I didn't always live like this, in the mud, with trees as my
main companions. I grew up in a
Victorian terrace on a back road somewhere between Tottenham and Muswell Hill.
I was suspended between two worlds,
at a private school but returning home
in a beaten up fiat which seemed to break down at every junction. Some days I
walked back down Highgate Hill, over the pavements mosaiced with sycamore
leaves to a latch key existence as my mum made ends meet, a teacher in an
Islington school. There her kids, their shiny faces unaware of anything out of
the ordinary, would write in their 'news', 'my dad came round and stabbed my
mum last night, we went to the hospital in an ambulance, My aunty Doreen is
looking after me. Dad is at the police station.'
I remember the filthy smatterings that would coat my lower
legs on rainy days in Camden, helped by buses too close to the kerb. Now in
Herefordshire I have a kind of pasty pink, iron rich mud which besmears itself
over me at this time of the year. From this soil come the best of Britain's
agricultural fruits, the apples, and potatoes and hops and beefsides, the honey
and the milk. It is almost a shame to steal it from nature by collecting it on
my clothes. Its job is so vital, and life-giving. London's version was a personification of
pollution, a congealed pate of a city's strange ecological processes, the fume
and fag butts and human urine, creating a substance with dark powers.
Not that I hated
London. In fact, I love it still, yearn for its diversity, its population
captive, but somehow free. They are 'repressed but remarkably dressed' to quote
Morrissey, whose flower touting Wildean antics I emulated, whose lyrics I knew
by heart and would sing out loud in Highgate Cemetery or on the 134 from
Leicester Square. The squash and the squeeze of London, the desperate bids to
be seen among the millions, create the colourful blue quiffs, the platinum
spikes and bewildering costume of Kensington Market and Carnaby Street. I love
London's colour engendered by its people. a kind of rebellion against the grey.
The whirling leaves of London Plane trees, the wolves who used to howl for the
sheer paradox of their home in Regent's Park. My mum fled the county of her
birth for a slice of this freedom, for Whirligig, free-form dance, and street
theatre, and something more important,
for free thought, away from the provincial snobbery which is still palpable in
the Midlands. She fled the petty judgements of her childhood, the fake posh
accents, amateur dramatics and subtle
racism of her youth.
I went back. Not for any of that of course, but for the mud,
the hills, the air that doesn't drive asthma into children's lungs, the
psychological and the actual landscape. I lived for a time in the Home
counties, Oxfordshire and then Berkshire. The woody dells and byways there are
beautiful and I explored many in my job
as countryside reporter. Somehow, though, wherever I went, there was always the
faint sound of traffic and the sense that in front and behind you, to your left
and right, just around the next corner there would be an A road, a Tile
Warehouse, a B and Q or a Macdonald's. I came to Herefordshire, because here
the landscape opens itself out into the raw, green, unadulterated waterfalls
and valleys and dragon country of the Black Hills and the Brecon Beacons. There
is no motorway here, no restless, roaring, snaking monster tearing the land in
two, There is just a single lane road to
the seaside, where pipefish nest in rockpools and starlings roost under the
pier. Beyond too are the rained-on peaks of Snowdonia, and further still, with
big-mouthed basking sharks in its belly, there is the wide Atlantic Ocean.
There was another reason I came. It was here that I saw love
manifest itself along a timeline of sixty years, in the patience with which my
grandparents, cared for each other in old age. Here in a little detached house
in suburban Hereford, I watched love play itself out in domestic conclusion.
Ordinary everyday acts of love, tea at a certain o clock, offering of the larger
slice chocolate cake, my grandfather, teaching my granny how to pay the bills
just in case he went first. Here I
experienced an intact 'nuclear' family. The day, in day out, old-fashioned
roles of a man and woman, dividing into their household duties, in harmony, no
arguments. He had his tool shed, and his car, she had her kitchen and her
sewing machine. I make no sociological assertions, how can I? Women's Lib gave
me my education, which gift I cherish
above all. The experience for me as a child, though, was that I felt utterly
relaxed, safe to be a child knowing life was taken care of. So that is why i took myself out of the hub bub, the
excitement, the cultural richness of Oxford, London and the energy of the South
east, heading west, for love, for wide open spaces, and for mud.
Sasha x
No comments:
Post a Comment