That day I had driven to a place near Kemsing in Kent to visit a small garage that specialised in maintaining and repairing prewar cars. I have one, inherited from my father, a Morris Eight. Before returning home I drove it around some of the lanes I had walked as a small boy on regular camping weekends with my family. In those days this same old Morris was our family car.
For some days after, I experienced an insistent need to revisit a particular half-hidden level crossing which I had passed that day and had stopped at briefly. It led, I recalled, across the railway line to a path into a quiet wood we had sometimes walked in a lifetime ago. There had been something numinous about that secluded wood that I had felt keenly as a child.
The only way I could revisit it now as it was then was in memory, of course. Out of my reminiscence the following story came to me. It is a fiction, or possibly auto-fiction.
Rereading it now it reveals a personal ghost. I called the story Into the Bluebell Wood. This is it:
Into the Bluebell Wood
I drove down from Putney into Kent and traced the lanes I’d walked as a child to the level crossing where I remembered watching for the steam trains with my father. The fond memory of the place I’d carried in me all these years was roughed up by the reality I found now.
That’s how it is, I know. The past has gone. But, despite that, I want to wheedle it out of the here and now. What that’s about I’m not ready to think through just now. I wanted, against he odds to make it into the bluebell wood. That meant crossing the railway, which I could still do. Back then there had been a wooden gate, a sign about looking and listening, and wooden planking to take you across the four shining rails. Now there was a lot of mess. A wordy notice, litter, a nasty metal gate on a fierce spring. In fact it seemed the crossing was there under sufferance. Because, for some obscure reason, it had to be. Unwelcoming. What I remember is the magic of the place then. First the whanging of the rails, the train’s whistle and the crescendo of noise like an orgasm, as the steamer came past and over you. Then the silence crowding into the vacancy of the last whooshing carriage. After a pause we would cross the rails, those wonderful streaks of steel that lay waiting for the next train, still and strong and necessary.
Then we would be in the wood. What was the name we gave it? Something like the Enchanted Wood? Because it seemed to be in another world altogether: always specially silent though echoing with birdsong and I recall the cuckoo that I heard there. Always calling from some greater distance than any other creature.
Something was still there. I was standing a few steps in from the line, down the short embankment, among the first trees. The undergrowth was thicker than I remembered it, the trees stouter; now there were dead boughs and leaning boles where I remember tall, slender trunks rising up into the light. But the silence was still there, though the map showed me that the motorway passed close along the further edge of the wood. I could hear the continuous rush of the traffic, but it was very faint. It seemed as if the wood’s silence was subduing it and it was, in some odd way, the deeper for it. No sign of the bluebells, though.
A few more steps in, along what had become only a faint trace of the path, I was brought to a halt by two rapid shotgun reports. Their echoes rattled among the trees, followed by a clamour from a population of outraged rooks. Wings whirring and little crashes in the undergrowth filled the air. Then quiet again.
I walked on, trying to recall where the path had led me all those years ago when as a child I had walked beside my father, dead now more than four decades.
I felt the disappointment growing the further I walked. Of course, these excursions I wanted to make were perverse. It was as if I believed that if I went where my memories had been made: that is, to the exact locations, I would step back into a past that had continued unchanged. ‘As if’, indeed, because of course I did not believe that in the least. The disappointment that was growing in me now was my way of confronting the futility of my search, but at the same time facing up to the terrible need I had to revisit my past. There was something there I had, as it were, left behind, like a treasured possession dropped from my pocket. So I kept going back over my steps.
My introspection was broken into by a high wailing sound. It was part distress, part anger, and was punctuated by a series of damn, damn, damns! At a turn in the path, one hand on her forehead, the other pressed into the small of her back, stood a woman who might have been in her late sixties like myself.
She caught sight of me and said, “Ah! Caught in the act!” She smiled a little sheepishly.
I said, “Hello. Is anything the matter?”
“Hello,” she replied, “Lovely day for a walk. Or would have been if I hadn’t dropped my phone.”
“Oh dear. Yes, that’s never good.”
“Small matter: large consequences, losing your mobile,” she said with a wry smile.
“Hard to rise above that sort of setback!”
“Indeed. Hence the bad language.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
“I’ve used worse!”
Her eyes struck me as full of intelligence, younger than her years. Her dark green beret over her iron grey hair struck me as somehow continental. I realised I wasn’t at all unhappy to have her break into my solitude.
“As you see, I’m on my way up the path which I imagine is the way you came. I could walk along with you and four eyes are better than two.”
“I thought you were going to say four eyes good, two eyes bad! Yes, that sounds very helpful.”
“Also,” I said, raising my finger, “an idea. Give me your number and I’ll call it, and we’ll maybe hear the ringtone.”
“ Now that is a very good idea. But like so many good ideas, not much use. I keep the thing on vibrate.”
“Too bad.”
“You tried.”
We set off. She looking to the left, I to the right. I smiled to myself at how suddenly I had found myself in the company of a congenial stranger quite out of the blue. I said,
“I remember this wood used to be full of bluebells.”
“Indeed it did. But you must have been here a very long time ago.”
“I was. As a very young boy, in fact.”
“There still are some bluebells, but it’s rather early for them. I don’t know why, but some time ago they started to disappear. There are just a few little patches of them now.”
“Are you local?” I asked.
“Yes. I’ve been here most of my life. You?”
“London. But as a youngster my parents brought us here most weekends.”
“I’m Lotte, by the way.”
“James. Nice to meet you, Lotte.”
I realised the ‘nice to meet you’ was not the formality it sounded.
“James, I wonder if we could stop and rest a moment. There’s where we could sit. Old age, I’m afraid and a wonky hip.”
