Vulcan Street (On the Docks with my Grandfather, Seventy Years Apart)

By David Lewis:

The road along the Liverpool docks used to flow with the loading and unloading of great cargoes, noisy with the constant bustle of wagons, horses, steam lorries and the trains that ran from the enormous goods stations to the docks.  The streets behind held pubs, churches, engineering companies, shipping offices, workshops, forges.  Over all hung a pall of soots and smokes from steam engines and roaring chimneys.  On weekdays at least it was never silent, never still.  

Today the docks are neglected and vulnerable.  The goods stations have been demolished, leaving weedy cobbled footprints and buried rails.  The Dock Road is a boundary between redundant docks and streets of crumbling, derelict warehouses, each one a poem, an essay in brick, soot and obsolescence.  There are small businesses here, music spaces and hipster cafes, green shoots growing up between the cracks; but this is largely a place of ruined beauty and lost purpose, of silted iron doorways, towering brick walls, silences.  I have been alone here many times, walking the wind through rust, the rain through windows, walking sunlight on stone; walking the iron whispers, the lost stations of the Overhead Railway.  To walk these old places is to remember, and walking the visual memories of the city is inevitably an act of commemoration.  

At the dust and ghosts of the Canada Dock Station I imagine my grandfather Vincent walking down the wide steps to the crowded noisy street one day in 1952.  He is 48, ten years younger than I am now.  He shifts his brown canvas tool bag from hand to hand and turns through the working, shouting bustle of the dock gates out onto the quayside.  He worked all his life with wood.  Out on the dock there is a hut to be repaired, or a fallen beam to be cut or moved, given a new purpose.  Or perhaps he walks up a gangplank to a broken door or smashed panelling, maybe there are salt-warped frames to be straightened as a ship is loaded.  I imagine a careful unpacking of clamps and gluepot, a canvas fold of nails and screws, valuable and counted against the day’s work.  Vincent never lost his appreciation of wood and in old age he would run his hands gently over unworked timbers, unconsciously, the woodworker’s caress.  His hands were like warm sandpaper.  

On the Dock Road this grey day I am walking the wind through broken glass, meandering through a clatter and a scattering of pigeons.  All day the road is silent.  In his day the noise is unrelenting as he stops for some bread and cheese, an apple, a hand-rolled cigarette. Seventy years apart I eat a sandwich on the stump of an oily wooden beam on Vulcan Street, opposite the lost dock church of St Matthias.  It is now a petrol station.  Street cobbles are disappearing beneath sandy dust and fleshy wildflowers.  His river city is fading beneath tyre graveyards and taxi-cab workshops, and yet the massive ruins have a smashed grandeur, a solid, precarious dignity.  My grandfather lives on in my heart, but only as a smile, a face, as the memory of laughter, this man dead these forty years; in the ghost signs of lost businesses on the cold miles of these streets – importers, chandlers, engineers - I catch a glimpse into his world.  

The light is failing, perhaps it is November.  The air is thick with grease and smuts, the streets busy with cargoes loaded and unloaded, slow heavy trains, patient horses and their wagons.  My city too is darkening, the light is closing these old streets down, and it is time to head back to the present day.  In 1952 the golden pubs are roaring but through sirens and endings Vincent turns for home. He carries his canvas bag up the wooden steps to the station platform and waits for the train, dreaming of potatoes, sausages, a steamed pudding. Turns for home as the ship, warped panels straightened, slips from the river on the evening tide.

***

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside. He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 - and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter  

Whiteford Lighthouse

By Andrew C. Kidd:

Dimmed lampless and housed upon split shells that anchored
a cast iron mass, bedded to the seabed. Waves rolled across
and based its sailless mast, part-sunken, parting the sea.

Along the gantry, silent cormorants dotted mussel-black.
Their feathery cloaks ruffled gently in the sea-facing wind.
From this angle, it looked like a glassless aviary, iron-wrought,

emptied. On this rocky outcrop, fresh water basined to fill
and veil the rock beds and broken shells, yielding new life
after the lengthening advance and retreat of the diurnal tides.

Through its birdcage structure, the winter sun dipped to shroud
as evening that descended blue-violet, blanketing the day
and birds that disappeared from sight upon this windswept sound.

***

Andrew C. Kidd has had poetry and flash fiction published in Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, Journal of the American Medical Association and Friday Flash Fiction.

The perks of being a suburban wallflower

Milton Keynes EKZ by Dr Ronald Kunze is licensed under CC BY 3.0

By David Stoker:

Milton Keynes, situated between London and Birmingham, is frequently a punchline of a town. MK, as locals call it, has the reputation for being a bit of an oddball - if not backwards exactly, merely parochial, where weird things happen through sheer boredom, like local newspaper headlines that occasionally go viral. Given the British custom of celebrating all that is shabby (a book entitled “Crap Towns” was a surprise hit in 2003, selling 120,000 copies) it earns a chuckle more than true derision. People who live in older towns or cities that grew more organically over time balk at it. Really? You built this - here? 

