I didn’t know about maps when I was a kid. Growing up in the country, I knew our little green corner intimately and a piece of paper marked by a stranger’s interpretation would have meant nothing. For me, word of mouth and experience shaped a mental map with a rich, painterly geography to explore.
Half a century on, I think of those words and my mind recreates that painting like a jigsaw of a place and of people long gone.
Kiddie Simpson’s was a watery meadow filled with drifts of cowslips and dotted with orchids. Its hawthorn hedges dripped with blossom, and primroses led curious kids under trees to bluebells. It had 2 kissing gates and a pond with newts.
On the Easter Banks, we rolled hand painted hard boiled eggs down the slopes on Easter Sunday. In summer, someone showed us how to tickle trout in the beck. Wet-nosed cows swished their tails and twitched their ears all day long. We found John’s Pond along here. In spring, our fingers trawled for frogspawn to take home in jars. It would hatch into wriggling commas that grew legs.
In a field corner stood Iron Gate, much leaned on by the older generation. In Seaton’s Field, we picked mushrooms and avoided his bull. Ernie Seaton was the farmer, a man who spoke in a thick Yorkshire dialect that was hard to keep up with. He looked like a gnarled tattie in a flat cap and laughed a lot.
Our village, 2 lines of simple two up, two down houses with yards and allotments, was built to house the ironstone miners who once worked the dank drift mine, now long overgrown in the woods. The Sulphur Beck ran orange with ore, its mud staining our clothes and hands. Though we were all told to keep away, we knew its curves and depths intimately. Fascinated by its strangeness, we jumped, dammed, and fell into it, ruining clothes and earning early nights as a consequence.
Cheggy Wood had a clear beck. Trout danced over its gravel bed, darting like bullets into the shade at the sound of our voices. We so wanted to catch one.
Guided by beck and wood, we could get far from home, far enough to feel unsure. To the edge of our map.
Just there stood the Old Engine House. We were small enough to squeeze through the gap in its train-sized doors and stepped into shafts of dusty light, beneath the scrabble of squirrels on the tin sheet roof. A mountain of grain filled the space where ironstone trains had once stood.
The game needed no explanation: get to the top, slide back down, and try not to be swallowed.
Life held nothing but the present at that age and in places like this I sensed that was enough.