Home
Leaves rain golden, yellow, brown on the trodden path. To the left, a small-town football pitch. Seagulls where there is no sea. On the right a field of frilly green fronds, planted in rows. The Icknield Way is an ancient trackway which runs from Norfolk to Wiltshire. My walk starts at the approximate middle, two minutes from the house I am renting. The trackway, now a busy main road, cuts a boundary between the suburban and the rural, the portal an aluminium lovers’ gate. A satisfying clunk, and I am through to the other side. Fork-tailed red kite hovers in baby blue sky. Sweeps of cloud brush white-grey.
I moved to this small town on the edge of the Chilterns ten months ago. I moved again three years before that and again one year before that. Physical displacement has taught me to find a sense of home that is not house-based or fixed in location. At times I look to the external for affirmation, and finding none in my house, or in town, I reach for nature. I find what I need nestled in pockets of faded chamomile flowers, or underfoot in the flint-mud floor.
The weather is cuspy. Cool enough for a cardigan, warm enough to dispense with a coat. Leaving the hum of traffic behind me, I take a path bordered by the football pitch on one side and the field on the other. Curved hips of hills rise in mid distance. A second lovers’ gate tings behind me. Bleached grasses either side, I continue through a tunnel-like path. A solo pink bloom of summer clover. Then, between hedgerow a wide gateway opens into the next field, and I step through as if onto a stage. Field ploughed, clods of earth spill onto path. Bare, picked-over blackberry bushes. Wind catches my ear and the side of my face. A single cow lows in the distance. Blackbirds twitter. Collared doves pick over the open earth until disturbed by my presence, they flap.
Reaching the edge of the field, uneven steps reach down to a road. Sloes, small black balls of bitterness, butt the handrail. I take the bush lined road and note ‘fluffy stuff’. I find out later it is Old Man’s Beard. On the ground, cow parsley throws its last spray of tiny flowers. Coming to a curved bridge, I stop. The canal stretches either side, dark green today, dotted with gossamer leaves. Once the circulatory system for commerce, it is now the sanctuary of boat dwellers and holiday makers. The idea of a haven on the canal teases me from time to time, but like the too-young man in the pub, it’s an idle flirtation.
Steps down, rough wooden plinths, narrow gritty path. Plantain, stems brown, tall, nestle in damp grass at the edge. Returning to the world now: a pumping station. White swans preening under a pear tree, a flour mill. The hiss, burr, whirr of machinery. A copper carpet of beech leaves sees me onto the road, back to a civilisation I never really left, with its carved canals and cultivated fields. Taking the road back to the Icknield Way, I return to my house, imbued now with a sense of home for having been away.
