Three Liberations

When I looked out of the pub window, the night had transformed. Earlier, the sky had been clear, but for the faintest vapour of cloud. Around the full moon was a crown, a thin silver band. Looking up from the centre of Oxford as I walked, I watched the reigning light duck in and out behind the intricate shadows of college towers.

But as time passed, clouds had dethroned it. Now the orange-lit street seemed filled with ashy fragments, which fell in great screens, layered parked cars and walkers with a pinkish-tangerine crust. Snow.

There’s a six-year-old in my head pretending not to be there. So, as much as I sigh and put my hat on, scarf myself and prepare for wet feet, I’m also scurrying with excitement.

Oxford in snow – a surreal other-city of thickened grotesques on college walls, of light in ricochet between orange lamps, yellow sparkling stone and the white-blue sheets of ice. I remember, a few years ago, walking through a blizzard to stand in Radcliffe Square and look – who knows these days when you’ll get the chance again.

As I walked down Abingdon Road admiring the stateliness of each flake, quite black until it came to rest. With snow, with the swamping, silencing pillow-dust that fell that night, comes the opportunity to do daft things.

My feet were slipping as I walked – it was quite powdery. The six-year-old’s light came on in my brain – sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide! So I did.

 Run, turn side on, hurtle to a stop. Again, again, as the flakes piled up on my hat and coat, long scrapes stretching behind me. My face was frozen on the surface, but inside I was boiling – finally hot with embarrassment as at last I hit a bump and ended up on my face, plastered all over with ice. To top it off, I had torn a hole in my trouser knee, and in my skin.

I got home soggy but grinning. My face glowed, my breath rose up in white clouds. The snow tumbled round me.

*

Outside was mild, but the wind had an edge to it. It was strong as I walked beside the cars on Donnington Bridge, but down on Meadow Lane the air warmed up quickly. Soon there was grass and mud underfoot, and tall, bare trees hung their limbs out across the sky.

My ears seemed to switch on to the sound of the birds – robins, great tits, magpies, crows. All were clearing their throats ahead of spring – which wasn’t otherwise visible, except in the pimples of buds on low bushes.

I crossed the grass towards the river, and as I did so, something uncurled inside me. It was a physical sensation, and I felt a direct link from the birdsong around me to the unfurling, untensing that had no location – except “inside”.

I didn’t know I was wound up – perhaps I wasn’t, particularly. But I walked and felt shells of myself dropping away, hanging on brambles, slumping against lichenous trunks, flopping in the mud. I reduced to a body of brief, direct narratives: a leaner on trees, a shadow on the river, a walker soon absent from any one place.

*

Flattening, flattening, coming to an end. Flaring, noisy, drawing itself out. The day didn’t know which way to go. I was in the fields beyond the University Parks in Oxford, where every turn points towards house, roads or joggers, but still you can feel like you’re on the only path out.

The light had veered between grey and white all day, but in the last hour it had turned to colour. The ragged grass rainbowed, except where tree shadows laid their charcoal hues. If I kept turning away from where I was going I’d keep this place to myself, with its redwings and fieldfares, herons standing out bold as woodcuts by the ditches.

But the Cherwell had bloated itself, and spilt into the fields. Each path was sinking – the cross-hatch of willow branches ahead was cut off by foot-falls of slosh. Even as my sense widened into the start of twilight, my steps were cut short, redirected, contained.

Still, sense and memory carried on: water and birds, the voice of the roads; and summer walks, long grass and hayfever, kisses, and ridiculous talk. Getting back to Rainbow Bridge and crossing into the Parks was a float back into ordinary things.