Here's the script to Greenaway's 1978 film,



with notes by VFI scholars.
Notes can only be accessed with Java aware browsers.

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Tulse Luper arranged all these drawings in order for me one Monday afternoon when he heard that I was ill.

This was one of the drawings, in fact, he'd given me himself. It's one of a pair, though he told me not to bother to look for the other one.

These two drawings I had received anonymously on different occasions through the post.

This one I'd bought. I remember it cost me very little.

And these two were stolen though not by me. I was just the receiver.

This one I copied from a drawing at Bridsaw.

And this one I did steal - from the man who looked after the owls at the Amsterdam Zoo.

These two were given to me, probably as a birthday present.

Tulse Luper came back about eleven in the evening and told me that this drawing was probably the one I would need first.

Section 1

I finally left on the Tuesday morning early at about a quarter to two. This particular map had at one time been very familiar to me. I had always associated it with night. Perhaps the map had hung on a bedroom wall somewhere. I forget. Hestergard was the first measuring place. Once past it, it was impossible to go back. I had heard that one or two had been able to turn back, just before they reached Hestergard, but that was rare.

The Second City was Canter Lupis. This was one of the catalogue drawings. I bought a lot of them surreptitiously and kept them in a suitcase. The paper was poor stuff.

Hesgadin. It was in two parts - both of them silent. I remember this map came with a letter accusing me of stealing eggs. I had never understood the relationship of the map to the accusation. I still don't, but I'm grateful for the map.

After Hesgadin came Manephia, 34 miles from Hestergard. The road was very clearly marked, very red. This drawing, I remember, illustrated a theory about blood oranges, or perhaps it was about pomegranates.

The fifth city was Balladrome. This drawing was a frontispiece to a novel by Fallbazz called The Ringed Woman. Fallbazz was a pioneer naturalist, one of the first to promote the ringing of birds to check on their movements. After some 20 years of practise in which time Fallbazz and his wife must have ringed some 25,000 birds he decided that the information gained was not to be trusted. He came to the conclusion that information from a ringed bird was not the same as information from a bird. Fallbazz tried to curb the enthusiasm he had helped to pioneer and half in earnest, half in jest - to draw a behavioural parallel - he wrote his erotic novel in which the heroine is ringed. Fallbazz' wife did the illustrations, but they never appeared when the novel was published. Where this illustration fits in the novel is not clear.

After Balladrome was Dormis, a sedate place. Dormis was 79 miles from Hestergard and 33 from Hesgadin. This drawing came by post unsigned on a birthday I had spent in bed with chicken pox.

Another of the catalogue drawings. I was told to keep it on permanent loan by the security officer who stole it. The scarlet brick road was still unmistakable. This city is unnamed. If it had a name, I forget it.

After one unnamed city I came upon another. This one hadn't got pavements. It surprised me a little. It reminded me of a seaport, though it was far from the sea.

And then, Antilipe. According to Tulse Luper, Antilipe in Syria was the home of a unique species of black maritime rook that mated with seagulls. That was obviously another Antilipe.

Contorpis, the tenth city, 117 miles from Hestergard. My brother found this drawing under the lining paper in one of the drawers of a desk he'd bought from a judge. He had the drawing framed and glazed, and he hung it on the wall in his house. The drawing was stolen by a woman, the companion of one of the invited guests at the christening party of my brother's eldest daughter. The woman hid the drawing under a shawl embroidered with peacocks. As she was leaving, in the crush of guests at the front door, the glass in the picture frame broke, splintering her arm and her breast. She fainted. When she came to, she was very embarrassed. Said her name was Correlegiano. She offered a cheque to cover the damages. According to my brother the red on the road is blood, type A.
Tulse Luper suggested my journey through H needed 92 maps. Anticipating my question he suggested the time to decide what H stood for was at the end of the journey and by that time it scarcely mattered.

Section 2

This drawing had been found one day in my luggage. I returned it to the hotel clerk; there were no claimants, and the hotel posted it on to me.

And this, I had always been led to believe, was an unrealized plan for a park at Staines, with a bandstand. It seemed that the park had been realized, but not in Staines.

