Mistley

A weekend away...

I left the half-finished novel at home. Lyra and Will in the land of the dead, and I can’t remember whether they both make it out of there – it is a quarter of a century since I last walked that path with them – and I know some children’s books are designed to make them cry, to teach them that not everyone survives. They’ll wait for me there.

I brought only poetry with me for this weekend.

~

On a train. The wide Anglian skies have gone AWOL. We’re rattling through rain and into mist that
might be on the opposite bank of the Styx. Water lurks on pavements and roads. Fields are full of patient lakes, waiting either for the water below to seep away and let them follow, or for the sun to return and call them back into the sky. The pavements, the roads, the muddied fields, the new-born ponds, the muddied lakes where crops once grew or cattle grazed, a purgatory of raindrops. Uncertain.

Against the uncoloured water-washed backdrop, the trees, sentinel still in winter armour, hold the lines, where hedges used to be, long-since grubbed up.

An egret perches on a fence post. Luminescent branches overhang the waters. Willows, lichened alders and birches. The stream is a weak tea with too much milk, a pale imitation of the ice-white bird and offers no reflection. Everything speaks of too much rain and the absent sky.

~

At Ipswich I pull on waterproof over trousers, anticipating a long walk in a downpour.

Arriving at Mistley: the walk is short…and the rain has passed over for a while.

I forget what "clockwise" means and struggle to open the simplest of locks. It takes an embarrassing phone-call to get me inside.

~
I always thought I would end up living in a house like this. An old, terraced cottage, once a literal two-up-two-down, extended out the back to make a new kitchen and a bathroom. A front door that opens from the street into the living room. Steep stairs, that might once have been behind a door, with a handrail that is necessary, especially coming down, especially in the dark, because the necessary might no longer be across the yard, but it’s still downstairs, out back, and I’m of an age to need to visit in the middle of the night.

I can see the bones of the place as it was built. Where the walls have been removed, where the yard has disappeared. Where there was once a back alley, where washing hung and children played. And all is silent now.

What did they do, those people who lived here once upon a time? Not merchants, for sure. Not wool traders. Steady folk, though, workmanlike. Maybe sailors and her left at home to find for the young ones…or quay workers, maltings men…they wouldn't have owned, but the rent would have been within their means...so long as they both worked and there weren't too many children. Two-up, two-down - and back then one of the down would have been the kitchen, and the nettie would have been across the yard out back. And a luxury at that.

There’s nothing left of it. The soul has been stripped away. It's modern now. All white walls, and simple artwork. TV & Wi-fi. Where once a fire would have blazed, and more recently an imitation thing to evoke the past, there's now a woodstack - artful in the chimney space - and an apology about Health & Safety.

I can't complain. My own open hearth holds a copper kettle, because I've not gotten around to sweeping the chimney and wouldn't trust myself to light a fire if I did.

When I thought I would live somewhere like this, I imagined inhabiting its history. I imagined the marks of its life staring at me from the walls and doors and ceilings and floors.

To be fair, I’m glad my life took a different turn, and the history I do inhabit is finding its own way out into the wild, but that's another story being told in another place.

For this weekend, I simply want the bones of this other building to warm up, and return some of the heat back to me. I’m cold. I sleep cold. I wake up cold. The central heating is switched on and I keep upping the thermostat - but there is a remote control elsewhere and I may be losing.

The next day the house is more generous – it warms up more quickly, gives back more readily.

The weather is less kind.

~

The rain arrives. And stays.

I open a tub of pre-packed blackberries, flown in from Mexico. I know! I know! They’re not even as sweet as the ones I grow out my own back, but it’s February and I’m craving Summer.

I go out anyway. Along a rutted road, over sodden fields and into the woods. Forests of mouse tail moss (I think) are colonising trunks, and branches, giving trees ra-ra skirts and a ghostly sheen to their branches.

I’m hunting a local celebrity. Old Knobbley. Eight hundred years of oak.

Despite what most sources claim, its ancient gnarled and damaged trunk is not 9.5 metres ‘wide’. The measurement refers to girth – that is circumference. If I remember my maths correctly, it’s width (if it were roughly circular) would be about 3 metres. Impressive enough to be fair. Knobbley’s character though is not one of a giant. He’s a squat old thing, who seems to have lost most of his main central trunk ages ago, with only the two outer limbs, themselves dividing, showing any strength of years. For the rest he provides a platform for spindly new growth, like some aged uncle carrying youngsters on his back. There’s charring to the central body – evidence of fire – whether from lightning strike from above or importunate lighting of a camp fire within its shelter below, I
cannot say.

