Blackthorn Blooms in the Fiery Fields
It’s April, and still cold. The cowslips shiver in the grass, their soft heads too delicate for the sharp bursts of freezing rain. My sisters’ first act as they step out of the door is to swoop down on the red ones, plucking them without mercy. They have to go, they tell me, or they’ll crossbreed with the real cowslips. The yellow ones are buttery, softly golden, but the others, the impostors, are stained with creeping blotches of browny red, like drying blood. I watch them flop in my sisters’ clenched fists.
My father’s house is a house like every other on the estate, brick with that strange brown cladding that I hate. I wait for my father and my sisters to get their shoes and coats on in what we call ‘the meadow’ - that is, the front lawn, where my father lets the orchids and the cowslips grow. The orchids, lesser-spotted and slight, are easy to miss in the summer. My father has taken to marking their presence with a small stick driven into the ground, like a science experiment, or the site of a miracle. Perhap it is quietly miraculous: the soft, pale beauties emerging lithe and trembling from the tile waste and the spoil heaps at the edge of this ex-industrial valley.
In a perennially struggling pear tree, which flowers but never fruits, a pair of fat pigeons are tending to their nest. I can hear my father hurrying my sisters along: they are busy hitting each other with sticks. I turn my attention to the pigeons, looking bloated and precarious in the fine web of branches. It is nice to swap the oily glimmer of the city birds for the smooth grey of the wood pigeons at home. They seem stupider somehow, and more pompous, pushing each other off the railings of our balcony with an officious air that makes me smile, and makes my mother bang on the window.
‘Let us know if you’ve got a free moment’, my father had said to me when I told him I was coming home for a few days. He had a small heart attack last year. I have a free moment.
Daughters assembled, my father leads us to the fiery fields. We pass through a series of alleys that are called ginnels and jitties in this town: half in and half out, a ginnel might take you from the houses to the high street through what could be someone’s back garden, a jitty will take you through the trees, across a gravel driveway, and spit you out somewhere unexpected. We dodge muddy puddles and listen to the crunch of our feet on the gravel, and to a blackbird singing somewhere. As we walk, my father stops to pat his chest and frown. I think about the mountains we climbed, when I was a child and he was newly divorced. I think about the bleakness of the barren Welsh hillsides we scaled, the Lake District crags. I don’t think his heart could take them again.
The fiery fields are dull and damp, ugly with early spring. Their name comes from the fires that escaped from the mine shafts here, burning for days on stores of natural gas. My father says something about coal and methane, and it is impossible to imagine the noise of it, the smell of fire and ash and the black roll of the smoke. Down in the valley, next to the river, the furnaces were so hot and loud and hellish they called them Bedlam, after the lunatic asylum. Now they are quiet, crumbling and tinged green by the light filtering through the trees and the lick of it sparking from the river. The roadside is dotted with twisted lumps of shining refuse from the furnaces. It’s grey and blue and black, mangled and heavy. I hopped from block to block as a child, between the sprays of rosebay willowherb and himalyan balsam by the river.
We walk, carefully for my father, around the edge of the fiery fields. I revisit this town through my sisters’ eyes. In their gossip and chatter I am reminded of what it is to grow up in a town like this, in a place like this: formed in the fires of the industrial revolution, churning and important and bitter with smoke, mined and quarried and burnt until the land is left empty, slowly filling itself back up with woods and wild garlic. They talk about the farm boys riding into town on their quad bikes, the ongoing saga of guerrilla coppicing in the nature reserve. Local kids (my sisters call them ‘youths’ as if they were not themselves youths, and I can’t help feeling that this has a subtle class dimension) have been cutting down saplings, leaving stumps and the remains of smoky, greenwood fires. We know they’re not scouts, my sisters say, because they’d know not to burn the greenwood.
I feel something like solidarity for this destruction. Picture it: outside, in the dark, the swoop and crash of a falling tree and then the sudden lifting of the total blackness as the hole in the forest canopy lets the grey starlight through. Picture being young around a smoking fire, the smell of it threading its way through the seams of your clothes and the hair on your head, the light of it dancing back, reflected in the glassy eyes of the others. How can we begrudge them that, I think. My sisters tell me the police are looking into it.
When I walk with my mother, it’s a test. ‘What’s that?’ she’ll demand, pointing to a small flower, a scrap of animal fur hanging on a barbed wire fence, the leaves of a tree just unfurling. When I was young she would take me into the woods and we would sit with our eyes closed, listening. ‘Woodpecker’, she’d say. ‘There. Chaffinch, blackbird, thrush.’ When I walk with my father, it’s a tour. ‘There’, he says, ‘Along the line of the field. That’s the old tramway, to carry whatever it was they were mining from the woods.’ There were horses then, pulling carts along rails, there were men, labouring in the side of the steep gorge.