MK is famous for two things: roundabouts and concrete cows. Occasionally nausea-inducing to drive on, the 130 roundabouts punctuate the vertices of its grid squares, the town’s transport arteries designed with a ruler. Visiting “H6” may be less glamorous than New York’s “40th and 8,” but such is the power of movies to elevate mere digits. The cows: at first glance they seem to be a memento of an agricultural past, a lifesize version of the cheap fridge magnets you and I collect from a city break. Yet somehow the herd is celebrated: these hand-forged Fresians were long adopted as the unofficial town mascots. Amateurish yet undeniably cheerful, the cows express a kitsch naivety and as such have earned significant affection from locals.

Concrete Cows at CMK by Prioryman is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

My relationship to MK is like one has to a gawky high school photo of oneself - familiar, with a small grimace. Or perhaps the special blankness we reserve for people we have ghosted, or - morally and aesthetically - outgrown. Having spent some formative years there, I felt lucky to have got out. My memory is of what French philosopher Marc Augé has described as “non places”: corporate blandness of airport lobbies and drab, air-conditioned conference centres, devoid of character. I would joke that the town is a giant car park with shops and houses attached. But my mind was opened by Filmmaker Richard Macer’s recent BBC4 documentary Milton Keynes and Me, which showed the idealistic vision behind the project. Luxurious, quasi-socialist, grand meeting places were planned, open to all, flattening social hierarchies. So I got thinking about Milton Keynes and me - was it so terrible? How did it shape my character?

Britain’s newest town built from scratch was founded in 1967. But idealised urban planning has a long history: in the Renaissance, symmetrical, fortress-like, pentagonal cities were drafted, intended to represent the Platonic ideal of a city. Bauhaus pioneer Le Corbusier boldly described homes as ‘machines for living’ that he believed would eventually have a transformative effect on human behaviour. As their fame and reputation grew, Bauhaus visionaries were soon designing, if not whole cities, then large estates. Yet social problems soon emerged in these concrete palaces, from places like outer-Amsterdam estate De Biljmer; to Glasgow’s high-rises, and the housing ‘projects’ in the US. Many were torn down. One infamous block came down in only 20 years, such was the human misery its misguided design caused.

To ask whether MK’s design is equally misguided needs a caveat: it was softer from the start, more modest, less stark. MK, despite some brutalist centrepieces, didn’t go full modernist to its core - you might call it twee-modernist. From above, within each grid square, instead of a spray-painted, hatch grille of harsh hexagons, street designs look more like a doily dusted with icing sugar, relatively benign. No rows of communist-style blocks - though there are some foreboding low-rise 1970s estates - (round the corner from our house was a series of long, dark-chocolate-bricked, triangular prisms, twenty houses deep) - but from the 80s onwards house building was firmly conventional, even ‘checkbox’, what have been dismissively called ‘Noddy houses.’

And misery, what misery exactly? In controlled, over-regular environments, we feel penned in and our senses dulled. One of the psychological imperatives of humans is to make their mark on things. Notably, entire sprawling MK estates of detached houses shared a common floor plan and exterior. I sometimes imagined locals would need to count the number of turns they make left or right upon driving home, such was the difficulty of recognising one’s own house. A car aerial, one can put a brightly coloured ball on - not so easy to festoon a house for distinctiveness, at least outside of the festive season.

Suburbia has its pains for any teenager and I was no different: I wanted ‘scenes’, a ferment, the accidental, to feel legitimately part of something bigger. Brought together by daily coach-rides to my high school, my teen friendships were a constellation of satellites and in the evenings we socialised on MSN Messenger, discussing how to impress girls without many opportunities to try it out. My mates had sports - MK has the national badminton centre - and I had my books and music. I organised my collections as an antidote to life’s anxieties and meaninglessness, self medication. It was my spiritual way out. Weekends saw us at Centre MK: Europe’s longest shopping centre was our temple, our promenade, our place to go. It wasn’t much: MK could be described as a sad Los Angeles without its Vegas. But it was ours.

Milton Keynes Centre Queens Court by Cnyborg is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

There is a real eeriness to MK. If you visit, you will feel it. Away from the roads it is quiet - too quiet. Early settlers had a counsellor appointed by the development company to make sure they weren’t going loopy. It was just a couple of streets at first. Coming from my current London neighbourhood I sometimes feel like I’ve wandered onto the Truman Show, but with no-one watching. Connection suffers in towns built at the scale of the car - the distances were just too far to allow chemical reaction. A social coarseness can easily creep in like bindweed when people don’t mix enough, aren’t given proper meeting places. To create chemical reactions in an area too big without enough particles, you must add heat.

