Inches

by Mellisa Pascale:

I’ve lived here long enough to know that for a forty-minute walk, I should start northeast on Henry Avenue. In July, the full green boughs of the sidewalk trees reach out to each other like hands, shading ramblers from the searing afternoon sun. I march past the brick rowhomes, past the single stone houses, past the empty university grounds, and onto Henry Avenue Bridge. All the while, cars rumble by in noisy vrooms. 

After the bridge, a flat rock to the right marks the start of a narrow trail leading into Wissahickon, a 2,000-acre park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Almost as soon as I enter the woodland, a sound like crackling fire draws my eyes up and to the left. A deer lopes away, her tail flashing white as she’s swallowed by thick green brush. I imagine her fleeing deeper into Wissahickon, perhaps north through the long march of trees to golden Andorra Meadow, or maybe east down the valley to the rocky banks of the rushing creek, which is where I’m headed.

As Henry Avenue recedes behind me, the hiss of cars is gradually exchanged for the swish of leaves and the gossip of birds. In another life, it was birds, not deer, that I paused to admire: a fantail’s splayed feathers winking from a silver beech branch, or a kea’s emerald wings soaring in shadowy vales, the varied avian life that had ruled New Zealand’s gnarled terrain in whirrs and cries. But that’s another story. How to summarize New Zealand here, so you’ll understand? I don’t even know what verb to use. Traveling seems inaccurate, since the highlight of my trip was the seven weeks spent not traveling at all but hiding out with books and boots in Te Anau, a lakeside town on the edge of Fiordland National Park. Backpacking has two meanings: it could indicate that I bought an expensive oversize pack to go tramping in the backcountry or that I bought an expensive oversize pack to go from one hostel to another, and each of those is somewhat true but also somewhat imprecise. And wandering isn’t the right word either, for I’m the kind of person who likes to know where she’s going. Suffice it to say that I was once in New Zealand for a longish spell and that every walk in Wissahickon calls forth fragmented memories of heavy boots, quiet mornings out the hostel door, and walking and walking under the trill of birdsong, walking and walking routes with markers.

In Wissahickon, my feet know the way down the valley to the creek. 

A level dirt path, the undergrowth tickling my ankles as I pass the place where the deer once stood. Right, the trail dips and smooths out where mountain bikers usually storm through, but there’s no one today. Left, and my feet think a little harder as rocks and roots pock the descending terrain. A runner passes me, and then I almost catch up to her, my sneakers well-worn by this puzzle of a path. The lower we descend into the gorge, the louder the sound of rumbling water.

Eventually, I step onto Forbidden Drive, a wide gravel track following Wissahickon Creek. Together, track and creek bisect the long park, ribboning from the city limits in the north down to Philadelphia’s Wissahickon neighborhood on the banks of the Schuylkill River. Wissahickon is derived from a Lenape word meaning “catfish creek.” The catfish population has declined, but trout, bass, and sunfish flit through the cool, muddy waters, shaded by oak trees and American beeches. Crossing a stone bridge, I take a second dirt trail ascending the other side of the valley. Sunny tendrils stream through the trees, alighting flecks of schist embedded in the ground. All around, birds warble in the brush and branches. Wissahickon is home to buntings and thrushes, ducks and herons, woodpeckers and cardinals, over two hundred species of birds. I try not to picture myself somewhere else. This park could take my heart if I would let it.  

After coming home from New Zealand, Wissahickon was where I went to prove myself. I would spend three hours on the trails, pretending I was still the person who’d spent eight hours on her first big peak, three days on her longest backcountry tramp. Or I would spend three hours in Wissahickon pretending I was no longer the person who, prior to New Zealand, had considered a twenty-minute walk to be an extravagant lunch break from the office. Dimensions had always been everything: How long did I have to work to save enough money to travel? How many months would I spend in New Zealand? How far could I go when I got there? And when I came home, how much walking was required to keep up with the habits I’d built while away? Walking had been a vessel for connection, and the more I walked, through green farmland or over a mountain spine, the stronger my bond with the land had become, the stronger I had become. Now that I’m back, exploring Wissahickon, I can’t shake the feeling that if I stop walking I’ll float away.