I look where he’s pointing and it’s just visible: a long, raised section of earth that follows the boundary line of the hedge and disappears into the woods. I am disappointed: I thought that the rise and dip was a holloway, made by the monks from the abbey and smoothed by thousands of years of penitent feet. The woods rise, tall and dark at the edge of the field. They are part of the Wiley estate. There are gatekeepers’ cottages on the edge of town, marking the entrance to a long and winding driveway that snakes out of sight. I have never seen the big house, and it’s almost funny that in this place, which has seen so much upheaval and destruction, that brought, we have been taught, modernity, we are still so feudal. I would like to go into those woods that have never been mined. I’d like to stand in the dark wet greenness of them, feel the quietness of a place that has been left undisturbed. My father tells me that they still have a gamekeeper.
We come to an oak tree growing above a small hollow, and pause. Someone has tied a rope swing to a thick, curving bough, and we watch as my sisters spin off into the sudden drop of space. It’s grey, and damp, but I can smell the thick scent of the blackthorn that flowers behind us, rising lumpen and dirty white. I remember swinging off out over the river from the rope swing tied to the railway bridge further down the valley. Above, trainloads of coal rattled across to the power station, and we were suspended over the green and golden waters. Through the murk of the river, we could glimpse things submerged: metal rods, rubble, a shopping trolley. Out of sight, the steam from the power station cooling towers would rise, pearly, pure into the blue. They have pulled them down now, readying the land for housing. This winter the last remaining factory in the valley, one that made Agas, closed its gates for the final time. My mother told me that the workers left their work boots upended on the railings, in a goodbye. Industry is over, it seems. Housing is coming.
Maybe in the summer this could be a wildflower meadow. I hope it will be, but for now there is just the lurid green of grass, and the glint of plastic wrappers. There is the burned out stump of a tree (more youths, my sisters tell me), disturbed earth and a break in the wire fence that could be badgers. My father points out a capped mine shaft: the fencing looks new and full of splinters, guarding a small cairn of grey rubble marking the shaft entrance. The mines are capped, but not filled in: in the darkness below the town there is empty space. The whole valley feels it, a hollowness, an instability. The road that winds down to the river is sagging, slipping gently into the dark emptiness beneath it. There is a house on the other bank whose foundations have gone. It is listing like a ship at sea.
We are losing land year by year, but I don’t know how much is the mine shafts and how much is the river, pulling and sucking the gorge away one winter flood at a time. In November we start to brace ourselves: the flood defences come out, the pumps are readied in basements. When the grey waters start to lap at the railings we will walk down to look at them. There is always a bored engineer in a van. Downstream, they have tried to stabilise the banks: clearing whole sections of the secret, garlicky woods and running metal through the valleyside instead, installing rubble in cages and concrete. It looks ugly and plucked, and you can see the lines where they have laid the new turf down.
One day it will all be in the river, my mother tells me, and I can’t bear to think of it. Her garden, all summer pinks and purples with the dog roses and the ladies smock, the irises in the pond and the spring frogspawn, will slip into the river one day and be gone, as if it had never been.
I don’t live here anymore. As teenagers, we’d walk the railway line, listening for the dull throb on an oncoming train that one day simply stopped running. We’d climb through windows into the disused factories and warehouses, wondering at the empty space, at the weeds growing, jumpy at the thought of guard dogs. I walked past one of the factories the other day and saw a plywood board blocking the window where we’d chance cut glass for the thrill of trespass. They’ll be gone soon, replaced with something more respectable.
I watch my sisters swing out into the void and wonder what they will do here in the long boredom of adolescence. When I was a teenager the land was still lying fallow, waiting, welcoming prying eyes and secret excursions: kisses on the hill that looked over the cooling towers that now looks out over nothing, clandestine cigarettes in crumbling buildings that no longer exist. That land isn’t here anymore - it has been cordoned off, flattened, cleared. The halfway places are disappearing. My father clears his throat. It’s time to walk again. At my feet, a small white flower blinks up at me from the monotony of the grass. It’s delicate, pristine, and I can’t remember its name.
Hannah Green is a writer from Shropshire, UK. She currently works for Ledbury Poetry Festival and has been published in Bristol Poetry Anthology, The Cardiff Review and Helicon Magazine.