When I ordered my home-centred map, I gave it the title Home Ground in lieu of anything more inspiring, but perhaps it was that title that set me to spiralling outwards from the areas I know well, habituating me to the process, before venturing into areas that I don’t know at all. Anyone following this intermittent series will have worked out just how little I know the very-close-to-home ground,
despite how often I walk it. I am both surprised by that, and not surprised. We are all creatures of habit. Having found enough green spaces, enough walk-routes, I have tended to stick to them. There are many spaces I have not yet stumbled into, many leafy suburban streets I have not yet had cause to walk down.
The latter is proving to be one of my own particular pleasures of taking on this “Single Map” notion of exploration – the suburban streets. These un-wild rambles can be thought-provoking in their own right. I’ve always taken pleasure in ‘other people’s gardens’ in all their spectrum of tended through rewilded to completely abandoned. Our gardens say much about who we are, but what they say depends not so much on the language they speak as on the interpreter who listens to them. I might call simply ‘wild’ what someone else might describe as a disgrace. When it comes to the diligently tended, I might think beautiful or I might think it bleak, and that might depend on my mood or the light or the time of year.
I still have not mustered the courage to photograph the gardens I like from the street. It feels like an incursion. A rudeness. But I look. And some things – like a crop of mini-scarecrows – make me smile.
In terms of exploring the map, I am still close enough to home to simply walk out from here. The getting onto the relevant map-square remains an integral part of my wandering.
Wandering. I’ve figured out that that is what I do now. I wander. I meander. I stroll. It is not so long ago that I was counting up the miles, checking off the routes completed, but when I had to write a very brief author-bio recently I found myself penning ‘gentle walker’ – that’s where I’ve arrived after all the fell-walking and mountain treks and ambitions unfulfilled to walk long distance trails, I am now a gentle walker. A stroller. I admit that I am a list-maker and list-ticker by default, so the irony of saying it’s no longer about ticking off the route, when I’m ticking off map squares, does not escape me. But there is freedom in the square. I have not set myself the task of walking the edge lines of each square or covering all the foot-walkable inches of it. I am not even limiting myself to it, in either the day’s walking or the resultant writing. It is merely a destination, a wander-zone with permeable boundaries.
Today was another literal ‘walk in the park’. This map square is dominated by the green that is Eaton Park. I have written about this place before. It is one of the gems of Norwich. A Victorian park, designed and constructed largely to provide work for de-mobbed soldiers during a depression, that continues to be loved, continues to evolve to serve the community. A park is as good as any other focal point for a bright sunny morning in May. We have had a grey, wet Spring, so being gifted a bright early Summer morning was a loud enough call to pick up the camera and go wander.
The difference between a walk and a hike, is distance. The difference between a stroll and a walk, is speed. The difference between a wander and a stroll is the randomness of direction. This was a random wander. Obviously, the aim was to explore the designated map-square, but there were ways of getting onto the grid-point and some were more direct than others. It was a sunny Sunday morning and I had no reason to be home before an expected delivery sometime after 3-30pm. I could afford to divert via the cemetery, and the cascades of laburnum flowers were my reason for doing so. These dripping chandeliers of butter-yellow flowers are perfectly off-set against the copper beech and lime and thorn hedges. I remember a tree that used to overhang our back fence at home, that we were admonished never to touch because of its toxicity. I think Mr Farmer uprooted it eventually. I wonder if Mam asked him to do so. I wonder if he took down the lilac from the front in retaliation. We weren’t natural flower-eaters, my brother and I, the laburnum would have done us no harm.
The hanging golden chains also reminded me of the garlands hung around the necks of visitors in eastern countries, ready-strung strands of good luck. I always say that my favourite colour is blue, but I have to admit how much my spirit is lifted by bright yellow flowers. I love the sun as well as the sky.
Beyond the cemetery I let my footsteps be led by instinct – and they lead me awry. Whatever I recollected of the map I recalled incorrectly. It mattered not. It took me along local streets that I had not previously walked down. A post-war council estate. Probably mostly privately-owned now. Quiet streets that I could imagine living on back then when they would have thronged with children playing on bicycles and roller skates, kicking balls around, laughing and shouting and running free. Streets too quiet now, either because the people that bought their council houses have all grown old or, more likely, because the children who live there are either not allowed to play in the road or would in any case rather be on the computer in their rooms.
On the other hand, the houses and gardens look well-kept. Cars and curtains speak of well-ordered lives, jobs being held down. Occasional neighbours are out chatting to each other. Everyone I pass says hello. There is a primary school that I did not know about, and local shops in unexpected places. The gardens have trees and shrubs and flowering things. They are kept, but not manicured. They feel more mature than the one I grew up with…not wild by any stretch, but also – somehow
– not thoroughly tamed either. I find myself hoping it is an actual neighbourhood, that these people know each other and look out for each other. It won’t be one in the old-fashioned sense, but maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that we’ve already strayed beyond the pale.
I walk through an unexpected enclave. A street name I’ve only ever seen on my ‘nextbus’ app shows itself to be the kind of secluded square you might expect in London, but on a smaller scale, and the ‘garden’ in the middle is not fenced off. Public open space. A bit of green. A few shrubs. Ragwort allowed to flower in edge patches. Grass for picnicking on or kicking a ball about. A place infant-schoolers can build their grass camps, and there is cut grass left for them to do it with. But no doubt they are all indoors holding iPads.
