Jane Metcalfe

I often pass the first house I lived in here. 45 Gensing Rd. It was a mess inside but it was quaint and exciting to be away from the blandness of the long uniform street where we lived in Leyton; to be transplanted into the glamour of the far from uniform streets in lower St Leonards. The special feature of this house was the large grey pebble-rendered fascia, now a prim white. The house has gone up in the world. In our time the local drug dealer lived next door. It wasn’t like today. He was well respected. For some reason what he did never impinged on us and he ran his “business” in an orderly fashion…though once in a while he would go loopy and hurl things over into our garden, which, when he’d calmed down, we’d throw back. 

In the park I am enchanted by the dog daisies that have fully dilated since I last saw them. They lean eagerly towards the path like a crowd waiting for a parade to pass. We are the parade and they stare at us with their intense yellow irises. 

I am struck by the light today and the contrast. It is as if everything has been sharpened by a whetting stone, the edges of leaves and blades of grass glistening with bright attention. I can’t stop looking everywhere. I am a child again.. and then a man quite blindly walks into me out of nowhere. I feel my hackles rise. How dare he! I see he isn’t really “there” and my anger slides back to where it came from. I am reminded these are strange times with a dark story lurking out of sight, nothing to do with the beauty of this day.

I take a photo of my shadow.

 

Music in May. The first lines of Ivor Novello’s song kept popping into my head after passing the May tree in the gardens of the Clock House, a Victorian Gothic folly whose shrubbery gardens fall sharply down to the park. The delicate blossoms dotting the branches like tiny white candles, seemed to have just appeared today. I paused a moment to admire them. 

“The first music in May

Sings to my heart

Live for today…”

Incurable romantic that he was, Ivor Novello wrote numerous musicals with improbable stories and some memorable tunes that visit the realms of yearning and idealised love. In WW1 he became famous for the patriotic sentiment in Keep the Home Fires Burning.

None of that is relevant to my walk. The song though with its lines: “live for today” is.

I ponder lockdown and sometimes wonder if the cure is worse than the disease. Now don’t shoot me down in flames! We all entertain myriad thoughts and ideas vying with one another all the time – like panning for gold. Surely a nugget of absolute truth will appear if I pan long enough? Or maybe we shut the operation down for a rest and come back to it another time. 

My daily experiences as I walk always produce the same result. I am here, wherever that is, right now, fully engaged in appreciating and experiencing whatever appears in front of me. Up the road I overhear a conversation between a gardener and a woman: “What new normal will it be?” She says as he pulls up brambles. “Will Heathrow reopen its runways?”

I couldn’t help thinking how different concerns strike us differently. I have decided (not consciously; it sort of emerged) to not crystal gaze into life after lockdown. My experience has been the richer for it. 

Down the alley again I collect more firewood and decide stinging my hands a bit (no gloves) is worth it to gather a few nettles. 

Back home I make nettle soup, which has the same basic ingredients as wild garlic soup! It has a more delicate taste, but is just as green.

 

A man in the park with two daughters: “Come on we’ve got to look for some hemlock”, he said. “Are you wanting to poison someone?” I responded. He laughed and said he wanted to show his daughters what it was so they wouldn’t ever eat it. “We do a lot of foraging”, he said, “and hemlock looks similar to cow parsley, only it has little red specks on its spine.” Well that’s useful to know – not that I’m planning on poisoning anybody right now…

My walk took me back to the footpaths to pick up some wood I saw the other day for my fire. It is very satisfying foraging. I am quite new to it (aside from gathering wood), but after my wild garlic soup I am ready to explore further. Nettles may be next, for tea or soup and even cordial; but I must remember to take gloves.

The contrast of the bright spring light and the billowing train of clouds lazily travelling the skyway, makes for sharp delineations of shadow on sea. 

I am standing up close and personal to the brambles on a grassy gap at the zenith of West Hill Rd, where once a couple of houses must have stood. The view of the sea over to Bexhill could have been a candidate for a Judges postcard. For years Judges, based in St Leonard’s, turned out postcards aimed at holidaymakers. Once, for a reminiscence project, I found cards as far back as the end of WW1, sent by dutiful daughters or mothers or aunts. “The weather is bracing. The food is passable.” Not far off the shorthand of today’s texts. Loopy handwriting in faded Indian ink. Duty done with a colour-enhanced picture of the pier or a tourist crammed beach. 

What surprises each day has to offer!

My apparently restricted days have brought nothing but riches.

 

It is chilly and gusty but the sun is out. Through the park the spring blossoms are looking a little battered but the light is sharp and the contrast of tree shadow on grass jumps out at you like a 3D image. With my phone camera any attempt to capture it is hopeless. The lens of memory is best in these cases. 

On up Maze Hill and past the flowering cherry, whose starry petals, herded by the wind, have thickly coated the gutter. It makes me think of a favourite Oscar Wilde quote: “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.” My brother had it on a fridge magnet which, after he died I placed on my fridge. His life wasn’t easy but he had a quirky way with him that endeared him to many. He owned nothing but papers of all sorts, the skin he inhabited, the magnet and 3 pieces of nice pine furniture bought from redundancy money. 

I walk on into the alley, past fading bluebells comfrey, cow parsley and fallen branches, some pieces of which I take for my fire. I am happiest here, doing this. Then the long patch of wild garlic. I ask, in a manner of speaking, if it’s okay to take some, but it is so dense I know the 50gms or so I need to make my soup won’t be missed.

As I walk, like a country person from long ago, one of my favourite folk songs, Linden Lea, pops into my head. Written in the mid eighteen hundreds, the poet expresses his sheer delight in the countryside and ardently states that other men may make money faster in dark-roomed towns, but he is free to walk about in his domain, rich with the fruits of Nature.

I know how he feels. The soup was a great success!

 

After most of the previous day without water due to a faulty pipe in the main resevoir, I woke up this morning to sputtering taps clearing their pipes, much the same as I do first thing before my breath flows smoothly. It was raining and I felt that little slump of disappointment in me after weeks of sunny walks. By 10.30 it had turned to drizzle and off I went. I was immediately struck by the plants: sharp and glistening, as thankful to bathe in water as I had been earlier. 

There were very few people out. I went into the park to visit my favourite tree for a spot of tai chi (an unintentional rhyme). Afterwards I was marvelling at the strange vein-like streaks in its trunk. I hadn’t noticed them before. 

Then at the base was a little patch of foam emanating from the point where trunk met earth. I bent down to look and of course took a photo. As I walked down the path a man with an elderly dog, who was dutifully sniffing at a plant, asked why I was taking a photo of the trunk base. I confessed to being curious. He said there was probably some damage and this was the sycamore’s reaction. Sycamore! I hadn’t known! Now my favourite tree had a name! We talked at distance for a while as he waited for his 18 year old dog to finish her foraging. “She doesn’t like to come out” he told me. He spoke wistfully, as though feeling the imminent loss of her and, perhaps too, of his excuse for leaving his 4 walls behind to dwell awhile in this – Nature’s open-plan house.

I love this peek into people when they reveal quite unintentionally a good heart, a passion, a sensitivity that calls to me on a deep level. This is real connection. 

I stopped to look at the drops of rain fanning out between the lily pads on the little lake then on to the seafront and a half tide with 4 cormorants lording it, each on their own reptilian rock. And finally this lone man gazing out to sea.

Rain. Water. Sea. Connections. Where would we be without them?