Digging

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

SEAMUS HEANEY From Death of a Naturalist (1966)

I don't think anyone who's been reading my Ur-posts lately will fail to realise the significance of this poem for me. Written early in Heaney's poetic career, this is an archetypal poem about the practical father and the literary son. The differences - and the connections (the 'living roots') - between them.

Seamus Heaney is one of my very favourite poets. I love both his poetry and his critical essays. He's certainly one of the finest writers of my generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here's his wonderful Nobel lecture. Do read it.

The Miller's Tale: A Man And His Machine

Memory is just another instance of the many ways in which we make stories. JENNY DISKI

After the Green Bridge the track curves round...

...to the top of Rocket Lane, which you'll recall was the start of this walk a few days (or was it half a lifetime?) ago...

If you double-clicked on the 1st pic you will have seen a black and white mill tower in the background. This was my father's windmill, and his father's before him. It was sold when my father retired, and is now a private house. There's scaffolding up for repainting the tower. When I was young, the repainting was done from a precarious wooden box winched up with a pulley and chain. I rode in it once and scared myself stiff as it swung this way and that...

I'm not sure when the sails were taken down. All I ever remember is a Ruston Hornsby diesel engine powering the machinery. (Ruston used to be the main employer in Lincoln. It's now part of Siemens - whose gas turbines are used all over the world.)

This diesel engine was my father's pride and joy. He was forever checking the dials, polishing the dark green casing, oiling the camshafts and repairing the drive belts. As a young child I entered the engine house with a mixture of fear and awe. Inside lay a noisy, chugging, wondrous machine, a masterpiece of mechanical engineering, with its rods and pistons - and huge flywheel dominating everything. It always felt rather dangerous and intimidating, especially if you were in there alone with the door shut. Of course in the end I got to understand a little how it worked, how all the bits fitted together. I learnt how to grease it, start it up, close it down. Once a workman's hand got caught in some part of the machinery - a corn grinder I think it was - and my dad, half-way across a neighbouring field at the time, could tell from the sound and pitch of the engine that something was wrong - so in touch was he with this sleek, oily, powerful beast.

The farmers, who farmed the open fields all around, came with their grain to the mill - which my grandfather turned into flour, like an alchemist transforming base metal into gold. But the sails and grinding stones were finally removed, and in my father's day the mill produced high-grade animal feed out of ground corn and maizemeal, fishmeal, minerals and a host of other ingredients - all to a secret recipe.

This is one of the original mill stones, mounted in front of my father's house...

This is the windmill in 1907 (you can see my grandfather standing on the dray behind the 2 horses)...



... and this is it - minus sails - in 1947...

To be continued...

Sex, Death And The Path Less Travelled

Just beyond the secret wood there's a mile-long railway cutting. Two bridges span this cutting. The first one I named the Green Bridge (as opposed to the Red Bridge earlier on the walk). Now there's a constructed path up the bank to the eastern end of the bridge...

But I'm keen to rediscover the path my friends and I used to clamber up on the western side. At first it's choked with spiny hawthorn bushes. But I soon find a way through...

... and scramble up a path now less frequented...

... until I reach the meditative spot - part clay, part concrete - where I was in the habit of resting a while. It was also a good launching place for exciting forays into the girderwork, which is now getting very rusty I see...

It was once rumoured some daredevil village kid had tried to cross the cutting along these iron girders, and had fallen to his death at the half-way point...

There's a rather spooky, gloomy atmosphere here in the bridge's shade. It's a sunless place...

The whole length of the cutting itself is also slightly sinister. Often in shadow, it was regularly patrolled most evenings by a cousin's husband, who silently trod the path looking for rabbits, a shotgun over his arm. Back then, I suppose, the old railway track - not long disused - was, strictly speaking, out of bounds. But this faint air of illegality lent a pleasurable thrill to our boyish activities. This old sign, mounted in concrete and now lying horizontally across the path (having fallen long ago), used to say something like 'Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted: By Order Of The Railways' Board', followed by a long list of byelaws and regulations...