Is it too harsh to say that planned towns are doomed to make life boring and lonely? It feels like one priority, living space and affordable home ownership (it was originally designed to alleviate urban crowding in London) was pursued above all others. The privacy of one’s tiny castle. And on one level, it succeeded fully in improving the material standards of its residents. Notably Milton Keynes’ original vision was only incompletely realised - a huge cultural district was planned and scrapped. 

And there was beauty amidst the boredom: cycling up to the concrete cows with a mate and sitting on them, off past ruins of an abbey, past lakes and past pub lunch denizens. In pre-teen years there were some local excitements: I remember being confronted by estate kids. These boys, though looking back, so obviously deplete of love, stability and material resources - had a physical rough and readiness that I found exhilarating. The adrenaline you feel when you might be put in a head-lock for no reason. Their desire to explore places we weren’t allowed to go. 

In some ways, MK occupies an “uncanny valley” between utopia and dystopia. But it was not all bad, a grey life. Actually it was quite green. Last time I went, MK felt slowly better - more ethnically diverse. There is a new art gallery, sheepishly hopeful, an outpost of bigger dreams. If I could write to myself aged fifteen, I would reassure my younger self that not all places suit all people. So don’t worry. Cultivate your own curriculum and throw yourself into connecting with people, even if it seems pointless. I wish MK’s current teenagers well. I hope souls’ wildflowers can grow on its roundabout verges. 

Timbold Roundabout, Milton Keynes by John Winfield, is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

***

David Stoker is a writer, facilitator, and communications specialist. He has lived in Berlin and Amsterdam and now calls London home. He has worked as an analyst in the nonprofit and public sectors, a policy researcher and an educator of children. His writing has appeared on Citizens Advice and the UK Cohousing Network, and he has performed poetry to Sunday Assembly London. His other interests include accumulating more books than he could ever read, painting watercolours and building secular community.

Diligence in the Snow

Photo: Marcel Krueger

By Marcel Krueger:

I sit on my island, in winter, and the antigen test is negative. 

Winter in Ireland rarely means snow, but always wind and rain. From November on, storm after storm rolls in from the Atlantic, often making ferry crossings and fishing dangerous or near impossible, and howl around my house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. I was born in October, so autumn is my favourite season yet winter following is a close second. I always wallowed in the dark and the cold, as for some reason I do not seem to be afflicted by seasonal affective disorder; or maybe a reverse one: I don't like heat, or the summer.  I have no issue with maintaining a work rhythm in winter, and sometimes even feel I write better, with the fireplace lit and a glass of whiskey at hand admittedly, but it is the muggy heat of summer that drains all my focus, motivation and attention. And where for others it might be a time for a lake or park picnic with friends or to have a few cold ones by the beach, it makes me only want to lie in a dark room with air-conditioning until October arrives. 

For me, winter is never about the hope of light after the dark, never about the return of spring. It is always about the dark itself, and the chance of introspection it provides. In recent years I often think about what we humans do in face of adversity and hardship, and how the pandemic has brought to light how our greed and fear of change seem to make it impossible to react properly to these challenges, much more than I would have ever felt possible. As I write this, people in democracies everywhere in Europe are out protesting the need to adhere to science and proclaim that they live in a dictatorship, on a continent that has seen so much real oppression and totalitarianism in the last hundred years alone. 

South of Dundalk, in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, hangs one of my favourite winter paintings: “The Diligence in the Snow” (La diligence dans la neige) from 1860, created by French socialist and realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877). If you look at the upper half of the painting, there is only an empty landscape, the east of France - on occasion Courbet added “Montagnes du Jura” to the title - stretching out to the horizon in grey and white, under an equally grey and white sky, indifferent in its monotony. There are no houses, no smoke from chimneys rising into the sky, and the light portrayed here is the undefinable greyness of winter - it could be anytime from later morning to early evening.

The human chaos and drama is confined to the bottom of the painting, where a stagecoach struggles through high drifts of snow pulled by two oxen and two horses, the two oxen in front struggling with their necks down, one coachman riding atop one, slumped down and blowing on his hands with a whip held in the crook of his arm. Behind them one horse rises up in its bridles, the other, exhausted, has already sunken to the side. The coach itself, weighted down with large chunks of snow on its roof, seems to be in the moment of foundering, dangerously tilted to the right. Another human figure, the second driver perhaps, has fallen face down into the snow hurrying towards the horses, and a woman and a man behind him, the passengers, are already left behind the capsizing coach. The man reaches out an arm towards it as the woman, the last in this chain of unlucky ones, holds on to the arm of the man. There are four or five houses depicted close by, also almost sunken into the snow, but no help is coming: there is no smoke rising from their chimneys either, the windows dark.   