This drawing had belonged to my aunt. For 57 years I thought that it was a plan of her garden. She died of food poisoning after eating an omelette. The map began to fade before I had crossed two thirds on the territory it represented. All that remained on the paper was a mark that could have been a signpost or the skeleton of a windmill. All those 13 maps whose territory I'd passed through had faded, but in their place on each sheet was the same mark or one very much like it. I hurried till I was sure that I had reached the territory of the next map, the fourteenth.

It was a small drawing that I'd acquired from a man who was an inspector of mazes. I had expected it to be an invaluable asset, but it faded before I had walked less than a third of its territory. The maps not only faded with use, they faded after the allotted time for their use had become exhausted.

I ran to keep pace with the fifteenth map. It faded as I reached its furthest edge. I hurried on. I was 161 miles from Hestergard. I was using the sixteenth map, and I was running. More like A Run Through H. I was encouraged by the sight of a bird. If it could rest, so perhaps could I. I slowed up, apprehensively.

This is a map made by an exiled pianist, as a directive to the members of his band. He could not foresee that his musical and topographical instruction should be used backwards. As a cartographer, he was not appreciated in his own country.

I had sent away for a plan of Anascol and had received this map in return. It was accompanied with a note saying Anascol didn't exist but would this do. It was too late to argue at this time, so I kept it. I was never able to trace its identity until now.

The maps had stopped fading. Unless there was some other reason unaccounted for, it looked as though I had discovered the correct walking pace. This drawing was bought on my behalf from a traveller who said she had made the journey before. I'd paid a lot for it. I thought at the time that any journey she might take would be worth taking. The road was clearly marked, perhaps too clearly. As a map the drawing was worthless. The image faded, but when it had gone the paper was empty. There was no mark, no cross, no skeleton of a windmill. I had strayed to a dead end.

Tulse Luper said, if in need I should play this map like a blank in a card game. It might get me out of trouble. For encouragement I had some reason to think that I had a guide.

The twentyfirst map. The map of a conscientious cartographer. This map had been a legal orthodox buy from an antiquarian's bookshop. It had been kept in a map cabinet. It had been exchanged in daylight for an authorized cheque. There had been a receipt. Yet, for all that I never felt the map was mine. I'd kept it hidden. Perhaps that had helped preserve the pencil marks from fading. Now indeed I was among fields. Small fields surrounded by (two words inaudible). There were enough possible routes to follow.

My daughter as a child on numerous occasions stood before this map and made imaginary journeys on it. It was glazed, and one day she'd scratched a route on the glass with a hard engraving tool. I was angry but I noted the journey and didn't replace the glass. The journey she took is not the one I was persuaded to take.

There had been more than one occasion when I'd nearly thrown this map away. When he couldn't find it, Tulse Luper asked where it was. He suggested my judgment was too much governed by that of other people. This gullibility might have governed the number of maps I was obliged to take with me. By the same token, others might take less time than I deciding what the initial H was to stand for. It didn't stand for heron.

I didn't like this drawing much either. I'd found it in a hide, it was frozen to the observation window. I had reason to suppose that my guide had been scared off.

This drawing was supposed to have been by Erhaus Bewler, but if that's the case then it's a fake. It's obviously more valuable to me as a fake. It saw me successfully into the territory of the next map, the twentyeighth, though I was less and less inclined to walk there.

Map 28 was no fake. A playing field marked out for an abandoned game and scattered with obstacles that made the game unplayable. This was the map Tulse Luper gave me himself as a present on some anniversary of his own. He told me I should need to use it twice, to accustom myself to what was to come immediately after. And the landscape did repeat itself. There was probably another drawing to match this one. I think Tulse Luper gave it to my brother. In the other drawing, I was sure, there were no obstacles on the pitch. At the end of the field came the gate. Tulse Luper called it the Owl Gate. It was to introduce perhaps the most significant map, The Amsterdam map.

