Here were giants...

By Fiona M Jones:

This is a mountain-range on Middle Earth. Twisted folds of rock, precipitous cliffs and narrow hidden glens. Deep caves below, where live the things that hide from the light of day. Confronted with this massif you must scale it or negotiate, at your peril, the subterranean pathways—

OK, it’s a tree stump in a cow field. It’s still epic. By its girth it must have been a giant, shrugging off the centuries, a thing that lived until it had forgotten how to die. This one’s the largest in a widely-spaced row just outside the southern boundary of the Pitfirrane golf course, along from the prisoner-of-war base. 

Somebody, at some point in the mid-to-late 1900s, must have looked at these majestic trees and decided to cut them down. Every one of them, levelled to knee-height. I wonder where the hundred-tons of wood went—how much was burned, which gates and roof-beams came from these. And when. These tree-remains have stood for decades, rotting hollow and silvering, mossing on the outside, concealing who knows what of rodents and invertebrates. 

Perhaps this row of giants would all have fallen by now anyway, succumbing one by one to wind or lightning, untidy in their dwindling. Trees should be tidy, someone must have said; and untidy trees are only worth their wood. 

But how tidy do you need a muddy field, one you can’t even walk through except after weeks without rain? Even before it was a cows’ field it was only a prison camp. Before that it would have belonged to the original Pitfirrane estate. Someone two or three centuries ago planted a row of saplings for the edge of a road or the boundary of a vista. Most land in Britain has changed its use so many times you’ll find a king in a car park or a Roman bath under a shopping centre. I don’t know what this landscape was when these trees first came here. 

Here were giants, at the edge of this boggy field churned deep with the hooves of cattle. Not much of each giant is left. Enough to house a few families of hedgehogs and mice, and a nation or two of woodlice. If you step on top of this tree stump you still stand upon the roof of a world. 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Memories of Elsewhere: Westcliff Parade, by Dan Carney

Photo: Marc Pether-Longman

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Dan Carney:

It’s a number of things that will keep Westcliff Parade in memory shortly after you’ve left, when venturing further than 500 metres from home will become an exotic and reckless act, and your mind will be constantly occupied by the newly inaccessible.

It’s the curious way it can feel windswept and deserted here even when the air is still and there are people all around. It’s the grand old Westcliff Hotel, brilliant white and offseason-empty, as well as the Cliffs Pavilion theatre just beyond, a strange but compelling blend of art deco and brutalism, a 1950s Butlin’s building imagined as a cruise ship from the near future. It’s the gentle decline, on one side, to the seafront between Southend and Westcliff, and the Cliff Gardens, a multi-tiered Edwardian pleasure garden set into the slope and stretching all the way along to the Adventure Island amusement park. A tastefully verdant point from which to take in the not quite unending view of the never quite empty sea; the first widening of the Thames Estuary, and the Isles of Grain and Sheppey. The Canvey Island skyline to the right and, to the left, Southend Pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world.

The gardens were designed by the renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose other works include the palatial Rashtrapati Bhavan presidential residence in New Delhi, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, and the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Lutyens was also responsible for the memorial to Southend’s own Great War dead, a freestanding eleven-metre obelisk of Portland Stone that also resides here, further along at Clifftown Parade. His daughter Elisabeth, a prominent composer, had a similarly diverse career, pioneering her own technique of serial composition – an approach involving the equal usage of all twelve notes on the chromatic scale – scoring a number of 1960s Hammer horror films, and drawing admiration from Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, and Stravinsky. 

But what will make this short stretch linger, more than its panoramic views, impressive landscaping, or aristocratic architect-composer bloodlines, is the thing that has brought you here. Dad died two days ago, fading away peacefully – and expectedly - in a nearby care home, following a long period of illness. You’ve been here since, staying at the Westcliff Hotel, helping Mum with death administration and trying to provide general support.

Between you, you’ve been working down the list – getting the death registered, cancelling the pension payments, transferring the joint account into a single name, going through the production line notification of friends and relatives. There’s a bleak humour in how mundanely procedural a lot of it is, how the infrastructure of eight and a half decades of unbroken existence can be so easily dismantled or reassigned. There isn’t much humour, however, in how nothing either of you do or say seems enough to fill the new gap, a vast, weird expanse it’ll take time to explore and understand. For now, it’s less complicated to collect the certificates, make the appointments, and sign the forms, all rituals which - at this moment - seem to exist solely to enable the deferral of the more ambiguous stuff.

Even so, you spend a lot of time while you’re here wondering what’s going on. Even when death is foregrounded by decline and inevitability, a release when it finally comes, it’s still a punch in the chest. You’ve been standing on the track watching the train approach, able to do pretty much anything to prepare for impact, except get out of the way. And if it’s hit you hard then Mum, after 55 years of marriage, has been hit harder still. What it leaves is more than just simple sadness or loss. It’s a disorienting blend of the fluid and the fixed. Panic and permanence, everything rising and spinning around a monolithically immovable core. A contradictory thing which won’t settle or be made sense of, leaving you feeling like a switch waiting to be flicked, a punch yet to be thrown.

