Down The Lane

Over Christmas, I spent a few days at my mother's house, the house I grew up in, the house in which I spent the entirety of my generally happy childhood.


After the usual over-eating of Christmas lunch, I decided to take a walk. My mother lives on the edge of a smallish, rather anonymous village, and running down the side of her small house and garden is a narrow lane which winds between a mile or two of fields to the next village. This was the route I decided to take so, wrapped up against the unusually icy weather of this winter, I set off.


The road has a name, but to us it has always been known simply as "the lane." As I walked down between the high hedgerows, the road itself sunken into the landscape by several hundred years of footsteps, horses hooves, cart-wheels and car tyres, my mind drifted away from the present moment, to countless occasions during my childhood when I had walked this same path.


To us, "going down the lane" was always an adventure. There was an air of the mysterious about it. As it meanders its way left and right, climbing hills then running down to the base on the other side to cross over streams, all the time half-hidden between the banks and hedges flanking it, it keeps itself half-hidden, so to young, forming minds, it seemed to hold something new and different with every new stretch which became visible as we walked.


I remembered, too, how much further it seemed. To an adult, a walk to the next village would take no more than forty minutes. To a six-year-old, however, it was a trek that had no ending, a journey into the wilds of the unknown country. There were strange and exotic things to be found as one followed it, and once sight of our house had been lost behind the hedge and the hill we had just crested, we were truly in a foreign land.


After barely ten minutes, I came to "the brook." I remembered how, in early childhood, common features such as brooks, hills, fields and lanes were thought of not simply as one specific instance out of a thousand, but as a singular, unique item, to be denoted by use of the definite article. Our world consisted almost entirely of what could be seen from our window and, since within that proscribed view there was only one such run of water visible, this became "the brook," in exactly the same way that the one road was "the lane," and the one un-metalled track that ran off it was "the dirt-track." The field at the bottom of the garden was "the field," and the playing field at the end of the road was "the rec." No need to be more specific; our world consisted of just one of each feature. Such simple times.


The lane crosses over the brook without fuss; no quaint hump-backed bridge, no dramatic ford, just a utilitarian flat bridge running over a concrete tunnel beneath. I stopped here for a moment, recalling the sense of slightly guilty excitement of the times when, as a seven- or eight-year old boy, I would play under the bridge with my friend. We would have followed the brook from close to his house some half a mile away--a lengthy journey in our world--to arrive at this point. The sense of danger was palpable as we entered the dark tunnel, and if a car were to pass over the bridge as we were underneath it, this excitement would be heightened to almost unbearable levels. Surely the whole thing would choose precisely the moment when two small boys had chosen to clamber through it to crash down, entombing us beneath concrete, masonry and twisted metal?


Beyond the bridge, the road climbs again, towards the destination for many of our childhood walks: "Wooden Hut." Not within my memory has there been an actual wooden hut anywhere in the vicinity, but one supposes that once there was, and this gave rise to its name.


It is very hard to describe this place in a way that would convey the sense of mystery, excitement and joy with which we reached it. In essence, it consists of a stand of trees, bisected by the road. The actions of rain over decades have eroded out the roots of the trees on each side of the road, so that they now form a knotted wooden jumble on the red-earth banks. Climbing up these, one can reach the top of the bank and stand amongst the trees. As I reached this place so indelibly burned into my early memories, so powerful were my recollections I could almost hear those delighted yelps as we ran down one bank, across the road and up the other side, using the exposed roots as make-shift ladders.


On one side of the road here, a small stream had cut a deep channel in the red earth, and this had subsequently become overgrown with tangled hawthorns. The combined effect was of a dark, secret place that promised great adventure and excitement to anyone brave enough to dare its shadows. We never did. Some things are just too scary for six-year-olds to attempt. Looking at it now, thirty years on, I could see that all it led to was a rusty barbed-wire fence delimiting one field from its neighbour. The dried water-course had simply been used as a convenient marker, and an untidy hawthorn hedge planted alongside it.


And in that moment, I felt a profound sadness for times lost. For those times when the prospect of walking a mile from home was one of such wild excitement that it was barely containable. The times when even such mundane, ordinary places as this slowly decaying group of sycamores could hold such mystery, such novelty and adventure. We had almost nothing when we were young, my parents struggled financially more than I will ever truly appreciate. And yet not once did we consider ourselves poor or deprived. Wearing scruffy jeans, wellington boots and knitted sweaters, as we played and explored our tiny part of the world, we counted ourselves rich beyond imagining.


And we were.