Ruddy Terracotta

I love this time of year, getting home in the dark after a drive through gathering gloom. Winter’s days on the common always seemed to be dark and grey with the stark trees on the horizon. Despite all this lack of active life in the landscape, there always seemed to be some sort of presence that only came out of the shrubbery when there were few people about, maybe just us kids. You know well that I don’t believe in all things supernatural but this winter spirit seemed real at the time. The feeling would persist well beyond Christmas and seemed to overcome the post-festive feeling of anti-climax. We were a disparate bunch out there in the cold, with an agenda for the day which had no plan and no defined outcome. We would skate on the ponds, or plumb them to see how deep they were. We were idiots of high order and yet we all survived. On a few years, the shallow ponds on the common froze over, indeed froze solid as they were only a foot deep, and we would play various made-up games on them. They would even take the weight of bicycles which resulted in some dangerous falls. As I said, we were idiots.

I dream of being back there again, with no worries. Or maybe slightly older, nervously trying to adjust my walk to the head girl next to me while we tramped to the bar during the interval at Stratford (See above). Is it dangerous to wish for reliving happier times? I see the black trees and the steely sky, the snow threatening us until we dive home for hot drinks and the crackling fire. I see these places today, the winter spirits filling them, flowing like heavy smoke from the chimneys, into the cracks under the doors, drawn up in the fire into all the secret corners of this house. Where is the maths to explain this? And then the growl of night cracks the wood, and jams us indoors for days, the cold taking the windows as ice as weather smothers everything, breaks us in with trials of cold and snow.

So much to record and so little ability here. How can I get this feeling across? There is a field, empty of people save for us, brave explorers inappropriately clothed, yomping like the best Marines, to save the world from whatever we have deemed to be the biggest threat. We had the world ended and us the only survivors. The hills loomed over us, making it darker after noon, shadowing the valley like a looming giant, following a boat, a sea-monster with threat and venom. For it brought cold beyond most people’s experience, something that would seem to encircle your spine and crush and freeze it at the same time, a double hit of pain in the night. And there I am listening to late-night radio, switching between John peel and radio Luxembourg as the various signals faded in and out, with radio Moscow coming in so clear it could have been transmitted from down the road. And there were never enough blankets to keep out the cold. We might sleep, but waking up would bring the real world back in like a shot, a burst of shivering that no high metabolism could beat. And what tense and what tense. We had friends who lived in a brick-faced Georgian farmhouse, and visits to them would see us all in the one warm room, sat on the high-backed settle with the giant fire fighting the light bulbs as the biggest source of light. There would be toys on the floor and books on the table, and steam from the cooking and shrieks and shouts and so much more. The window showed the grey sky as blue and bluer and darker until the house was a ship in black space, sailing towards mealtimes and bedtimes. There might be fireworks. We were just the last of many children, unhindered by much discipline, making that house laugh and cry.

Where has it all gone now? The world so right and safe has none of this though this may be me. Too much comes in from obligations and constraints to let you live your life with no plan. Anything not foreseen makes me unhappy, or worse. The odd CD here and there is the nearest I get to feeling unburdened by the modern world. Would I want to wake up back there, with the knowledge of all that is to come afterwards, or would it repeat forever, like Groundhog Day? There is me, sat in the window reading, sometimes looking at the sky waiting for snow maybe, or asleep against the cold. And the animist dreams sail over the ploughed fields, the frozen streams, looking for anything moving, for anything to breathe on. All is quiet, and yet all is moving, still alive and kept that way by the spiralling ghosts of all the previous winters.