We’re getting towards the end of February and mostly it is still raining. It feels like it hasn’t stopped since sometime in November. I know that’s not literally true, but it hasn’t stopped long enough for anything to properly dry out. In that context, waking to a second day of sunshine was enough for me to put all other plans on hold, check out the next square and get out before the weather changed its mind.
I’m not a sufferer of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Quite the opposite, I love the seasonality of the UK, the shifting nature of the weather, the light, the plants and animals, the skies. I love the extremes: the cold, the hot, the wet, the dry, the mist, the clear, but what I really love is the shifting-ness of it. This Winter has been different. It hasn’t really got going on being wintry – not yet! There’s still time.
Instead, it has remained drab and Novemberish. Weeks and weeks of dismal days of cloud and grey. A lot of rain. Soggy paths, flooded fields (and worse). So now I just want it to stop. Draw a line. Accept that it was a wet Winter, just as 2023 was a wet Summer.
I want us to move on now.
I want the weather gods to recognise that Imbolc has been and gone. It is time for Spring. The flowers know. The trees know. The birds and the squirrels have got the message. So, let’s have a few dry days. A couple of dry weeks wouldn’t go amiss. Please.
That said: I am grateful for today, for waking up to bright daylight and mostly blue sky, for the urge to simply check out the map and head out and see where I end up. It looked uninspiring. Not so much ‘suburban’ as ‘council estate’…which is what a lot of it was.
As I walked through streets that reminded me very much of where I grew up, two main thoughts kept rambling through my brain.
The first one was: where are all the children? It was mid-morning on a Saturday, the first sunny one for a while, and these streets were quiet. People were home. All the parked cars testified to that.
Am I mis-remembering? I think that when I was growing up, on this kind of day, heading to the end of a wet half-term holiday, we would have been out. On bikes. On roller skates. Playing tiggy-on-high. Playing Grandmother’s Footsteps (a.k.a. What time is it Mr Wolf?). Making up war games that were really just glorified hide-and-seek escapades. Playing simple hide-and-seek: hidey-bo, we called it. A corruption of ‘hide and go’ presumably. Climbing trees. Kicking or throwing balls about. Annoying the grown-ups, no doubt…but being children. Laughing, shouting, making a noise.
There was no noise, no laughter.
As the morning went on, I passed so few children that I counted them. Seven. In a two hour walk. That’s worrying.
On the door step of one house, three girls of about (I’d guess) ten or eleven, just mingling, talking. That age when you’ve grown out of junior school games, but not yet grown into being a teenager. In another street, another three, much younger, earnestly discussing the rules of the game they were clearly making up. Later again, a beautiful young one, with a push-along-scooter, corn-rows in her hair and a hesitant smile. Maybe around six or seven years old. She caught my smile, and the fact that I was just walking past, and she beamed. “Hello” she said. “Hello!” I replied and kept on walking. These days you’re never certain if you can stop and chat. You have to wonder if it is fear that keeps the children inside…not theirs, but ours.
There were no young boys playing. No make-believe, with cap guns – a simple snap no substitute for the screen explosions in full colour. No kick-abouts. No cycle riders.
It occurs to me that if we really want to rewild our world, we have to start by rewilding our children, and by that I don’t mean make them wilder, angrier. I mean, take them back to their innocence, allow them to be children, watch over them as a community so that they can run free in their neighbourhoods, give them space to play their ball games…I want to see signs on walls that say 'Be careful with your ball' rather than ‘No Ball Games!’ I want communities to accept that the occasional ball will end up in the wrong garden or through a window. Windows can be fixed. Imprisoned childhoods cannot.
I walked those streets and wondered what the children were doing behind those doors, and worried how little of it involved jigsaw puzzles or colouring books or making jam tarts or sanding wood or making models or drawing, and how much of it involved the passiveness and/or the uninventiveness of sitting in front of a screen.
