GOING BACK

“Well, shall we go up and look?”

The pretty raven-haired woman raised her head and looked enquiringly at the tall man beside her.

“So far little seems familiar, but after coming all this way I do think we had better go and see what else has changed.”

Her companion looked around him with some bemusement before turning back to the woman and sighing, “Yes you’re right, we might as well go and look.”

He turned away and started climbing rapidly the stony pathway leading to an old railway bridge, a rather unlovely structure made of tarred black iron that spanned four railway lines and two sidings. Unlovely though it was, he knew that it lead to the great flat tide- washed grass of the Lamby. He remembered the way it used to look and how for a young adventurous child with a glowing imagination, it was the gateway to miles of sea bank, fields, thick untamed hedges and drainage ditches, or reens that swarmed with bird life and adventure. It was the entryway to, what was for many young children, a vast and varied playground that few adults frequented except for young teenaged couples in search of privacy in which to conduct their courtship rituals. The anticipation of what lay ahead filled his mind with memories of many enjoyable days exploring and playing with his friends

He had already noticed that the land on the village side of the railway had changed considerably. Where once there were small fields bordered by hedges of hawthorne and blackberry punctuated with beech, elm and oak, there was now a barren expanse of playing field with just a few rows of trees to break the monotonous flatness. The old spring and the adjacent frog pond were now covered with houses and gardens. Some people had taken the cue from this environmental insult and had decided that this was a truly unloved part of the world that they could mistreat with impunity and so had dropped their old sofas and bed frames, which sat there until someone complained enough to get the City to send people to remove them. But the insult remained and many decided that this was a part of their world that they could sully at will.

The biggest change however, was ahead of him. As he neared the centre of the bridge, he expected to see the first glimpses of an expanse of sea washed grass. What greeted his eyes as he crossed the bridge, brought on a shudder of dismay followed by despair. Instead of the bright river meandering through the short, springy salt turf stretching to the silvery sea in the far distance, there was a road bordered by squat ugly industrial buildings, many with storage yards in which were stacked all sorts of clutter including large packing crates, various odd shaped pieces of metal and some large flat-bed trailers left by freight lorries to be unloaded later. The road continued across the River but the bridge that bore it was neither elegant nor soaring. It was just a flat roadway supported on utilitarian cement columns. Somehow the River that ran beneath seemed diminished by all this building and was now just a shadow of that stream that had been such a draw yet also a source of fear because of the fast tides that streamed between its banks of tide-washed grass. The big meandering bend in the River that had been partly cut off to form a shallow, muddy re-entrant was now replaced by a shallow lake, circumnavigated by a path lined with young saplings and shrubs. The edge of the lake was marked by small protrusions or tiny peninsulas that pushed out into the lake, on which were benches for people to sit and also fish, as he read on the sign announcing the City’s gift of a fishing lake and park to the people of the Village.

As he looked further over the roofs of the industrial buildings, his heart sank further. There, just beyond the buildings was a huge mountain of rubbish. Large lorries were backing up the side of this mountain and emptying even more rubbish from their smelly bowels, and a man atop a bulldozer was grinding back and forth, pushing the mounds of new rubbish that were dropped from the lorries, and leveling it out. The pile of rubbish was huge, and worst of all it blocked the beyond, what was once an uninterrupted view to the sea and the blue hills on the far shore.

He could not conceive of a better way to despoil and completely ruin this delicate and historical stretch of coast. Long ago he had taken it for granted not only as a playground that allowed the imagination to soar but also as a permanent feature that he could always come back to. This flat land of tough salt-washed grass bordered by the muddy tidal River, was once despoiled only by the nefarious turf cutters who would cut out patches of turf and sell it to unsuspecting gardeners, who did not understand that this was grass that loved the periodic inundations of salty and muddy water that came with the Spring tides and would not survive frequent mowing and strong fertilizer. Walking to the end of the lane meant leaving behind a world of cars, buses, bustle and interfering adults, and entering a world of wide skies, skies that could range from the clear blue of an imagined prairie sky to the low cloud-scudding stormy sky of a full gale such as mariners feel at sea. Imagination would then take his child’s mind to any number of fascinating places.

As a child he had not thought about the origins of this place that was so important to his young mind. But in his adult years he had read and learned much that surprised him. None of the adults who once surrounded him as a child knew anything about the origin of the sea bank or the reens. They were assumed to have been there forever and to have emerged sometime in the misty past for no apparent reason. His recent readings had shown that this was so ignorant of the truth that he could barely comprehend their complete absence of inquisitiveness. The reality was so complex and fascinating that the man almost resented that he knew so little of it as a young boy as he explored this fascinating and adventure filled world. He did not know that Roman soldiers made the original sea bank or that they probably grazed their horses in the fields behind the bank. Nor did he know that Bronze Age Celtic people had farmed the land and dug some of the early reens. The word “Lamby” was always in use but he never knew that it was a Nordic name and that it recorded the long ago visits of feared Vikings.

Some parts of Village history were spoken of, but he now knew that the accounts were garbled, incomplete and hopelessly mixed up. The Normans had lived here and built an important castle and then a church that still was in use. He looked again at the horrific blight that had been laid on this land and realized that only people who were ignorant of the past and the subtleties of landscape could do such an evil and thoughtless thing. He remembered an incident from his childhood when a bus stopped at the end of the lane and a crowd of students tumbled off. They were lead by their teacher who set off across the railway bridge and into the sea grass carpet of the Lamby. He followed and watched as they gathered around the older man who was leading them and listened as he talked and pointed and then stooped to pluck something from the ground to show the little assembly. He was vaguely aware that they were from the University in the City and that they were on some sort of nature walk. He knew about nature walks he had once been sent away to live with his aunt for a several months and the teacher at the little school he attended would take them on walks to collect plants and seeds for their classroom collection. They had rambled, just like these students, stopping to identify and collect specimens along the way. The plants they collected were taken back to the classroom, labeled and mounted on large sheets of stiff paper that were mounted on the walls. The scent of the drying plants and leaves perfumed the room for weeks.

His response to these students and their professor was strange and even slightly discomforting. His first response was resentment that these strangers had invaded “their territory”. He and his friends knew the Lamby in great detail; the places where the turf cutters had left different geometrical shapes in the salt grass, the bends in the river and the subtle swales in the otherwise flat expanse of sea washed grass. So, he looked upon these people as interlopers who had some “cheek” to come onto their “territory”.

However upon reflection he realized that these people seemed to know more about this landscape than the he and his friends. They gathered around a pond that had formed in the cuts made long ago by the turf cutters. Time and the infrequent yet vigorous eroding wash of the highest tides had smoothed and altered the original angular shape left by the cutters and in its stead there was the irregular shape of a tide pool that was home to stranded creatures including eels during the annual run in September. The man in charge was talking and pointing and even dipping a net into the water and retrieving some of the ponds inhabitants for the students to examine. It was amazing that they found so much to examine and talk about and slowly there dawned on his consciousness the idea that there was a lot about this microcosmic world that he and his friends roamed and played in, that they did not comprehend at all.

He remained for a while. Reflecting on these and other incidents in his past and wondering who had allowed this desecration of what he remembered as a wonderful world, rich in plants and birds and a constantly changing backdrop to a childhood world of adventure. His eyes defocused and the ugly scene faded as he went into a reverie of remembrance. It all came back to him; the way it was once, his friends who formed the “Gang” and the various friends and foes they encountered. He could see it and smell it; the tree sap, the smell of crushed grass and the ever-present tang of salty mudflats. An overwhelming flood of memory that took him to another place and time.