Gustave Courbet,'The Diligence in the Snow' © The National Gallery, London. Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

What I like about the painting most is its duality, and, after a fashion, hopelessness. One moment you're hurrying along in the warm cabin of the coach swaddled in blankets looking out at a beautiful scenery, the next moment everything secure and safe is brought crashing down around you and the beautiful scenery you thought only to exist for your merriment becomes something dangerous, something threatening to kill you. 

If you live in winter, regardless on what hemisphere, you know this. You are acutely aware of the fragility of human existence, of it's often sudden and violent end in dark and windswept places, and are reminded of that fact every year when the first storms of the seasons make ferry crossings impossible.

I don't wish for winter to end. 

If we manage to kill it, which seems a distinct possibility given our rising temperatures and our incapability to do anything against the climate catastrophe here in Europe, what will make us pause and take a breath? If there is only an eternal summer, will we not manically keep on drinking and eating and using up whatever is left while the rest of the world already burns and those we abandoned making their way to us to partake in our frantic feast before it all goes to hell? 

I think we all need to learn to adjust to winter, even its dark and hopelessness. I was actually happy when in February 2021 the tail end of Storm Darcy  brought with it snow and wind for all of Ireland. Not much snow, just enough to dust the cockle fleet in the harbour and the scrapyard on the quays, but the three days it lasted may have given me more joy and hope than anything humans gave me in the 12 months before that. 

In the midst of winter, I did not discover an eternal summer, to paraphrase Albert Camus, but instead the conviction that we can't carry on as we've done before. As strong as the urge is to re-emerge from the pandemic into a world where nothing has changed, this is wishful thinking. Doing as we've always done and rejecting science is what brought us here, to a time of rampant viruses emerging from burning rain forests and thawing permafrost, of floods and death and people fleeing a heating global south. Those of us in the midst of winter, in deep ice and snow and hiding from the storms howling outside, we need to preserve and protect these moments of stillness and contemplation. Otherwise we will just watch the coach founder and find ourselves in a hostile place, with no help coming. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Uist

Photo: Jack Bush

By Emma Jones:

On the ferry our bikes are all tied up with string to keep them stable. I am not a seafarer and do not know the knots. I twist and wind the rope and hope that it will be enough to keep my bike from toppling over. My bike is heavy, all loaded up, front and back and frame bag. We are two weeks into our trip and my packing is becoming untidy, clothing shed and then not put away properly, instead glove fingers peeking, a shirt tied unceremoniously, one arm flapping in the breeze. 

These two weeks are felt in the body too. My legs are tired, calves stretched and thighs hot, lower back burning. Hair stuck down to my scalp. Clothes streaked with mud and sheep shit and sweat. In the mornings wriggling about inside the tent I keep myself curled up so as not to touch the sides and let the dew in. A whole home folded up and wrapped tight. Kneeling my weight down onto my roll mat I feel the air being pushed out of it and something gives way in this act of deflating, like I am letting all of that is pent up inside of me out too, shaking myself out in the wet morning light. When we leave, all that’s left behind from the night before is an indistinct shape in the flattened grass.

Climbing up to the deck we sit on the little plastic seats and feel the salt and wind sting. It's another grey day where I do not cast a shadow, as if a part of me is missing, as if I have nothing to project. I watch the diving birds fold their wings and turn themselves into one long beak and barely upset the water. I watch the ferry engine churn everything behind it up into white foam. I look for land, and look, and look, and then, finally, it’s Uist that rises from the sea. 

I am politely told by a man we meet on the ferry that I am pronouncing Uist wrong. It should, in fact, be an oo sound and then the ee and a short sharp st. Not Ooohisst but Oooooeest. More like a whistling sound, he says. I try it on, but struggle with its call. Each small town and road sign is noted in Gaelic, the collection of letters and accents unfamiliar to me, a language that is, in part, an act of civic reclamation. English was enforced here, first among the clan chiefs, and then the schoolchildren. I read these signs as a form of taking back. As a way to think about place but also the body. Does language impact and change the shape of the tongue? Until the body forgets what it used to speak with ease? My own struggles to take the shape of this place in. I cannot speak it, despite the sign telling me Failte gu Uibhist a Deas.  

Uist isn't one place exactly, but a collection of six islands, stippling the coast of West Scotland. A collection that seems unsteadily attached to the water beneath, as if at any moment it could shudder and give way, become unmoored and break up even further. Each island is connected via causeway, with rocks buffeting each side. Whenever we cycle over them the tide seems to be perpetually out, revealing white sand or fecund matter and the faint smell of something rotting. It is very open and the wind is against us. I try to keep close behind Jack, use his body as a type of shelter. He is a stronger rider than me, pushing us forward while I hang back. We’re both tired and not talking in that gentle familiar way that comes from being in each other's company a lot. And so, I am mainly left alone, just my body and my thoughts.

