A Return to Den Wood

A companion piece to Winter in Den Wood, published here on Elsewhere in January 2021.

By Ian Grosz: 

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers – Herman Hesse

In late May I returned to Den Wood. I had last been here in the winter when the trees had been bare and seemingly lifeless. The small tunnel of twisted, comingling branches at the entrance to the wood was now almost a full leafy canopy, but it had been a cold and wet May, and the wood was late in its blooming; the ferns not yet unfurled and many buds yet unbudded; the growth of the wood almost a month behind its usual blossoming. The gorse was in full flower though, and there was a greater variety of birdlife amongst the trees: bluetits and yellow hammers; finches and robins as well as the ground birds I’d seen before: the blackbirds and thrushes. The lower sections of the wood were full with song and I felt my mind begin to slow with each step, the earthiness of the air in my lungs as I walked in the marbled light of the first warm days we’d seen since the onset of spring. 

I had felt tense when I arrived. Both my wife and I had been bad tempered that morning, and I was still carrying the frustration and mild anger of our irritability. We’d been locked down together in our small home since I had lost my job the year before. We all need our own space from time-to-time, especially when under the added strain of uncertainty. Arriving at the woods, that space for me immediately opened up, but it can still be difficult to let go of our often, self-imposed time constraints; let life flow a little more freely. I walked too quickly along the path, headed for the grove of wych elms I’d last seen bare and ghoulish in the winter; headed single-mindedly to my intended destination with my camera as though I had some urgent appointment. I crossed the low bridge above the stream and forced myself to pause there, letting the trickling sounds of its meditative flow settle me a moment.

I’d been diagnosed with anxiety disorder the previous summer, and I had become more aware of its insidious nature; the way it can overtake me without my realising it; make me feel as though everything is urgent; everything time-critical and to be done quickly. As a pilot, a sense of time pressure and sometimes urgency had been an occupational hazard that had crept into the rest of my life, invading everything I did with its insistency. It had become so great I couldn’t go shopping or load the dishwasher without my chest tightening and my pulse quickening. Everything I did, I did furiously. Finally, I had developed vertigo, and my flying life was over. Now I needed to force myself to slow down; to let life flow a little just like this stream, and I stood on the bridge and allowed the sounds of the water to fill my consciousness.  It did the trick, because I now ambled up to the elms, taking my time and taking photographs along the way, noticing details; letting the green light of the wood bathe me in its soothing balm. 

It is now a well-known scientific fact that being amongst trees is good for us. Studies have shown that a walk in the woods reduces levels of cortisol and other harmful hormones in the body; lowers blood pressure and even boosts the body’s immune system through the release of phytoncides in aromatic compounds. A study carried out in Japan in 2016 on elderly patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, found that ‘forest bathing’ significantly reduced the production of chemicals that add to inflammation and stress. The exact mechanisms at play seem unclear, but perhaps it’s the way we simply slow down when in natural environments; allow our bodies and minds the space they crave.

I had seen the potential for life in the bare elms of the winter; the promise of the spring to come and the message it held for both my own situation and the world in the midst of a pandemic. Now they had made a healing canopy of patchwork green high overhead, the thin trace of blue sky and clouds appearing as though threaded through their branches; earth and sky connected by their reaching presence.  I stood beneath them for a long time, just breathing them in, and the stresses in my body, out.

Finally leaving the grove, I sat on a low knoll amongst beech and hazel trees.  Self-consciously at first, I closed my eyes to listen to the birdsong; the susurration of the leaves; and to better feel the earth under me. I stopped looking at myself from the outside in, and allowed myself to be. Dare I say it, for a moment perhaps, I felt almost part of things; connected by the trees around me. My heart rate slowed considerably; I know that. For once, I had let go of time; and time it seems, for a moment at least, had let go of me. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity.

Winter Spell: A walk through Heptonstall

By Anna Evans:

These grasses of light
Which think they are alone in the world
These stones of darkness
Which have a world to themselves
– Ted Hughes

In my hand a shard of ice. I trace the shape of its perimeter. A prism hastily frozen and troubled by wind and rain, trapping air and all the falling elements of the earth below. It has a solidity, a texture that hints at the colours of the land beyond its edges, of green and brown, opaque, and patterned. The mesmerizing quality of looking through where the rain froze into earth in crystals of reflected light. On its surface bright scatters of light like carvings, as though initialed or drawn in delicate lines of white silver.

It is cold when we walk here. The spell of winter freezes over ponds and parts of rivers. The ground is held silent, the saddened grass still, nothing moves. In the winter when the light is always fading. The icy cold brings respite from the valleys running down with rain, from eroded riverbanks, the wind that batters fragile skeleton trees. Each frozen puddle lies in trails from rising rivers. The muddy ground is packed in tightly, ready to move again.