Here we dragged our bikes and searched for birds' nests and fantasized about girls. We entertained ideas about bringing girls down here, but we never did. Girls to us at that age - perhaps 12 or 13 - were a strange and exotic species, not quite of this world. Alluring, definitely, but untouchable in their mystery. Again there were rumours that certain village girls would 'come down the railway bank' to perform various acts - acts which were always left tantalisingly vague... One day I found a rain-soaked and well-thumbed copy of Health And Efficiency magazine in the long grass of the embankment. It absorbed me for hours. So this was what went on under those tight skirts and rippling blouses!

I climb awkwardly a barbed wire fence and emerge onto the lane above. As you can see, the Green Bridge is not a very pretty bridge, and it's in sore need of repainting. But both bridges - the Red and the Green, the handsome one and its ugly sister - are important talismans in my memory and imagination, landmarks of the physical and spiritual geography of my childhood, bookends to the Ur-walk trail...

To be continued...

The Secret Wood

In the middle of my life's road I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost. DANTE The Divine Comedy

Just at the spot where the embankment disappears, and a long railway cutting begins, lies my secret wood. Today it's much as it always was - darkly canopied, the floor creeping with ivy. It fills a natural bowl between the railway line, a farmer's field and a low, curving cliff of red clay banded with gypsum...

The fox holes in the cliff are still there, but whether a family of foxes lives there now I can not tell.

This tiny wood, like most woods, always conspired to withhold many of its secrets, and it still feels the same decades later. Perhaps something new and startling would be revealed behind the next tree, or after the next bend in the path? But there were ever more trees, and ever more bends leading you somewhere and nowhere.

A few birds are calling - chaffinches, blackbirds, a hidden robin whirring away in the undergrowth. A lone cyclist hisses by on the trail - oblivious to the grown child, which is myself, skulking in the bushes just ten yards away.

A dead branch cracks like a pistol shot as I step on it.

A small, central glade is a pool of light.

To be continued...

Sky Blue Trades And Heedless Ways

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

DYLAN THOMAS

This is the best evocation of a country childhood that I know.

Listening To The Silence

A long time ago someone told me that 'silent' has the same letters as 'listen'. From am's blog.

This land is your land, this land is my land/From California, to the New York Island/From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters/This land was made for you and me. Woody Guthrie.

I'm lounging here, half-way through my Ur-walk, among the flowers and tall grasses of the railway bank, listening to the silence. I've dallied briefly with the agricultural history of the Isle of Axholme - which is also its social and political history - and reflected on why this open landscape looks way it does. Thinking of my own, small, inherited field, I consider such questions as: who owns the land, and why do they own it? Is it our land any more? Are we alienated from the land, or do we still feel a connection with it, in some primitive, instinctive way? What common land is left? Certainly this rambling railway embankment - once owned by British Railways - is now shared land, for the enjoyment of all: a physical, recreational walkway, a valuable spiritual resource.

I lie on the grass, stretched out like a cat in the hot sun. I listen to the silence, trying to recall what I heard, what I experienced (or what I imagined I heard and experienced) all those years ago, when I was young and easy under the apple boughs about the lilting house and happy as the grass was green. But all I get are distant echoes, shards of memory, disjointed fragments of meaning, little signs and pointers like the yellow arrows on the Camino: a wilted spray of elderberry blossom fallen onto the path; a rampant bed of nettles over a rubble of bricks - all that's left, forty years later, of the derelict station-master's cottage a gang of us used to explore; a dead fox, legs splayed out, a bullet wound to the head, and a spent shotgun cartridge, 'Trapshooter No 8', lying discarded in the grass.

The pain I once felt so piercingly as an adolescent is now but a mere shadow of this former suffering; the ecstasies I once felt so blindingly are now but faded rags of joy.

It didn't amount to anything more than what the broken glass reflects. (Bob Dylan. Up To Me.) Is this correct?

