Floodplain (2)

When I first started writing this piece, it turned into a poem. I circled around, wondering if I was finished with it. Now it seems to have returned as prose. I don't know why it has to filter through these two forms, maybe because it's about paths in a place I know very well, but which I'd never taken before.

The railway runs west of Oxford. Near where I live there's a lake, originally a feeder for the canal, now a duck and fisherman hub. A wooden bridge runs across it, which on the far bank rises steeply as it crosses the railway.

When our daughter was first born, and life was a sleepless hurtle, I'd come to this bridge as the sun was setting and try to descend into the light and geese calls as if plunging through water. Occasionally bats would brush my head as they pursued insects down to the water's top.

So crossing the bridge always has a slight sense of escape for me. I don't wish to go back to those days, but as the thick boards thunk under my feet I do feel a reach somewhere in my mind for the reddening stillness and the water-flavoured air of those moments of calm.

This afternoon was hot, and I hadn't really planned where I would go. On the far side of the railway are some fishing ponds, filled up from Hinksey Stream, and then the Devil's Backbone. Despite sharing its name with Guillermo del Toro's brilliant, terrifying film, this is a pleasant place, a thoroughfare for cyclist, joggers and idle wanderers like me. Originally it was a medieval track raised above the surrounding flood plain. It's now tarmacked and the floods regularly cover it. In the ditches either side the "suite" of modern English farmland plants - nettles, Himalayan balsam, tussocky grass and dandelions - flourish on the run-off fertiliser from the fields. But on a late summer afternoon it's a good spot for walking feet.

Perhaps, I thought, I should head on through South Hinksey and get to Happy Valley. Or maybe turn up the metalled path that connects the two electricity sub-stations down here and leads on to town or a pub I know. Those two are paths I've walked more times than I can count. For various reasons this free afternoon was unexpected, so keep the feeling of breaking out I eventually chose a different route.

Where the railway bridge drops down again, beyond the tracks and mounds of stones that end up spread between the sleepers, there's a willow tree. From the main trunk huge branches stretch out, thick, climbable and always striped by the light falling between the higher limbs. Right by the belly of this tree runs a steel and concrete fencing approaching its last days. And down off the Backbone and across the field leads a path.

I'd passed it many times. I didn't know whether it went anywhere, led me into trouble, or just looped back towards the metalled way where joggers flustered in the sun. Might as well, I thought.

Getting down to the bare earth of the path meant bending low under the tree's elbows. Then I was out in the light, with the seed-ends of grass tapping against my feet. Sometimes a path is nothing but a doubling-over of stems in the direction someone went before. Sometimes it's a slash across vegetation. This one was a shortening and discolouration in the grass, defined by shadows from the low sun. Meanwhile the ring-road buzzed and growled on my left.

The land I crossed was meant for water. To the right, the historical city of Oxford was built on gravel promontories that gave access to the ford between Mercia and Wessex. To my left, the A34 is raised far above the natural land, and the hills on the other side were among the first parts of the region to be farmed in Saxon times. The space between was shared with the river.

I walked on alluvial mud. Now the ground is intermittently grazed and only half-heartedly fenced. Cattle appear in the distance, or you might slip in the churned-up earth where they've passed through a gate. Here, the grass had been cut for hay, and the abbreviated stems did not prevent slippy contact with the wet ground.

Many years ago I played a frustrating computer game whose name I forget. It had to be loaded via a tape that took more than half an hour to run (Space Invaders took three minutes). In the game you were some sort of wizard character that zapped various monsters while moving through a series of fields. This was in the days when graphics were pretty minimal. Most of the background was black, the hedges a virulent green, and the characters bright yellow. This game had a serious bug. If you defeated all the witches, ogres, goblins and so on you'd end up in a field with a minotaur sort of things. You were funnelled in, surrounded by ever thicker groups of trees. The minotaur quartered the ground - and was unkillable. There was no way out of the field.

Stymied several times, I once tried to shake the monster's hand. It did me in again, as it always did. Eventually I gave the game up in disgust, and went on to play Dan Dare I-III, and something very Beckettian - if you can imagine The Unnameable crossed with space robots - called N.O.M.A.D.

I mention this because the field I entered some way along the path was uncannily like the minotaur's paddock in that ancient game. Not only that, but the foliage on either side became more unkempt, shot through with nettles' green. The tree-hedges were thick with brambles. Overhead, the leaves of horse chestnut trees had already yellowed (the work of leaf miner larvae - they don't kill the tree but weaken it, meaning smaller conkers). They jarred against the lushness of the green below.

I don't mean to say that I kept a lookout for the minotaur as I walked through the grass. There were crickets stridulating, and once or twice a call from a heat-distracted bird, rather than the long-looping theme tune from that annoying game. But when I found there were indeed no exits from the field my imagination did become slightly edgy. At least the sky was blue, not unrelieved black.

And years of experience walking in the "edgelands" of south Oxford mean I know that even when it looks as though there's no way through, someone will have made one. There was definitely nothing on the right; on the left was Hinksey Stream, bright in the sun but uncrossable. Ahead appeared to be thick wads of nettles as far as the trees lasted.

But in the willows a barbed wire fence was strung, and to the wire led a hesitant path, a few steps forwards, then a jink here or there, the nettles pressed down into the mud, their leaves almost white. The wire itself was rusted, and sagged between desultory posts. Clearly, if anyone cared about this barrier, they were no match for Ted Hughes' father in law in "A monument":

That appalling stubbornness of the plan, among thorns,
Under tightening undergrowth…
To be discovered by some future owner
As a wire tensed through impassable thicket

Through the screen of trees was a sports field, an image of human order - cricket pitch, tennis courts, a flat, unbeautiful pavilion. In the shade of the branches through which I peered a woman lay on the grass reading Dickens. Strange contrast with the straggly world I was in, but all of the same piece - all floodplain, all humanised - just that one is valued and attended, the other left to soak up consequences.