Swinney Lane, Insanely New
by David Gladwin
Heated unseasonably, ground baking dry, every lawn shrinks a fingerwidth back. Track. Daily I walk town and country, find newly-mysterious things. Images, scratched into stone and dried earth, made from twigs. The same figure, I figure. The artist unknown. But I watch, for the pure joy of seeing. The being. Whomever, whenever. Awaited, awoke.
And bees, I see bees. Dead bees, everywhere, dead. Under lime trees on Chesterfield Road yesterday, along borders, the riverside path. Dead bees on the pavements, the road, Swinney Lane and the well in the wall, spring abandoned, bricked-over like Nature. Sealed off as though flow could be strained and detained, cold constrained. Grained. Stained and remained.
Why did I come here to live, why back here again, once everybody had gone? To take it all back. Lack. Trick track, unpack. Swinney, Piggy swine line. Fed to Saint Winifred. Swinney Lane to Piggy Lane, stream trotting trickling back down through the stones of this place. Trace the birthplace. I live on Well Yard, where the view from my bedroom is over the roof of the East Mill and off up the valley, the Derwent, the river, the flow. Know. Life runs the land’s veins and arteries. Charted, departed and martyred. Imparted. Divided amongst, against grain, against gradient. Radiant backward, the roots of the tree.
To walk the length of Swinney Lane, observing and reversing to reflect on miry flections, chips and splinters, broken-taken, how the stone was maken. All the masons’ hammertaps, combtoothed across the faces of the walls’ dry sections. Questions. Knowing where to strike, how little force, how hard, the mallet’s transit, glance it, trace and shape the blocks’ approximations, stationed. Set in rows and columns by the wallers, fallers. Gone before she bore me, tore me loosened from the gritgrain of the town. We are blinded by such tiny particles, articles. Them, thou and thee.
Tradition, inhibitional. Urgent indulgent. Frightened by specifics I dare not yet specify. The specifier and the specified. Lied. Led a stringer. Pearls, before Swinney Lane. Train. Tracked, signalled, signified. Indignified, defied astride. A bride, tried. Tied and fastened, tight, fitting. Unflitting, permitting. Written signed and stealed. Yield. Fields lain and slain but the names yet retained, Field Lane and Green Lane defielded, degreened.
Late Friday afternoon, delicious interval, the peace before the pissups. Sit up here with beer and gaze away down Mill Street, incomplete. The shrieking scream of peregrines above, unseen, away behind the trees, between the mills and churches. Perches. Cliffs of brick and stone, unknown aloft, unsoft and often stooping. Pigeon feathers left, bereft. I look again but see no bird. Unheard, unsignified. Unsignificient. Just like me, unvisioned and immissioned.
But the vision comes, it comes a-taunting. Haunting. Failure-flaunting in the summer of my days. Its ways are winding, hiding. Sparks uprising, fire a second’s thought away. Delay, decamp and damp the dread back under. Stand another. Life lies between energy and enjoyment. Employment, deployed in the business of burning the world. Busy hands make no mischief, the Chief misses nothing and we are too tired to see what he has sired.
An empty pint, with insides sudded foamy. Town below me, show me. Throw me out a catch to catch me out, unlatch the drought, act out inaction. Fractious factions, fractioned. Ration out the doubt. Devout and out. Devoted, vote demoted. Motivate your mate, Ms Nature! Missing, inaction in traction. Engines talled and stalled. Fall, chimneys, fall and pull the buildings down. The town. Around my sorry crown.
Even my dreams have confined and aligned, predesigned. Wednesday night I was driving a narrowing roadway through woodland, thin round moorland grasses and bracken alongside the sandygrained soil of the hollowed way, closing to pathwide and halfblocked ahead with stone, boulders, perched angled together to roll at the touch. I was pushing the car now, impossibly upward the steepening way on the west of the valley, with nowhere to go. Slow.
Wakened and walked through the heat and dead bees again. Then last night drove in my dream up the opposite side, Toadmoor Lane there in Ambergate, steepening just like the woodway but here between stones of the houses and walls with the road angling back until, nothing but sky through the windscreen, I felt the front wheels lifting light from the tarmac, the car tipping back on itself in a fall back to bed, where I started from sleep and lay breathing, relieved. But believe me, I don’t have a car.
A fuller glass now, sipped to keep from spilling, willing time to slow as back I go to sit under the sun, before the others come. The people make me want to stay, and then they make me go away. Betrayed by what I sayed. Dismayed them, made them see short time and scant resources, mighty forces. Courses, action. Now and ever. Never. Ending of our tether. Tenure. Summer in its splendour. End you.
Quietly in crisis sit and think. Drink. Links us to the cycling water, Nature hates a vacuum, nothing goes to waste. Haste, paced. Climbing to place. Ever higher, admired. Rewarded, retired, uninspired. Cyclical movement, in and on cycles. These are my people, not those who were driven away. Stay. Ours is the houses and streets of the town in the valley, the watercourse. Coursing inside us and through, me and you, interfected. Reflected. The water gave us our first image, our sense of ourselves. All of this taken back with the lack, dusty track. Dry lips crack.
Unless, yes! We redress, strip the flesh from the selfish, tear down all the grand. Let the land love the people who love back the land. Take it back, given back in a redistribution of health, feed the need, not the greedy. This locus our focus, folk history made in the making, re-taking and shaking. Shake tape to take shape, make the world in its image by city and village, uphill and downriver together. To gather, in pace and in mass, to trespass on their cosseted assets. The beast will be risen as bidden, by each and all, folk into focal, your local where I am the figure, a cell. Dwell.
Sit with me now, let us talk our way back and yet forward, on upward to topple the tomb at the top. Talk as we drink, but it’s not the drink talking. The wayward are walking, our footsteps no march. We tread light and stealthy, sneak up on the wealthy and stick ourselves fast. Vast, we are massive in passive and active resistance, insistence on instant renewal, defueling the fossils to nurture the future. The struggle before and behind and forever. Endeavour. Our never and ever, our end.
WENSUM 