A Good Parcel of English Soil Read online

  I’m not sure quite what my concept of ‘nature’ was at this age. I’d already, rather precociously, begun reading (and shamelessly plagiarizing in my school English essays) the nineteenth-century rural writer Richard Jefferies. I was especially smitten by his collection Wild Life in a Southern County (1879), with its rhapsodic descriptions of chalk hills and ancient trackways. I had no idea then that in the late 1870s he was already living in the Surrey suburbs and penning essays with titles like ‘A London Trout’ and ‘Trees about Town’. In 1880 he declared his belief in ‘the light of the future’, and wanted a world, in the words of his biographer Edward Thomas thirty years later, in which ‘the light railway [would] call at the farmyard gate’ – a prophetic phrase which could have become a slogan for nascent Metroland.

  But my sense of nature in The Field was nothing like the self-conscious reflections of Jefferies. ‘Nature’ was something we all took for granted, like an extra layer of skin. We treated the great cedars of Lebanon, layered with tiers of cobwebbed wooden debris, as condominiums, and spent whole afternoons aloft in their spacious apartments. I did my first foraging, after the ‘bread-and-cheese’ of young hawthorn leaves, but was quite unaware that it was anything exceptional. We nicked the odd bird’s egg, but regarded the owls that nested in the ruins of the Hall’s old barns as familiars. Their dusk beatings around the edge of The Field – honey-coloured wings against the lime-green poplar leaves – marked out the edges of our own tribal territory. We were living in the no-man’s-land between two warring systems – Metroland and the old countryside – and I suppose it is no surprise that we turned into part refugees, part pubescent guerrillas.

  Our parents scarcely behaved more sedately, and used The Field as if it were a fairground site. There were community bonfires and picnics, and mass toboggan runs on steeper slopes. On Guy Fawkes Night my dad brought along giant boxes of fireworks for the entire road’s delectation. His techno-sassiness also ensured that my own games in The Field were of an advanced kind. He was fond of cruising the army surplus stores in the City and used to come home with bags of hardware, a kind of military offal, along with the real tripe he’d picked up in Smithfield meat market. So it was that I became the proud owner, at a dangerously young age, of an eye surgeon’s field operating kit (brilliant for cutting balsa wood accurately), a portable generator and some USAF meteorological box-kites. They flew triumphantly over the tawny grassland, as did the rubber-powered model aircraft I’d laboriously built from balsa frames and lacquered tissue skins. But it was the Jetex-fuelled planes that were the real ‘light of the future’. The Jetex engine (now classed as an explosive and illegal to sell) was a small tube into which you plugged a fast-burning solid-fuel cartridge. When it was lit, using a long fuse, it produced such a thrust that the planes sped off at astonishing speed, often quite low, and came perilously close to the neighbourhood greenhouses.

  With hindsight it looks as if, young and old, we were all acting out an unconscious parody of Metroland and the pomposity of its advertising campaign. But at the time, I felt a simple thrill in the repeated clashes between the supposed respectability of the place I lived and played in, and the feral forces of young imaginations and wild regeneration. We once set the grassland on fire for a dare, and scattered into the bushes in a kind of crazed excitement. We tried to ride the Highland cattle a local smallholder put out to graze there. We went back reluctantly to our homes at teatime with bites and scars and stories we would never dare tell our parents. We were all Metro-kids, with no rural backgrounds, and I’ve no idea of the origins of our intuitive understanding of The Field, of which leaves made the best camp roofing and which woods the best fires. But those days imprinted me with a sense that the border between the domestic world and the wild was porous and mobile; that wherever there was development there would be creative disintegration; and that alongside all straight, organizing staves like railway lines, some life would always move in an improvised, syncopated rhythm, contrametro.

  I began drifting towards the Met’s heartland as soon as I could ride a bike, aged about eleven, I guess. Metroland was created on the assumption of an instinctive itch to migrate west, following the movement of the sun, to where, as Thoreau believed, the land was ‘more unexhausted and richer’. But we lived north of the line, and my natural compass seemed from the beginning to have been set southwards. South was where the hills began, where the winter bournes rose like rippling silver eels, where even the wayside cow parsley seemed frothier.

