The Green
Although we called it a village, the place I grew up was really three hamlets, all of very different characters, which shared a village green, The Green, some couple of hundred yards between them. When I was very young we would play on it, but it always felt a little odd, a little off-kilter, partly because it was never terribly clear who it belonged to, if anyone; though people seemed to come together to maintain it and trim the grass. As I grew older, the relationship between the hamlets shifted. The population in one stagnated and aged, and The Green became more and more marginal; abandoned. Across my adulthood it became a wilderness of young trees and bramble, a small and isolated world only intermittently accessible through low runs and sparsely vegetated clearings.
This may seem unusual from the off: why had no one claimed the land, built a home on it – built ten homes on it? But this in itself is not unusual. One of the paradoxes of the south coast and downlands is how much people want to build there, and how much wild and unkempt land there is, ownership obscure, management slowly abandoned. I can't speak for all such places, but what I have seen of our village green does make me consider what ancient process, beyond forgotten rights, might be involved.
Outwardly, The Green now looks like any other hedgerow-thick young woodland in the area, but as it grew there was a strange dynamic to it. If you bothered to enter it, and few did, it was clear immediately that each tree had completed its own peculiar archaeology, lifting, as it rose, assorted items from the earth. These hung, trapped in the meeting of branches or festooned on an extended limb. Everything was exhumed: coins and cans, bags and banners, all quietly resurrected; a bizarre museum of the village's life formulated by The Green as a response to its abandonment – as an expulsion of the human back to its originators.
As time when on, this seemed less and less like a positive expression of desire for a human connection, a return to small children playing and 70s housewives grabbing five minutes downtime, and more and more like a shrugging off of the human – nay, revenge for it: for something else was exhumed by those trees; something the village would rather have stayed hidden. My brother, who continued to live in our old home, avoided the place, claiming to have seen adders, otherwise rare near us, leaving it – including one of an enormous size. On my increasingly infrequent visits, I'd walk across the nearby saltmarsh to the pub at dusk, and coming back late in the night passed The Green I would hear movements in its margins, not the movements of dog or fox, but rather something human-sized, bipedal, moving clumsily through its tunnels to watch me as I walked. Although the village was certainly a fine place to live, like any isolated community round since the Domesday book it had its fair share of unspoken secrets: sudden disappearances; unlikely murders; frosty looks with origins in generations long buried. I have no idea what The Green exuded from its fine loam, and saw nothing during my rare forays into it during the day, but I stopped entering it at night, and most folk seemed to avoid it, even on the best of days. As time went on, there grew a feeling about the place, a feeling that as the village changed, as the old generations from the 20s and 30s passed, and the incomers knew less and less how to be in the space, The Green became more and more unruly, more and more forbidden, until, eventually, it had expelled all that it had ever accepted, and was best left to its own devices, whatever they may be.
When last I went back, The Green itself was an impenetrable mass, but more, the inclination of it had started to bleed into its surroundings. The drained millpond opposite, usually full of cattle, had been abandoned to the rushes and wren-filled hawthorns, while the ford at The Green's margin was silting up and bulging with brambles. Nearby woods had taken the cue and annealed, becoming inaccessible through the usual routes, while the sea walls were becoming treacherous to navigate and increasingly encouraging of managed retreat. Even apparently human spaces, local orchards and allotments, were overgrown with willowherb and bindweed. Shortly after, my parents and brother moved away, partly to be closer to the rest of us, partly because the place had changed – less and less community, more newcomers who didn't understand the dynamics of the place, who didn't know the old paths and the village characters, long since buried. Folk who never knew it was The Green, and still less that it was on the move.
15 Sept 2024