Further north in the park, there’s a bridge that I used to cross on my three-hour rambles—Fingerspan, a covered, steel structure dotted with holes. From inside, I loved how Wissahickon became a mosaic of greens and bronze and blue-sky pieces wrapping around my tired body. “When I think of a bridge,” said Fingerspan’s architect Jody Pinto, from a nearby information placard, “I think of a reaching, a touching, a connection.” True to this vision, the narrow bridge bent over the gap like an appendage sprouting from one side and digging its nails into the other. Whether lingering inside Fingerspan or observing it from without, I could think of nothing but the strange bridge, and where I was.  

But it’s been a while since I’ve felt like doing that particular walk. My lungs are shabby, neglected, by the time this end of the trail spits me out at Rittenhouse Town, remnants of a seventeenth-century paper mill village. The woods at my back, ahead is an old stone barn and creaky picnic tables. Smaller buildings, more Rittenhouse relics, are visible through an outcrop of trees. Everything is still and quiet. Last week, I sat down to read at one of the picnic tables. Mosquitos had gnawed my bare limbs as sweat dripped down my back from the humid summer evening. I’d propped my elbows up and held a book in front of my face. Suddenly, my eyes had caught a fragment of a twig moving across the table’s grey wooden slats. It had scrunched itself up in an arc and then released its body into a flat line. Not a twig. The inchworm was just long enough to cross the gaps between boards, and he performed his strange glissade in an unbroken rhythm across the table. Anytime he hovered in his bent form, he looked like a miniature Fingerspan Bridge. 

Today, taking a seat at the same picnic table and facing out, I entertain the unlikely idea that I’ll see the inchworm again. The mosquitos are absent, and a steady gust breathes cool relief into the stuffy summer afternoon. I can still picture the inchworm’s peculiar gait: scrunch, release, scrunch. Only ever going as far as the length of his body. And I wonder if every time I reach for something, I’m going the same distance that I always do, whether it’s New Zealand or Wissahickon, three hours or forty minutes, the deer’s haphazard flight or a worn route. At the picnic table, I scrunch up my legs and swing them between the bench and the tabletop. I pull out another book. I don’t see the inchworm again. 

***

Mellisa Pascale’s essays and travel guides have been published by TulipTree Review, City Creatures Blog, Passion Passport, Matador Network, and other publications. She holds an M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and will soon begin studying for her M. Phil. in Medieval Language and Literature at Trinity College Dublin. She is working on a travel memoir. Find her at mellisapascale.com

Plum Cove

By Emma Johnson Tarp:

The beach is smaller than I remember and it’s high tide and the water is so blue it stings my eyes, the back of my nose, the back of my throat and there, I see them:

Three boys climbing out on the big rock, their hands finding the same cracks, cracks they know on instinct, like breathing, from summers and summers of swimming-climbing-jumping, summers of returning here just as I return here now but not like that at all because I don’t know those cracks and it stings in my eyes and nose and throat that I don’t and look—

They pull their small, hard bodies up and out of the seaweed,

One tall and dark, too big for his trunks—

One compact, a square all-over—

One slight with a shock of blonde hair that glows against his sun-brown skin—

And they jump into the water and they don’t come back up 

Until 30 years later when they return with me for the first time and we will wade through the seaweed together, my blue-white skin on edge from it all and their skin now lined, lungs lined, with sand and sun from endless summers right here and one that never really did end at Desert Shield and they will find the cracks— cracks they know on instinct, like breathing— and they will stare at their hands like they are magical instruments then lay them on me, pulling me up to join them.

***

Emma Johnson Tarp writes stories about devotion, bodies, and liminal space. She studied literature and religion at William & Mary and lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two rebel-hearted cats.

Americana – A trilogy by Shannon Finck

AMERICANA

Pulling strands of hair from my eyes,
I lose my dog down the beach
after gulls.

I watch her until she mottles
the rocks, small plants, 
hazy things.

My dad taught me to play the guitar
with America songs.
America songs are all I know.

Yet, here I am on the coast of California,
and America is just the horse 
with no name I rode in on.

I love this dog, who is 
always running away from me—
a sandy flightless freebird.

I’m writing a poem about you,
I yell to her—the speck of her,
the blur of her, her feet on the wing.

Later, at the foot of the bed,
in a dog dream,
she runs in place.