Section 3

I had known in advance that this map would be significant. Up until my possession of it, any accumulation of maps I might have made was unplanned, fortuitous. It was only after I had been persuaded to steal this map did I look for a map in everything I possessed and in most things I didn't possess as well. I had no idea how to use it. As far as I could see, no road was more clearly marked than any other. Cautiously, I followed what I considered to be an amenable route - and soon had to retrace my path.
Up until I stole this map I'd made no mistakes about collecting the right information for this journey. After it was mine my mistakes were legion. I collected rubbish, worthless junk. Tulse Luper on the evening of my last illness waded through that worthless ephemera with a frown, tossing the papers into the air like confetti.
Yet it was Tulse Luper who had cajoled me into possessing this map. He said that it was imperative that it should be mine. This map that had belonged, technically, to the keeper of the owls at the Amsterdam Zoo.
The zoo keeper's name was Van Hoyten, another H. Before his job at the Amsterdam Zoo he'd lived at Assidium, a town on the Bosporus favoured by metal smiths who hammered copper artifacts with a tool shaped like a wishbone. Van Hoyten was a bird counter. He counted the birds as they flew from Europe to Africa each autumn along their migration route across the Bosporus.
The possibilities of following a route, any route, on this map were so numerous. I wondered by what criterion I should make a choice. With no compass directions, I could not depend on the top of the map being north.
A telescope was used to count the birds as they flew across the disk of the full moon. Against the disk of the full moon even white birds are black. The birds were often two or three miles away and in some cases were as small as a Scop's Owl. Van Hoyten let owls go by uncounted, they were immune from his count. There was no point in counting what you already knew was your own.
Areas of this map were now becoming familiar, so was the territory they represented. Had they become familiar to other travellers? Were other travellers obliged to travel through the same country? There was no indication that they should, they left me no signposts. Perhaps it was not impossible that other travellers had different maps of this territory, simpler and more straightforward maps. Perhaps the country only existed in its maps, in which case the traveller created the territory as he walked through it. If he should stand still, so would the landscape.
I kept moving. The anxiety about the map fading through the wasting of time could still prevent me from halting for a longer interval to satisfy such a prospect.
At Assidium there were only 4 or 5 bird-counting nights every month. On several of these the moon would be obscured by cloud. It might be possible, perhaps, to guarantee only 30 bird-counting nights a year. The odds were still too high in Van Hoyten's favour, for Tulse Luper reckoned a count was as good as a capture. I hid the telescope. I locked the observatory. Three times I lit fires in the observatory garden and heaped them with damped wood to hide the moon with smoke.
On the map I continued to follow what I thought might be a sensible route. If there had been cardinal points I was walking north, south, east, and west indiscriminately, and I kept coming across the same places and the same events. I slowed my pace, knowing that I was lost.
Van Hoyten had a lot of free time. He collected feathers, his room was full of them. He hung them up like trophies. When he was not collecting feathers or counting souls as they flew across the face of the full moon, he was compiling a catalogue, a catalogue of the migrating birds of the northern hemisphere. Tulse Luper said that it was important that Van Hoyten should never finish his catalogue of the birds of the northern hemisphere. He should be discouraged, or he should be lured away from the Bosporus. The catalogue should be completed by some disinterested person, an ornithologist with no ulterior motive.
Tulse Luper wrote, suggesting I might find a suitable map for his wife as a present. He knew that she was dying. At the ninety-second booth of the metal workers' street in Assidium I saw this map. I put down a deposit to the equivalent of half its price. Then I wrote to Tulse Luper, describing the map and the street where I had found it. He curtly replied that it was of no use to his wife, but it was imperative that I should buy it for myself. When I went back to do just that the map had gone. Three days later it was pinned up in Van Hoyten's room.
I fell ill for six weeks with food poisoning. At the end of autumn I was offered a job as a keeper of the owls at the Amsterdam Zoo. Tulse Luper had recommended me. I arrived in Amsterdam to find that the job had been taken - by Van Hoyten. He also suggested to the zoo authority that I was a saboteur, that I had three times tried to burn down the Bosporus observatory. I searched for his office to confront him with this calumny. He wasn't there but the map was. I left money to make the deposit up to the metal smith's price and I took the map.
At the time I had passed one point on this map nine times, it occurred to me I might in fact be marking time by arrangement, awaiting the convenience of future maps. Perhaps the time allowance for each map stretched forwards as well as backwards? Perhaps I had now been walking through H too fast?
Van Hoyten stayed on as owl-keeper of the Amsterdam Zoo. He'd been lured away from Assidium and I had been the lure. When I returned to London, Tulse Luper said that no one would follow up the theft. They would leave their pursuit until such time as I should seriously need to use the map, like now. Perhaps the owl-keeper of the Amsterdam Zoo succeeded no more than to keep me waiting, for at the end of the ninth profitless journey I knew that the tenth would show an exit.

