Doubling Back: Paths trodden in memory - Softcover

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Linda Cracknell is a writer of narrative nonfiction on the natural world, as well as of fiction and radio scripts, and the author of Writing Landscape (Saraband, 2023). Landscape, place, nature, and memory are key themes in her work. Her first story collection was nominated for Scotland’s National Book Awards and the Robin Jenkins Literary Award for environmental writing. She teaches nature and place writing as well as creative fiction writing, often through the medium of outdoor or residential workshops and courses.

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Saunters

Château de Lavigny, Switzerland, August 2012

The desk at the window of my room overlooks the orderly lawns of the Château. Hibiscus is flowering on the veranda and roses are trained over arches. A few kilometres below, Lác Leman shimmers, and beyond it rises the hazy outline of the Alps. A huge plane tree flapped its leaves close to my window throughout last night, played into tunes by the wind and rain. I arrived three days ago to a heat-wave but thunderstorms are beginning to fracture it now; the air is cooled by rain and then rises up yet more steamily when the sun returns.

I’m here on a writing retreat, and each day for a month is my own. Already I have established rituals. I like to be first to the kitchen, to collect the fresh loaves left hanging on the little side-door which opens onto the village street. After a glass of orange juice, I put on my shoes and slip into the garden, past the lavender bushes fussed over by small white butterflies and scrambling with bees. At the bottom of the sloping lawn, a wicket gate opens into the wider world.

At first the way is familiar. There’s a grassy avenue between a field of sunflowers to my left, each swinging heavy heads in the same direction, and rows of glossy vines to my right. Soon though, I’ll break new ground, perhaps venturing into the wooded slopes of the Aubonne valley to find out where a set of steps go that lead intriguingly upwards. Greeting the day like this I walk the restlessness out of my body and wake up to my work. But my morning walks here are also about exploring. It’s as if the Château is laced into place by small lanes, tracks and paths between farms and villages. I need to get to know them, to fill in the detail of my circle a little more each day. There are places to go back to, perhaps to sit and draw, or just for the pleasure of returning. By walking an hour each morning, I plant myself here.

My internal monologue and a tiny hand-stitched notebook always accompany me. There may be chatter or observations I need to note down, a new story idea, or solutions to my writing problems. It’s as if I think better on the move, think more creatively, or as Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have it, ‘my mind only works with my legs’. Slow but alert. Attentive to both inner and outer landscapes. Later, each walk will become a journal entry and a sketch map.

*

The first time I remember striking out alone on a journey I can’t have been more than about four years old, yet many of the elements of my adult walking are reflected in it. There was something deliberate about it, a necessary adventure which changed my relationship to a landscape. It remains greenly luminous in my memory.

After the death of my father in 1961, my mother moved my older sister, brother and myself to a Surrey suburb. I was under two, and the garden became my habitat. It was where I went by choice but also where I was banished. My mother would turn the key on the inside while she washed the kitchen floor. In memory, although we disagree about this now, the key then stayed turned for much of the day.

As the corner plot of an estate of circularly-arranged houses, it was by default a large garden stretching down to the railway line running between Guildford and Waterloo. Whilst tipping its hat to tameness and family life with lawns for somersaults, handstands and sunbathing and a vegetable garden where my mother teased up rows of beans and blackcurrants, it was the remainder that most interested me, where things grew of their own accord. Down one side of the garden and across its end a dense jungle of bracken and rhododendron, swayed over by silver birch, encroached on the order. A rowan tree hosted enormous pigeons when loaded with fruit. I would sometimes pick the berries, crush them with ditch-water and serve the resulting ‘tea’ in old yoghurt pots to my imaginary guests. They came to visit at the ‘dwelling’ I built in the woods out of old timber packing cases.

The garden teemed with life and mysteries. I was secure between its taut wire fences, but it also offered exploration and adventure and I became myself amidst the undergrowth and mud. The ground was clayey, crossed by drainage ditches that emptied into a larger one stinking its way parallel with the railway line. Leaves darkened these ditches and the water was covered with a film of oily rust. The sludginess always fascinated me and drew me down into them.

My first solo journey wasn’t exactly a walk but rather a crawl on hands and knees, a traverse parallel to the railway line from one boundary fence to the other at the bottom of the garden. I never saw my mother in this part of the garden except when she emptied grass clippings onto the compost heap, but some impulse sent me trail- blazing a tunnel though a forest of sappy bracken. My hands dragged through leaf mould, sinking into mysterious layers of damp things, too soft to exactly be considered ground. I disturbed dark smells, slugs and worms. I pressed on, despite slow progress across the no-mans-land, determined to reach my destination. In memory the journey took a long morning.

When I completed the expedition, I recall a sense of achievement; a new, braver me had emerged at the other end. It was play of sorts I suppose, but serious-feeling play, and solitary. I repeated it and I discovered other journeys to make in the garden, wearing paths through the undergrowth that came to carry our family stories. Supposedly I often disappeared like this, only traceable by the quiver of bracken fronds, and emerging muddy and beetle-infested a few hours later.

It was also in that area of the garden that my hands scrabbled below the surface for treasures, churning up fragments of pottery, and one day, a large white shiny lump that I dragged onto the lawn for inspection. It turned out to be a smashed ceramic insulator from the railway line, but this did nothing to dispel the thrill of my own act of discovery.

This exhilarating place could also turn on me. There were brambles, stinging nettles, poisonous berries. I remember once sitting damp- bottomed and submerged amongst the undergrowth when I saw something from the corner of my eye. Whatever it was, the horror of it propelled me towards the house screaming, yet unable to explain what I’d seen. I only knew that it was too terrifying to revisit or give words to. I can vaguely remember it now. Something was caught in my hair or perhaps in a nearby branch and blurred by proximity; the suggestion of a spider’s web shape but with a great darkness and weight and horrible stickiness.

The garden was where I went to sob away my private miseries but also a setting for odd rituals. At a predestined time each day, I’d climb onto a pile of silver-birch logs, swallow a lungful of air and bellow across the adjoining back gardens the repeated line from Cilla Black’s, ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’; number one in the charts in 1964.

I suspect I was a strange child, internalised, tearful, quiet. But I remember that there was always a lot going on in my imagination. It was fed by this strange Surrey garden that was a place of safety, adventure, play and enchantment, with a geography that came to be mapped intricately in my head as I grew higher than the bracken. I learnt about my need to discover, to make sense of local geography by propelling myself through it. I trod routes into familiarity, let my imagination...