*

INVASIVE SPECIES

Despicable featherless bipeds, we roost 
under a threadbare sheet, 
tarred together by behind-knee sweat.
Spliffed, suntanned, we count 
each long day left of July, 
spending it, getting lucky
in a Pasadena pool house—
its owner, a slammer of screendoors, 
host to transcendental meditation parties
attended in pitch dark.
You say you saw David Lynch. 
I believe you. It’s pitch dark
as lakes in La Brea.
We squawk through the night— 
in the morning, the parrots talk to us.
The stalwart dachshund howls
at flowers by the mailboxes that, too, have mouths.
Something is said about the noise. 

I thought my bones were hollow
and yours were adamantium— 
a marvel, such mass—
but when we careen 
up HWY 1 in the superbloom,
you scream into sunlight,
and I find I have taken root
in the cane cholla with the 
trashed star map.

*

APPULSE

The robin has flung full
pectus and ventrum
into the window thrice.
It stands on the porch rail
not stunned, determined,
yellow legs like stalks of foxtail barley
swaying with the Diablos
as if made of wildfire. 

It will try again—
the avian arrhythmia
in its sunset breast,
wills the glass to give.
I want to think I know
what unknowable magnetism
causes it to see and not see
and move anyway.
But a bird’s heart
is its own ambit.

When your elbow
bumps the window
where you sit close,
I search the ground for red feathers,
for the body wrenched
like a stiff pocketknife.
It was only me, you say, standing—
only me, clumsy—
and I pitch into your arms, exhaling dryly
into the ridges and canyons,
the firebreaks of your ribcage.
The sky opens, and I fly.

***
Shannon Finck is a lecturer of English at Georgia State University. She earned her Ph.D. in transatlantic modernism with a secondary emphasis in global postmodern and contemporary literatures in 2014. She also holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and narrative poetry from Georgia College (GCSU) in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, GA. Her critical and creative work appear in such journals as ASAP/J, Angelaki, Miranda, a/b: Autobiography Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Journal of Modern Literature, SWWIM, Willawaw, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, and FUGUE. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for the independent literary quarterly, Birdcoat, and is Co-Founder of Ghost Peach Press.

Crookes

By Sarah Alwin:

A gentle tug of nostalgia helps me up the hill to Crookes, a place I have not been for about fifteen years despite still only living less than two miles away. I stride up purposefully, eyes stinging from the robust breeze and high pollen count, camera at the ready to contain those recalcitrant memories. Sheffield is a city of seven hills, like Rome, as everyone says gleefully, citing strong calf muscles as a prerequisite or maybe even benefit of settling here.

Today, artisan coffee shops like Whaletown Coffee Co. that would sit quite comfortably in Notting Hill instead jostle by the Londis convenience and Barnardo’s charity shop. I had forgotten how much my weeks had been punctuated by the pub and I had really forgotten quite how many of them there actually were in the short walk from Broomhill to Crookes. All the pubs now serve food. This would have been inconceivable, sacrilegious even, when I lived here in 1998. They all retain their original names: The Grindstone, The Ball, The Punchbowl, and The Noah’s Ark; but have a quietly different aesthetic. Outside The Ball, hungover hipsters tuck into avocado and poached egg crumpets. I remember taking over pitchers of lager from The Ball to the unlicensed Indian Chef across the road on a Friday night, careful not to slosh any over the zebra crossing.

It is when I turn onto Loxley View Road that I remember moving in at number 9 in July 1998, having just graduated and about to embark on a PGCE. I was earnest and a deep believer in my own edginess, and together with my housemate (also confusingly named Sarah – at one time it was a fashionable one) constructed a self-consciously adult domestic formula at Loxley View. In reality we were simply play acting.

Over the summer I turned 21 and four awkward boys moved into number 7. Sarah announced with disgust one afternoon that one of them had moved in early and wanted to get to know us. She said this as if he’d been a fungal infection. I was of course smitten with them. I had a battered Citroen AX and gave them lifts to work and to town in between my school placements, and the six of us eventually fell into comfortable, genial companionship, revolving around the pub in the main. The boys used to distinguish between me and the other Sarah by calling me Chicken. Ironically this was because they were too chicken to give her the nickname, probably sensing that underneath it all she thought they were fungal. One of the lads was a little feral, that much was true. But whenever his dad came to visit he would put on a shirt and tie, which we all found miserable.