No one else could play that tune; you know it was up to me. (Bob Dylan. Up To Me.) Or is this correct?

I guess it's 'up to me' to decide - whether to leave the shattered glass of memory in meaningless fragments, or whether to say: yes, it's my life, my unique childhood, my individual world, my 'tune'. Let me stitch it together and make a coherent tapestry out of it!

The sun slips behind cloud, and I stand up, drunk with the heat, my neck red and tender, almost painful to the touch. A mild case of sunburn. Feeling sweetly, if not sweatily, melancholic, I carry on slowly up the trail...

To be continued...

One View Of England

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise;
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

From Shakespeare's King Richard II Act 2 Scene 1

Common Wealth And Common Ground

On the Isle's higher ground (never very high - the highest point is only 40m above sea level) you can find traces of medieval open fields, and the long strips into which they were divided. Indeed, in some areas this centuries-old farming system is being experimentally reintroduced. Here you can see alternate strips of beans and barley...

There are only a few places left where you can still witness this ancient practice of strip farming: Laxton in Nottinghamshire, Braunton in North Devon, Laugharne in West Wales - and the Isle of Axholme. It survived in the Isle because the land was never 'enclosed' like most of the low-lying agricultural land of the English Midlands.

'Enclosure' (formerly 'Inclosure') of open fields started gradually in the 13th century, and happened wholesale in the 18th and 19th centuries. Basically this was a massive land grab for already wealthy landowners, who appropriated public land for their own benefit - becoming even richer and more powerful in the process.

In medieval England, the typical manorial village was surrounded by several large, unenclosed arable fields. Each villager (or commoner) was allocated by the landowner (usually the lord of the manor) a number of strips in these fields, which he would then subsistence farm. The rights to use this land were shared between landowner and tenant. Other 'common' rights included rights to cut wood, to run pigs in common woodland, to make hay on common meadowland, and to graze livestock on land where crops were not being grown. There was also a communal village green for social and festive activities.

But by the end of the 19th century most land had been 'enclosed' - hedged, fenced-off and taken into full, private ownership. Only a few common pastures and village greens remained. Despite riots and revolts, the Enclosure movement had become unstoppable. So the traditional common rights to the land enjoyed by the small-scale, peasant farmers had all but disappeared. A mass of working people, hoping to escape the resulting poverty, fled the countryside and crowded into the growing number of towns and cities which had sprung up to accommodate the Industrial Revolution. But conditions there were even grimmer - as anyone who has read Hard Times by Charles Dickens knows full well.

We tend to forget that England was once 'open', unfenced and unhedged - and, if we sometimes get all lyrical and romantic about hedges, let's remember they are symbols of privatization, the enforced parcelling up of the land for the personal gain of a few. So this is the reason the Isle of Axholme has very few hedges, the reason it looks the way it does: it's a pre-Enclosure landscape...

Here's one of my favourite singers, June Tabor, singing about England, and about 'common wealth and common ground'...

A Place Called England

I rode out on a bright May morning/Like a hero in a song/Looking for a place called England/Trying to find where I belong/Couldn't find the old flood meadow/Or the house that I once knew/No trace of that little river/Or the garden where I grew

I saw town and I saw country/Motorway and sink estate/Rich man in his rolling acres/Poor man still outside the gate/Retail park and burger kingdom/Prairie field and factory farm/Run by men who think that England's/Only a place to park their car

But as the train pulled from the station/Through the wastelands of despair/From the corner of my eye/A brightness filled the filthy air/Someone's sown a patch of sunflowers/Though the soil is sooty black/Marigolds and a few tomatoes/Right beside the railway track

Down behind the terraced houses/In between the concrete towers/Compost heaps and scarlet runners/Secret gardens full of flowers/Meeta grows her scented roses/Right beneath the big jet's path/Bid a fortune for her garden/Eileen turns away and laughs