From this ground to the dark stone of houses. A steep hill leading upwards to the village perched on a hill, notable for the preservation of its narrow lanes and cobbled streets, windswept and shaken by the elements. Walking through the lanes past stone cottages with slate roofs and chimneys, stable doors of different colours. In the centre of a little square of cobblestones and paving stands a tree with lights and decorations. The village inns are lantern-lit, inviting.

In these quiet times there are words and pictures to bring it closer. Instead of going there, I am picturing the journey to Heptonstall along the road that travels from Mytholmroyd to Todmorden. The familiar stone of the houses and winter trees, the shadows of the hills, seem to blend one into the other.

The poet found in this landscape a mythology of stone and water; the words to write about a time already vanishing, the remains of Elmet. The haze that hangs across the valleys, the mist of rain. In the smoke from the mills and chimneys of factories, the ceaseless damp that made its way into the stone, to turn it black. In the weavers cottages are the histories of the lives that passed through; the blackened walls that absorbed their voices. We walk along to the old church its ancient frames laid open, exposed against the sky, underfoot uneven tombstones. You wrote of the ruined frame of the old church as the ancient bones of a giant bird that landed.

In the graveyard, we find the headstone marking barely thirty years in letters plain and black. Contested little stone that makes its claim to the land, far from home or fanfare. On a hilltop resting place exposed, with its pantheon of wind and rain and harsh elements, among stones you walked. In the poet’s eye only stone remains, moving outwards, ever outwards from the stone of a grave. A singular line to the empty moors and dark skies, forlorn, firm, and resolute. Marking a life turned inwards. You picture dark swans, wings beating, take flight across the valley; not one but many now, their wings spread wide in shelter, over hills and beyond to the crest of an ocean. 

High crags and lines of trees look down to the emptiness of hills, bleak and featureless. The grass seems hardened and scrubbed, it waves and ripples in the wind, unyielding, made to survive the elements. Sometimes you perceive the landscape as nothingness, where everything feels unfixed and even the land is temporary, drowned out by wind.

Drawn in lines the brooding sky, the hanging cloud, the dark constant of the horizon. The moorland furrowed dark and light with grass and rock. Then the line of the crag, a crater curves through and cuts into the landscape precipitous. The dry-stone wall piled up as if taken from the side of the valley and abandoned here. 

In the shelter of the moors, in the winter spell, the light is always fading. Narrow roads lead upwards, disappearing suddenly up impossible ascents, to the villages and farmhouse on the hills; the drear sweep of cloud, or mist: of still. The cycle of rain to river to clouds to hills. Weavers cottages stand tall at the side of the valley and low dark terraces in rows. In the still of winter it is almost possible to sense the residual smoke hanging across the valleys from abandoned chimneys and textile mills. A place caught in time and held by its lines of canals, the stone that trickles down from hill into valley. 

Even a fragment of ice has an accidental quality. As I hold it in my hand attempting to give it a significance, it has begun to melt very slowly. Tiny amounts of water receding from its edges; the shape it has become already changing. I lay it down once more on the cold and frozen soil, already less than whole, so it can continue its existence with every other part of earth and water that lies along the ground I walk. From its edges, moving outwards. 

The landscape leaves its marks, draws its way through my veins, like the road running through tree-lined stretches, where trees tunnel over us. This is how I remember it, etched in, and layered with buildings. The dark river, which is high at this time of year, winds through Hebden Bridge. The town is lit by lights, winter blue. In my hand a shard of ice. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blog The Street Walks In. 

Winter in Den Wood

By Ian Grosz:

There is little light in northern Scotland in mid-winter, and as we entered a new lockdown, everything seemed to get that little bit darker. Like most people, the freedom of the daily walk once again took on new significance as our worlds shrank back. We had been living in our village for over ten years and felt we knew almost every inch of it, but looking online for new places we could explore locally, I happened on Den Wood. The only Woodland Trust managed site in the North East of Scotland, it is a humble patch of mixed ancient woodland stretching to just eighteen hectares, but hosts a diverse mix of trees including pine, oak, alder, ash, rowan, hawthorn, hazel, silver birch, lime and beech. A thriving habitat for insects, birds, foxes, red squirrels and roe deer, it also retains the almost extinct wych elm, on which the equally rare, white-letter hairstreak butterfly caterpillar relies. 