As if to reflect this, Westcliff Parade dissolves and reforms daily. In the mornings it’s a marvel of Edwardian seafront elegance, the gardens stately and welcoming, the timber- and glass-fronted houses inviting unhurried admiration. It’s not hard, in the bright mornings - even months before the summer crowds will arrive at the beaches below - to feel the energy and possibility that must have crackled through here in the 1800s and early 1900s, when Southend was an exclusive seaside resort, the destination of choice for well-heeled Londoners.

In the evenings, however, the desirability and bustle of years past are nowhere to be seen or felt, overwritten by darkness, dread, and decades of affordable overseas holidays. Westcliff Parade is the chilly precursor to hasty Wetherspoons meals, eaten late and alone in the cavernous converted post office off Southend High Street, before the trudge back to the hotel. It is yesterday’s place, shuttered and embalmed, offering no restorative views or palatable metaphors for death and grief. It doesn’t want you here, and it makes sure you know it. It watches disapprovingly, tallying your steps and keeping track of every minute you stay.   

On the last day you are here, the duties are mainly done. The morning is clear and crisp but the answers, unsurprisingly, are still to appear. You check out of the hotel and find yourself standing at the top of the Cliff Gardens in the rising wind, surveying the choppy estuary. You look across to Canvey, then down at the couple on the bench. In the months that follow, you’ll sometimes feel like you’re on your way through, but more often like an engine sputtering quietly to a halt, a box boarded under the floor.

***

Dan Carney is a musician/writer from north-east London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also authored a number of academic research papers on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Unreal estate No.03: The Easternmost House

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the third of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to The Easternmost House Juliet Blaxland’s book of the same name. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Juliet herself.

“On a stormy night, sleeping at the Easternmost House is like sleeping in a boat.” - Juliet Blaxland, The Easternmost House, 2019

Juliet Blaxland, writer, architect and illustrator, had lived in a coastal house by the North Sea with her family for more than a decade, until the eve of 2020. The house is not there anymore, but continues to live in a book she wrote about it. “The Easternmost House is a portrait of place that soon will no longer exist,” Juliet writes in the introduction of The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England, not yet realising how very soon that will be. “It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone.” 

The Easternmost House was published last April, when the house was still standing on the edge of the cliff in Suffolk, England, overlooking the sea. It was demolished this February, so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. 

“The erosion process is historic and ongoing, with years of stability followed by great crashes of land-loss in a single tide.” 

The House

“From the sea, it appears as a house from an old fashioned story book,” Juliet writes, a house located “east of London, east of Ipswich and east of all the rest of England”. The name of the house is also a nod to The Outermost House, a seminal book by American author Henry Beston and one of Juliet’s favorites. In both books the land runs out, a fact that Juliet writes you can even sense without seeing, when driving along the road about a mile away.

“It is a windblown house on the edge of an eroding clifftop at the easternmost end of a track which leads only into the sea,” she writes. “There used to be a village here and there used to be several hundred more acres of farmland.” There was a time when the Easternmost House wasn’t a house on the edge, there was another building, which was demolished a few years earlier because of erosion. “Here, the history of houses and farmland being lost to the sea reaches far away back into time, a known unknown.” 

It was originally a row of three estate cottages, built for farm labourers or similar around 1800. “Practical, solid, honest and well-proportioned, with fireplaces and original features intact, but also a bit butchered by ‘improvements’ over the years.” It was red brick, with dark pantiles, “referred to in Suffolk as ‘blue’ pantiles, but actually as dark grey-black, and very typical of the local vernacular.” The wall facing the sea was painted pink, also very typically Suffolk. 

The house had its original bead-and-butt doors with Suffolk latches, “and the old threshold timbers are worn into soft curves by the boots of farm labourers past, hinting that it might be older than it at first looks.” The defining feature of the house, that made it recognisable from afar across the fields and trees, or from some distant part of the beach, Juliet writes, was its chimneys. “Because of being originally three cottages, with two being mirror images of each other in plan, plus the one nearest the cliff-edge, the chimney line goes: chimney, space, space, chimney, space, chimney. “Something like this: I__I_I”.”

The book is organised by months: there are twelve chapters, from January to December. Each is filled with the author’s observations, memories and details that help to re-create a strong sense of place on the page. A coastal house is never just a building. It is a place with a huge view of the sea, ever-present, ever-changing, while Juliet sits at a “clifftop kitchen table” and watches it, day by day, season by season. 

And so the seaside window is married to weather and its dramas, as are the inhabitants of the house. But it is not just what you can see; there are also smells and sounds. “A common sound of life on a windblown cliff is that of hammering nails into timber after gales. Repairs.” 

To help the reader imagine what the Easternmost House feels like inside, Juliet Blaxland writes about her own vivid childhood memories, because she lived somewhere nearby, in a different house as a kid. “A curious aspect of my childhood was the complete absence of modernity about it, even though it was the 1970s.” 

She remembers how old everything was, and not just the big things like the house, furniture or pictures, but the small, everyday items as well; she recalls that even the soap seemed to smell of ‘oldness’. “We went to bed in old beds, with old sheets, old blankets, old pillows, and old eiderdowns with the feathers falling out.” And she still did, while she wrote the book, because the Easternmost House was furnished “with a distillation of those same ‘old things’, it being filled with all the ‘old things’ that other members of our families didn’t want. The house itself is a refugee from a larger estate and most of the contents are similarly refugees from a past life larger than ours is now.” 