Over the road from us, on the other corner of Loxley View, was an Indian and Bangladeshi restaurant called Jaflong. The lads next door were frequent visitors, as were our two cats. Today Jaflong is in bigger premises further down Crookes, and its original site looks worse for wear. 

I take this photograph to corroborate my presence there today. I kind of like the washing machine in there next to the rubble and my almost ghostly reflected squint into the murk.

In reality, my time at Loxley View Road was sometimes extremely painful. That winter I embarked on a difficult relationship with a much older, already attached man. It was part of that carefully constructed growing up that I had prepared for myself: ostensibly marginal in a nonchalant way but in reality quite difficult to navigate and more of a cliché than I could admit to myself.

Some afternoons I would walk to the end of Loxley View and look out over the view it was named for. 

Some nights I would go there if I couldn’t sleep, staring into the twinkle of lives across the valley. The view there today is as stunning and the stiff breeze throws up this crow who seems to fit in well with my walk. I am still moved by this beauty. It is so simple and so true.

I still know one of the boys next door though he doesn’t call me Chicken any more. We don’t see each other too often but he is steadfast and good, and I am glad that he got to know us. It was camaraderie and curry that got me through that time, that chastened me out of wanting to grow up sophisticated so fast. It was this vista too that stilled me and took me back to myself. 

***
Sarah Alwin is a special needs teacher and PhD researcher working on domestic space in South East Asian literature. She is half Dutch and half Singaporean and has lived in Sheffield for 27 years. She co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, on a community radio station, Sheffield Live 93.2FM.

A time of hopeful anticipation

By Ruth Bradshaw:

The park is deserted at this hour, the café closed and the playground empty. The dog walkers and joggers are still sleeping. It is that time after the coldest, darkest part of the night has passed but before the sun has risen. A faint glimmer appears on the horizon and my nervousness at being out alone in the unpeopled early morning is gradually replaced by a sense of anticipation. The darkness will soon be gone. Dawn is here and the sunrise I’ve come to see will not be far behind it.

The only sign of human life is the faint sound of distant traffic and even that recedes when I reach the top of the hill where there is more tree cover. Here it is tranquil but still far from silent. The birds make this space their own with a rush of notes that feels more of a competition than a chorus and, as the light slowly increases, they grow louder still. It is impossible for my inexpert ear to distinguish most of the individual voices, but I recognise blackbirds and robins and hear the occasional cawing of crows accompanied by the shaken cloth sound of their wings flapping. I can only guess at the rest, but I decide that today it matters not what all these birds are, only that there are so many of them singing. 

As it grows bright enough for me to make out traces of the hilly fields and meadows which the park replaced, it is not difficult to imagine that a line of taller trees could mark an ancient boundary. I walk over and lean back against the nearest of these with my eyes closed. It is a mature lime tree, its bark ridged and furrowed with age and experience. The sound of the wind in its leaves is so like gentle rainfall on dry ground that when I open my eyes, I expect to see a soft rain falling.

At this time of half-light, half-night, nothing is quite as it first appears, and the past feels closer. It is the time before this landscape was farmland that I can sense most strongly. In the twilight it is possible to replace the parkland limes and chestnuts with the woods of coppiced oak and hornbeam that covered this part of London for centuries. I think of the sights, sounds and smells of that woodland - the calls of turtle doves and cuckoos, the rich scent of wild garlic, the orchids and helleborines growing among a multitude of other plants - all long since lost to this place.

If I were a visitor in one of those earlier centuries, it would have to be necessity rather than curiosity that brought me here at this hour, something that made me desperate enough to risk the dangers of the woods at night. For even after the wolves, bears and lynx were gone, there was still the threat of robbery or worse. Perhaps I am here to search frantically for firewood to heat food for an ailing relative? Or maybe it’s to find the herbs I need to cure that relative using a knowledge of plants taught me by my mother just as she learnt it from hers. I’m sure I would know that when I find the right plants, I should take only as much as is needed so plenty are left to grow for future use. But would I stop for a moment to appreciate the wildflowers and birdsong on this fine Spring morning? Or would this experience be so commonplace and my fear so great that I would hurry home without paying them any attention? 

