Many years ago when I was considering a career as a professional photographer I spent many happy hours taking pictures in an area of woodland a few miles from where I was living at the time. Good pictures they were too, even if I do say so myself. The woods, fields and farmland were part of a large medieval estate, significant areas of which appeared to have been left undisturbed for decades. Remote and hidden, the woodland was last used to conceal troops prior to the D-Day embarkations. It was a magical peaceful place, full of birdsong, wildlife and leafy dappled sunlight. Then in the 1980s the farmland fell into disuse and the whole area became part of a plan to build a new town. A public enquiry took place but despite massive objection the outcome was a foregone conclusion and in 1986 work began on building a shopping centre and business park. Woodland tracks that had once been silent in the middle of nowhere were suddenly fringed by a major road and a huge car park, but the northern part of the area remained largely intact. Wild daffodils, bluebells and wild garlic carpeted part of the woods in a springtime profusion that I have never seen bettered anywhere else. At the end of a track a massive oak tree stood in solitary splendour in the middle of a small field that was surrounded on 3 sides with glorious woodland. It was possible to stop and hear nothing but the rustle of the leaves and the sound of cuckoos. The whole place fostered in me a lifelong interest in ecology, landscape and the loss of natural habitat. I was an angry young idealist, but life got in the way. I last went there around 1990.
Fast forward 34 years and I recently had occasion to visit the same woods again. It was an utterly disorientating experience. Paths that I had walked years before abruptly disappeared into roads filled with houses. Hundreds of houses squeezed onto tiny plots of land in streets cynically named after butterflies and birds, meadows and bluebells. The daffodil wood was still there, but fringed with houses on all sides. The paths were littered with discarded bags of dogshit and beer cans. The huge solitary oak tree was still standing though, but now yards from a major road that cut brutally across the field where once it had sat in splendid isolation.
It’s progress you may say. There’s no room for sentiment when people need houses, and houses have to go somewhere. This is nothing but the weary nostalgia of an old man, right? Maybe so, but maybe there’s still enough of the youthful idealist left in me to feel that it’s all wrong. It’s a new town that no one wanted built on shortsightedness, greed and dodgy politics, and it takes no account of environmental impact, loss of habitat or general despoilation of the countryside. There’s so much shit going on in the world that it seems somehow wrong to be indignant about issues like this which seem trivial and marginal in comparison with the wider tsunami of general awfulness. After all, few governments have the vision or courage to do much to avert an ecological catastrophe, including those preferring to focus on killing innocent people for short-term machismo and territorial gain. So should anyone care any more about the loss of another thousand or so acres of ancient countryside in the UK? Am I just out of step with the times?
Those days are gone forever, I should just let them go but……
When I was last in the U.K. for my dad’s funeral, I visited my old primary school, within walking distance. I wondered if I had the right place, or remembered it accurately. The playing field, a big, well-tended grass slope bordered by mature trees, was filled with tiny streets of tiny houses, all in some kind of suburban mansion style, but so small as to seem parodic, like a TV series set, with gaps between them – “detached”, you see – barely wide enough to walk through. The school itself was much diminished, too, and although the single story with big windows seemed familiar, nothing remained. I spoke to a teacher – the school of my fond memory had been demolished years ago, the land sold off, and a much smaller school built to serve the much smaller number of pupils. The local population was ageing (literally dying out, as I knew) – the tiny homes made more sense. There had been hundreds of kids growing up through that school, in an atmosphere of light and openness, with free milk and a good library, now reduced to a virtual straggle, hemmed in by flat-pack houses with no gardens.
I walked back to my childhood home, a thin shadow of my memories, through streets empty of visible life. You can’t go home again.
Lines to be read at the funeral, as much about another death as his life:
Something Of England
Something of England will go with him in memory
That Ariel summer down to the sea
Racing the rattler under galleon skies
The halloo from a hill, the cut pillows with steam
And apples bright as bells in the shining bower
The chalk stream chill and ribbon rill
By the wagon in the furrowed lea
Through blithe lanes to the free house
A seat in the sunset window, and her laugh
Rig the dappled canvas, spark and tinder
The starstruck sigh of her name
And the breath of old gods, green and gold
Passed then from that blessed earth
On the best of days, and the last
The Radio Times unread, her picture in the hall
The kettle clouds the dimming glass, waits for his star to fall
If memory serves, you wrote that didn’t you HP? It’s very beautiful and affecting – you are a very talented writer.
I am agree.
Bit confused re second line: not sure where washing powder fits in?
I am also agree
It’s fantastic. It’s also dusty here.
Read. Enjoyed. Wiped small tear from eye unnoticed by others. Thank you.
I’m happy to report that there is a little word doc on my hard drive called ‘HP – Something Of England’ which I, greatly moved, put there upon having read the original post.
A year later, on the day before my Mum’s funeral, I re-read it to rediscover that profoundly personal and quietly fond sense of loss. It is a beautiful thing.
This is the basic plot of Orwell’s Coming up for Air.
I can highly recommend it. It is an angry book in some ways, but there’s also a lot of humour and the nostalgia for a world that has been subsumed by modernity is quite affecting.
It’s not his most important work, of course, but it’s my favourite. The older I get, the more like George “Fatty” Bowling I become.
One bit that resonated was where he looks at himself naked in the mirror, and thinks that no woman would ever see his body again, unless he paid her.
Yep. That raised a wry smile with me. His wife and her mates were awful, to be fair.
It’s years since I read Coming Up for Air; I must read it again. That kind of nostalgia for a world subsumed by modernity was very much of its time. It’s something we inevitably seem to have lost.
Nostalgia for nostalgia?
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
@Boneshaker
It never was.
Recursive nostalgia. I am liking this hall of mirrors, though I am getting a sense of Vertigo (great record label).
“And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Most things are never meant.
This won’t be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon”
[the last two stanzas of] Philip Larkin’s “Going, Going” (1946)
Tomorrow might find me at last
Turning my back on the past.
But time will tell of stars that fell
A million years ago.
Memories can never take you back home, sweet home
You can never go home anymore.
[the final lines of] ‘You Can Never Go Home’ by The Moody Blues (1971)
Thirty-six years ago I worked a couple of terms in a frontistirio in Mykonos – that’s a kind of after-school school where I taught Extra English to kids from seven to seventeen. The place had three rooms – a classroom, and office, and a kitchen with a bed in it. It also had one of the best views on the island – three windmills in a descending line into the sea, and Delos beyond.
Next week we’re going back to look for it. It won’t be there, it’ll be under an enormous condo, with that view. Here’s the thing; going back changes the memory, in this case a fond one, and all future recollections of the place and the time are tainted by the update. Kind of like a Windows install. So this is the last time I’ll remember that place as it was for me then.
Good point, Chiz.
Going back to revisit a place we were happy will just delete all our wonderful memories.
Just look at what happens to John Cusack’s character, Martin Blank, in Grosse Pointe Blank.
He goes back to his old high school reunion and all hell breaks loose.
Listen up, folks! Don’t go to that Fiends Reunited School Reunion. It will end up in murder and mayhem!
The book Remember by Lisa Genova, the author behind the film ‘Still Alice’ discusses the science behind memory. One of the many fascinating revelations for me was the layering of memories – that the hippocampus takes all the sensory, emotional and cognitive experiences of a time and stores them across the different cortexes in a connected way, such that when just one element of that memory layer e.g. a song not heard since that time) is reactivated, the whole of that memory returns such that you are living it again.
But, similar to Chiz’s school->condo experience, by recalling the memory, you change it. I think of it as a solidification of memory – it takes on more shape and substance as we experience it secondhand, but it also can never again be recalled without bringing with it all subsequent recollections, and like rerecordings or monks copying out old texts, errors creep in. It was never as we remember it.
This made me think that my last sentence – So this is the last time I’ll remember that place as it was for me then, is already wrong, because actually what I remember now is the memory of the last time I remembered it, not the original First Edition memory. So when I go back there next week I might be looking for something that was never there. There’s a possibility that I’ll turn a corner in the winding town and what I see will trigger some long-dormant synapse and a whole bunch of new old stuff will flow though it; but I doubt it. Will let you know how I get on.
I’m not sure if anyone is interested, but Maggie Rogers’ album released last month is full of wistful lyrics about the past, about hanging on or moving on:
And everywhere I look around
It seems we’re always saying goodbye
–
I’m crying, wish I wasn’t hanging on
But I know it won’t last for long
So fast, it’s fading out of view
I’m flying long past twenty-two
So high, can’t find the moment it went wrong
But it was coming all along
–
Time is up, you’ve had your fun…
Oh, and where it goes
Is somewhere no one knows
–
One of these days, I’m gonna wake up smiling
One of these days, I’m gonna cry
When all of the years start to blend in together
I watch ’em disappear in your eyes
One of these days, I’m gonna wake up fresh
And wipe all the past from my eyes
Curl up next to you in tall grass, sunshine
And wrap my body’s shape ’round your side
–
I know you find it funny, ooh
But I can’t seem to let it go
I keep wishin’ there was something to do
Oh, don’t you?
‘Cause if now was then, I would get out of my head
I would touch your chest, I would break the bed
I would say the things that I never said
Oh, the things I’d do, oh, if now was then
But you can’t take it back
–
One day, you’ll be lookin’ back
And maybe wish that you were kinder
But ain’t it always just the truth
Oh, that hindsight makes you softer?
I’ve played it back a million times
And always wish that I was wiser
But it’ll be comin’ back to bite you like a dog
You know you better run for cover
–
All the same
Day by day
And suddenly you look around
And find the ground still feeling like it’s yesterday
So it goes
Time moves slow
Until one day, you wake up and you realize
That what you see is what you know
And still you wish for one more kiss
A moment’s bliss from a lover you’ve always known
This is a timely post. I was going to keep this to myself, but the fit is too good.
On Sunday, I went out for a morning constitutional walk. There are some woods nearby that I have been fond of visiting all my life, going back without doubt to my mother taking me there to witness the first catkins of the year and so on. The public path through them runs against the grain of any route I might take from where I live now, so they haven’t been a part of any obvious itinerary of late, hence less visited, but I can see them across the fields every time I emerge onto the public road when I leave the house.
There have been tussles over access in the past, I know, but I don’t get my local paper so wasn’t prepared for what came next. The public footpath is now hemmed in by metal fences, ten feet high. The landowner, unable to deny the existence of public rights of way, has clearly won some other battle to say that these rights exist no wider than a strip, say, ten foot wide. It now has the appearance of walking through an industrial estate. There are signs everywhere shouting ‘CCTV’ and ‘Shooting in Progress’, but these are clearly lies, not least as there is not even a locked gate in these fences; even the owner hasn’t got a means of access to his/her precious land.
I am deeply saddened. A piece of my childhood has been carved up, for no apparent benefit to anyone. I hurried through. I am not even sure I will ever go back, and this is somewhere within a mile of home. The only consolation is that the birds seemed to be having a wonderful time and maybe they will flourish without the disturbance of the many dogwalkers and kids who used to enjoy those woods, but the dogs and the kids will not have that wonderful time any more.
I can’t publish my thoughts on the owner of that land.
I had pretty much the same thoughts in my OP above @thecheshirecat. Fields that haven’t yet been built on have been fenced off with linked steel fences, at best signalling future intent, at worst closing existing footpaths or permissive rights of way.
On a more upbeat note, our local county council, not usually known for its foresight other than in protecting the very affluent city in which it is based from any unwanted development, purchased a 12 acre field near us about 15 years ago. The field had been used for light arable farming and occasionally housing pigs. It has now been left to its own devices. In that time it has reverted to scrub and now to the beginnings of woodland. It’s a beautiful place to walk and is testament to the amazing ability of nature to regenerate from seemingly hopeless beginnings.
The thing is, there is no way this wood has been fenced off for development. There wouldn’t be a chance of that happening where it is. It’s just pure dog-in-a-manger stuff.
@thecheshirecat
Feel your pain, TCC.
My battle with my rapacious neighbours over the two oversized sheds they built on land belonging to my late uncle, plus a jetty they “mistakenly” built on a piece of riverfront land he left to me and my sister is now approaching its fourth anniversary.
Despite being ordered to tear their various structures down because they were built without planning permission the pair are stringing things out in the courts.
After they got fined and convicted in early March, they are coming up on appeal next month. Big question is whether I can find out the date of their appearance and attend. Reason for this is that the council here hate my guts because of the way I have pursued a case I imagine they would have quite happily let drop.
Given that the place is extraordinarily beautiful and has been in my family for 200-odd years, I am not going to let it go without a fight.
More info here
Yes, I have followed your story. There are so many familiar themes: ineffective or unwilling local government; a belief that rules don’t apply to some; and sheer thick skin.
Land ownership – embedded violence since 1066.
I’m a great believer in the philosophy “Don’t look back, you can never look back”. The past doesn’t interest me at all (and the future frightens me, so I avoid thinking about it). When facebook came into being, several old friends from school and uni who I hadn’t bothered keeping in touch with requested my friendship. Being a callous bastard, I ignored them. There are literally thousands of people on this planet. Maybe even more. And new ones keep coming into my life all the time. I can’t be expected to keep track of them all. Move on, embrace the new, don’t look back.
I’ve checked and there are 1020 people on the Afterword, so allowing for all the ladies, children and younger men who aren’t, your population estimate is probably in the right ballpark.
It’s a shame, but 30 years ago the population of the UK was 57 million, it is now 67 million. These people have to live somewhere and there isn’t an awful lot of room in many parts of that overcrowded island.
Canada is way bigger landwise, but the population is growing at probably a faster rate, still only about 40 million though. The US is smaller in area and has about 350 million. However large parts of Canada are effectively uninhabitable and the area where I live has changed a lot since I moved here 9 years ago. There are still some protected areas in cities where houses can’t be built, but they are shrinking fast. Inbetween areas with major populations there is lots of unspoiled land, lovely lakes, trails etc, but no jobs