Juliet Blaxland keeps returning to scale in her book. The house appeared as a tiny dark rectangle in an enormous skyscape, she writes, “like a little matchbox placed on the mantelpiece in front of one of the larger of Turner’s most abstracted weather-inspired canvasses, sometimes all dark blues and steely greys, sometimes the wildest fires of unnaturally loud pinks and oranges, dazzling vast and bright and all-encompassing.” 

Juliet is an architect and is used to playing with scale in her work, drawing a building 1:50, “each line one-fiftieth of its real size, drawing a site plan at 1:500, making a model.” But it is more than just making models, it has become a mindset for her, and partly because of the place where she lives. “Living on a crumbling cliff with a dark night sky and a view of a sea horizon which hints at the curvature of the Earth, encourages consideration of scale on a grand scale, a universal scale, and the effects of thinking about a scale in this way can be mesmerising and amusing.” 

Time is a scale, a dimension that opens a more philosophical pocket in the book. It is also the time of tides, a clock of coastal erosion, inevitably ticking if you live in a house by the sea. “Living in a place where the church fell into the sea three hundred years ago makes it quite easy to imagine life in the future: not just a decade hence, but fifty years, a century, or three centuries hence. What will be exactly here, at X? What will the world be like?” 

One of the more peaceful passages in the book is when Juliet describes a warm June night spent outside with her family. “For a night on the dune we need no camping kit, no cutlery, no rucksack, no map, no whistling kettle, no nothing. Just an old wool rug and the billy-kid sausages and the rosemary twigs.” Juliet imagines for a moment what would be left if a freak wave would suddenly wash them away: just buttons of their shirts and soles of their sun-bleached canvas shoes, while wool, cotton and wood is biodegradable and would leave no trace. “We lie out on the dune, in silence under the vast universe, as the waves shush us to a state of half-watchful near-sleep, then just the waves and breathing, and then the sleep itself.”

The house has disappeared now, leaving no trace in the landscape. In early March Juliet Blaxland published a photo on her Twitter account. It was the familiar scenery of land, of sea and sky, but now without the tiny matchbox of the Easternmost House.

***

About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

Holding Homes

By Amy Doffegnies: 

Believing that there is no place like home is akin to my belief in fate; it brings me comfort, but I stop short of certainty. After almost a decade away, I thought that moving back to my native Cumbrian village of mossy dry-stone walls and black winter branches would be simple. Like the Herdwick sheep that graze the highest fells, I have long been hefted to this home. I have strayed far – making homes in Australia, Thailand and Myanmar  – but never letting go of the secret wish to return. When I arrived back I felt the glee of homing and of finally being stationary. But in past months my mind has remained in flight. It flitters far, even as my body, clambering up the deep fells, has willed it to slow, and stay. 

Some days I see only symmetry. The other days it is more difficult to write and I breathe at the surface. I am a wanderer amongst people who have their place. For people here, home is unambiguous. The snow-haired gent who, with a craned back, ambles past our house, bickering with Dad about the Labour Party and the broken northern rail service. They share the autumn fruits of the tree beside the beck, taking apples at their respective heights. Then there’s the damson-eyed boy from school. In a yellow puffer jacket, he reads Japanese manga comics on his train home, as it laces across the sands of Morecambe Bay.  

The question of whether there is still no place like home loiters around my heart. I wonder if I am the only one – was I mistaken in hurrying back for ‘home?’ Across the countertop, a young woman I went to high school with serves coffee to pay for her next flight. I met with a fellow Cumbrian in Myanmar last year, lanky and handsome, a farmer’s son and now part-time model come English teacher in Yangon; his students speak English in a thick northern accent. 

Wherever I have been, I look to poems to steady me. Alongside poems I have taken to carrying other things, fragments of collected homes, physical symbols of vast parts of me that exist, invisible. I hold on to these proofs my other homes, bicycles and blankets. I orient myself by larger, more containing things than before; I follow the phases of the moon, the very same that hung over me in other places.

Opening a freshly acquired copy of the New Cumbrian Anthology of Poems, I come to Robert Macfarlane’s question, which resonates:

“What do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?”

Nowhere else do I know being a daughter, at home, by the whip of the hearth, it’s different. Nowhere else do I know the pair of white egrets, homing in the evening to the field’s trees. Nowhere else, the grandfatherly brown buzzard patrolling or, by the level crossing, the wink of a deer; or standing in the rust strewn stream, the glint of an eel (or was it?) 

And still, there’s something other than here that I cling to, on strolls past square hedges, down green lanes. What of those things I knew of other homes? Am I to know them nowhere else? 

*

Sitting on my single bed, under a charcoal fleece and the winter half-light, I hear Pay Pay’s voice at the end of the phone, the rain hammering on his tin roof and the infrequent thud of a mango dropping. Pay Pay (‘Dad’, in Burmese) recently moved back to a small town in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta region, where he grew up. From the comparatively modern Thai border town of Mae Sot where we met eight years ago, Pay Pay’s home for a quarter century, it’s a shift. Our life circumstances and the places that we have returned to are worlds apart, but we both find ourselves plunged back into places that we once called home.