Photo: Jack Bush

Perhaps it is the proximity to the sea, and the grey nothing of the day, that makes it hard to feel as if I am doing anything but moving through, floating through, passing through. I feel strangely unplaced here. Letting the road dictate my movements but not taking anything further in. Only the asphalt beneath me. Swift and sharp pushes over small rises, dipping into another collection of houses, feeling the cars passing with a metallic reverb. We plan to travel from south to north over the course of the day, and it is distance that keeps me occupied. I keep tracking how far it is I have travelled, how far there is still to go. I am chasing the miles, wanting my body to become a blur. 

I am trying to act as if it's impossible for this place to be felt. As if cycling isn't a series of impressions in which place and body meet. But each turn of the pedal feels like another chance to look again. A cliché about wheels turning, a place that beckons as a type of rotation. Calls out, fades, calls out again. 

It is not as if this place is empty. When we pause at a Co-Op car park to eat lunch a car pulls up and I watch a man in a heavy green quilted jacket walk up to the curb to kick and scrape his boots. Signs of industry and labour are everywhere. There are sprawling farms with jagged half fence posts and abandoned rust-toothed machinery. Fishing nets all tangled up in a dense weave. So too, are signs of this industry fading as the permanent population of these islands steadily decreases. Former homes reduced to an outline of bricks and gaping doors and windows. In one field we watch a short-eared owl quartering dreamily just above the grass, silent on its daytime hunt for the squinting voles.

In North Uist, the final island of the day and where we plan to spend the night, the landscape changes into earthy peatland. There are small incisions from where it has been cut out in blocks. There aren’t many trees here and so the peat is burnt for fuel. The local population knows how to take from this landscape and use it up. While riding, I am trying to do the same. It is not a moving through, but an attempt to take in. We stop for dinner and I try Lobster for the first time, a local catch, and am surprised when it is served cold. I dig my little trident under the shell, pull out white flesh. 

A woman in the pub asks if we are staying and I wonder how many people she sees each evening with bags on their bikes, or else, all wrapped up in the metal shell of a camper van. How many of them, like me, will be trying to remember and gather up as much as possible before the next place sits on the tongue. There is more of Uist than I am able to tell but still, I am here, trying to find a way through. 

In the late spring it doesn’t get dark here until after 10pm. Toward the end of the day the sun starts to break through the clouds and soon everything is turned soft with a peachy hue. On the way down to the beach where we plan to camp there’s an old graveyard between the sea and the machair. There are old graves mixed with the new. And beneath the graves are the bodies of the people who lived here, the ground finally pushing into their bones, in a way that it will never do for me.

***

Emma Jones is a non-fiction writer and Curatorial Assistant, Photography at Tate. They hold an MA in Writing from Royal Holloway, London. As an arts writer and curator, Emma has been published in Source Magazine and contributed to the recent publication Photography: A Feminist History (Octopus Publishing). Contact her on twitter: @perceptivehow

A Plot of Land

By Dermot O’Sullivan:

In a suburb somewhere in Dublin, swarms of pebble-dashed houses clamour silently about the fringes of an oblong patch of land. Long ago, this plot was just one of the countless green fields that mantled the foothills of the mountains. Then it was the last one, lost among the new grey sprawl. Finally, it was flooded with cement and cinder blocks. 

For many years after this, a dairy and the HB factory coexisted here in convenient symbiosis. Their combined workforce was sufficiently large to make driveway blockage an issue for the locals, even though most of the employees walked to work from the nearby council estates. After bouts of letter writing and public representation, an overflow car park was built and peace returned to the cul-de-sacs.    

Then the dairy was shut down and demolished. The rubble was piled in heaps at one end of the flat wasteland and, within a week, the travellers had moved in. Bikes were stolen. Litter and faeces accumulated. Somebody’s son was struck on the cheek with a broken hula-hoop. In short, havoc was unleashed. Letters were written, words were exchanged and the inaugural residents’ association meeting was conducted in the school sports hall. Relief and disappointment mingled when the travellers left without warning one rainy Tuesday morning.

To prevent a repeat, the council constructed a pathetically low wall all around the site and so facilitated its transformation into a hang-out spot for local teenagers. The emerging generation drunk, smoked and fucked themselves through adolescence amid the tangled weeds and shattered masonry. Slugs nested in the slowly rusting cider cans. Cracks in the concrete of the former dairy floor collected a bedding of stained cigarettes butts. Within a couple of years, parts were totally overgrown and the drone of insects in the summer was loud enough to drown out the endless hum of suburban traffic. The overflow car park was decommissioned: its entrance was bricked up and the painted white lines began to dissolve slowly into the tarmac.