The wych elm has been decimated by Dutch elm disease, caused by the fungus Ophiostoma novo-ulmi and spread by the elm bark beetle. The fungus blocks the tree’s vascular system, causing wilt and eventual death. It first appeared in 1910, and quickly became an epidemic that spread across Europe, killing up to forty percent of the European elm population through the first half of the twentieth century. The disease abated by the 1940s, but a second epidemic beginning in the 1960s with a much more virulent outbreak was far more destructive. Arriving in the UK on imported elm logs from Canada, it killed tens of millions of trees, leaving the elm an endangered species on these islands. 

The Woodland Trust is the UK’s largest conservation organisation set up to restore and conserve Britain’s remaining ancient woodland, now covering just 2.4% of the landscape and fighting for survival against development, agriculture and the mono-cultures of forestry. Supporting a greater diversity of plants and animals, ancient woodland represents the living memory of our lost habitats and the visible reminder of our old relationships with nature, once characterised by sympathetic husbandry more in tune with the seasonal ebb and flow of the land and its life-cycles. We took care of the land and the land took care of us. Only now are we realising the benefits of smaller scale farming and the greater diversity it supports, the importance of mixed woodland management to our plant and animal ecologies. I was looking forward to experiencing Den Wood: what we would find there, how we might feel. 

We set out on a cold January Sunday, negotiating the ice-rink-like back roads. We eventually found the small car park that allows access to the wood, tucked away down a country lane amidst the dips and folds of the land. I wasn’t surprised that we’d missed it up to now. A notice board revealed a mix of short trails we could follow. The paths were muddy and icy, the trees bare, but still, it felt as though we were entering a special place as we made our way into the woodland through a narrow tunnel of comingling branches. 

The air was still. Our feet crunched noisily through the trail in the snow, the branches hanging over our heads and the weak morning sunlight beginning to brighten the slab grey of the sky. Though certainly a cold, bleak day, our spirits were immediately lifted as we trudged along the trail, here and there robins bobbing amongst the bare branches and blackbirds foraging amongst the still frozen leaf-litter. We met a couple walking their dog and stopped to chat when their young puppy jumped up on us. 

‘It’s a bit skitie today,’ the man said, meaning slippery. ‘But it’s a great place in the summer when the trees are full.’ 

He told us we could walk a circuit that would take us over a low bridge across a stream and then up onto a rise in the fields where we would get a good view of Bennachie, a popular hill which dominates the local landscape.

In a guide-book published in 1890, the locally born Scottish mountaineer and author Alexander McConnochie wrote that: 

There is no mountain in Aberdeenshire – or indeed in the north of Scotland – better known, or more visited that Bennachie. This is easily accounted for. Its graceful outline; its standing comparatively alone, and being thus discernible and prominent from all points; its magnificent mountain and lowland views to be obtained from its summits; and its easiness of access – all contribute to render Bennachie familiarly known even to those who are not given to mountain climbing. [1]  

This holds true as much today as it did in McConnochie’s time, and Bennachie remains, in many ways, the perfect mountain: accessible and easily climbed, yet giving that sense of elevation and escape that the high places bring. 

We thanked the couple and continued on along the track, soon finding the low bridge that forged the stream running through a shallow gulley, before climbing steeply over a knoll into more open ground filled with, surprisingly, newly flowering gorse. Eventually we climbed up into a grove of tall wych elm, beyond an old estate boundary wall covered in moss and lichens and slowly submerging into the land. Here the woods felt dead and still, almost sacred in its silence; the trees, with their dark silhouettes against the flat light of a cold sky, waiting to come back to life just as the world was. 

Staring up into the bare canopy of the elms with their ghoulish, finger-like branches knotted above us, it was difficult to imagine the woods in full bloom, filled with life and vibrancy. It spoke to us of the pause we all felt in life, somehow more poignant now in mid-winter than it had been in the summer. Then, many of us welcomed the change of pace in life, noticed the birds singing as though for the first time, appreciated our parks and gardens, felt that we were learning something of the importance of the simple things in life again. But now that stillness felt like purgatory, our lives shrinking with the light, the cold days and the inability to travel. Just at a time of year when we need human contact the most, it had been taken away. 

Yet these seemingly dead woods were only dormant, and would surely come to life again. It was simply a matter of time; something this little patch of ancient woodland held like sap in its branches: slow and viscous now, but soon to rise and flow freely. That first lockdown showed us that to be dormant for a time, to be still and to reflect, is a great gift, and the woods seemed to be reminding us of this.

As we crowned the low hill at the centre of the elms, we could see the distinctive shape of Bennachie rising up out of the landscape beyond the woodland boundary. Covered in snow, it seemed much larger than it normally appears, its boulder-strewn summits strung out like small volcanic archipelagos across its long back. Too far away for us to be able to travel to under the lockdown, it looked more inviting than ever; but we knew that it wasn’t going anywhere: that it would still be there, signalling home to us, whenever this virus had been beaten, and that like these woods, life would return in abundance. We turned to make our way back to the car, quiet but happy, and silently resolved to keep a sense of the promise of the dormant wych elms with us through the long months to come. 

