Landmarks (27 page)

‘As you sit on the hillside
, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream,’ wrote the walker Stephen Graham in 1927, ‘the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.’ Such visionary moments came rarely to Graham – as they come rarely to all adults – though he sought them throughout his life, tramping across America, Russia and Britain in the hope of glimpsing ‘the great door’ swing open. John Muir, childish by nature, had used the same image some thirty years earlier:
‘Between every two pines is a door leading to a new life.’

To young children, of course, nature is full of doors – is nothing but doors, really – and they swing open at every step. A hollow in a tree is the gateway to a castle. An ant hole in dry soil leads to the other side of the world. A stick-den is a palace. A puddle is the portal to an undersea realm. To a three- or four-year-old, ‘landscape’ is not backdrop or wallpaper, it is a medium, teeming with opportunity and volatile in its textures. Time is fluid and loopy, not made of increment and interval. Time can flow slow enough that a mess of green moss on the leg of a tree can be explored for an age, and fast enough that to run over leaves is to take off and fly. What we bloodlessly call ‘place’ is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always
in
, never
on
.

The best children’s literature understands this different order of
affordance. This is why so many of the greatest children’s stories involve thresholds, place-warps, time-slips and doorways: access points that lead to experience and danger, in defiance of standard geometries, and often beyond the guardianship of adults. Virginia Woolf once observed that the most difficult task for a novelist was getting a character out of one room and into another. Children’s literature feels no such awkwardness: characters can step out of one room and find themselves – without explanation – in a different epoch, continent or universe. Thus the wardrobe that opens into Narnia, or the flickering border through which Will passes in Philip Pullman’s
The Subtle Knife
(1997) to reach the shadowlands. Susan Cooper’s
The Dark Is Rising
(1973), the eeriest novel I know, begins in a Buckinghamshire village on Midwinter Eve, four days short of Christmas and one short of the birthday of a boy named Will Stanton. Far to the north a blizzard is brewing, and things are not as they ‘normally’ are in the land around. Animals are restless, and rooks clatter from the treetops to swirl blackly above the fields. The blizzard strikes in the evening, and Will wakes the next morning to hear strange music, rising loudly and then falling away:

It had gone again
. And when he looked back through the window, he saw that his own world had gone with it. In that flash everything had changed. The snow was there as it had been a moment before, but not piled now on roofs or stretching flat over lawns and fields. There were only trees. Will was looking over a great white forest: a forest of massive trees, sturdy as towers and ancient as rock.

The strange world lay stroked by silence. No birds sang. The garden was no longer there, in this forested land. Nor were the outbuildings nor the old crumbling walls. There lay only a narrow clearing round the house now, hummocked with unbroken snowdrifts, before the trees began, with a narrow path leading away … As soon as he moved away from the house he felt very much alone, and he made himself go on without looking back over his shoulder, because he knew that when he looked, he would find that the house was gone.

‘[H]e saw …’, ‘he knew …’: These drastic transformations don’t surprise Will, though they scare him, nor does their uncanniness need explanation – for they pre-exist within his sense of the possible. He has not yet fallen to the real.

‘Children have many more
perceptions than they have terms to translate them,’ wrote Henry James, memorably, in his Preface to
What Maisie Knew
(1897). But it might be truer to say that ‘Children have many more terms than we have perceptions to translate them.’ For the speech of young children is subtle in its intricacies and rich in its metaphors. It is not an impoverished dialect of adult speech. Rather, it is another language altogether; impossible for adults to speak and arduous for us to understand. We might call that language ‘Childish’: we have all been fluent in Childish once, and it is a language with a billion or more native speakers today – though all of those speakers will in time forget they ever knew it.