This gloomy afternoon, Pay Pay asks with a hint of rascal, “Thamee (daughter), what do you think about fate?” his voice emphatic, accented. My adopted (additional, essential), far-away father is an erudite and graceful rebel. Pay Pay is a former member of the Burmese Communist Party, ex-political prisoner and teacher. 

On my days off in Mae Sot, usually on Saturday mornings, I would make my way by bicycle to my Burmese teacher’s front room. His small classroom, like an open shop front, doubled as Pay Pay’s kind-eyed wife Ei Ei’s tailoring business. At the front of their home sat a line of carefully nurtured pot plants: rosella, yellow roses, a small papaya tree, and Pay Pay always standing to greet me, hands on hips. He taught me the basics of Burmese language and though I didn’t yet know the colours of the rainbow, the vocabulary list he gifted me across the desk included ‘democracy,’ ‘demonstration,’ and ‘election,’ – start with the essentials. 

Quickly, I learned that Pay Pay was a poet, a fact that sang in his speech. In that Thailand life, Pay Pay woke at dawn to teach a full load of classes. He drove an old motorbike and stayed up late at night, busy with translation work and absorbing international news. As my friends played a weekly women’s football match across from Pay Pay’s house, I’d stop by. Over tealeaf salad he told me of the letters that he and his wife wrote to each other while he was in prison, and the story of his exile to Thailand, away from the regime that had imprisoned him. In the place where Pay Pay became my family, I grew my first home away from home; home expanded and was added to. Silently, the place was taking hold and nestling deep within, made of slowly forged connections. 

Jolting me back to the moment, “Do you believe in fate, Thamee?” Pay Pay asked again. “I think so,” I say. It’s something I want to believe in, but in truth, I’m not sure.

*

A year on from this phone call, I’m back again in the Cumbria of my school days, time suspended. The pandemic struck and I bolted from the city to the shelter of space. But being back here last year, after so much time spent away, I had learned the difficulty in coming back to a place where I once belonged, having since belonged in other places, and still belonging elsewhere. A jigsaw piece grown huge from holding other homes, my heart sways here perilously between disquiet, loss, and deep love of this place. The paradox that my (former?) home can be the loneliest place is something I didn’t anticipate. 

Some days, the fields have been a tonic. The first days back I lived that phase that always comes first after returning: every corner is alight and for a time I fully draw in the air: half-sea, half-mountain. Nettles, jagged-edged stamps of spring line the verges, and bluebells shine in the woods, an uneven amphitheatre. One day, a red deer, this time in full view, an injection of bandy limbs vital after a day inside. More common, but still my favourite sight, is my Dad’s sheepdog plaining through the shallow stream, part-seal, part-collie, her black tail a thick, white-tipped whip above the water. 

The questions have not left, they swirl around stubbornly still, questions of my place and purpose, and where I fit, and where is home? I sometimes feel far, far from my other homes. I won’t give up my anchors set down in disparate spaces, spread far across continents. 

Sometimes, coals of knowing glow, in unexpected moments. Walking out on the cold sands surrounding Humphrey Head, bare feet, careful to step where it’s firm enough to tread, Dad’s lone figure is metres ahead – yes, this is home.

Sitting on my bed, again, I watch a video clip of Yangon during the pandemic, its streets are naked now, but it’s the same jungle city, masses of trees and silver skyscrapers, scattered through with golden pagodas – yes, this is home.

And appearing in my dreams, the luminous backyard wattle tree I could see from my Canberra bedroom window, a kookaburra too, on lucky days. Out the front bony bicycles slumped against our resident Terrence pine, its needles treaded into the ropey rug inside – yes, this is home.

As my chunky Aussie boots feel through the grasses of Morecambe Bay, I know, in the space that bodily movement allows, that home is everywhere I have been long enough to love. I know these waves of comfort will not stay, skimming in like sheets of water over sticky sands. For home to be amorphous is not straightforward, but it’s the only way I know. 

I used to think that fate might eventually fix me to one place. Now I don’t know a fate that will show me where to go and where is home. On good days though, I think it shines light through my way, from home to home, through bluebell lit woods, and on.

***

Amy Doffegnies is a writer and poet currently living between Cumbria and Oxford. Her work has been published in Mekong Review, New Mandala, Frontier Myanmar and Kendal Mountain Festival Review. She has a PhD focused on human rights and Buddhism in Myanmar. 

Postcard from... Norfolk

By Rachel Alcock-Hodgson:

On my first morning home I wake up to the wide open view. Morning damp, not quite mist, hangs from the heathery drifts of bare trees beyond the fields. The purple and lichen green of the branches picked out in the golden light. The birds are in full throttle, twirling blackbird song layering over the thrum of wood pigeons. I step out, and begin to try and breathe the fresh coolness in, but it can’t quite calm my jangling brain, or ease the pressure on my chest.

The following days are defined by forcing my thoughts to settle and appreciate small pleasures - walks round the fields, bike rides, sitting in the sun looking out of the window and drawing. I have left the city and work to give myself headspace to negotiate a rush of crippling physical anxiety I had been hit with a couple of weeks earlier, seemingly from nowhere. This gives me the double edged luxury of time to appreciate where I am, but with a mind that I can’t keep on the straight and narrow, and routinely dives off into eddies of existential dread where my future is mundane, monotonous and always pointless.

