Solvitur Ambulando

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. BASHO

So I'd followed the yellow arrows through an ancient, open, familiar landscape...

...and I'd walked the railway bank past the Red Bridge, and through the cutting to the Green Bridge and my Secret Wood...

... until I'd returned to my old family home - which wasn't my home any more. It hadn't been home for a long, long time. In fact it doesn't even feel like my father's house now. The 'For Sale' board is up. The estate agent has the keys. And I leave by the gate for one last time, my eyes fixed on the yellowing fields and the blue sky beyond. There are plenty of ghosts, but they're in my mind, no longer in the bricks and the mortar and the rabbit-run garden. I pass the mill stones which flank the gate and walk on, not looking back...

Valedictory

The Ur-Walk is done. Except that it's never really finished. All past walks contain traces of it; all future walks will be haunted by it.

I return to my father's house. It's getting late in the day. Eastwards the blue sky's dulling over. Banks of low, grey cloud layer themselves above gently sloping fields of corn. I look out over my father's garden, his hortus conclusus, at the worked land beyond. I pray: may my heart be as open as the open fields around me, and my mind as unfenced and uncluttered as these wide, green, open spaces.

I mooch disconsolately about the house. Much of the furniture's now been sold, the pictures auctioned, the junk taken to the tip. I'd made some interesting finds. Such as a bayonet. And a WWII army helmet, which I think belonged to my mum (she was in the 'searchlights' during the War). A dummy wooden rifle used by the Home Guard (this must have been my dad's - born with a 'club foot', he was denied active service). A rather fine diamond-patterned glass cabinet full of heirlooms, knick knacks and commemorative jugs. Some Carlton Ware. A Royal Worcester plate. But most of the stuff was of sentimental rather than any monetary or aesthetic value. Like the vinyl 'single' records I must have bought in my early teens, and which had been faithfully kept by my father all this time in his 1960's teak 'radiogram': Durham Town by Roger Whittaker, Wichita Lineman by Glenn Campbell and Sugar, Sugar by the Archies. How embarrassing!

My father had hung on to everything, perhaps hoping he'd find a use for it one day. A collection of broken old radios, dating back decades (complete with their original boxes and instruction booklets). An unfixable fridge and freezer. A rusty filing cabinet, locked and keyless. Countless tins of nails and screws, nuts and bolts. Spare parts for long-redundant washing machines and vacuum cleaners. A felted card table, pocked and threadbare, with gammy legs. Several stained and lumpy mattresses. An array of worn-out electric razors, all neatly cased. A chamber pot. False teeth...

To be continued...

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 cap, sails and fantail - 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 the 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, and 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