For wake up George and rise up Arthur/Time to rouse up from your sleep/Deck the horse with sea-green ribbons/Drag the old sword from the deep/Hold the line for Dave and Daniel/As they tunnel through the clay/While the oak in all its glory/Soaks up sun for one more day

So come all you at home with freedom/Whatever the land that gave you birth/There's room for you both root and branch/As long as you love this English earth/Room for vole and room for orchid/Room for all to grow and thrive/Just less room for the fat landowner/On his arse in his four-wheel drive

For England is not flag or Empire/It is not money and it is not blood/It's limestone gorge and granite fell/It's Wealden clay and Severn mud/It's blackbird singing from the may-tree/Lark ascending through the scales/It's robin watching from the spade/And English earth beneath your nails

So here's two cheers for a place called England/Sore abused but not yet dead/A Mr Harding sort of England/Hanging in there by a thread/Here's two cheers for the crazy Diggers/Now their hour shall come around/We shall plant the seed they saved us/Common wealth and common ground

Words by Maggie Holland

To be continued...

Death By Showbusiness

There are three figures who will stand as defining icons of popular music in the second half of the 20th century: Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Michael Jackson. And just like the deaths of Elvis and Lennon, so Jackson's passing can be seen as a consequence of the extraordinary demands and vicissitudes of fame, particularly the extraordinary fame that Jackson came to — can we really use the word? — enjoy throughout his life.

If Elvis’s death can be seen as the most extreme consequence of excess, and Lennon’s as the most horrific outcome of the malevolent attention of strangers, Jackson’s can surely be attributed to the imperative that was driven into him from childhood — to perform, to dazzle and to pay the bills.

Mick Brown in today's Daily Telegraph

Warped

Soon the trees give way and the views open up. This is looking east from the railway bank...

...and this looking west...

This whole area, which is completely surrounded by rivers and drainage channels, is called The Isle of Axholme - the only part of Lincolnshire west of the river Trent.

A thousand years ago the Isle's series of low hills - home to its main villages of Haxey, Epworth, Belton and Owston Ferry - were islands in an inland sea. Later, in the 17th century, the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden came along and drained this wild, remote and inhospitable region. The inland sea became marsh and wet pasture land; however, these 'wastes' were still flooded in the winter months. So, in the 18th century, a more complex system involving sluices, drains and flood gates was engineered - allowing the surrounding rivers to inundate the low lying land in a controlled way.

And the rich alluvial sediments thus deposited - plus the deeper layers of peat already there (the region had been densely forested in much earlier times) - created some very high quality agricultural land. This has been intensively cultivated for the last two centuries, now producing bumper crops of sugar beet, carrots, celery, cereals and oilseed rape. This process of controlled flooding - producing such a rich topsoil - is known as 'warping' the land; and the land thereby created is known as 'warped' land.

Pieces of petrified wood from the Isle's ancient forest turn up quite regularly; they're known locally as 'bog oak'.

This is the land I lived in for seventeen years - from babyhood through childhood to adolescence. Bleakly beautiful, I suppose - though I didn't appreciate it at the time. In my teens I just wanted to get away. And as far as possible. Whether the land 'warped' me or not I'll leave you to judge - as this story unfolds. (Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about the walk. It's still unravelling - remember, all the best walks have their little detours and deviations, their wrong turnings and their cul-de-sacs.)

Anyway, so much for the Isle's flat bits. But what about the hills?

To be continued...

A View From The Bridge

Just beyond the field gate, my field gate, you can see the wooded embankment of the former Axholme Joint Railway stretching in a straight line across a flat and fertile landscape...

The line has long been disused. (I vaguely recall it still operating when I was very young; but it was axed in the 1960s by Doctor Beeching when he 'reshaped' the railway network by scrapping thousands of miles of track he deemed underused and unprofitable.) It's now a lovely recreational path for walkers and cyclists. And a kind of linear nature reserve. As a young boy, either alone or with friends, I loved to climb up the side of this handsome, red-brick bridge onto the embankment. There were no steps or handrail then; it was a short, steep scramble up the edge, interesting when wet...

