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Entering the forest with your back
to Bell Common, skip out of your other self.
You are not who you were on the High Road.
In two hundred yards, ignore the waymarker.
Despite what they say, you can take this path,
that path, it doesn’t really matter.
By David Lewis:
When I was a child in 1970s Liverpool we sometimes bought our Christmas tree from Delamere Forest, a commercial woodland in Cheshire and the remnant of a vast medieval hunting forest, a place of dense woods, open water, fens and bogs.
I was a bookish child. My reading was enriched by my experiences of landscape and my awareness of landscape was informed by my reading. Delamere took me to a European forest-land of giants and ogres and child-eating witches, and on the maps the darkness was visible – Black Lake, Hunger Hill, Dead Lake. I did not feel that other people took a pleasure in these connections.
The Delamere visit was a day for heavy coats and wellington boots, because the forest car park was a muddy field and the sales area was just a clearing in the trees, ringed by coloured lights. The frozen ground had been trampled to icy mush, and pine branches had been laid down to make the paths safer. Chalk-red and powder-green huts, decked with pine branches and fir cones, were built in the trees for Father Christmas and the sale of trees, hot food and drinks. Chestnuts roasted on a brazier, slightly-burned-sausage smoke drifted through the trees. Shivery elves took donations for local good causes, and the Salvation Army brass band played carols from a wooden stage.
And yet the visit to the Forest was a very different Christmas activity from the school Nativity play or the carol service. The felled trees were arranged in flopped, loose rows on the ground, rough finger-jabbing, resin-scented spikes, sharp, unfriendly, essentially defeated, and the heavy twinkle of gaudy lights moving in the thin wind was unable to hold back the Forest’s innate gloom. I half-knew that there was nothing Christian about visiting Delamere at midwinter, that it was a cold pagan celebration of muddy folk tales and encroaching darkness.
Northern England in December is grey if rarely bitterly cold, but one year, in the countryside outside the city, about two centimetres of snow fell. Drained of colour, the Cheshire hills and fields were sharpened to blacks and whites and snow-greys. Once we had bought the tree we chose to go for a walk, away from the lights into the sighing trees and crisp wind. Here the year was dying, silently and without warmth or light - the gloom of mid-afternoon was shadowing the dusk, and it would be dark early. And I loved it. I loved the sharp wind on my face, the snowy tree-fields receding into the early dusk. I loved the silence after the brash tinny music, the grey light after the gaudy bulbs, loved the fact that nobody had walked the paths since the snow had fallen overnight.
There are moments in childhood when we catch a glimpse of those things which will enrich our adult lives. The forest paths were deserted on that late afternoon because most people take no pleasure in cold and snow and darkness, but for the first time I realised that I did not share this opinion. And more importantly at that time I began to realise that I had every right to think differently, about this and about many other things. I was right to love the cold, right to connect storytelling with landscape, right to love maps and place-names. My feelings about the forest walk on that long-ago afternoon were a step to creative adulthood, and ultimately a step towards my shadow-life as a writer.
***
David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside. He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter
IMAGE: Katrin Schönig
Read by Paul Scraton:
Early on in the pages of Turning, a swimming memoir about taking a dip in 52 lakes in Berlin and the surrounding Brandenburg countryside, Jessica J. Lee admits to fears and insecurities in the water. This is something I share. I have never been a massive fan of swimming, whether in the sea or the swimming pool, and especially when out of my depth. It has only been in the past couple of years, swimming in some of the very same lakes that Lee visits in this excellent book, that I began to conquer those fears.
It was then that I began to understand what people were talking about when they - like Lee herself - quoted Roger Deakin and his description of the ‘frog’s eye view’. As Lee describes being in the water in Brandenburg, surrounded by the pines and the sky, I can picture it exactly as I have experienced it as well. You do get a different view from the water, a different understanding of place. And that, for me at least, is ultimately the story of this book: as well as personal history sensitively and bravely told, Turning is about a person gaining a feeling for the history and the stories of the places she visits, deepening her knowledge of the geology, ecology, communities and political history of the city she lives in and the surrounding countryside, each time she takes to the water.
As someone who both shares these interests about place in general, and about Berlin and Brandenburg specifically, it is not surprising that I found myself nodding in agreement and recognition as I read. There were other elements of the story that resonated as well: the loneliness of being new in a big city and of building a personal connection to the place by getting to know and to love the landscape, the forests, the suburban S-Bahn lines and the gruff owners of rural snack kiosks.
Lee is an elegant writer; precise in her description, thoughtful in her observation, and most of all interested in the world that surrounds her. This is not always the case when it comes to memoirs, which can sometimes become so tied up in the internal emotions of the writer that there is no space for any exterior, for the world around them, and therefore context to the story they are trying to tell. In Turning, Lee’s personal journey is deeper and richer for the reader because the lakes and their surroundings are characters in the story. As is the weather. As are the seasons. The plan was to explore the 52 lakes over the course of a year, and so Lee was swimming at the height of summer and in the depths of the winter, breaking the ice with a little hammer in order to clear enough room for her to have a swim.
Indeed, one of my favourite lines in the book - one that had me reaching for a pen in order to scribble it down for later - concerned the shifting of the seasons: “It’s all too easy,” Lee writes, “to be sucked under by sadness in the autumn.” I understand that emotion only too well, even if I haven’t (yet) tried a plunge in an autumnal pool to try and alleviate the October blues.
And then, a few pages later, more recognition: “I’ve become divided, stretched across places.” At the very time I was reading this book, I was working on my own project about walking the outskirts of Berlin. One of the motivations for these walks was to try and gain a better understanding of the city I live in a time when my feelings about place, belonging and identity had been thrown into turmoil by referendum results and a series of trips “home” that made me wonder, more than I ever had before, where “home” actually is. I too have felt stretched and divided. The only question, is whether it matters. Each walk, each swim, can help the clarification process.
Walking or swimming. Building our connection and understanding of a place by interacting with the landscape, the history and the people, can be done in different ways. The strength of the book is, I believe, that it not only is a good story very well told, but that it will make readers think about their own places, their own feelings of home and belonging, of their own lakes, forests or city streets, and think a little deeper about them. Jessica J. Lee’s is a trip to the lake well worth taking, inspiring even this reluctant swimmer to reach for his swimming shorts (if not the ice hammer).
Support your local bookshop! Go and get your copy of Turning by Jessica J. Lee there. Meanwhile, here is Jessica's website.