The high-pitched screech of a ring-necked parakeet returns me to the 21st century. I am thankful that my survival is no longer dependent on what I can gather from the woods. But I am sad too that I do not have the knowledge needed to do this anyway and sadder still that I will probably never experience a springtime woodland with quite such a variety of sound and beauty as that earlier visitor. My greatest sadness is that I live in a time and a society whose untamed desires have so changed the world, that the future of many species, including my own, is now uncertain. Even now we understand the damage we are doing to the world we don’t seem to be capable of taking only what we need. We must always have more. 

As the light grows, I think of what the future holds for this area. This is not as easy as picturing its past. Not because I cannot guess the impacts of the storms and droughts that already arrive with increasing frequency but because it is too painful to contemplate the uprooted trees and withered plants they will leave in their wake. I know I cannot ignore those threats but, as a new day starts, I focus instead on how green and vibrant the horse chestnut leaves look when backlit by the rising sun. 

***

Ruth Bradshaw works in environmental policy and has been a regular conservation volunteer for over a decade. She is currently writing a book about the value of urban wildlife which draws on both her professional expertise and her volunteering experiences. Her essay ‘Stories of Co-existence’ was recently shortlisted for the Future Places Prize and her creative non-fiction has also been published in a variety of websites and journals including Canary LitMag, The Clearing and The Selkie. When not writing or working, she can often be found in the woods near her home in South London and occasionally on twitter @ruthc_b

Under the Over

By Alex Rankin:

There is no right way to go at this end of the harbour. No signs, no barriers and no lattes. It’s as close to abandoned as you can get without being out of use.  

Activity is everywhere, though less conspicuous than upriver; control rooms squashed beneath the overpass, a maintenance yard and of course the relentless traffic. People leave their mark here too. The base of the swing bridge is splattered in a multi-coloured crime scene and evidence of guerilla gardening is everywhere in the form of troughs and plant pots. 

Under the overpass, pillars uphold the status quo. They’re painted in bright colours, another human intervention and the sunlight adds its own touch, carving up the shadows with long arcs.  

I follow the snake of concrete to a point where two roads merge. There are life-size Lego blocks here that look like they’ve been airlifted straight from a fabrication plant. I wonder what they might be used for, BMX or parkour or maybe builders like to come and sit on them on their day off. A ramp made from broken slabs tells me there must be wheels involved.

Back across the lock is a land of mud and rust. Old landing stations quietly decay and thick tufts of grass hang down over primordial mudslides. It’s easy to lose track of time here, because time doesn’t exist. For the time being, at least. Somewhere else in the city, councillors huddle over prized plans for this area, passing them along the conveyor belt of authorisation.

On my way back, I find a bench encrusted with lichen. It’s surrounded by ancient lines of moss and scrub and I wonder if you were to sit there long enough, would it transport you back to a time when nature ruled and things were a little simpler?  

***

Alex Rankin is a writer from Bristol, UK. He has always had a passion for writing fiction, but ended up studying journalism. He now writes a mix of fiction and nonfiction (with a sprinkling of poetry). Previous work has appeared in The Drabble, A Thin Slice of Anxiety and The Hyacinth Review.

Outer space in Währinger Strasse

By Pippa Goldschmidt:

It was a weekend of dissonances. I’d gone to Vienna to talk about outer space at a symposium held in an arts centre called WUK; a complex of dilapidated brick buildings which started life in 1855 as a railway locomotive factory. This soot-stained evidence of Vienna’s industrial past contrasted sharply with the fancy Baroque palaces for which the city is famous, their gold-and-white decoration gleaming in the early March sunshine.

Amongst the topics for discussion at the symposium was the Outer Space Treaty, a utopian attempt by the United Nations in 1967 to declare that no nation state can stake a claim to any object in ‘outer space’ – wherever that may be exactly, the treaty avoids having to define its location. But in the decades that have passed since it was originally drafted and ratified, many companies have decided they want to stake a claim to objects in outer space, such as asteroids, in order to mine them for metals which are rare on Earth. The symposium agreed that outer space should be accessible to all, and not colonised for the purposes of making rich people even richer and we shared a hope that the future of space exploration might be profoundly different from its past; more egalitarian, less connected to military and imperial aspirations.