***

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

Notes:

[1]  Alex Inkson McConnochie, Bennachie, (1890, repr., Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire Classics Series, James, G. Bisset, 1985) p. 10

These streets are life: Withington

Photo: Gursh Nijjar

By Andrew Edgeworth:

Borders are many things; physical, lines on a map, constitutional, binding. But most are psychological. There is a contrast where borders are concerned and while they may not all be manned by armed guards and Government backed, society ensures they remain in place.

In a springtime induced fugue I set out to clear my head, a walk through a neighbourhood I’d come to know over the past twelve months or so. Leaving Ballbrook Avenue I headed on to Palatine Road; the birthplace and home of that great Manchester institution, Factory Records. A blue plaque of commemoration is hidden from all but the most observant. You can still see the spectre of the irascible Tony Wilson on the squalid balcony, gazing down at you, fag in hand. 

In the grounds of one of the horrendously named apartment blocks, (Mottram Manor, Barry Court) the corpse of a cat lies in the undergrowth. The locus delicti unknown, but it had undoubtedly come to rest here in its final moments. In fairness there are worse places to call it a day than under a juniper bush. Had it been run over or poisoned? Who knows? It was not a time to tarry. 

It is here that the Christie hospital seeps into Didsbury gradually, like expanding foam. Every new piece of it is shinier and grander than the last. Progress is signposted by disinfected metals and floor to ceiling strip lights. At one of the many entrances are groups of smokers waiting for death on the pavement, their chemotherapy drips in tow.

The Christie is a non-smoking site

I struggle for a collective noun, the scene neither suburban nor hospice, presents a moral dilemma which forces me onwards. 

Adjacent to me, residents of an anonymous halfway house patrol the pavement in various states of unease. Cigarettes and alcohol hold sway.

Just beyond them the inmates of a nursing home stare on blankly from secure balconies. A vast complex with hourly blue light visits. 

St Cuthbert’s Church stands on the corner of Marriott Street and its foodbank is now just as much a source of salvation. Money is tight and time tighter.

CONFESSIONS: Saturdays: 11am-12pm

The penitent queue stretches back down Palatine Road every Monday lunchtime, and seems to get bigger by the week. In years gone by it would have made the front page of a national newspaper. Now we all put our heads down and shuffle past it on the opposite side of the road. 

Cross over the road my friend, ask anybody but the Government for a lend. 

But the faex populi are not welcome in Didsbury. The needy are an unwanted nuisance in the Tory version of Chorlton. They want their upcycled tables made from unwanted pallets. Just as long as there is still sufficient parking for Range Rovers outside of hipster brunch establishments. Withington is now a little too close for comfort. 

The crossroad with Wilmslow Road and Burton Road mark the unofficial, official start of Withington. An open air theme park for all walks of life, tightly crammed into a place that is different things to different people. Mamucium begins here!

The former White Lion pub is now a Sainsbury’s Local where kind students often sit on the ground outside with the local indigents sharing fags and sandwiches. Long-term cash machine tenants asking about that bizarre concept – spare change. Contactless payment now limits reward. 

The old Scala theatre has been demolished and replaced at the behest of Britannia Group and is now a vulgar set of flats complete with an out-of-place Costa coffee shop on the ground floor. 

Like all apartments they are mandatory luxury – you are no longer allowed, nice or mediocre apartments. No definition exists however. Opposite is yet another set of luxury apartments, balconies affording uneasy viewing for overpaying residents. A strategic reinventing of the local is underway. Old shopfronts have been replaced by bike rack balconies. In Didsbury blocks of apartments (never flats) are given names that couldn’t be further from reality; Alpine Court, Didsbury Gate, Larke Rise. Not so in Withington – they are only allowed a number.

On the main drag a commotion ensues at the bus stop by the now derelict municipal building. A hugely obese man is destroying his walking stick by repeatedly smashing it against the bus stop pole whilst shouting “BASTARD BUS DRIVER” at the top of his voice. The local pedestrians and motorists, despite being at very real risk of injury from flying pieces of cheap timber that are now flying around at all angles, remain oblivious to his protest. The 43 bus adds insult to injury by stopping at the pedestrian crossing a few yards further on. With no stick left he furiously shakes the handles of his wheeled walking frame. The obscenities continue.

