there’s a smell that older trees have about them in the autumn that is redolent of time passing which carries me back to my early childhood in altrincham, cheshire.
check into altrincham here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altrincham
i attended st. georges school there which was side-by-side with st. george’s church, a church of england building. it had a small graveyard and i recall that during one of our playtimes (known in canada as recesses and now in the manner of machines needing maintenance “nutrition breaks”) a group of us boys scaled the stone wall between the school play yard and the graveyard and we took turns sliding on the long smooth-as-ice gravestones that were laid flat more-or-less side-by-side. the gravestones were slick with moisture, leaves, and moss and were perfect for sliding on. no consideration for the dead. it was fun.
this weekend i’m going to build the blog postings that have hovered on the edges of other blog postings. i have found that writing a blog allows memories and current experiences to surface side-by-side and patterns, connections, linked emotional states emerge that are worth addressing. my english childhood is a funny thing for me because it is such a distant and different world - not just chronologically but also in terms of its form and especially because of its very englishness, its simplicity, and because for me it is very vivid, poignantly vivid.
helen allingham the romantic english artist grew up in altrincham, she captured an england that is all but gone from the fabric of knowing that people experience in england and abroad. here’s a link to helen if she’s an unknown quantity for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Allingham
i have read the words of many writers who have tried to capture this england. it’s surface features are lost but it’s deep mapped features are very very present in ways that might be perceived as esoteric or questionable by the more pragmatic reader but i sense that they they are still there.
on my last trip to england i ventured south of london. i don’t like london. it is as not england as new york is not america. london is london. new york is new york. they are states of being unto themselves.
i arrived in dorset. and learned an england that is totally unlike and yet paralleled in my own experience by the england of the north yorkshire moors, especially the smaller villages tucked away in the more unpenetrable locales of the pennines.
dorset has a depth about it that is very present in its landscape and which can also be found in its people. as i was walking from cranborne - seen here . . .
to wimborne minster (here's a thatched roof cottage just outside wimborne minster)
one day for example, i came across an older gentleman carrying a small scythe. he asked me with the most beautiful dorset accent where i had come from and where i was going to stay the night. i told him. he was gobsmacked and told me that he had been to each place - wimborne minster within the year and cranborne a few years prior. the two locations are twelve miles apart. 12 miles. i bike more than that evry day just travelling to and from work.
he showed me his gardens which were very english and immaculate and wonderfully eccentric and of course in all the order and labelling, there was a place for the fairies - something i learned about from both my grandmother and my father and which i have provided in my own garden. a little wild untamed untouched spot that is visited with care and consideration for the little ones who live there - oops there goes my readership . . . oh well!
the place for the fairies is so quintessentially a piece of knowledge i have that links me inexorably to my english heritage.
england. my england. locked in my heart and my soul’s experiencing. as real as i wish it to be.
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