collapse and throw me into clumps of stingers. With a
bolo
I hack my way to the top for it is important to have visited every square inch of the island.
From the summit (whose exact location is not easy to decide: maybe I never did get there) there is no view at all. Splinters of blue light jab inwards from all over but it is impossible to say whether they come from sea or sky. There is a pungent smell of fresh paint from some plant I have cut. As I stand in silence the noises start up again, the crickets and tree-frogs and
tukos
carry on their interrupted discourse. I wonder which of the massive trunks around me supports the sea-eagles’ eyrie. I am immensely happy in my wild domain; it is like coming home.
Why? I ask myself as I slash my way out again. Why should it be like coming home? From where did I constructthis landscape? Come to that, other than from English literature, where did I acquire any sense of landscape and place? In its near-unanswerableness this question merely throws up four separate memories which come to me as I regain the grassfield and the full glare of the sun.
The first, chronologically, is of Windlesham House, the private school in Sussex to which I was sent when I was nearly nine. Typically enough this was a substantial country house standing in its own grounds among the South Downs and cut off from the outside world by a long drive ending in a pair of iron gates. Equally typically I felt lost, homesick, bullied. Escape through the gates was impossible yet temporary escape via the farm at the back was not only possible but condoned. We were encouraged to go for long walks among those hills with their chalky scars, horse chestnut and beech woods, hummocks of grass littered with rabbit droppings, windy spaces and far-off glimpses of the sea. But what interested us was the spoor of war. The Army had used the area as a training ground in the Second World War which, when I first went to the school, had been over only four years. Behind them they had left countless unexploded smoke grenades now rusting through to expose a damp pinkish paste inside. We would collect the perforated metal tail fins of these canisters as well as live blank .303 cartridges which could be found all over the place. We would bring them back to the school and, sitting on our beds in the freezing dormitories, lever open with penknife blades the crimped ends, pull out the wads and let the brittle cordite sticks cascade onto the blankets. In the two years I was at the school I collected many ounces of cordite in Stephens’ ink bottles. We would explode the mercury fulminate caps with nails hammered into the base of the cartridges and set fire to cordite trails leading off across the floor among the beds. From the very first, I can say, my landscapes were associated with ordnance.
The second memory represents war of a different kind, the one with my father. Once again the occasion was a family holiday in the West Country, although it may well have been the same one since holidays tend to elide intoundifferentiated scenes of squabbling and bad weather. We were possibly near Okehampton in our sagging grey Wolseley. I remember only the torrential rain, the irritable proximity of a family cooped up in a car with our breath misting the windows and the windscreen wipers’ vain clack and slap. There was that clear sense of four individuals each asking themselves what they thought they were doing here: the dismay of two adults at being parents and that of two offspring at being, by the same token, children, all brewed up in evil weather and grim unspokenness. Finally the rain stopped enough for us to open the windows. Off the road to our right was a long valley whose windings were defined by a newly swollen river.
‘Oh look,’ said my father, probably quite privately to my mother. ‘See how the river meanders down the valley.’
‘Oh,
meanders,
does it?’ broke in my hateful eleven-year-old’s voice, heavily sarcastic from the
bolo
I hack my way to the top for it is important to have visited every square inch of the island.
From the summit (whose exact location is not easy to decide: maybe I never did get there) there is no view at all. Splinters of blue light jab inwards from all over but it is impossible to say whether they come from sea or sky. There is a pungent smell of fresh paint from some plant I have cut. As I stand in silence the noises start up again, the crickets and tree-frogs and
tukos
carry on their interrupted discourse. I wonder which of the massive trunks around me supports the sea-eagles’ eyrie. I am immensely happy in my wild domain; it is like coming home.
Why? I ask myself as I slash my way out again. Why should it be like coming home? From where did I constructthis landscape? Come to that, other than from English literature, where did I acquire any sense of landscape and place? In its near-unanswerableness this question merely throws up four separate memories which come to me as I regain the grassfield and the full glare of the sun.
The first, chronologically, is of Windlesham House, the private school in Sussex to which I was sent when I was nearly nine. Typically enough this was a substantial country house standing in its own grounds among the South Downs and cut off from the outside world by a long drive ending in a pair of iron gates. Equally typically I felt lost, homesick, bullied. Escape through the gates was impossible yet temporary escape via the farm at the back was not only possible but condoned. We were encouraged to go for long walks among those hills with their chalky scars, horse chestnut and beech woods, hummocks of grass littered with rabbit droppings, windy spaces and far-off glimpses of the sea. But what interested us was the spoor of war. The Army had used the area as a training ground in the Second World War which, when I first went to the school, had been over only four years. Behind them they had left countless unexploded smoke grenades now rusting through to expose a damp pinkish paste inside. We would collect the perforated metal tail fins of these canisters as well as live blank .303 cartridges which could be found all over the place. We would bring them back to the school and, sitting on our beds in the freezing dormitories, lever open with penknife blades the crimped ends, pull out the wads and let the brittle cordite sticks cascade onto the blankets. In the two years I was at the school I collected many ounces of cordite in Stephens’ ink bottles. We would explode the mercury fulminate caps with nails hammered into the base of the cartridges and set fire to cordite trails leading off across the floor among the beds. From the very first, I can say, my landscapes were associated with ordnance.
The second memory represents war of a different kind, the one with my father. Once again the occasion was a family holiday in the West Country, although it may well have been the same one since holidays tend to elide intoundifferentiated scenes of squabbling and bad weather. We were possibly near Okehampton in our sagging grey Wolseley. I remember only the torrential rain, the irritable proximity of a family cooped up in a car with our breath misting the windows and the windscreen wipers’ vain clack and slap. There was that clear sense of four individuals each asking themselves what they thought they were doing here: the dismay of two adults at being parents and that of two offspring at being, by the same token, children, all brewed up in evil weather and grim unspokenness. Finally the rain stopped enough for us to open the windows. Off the road to our right was a long valley whose windings were defined by a newly swollen river.
‘Oh look,’ said my father, probably quite privately to my mother. ‘See how the river meanders down the valley.’
‘Oh,
meanders,
does it?’ broke in my hateful eleven-year-old’s voice, heavily sarcastic from the
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