~

Five or six years ago I met a remarkable person called Deb Wilenski. Deb understands Childish better than any other adult I have met. In her thirties she was a researcher specializing in primate behaviour and psychology. She undertook fieldwork with rhesus macaques in Cayo Santiago, and with baboons in Namibia, following a pack in the high orange hills of the country’s south-west. She was studying
how the baboons oriented and navigated themselves, and how intent and knowledge were communicated between members of the troop. ‘The baboons would meet and mingle in the mornings,’ she told me, ‘flow their many different ways down into the valleys, and then miraculously coincide, miles away, hours later, as if each knew where the invisible rest of the group was heading.’ Up in the Namibian hills, looking out over the landscape, with seventy-four pairs of baboon eyes also looking out over the same relatively simple terrain (slopes, gravel plains, dry riverbeds), she began to realize how she and the baboons were ‘seeing different things: the routes and resources, the ways through the land, the landmarks, were all multiple’.

From baboons, Deb turned to young children, but continued her interest in ‘multiple’ landscapes. She left anthropology and academia behind, and became involved in outdoor pre-school education, inspired in the first instance by the forest kindergartens of Scandinavia, and by Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia approach, who emphasized the need to listen to children rather than to instruct them. Deb wanted to let children lead her into landscapes, rather than the reverse – and to explore their imaginations as they explored places. She began working with groups of children over several months, taking them often to the same areas of forest or wild ground and then letting them find their own ways into the woods. As they discussed their findings with one another, Deb listened – and this was how she began to comprehend at least some of what Malaguzzi once called
‘the hundred languages of children’
.

One of the first places Deb went was Wandlebury, the area of mixed beech woods and grassland that lies on the chalk uplands south of Cambridge, near to my home. Wandlebury is a child’s delight: there is an Iron Age ring-fort with a deep outer ditch, twelve
feet deep in places, around which you can run in an endless circle. Beyond it, among the trees, is a network of forking and interlacing paths so complex that it seems impossible to trace the same route twice. At Wandlebury the children led and Deb followed. She was careful not to intervene in their plots and plans, except when safety required it. Slowly, she began to make records of the children’s conversations as they explored the area. She mapped the routes they followed, the dens they built out of dead wood and fallen branches, the places of rest and shelter they settled upon and the doorways they found, and the language they used to describe what they discovered each day.

In the winter of 2012, together with an artist called Caroline Wendling, and encouraged by an organization called Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination, Deb began work with a reception class from a primary school in Hinchingbrooke, north Cambridgeshire. For three months, each Monday morning she and Caroline went with around thirty four- and five-year-old children into the country park that bordered the school’s grounds. The eve of that first Monday was – echoes of
The Dark Is Rising
– a night of blizzards. Heavy snow lay on the land the next morning, and there ensued one of the harshest winter-springs of recent years in the south of England.
‘It was cold when we began
in January,’ remembered Deb later, ‘and it was still cold when we ended in April. What was amazing was that nobody seemed to mind.’

Hinchingbrooke Country Park consists of 170 acres of meadow, lake, wood and marsh, lying a mile or so west of Huntingdon and bounded on one side by a dual carriageway and on another by a hospital car park. It is a landscape of contrasts: tall old pines with dark short sightlines give way to meadows that lead down to the edge of water. The children were free to explore within the park, and the
hours they spent there were unstructured by commitment. Each Monday morning was spent in the landscape, each afternoon back in the school further investigating
‘the real and fantastical place that the park was becoming’
.

Deb watched and listened over the months, and tried to record without distortion how the children ‘met’ the landscape, and how they used their bodies, senses and voices to explore it
‘with imagination and with daring
’. She sought to follow how the children navigated and oriented themselves: the ‘visible and invisible traces through the forest’ that they left, the ‘lines drawn on paper’ and ‘words [and stories] that connect one place to another’.