  The Met Line and I were both arrowing in, from different directions, on the Chiltern heartlands, a region too abstract to make any topographical sense to me at that age, but which held me in a powerful spell. There was a point on a hilltop where I would always pause on my cycle ride to school cricket, and gaze in something close to rapture at the scene that unfolded southwards, the rising hills, the ancient beech groves, the ashwood where the first chiffchaff always sang … ‘It was an unsettling feeling,’ I wrote later, ‘numinous, indefinable, a sense of something just beyond reach. At times it turned into an actual physical sensation that made the back of my legs tighten, as if I were peering down from a great height.’ All the runes pointed towards Chesham, where, quite unbeknown to me at the time, the Metropolitan Line came to a ceremonious full stop against a set of buffers. I was more impressed by the way the locals pronounced the town’s name (Chez-ham, after the River Chess, which flowed through it, not Chesh-am) than by the fact that it was a major local freight station, famous for ferrying the town’s three B’s – boots, beer and brushes – to the London markets.

  By the time I had a car I was using the countryside just north of the line between the stations at Chesham and Chalfont & Latimer as an alfresco pied à terre. Whenever things in Berkoland seemed too stale or reserved (The Field, with a terrible irony, was swallowed up by a Metroland-style estate in the 1960s), I’d take off to this luxuriant patch alongside the Chess, where the bluebells bloomed earlier and swallows arrived sooner. I went south, I think, quite deliberately to meet spring on its way north.

  I was a walker in the William Hazlitt mould in those days, using regular routes as a source of reassurance, touching trees for luck, religiously dogging my own footsteps. ‘I can saunter for hours,’ Hazlitt wrote, ‘bending my eye forward, stopping and turning to look back, thinking to strike off into some less trodden path, yet hesitating to quit the one I am on, afraid to snap the brittle threads of memory.’ I settled into a ritual clockwise walk, increasingly threaded with memories, through the water meadows on the north side of the river, then back along the foot of a beechwood and a network of green lanes. It was the kind of journey you could make in almost any chalk-country valley, but the Metropolitan Line was only a mile to the south, and even at that distance it changed things. The aura of suburbia it generated seeped through the surrounding countryside, but nature argued back, contrametro, and these buffer-lands alongside the line were rowdy with dissonance. Things appeared here which were unthinkable eight miles further north, like the six calling cuckoos I once saw together in a single meadow. The river helped. The Chess was a real chalk stream, and it eddied through a complex series of creeks and S-bends here, so that straightforward ecological muddle was added to the mistier questions of landscape identity.

  The basic unit of field division in this patch of the Chilterns, heavily settled as it was by the aspirant middle classes, was the weekend and after-school-hours paddock for young girls’ ponies. But there were no neat post-and-rail fences yet, and hedges that dated back to before the Norman invasion crowded into rough water meadows full of improvised oil-barrel jumps. Watercress beds (the crop was taken on piled-high lorries to the Met Line freight depot at Chesham) edged into the lower parts of the woods. So did kingfishers, which occasionally shot like meteors between the lower branches. The woods retaliated, and after storms, beech trunks lay slowly mouldering in the water and irritating the fly-fishers. I loved one familiar of these fallen trees in particular, the bracket fungus known as
beech tuft. The glutinous white caps were partly translucent and became slightly droopy as they aged, so that they often took on the form of the melting watch in Salvador Dalí’s painting The Persistence of Memory. To which faculty they greatly contributed: sprouting limply from trunks almost submerged in the water, they had the look of ectoplasmic lotus blossom.

  The woodland flowers were special too, especially in Mounts Wood. This was a thin fillet of beechwood, sandwiched between the river and the slope south to Chorleywood, but it had an extraordinary collection of ancient woodland specialities: sweet woodruff, yellow archangel, wood anemone – even their names sounded like a forest carol. Best of all, it contained what is virtually the signature plant of Metroland, coralroot, which grows nowhere in Britain save the gravelly woods between Watford and Chesham and a few patches in the Kentish Weald. It’s a plant of extraordinary grace, like a woodland lady’s-smock, with larger, darker pink flowers and with purple-brown bulbils at the base of the leaves. In those days in my early thirties I was in thrall to an elfin ecologist who happened to live at the London end of the Metropolitan Line. One afternoon in early May, in an attempt to woo her to either my charms or those of my Metro homeland (I’m truly not sure which), I tracked down a patch of Mounts Wood’s very best, my shot at laying out a suburban version of Titania’s floral couch in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When we stopped to peer down at it, the effect of the maze of filigree plants – the whorls of viridian woodruff leaves, the coralroot’s pale rubies, the waving wands of wood melick grass, all set against tuffets of moss – was so overpowering, such a miniature cameo of the wonderful variety of life, that I quite lost the plot and retreated into my own private epiphany. Nature can be a very fierce romantic rival.

