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Sep. 24th, 2003 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanI said I'd write something about the village in which I grew up, and I am a man who keeps my promises...
It isn't the perfect villlage... it's less rural than many, stuck in between Southampton, Portsmouth and Winchester as it is. But it has farms, and village shops, and a parish council, and a medieval inn or two. We've lived there almost all my life, my brother died there, my father was chairman of the parish council (Ind) for 20 years, and so on and so forth.
Away from the village the farms and fields run on, down to the river and the woods. I used to take my dog Barney, an Irish Setter deranged even by the standards of that neurotic breed, for an hour's walk after school every day. I'd wander along, imaging I was in medieval England, or that the legions were marching over the hill from Winchester on the road I was using, as indeed they once did, or that I was walking down the Greenway in Middle Earth, or that the Wart and Sir Pellinore would suddenly emerge. Yes, I was a lonely child, entirely too obsessed by books...
The turning point of our walk was where the woods met the river. When we started, nearly twenty years ago now, the tracks through the woods were maintained more by animals than by humans. It's different now.
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
.....
As thought they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods...
Not so here. For there is a way through the woods. And it's marked with signs, pointing ways to other ways through the woods, and yet other ways are barred off. Hell, some of the marked ways were made by me and Barney. And there are spaces to have picnics, and little signs explaining bits of the history.
Can I really moan about this? No, I suppose I can't: who am I to deny others the chance to know this place. But they never will know it really, not unless they walk it daily for year after year, in snow, and hail, and sweltering sunshine, in the dark and in the half-light, on days when the mud covers your boots and on days when I go barefoot. Just as I'll never really know other places I love. But this one was mine, once.
Nearby is the old church, for the heart of the village moved in the late middle ages when for some reason the ford shifted upstream, and the church and the manor house were left somewhat deserted. I used to sit here and think about God, or my idea of God, which even in those days, when I thought I might have a vocation, were mildly heretical (once the diocesan head of vocations, out for a walk with the parish priest, was mildly scandalised to find me sitting on an eighteenth century grave smoking a cigarette there). That too has its board explaining the history of the place, though I find it less grating there. The church is still used for occasional weddings, my sister's among them, and some who are buried there still have family living in the village. The board seeks to define the place as a museum, but it can't overcome the fact that it still is, if not a regularly used church, somewhere people come and observe the defining rituals of their lives, and where others come to sit, and think. As I did this Saturday, watching the sun go down from my accustomed gravestone. I don't believe Samuel minds... I worked out my personal philosophy, and my belief in god as something in all of us and all of us in something, and then later the realisation that despite all of that, and my many disagreements with the way Rome does things and considers as sin things I happily do (or would do), that being a Catholic could and did still mean something to me, over the years I sat there.
But the woods, and the old road over the hill, now fenced and with potholes filled: they aren't mine in the way they were. I wouldn't mind so much if it felt organic. What bothers me is precisely that it is not: it is an attempt to make the place safe and easy for day trippers, and to create a "Country Park" telltale inverted commas included, from what was once an organic landscape, changing incrementally, year by year.
To be fair, the organisation responsible for all this has sought to point up something I feel many fail to understand about places like this: that it is not untramelled nature but the result of 3000 and more years of human interaction with their environment. Too often I feel that the kneejerk underlying feeling of enthusiasts for the environment is that nature is something over there, and humans are something over there and that the latter is intrinsically inimical to the former, as though humanity were not part of nature. (And God forbid that humans should take any part in the process of one species limiting the activities and numbers of another.. but that's a can of worms I'm not opening today). At least the people responsible for all these noticeboards and the rest have included ones explaining that some of the woods are the result of coppicing, and discussing the ancient field lines.
Back in the centre of the village, the Local Shops for Local People struggle on, out of town superstores and insane regulations notwithstanding (their trick is to be very, very, good, which is almost certainly the way forward). The pubs still thrive, and are full of the same people night after night, and most people still know most people, at least enough to say "morning". Hell, most people still know me, and I moved away 12 years ago this week. But one wonders how long that will last...
And I catch the train back to London and Primrose Hill, on a golden evening, in time to sit outside the café in Primrose Hill. Increasingly people here too know me, at least by sight (with any luck the Gorgeous Girl I met here last Friday's gloriously sunny afternoon will come back and talk to me again one day soon). It's its own place, yet somehow similar, and familiar. I've never yet worked out where I'm happiest, in central London or rural England, or in the wilds of Ireland or on the islands in Greece, all of them have their place in my heart. Obviously I shall just have to become heinously rich and buy a house in each...
Right. I really am going home to grapple with my tax return now.
It isn't the perfect villlage... it's less rural than many, stuck in between Southampton, Portsmouth and Winchester as it is. But it has farms, and village shops, and a parish council, and a medieval inn or two. We've lived there almost all my life, my brother died there, my father was chairman of the parish council (Ind) for 20 years, and so on and so forth.