It was clear that the children perceived a drastically different landscape from Deb and Caroline. They travelled simultaneously in physical, imagined and wholly speculative worlds. With the children as her guides, Deb began to see the park as
‘a place of possibility
’, in which the ‘ordinary and the fantastic’ – immiscible to adult eyes – melded into a single alloy. No longer constituted by municipal zonings and boundaries, it was instead a limitless universe, wormholed and Möbian, constantly replenished in its novelty. No map of it could ever be complete, for new stories seethed up from its soil, and its surfaces could give way at any moment. The hollows of its trees were routes to other planets, its subterrane flowed with streams of silver, and its woods were threaded through with filaments of magical force. Within it the children could shape-shift into bird, leaf, fish or water.

Each day brought different weather, and each weather different worlds. The snow of the first week was white to Deb’s and Caroline’s eyes, but to the children it was technicoloured:
‘yellow at the edges
’ and ‘green at the top of the trees’ to a boy called Filip; a ‘pink forest’ to Thomas. When the thaw eventually came, it left a world
‘of newly made mud’
. The smooth snow-sward gave way to new textures and dimensions: slipperiness, sinkholes, ruts and rivulets. The wood became suddenly deep to the children, as the mud sucked and clutched at them. When rain came, the children were drawn to water and waterways. One of the children, Cody, became fascinated by the disappearance and reappearance of running water within the park: how pond connected to lake, stream to puddle. In ways that were in contradiction of gravity, but consistent with the physics of his own imagination, Cody started to account for the existence of visible water by means of an unseen network of what he called
‘secret water
’ that ran unprovably beneath the ground. He took to a kind of dowsing, pacing out on the surface the flow-lines of this secret water, and – as Deb put it – helping her ‘realize that the land we are exploring sits on top of a whole other land, subterranean, that shares with ours a single, continuous, touchable surface’.

Cody found entrances to this underworld by reeds and tree roots – as every child found doorways to the realms they named into being. These doors led to dangerous places as well as ‘good spots’, and the landscape was soon crowded with them, like the beehive cells of the Skelligs. The drawings the children made in the afternoons were also densely doorwayed: mouse holes, tunnel mouths, portals. None of the doors the children drew, Deb noticed, had locks. The doors appeared and disappeared, but always opened both ways.

As well as opening doors, the children made dens: the doors allowing access and adventure, the dens permitting retreat and shelter. Young children are, as all parents know, natural den-makers. Indoors, they curl up in bedclothes, they string sheets between chairs, they prop cushions in corners, they crawl under tables, they shut themselves into cardboard boxes – fashioning nests, bolt-holes, setts and holts. Outside they steal into the hearts of hedges,
improvise shelters from packing cases and plastic bags, or make rickety wigwams and lean-tos out of branches. Children’s literature is dense with dens: the hollow-tree hideout that becomes the redoubt of the feral siblings in BB’s
Brendon Chase
(1944), the scavenged shanty-den of
Stig of the Dump
down at the bottom of the chalk pit, or the piratical stockades founded by Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

In the architecture of dens, function is subservient to form: it doesn’t matter that a den’s loose-ribbed walls would keep out no wind, or that its entrance can be entered only at a crawl. A fallen trunk will serve as a roof ridge, against which sticks and branches can be leaned. Yellowing leaves are gathered and piled to make a heatless fire, around which the children can sit, warming their hands in its light. Old dens are cannibalized to make new dens, and no one structure is built to last more than a season. The woods at Wandlebury hold dozens of dens at any one time, and when I see them there together and in such number, seen between the beeches, there is a curiously ethnographic feel to the encounter: as if the dens are the evidence of a lost tribe, discovered in a region that is barely reachable or known.

Which, of course, is what they are: the tribe being children, the region being childhood, and the ethnographers being adults. Not that we wholly lose our fascination with dens as we age.
‘After one of his shipwreckings
in the
Odyssey
,’ notes Tim Dee:

Odysseus clambers up a hill from a beach and crawls beneath two olive trees, one wild and one domesticated, and makes a nest there from the dropped leaves of both. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, walking in the Lake District in June 1801, found ‘a Hollow place in a Rock like a Coffin – exactly my own Length – there I lay and slept. It was quite soft.’