  Even the geology has a hybrid accent here. A very distinctive local rock, which sometimes turns up in fields during deep-ploughing, is puddingstone. It’s a conglomerate of all kinds of pebbles and sands, packed together by glacial drift; a natural concrete. When big specimens are found they’re hauled off to adorn village greens and pub gardens, but are sometimes hijacked from one village to another. I once overheard some ramblers (mistaking what they were seeing) gravely discussing the glacial origins of a leftover pile of Second World War concrete tank traps.

  This perspective, festive but also slightly dislocated, seemed to infect the other saunterers I encountered on my rounds, many of whom had come straight off the Met Line. One regular plodded the flat riverside footpaths in serious climbing boots, carrying a small dog in his arms. Two others I never saw, but I found their champagne glasses, perfectly polished, hidden in the cruck of an ancient oak, ten feet above the ground. I once crossed paths with a party of sixth-formers from a Jewish school in north London who wanted to make sure of getting back to Chorleywood station without missing any of the scenery. Could I point them on a suitable route? I did my best, and half an hour later I spotted them again, marching east well on schedule, their Hebrew songs ringing through the beechwoods.

  I became familiar with another stretch of Metroland in my twenties, at the end of the branch line that runs from Harrow to Uxbridge. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I worked in this patch, among the jumble of scrapyards and derelict canals that was scattered over much of this corner of Middlesex. I’d got a hot editorial job, at an outpost of Penguin Books, and I felt as elated as if I’d been beamed from my beechwood homeland direct to the pulsing, bohemian heart of Bloomsbury. The nature I’d worshipped as a romantic teenager went temporarily into cold storage at the back of my mind. There were, in the political and intellectual ferment of the time, other priorities.

  But nature seemed disinclined to play along with the backstage role I’d given it. I could, at a pinch, have commuted from home via the LMS to Harrow and then the Met Line south. But there was an easy coach connection between Watford and the office, and it took me along a route that was the short western side of a triangle formed by the two forks of the Met, and which ran alongside a long string of active gravel diggings in the River Colne. On my hour-long journey I felt as if I were watching an eco road movie through the windows. I had glimpses of fugitive water and resplendent wildfowl glinting behind thickets of wayside scrub. The road was being constantly repaired (the M25 would soon run almost parallel with it) and on carriageways and in pits along the way immense earth-movers scrunched like glaciers through prehistoric beds of flint and gravel. On a new roundabout near Uxbridge they’d piled up an artificial sandbank, and during that first summer a colony of sand martins raised their families in the shifting bank, darting nonchalantly between the JCBs and the traffic. It was that opportunist edge-land effect again, the road builders’ summer-season rubble standing in for the ancient cliff face.

  It was an even more fantastical scene at work. Our outpost of the Penguin empire was shaped like a slice of cake, and wedged between a canal and a main road. When I looked through one window of my office, I gazed down on a flotsam-strewn channel edged by plants I’d never seen in my life before, from all quarters of the globe: Indian balsam, Japanese knotweed, Canadian fleabane. From the other window I could watch kestrels hovering above the rush-hour traffic on the canal bridge. I tried to imagine the Escher-like complexity of the images on their retinas: towpath jungle, pub garden, concrete and metal stream, all in different focal planes.

  I used to go out exploring in my lunch hours, and found this rowdy, cosmopolitan luxuriance played out at a landscape scale, with scant respect for the Metropolitan Railway’s blandishments. In July 1914 its regular leaflet series The Met carried an article about the region entitled ‘Unknown Rural Haunts Close to London’. The reader was invited to

  TAKE A TRIP to … Ickenham or Uxbridge. In atmosphere, though not in distance, these charming rural hamlets are hundreds of miles away.