Away from the village the farms and fields run on, down to the river and the woods. I used to take my dog Barney, an Irish Setter deranged even by the standards of that neurotic breed, for an hour's walk after school every day. I'd wander along, imaging I was in medieval England, or that the legions were marching over the hill from Winchester on the road I was using, as indeed they once did, or that I was walking down the Greenway in Middle Earth, or that the Wart and Sir Pellinore would suddenly emerge. Yes, I was a lonely child, entirely too obsessed by books...
The turning point of our walk was where the woods met the river. When we started, nearly twenty years ago now, the tracks through the woods were maintained more by animals than by humans. It's different now.
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
.....
As thought they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods...
Not so here. For there is a way through the woods. And it's marked with signs, pointing ways to other ways through the woods, and yet other ways are barred off. Hell, some of the marked ways were made by me and Barney. And there are spaces to have picnics, and little signs explaining bits of the history.
Can I really moan about this? No, I suppose I can't: who am I to deny others the chance to know this place. But they never will know it really, not unless they walk it daily for year after year, in snow, and hail, and sweltering sunshine, in the dark and in the half-light, on days when the mud covers your boots and on days when I go barefoot. Just as I'll never really know other places I love. But this one was mine, once.
Nearby is the old church, for the heart of the village moved in the late middle ages when for some reason the ford shifted upstream, and the church and the manor house were left somewhat deserted. I used to sit here and think about God, or my idea of God, which even in those days, when I thought I might have a vocation, were mildly heretical (once the diocesan head of vocations, out for a walk with the parish priest, was mildly scandalised to find me sitting on an eighteenth century grave smoking a cigarette there). That too has its board explaining the history of the place, though I find it less grating there. The church is still used for occasional weddings, my sister's among them, and some who are buried there still have family living in the village. The board seeks to define the place as a museum, but it can't overcome the fact that it still is, if not a regularly used church, somewhere people come and observe the defining rituals of their lives, and where others come to sit, and think. As I did this Saturday, watching the sun go down from my accustomed gravestone. I don't believe Samuel minds... I worked out my personal philosophy, and my belief in god as something in all of us and all of us in something, and then later the realisation that despite all of that, and my many disagreements with the way Rome does things and considers as sin things I happily do (or would do), that being a Catholic could and did still mean something to me, over the years I sat there.
But the woods, and the old road over the hill, now fenced and with potholes filled: they aren't mine in the way they were. I wouldn't mind so much if it felt organic. What bothers me is precisely that it is not: it is an attempt to make the place safe and easy for day trippers, and to create a "Country Park" telltale inverted commas included, from what was once an organic landscape, changing incrementally, year by year.
To be fair, the organisation responsible for all this has sought to point up something I feel many fail to understand about places like this: that it is not untramelled nature but the result of 3000 and more years of human interaction with their environment. Too often I feel that the kneejerk underlying feeling of enthusiasts for the environment is that nature is something over there, and humans are something over there and that the latter is intrinsically inimical to the former, as though humanity were not part of nature. (And God forbid that humans should take any part in the process of one species limiting the activities and numbers of another.. but that's a can of worms I'm not opening today). At least the people responsible for all these noticeboards and the rest have included ones explaining that some of the woods are the result of coppicing, and discussing the ancient field lines.
Back in the centre of the village, the Local Shops for Local People struggle on, out of town superstores and insane regulations notwithstanding (their trick is to be very, very, good, which is almost certainly the way forward). The pubs still thrive, and are full of the same people night after night, and most people still know most people, at least enough to say "morning". Hell, most people still know me, and I moved away 12 years ago this week. But one wonders how long that will last...
And I catch the train back to London and Primrose Hill, on a golden evening, in time to sit outside the café in Primrose Hill. Increasingly people here too know me, at least by sight (with any luck the Gorgeous Girl I met here last Friday's gloriously sunny afternoon will come back and talk to me again one day soon). It's its own place, yet somehow similar, and familiar. I've never yet worked out where I'm happiest, in central London or rural England, or in the wilds of Ireland or on the islands in Greece, all of them have their place in my heart. Obviously I shall just have to become heinously rich and buy a house in each...
Right. I really am going home to grapple with my tax return now.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-24 08:36 am (UTC)when i was little, i wandered around the woods behind my house saying "aslan aslan" or "gummry, gummry" depending on what mood i was in, believing beyond all belief that one day somebody would come for me, to take me on a wonderful adventure that was destined just for me...
alas...reality hit...
(but i havent given up ALL hope yet...)
i love your happy catholicness too - only i wasnt caught smoking - i was caught asking "was mary REALLY a virgin" and the priest was so horrified at me that i was still used in Easter Homilies years later about the horors of youth not understanding their faith (i was about ten then by the way, and i really had said it just to piss the priest off, which worked i guess)
anyways - you should write...
no subject
Date: 2003-09-26 11:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-24 03:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-24 03:40 pm (UTC)my joy, however, is that i feel the beauty and goodness of each when i'm there, rather than see the relative faults and crave the other ... which makes for many comfortable moments of momentary happiness but doesn't help with the 'what on earth should i do with the rest of my life' conundrum i've had of late.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-24 04:29 pm (UTC)