The peace and quiet that penetrates bit by bit hustles with non-human busyness. I watch the negotiations at the bird feeders, blue tits shuttling back and forth between the feeders and the cover of the big half-pruned bay tree, nuthatches hanging upside down, squirrels making off with as much as they can carry.

Bike ride number one is my first lycra-clad ride in too long. By the house, the air is tangy with salt - surely we are too far from the coast for it to be from the sea? But mum can smell it too when I call her out. Neither of us have smelt this here before. As I ride, the rhythm of the exercise makes space for spring to dawn on me. Heading out of the village, the hedges are alive with jittering sparrows. The views I cycle through are full of wide, wet, ploughed, brown-pink fields, ready to sprout. Rich and solid, something in between the red of Devon soil and the black of Lincolnshire. Kestrels hang, fluttering at the edges. When one swoops low, its red-brown back is a softer reflection of the fields. 

Dense clumps of acid yellow primroses hug the ground, clustering at the bottom of trees on the verges. Near Happisburgh and its red and white lighthouse, there is the hazy, vanilla smell of daffs, and as the road winds and sinks down through sheltered banks, strong wafts of wild garlic. I remember that I love the feeling of battling the wind for miles and miles then turning the corner and my bike taking off and the tarmac starting to hum.

There’s a comfort in navigating by place names I know, not needing a map. Knowing the landscape feels like I am part of it, connected to those who have gone before me and walked the footpaths and lokes that crisscross the fields and squeeze in between gardens and houses.

Buoyed up by this, ride number two starts with us - my dad, mum and me - pootling out into the chill dusk. We are heading towards the landmarks of my childhood, Witton Woods, Bacton Gas terminals, Happisburgh lighthouse.

Even before we had quite set off en famille, mum started to give us a guided tour, accompanying the first pedal strokes with an anecdote about the post-man who’s just driven off and his ‘lunchtime liaison’, then telling us who lives in every house and what lies ahead at every cross-road. Uncharacteristically, and surprising myself, I don’t default to grumpiness (‘I know where we are mum!’), instead letting myself listen. I have the obvious but startling realisation that my connection to this place is not just an innate one with nature, or general countryside, it is also because of the web of community my mum has spent 30 years working hard to create. Resting into the familiarity of place and people, feels like leaning back into a hot bath.

On Sunday, mum and I walk. We end up on the hill above the village in the wind blasted churchyard where my maternal grandmother is buried. Her stone is dull stormy grey. Tall, blunt and asymmetric, conspicuous above the others. It commemorates her achievements in blocky capitals: her Merit award from the Royal College of Physicians, her ‘Dr’, and her specialism, rheumatism, in Greek. Very her. And very different to the usual ‘in loving memory’ and family lists, on smoothly curved and polished granite. 

My grandmother never lived here. Her name is Scottish, via New Zealand, worlds away from the generations of Hannants and Dixons that populate the graveyard. Though her family connections aren’t listed, she is here because this is where my mum chose to be. We sit sheltered on the grass, bathed in warm spring sun and feel held by the generations beneath us. My tangled feeling of family connection and connection to the land all the more significant.

We end the day by gardening into the dusk, bonfire cracking and smoking like on the busy Sundays of my childhood. I enjoy the methodical and companionable progress of weeding, listening to the woodpecker jackhammer a hollow tree, and a blackbird’s aria. We stay out until the birds leave and the cooling shadows overtake the warmth of the sun, finally going inside quietly contented with the day. 

***

Rachel Alcock-Hodgson lives in Edinburgh, but has roots in Norfolk. She is a walker, climber, swimmer, knitter, mender of anything, gardener, cyclist and reader. She did an English Literature degree a few years ago, and is getting back into writing after a pause - having realised that it’s an important part of her understanding of the world.

This story was published previously in a different form by Mxogyny.

Definitions: Loke is a Norfolk word for a short, narrow lane. Used in the countryside and towns. 

Wiesenburg: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

Field notes from Brandenburg:

We walk across the fields to the old village just before tea, and we see that the stork has returned. The nest is on top of the brick chimney above a workshop that is now an art and community hall between the supermarket and the Schloss. But the stork is in the fields, taking languid strides across the rutted ground, while a hooded crow watches on from a safe distance.

Another returnee to the village: the artwork that stands in the middle of the pond, part of a 42-km walking route that links Wiesenburg with Bad Belzig. The artwork represents all the lost and abandoned villages of High Fläming. Those destroyed in the Thirty Years War or left as ghost villages as industry shifted, swallowed by the forest. Each winter the artwork is taken away to protect it in case the pond waters freeze, and each spring it is brought back. The lost villages found once more. 

In the Schloss gardens, the anglers sit along the banks of the ponds, easily maintaining social distance with their umbrellas and low stools, trailers pulled by bicycles and plastic bottles of water and beer. 

At dusk I watch the bats dance between the houses above the gentle orange glow of the street light. I stand on our driveway and look up and down the street. A number of houses are empty. Shuttered and waiting for someone new. A generation change, our neighbour said. 