  GO WHILE NATURE IS FRESH, the birds carolling, the flowers in bloom.

  HOW MANY City men know that they can be carried by THE MET straight from their offices into rural solitude where they may wander through the fields by lake and thicket in the quiet summer evening, cooled and invigorated by health-giving breezes laden with the fragrance of foliage and flowers?

  The lakes and thickets just south of Uxbridge resembled this scene re-imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. My own rambles (invigorating, I concede, but far from health-giving) took me across derelict Victorian rubbish tips and through burgeoning woods of rampant Asian and Mediterranean shrubs – buddleia, bladder senna, Russian vine. I saw terns wafting over pits where the dredgers were still pulling up buckets of gravel, and great-crested grebes nesting on floating car tyres. The fragrances on the breeze were household garbage and engine oil, and the top predator was the scrapyard Alsatian guard dog. On one of my very first forays I stumbled into a plant I scarcely knew existed in Britain, a thorn apple, an aggressively bushy member of the nightshade family from the New World, with deceptively beautiful, swan-necked flowers that later develop into spiny fruits the size of conkers. These contain potent, psychotropic alkaloids, and up to a few centuries ago the seeds were used as an anaesthetic during surgery. Wild dope – sprung maybe from seeds in an imported Peruvian house plant – was growing on a refuse tip just three miles from Uxbridge tube station.

  I was, for a while, emotionally lost in these ecologically potent badlands. I felt exhilarated, bewildered, mischievous. Despite the way my imagination had been freed up by those childhood days in The Field, I still shared the conventional, anthropomorphic assumption that industrial dereliction was as inimical to nature as to humans. But here the wild seemed to have a different agenda, an insistence on a postmodern coexistence with the city, even a hint of triumphalism. In the mood of the times, it seemed almost insurrectionary.

  It wasn’t that I needed relief from the indoor publishing routine. The work we were doing at Penguin Education, reinventing the school textbook, was radical and powerfully exciting. Walking out into the bolshie exuberance of Metroland’s jungle edges seemed, in the fervid atmosphere of the late 1960s, to be just taking the office outdoo
rs.

  This was all a long time ago. These days much of the land is being reined back into a more recognizable Metroland profile. The canal towpaths are gravelled over, and marinas for weekend narrowboats are being scalloped out along their edges. Part of the area is now inside the Colne Valley Regional Park, with its own signposted walks and interpretation boards. But many of the refuse-tip scrublands are still there, now evolving into a bizarre high forest of thirty-foot-tall buddleia, sycamore, willow and pioneering oaks. And down in the Colne’s tributaries, great green wands of club-rush are swallowing the dumped fridges and lager cans.

  But in trying to piece this story together, to understand better how these improbable wastes had captured my heart, and those of so many others, there were bits of Metroland I needed to experience again, and crucial stretches I’d never seen at all. One in particular lay deep in my old Penguin terroir. I first saw it, tipped off by a friend, in 2005. In the midst of a cluster of old totters’ paddocks, wedged between two streams and close to the anglers’ pub where we often took our lunch breaks, was a rectangle of tussocky grassland with my name on it. ‘Mabey’s Meadow’ the London Wildlife Trust noticeboard announced, as if I’d been martyred there in some crucial ecological battle. (What a shame they didn’t know my father’s nom d’invention. ‘May-bee’s Meadow’ would have been much more waspishly appropriate.) I felt slightly posthumous, and it took me a while to find out what this flattering dedication meant. Apparently, when the Trust took over the care of the meadow and were casting about for a name, they remembered that I’d helped their ecologists survey this site back in the 1970s. We’d found some prodigious plants there, scarce sedges specific to ancient marshland and the seriously odd adder’s tongue, a diminutive fern with a single bright green leaf from which protrudes a spore-bearing blade that, to tell the truth, is more like a green dog’s cock than a snake’s tongue. There was an even chance that it had been clinging on in this field for more than four centuries, the kind of ancient provenance beloved of Metroland rhapsodies. The great Elizabethan botanist John Gerard mentions it in his Herball of 1597, growing in meadows by this very river, the ‘Col[n]e-brook’.