Collections of this Kind

Small worlds

They say the scale of children's worlds is collapsing, and while there's some truth in that, the scale of children's lives have always been different from adults, and in some ways richer and more rooted for it.

When I was five or six, our little group at school would spend endless breaktimes digging tunnels through the hard dry clay soil our school stood on, building miniworlds of complex levels for various toys to enjoy in an area probably no more than two metres wide. All around the playing field, other groups, groups I had no idea of, did the same, with tiny regions of their own.

A couple of years latter, and we were all about dens for ourselves, under brambles and in the deep dry grass that surrounded our house. Each den carved out a small world which we knew in detail: each branch and stone, each old birds' nest and animal smeuse winding its way through the dense hedgerows.

But perhaps the peak of this intimacy settled on the ford just down from our house, where one of the many local chalk streams came out from its thick water grass and spilled under a footbridge into a pond which no sane driver would actually attempt1. The ford was the centre of our world: entertainment, education, and meetplace. It was the boundary where new comers would be tested against our moral standards, where knowledge of the depths and shallows was a matter of life and death, where understanding the eel-hides and minnow movements gave you access to the power of a natural magic.

From this pole we would spill out as our confidence grew, first to the underbridges and islands of the surrounding chalk streams, then the abandoned corners of local scrubs and woods, the owners of which never seemed to mind us setting up camp. From there, we wound our way out across the estuary and The Downs, to the far reaches of the country and planet, but with size comes generality, and so we always found our way back to the ford, with our lovers and then with our children, that they should see the beauty of an hour watching water boatmen and the glory of the caddis larva, and know that from this small detailed centre, the universe should rightfully proceed.

9 July 1976