The new house that we pass on our walks is beginning to take shape. Walls and and a roof. Windows and doors to come. The old tumbledown shack that was the only structure on the once-tangled and overgrown property now has a shiny new big brother. 

The path through the forest follows the old dry valleys formed by the last Ice Age and leads us to the next village. It is there we spot the first swallows of spring, pinging this way and that as we walk down past the houses with their neat gardens to the sandy track out the other side. We’ve never been this far before, and the path leads up to a lookout point that offers as close to a view as you’ll get in Brandenburg without climbing a castle tower or a wooden walkway high above the trees. 

Our neighbouring house has been gutted, the remnants of the old lives lived between those walls piled up in the garden. The things that were left behind when they sold it. Old travel cases and trunks. Hunting trophies. Garden gnomes. The new neighbours are working on it around their jobs, on evenings and weekends, working hard and making good progress. The kids play on piles of sand as the adults pause for a beer and we say cheers across the top of an overgrown hedge. 

In the window of the village library, closed since March, there is a line-up of books: Albert Camus’ The Plague. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. David Wallace Wells’ The UnInhabitable Earth. The librarian has a sense of humour.

In the garden the cherry blossom comes and then the cherry blossom is gone. 

On a walk along the art trail we come to an open door on the edge of a field. In the middle of the 19th century the village of Groß Glien had 42 residents. Now all that remains of the village are the ruins of the church foundations a few steps from the work of art, enclosed in a tangle of brambles and young trees.

At the top of the Hagelberg, a five kilometre run from our house, I’m at the highest point in Brandenburg and the smallest Mittelgebirge in Germany. Or perhaps it is the second highest. It seems that there is a debate, involving places on the borders with other states and rumours of earth movers in the middle of the night in order to take the crown. No matter. It’s so peaceful on the hill it is hard to imagine this is the site of a bloody battle that, in 1813, took 3,000 lives. 

Outside the supermarket the asparagus stand is erected. Beelitz is not far away. They sell white and green asparagus, offcuts for soup and punnets of strawberries. A plastic screen stands between us and the friendly woman who weighs our purchases and takes our money through a small gap at the bottom of the barrier. 

On a run out from the village I see what I think might be wolf droppings, but there’s no internet connection on my phone to check so I take a photograph for later. The results of the research are inconclusive. 

We hear the sirens first. Then see the first engines passing by quickly on our road. Over the fence we hear our neighbour say that he should go down to the station and see what’s what. There’s barely been any rain for months, and the forests are dry as a bone. Twenty minutes later the engines return, slower now, as does our neighbour, ringing his bicycle bell as he turns into the drive.

The latest coronavirus information is posted outside the town hall. The number of new infections, of those who have died, useful telephone numbers and relaxations to contact restrictions. Other notices include planning permission for an extension to the supermarket, and on which days the military will be conducting live fire exercises in the restricted zone. 

In the remnants of the old GDR factory on the edge of the village, the police find two thousand cannabis plants in an old warehouse. Three men are arrested. 

Most mornings a red kite hovers over our garden and most mornings I wonder if it is possible that there is a more beautiful bird. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Letting Frogs Pop into Existence

By Blaise Kielar:

Walking the interlaced paths of Duke Gardens, carefully maintaining proper social distance, I catch myself possessive of my airspace, far beyond six feet. In finding my little corner of solitude and quiet, I fear a wind-borne germ as if it tags along with the yellow pollen already raining down from the pines. Like the virus, a pollen grain is invisible, that is, until thousands pool on the ground. My sneeze is doubly unwelcome.

I’m grateful for this urban oasis, started in 1938 by Sarah P. Duke’s daughter as a tribute to her nature-loving mother. The major buildings of Duke University’s West Campus were completed by 1935, planned around Duke Chapel with its 210-foot-tall bell tower, perched on the highest spot of the campus. The garden was an inspired use of a ravine within easy walk of Duke Hospital, the Chapel, the library, and the dorms.

I meander down a gentle slope, calmed by artful groupings of small trees, groundcover and boulders, unperturbed by sporadic beeping of construction equipment nearby. The beeps remind me of how humans alter our environment, and I realize the rocks are of a variety of types with different weathering patterns yet are arranged to appear like natural groupings. The engineers and landscape designers had plenty of budget to lay out this exquisite garden to deliver each visitor a taste of the beauty of Mother Nature, on paved walkways in formal gardens or dirt paths in themed habitats.  

A gray stone beckons me to sit, more appealing than the elegant bench just uphill. I want to spend some time with a Japanese Maple that has caught my eye. I marvel at its gracefully rounded shape, like the top of a well-shorn man’s head. Low to the ground, all its branches are visible - the buds have not yet burst forth into leaves. The thick short trunk is far to the right. Three main branches twist chaotically to underpin the smooth crown. As I admire this dramatic asymmetry, I realize this tree has been trained by generations of gardeners - bonsai on the scale of a small tree. I stand to look for clues. There are few obvious pruning scars. All these gnarled branches crisscrossing each other repeatedly have been coaxed by man, perhaps with string or wire, maybe turnbuckles; a vision taking decades of management to fulfill. My eyes get lost in following just one of the branches – it seems like it touches all the others on its journey from trunk to its delicate buds.