We sat side by side two feet apart.
“You didn’t use your phone at all as you were coming along, I suppose?”
“No such luck. No terminus post quem as we lawyers used to like to say.”
We sat in what felt to me a comfortable silence for a while, but then Lotte said,
“It’s very kind of you to help me, James. But you really mustn’t let me hold you up. I expect I stand a fair chance of spotting the blessed phone on my own.”
“I’m in no hurry to be anywhere.” I said quickly, then bethought myself, “Mind you I shouldn’t impose myself on you.”
She chuckled. “Well, I was thinking how it might look like a very successful pick-up on my part, but it’s only now the idea has come into my head! Lottele, du bist a shande ! I can hear my father say, Little Lotte you are a disgrace! That was my father, from Berlin who came here but also never left Berlin.”
“You’re from Berlin?”
“I was born here, or I wouldn’t have been born at all, James.”
“Yes, yes, of course. I understand.”
“But London. You are out of your way here. I hope you didn’t come all this way just for the bluebells that aren’t here any more.”
“In a way I did just that. I’m sort of walking through my past. That time of life. I have memories of this place which these days are more, what can I say? more coloured, more textured, dearer than what I live day to day. I’m afraid I might be beginning to live in my past. Except,” I said feeling suddenly flat and empty, “except it doesn’t really let me in. Always now I’m looking in from the outside.”
“Oh dear, James, that sounds so sad. I should say ‘Cheer up, old fellow, shake out of it!’ Actually much of my life I would have said just that. That’s what England taught my family, or tried to. But, no, I don’t say that.”
We sat quietly, rather like old acquaintances, I felt, and it was a comfortable feeling. Lotte seemed in no hurry to move on. Around us the peculiar silence of the ancient woodland embroidered with the gentle bird sounds and the occasional shuffling in the undergrowth; beyond, in the other world, the motorway hummed.
I bestirred myself. “What brought you here? Just the walk?”
“With my hip, I rarely choose to walk much. Perhaps if I get it seen to I will, but there are complications. No, I’m on a visit to my past, too, as it happens. I’ll tell you, since we have become such old friends and may never see each other again…don’t answer that: you don’t have to.
“You have a family, children?” she then asked.
“I do. Three.”
“Let me guess, two of one and one of the other?”
“Exactly.” I laughed.
“I had only one. A boy. He lived for just fifteen years. He’d been ill and became partly deaf, and he was killed by a train. Here. Where you came into the woods. I’ve come here every year, well, every year I could, on the anniversary of his death, which is today. He played in these woods a lot. He found it easier to hear the birds because the background is so quiet. He was probably responsible for the poor bluebells, because he brought me armfuls, and we were very close.”
I had been looking straight ahead as she was talking. Now I glanced at her. She was looking straight too. Her eyes were dry, but I felt mine clouding with tears.
“So he never became old,” I heard myself say.
“He only had the beginnings of a life. I’ll never know what he would have become, and nor will he. But you, James…you…”
I turned to her. Strange how at that moment she seemed to know me. Losing her son had made her wise, and I could detect no bitterness as I knew I would have felt. But what could I know?
“You have had a life, James.”
“Yes, I have, I have, of course.”
“We have had a life.”
‘But,’ I wanted to say, ‘But what have I made of it? What have I become?’
“It’s what we make of ourselves, isn’t it?” I heard myself say.
“Well? … May I ask?”
“Oh, I have been mostly a teacher…You, I gather, a lawyer?”
“Yes, a lawyer, a judge and now, an environmentalist, amateur, that is. That’s what old ladies in the countryside do.,
“There it is,” she said.
“What?”
“My phone.”
She pointed. I brought it to her. She stood up rather stiffly.
“I don’t think I should go all the way back now. I’ll call it a day for this year. What about you?”
“I was planning to go to the end of the path. I don’t remember going all the way in the past.”
“You get to the motorway cutting. You come out onto a footbridge over it. Just a scrap of the poor old wood on the other side. Not very lovely, though I have sometimes stood on the bridge and been mesmerised by the traffic hurtling along.”
I thought I wouldn’t go on. There was only so much change I could risk, or my memories might be overlaid, washed out, even disappear. There, I thought, I’m still at it, still clinging…
We said goodbye, exchanged smiles, parted.
She turned and said, “Well, you’ll know where I plan to be a year from now, if I’m still on my pins!”
“Is it a date?” I said.
She chuckled and waved and went her way.
In my car parked near the level crossing I took out a flask of coffee and pulled out my ragged one-inch Ordnance Survey map. I’d had it since my teens: a map of the past. The wood had no motorway running through it. There too was the Pilgrim’s Way I had walked with my first love in my teens. We had taken the train on this very line, in fact, and set off, our heads full of Chaucer and romance. We’d slept in a barn. I recalled that, and not very much else, though I had a sense the initial glow of adventure and intimacy had been cooled by waking in a cold, dark hayloft, hungry, thirsty and itchy.
What, however, I did recall, after so long, is that I had lost on the way a fine, black 1920’s fountain pen with a beautiful gold nib, my grandfather had given me. I had taken it with me to write in my journal-cum-notebook. I had dropped it along the way, and the notion of going back to look for it had not crossed my mind. No question then of going back. Then all the good lay ahead. Only many years later had I remembered the lost fountain pen, and had, in a sense, metaphorically, that is, gone back to look for it. Would I ever be free of this backward look? This tug I felt, for the past?
I started the car. As I drove past the level crossing, I saw a family: mother, father, a little boy, a child in a buggy, waiting for a train to pass. The little boy, sitting up on his father’s shoulders, looked very excited.