During these few years, the HB factory limped on partnerless until it too was shut and flattened. The whole site was levelled and the weeds and beer cans were swept away. The walls were raised and a security guard was appointed, fully equipped with a Beware of Dogs sign though not with any actual dogs. Baked teenagers gazing at headless dolls or rusted bicycles left by the travellers, and drunken ones rolling on the ground blocking orifices, were no longer tolerated. The land was worth something now and something was going to happen.  Then it happened: a block of retail units was built. Then a block of stylish apartments. A giant electrical goods store opened. A second block of apartments was planned. Then the calendar rolled on and hit 2—0—0—8.

The other retail units are still vacant: their big bellies of glass hold gloomy interiors strewn with pallets and plastic sheeting. The cement dust has settled in deep undisturbed drifts. Not one of the apartments has sold. Their silent rooms are full of unconnected bathtubs and unused floor tiles. Their unpainted grey windowsills are speckled with pigeon droppings. Beads of damp sweat gather in the high corners.

The security guard still sits in his little box, but soon he too will have to go. Perhaps, at the same time, the apartments will be boarded up or even torn down. Or perhaps not. In any case, it seems likely that one day the empty space will return and sober and stupefied brains alike will stare at the rubble or scaffolding or whatever it is that comes next.        

***

Dermot O'Sullivan is an Irish writer whose work has been published in various journals including The Honest Ulsterman, Causeway/Cabhsair, The Dalhousie Review and Fence. He currently lives in Brazil, where he recently had his first full-length play produced.

The Cuckoo's Place

By Rebecca Welshman:

I follow an overgrown track alongside the dark recesses of a Sitka spruce plantation. Although sunshine rarely penetrates these shadow-wrought trunks, a feathered visitor has taken up a perch among the topmost boughs to sing. The sound carries through the air, stands out above everything else. I heard my first cuckoo in Henfield, Sussex where I spent my childhood. The scrubby streams and unkempt meadows surrounding the village at that time were the cuckoo’s ideal habitat. In East Sussex the arrival of the cuckoo has long been associated with a specific place. At the annual cuckoo fair in Heathfield each April a cuckoo was released from a wicker basket to mark the start of spring – a tradition with origins at least as far back as 1315 when the fair was given a charter. In the mid nineteenth century an elderly woman was still known to visit the vicinity at dawn to “turn out the cuckoo”. Today the fair is still held, and pigeons are released from a basket instead by “Dame Heffle”. As a herald of spring, the cuckoo symbolises the return of the light; the life-renewing emergence from the dark dormancy of winter. 

But for many years the cuckoo fell silent in my life. Over a period of ten years, as I moved to Liverpool, to Somerset, then Cumbria, I heard only one. The last place I heard it was in Shropshire, three years ago: a faint distant call, holding memories of fields and woods. Now, in Dumfries and Galloway the cuckoo’s song is once again part of spring. The very real reason for this of course is that cuckoo populations have declined in England, and increased in Scotland. The valley where the male cuckoo has taken up residence lies at the edge of the Ae Forest, a sheep-grazed island within an area of industrial forestry that stretches for miles in all directions. Its gently sloping sides are planted with sitka spruce, with some recently clear felled areas. Its floor is a broad soft tussocky expanse bisected by Garpol Water, a shallow fast flowing burn that has its origins in the Lowther Hills. Many thousands of years ago this would have been a river basin. Domed heads of islands still pepper the landscape, and amongst them are scattered the last remaining native tree species of the valley – birch, rowan, and oak. Although the ordnance survey map draws a clear yellow line along this part of the hillside, the forest has no real boundary on the ground. Miniature spruce grow wherever they happen to put down their resilient roots, in walls, on mounds, or amongst the gritty broken tarmac of forest roads. At the forest edge-lands any sense of ownership dissolves. 

A maverick of the bird world, the word “cuckoo” is synonymous with “strange”, and “eccentric”, suggesting its lack of conformity, a lone existence. While the bird is celebrated as an emblem of British springtime, it has also been maligned as a trickster and thief. Their true breeding habits were strongly disputed until the 1920s when ornithologist Edgar Chance made the film “The Home-Wrecker”, which showed the cuckoo laying her eggs in other birds’ nests. One of only two avian brood parasite species, fledgling cuckoos manoeuvre the eggs of their host bird parents out of the nest to make room for themselves. While these behaviours may seem treacherous or cruel, it is not our place to judge them by human standards.  Cuckoos feel the pull of spring time in the British Isles as much, or deeper, than we do. Their actions are hard-wired into them, set deep in their psyche after centuries of repetition. The instinct that drives them to return here each April to breed is detectable in their haunting two-tone call, which carries a beguiling air of mystery, compels me to listen, taps into my own instinct to pause whatever I am doing. 

