A Short Climb

I’m not very good at being in groups, except at the edge, looking out or in. A cousin’s wedding had returned me to a place almost outside my memory – Kibblestone Scout Camp, near Stone in Staffordshire. I remembered half the site all right. With friends I’d bored the stars with talking about Freddie Mercury, Jimi Hendrix and so on through large parts of the early 1990s. But the part on the other side of the road took me back about 30 years to Cub Scout days, when I was all toothy grin and bowl haircut under my green cap.

The ceremony was held among bluebells, with blue tits and wrens sheltering from the rain in the trees all around. Trees and bluebells are among the best things in an English summer – I like the Spanish ones as much as the more violet native kind. Here, English bluebells spread up the slope out of sight, and even in the rain there were a few bees making their visits.

Later, I climbed trees and ran up and down the hills several times with my daughter and her new-made friend. I didn’t remember these parts of the site. All I could recall was the dormitory filled with hard bunk beds, another time a tent smelling of heavy canvas with a history of damp, problems getting breakfast one morning – and rope swings, a thrilling novelty to my six, seven or eight years. They aren’t there now, but there is some exciting climbing equipment suspended in the trees.

But as the afternoon went on I felt as though I was beginning to evaporate. I went for a walk away from the main building, up the hill opposite, through leaf litter. The sun was just above the treetops. I found a huge beech that had come down in a storm, its trunk and branches laid out as if by relatives under the cracked stump. With some effort, I climbed to the top of the stump, a few metres above the hilltop.

This was a place to settle. The sky glowed with evening, and robins and blackbirds were in their endless talks about talks. Away down towards the road the bluebells spread, a huge and beautiful gathering. On the far side of the trees I could see grass jewelling the slopes. From below came the hubbub of the wedding, all the meeting, smiling and storytelling that goes on.

I leaned on the fractured wood and enjoyed the whole of it. Had I been there or not been there everything would have been the same – except that the flowers would have been unseen, the birdsong no more than a territorial assertion. All those things were what I gained.