Although I’d intended otherwise, I find myself entering the park via Bluebell Wood. It strikes me that this is possibly the first time I have been here at bluebell time. Can that be right? There is such a swathe of them in Earlham Woods, I have always gone there. And this year I also had the privilege of a pilgrimage to Blickling Great Wood specifically for the bluebells. I suspected as I headed along the eponymous Lane that the bells would be finished by now, getting raggedy and tired, and maybe their season is beginning to end, so it was a delight to see them still here.
The Blickling rangers talk of ‘managing’ the wood to ensure a display of bluebells. One would not thank me for the quote “essentially, we are gardening”. Here, though, in this tiny patch of woodland that gives its name to the road that bounds it, and edges onto a pitch-and-putt course, the flowers have to fight for their space. They live among the stitchwort and the nettles and the goosegrass. They shelter under ferns. Hunker up close to oak trunks. This is not a carpet of bluebells. It is more like an apprentice-piece tapestry, where there is a hope of them dominating, but nowhere near a certainty. It is a different way of experiencing their delicacy.
It may not be the first time I’ve been here at bluebell time, but it is probably the first time I’ve really thought about it. Bluebells are a signature of ancient woodland. I’ve never previously thought about this little patch and where it might once have stretched. Up over what is now the park for sure; down over what is now the road and through the campus before the Broad was dug. Are these woods directly related to Earlham Woods? Are the bluebells here familial with those I more normally see on the other side of the campus? Are they lost to each other, or is there some subterranean network that sends the updates back and forth?
That’s one of the things about city living, suburban living, perhaps all modern living. We have become accustomed to living in the patchwork. We rarely stop to think about how it looked before, when the patches were part of a whole other picture. I wonder what my map would look like if I removed all of the infrastructure and left only the patchwork, the green spaces. I wonder if that is what is needed to show us where chains have been broken and nature-pathways are urgently needed, where the islands are that need to be reconnected. I wonder if anyone is doing that already.
And all of this before I even enter the park.
I edge my way around and through the pitch & putt course, getting my sandalled feet wet in the long grass, still dewy even at mid-morning. I remember the old saying that if you wash your face in the May-Day-dew you will be beautiful forever. I wonder how well it works if you’re washing your toes five days later.
Into the main body of the park, still walking along its edges. There are the flowers of my childhood: buttercups and daisies and cow parsley, and I remember the feeling. I have snippet-memories of the where – mostly places I was not meant to be – but maybe my parents knew that it mattered that I be allowed that measure of that kind of freedom – the freedom to be (or at least to think I was alone) – in those kinds of spaces…the spaces where common flowers grew. Buttercups. Daisies. Dandelions. Cow Parsley. Yellow. White. Yellow. White. All among the green. Today I walked up the edge of the park, with the hint of a scent that I could catch. Constellations of daisies. Couplets of buttercups. The bright green leaves of spring in the trees. And I remembered feeling likethis before, a very long time ago.
When I was…what...8 or 9 years old? I would not have known to call this ‘peace’ or ‘bliss’ or ‘joy’.
But I do now, and I know the feeling from all those years ago. I know that what I felt in the daisy field, or by the cow parsley hedgerows, as a child, is exactly what I feel decades later – only now I know to call it peace, bliss, joy.
I know it as the feeling that stops you thinking. I know it as the feeling that holds you and tells you that this has been / will be a good day, an important day, even if you don’t remember it.
When I was a child and I sat in my secret daisy field, I couldn’t have imagined that I would remember it fifty years later. I couldn’t have known that it would still matter fifty years later. So these days when I walk, gathering up random impressions and filing them away in the dark
recesses of my memory, I do so knowing that many of them will never surface again, but that some of them will and will prove to be important. I do it not knowing which is which.
On the sports field there is a game in progress that I cannot figure out. It is sort-of rugby, but not quite. There don’t appear to be actual teams, but they seem to know whose side they’re on at that moment by direction of play; players are switching in and out at random, queuing to join the field whenever someone chooses to leave it. There are adults and children, male and female, all playing together. I cannot see anything that looks like a scoring zone. I hear calls and watch passes. They seem to know the rules. They all seem to be happy in their play. And that makes me smile too.
Elsewhere families are picnicking. There’s a queue at the café. The crazy golf course is open, and the adjacent green has gained a giant chess game, that no-one is playing. Very young children are playing on the swings and roundabouts. Or kicking footballs and trying to stay out of the mud, or riding tiny scooters and trying to stay out of the mud. I worry about a generation that doesn’t actually want to get muddy.
On the boating lake two tiny speedboats are kicking up wakes. Elderly gents playing with their toys.
In the lily pond, a couple of mallard wander about nonchalantly. The lilies are not yet in flower. The local heron poses for his pictures. A lady in a wheelchair tells me that her daughter loved the heron until she saw him eat a fish. That upset her. Cycle of Iife, the mother said. Ain’t that the truth? That it is the cycle of life and that somehow, though we know better, we still seem to choose sides. I love the heron, so maybe it is as well that at least one small child loved the fish.