I return to my boulder and admire the whole tree, the urge of nature tempered by the skill of man. Knowing that I am admiring art and science as well as nature does not separate me from its beauty. What wonders arise when I just slow down and truly see! Reminds me of decades ago when I’d take friends into a side lobby of the Morehead Planetarium building at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.  A ring of marble columns encircled a rotunda and set off elegant wood paneling with portraits hung between pairs of columns. Among the stiff portraits hung a genuine Rembrandt. Anybody could wander in, even late at night, and behold that secret!

I stand, expansive at discovering my secret tree, offer thanks to the Japanese Maple, and wander on. Small groups walk together – my shoulders tighten. Should I be mindful of not walking in the wake of their breathing?

“I’m scared.” A small girl, eyes scrunched up to hold back upcoming tears, runs away from her mother. The bee she saw is already gone.

“If you don’t bother him, he won’t bother you,” the mom replies in a soothing tone. The child is unconvinced.

I watch them walk quickly away. A red-lacquered bridge beckons me to cross, its dramatic arch evoking Kyoto. I stop in a part of the garden unknown to me and empty of people. Shoulders loosen. An inscribed pole tells in English and Japanese that this tumbling waterfall garden was dedicated just five years ago. It looks ageless. Water flows from a hidden pump over jumbles of rock in two tumbling streams, uniting in a tiny pond near the footpath. I admire the artful placement of the boulders, the regular horizontals energized by leaning verticals and strong diagonals - a dynamic composition, just like an Old Master landscape. I sit on a stone where it is permitted and notice the split bamboo arches that prevent climbing on the other side of the water.  A Japanese Maple is a central feature, left to its organic shape reaching for the sky. A narrow streamlet leaves the little pond and heads downhill, its gentle burbling washing away my Covid worry.

 Peace returns - until I recall a passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek where she details all the life in a square foot of ground – over a thousand critters including mites, springtails, millipedes, beetles. Was it millions of creatures if you include microbes? The lack of signs of animal life makes my little Eden seem like an outdoor museum behind invisible glass. I long for ant mounds or a bee buzzing, even a mosquito! I focus my intention and let thoughts dissolve. Ten blissful minutes pass. With a sudden pop my eyes resolve a pattern on the ground into a frog! It did not exist two seconds ago. Nothing has moved, other than my brainwaves. The leg and torso blend with the jumble around it. How did I miss its brown skin on the light mulch, after sitting there for half an hour? I stare into its bulging eyes until my concentration fades. Pop – there’s another frog – and a third! One in the cleft of a rock, one among some low scrabbly growth, much better camouflaged. Now clear in my visual field, they are an exciting part of my world. I congratulate myself on my stillness and observation skills. Pop – I see another further downstream, and a minute later, the largest one appears just beyond arm’s reach! How did I not scare him off when I sat down? How did I not see him, big and brown, perched on a slanted light gray rock, just below my eye level? For close to an hour I sat in a faux forest scene, playing the role of a faux human, missing the reality of frogs, so at home in their environment that they could hide in plain sight.

 Me and the big frog maintain eye contact a long time. He is as still as his rock. I get self-conscious every time I shift my arm or tilt my head. I finally notice movement – his throat sac slowly pulses as he breathes. With no ribs or diaphragm, the subtle expansion and contraction of the sac pulls air into his lungs and pushes it back out. Discovering this sign of our equal dependence on air, my connection with him seems stronger. When I break my gaze, I see that one of the other frogs is gone. I scan to check on the other four. While looking right, I hear a plop from the left! Only three remain. I never see movement, only presence or absence. Now you see it, now you don’t. I stare into the large frog’s eyes one last time as if to find the secret of this magic. I resolve to come back soon to revisit his world. My heart warms to discover a safe way to feel connected in this time of social distancing. Alas, Duke closes the Garden the next day over Covid precautions. Now just a feature of my inner landscape, frogs pop into existence only when my worries fade.

***

Known in North Carolina as the leader of the Bulltown Strutters, Durham’s community New Orleans style brass band, violin and clarinet player Blaise Kielar believes that even the most expressive music sometimes cannot say what is lurking to be said. Well-chosen words create a soulful rhythm of their own. He’s been writing poetry and creative non-fiction since 1991.    

Studying the Universe from Blackford Hill

Photo: Macumba, Wikimedia Commons Public Domain – Link

By Pippa Goldschmidt: 

Blackford Hill is one of the seven hills of Edinburgh, situated a couple of miles due south of the city centre. The hill seems to mark a boundary of the city, on its north side are the city’s suburbs, arrays of tenement buildings as evenly spaced as any mathematical grid. To the south, the artifice of a golf course soon gives way to fields and moorland. If you travel up the main road to the top of the hill you must first pass under an ornate sandstone arch with a florid inscription and medallion so typical of Edinburgh Victorian architecture. An arch that could be a portal in a Scottish science fiction novel, acting as a gateway to an earlier time or place. Perhaps it also does so in real life, because the hill is host to one of the largest astronomical observatories in the UK, internationally renowned for research on objects in the early Universe.

