artistic experiments, and I would love to indulge my creativity. I love the tension between real life stories and the reality that there is no one single way to tell that story in a definitive manner.
And this story stumped me, because the more I learned the harder it became to tell.
The fact is, I have only assembled known discoveries and then joined the dots. But the effect has been ground shaking and the only way I can hold on is to go through this with you.
Brian Annesley may have had a large portfolio of lands (Forest Place being a farmstead in Brockley, just one of many such ‘holdings’) and lived in a moated manor house in Lee, but worldly riches notwithstanding, as the last years approached he became impaired of mind. He had three daughters and two sons-in-law eager to know what would soon happen to his estate.
I had actually heard of this some time before in the context of Shakespeare studies (minus the locations and details) and so that in itself did not register. Secondly I had also by coincidence been on a walk with Quaggy Waterways Action Group and the blogger Running Past where we saw the approximate site of Brian’s moat by Lee High Road. And once again, nothing spectacular registered in my mind that day as I don’t recall our guides mentioning Shakespeare, after all I’m sure I would have reacted with surprise at the time if they had. I had not the overlapping pieces of information to put the two stories together.
So everything had been set up ready to go off (in my mind at least) if those two facts should collide. And sure enough at the Lewisham Local History Society it was mentioned in a passing comment, that a site most likely opposite The Brockley Jack Pub could have been Forest Place (whatever that meant) and that it could have been connected to King Lear.
Something in my memory was triggered, but the moat in Lee hadn’t been mentioned so I hadn’t sat down and put all the facts together. But I left it for some reason. However on another visit to LLHS the subject was mentioned in passing again and this time I knew I had to get the bottom of this.