Withington high street (Wilmslow Road) is much the same as many others that have suffered in recent years. There is not the spendthrift clientele of the South Manchester ‘villages’ to make it fashionable. The retail sector look is eclectic-poverty, trapped between eras and demography. An Eastern bloc supermarket peddles super strength lager, while charity shops appeal to the classier end of the market. Other businesses have been there since time immemorial and cling on like barnacles to a sea wreck. A laundrette that still runs on 50p pieces, the locksmiths with less life than a deadbolt.

The former bank is like all others in similar locations – derelict. Above the shop fronts, boarded up windows are strewn in graffiti, while at ground level slum dog estate agents prey on low income renters and those in full-time higher education.

Side alleys are not to be ventured down without purpose, the realm of backstreet MOT garages and taxi companies, a permanent haze of oil and cigarette smoke. It’s back-street traditional. Big men in dirty overalls. Big doors and big dogs.

And no ‘High Street’ is complete without boozers. The Victoria is your classic pub where anybody may be unwillingly plucked from the street at any given time to take part in karaoke. Leopard print and lipstick. Flat caps and vapes. Pints of cheap lager and even cheaper bitter. An eternal happy hour where nobody smiles. 

Albert Wilson’s is a more eccentric place altogether. A Sillitoesque corner bar with ceilings seemingly lowered by the weight of time and an uninviting doorway. Mysterious but not to the point of curiosity. 

Students and young professionals choose instead to seek out the safety of familiarity. A vegan café and a hipster bar with monosyllabic names where there appears to be a requirement to dress as if you’ve fallen through the sale rack in TK Maxx to be accepted (my generation of student was nowhere near as adventurous. We were just boring).

The street is now dividing slowly. To the East runs Egerton Crescent with its record store cum coffee-shop and post office. To the West is Copson Street. Another border is slowly materialising. 

The initial impression of Copson Street is one of pound shops in stiff competition, their wares taking over the pavement, an industrial scale operation for entire families each morning. The constant battle of tat outdoing tat. An entire oceans worth of non-recyclable plastic.  Plant pots, shopping trolleys and reusable food containers in a battle for passing trade attention.

More commotion. A man stood by the open door of a scaffolding flatbed truck energetically screams into a phone while inexplicably pointing to the directions he has taken to what is clearly the wrong address. 

I went right down there and then left back there…

I move on in exasperation, passed the mandatory mobile phone repair shop and bookmaker, complete with its FOBTs (fixed odds betting terminals) promising to ruin yet another life. 

The hub of the street in question however is undoubtedly the location of greasy spoon which sees the denizens of Withington flock daily for a bonne bouche. Come rain or shine the locals huddle at bolero style tables on the pavement, most of whom appear to the victims of widespread hypodontia. A sea of shipwrecked mouths pleading for a willing ear. 

At the various grocery shops care workers of African descent fill shopping trolleys and suitcases on wheels with groceries. Students count change in their hands with a lamentable decision to make over one avocado or a packet of rice. 

Behind the retail sector, Victorian terraces run parallel to the main thoroughfare, gated alleyways act as a honeypot for fly-tippers. Six to a house or split into quick-fix flats, MDF warrens that give fire safety officers sleepless nights.

Nearby, on Mauldeth Road West, a ghost-bike is chained to a lamppost in tribute to Harry Sievey. A local musician and son of Frank Sidebottom creator, Chris Sievey, who perished when his bicycle collided with a car in 2017. 

But these streets are life. Withington is real life, not the show home façade of its snooty neighbour which looks down its nose at it from behind electric gates.

Withington is slowly evolving. High house prices have meant that the people who once fled it are now buying up property. No matter how ugly the new facades of apartment buildings are, investment is there. Once thriving, it hopes to thrive again while Didsbury watches on uneasily.

***

Andrew Edgeworth is a former journalist who has been writing fiction since 2013. He was awarded the 2017 Origins flash fiction prize was runner up in the 2019 Splash Fiction competition. His work has also been published by Fairlight Books. He lives in Manchester with his dog, Orwell.

Nowhere else to go

By Fiona M Jones:

I’ve always loved moss, and I can’t explain why. In my view, every stone wall should be covered in moss, every wooden fence-post topped with it like a tiny wig, and every unfrequented roadway carpeted in vivid velvet-textured life. 

I like to see the crumbling brickwork of nineteenth-century coalworks swallowed up in a slow tsunami of mosses, and I like to watch old fallen trees turn green again in its grip. I like moss so much that when my children were little and they’d invent imaginary solar systems, they always made a green mossy planet for me—and they’d leave me there with a cup of tea while they waged their spaceship wars on intergalactic baddies. 

