We’re into February. Imbolc was mid-week, and I’m with the Celts & Anglo-Saxons who saw this as the beginning of Spring. I’ll leave the meteorologists and modern-calendar watchers to decide your own dates, but so much feels more ‘right’ to me since I learned that the cross-quarter days are the season starts and ends, and the quarter days (solstice & equinox) are the mid-season points.
And who doesn’t want to celebrate the start of Spring? Who doesn’t want to notice that, yes, the days are already noticeably longer, that there are snowdrop drifts and crocuses beginning to show their faces? Who doesn’t want to notice that sun is already climbing high enough to warm your face rather than just brighten it?
This is Britain and there may yet be frost and snow – but I have known snow in May and you cannot kid me that that is still Winter. Weather is no reliable guide to season. Weather is wayward and wild.
Winter is the sleeping time and anyone who walks outside and looks at what’s happening in the non-human world right now can see, this is the waking time. Down the Blackwall path there are celandines. Everywhere there are snowdrops. I saw my first butterfly today.
Today I walked. Still close to home, my current home, but closer still to my earlier homes in the
city…sometimes ‘memory lane’ is made up of actual streets. I walked down the hill along one of the cemetery-edges and remembered my second year at Uni. I remembered pushing my blue bike up this hill – I never once cycled up it – but it was worth it to fly down that way at the end of the day. I’m sure I must have done it in Spring and Summer, but in my memory it is always Winter: cold, often wet, I’m wearing a blue kagoule and my books are double-wrapped and I’m worrying that I am no way good enough to get this degree.
I walk past the house, no longer a student-let, where Bex and BM and Lloyd lived that year – where the vegetarian ladies held a ceremonial burial for Lloyd’s sausages. He was not amused. That was the house in which I had my 20th birthday party: I remember my jeans and my blouse that Mam later disintegrated with bleach and the cuddly-toy Elephant they bought me, and how that was my first night with Clive. I remember my last as well…that was in this bungalow, so many decades later.
Just round the corner is from their place is where I was living at the time. Coronation House,1902. I don’t recall noticing that before. There are stained glass panels in the door and the hall windows. The door is new, probably the windows too.
I remember how we all parked our bikes in the hallway, and left mail on the shelf just inside the door. My old room looks to be unoccupied at the moment – the windows are cleaner than they ever were when I lived there.
I remember that room very clearly: the two-bar fire where I singed a sweatshirt I was trying to try, the big old table that we once did a huge jigsaw puzzle on over many weeks, the low-lighting, the hundreds of postcards I Blu-tacked to the wall, my black & white portable TV that I could only watch when my flatmate was away, because she had prior claim on the aerial cable, that all of my clothes fitted into one suitcase under the bed.
I remember that I was reading about Franco’s Spain, and Watership Down and The Plague Dogs.
I remember that I was falling in love, and therefore also out of love. I remember the scent of jasmine oil…and a black shawl doubling as a table drape. I remember the first night, when we talked until one in the morning. I remember the many nights – reading Vonnegut now – that I’d read until the Capri turned up in the street below, and I knew he was thinking about me, before turning out the light and sleeping late the next day.
I remember that he was always late, even then. And one night I needed to finish and essay so he took Pip to Whites instead. We both thought that was both weird and not weird. It was so him. I wonder what happened to Pip. Last heard of heading back to civil-war-torn Zimbabwe.
I remember playing The Doors and Blackfoot and Billy Joel’s Songs from the Attic.
The laundrette is still on the corner. The video rental place with its flashing light is now a closed-blinded lettings agency.
The park just round the first corner is more wooded than I remember. I sunbathed here, once or twice, trying to study economics text books that only sort-of made sense, even then. Even less so now. I don’t think I was ever here when there were snowdrops and crocuses. Someone has abandoned a microwave oven on a park bench. Were microwaves even a thing back then?
I wander down half-remembered streets and then, because this is Norwich, I stumble across a church. A church for every Sunday. You’d think by now I would have found them all, but no. St Barnabas with Bartholomew is new-to-me. So when I get home, I start to delve.