And this is the view from the top...

The embankment is rank with vegetation and dense with foliage. It's much more lush and overgrown than I remember it. Of course over forty years big trees have grown from tiny saplings, and numerous wild flowers (back then I simply took for granted the huge variety) have established themselves even more profusely, for they've been left well alone - far from the reach of pesticides and 'land improvement' schemes: there's selfheal, mallow, foxglove, poppy, buttercup, fumitory, crane's-bill, teasel, thistle, vetch and bramble; white campion, white clover and white bryony; cow parsley and common nettle; goosegrass, lesser burdock, ox-eye daisy, bird's-foot-trefoil, herb-robert and dog rose. And lots more. Come July, rosebay willowherb will be in flower everywhere. And, more rarely, orchids. Just yesterday, on this ritual walk, I nearly overlooked among the nettles the pink-and-blue flowering spikes of viper's-bugloss (once used as a cure for snake-bite)...

The walk follows the old trackbed...



To be continued...

Ur-Walk

A few minutes' stroll from my father's house, a short stone's throw away from where I sit writing this, on top of the low hill where I spent my childhood, begins a walk. I suppose my love of walking, wildlife and the countryside starts here too. This walk is the essence of my whole boyhood. It's the first walk, the original walk, the walk which all later walks try to recapture in spirit. It's the walk which is the beginning and end of all walks. In a sense, all my subsequent walks are variations on this one: this walk through the memory-fields of youth, this walk fronded and flowered with those earliest experiences - first sight of butterfly and smell of new mown hay, first scent of fox and taste of blackberry. For me this is really the one and only walk. A walk through Paradise before the serpent appeared. A walk alive with symbols, redolent with joy and pain, fragrant with nostalgia. It's the true walk, the ultimate walk, the Ur-walk. It begins unassumingly at the top of Rocket Lane...

A farmers' track bends to the left and leads straight down a slope with an ancient hedge on one side and a cornfield on the other...

...to a small three-cornered field which used to be my father's. It's now my field. It's nice to have a field. I think it's been left as meadow grassland for many years...

To be continued...

One Love, One Heart

One love, one heart, let's get together and feel all right...

500th Post

It seems incredible, but this is the 500th post since I began blogging nearly 2 years back. I started on 23 June 2007, to be exact. This was my very 1st post all those bits and bytes ago. I see that I set the 'literary walking' tone there and then! I don't want to make a big song and dance about it, but I'm quietly pleased I've got this far. I've enjoyed and continue to enjoy the whole cyber-journey.

I'm staying once more at my father's house, my old family home, and preparing it for sale. It stands in quite an isolated position, deep in the country, a mile from the nearest village, in a remote part of north-west Lincolnshire called The Isle of Axholme. It's deliciously lonely.

The picture was taken, looking westward from this house, one evening a few weeks ago.

I'd like to end with a quote I've been eyeing, magpie-like, on Graceful Yoga's excellent blog:

The church says: The body is a sin
Science says: The body is a machine
Advertising says: The body is a business
The body says: I am a fiesta

Eduardo Galeano

(Do check out the Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano - he sounds really interesting, especially if you're already into South American authors like Llosa and Márquez. I must admit I'd never heard of him until encountering his name on Graceful Yoga's blog.)

The Queen Of English Folk

Why is it I have this thing about female singers singing melancholic songs? I don't know, but I do. And here's another one - the incomparable, late, great Sandy Denny. (Of course she was part of the seminal folk rock band Fairport Convention - along with Richard Thompson. It's a small and connected world, the English folk world.) Sandy died tragically early, aged 31 - most probably from a brain haemorrhage caused by a tumour (my own sister and only sibling died in the same way - at the equally young age of 29). If, for me, Aretha Franklin is the Queen of Soul, Emmylou Harris the Queen of Country, and Odetta Queen of the Blues, Sandy Denny is indisputedly the Queen of English Folk. I find her voice almost unbearably poignant and moving.