I’ve never understood why people wage war on moss, blasting it from their stonework and spraying their lawns to kill it. Moss isn’t a baddie. I feel a secret sense of triumph when I hear of city councils, desperate to solve their crisis-level air pollution, building concrete frames of mosses to purge their unclean air. They’ve finally discovered that moss knows what to do with diesel fumes as well as bare ground and fallen trees. 

And here’s my favourite place of moss, in these Coronavirus-shutdown times when Boris has told us we can only Walk From Home, and Once A Day; and the local farmers say Don’t Touch Our Gates. From Crossford village you follow Waggon Road south to the 985, then walk along to the right until the Charlestown exit. Just before the narrow bridge, you take an almost invisible footpath to the right, skirting a new plantation of baby trees still hidden inside their protective tubes. You find yourself quite suddenly above a rushing burn in the greenest valley you’ve seen for months—sheltered and damp and multi-hued in green where new spring growth has just begun to compete with the darker tones of ivy and the yellower greens of moss. 

Down the trodden path beside the noisy water, you come across the remains of stone buildings, ruined, rebuilt in brick and metalwork, ruined once more by time and creeping vegetation. A semi-cylindrical metal barn, the most recent building, stands open too, disused, roof sagging and ready to fall in a cascade of asbestos-laden rubble. Most of these constructions would have pertained to coal-mining. Across the burn, on the steeper side of the valley, three long-abandoned coal seams open onto the burn, mysterious dark entrances of sliding scree hung over with ivy from above. 

If you follow the burn downhill, you come out under a disused railway bridge, full of nesting birds, on to a flat muddy shore of driftwood, seaweed, flotsam and seabirds; and here, if you look in the right place, you can find multitudes of squirming, wormlike fossils in the crumbling mudstone above the tideline. 

Assuming you’re wearing sturdy clothes you can fight your way along the ivied, brambling railway until you come to lower Charlestown, then back around by road to make a longer walk. Because, after all, it’s springtime, the clouds are almost shining, and we’ve nowhere else to go. 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Berlin: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

On a midweek morning, in these strange and anxious days, I go for a walk. Sometimes it feels like all I can do. I cannot concentrate on the words I would like to read and write. My eyes ache for something other than the gentle glow of a backlit screen. The sun is shining and our pavements are wide. In Berlin it is springtime, our balcony full of the sound of bees delivered to a neighbour by mail order. I head out into the city.

My walk takes me south from where I live in Gesundbrunnen, crossing the route of the Berlin Wall into Mitte before following a familiar route through Rosenthaler Platz to Hackescher Markt and Museum Island. The first stretch feels reasonably normal (whatever that means right now), with kids on scooters, joggers and dog-walkers, and apartment dwellers escaping the inside for sunshine on a bench. Apart from the playgrounds being locked up, it feels like it always does.

Closer to the city centre, it is all a little more eerie. The hotels around Rosenthaler Platz are darkened. The pavements are empty. It is a reminder not only of current events, but in a strange way of the changes that took place over the past two decades in these neighbourhoods, ones that perhaps we did not notice while they were happening. Without the tourists, the hotel and hostel guests and the AirBnBers, the population is diminished. As I walk, I wonder how it would have looked on these streets had these contact restrictions and ban on tourist stays in the city happened twenty years before. 

In a recent essay for Literary Hub, the walker-writer Lauren Elkin explored the idea of what we remember when we walk the city, reflecting on the idea that “[w]e city-dwellers are recording devices, forever observing the micro-adjustments time works on our neighborhoods, noting what used to be where, making predictions about what will last and what won’t.” 

This is always true, I think – although sometimes we don’t notice as much as we should as the city changes around us – but as I walk through a Berlin that was stalled about a month ago and only just starting to move again, the question of what will last has become more urgent than ever before. Will these hotels ever reopen? The restaurants and bars, where chairs were lifted onto tables all those weeks ago and have not been down since? The clubs, where only ghosts dance, behind their heavy, locked doors?

And we think of the stories from the hospitals and care homes, we read the testimonies of the key workers and we see the numbers going up and up and we think not only of what will last but what we’ll have lost.  

We walk the city to remember. 

On Rosenthaler Straße I pass the place where we used to go drinking in the basement of a junkyard and the bar on the corner that never seemed to close. One is an adventure playground now, a place where my daughter spent afternoons during primary school. The other belongs to a hotel that was built on what was still an empty space when I first moved to Berlin. I walk down this street all the time, but usually I am going to or coming from somewhere, to meet my daughter from school or my partner after work. I don’t remember much then. But today I do.  