First thing I learn is that Heigham may have derived its name from ‘ea’ (or ‘hea’) meaning ‘water’. That sent me on another wild water chase further down memory lanes into County Durham, stories for another day. Ham we know means village – or something similar – hamlet, encampment, farmstead – a grouping of dwellings. It would make sense then that this particular Heigham is named for being by the river. There is a disused lane named Heigham Watering, which no longer leads down to the modern river but once upon a time must have done so…was presumably a short drove road for animals.
The main route into Tombland (the medieval market place) from West Norfolk, would have been along what is now Dereham Road. If animals being brought in for sale were to be watered, shortly before passing through Helgate then the short diversion to the riverbanks around Heigham would make sense.
In the early 15th Century a church dedicated to St Bartholomew stood on rise above the Wensum. The church and the rectory were destroyed by enemy action at the end of April 1942, but apparently the tower still stands. I didn’t find it today, but I will go and look for it. So close to where I used to
live and I knew nothing of any of this.
The church I’ve just stumbled across is dedicated to St Barnabas (who?) though the parish board now joins the two saints. Neither name is familiar to this heathen. Church history sites tell me that the parish of Heigham covered a whole sweep of outer Norwich, from Hellesdon to the north-west anticlockwise through Earlham and Eaton round to Lakenham on the south. In the first half of the 19th century the population of this area grew from 544 (in 1801) to 13,893 by 1861. I’m guessing this is when this part of the rural ‘outer Norwich’ started to become urbanised and fall within the city boundaries. Speculation on my part here. The records show, however, that the parish was being sub-divided and churches built to accommodate the influx of people.*
Today the church is hemmed in by housing estates. I wander around streets that I have never had cause to explore before, dating them by their architecture, 1950s, 1970s, ultra-new. Mostly council-built around here. The shifting financial pressures evident in the density of build, the diminishing availability of communal outdoor space. I hope that one of the gifts of the covid years is that planners will realise how important this is and revert to leaving gaps, open spaces without ‘no ball games’ signs, trees that can be climbed, hillocks for scrambling up and rolling down. I remember similar spaces from my own childhood with deep affection.
Meanwhile I wander down a busy road full of car showrooms and home décor places. The lighting shop arrests me for a while as I pick out all the things from the window that I would actually think of buying before I realise I have nowhere to put them, and all the things that I personally find kitsch but I know my cousin would love. Each to their own.
I come to the Dolphin and am saddened to discover it’s no longer an inn. The building is still serving in its own way though, and that’s enough to keep it looked after, which matters for this former Bishop’s palace. The inbuilt date of 1610 is believed to be that of a renovation rather than the original construction. It is known to have been the country residence of the Sheriff of Norwich in 1585, though not whether he built from scratch, before passing to Bishop Joseph Hall. Given it’s proximity to the water, it may have been an earlier farmstead. In any event, it had become a pub by 1715 and remained that way until 1999. A pub for every day of the year…not any longer, many of them are gone with our changed tastes and drinking habits.
Just as with churches, so with pubs, I am glad to see them retained and repurposed. I’ve noticed that one of the signs of age is the tendency to give directions and navigate by where pubs used to be – a thought that crossed my mind as I passed the corner where the Earl of Leicester site is still empty and overgrown.
And so, finally, I reach the river and step onto a tarmac’d path. It’s a scruffy backwater. Nature is in her end-of-winter bedraggle. Flood wash and storm fall. Unrotted leaves. And so much human detritus. An algae-clogged cut is pink and blue with floating plastic. A beautiful spindle-backed chair lurks in the undergrowth begging for rescue, next to a rotting Co-op bag seemingly full of cut electrical wires. A keep-right road sign lies on the ground pointing back the way I’ve come.
And yet…the river flows and the trees lead my sight skywards. I hear robin and blackbird, bluetit and great tit. I’m delighted to have found so much so close that I did not know was here. I will walk that riverside again in other seasons, just to see how it looks. MaybeI’ll take a bag so I can pick up at least some of the rubbish. I’ll hunt down that still-standing tower. Most of all I am relishing a rekindling of something I had lost in Clive’s passing, and have deeply missed… that I did not know that! feeling, that joy of discovering something that one feels maybe one should have known, would have known had one paid more attention. Esoteric stuff that is not of much value, but is just quite interesting
*More information on the Church and its history isavailable here: St Barnabas Church –Our Lads – The Heroes of Heigham (heighamheroes.co.uk)