The symposium had an online audience, perhaps connected to us by those invisible satellites we were discussing, and I was constantly distracted by my image on a screen just off to one side of me. As I read out part of a short story, so did my on-screen doppelgänger, but she was always half a sentence behind me. When I finished, I watched her mouth move silently before she too stopped and we regarded each other.

The speakers at the symposium discussed the origins of satellites and rockets in metal that has to be dug out of the earth, and described how workers in some of these mines have gone on strike over the dangerous conditions and environmental damage. This juxtaposition between shiny rockets soaring apparently effortlessly into the sky and people working underground was mirrored by the half-imaginary entity of outer space – a legal no-place far above us – contrasting sharply with the post-industrial spaces of WUK and its rusting iron pipes.

Once the capital of a vast empire, Vienna now feels like a city out of time, not quite sure how it can fit into the 21st century other than presenting itself as a theme park with endless statues of emperors and empresses, with the percussive clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages taking the tourists for rides around the Ring, and where these tourists (after their carriage rides) can queue outside traditional cafés to eat Sachertorte or Kaiserschmarrn. Cafés where everything, even the strong and bitter coffee, is covered with a thick layer of whipped cream.

But there is yet more juxtaposition for me personally, and on much smaller scales. WUK is situated in Währinger Strasse, a long street that juts like the spoke of a bicycle wheel out of the city centre towards the woods in the north-west. I had heard of this street before I came here because it is where my grandmother was born and grew up. She left in 1938, one of the few Jewish adults able to get a visa to enter Britain, possibly because she was young and could speak English. Her parents, who had no savings, and were neither young enough to work nor able to speak English, were left behind in Vienna. She never saw them again.

So for me, Währinger Strasse is not a place associated with nostalgia or coffee served with Schlagsahne. When I was young, my grandmother repeatedly told me to visit Vienna, to see the imperial art collections and the architecture; the magnificent churches with shining domes and steep patterned roofs, as well as the Modernist Secession building and the Bauhaus-influenced house designed by  Wittgenstein for his sister. She did not tell me to go to Währinger Strasse and see the apartment block where she spent her childhood, and from where her parents were evicted in 1939 before they were forced into an overcrowded ghetto in the city centre. There her father died, and her mother was deported east.

My grandmother didn’t tell me to go there because she never talked about this part of the family history, but she had written down the address and so I went there anyway.

There was nothing to see, of course. There never is anything to see at these places, their very anonymity heightens the horror. If it could happen here at this four storey apartment block on a bend in the road and with a tramline running past the front door, it could – and did – happen anywhere. I stood and watched the building from the other side of the road, perhaps wanting to see a sign of life. But nobody inside gave me any such sign, the windows remained blank and dark, and so I left.

I returned to my hotel near the busy shopping street Mariahilfer Strasse, and just across the road from the Westbahnhof, the station from where my grandmother would have caught that train in 1938. There is a memorial in this station to the Jewish children who escaped Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1939. But it says nothing about the adults who also escaped. Given how large it was, the destroyed Jewish community of Vienna has remarkably few memorials, the city apparently prefers to dwell on more distant events. And perhaps I do too, after all my main reason for coming here was to talk about outer space, rather than be confronted with what happened to my grandmother and great-grandparents. But the buildings dragged me back down to earth.

When I left Vienna to return home I caught a train from the Hauptbahnhof, which was crowded with refugees from Ukraine. Hundreds of people waited on the main concourse to travel further west; exhausted women, children, old people and pets were all being given food by volunteers. My train, advertised as nearly empty when I booked my ticket at the beginning of February, was now full. I sat next to a teenage girl who slept almost the entire six hour journey to Frankfurt, her pet rabbit in a travel carrier at her feet. I thought of my grandmother and great-grandparents, and cried.

***

Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Frankfurt and Edinburgh. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (both published by Freight Books), and most recently she’s co-editor (with Drs Gill Haddow and Fadhila Mazanderani) of Uncanny Bodies (Luna Press) an anthology of work inspired by Freud’s uncanny as it reveals itself in the human body, the forest and the city. She’s recently completed a memoir/family history The German Lesson about what it feels like to ‘return’ to Frankfurt, the city her grandfather fled in 1938.