All the same it is a tree to inspire stories, having the look of an Ent that might at any moment get up and continue upon some arrested rampage. It’s not a kindly looking being, but then, it has suffered during its long life.

There are tales of the Manningtree witches having taken shelter here, but they are likely of modern concoction. It is too close to town and not sheltered enough to have offered serious sanctuary. But trees and witches – trees and eldritch shadows of moss-covered walking spirits – they’re worth keeping alive, if only to keep us coming back to the trees. When I share the picture with a friend, his simple response is “Still strong”, which took me back to my own poem about another oak in another wood – an extract of which reads:

Teach me how to put down roots,
to hold my centre through the storms,
not to bend, but rather to not mind
being broken.

~
A few years back, when we were new, I told him that my favourite trees are willow and birch. No, he replied, You are much more oak. I now choose to take that as a compliment. Battle scarred, but still strong. Yes...I am learning to be much more oak.

~
One day I walked along the river, as far as the railway, under & beyond it, as far as the pillbox near the road. The path was squelchy. The tide was low and the intermittent sun shone on the mud flats highlighting the trails of long-gone birds.

Three swans circled round: low over the tidal mud and then high and gleaming against the sky. Is there a more joyous sight than bright white birds in flight against a sullen sky? I don’t know if they were, but they might have been among the birds I passed a little later, who were being fed by a man with dark-rimmed glasses, a plastic bag and a sad look about him.

There was jetsam on the riverine marshland. By the sluice gate there was a number of discarded bread rolls, thrown in whole for whatever kind of monstrous being someone thought might come and claim them. Someone else – or, for all I know, the same someone – has discarded half a dozen potatoes, looking like giant mushrooms among the marsh-moss. A mountain bike, child-sized, pink, lies abandoned. I imagine a stroppy ten-year-old throwing it down and refusing to pick it up again, and a mother at the end of her tether ranting back Ok! Just leave it then, and walk! But don’t think you’re getting another one! I remember the racing bike that I never said I wanted; my mother’s anger that I never rode it. Perhaps it was her own poor decision to buy it that made her so cross. She sold it eventually, and I didn’t mind. I was angry, later, when she gave away my desk without asking. I wanted to keep that. I would have it now, had I been given the choice.

~

There’s an old boat rotting in the creek. There is always an old boat, rotting, this is part of the definition of ‘creek’. This is a small one. A two-seater that probably had an outboard motor. A tender, I reckon, for getting to and from a yacht. Did it steal away one night and hide out in the marshy edgelands? Or did a storm take it too far for its owners to continue looking? Or did they sell the yacht and simply leave the old runabout where it last brought them ashore?

To my eye it is a hiding shade of grey-green, dull and weathered. My camera sees it differently, picking out the mossy blanketing as if it were the beginnings of some new cocooning, a bright new weaving. Or a slapdash repainting, still wet. A brighter lime altogether.

Colours are unreliable. The swans are a less pure white when seen close-up. More mottled. They say our memories are not retrieved, but re-created. They say that when we read, we use an inbuilt auto-text to predict the following words, correcting errors in the original as we go. I wonder if we do the same with colour, seeing what we expect to see rather than what is really there. It makes me wonder if anything is really real.

~

I watch a murmuration fall out of the clouds and retreat back into them.

I watch flocks land on the flats to feed.

I watch three geese footstep their names in the sand.

I pootle around the bed of the old outdoor swimming pool and lament its loss. Only relics of walls and the twisted fallen steps remain. And the shelter provided ‘for the convenience of the Mother’s Union who visited by bus’. It’s unclear whether they were visiting the pool or the towered church (demolished) or just wanted to sit and watch the tides of the Stour.

~

I try to braid poems out of reality and imagination.

I wonder when it was I let go of needing to get up every holiday morning and take the map and picnic and make the most of exploring somewhere new; when it was I changed to simply wanting to wander slowly, and not for long, to simply see what I could make of whatever it was I’d found.

I’m still surprised at how much I’ve changed.

~ / ~