I’m not a parent or a teacher and the rowdiness of full-on childhood is not something I personally relish, but at the same time the echoing silence of its absence worries me.
My second thought was about the nature of wildness. This one will keep coming back to me as I explore this map, because part of Humphrey’s* original project included the search ‘for nature and wildness’. Wildness and wilderness. There you go. Put the too words together and it is obvious. There is the wild and the wilderness. The wilder-ness. The places more wild. But that only exists if we also accept a base level of ‘wild’ that it can be wilder than. And I don’t think we have given that enough thought.
I don’t think we understand how much of our gardens and parks and streets are full of ‘wild’.
Wild is whatever is growing and going its own way. It is everything that we are not controlling.
Wild is all of these trees that I walk under, as I wander through these estates, plane trees, lime trees, the beautiful silver birch, at her best against the wide blue sky. Wild is the daisies, the aconites…but also the crocus and the snowdrops, even if they were once deliberately planted. Anything that grows according to itself, is wild. Celebrate it as so, and the world becomes more itself. Just a little wilder than we might have thought.
Should we even have daisies in February?
Later in the day I will take to my own garden, spend two hours weeding a neglected bed, and find my first lime-green caterpillars of the year and a teeny tiny silver one, and my first two ladybirds of the season. I will wonder at the veined wings of ash seeds, that I cannot allow to take root this close to the building. I will uproot things, or try to. I know I don’t succeed because this bed is as much root network as it is soil, but I break up the soil and hopefully clear some breathing space for the lavender and the salvias, the golden rod and acanthus, all cut back before the winter. And the climbing rose that I will yet again try to establish against the wall.
I think about my own garden as I walk through the estates, being more judgemental than I have any right to be. Some are well-tended. Some are beautifully wild. Some are hard-standing. Some are rubbish tips with the stereotypical soggy mattresses and piles of unidentifiable metal. In one, two massive tree roots have been upended and deliberately placed, a plank between them to suggest a walk-way between two mountain hermitages. Or something else entirely. I love its simplicity and its beauty and its hint at the oriental. I am too close to their windows to be rude enough to take a photograph but wish I had dared to do so. I have a large unearathed root in my garden, and I am wondering what to do with it.
Although I have the map with me, I am wandering idly. Trying to look like I know where I’m going. Perhaps I have a visual in the back of my brain, an orientation at least, a notion of rough boundaries, but I am surprised when I stumble across Marlpit Wood. I double-check my street map later, but no, it isn’t marked on there either. The green space is shown as being school playing field.
To be fair, it is no bigger than a football pitch or two – a pocket woodland, but no less a joy for that.
The wood and the lane it adjoins both take their name from the large pit near the wood’s boundary. Marl is a mixture of chalk and clay dug out to be spread on thefields. Unfortunately the information board suggests that this use was as a ‘fertiliser'...well, not exactly. It’s use would add more calcium but its main use is to modifying the soil structure, to reduce its acidity. I can’t help thinking that adding chalk to the notoriously boggy clay of Norfolk fields would also help dry them out. But I’m neither a farmer nor a chemist…so what do I know?
I know that this pocket woodland is a lovely thing. It isn’t very old, only here since the 19thcentury. The Tithe Map of 1840 shows the pit and a wood (not contiguous with the current one). The 1886 OS map shows an ‘old lime pit’ and a building which may have been a lime kiln. Because I’m too lazy to do the necessary internet searching, I assume this indicates that marl is an upper layer between the surface clay and the underlying chalk and that once that has been removed, you get to the pure chalk which can then be heated into lime.
Regardless, the pit is wide and deep and was presumably dug out by hand. I look down into it and wonder how many men and how long. And how soon after their leaving did nature reclaim her own?
There are walked paths down into it, but I’m not about to risk them in the wet slipperiness of current conditions. I could happily, muddily slide down, but I wasn't confident of my ability to clamber back out again. Again, I note the absence of children…no bike tracks, or constructed camps, no rope swings, or dropped toys.
There are houses and flats all around. The primary school abuts the wood. Do they ever bring them here to learn? I wonder. Do they ever let them run naturally riotous at break time? More to the point, do the kids even think of scaling the fences to go off on their own in those mid-day precious moments, as we would have done, had our school not backed onto the police station and the fire station and the main road?
I also note what is there. The simple little things, like fallen beech logs, with ferns growing out of them. An abandoned bedhead, brilliant white, that might make a feature in a garden. A single daffodil, in bud. A clump of snowdrops. A drop of hazelcatkins, golden against the emerald of ivy. A hollow stump holding water, with an oak leaf floating deep within it. Bright green promises of bluebells to come.
There is no-one about. No scurrying in the undergrowth. I hear blackbirds and robins.
More houses and streets and gardens. Flats built around 'greens', ‘walks’ and ‘places’ and ironic street names. All of the post-war architecture, the shifting decades, are visually datable from the estates in my home town, as if all the local authorities used the same designers, the sames sets of plans. Perhaps they did. Some of it works; some of it doesn't.
There is ‘wild’ and ‘nature’ even here. There is green. There are trees. When people talk about a golden age of council house building, it isn’t just about the affordability and the numbers, it is about the thoughtfulness: the open space provision, the footpaths that weren’t put in until lines of desire made themselves known. I think above all it is the trees. I cannot imagine how puny they must have looked when they were planted, but here they are: grown into themselves.
These estates had and have their problems but, apart from the most shoddily built of the 1970s, most of them will survive, they will revive, there is space for them to do so, there is space for these people to come out of their houses and build communities.
I'm being optimisic. Perhaps I’m just a little heady from the unexpected sunshine.
A little later, I wander into Twenty Acre Wood. This one is much more open. It is skittery with springtime squirrels. I hear robin and blackbird. I hear (and see) dunnock, perched on a lowbranch. I hear tits, blue and great.
I find patches of dog-violet, scratched and ageing. And crocuses.
Have we fallen out of love with the crocus? We go on snowdrop pilgrimages at the beginning of the month, seek out their purity and demure hung heads. We are uplifted at stumbling upon a single clump of them in a woodland clearing or a whole drift cascading down a riverbank. Later we will watch and wait (as I am already doing) for the first bluebell, that seasonal shift of the woodland carpet from snow to sky. In between the crocus has been forgotten.
I admit they don’t stand up well in the rain. I walk past bedraggled clumps of them, flattened and defeated, but then I find their sisters, still upright, glistening drops on still-closed sheaths of regal purple. At the wood’s edge I find a whole patch of them in full bloom. Pale lilac cups open to the sky, saffron glistening within like caught drops of sunshine. Yolk within the egg. Strong enough to hold a few drops of rain, as if additional ornament were needed.
We have come to think things aren’t wild if someone put them there…but why? We have no say over whether or not they choose to fight their way through the darkness of the soil each spring. That is their own indominatable spirit, their own life force, their wildness. What in the end does it mean to be wild, if not simply “to live” in the place you find yourself, to best of your ability? To bloom where you are.
What does it mean to be wild, if not to be flamboyant? The snowdrop and the bluebell have their place – I love them too – but can I also send in a vote for the crocus. Saffron flower. Look at them more closely, and see just how beautiful they are.
I’m intrigued by an old beech (?) stump, long since felled, now home to a cloak of vivid green rough-stalked feather moss ('common moss' seems like an insult). I start to take pictures of it because it looks to me like another of those improbable mountains that you find in the east, rising out of the sea of fallen leaf litter. When I look at one of the pictures later, I have a different image: one of green-cloaked creature with a long, triangular face, who has stumbled in the woods and is pushing himself up, his arms in front of him, strength and beauty. Awakening. I see him as the spirit of spring, waking up to face all this excessive wetness.
I am given to such whimsy when I walk alone. I think it’s partly why I do it.