Website: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk

Border Crossing

By Martin Ransley:

Often, on Sunday mornings, I’m usually the first to duck beneath the colonnade arch, ascend the steep steps - making the transition from the land of the living to the land of the dead. As if the steps, and hill, the cemetery is built on help those, who believe in such things, that they are already on their way to heaven. Almost all visitors to Highgate Cemetery do exactly same, because the gothic arch at the entrance, linking the two chapels, gently guides visitors directly toward Bunning’s simply designed arch; treading a path mourners have respectfully trod since 1839. 

Once the transition is accomplished, visitors struggle to orientate themselves, as their senses become overwhelmed by the sight, sound, scent, and sheer beauty of the place. Change is sensed immediately; the air cools, light darkens, and from early March there is a scent of wild garlic – not as defence against vampires - there are none at Highgate, but because the ground offers perfect growing conditions, where it thrives in abundance, until its delicate, white flowers begin to fade in late May. Then, surprisingly, there are sounds of life heard among the trees and undergrowth. A blackbird, almost always first to break the dawn with its wistful, melancholic call; then a robin calls out with sweet, cheery short bursts of song. The bittersweet notes of native birds are often rudely interrupted by the squawking of parakeets, which some say, despite beautiful colouring, lower the tone somewhat, and threaten the inherent harmony of place. 

Then there are the stones looming out of the undergrowth: granite, slate, sandstone, marble; occasionally wooden markers in the shape of a cross - sometimes a shrub marks a grave, which flower annually and takes on a significance of its own. These markers signify something – a meaning - a language uniquely theirs. Highgate cemetery is a curious place, and a place for the curious, who, when they enter, embark on a journey, a quest to find answers - each stone, every marker begs a question, who am I, what did I do, am I remembered? That is the purpose of being here – an abiding memorial to remind relatives, friends and visitors of their status, and to pray for them in perpetuity, until an angel, perched above a grave, reaches for her horn and blows. 

Few do, though. Initially a grave is marked with a wooden cross, and remains in place for six months, sometimes a year; allowing the ground to settle before a permanent memorial is erected to commemorate the terminus of the corpse below. That is what the grave is, a terminus, generally understood as an endpoint, and for Victorian believers, signified a final border-crossing– or a first step on the stairway to heaven.  Twenty percent of wooden crosses, though, remain the only indication a burial has taken place. Visits become infrequent and then cease. Perhaps, relatives are reluctant to return to graveside and reawaken recent sorrows, or, maybe, the cost of a stone memorial is no longer justifiable for those faced with an acceleration in the cost of living in this world. Then again, once grief subsides, maybe remembrance occurs in the imagination, and the grave loses its function for contemplation of loss and silent reflection. Memories of the dead emerge randomly while taking the children to school, putting the rubbish out, or maybe not at all, and memories drift - forgotten – lost to history. It is reckoned after fifteen years, no relative or friend visit the stones, leaving them for the curiosity of visitors; those curious of knowing more. 

Suddenly there are splashes of colour - red, yellow, green. A bouquet left on a stone, in fact two, in different sections of the cemetery – graves from a time which no longer exists! No card attached with a fond message or signature. Anonymous. Whoever left them, the living certainly doesn’t need to know who was responsible for floral tributes reaching out through time. More questions for the curious – who, why? Surely not a token of grief – can grief be passed down through generations? 

One possibility is whoever found the stone, had been searching for ancestors, curious about those who had preceded them, and found a name – a continuity with the past linking them – an affirmation of identity, and the laying of flowers, heralds a prodigal return, albeit momentarily, paying a final tribute to an ancestor, a last hurrah of remembrance, one final trump. And what was lost, is now found, and their descendants might tell others what they did and how it was done. Maybe, a reaction will be set in motion – perhaps others will become curious and embark on a search for those who have gone before them and leave flowers in celebration of shared identity and a past, or perhaps not.

***

Martin completed a BA in English Literature at Birkbeck College in 2019 and is a former teacher. He lives in North London and swims, each morning, at a local lido during the winter months. Once spring arrives, he migrates to the ponds on Hampstead Heath. While cycling there, swimming, and then returning, ideas for writing form, which he writes down on his return. Border Crossing is the result of the method, such as it is! He is a guide at Highgate Cemetery.

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  

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.