Another World is Possible

One day last November I walked up the hill that I grew up on, took the old track that ran along the ridge, full of flints, passed the woods I'd spent so many hours in long years back, looking up into the ash trees young and old. A mile or so further on along the ridge, I stopped and properly took things in. I was at the end of an old cut through the side of the hill. It was said to be Neolithic and hugged the contours, almost in deference to the hill itself rather than smashing its way through, an imprint but within a scale that seemed almost part of a natural order. It felt like the beginnings of winter; cold but not that cold, the hills all full of haze and mist, the greens and golds all given up to blues and greys and brown.

Somehow though it felt substantial in itself, like winter was a mantle that was somehow warm as well as rich. It spoke of fires and the smell of woodsmoke caught upon the street, of company and comradeship. Here in the lee of the hill you could hear the wind but barely feel it and it added to the sense of peace, of being somewhere removed from all the rush and non-stop headiness. The feeling of tranquillity was tangible in a way I had not felt for years and the sense of dual strength and gentleness surprised me. I thought again of Hardy, of his poem of the thrush, of hope and changing seasons.

Even the pylons snaking their way across the Downs seemed almost homely up here, momentarily, and I thought again of the last time I had lived here, one bitter winter with a badly broken collar bone and the burgeoning idea for a book about roads. I’d left behind me many friends in Nottingham, falling off the bike had marked a parting of the ways but the memory of all the times and friends I’d known still stood clear in my mind and in my dreams. Things had seemed to chime in in some strange sort of way whenever I’d gone up there. People were warm and expansive and it was clearly not for nothing that they called this the heart of the country.

But it was interesting in other, less obvious ways. It was part of the cradle of the industrial revolution, the river valleys there were once full of blossoming cotton mills, what happened in the Midlands and much further north helped determine the future of the world for centuries to come. But also, among the obvious accolade of stories of the Forest and its righteous outlaws, there was the story of Nedd Ludd and his followers, rising up against the wave of mills and their machines. With talk of a huge expansion of tree planting of the now somewhat nominal Forest, together with adverts for the future of industry in the region in the station as I arrived, I knew at once what my friend meant when he said important battles had been waged here, I knew that they were very much still going on.

There were many things that made their mark during the time I spent up there; sunlight on the water in the Spring, a quality to it that is even now hard to define, the water filling up a disused gravel pit, now made a lake on a nature reserve. There was also the company of good old friends, of promise for the future. But there was much more; the starlight on the bits of quartz-like pebbles on the track in the woods at the back of the old mining village some friends of mine called home. Hawks from the hill in sunset, the orange gold just showing through in bands beneath the clouds as if in token of what might lie in store.

And then there were the rooks; a vast and spreading army in the woods, tumbling through the clouds and scraps of blue and silver in the October sky over the green of the village, keeping vast council in the remnants of the Forest. It was like the coloured hoods of my friends and the black mantles of the rooks were almost synonymous, the heart of the woods in winter both brooding and benevolent.

These were friends from Newbury and the ties were strong as any family. On my first visit they were setting up a social centre and looking at a massive house to set up in. I had dreams of both places later, Betjamen checking them out from under a hat made from folded newspaper, the kitchens in the basement busy with the foundations of some kind of new world order. For years, for me, it was an anchor point, my point of home and the strongest connection to the counter culture I was still just about a part of. While I was no longer at that point particularly politically engaged, it meant a lot to be somehow in connection with it all, there seemed a continuity that was at least symbolic.

And though I have since returned to a corner of this southern county, I cannot help salute everything old friends still choose to represent, just as I watch the movement rolling on, evolving first into the anti-capitalist demos, later to the Climate Camps. Perhaps there is a danger in putting too much faith in protest as the one and only means to the way forward. It has a massive role to play but can never be the only answer. What’s really needed now more than anything is a greater acknowledgement that we are all in this mess together and must find our way beyond it bonded by the knowledge of the common problem; a world whose biosphere is on the brink, whose store of cheap energy that has placed our lifestyles on a kind of pedestal for so long is beginning to run dry.

Protest can sometimes be portrayed as counterproductive to the cultivation of this sense of shared predicament. But to deny the role it has to play is to underestimate the forces that have such a massive impact on our daily lives. We need to change direction en masse and protest can be the necessary nudge to those in high places who would not choose to do so otherwise. Its necessity is defined by its opposite; the mentality that says nothing is wrong even as we helter skelter to a day that will at the very least be a monumental challenge. Even if it achieves nothing but communicating the sense that we are sleepwalking and that we must wake up, protest can constitute an alarm call that we need as badly now as ever.

And so the knowledge of good people gives me hope, just as there is hope in the far flung places, a hope informed perhaps of nothing but endurance, of the places waiting for us to come back to them, to mark them on our wanders on a winter’s day, to take that feeling back with us and hold it dear, before we are enfolded once again by media and chatter or maybe just the steady warmth of common human company.

It is this that bolsters my expectations for what we are faced with, that - just as we must live with whatever the future may hold - there are many who can help to lead the way, whose vision is formed of far more than some list of endless anti’s; they hold the cradle of the way ahead, of what it means to show some faith in the kind of world we could still bring about. Beneath the glacial tip of vocal protest there is a groundswell that is growing every day; of taking responsibility for what we eat or otherwise consume, for what we grow, for how we engage in the political spheres on even microcosmic levels, for how we can help foster what remains or can be revived of our communities.

It is perhaps a longshot, the faith it shows is maybe bloodyminded. But it is an attitude, a stance that says we will not turn our backs on future generations, on what survives around the corner, on communities a thousand miles away threatened by eviction for mines that only feed our dependence on a sea of pointless crap. The feelings of conviction I am trying to describe are inspired by a sense of what lies on the line and a sense of hope for what may lie in store.

This is something Hardy may have understood and perhaps he would be have been heartened that there are those who have the opportunity to do more than mourn the passing of the days, who strive to hold onto the personal, onto what is immediate and real, as well as call in a vision of how things could hopefully still be.

Returning through the woods the other day, the rooks were also coming home, calling out in their massed numbers as they passed above the trees, speaking of journeys, of what was coming in, of fondness and belonging. Maybe you will hear them if you wander in the hollows and high places. Maybe their song will help to lift your heart, despite the trials of the times that we are faced with, maybe their chorus can stir us to meet the much maligned but somehow still decipherable promise that tomorrow holds if we can only listen to her call.