(These images and the full accompanying essay will be published in the next issue of Magnachrom magazine, in February 2008.)
Close to my parents' house is a pool I still think of as a muddy, overgrown, wet wasteland. It is a place where we used to go to play, build dens, lob rocks and get filthy. These days it has become something of a Rosebud, a touchstone of sodden alders and jumbled sedges that I keep in my mental pocket to rub when the world starts to spin that little bit too fast. It is the sort of place that sentimental conservationists like to think was once commonplace, but which has always been unique for those prepared to look closely.
As children, the place was our private demesne. The mud and undergrowth kept casual adults from disturbing us, and we could play there with our fantasies untainted by dull reality. It is always more fun to hunt wild tigers if no-one present is grown up or unimaginative enough to point out that they are really sheep. Now, as an adult, I still like to imagine myself sneaking down there to hunt fierce beasts, but I have also come to love the sense of continuity represented by the undramatic plants, trees and wildlife. This is countryside, not wilderness, and its structure and interconnected ecology fascinate me because they say as much about the history of the people who live nearby as they do about themselves.
The pool is tidied now, and volunteers come regularly in their green wellies to pull up the ragweed and hack back the roiling brambles. There is less mud, less of an anaerobic stink, and more of the clear, bright chalkstream water for which the area is famous. The official name of the designated preserve is "The Moors", but among locals it still called "The Sand Boils", after the toe-tickling underwater fountains kicked up by spring water rising through the sandy riverbed. Children do still make dens there, but they also come to find the GPS geocache, or dutifully with notebooks to complete a course requirement. The housing boom has nibbled chunks off the margins and a bright, shiny notice board now tells you the official names of the butterflies and orchids. A fence discourages you from paddling among the sand boils.
For the whole of this essay please visit the Magnachrom site, where it will appear in the upcoming 7th issue: www.magnachrom.com.
Notes on the Photographs
When the children were small I would take them every day on a sleeping perambulation though the scrublands and half-neglected patches of idle land on the outskirts of our town. In these areas nurture is constrained by the limitations of the park service budget and nature has more of a chance to assert itself between visits from the municipal gardeners. The result is a structured untidiness of more-or-less accessible thickets, where an imposed formal order wages continual quiet war against the undergrowth's straggling vitality.
These particular photographs were taken while pushing our youngest son, who was less tolerant of halts than his siblings and who would wake up and protest loudly if the pram was stationary for more than a few minutes. There was rarely time for leisurely contemplation of the scene in the viewfinder, but I was able to look closely and repeatedly at the same things, to follow minutely the slow accumulation of details that makes up the cycle of seasons, and to wait for the appropriate light to invest a scene with meaning. There was also time for my own slow consciousness to catch up with the niggling sense that there were photographs here waiting to be discovered, if only I could see them.