This remote Dumfriesshire valley, now the cuckoo’s summer home before it returns to Africa, was once a contested area. A twelfth century castle mound still guards the rough track leading into it, and the rectangular outline of a much earlier earthwork is just visible amongst the green bog grasses beside the burn.  An ancient way visible on nineteenth century maps once threaded the valley from west to east and connected the distant hills with the infrastructure surrounding the Romans and Reivers route a few miles to the south. Deep within the valley can be found the remains of a circular monument with an entrance stone still standing. Remnants of cairns lie scattered around. A single aged oak tree growing from an islanded knoll watches over. Its branching trunks, dead at the ends, are angular and defiant, like antlers against the skyline. 

Scrub and heath – types of terrain that do not lend themselves to cultivation – are some of the cuckoo’s favourite places. As such the bird has long been associated with borderlands and heaths that once lay at the edges of medieval land units. The historic place name Yekheth in Acton parish, near Nantwich, derives from the Old English “gaecc” meaning “cuckoo”. It is a high point in the landscape, as is the neighbouring Wrenbury Heath a few miles to the south. In Irish folklore the cuckoo is attached to landscapes with historic human presence. The field of the mythical battle Moytura, in which the forces of light fought against the forces of darkness, has the highest concentration of megalithic monuments in Europe. A high point once known as “Cuckoo Hill” is marked by Eochaidh’s cairn. According to the writer and folklorist Padraic Colum, in his play Moytura, this spot was once known as “the cuckoo’s starting place”. That this bird of summer haunts the cold stones of an ancient tomb again reaffirms its association with the tensions between light and dark. The cuckoo, which embodies the light and dispels the shadows, has penetrated the human psyche at a deep level. It is no wonder that people all over the country still stop to remark upon hearing its first call.

Here at the edge of the Ae Forest the cuckoo’s mellow wood-note rings with piercing clarity. I draw closer, thinking that at any moment my footfalls and presence will disturb him, but still he calls. At the top of the hill I turn right onto the Southern Upland Way which leads away from the forest into the valley. As I leave him behind his echoing calls gradually grow more distant, and even though I know I cannot see him, I still turn back to look. This wizard of the woods has me under his spell. 

***

Rebecca is an author and researcher who lives in Dumfries and Galloway with her family, and numerous animals. Her publications include edited collections of the works of Victorian naturalist Richard Jefferies, and essays about literature, language, and the natural world. Her writing can be found at: rebeccawelshman.wordpress.com/blog and https://liverpool.academia.edu/RebeccaWelshman

Canal

By Rachel Sloan:

2000

The first time I find the canal, it’s an accident.

It’s January, I’m twenty, I’ve been in London only a few weeks. I’ve never been abroad before and everything dazzles me. But I spent last night in a crush of bodies in some West End club and this morning I’m desperate for quiet and space, so Regent’s Park it is.

Restless, I stride past the places I already know well and head north – in search of what, I don’t exactly know. I know Primrose Hill lies beyond, but before I reach it, I glimpse a snaking line of trees. Patches of water flash between the gaps. There’s a path and I follow it down and then everything changes.

The canal unspools in both directions. To my right, a long green ribbon of water and the peaks of Lord Snowdon’s aviary. To my left, a string of weeping willows, bare branches bowed toward the water like a group of mourning fair-haired giants; an enormous double-decker scarlet barge that looks like leftover opera scenery; a low bridge through which the canal bends away sharply and disappears. I turn left.

I pass gardens that spill down to the water’s edge, arbours laced in barky coils of wisteria, warehouses with windowpanes punched out like black eyes, thickets of trees and brambles wedged against brick walls. The silence is near total, the clangour of traffic sinking away into leaf mould and water. Crumpled lager cans and eviscerated crisp packets drift together in makeshift islands but when I stare down into the water I catch flashes of silver and gold tipped with red: roach, maybe bream. I round another bend and catch a heron picking its way through fallen twigs, its neck unreal, its eyes locking for an instant with mine.

I grew up thinking that the world was parcelled into boxes marked City, Suburb, Nature. As I walk I feel those tidy divisions blowing apart. In their wake is something rich and strange. Something that just yesterday I would have laughed off as an oxymoron. 

Urban nature.

I don’t yet have the vocabulary to get to grips with this new kind of nature, just a bone-deep feeling of belonging, despite this being a place I’ve only known for weeks, unlike the place I was born and where I lived for eighteen years. What I find at the canal isn’t the Romantic landscapes of Keats and Wordsworth that I spend my days dissecting in cramped seminar rooms.

One day, browsing a bookshop table piled with contemporary poetry, I stumble upon Tobias Hill. The Regent’s Canal runs through his poems like a mud-flecked golden thread. Here is someone who understands this place that exists within London and yet is not fully of it, that ticks along on its own parallel time, someone who can feel and give form to what the canal does to sound and light. He writes of air ‘pressed / into white slabs of mist’, of a dying eel entangled in a sunken shopping trolley, of canal-side magnolia blossoms glowing like lightbulbs and blackbirds whose pollen-filled mouths ‘burn with it / like fuse wires’.