At Hackescher Markt I bump into a friend. We don’t hug and stand a distance apart as we talk about how everything is, at work and home. We ask about our respective partners, families and what our daughters make of it all. It feels like we are the only two people on this street, a place where normally crowds bottleneck at one of the few locations where Berlin actually feels like a proper city. We say goodbye without the normal gestures of farewell. We don’t say that we should try and meet up soon. That we should hang out sometime. It all feels awkward. Strange. 

Down by the river I watch as the sun catches tiny waves caused by the wind and realise that it is not only people who are mostly missing from the scene, but also the river boats. There are no cruises out on the water, no sightseeing to be done even though the weather is fine. The city by the river has a different sound now. Birds and distant traffic. The laughter of a little girl on her bicycle. What’s missing are the engines of the boats and the commentary in different languages that crackles through loudspeakers before drifting off on the breeze that blows in between the grand old museum buildings at the water’s edge.

My route home takes me close to where my partner and I first lived together and the playground by the tram tracks, as empty as on a freezing winter’s day. I walk along the route of the Berlin Wall, the no-man’s land emptier than I have ever seen it, apart from maybe the last time I was here during the anniversary celebrations, when it was blocked off to allow the safe arrival of politicians and other dignitaries, who did their own short stroll to remember, from the black car to the chapel.

There are not many here to remember today. Those people who are out and about are all moving. No-one lingers, to read the memorial boards or look at the photographs. At the corner of Bernauer Straße the bakery is open, and I pause on the pavement to let a young woman in a face mask, cup of coffee in each hand, cross in front of me. When we walk we make predictions of the future. Of what will last. No-one can say how long our city will be like this. What version of Berlin will emerge on the other side. We do not know how much loss and sadness we will have to deal with along the way. 

A few blocks from home, a small group of workmen are putting the finishing touches to a new bar that is currently not allowed to open. But still they paint the window frames and inside tables are being laid out and the first drinks have been added to the shelves behind the bar. The day that it opens will be some party, but we don’t know when that might possibly be. The only thing is certain, I think as I turn the last corner, is that the city that welcomes it will not be the same as it was before. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

A Quiet Edge of England

By Alex Gray

I’m in England for the first time in a couple of years. I had only planned to spend a few weeks here visiting family, but then the corona virus swept its way across Europe and my plans, like everyone else’s, changed.  

Suffolk, on the east coast of England, is only a couple of hours from London by train, but it feels a world away. Here you can find the last lingering remnants of that English idyll where village traditions follow the seasons. It’s a land of farms, scattered woodlands and slow WiFi. At different stages of my life its remoteness has felt like both a prison and a refuge. Now it’s a combination of both.  

During most of February and early March I spent hours sitting at my laptop, refreshing maps tracking the spread of the virus and calling friends in other parts of the world to compare the situation. Almost all of them were in the same predicament as me, stuck at home and waiting for normality to resume. I video called my girlfriend and she said, “It feels like I’m waiting for you to come back from a war.”  

I laughed and told her, “It’s a very boring war.” 

But for a lot of us it’s true that so far this ‘war’ has been defined by an underlying unease and anxiety as we brace for an invisible wave that we know is coming and have little control over.   

As March continues winter eases into spring and better weather. I take the dog for long walks across the open countryside and begin to rediscover this quiet edge of England. There’s not much breath-taking about the Suffolk landscape. There are no spectacular mountains or waterfalls. Instead the beauty here is mostly subtle and undemanding of attention, in a way that I realise makes me love it all the more. A herd of deer on a distant field. Ancient twisted oak trees creaking in the wind. Waves of the North Sea lapping softly against the beaches. 

The ghostly shape of a barn owl at dusk. A gentle wildness. 

My parents get the local newspaper each morning and between the headlines about the coronavirus there are smaller articles, often about Suffolk’s vanishing coastline. The county has always been badly effected by coastal erosion and over centuries in certain places has literally disappeared into the sea.  

During my newly found free time I visit some of these places, defined by what has is no longer there. Dunwich, which in the Middle Ages was a bustling international port, is now a small village with a few ruins of an abbey on the cliffs. The subject of folktales and songs:  

“By the lost town of Dunwich 

The shore was washed away 

They say you hear the church bells still 

As they toll beneath the waves” 

The coast at Covehithe also has one of the highest rates of erosion in the whole of the UK. Fallen trees scatter the beach, one road simply drops away from the cliffs, and only a cluster of houses remain. But it’s also a great spot to walk and look for sea glass, twinkling like gem stones on the beach.  

The church here is another oddity. It sits within the ruined walls of a larger medieval church. Walking around this half destroyed structure, and with the sound of the nearby sea in my ears, I difficult not to think about the impermanence of our ways of living. Maybe it’s because everything suddenly seems so fragile.   