Section 4

But even out of the maze its influence still persisted in a shadow story. The yellow paper of this map is the protective wrapping from an X-ray film. The map was made by an hospital radiologist who said he was suffering from too much exposure to the X-ray machine. He was a thief, as well as a hallucinist. He stole a jacket of mine. In the inside pocket was my passport and the draft of a story called The Lammergeyer and the Capercaillie. The radiologist denied stealing anything, and he had nothing that I could steal back except his drawings, so I stole those. He reported me. I was dismissed, not for stealing the drawings, but for stealing the yellow paper which was hospital property.

This is a map that Tulse Luper found somewhere in the house. I heard him in the cellar and in the attic. He returned covered in dust, and sitting on the end of the bed he spread out all the items he'd found. He sorted and discarded, arranged and rearranged until he had the maps together in five sections. Then he began to sort out an order for the maps in each section. I asked him how he was to organize the material. He said he had a thousand schemes for my use and they would all come out in the same order. This map, in a sense, was a commission. I'd asked a friend to show me the way from the local railway station to his house. Not content with the few directions he spent some time on a map, filling it out with details that were not strictly necessary for so short a walk. As it happened on that occasion the map proved worthless, because I arrived at the wrong station.

Since I first owned this map the colours have darkened. It was an estate agent's plan. RED stood for redevelopment.

My wife took a drawing I had bought to be framed. It was a drawing I didn't know too well, but well enough to know that, when it came back, it had been exchanged for another. This is that replacement. I said nothing to my wife but, taking the receipt, I went to find the frame-maker. I couldn't find him. I mentioned to my wife that I'd passed the shop where she'd had the drawing framed, she only looked surprised for a moment. Six months later it would probably have been impossible to have verified either of our stories, because that part of Dresden was laid waste from the air. This drawing is a lot simpler than the one it was exchanged for, and one word in the caption has been changed.

This is a detail of a portrait of a man with a hawk on his wrist. My father paid seventy pounds for it. It was of his brother. Painted in the landscape behind the figure was this road. Tulse Luper calmly ripped the detail from the portrait and included it as map 46.

I don't remember this drawing but I remember one like it. It was destroyed in a fire. My son dealt with the insurance, perhaps he arranged for the replacement.

This was a lonely road. I have no recollection of owning the map, though my wife's name is on the back and so is the date of my stay in the Bosporus.

Intrigued by the map detail of the portrait of my uncle I wrote to his widow to find if she knew anything else about the painter responsible. She sent me this drawing with a note, saying that when her husband had left her it was the one map he left behind.

I don't remember this one. It has a strong similarity to map 48. The crosses are a later addition. There is a note on the back about raising geese.

And I don't remember this one. Again, there is some writing on the back, some personal details that only I could have put there.

This map was drawn by a patient named Vogul who was hospitalized with Ménière's's disease. An orderly supplied Vogul with the paper, took this drawing and many others like it, in exchange for favours, and entered them for a series of competitions in a popular ornithological magazine. I was one of the competition judges and this was one of the few entries that I kept. In the six months with Vogul's drawings the orderly won a car, a weekend holiday at a bird sanctuary in the Camargue, four hundred pounds, and a parrot.

The next three maps have been the property of Canton Ramadel, an ornithologist and a pioneer aviator. He designed kites based on his observations of seagulls. The kites were often made of waste paper which came from his work room. Paper, which sometimes bore his designs and drawings. This is such a strip. I'm told that it's a reworking of a flight plan of a much earlier conceptual aviator. I took the route of the third alternative. When first asked about the likelihood of making an aircraft, Ramadel was reputed to have said that it would be easier to breed giant seagulls and then ride the offspring. Tulse Luper said that the maps Ramadel had collected together for his final flight had been taken for the most brilliant aeronautical drawings of the time. Ramadel crashed his last plane into a cliff at Hastings, knocking my great-grandfather into the sea. My great-grandfather had been collecting seagull eggs.