When I leave London at the end of my semester abroad, Hill’s books are in my suitcase. I cling to them over the next fifteen months as I half-heartedly try to fit myself back into the contours of a life and a country in which I no longer feel I belong, as I plot my return. When I move back to begin a postgraduate degree, they, too, retrace their journey across the Atlantic. The canal is just as I’d left it; walking the towpath is a homecoming. But Hill has stopped writing poetry. He’s turned to novels, and although I try to love them I somehow can’t. As the years pass I dip into his poems now and then and I can still sense a kindred spirit – a ghost, growing ever fainter.

Only fourteen years later, chancing across a newspaper interview, do I learn that Hill and I have something else in common besides our love for the canal: he, too, is Jewish. And only some years after that will I realise how rare the two of us are, writing about nature, urban or otherwise.

2014

I’ve been walking the Regent’s Canal for years by now, in sun, fog, veils of rain. I’ve kayaked it too, clambering from my boat glazed in duckweed. I know it – or so I think – like the back of my hand.

One Saturday in November I visit the London Canal Museum and I discover how little I really know. In the grand scheme of things, the Regent’s Canal is a bauble, a plaything beside the mighty Grand Union Canal. I’ve always been vaguely aware of its existence without having any notion of its course; now I learn that two of its arms link the Regent’s Canal to the Thames in a series of snaky, unruly bends just over 20 miles long. I need no further urging. The next morning I’m on the towpath at Paddington Basin, walking to the Thames by the longest possible route.

The Grand Union has none of the tame prettiness of the western reaches of the Regent’s. At first it’s tough, gritty, obviously industrial. It curls past windswept tower blocks, empty warehouses. Islands of rubbish outnumber waterbirds. There are regular signposts for walkers but no other accoutrements of leisured walking: no waterside pubs, no enticements to linger. London seems, resolutely, to turn its back on the canal.

And then, imperceptibly, the canal grows wilder. To my right stretches the majestic mossy ruin of Kensal Green cemetery; seen from the canal you’d never guess it was still in use, the tombstones crumbling under skeins of ivy and bramble. To my left is a gargantuan Tube depot, an unravelling braid of steel in a sea of gravel, crosshatched by wires.

A few miles on, a mobile drift of snow carpets the towpath and I blink in disbelief. The snow resolves itself into the largest flock of mute swans I’ve ever seen. I edge toward them cautiously – no cygnets in evidence, but I know how quickly swans can shift from regal aloofness to hissing and snapping. They show no inclination to move out of my way. If I try to go round them I’ll end up either in the canal or snagged in brambles. Holding my breath, I wade through a sea of swans and everything changes again. The canal spills out into fields punctuated by scrub, thickets of hawthorn, banks of water-loving willow and alder that gradually condense into low-lying woodland. According to the map I’m still in London. But I know by now that maps can be right and wrong at the same time.

By four o’clock the shadows are fading. The edges of the clouds glow pink. Despite my woollen gloves, my fingers ache. I’m hollow with hunger; there are no blackberries to scrump now, just last summer’s wizened black buttons. I curse my poor planning. How could I have thought I could cover 20 miles in a day in November? Admitting defeat, I turn off the canal path to the nearest Tube station.

Greenford is on the branch of the Central Line that goes to Ruislip, the one that I’ve never had any reason to take. I almost lose my way in the cookie-cutter drabness of the streets. There’s a Polish delicatessen across from the station but fantasies of sinking my teeth into a hunk of poppyseed roll or a slab of apple pie are instantly dashed by the CLOSED sign on the door.

The platform at Greenford is above ground. At the top of the stairs, I find myself standing under a vault of flame and pearl, mackerel clouds stained rose-gold drifting away from the setting sun. Despite cold and hunger part of me wants to stay here until the last light fades, but the temptation of the warm interior of the train is too much. As the doors slide shut behind me, I remember a snippet of wall text from the Canal Museum. I didn’t think to note down its author, but this wise person observed that the joining of the Regent’s Canal and the Grand Union Canal, and their links to the Thames, effectively turn London into an island. An island within an island.

With one last glance at the blazing sky, I let the train carry me inland, away from the canal and into the heart of the Island London that I have made my home.

***

Rachel Sloan an art historian, curator and writer. Born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, she has called the UK – first London, now Kent – home for most of her adult life. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Moxy, Stonecrop Review, STORGY, and Canopy: an anthology of writing for the Urban Tree Festival (2021). Her short stories have been Highly Commended in the 2020 Bridport Prize, runner-up in the 2021 Urban Tree Festival writing competition and longlisted (twice) in the 2021 Mslexia Short Story Competition. She was also longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize; 'Canal' is an excerpt from her longlisted book proposal, a nature memoir entitled Taking Root.