And perhaps for the first time I feel very lucky to have this place at all, even if it won’t be here forever. What I’m feeling is probably familiar to anyone like me who has grown up knowing only one home. A place to return to, and keep returning, to gather thoughts, and take shelter in troubling times.  

***

Alex Gray is a writer and teacher of English literature from Suffolk, England. He is a former sub-editor of 52 Insights Magazine and holds an MA in Creative Writing. Since 2017 he has been based in Hanoi, Vietnam. His most recent writing focuses on travel and issues affecting indigenous communities. Website.

Dortmund: A winter diary

By Paul Scraton:

In the bowels of Dortmund station I look at a map of the city and try to get a sense of this place I’ve arrived in for the first time. The orientation points are limited by a lack of natural landmarks, like a river or a coastline, and my own ignorance. There’s a harbour, a river port through which much of the coal and steel that made this city once moved. There’s a ring road where the city walls once stood, surrounding what the historic old town that was very much destroyed by the bombing raids of the Second World War. And there is the Westfalenstadion, now named for a financial services company, home to a football club who have taken the name of Dortmund around the world and whose stickers in distinctive black and yellow occupy every lamppost, bus shelter and abandoned shop front in the city.

Our hotel is in the Nordstadt, divided from the city centre by the railway lines that function in the way that rivers do in other cities. Instead of bridges, there are long and dark tunnels underneath the tracks, giving each side a distinct feeling of being over here compared to over there. I am in the city for a panel discussion on the subject of borders at the Dortmunder U, an impressive arts space that occupies the giant brick building that was once a brewery. It is on the other side of the tracks from the hotel, and it feels fitting somehow that we have to cross beneath the tunnel to reach it, the lonely walk beneath the tracks as a reminder that borders and boundaries can take different forms in different places.

But we have some time before we need to make that journey, and so we walk out from the hotel in search of the harbour. From the docks at Dortmund it is a 269-kilometre journey along the Dortmund-Ems Canal to reach the North Sea. Unlike many canals, obsolete soon after they were built thanks to the coming of the railway, the Dortmund-Ems waterway was dug out of the western German soil in the 1890s precisely to alleviate the demand on the railway network, such was the freight transportation needs of the industrial city and the surrounding area. It helped turn the Port of Dortmund into one of the largest inland ports in Europe, with eleven kilometres of piers and one which, despite a decline since a peak in the 1970s, continues to move some three million tonnes of goods a year.

As we follow streets between the docks, past abandoned warehouses and coach parks for vehicles with number plates from Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo, it reminds me of Liverpool and Rostock, of Gdansk and Belfast, with that similar feel of port areas that still have enough cranes and shipping containers to suggest that work is being done but a distinct lack of people. And in the spaces where once they might have worked, other businesses have moved in. A bicycle parts wholesalers. A club venue with a view over the water and no neighbours to disturb. A portacabin and patch of wasteland behind a high fence, a place to park your caravan or camper van over the winter. Cranes move, high above on the other side of the street at the Container Terminal. The port functions. 

From beside the Container Terminal the road rises up, past the ornate old harbour administration building, to lead us back towards the Nordstadt and our hotel. From the bridge we can see across the port and over towards the city centre, the huge U atop the former brewery clearly visible. We have started to find our orientation points. 

The next morning, we move once more beneath the railway tracks to walk through the pedestrian area of the city centre, almost entirely rebuilt during the West German economic miracle to replace the medieval core that had been blown to pieces during the bombing raids. With its mix of mid- to late-twentieth century shop fronts it reminds me not only of other city centres I’ve passed through in this part of the world, but also those of my childhood, of parts of Manchester or Liverpool visited on Saturday afternoon shopping trips. Can you choose twin cities based on a feeling? Despite a light drizzle, the streets are busy, with shoppers and those who, judging by their hats, scarves and shirts that peak out from beneath heavy winter jackets, are getting ready for tonight’s game. I can’t help but feel that the fans of Liverpool FC and the two Manchester clubs who, in recent years, have come to Dortmund to support their team, would also have also found much to remind them of home. 

Back at the Dortmunder U we take an elevator to the very top floor and step out onto a roof terrace beneath the giant letter that is visible from across the city and look down on the ring road and the city centre and its collection of glass and steel office blocks that speak to the new industries that have replaced the old. There’s no interest here in managed decline. I can see the television tower and the railway tracks, and the cranes of the harbour. Over there, in the gloom, the groundskeeper will be putting the final touches to his Champions League stage set. I have been in the city for less than twenty-four hours, and I’m still ignorant of Dortmund, of what the city is and what it means to the people that live here. But I also know that when I return to the station and look at the map, I’ll already have a better sense of what I’m looking at than I did yesterday.

It’s a start. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).