This is a plan from a bogus ecological textbook, called Robinson Crusoe on Concrete Island. It shows the water drainage system for an inclined concrete platform. My landscape was not concrete, but the map was invaluable.

I know nothing about this one. I don't remember receiving the postcard neither did I send it. The address on the back is totally unknown to me as are most of the details of French history referred to on the front.

This ostensibly is the floor plan of a gallery, where I had once arranged an exhibition on the subject of flight. The red line was an instruction for a tracking film camera. It now served me as a track to the sixtieth map.

This map had been given to me by a charter flight steward in part-appeasement for a cancelled flight. It had been given to him by an anatomist who had signed his name in the passenger book in mirror writing. Tulse Luper put in the arrows.

Along with my elder brother I was offered as a prize the choice of one of several items laid out on a table at a fete. My brother, showing off some newly acquired erudition chose a drawing, I regretfully felt obliged to follow suit and took this one. Much, much later Tulse Luper made some small changes to the drawing and signed it. Originally the two drawings were very much alike, which at the time surprised me, because whilst my brother's choice was admired mine was not. It looks as though my brother even at that age, he must have been about eight, was making a decision that would be relevant. My imitative choice had to be corrected.

This too had belonged to my brother. He became an archaeologist. I made the alterations this time. Tulse Luper raised his eyebrows, but he didn't interfere. I followed the route suggested with some difficulty. It needed some interpretation. And I left the territory it represented without regret. It smelt of guano.

This map of the section of south-eastern Australia was reproduced in possibly 80,000 school textbooks. I'd never supposed that my version was any different from any other. Tulse Luper used this embellished photocopy of the original to fix the chronological position of the map that followed it...

...a journey on the plumage of a Red-legged Partridge. Only after reaching the eye of this upside-down bird did Tulse Luper suggest I return to the Australian photocopy, I lined the eye of the bird with the letter I in its name, and then proceed to point A. From my present book the map was not especially clear. I distrusted its usefulness, and I distrusted its place in the chronology. Most of all I was uneasy at Tulse Luper's lightness of manner. But the alphabetical path led me eventually to the territory of map 65.

A map sketched in laundry ink onto a ripped shirt collar, sent from Ceylon to a cousin who was milliner employed in the feather trade. The same information that suggested the drawing was authentic was also advice for me to quicken my pace. I walked quickly, having the used maps in my left hand and the unused in my right.

Section 5

Map 66. There could have been books like this one in my grandfather's front room. I spent a lot of time in that room, kept at a reasonable distance from the uncomfortable adult conversation in the kitchen. Perhaps it was my grandfather who had turned the title page into an instruction. It was not that easy to follow.

This drawing I do remember. It was down on the back of an old treasury envelope that escaped the incinerator. It had carried an instruction about the prevention of pigeons roosting on government property.

This map seemed based as much on a speculative appreciation of landscape as on anything permanent.

And, an inevitable recourse to a darkened copy of the past map was not that reassuring.

This map could suggest no more than the approximate whereabouts with series of river-beds that had dried and flooded several times between the making of the map and the journey I was taking. Nevertheless, the lack of clear route was not causing me any especial disappointment.

I was not remembering these maps at all. As the stack diminished I recognized less and less.





The maps offered alternative routes. Their magnanimity was not helpful.

A map that tried to pin down a sheep trail was just credible. But it was an optimistic map that tried to fix a path made by the wind.

Or a path made across the grass by the shadow of flying birds.

The usual intentions of cartography were now collapsing. Either that or the route itself was becoming so insecure...

...that mapping it was a foolhardy occupation.

I was nearing the end of the journey and the maps represented less and less distance on the ground.

Three miles.

Two miles.

The final mile. The last instruction. It was drawn on the torn envelope that had been wrapped around the maps of the last section. A bonus.
I walked the last half mile across a nearly featureless landscape, guided by a few stains and some distant pencil lines. The finish to that line was marked by the ubiquitous signpost or maybe it was the skeleton of a windmill.
I had arrived. It was Tuesday morning early at about a quarter to two. I had used 92 maps, and had travelled 1,418 miles.

The camera moves in on the cover of a book by Tulse Luper entitled Some Migratory Birds of the Northern Hemisphere. It contains 92 maps and 1,418 birds in colour.