Paths Back – Behind St Clement’s Church, Oxford

Traffic noise is always a given in Oxford. So much of the place is not-quite-city, not-quite-country, not-quite-suburb. At the foot of Headington Hill three green spaces are intercut by major roads. South Park, with its relic ridge-and-furrow in the grass, is the largest patch of green. Headington Hill Park is heavy with trees.

St Clement’s churchyard is the most intriguing. It lies below the level of Marston Road, a long stretch of cut grass leading to an 1830s church apparently known, unkindly but not unfairly, as the “boiled rabbit” when the famous John Henry Newman was curate there. Most of the graves are clustered under church walls, leaving almost all the grass level and expectant.

The broad route to the church is lined by lime trees. Their heart-shaped leaves both move in the air and lie yellowed under foot. The trunks are marked with discouraging signs – apparently I tread on the loose stones at my own risk.

I haven’t been down here for many years. The previous time was with my wife, before she was my wife. The day was hot. It was one of those rare English summer afternoons when the heat lies like a stone on the skin.

We had been walking, where from or to I forget. Everything was involved with sweat. We saw the church set back from the road, and decided to explore. This second visit is solitary, and the weather is overcast, but there’s enough warmth to prickle out reminders of summer.

First, I head for the church door. I don’t expect it to be open, and I’m not surprised when the big brass handle fails to respond. I can see the reasons for this, but locked churches always put me in mind of some of the more ungenerous brands of Christianity.

I suppose some of the causes of the locked door can be traced through the crowd of headstones behind the church. A narrow, well-trodden path runs close around the building, but beyond its borders is a dense sprouting of ground alder, clumps of grass and Spanish bluebells. Without a break this vegetation covers graves and the space between, as far as the ironwork fence around the churchyard. The plants stand in ranks around memorials whose carved lettering seems at once legible and far too weathered to read. Through them run three paths. It’s these paths – and more precisely the people who use them, probably at night – that I think are the cause of the decision to lock the church door.

When we came here that hot day, no doubt we tried the door, and then wondered what was in the field beyond the graves – I know that sounds melodramatically metaphorical. But there is a field on the other side of the graves, and it leads down to the River Cherwell. In those days, I do remember, there was no way from the churchyard to the river, but there was no problem hopping from the stern lime avenue to the church to another track made of ragged tarmac, which ended simply with the field. I don’t remember what buildings accompanied this track, but I know that there was no open invitation to wander across the field. On the other hand, there was nothing stopping us. I doubt we held hands, except maybe to jump across the narrow ditch between the lines of tarmac – palms too sticky.

Now the Air Cadets occupy the buildings by the other track. Beyond them is a wire fence that seems taller than me standing on my own shoulders. It’s clear now whether the field is on or off limits.

But behind the church paths go into the field, over the graves. To follow them you have to put your foot at least once into the space where bones lie. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I tried to tread lightly. Where there was a gap between the trees part of the iron fence had been wrenched out, and towards the river the plants on the other side gad been trodden down.

I leant on what was left of the fence for a long time. The paths quickly disappeared into waist-high vegetation, mainly nettles. I wondered about dropping down from the edge of the last grave and into the tracks of the people who had made the paths. But the combination of possible arrest and the certainty of extensive nettle stings held me back. I was probably just being timid.

I looked out to where the river was out of sight. I saw a place where someone had made an illicit fire well hidden from the road under the outspread branches of a lime. I wondered if the grave I’d had to stand on held the bones of someone who’d have understood why I wanted to tramp on through.

I wondered how much the riverbank had changed. On that hot day, I think we followed a trail of bent grass and flowers that concealed the river until we were almost at its bank. There the green tinged with parched white gave way to water’s blackness. Lines of weeds moved in the current under the surface. Shadows of trees, and illuminations from the sun on the books of ripples added colours that it’s hard to put a name to. Moving above the river’s action, the damselflies imposed their own bright scheme.

To say their blue was electric is one way of putting it – it conveys the sense that they were sparking through the air, invisible-visible-gone. But it doesn’t express the intensity of their blue, how it cut through the weight of the heat. We sat for a long time by the river, watching the insects.

I doubt they were a “special” kind – just Common Blue, more than likely. But I don’t put a name to them. I don’t aim to classify the experience. It belongs to an undemarcated time. Memories are always falsified to some extent, but this one is of an uncomplicated love for everything that we shared.

My revisit ends with a turn away from the fence and the bristly field beyond. I trace my way back through the graves along the third and final path. Outside the east end of the church I spend a little while appreciating the great intricacy of the lime trees, how their leaves move in the fitful sun. Then it’s back past the high fences, back to the busy road, time for a drink in the Angel and Greyhound.