So far in my life, I must have walked up and down this hill around a thousand times. Very few of these individual journeys have created their own distinct memories, other than the first one. I had been invited to an interview for a PhD place at the Observatory, and even though I had already looked at the route in an A to Z, I was not prepared for the experience of walking up a hill that becomes steeper as you approach its summit. By the time I finally reached the entrance, I was sweating profusely in my smart interview suit and already regretting my journey, my application for the PhD and the whole endeavour. 

However, I was successful and spent the next four years studying at the Observatory. My project was concerned with quasars, incredibly luminous centres of galaxies. Because they emit so much light we can see them from billions of lightyears away, in fact they are the most distant objects known in the Universe. At the time I was studying them, they were comparatively rare; thousands of galaxies had been detected but only a few hundred quasars were known. My job was to find more of them, determine their distances, and try and understand how they were connected to their surroundings – both their underlying ‘host’ galaxy and the wider environment. 

My experience of quasars was formed almost entirely through measuring the numbers attached to them. First, I knew them by their coordinates on the sky. Then they became redshifts, luminosities at different wavelengths and distances. I found that this tendency in the Observatory to experience physical objects through quantitative information started to spill over into the surroundings; as my studies progressed I couldn’t help transforming the hill into data such as the numbers of the houses, and the length of time it took me to reach the summit. (Seven minutes on a good day.) Studying this part of Edinburgh on an old Ordnance Survey map told me that the hill was 1/3 of a mile long. Contour lines centre on the summit like a fingerprint, the bottom of the hill corresponding to 200 feet altitude above sea level, while the Observatory is at 475 feet. 

With time, the hill’s intangible aspects started to become both smaller and more precious: the coconut-almond smell of the flowering gorse bushes in summer, the jagged-tooth view of the castle and the Royal Mile to the north, and the sparkle of the sea to the north-east. The few days each spring when all the frogs in that part of Scotland travelled to the hill to mate and I couldn’t walk more than a few metres in any direction without encountering a gravity-defying tower of them. The oddity that I couldn’t actually see my destination as I walked up the hill, the road rises to meet an open area of scrub land and the Observatory is situated off to one side. The abrupt transition between that scrub land of gorse bushes and thin birch trees, and the estate of the Observatory which is boundaried by a handsome stone wall. The  dichotomy between standing outside on a clear winter evening and gazing up at the anonymous stars, and studying quasars which are all invisible to the naked eye. 

The distinction between the hill and its representation on the map seems straightforward; the hill itself is real rocks, soil, trees and buildings whereas the map is a symbol of the hill on paper or screen. This relationship between the two must be one-sided, the map can’t exist without the reality and many things are present on the hill that are not (yet) mapped. Yet I realised from my work at the Observatory that maps and their corresponding realities are not so easily divided into two separate categories. All we can know of the Universe beyond the solar system is derived from maps. We have constructed maps of the stars in Milky Way, of surrounding galaxies in the Local Group, and of more distant galaxies. Furthermore, these maps don’t have to be of specific objects, like charting the seas on Earth we can plot diffuse gas. We can even map an entity we have not yet directly detected, such as dark matter. We can never hope to know or experience anything other than the maps, so they must always stand in for the reality. In the absence of any other knowledge, perhaps eventually they become that reality. 

*

The Observatory is not the only structure on the hill, about a hundred metres from it is a radio transmission tower used by the police. In the same way that the two poles of a bar magnet oppose each other, these two structures are apparent opposites; the tower is responsible for sending out invisible waves while the Observatory’s purpose is to receive waves from the sky above. Although it does this more indirectly than it used to, its two copper-topped domes (aligned along an East-West axis) each used to house a large telescope but these have long since been mothballed; two mechanical eyes blinded by obsolescence. Many astronomers who work there either travel to telescopes in other locations with better weather and less light pollution, such as Chile or Hawaii, or – increasingly – observe remotely. Telescopes in these places are sent instructions, carry out the observations in an automated fashion and transmit the data back to the Observatory.

I was always aware of a special irony in analysing images taken of the night sky during a Scottish winter day so full of cloud and mist that the Universe seemed like nothing more than a fantastical story written in numbers and graphs.

*

The map of the hill also has an iron age fort marked on it, although I’ve never managed to find it. On the other side of the hill is an eighteenth century house called the Hermitage which stands in a grass clearing, and now functions as the headquarters of a nature reserve. The Observatory, the radio transmission tower, the Hermitage and the fort all can be seen as emblems of specific eras, reminding us that each instance of time must carry along with it earlier times. 

Similarly, we tend to think of places as static and fixed, but one of the first things I learned was that the map of the Universe itself is expanding outwards with almost every galaxy moving away from each other, continuously adjusting their relationships with each other.

The walk at the beginning and end of each working day separated me not just physically, but also psychologically, from the rest of my life in Edinburgh. Its role as a ritual and a boundary was reinforced by the substantial wall surrounding the Observatory. All observatories are inherently not quite of their surroundings, constructed from metal and stone and grounded in the earth, their purpose is to study distant light. Walking up the hill towards the sky was a symbol of my efforts to understand what was far above me. 

***

Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Frankfurt and Edinburgh. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (both published by Freight Books). Her work has been broadcast and published in a variety of places, most recently in Litro, Mslexia, the Times Literary Supplement and on Radio 4. Website: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk