Landmarks (28 page)

In his classic study of intimate places,
The Poetics of Space
(1958), the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard writes at length about our lifelong dream-need for hollows and huts. Traversing ornithology, psychology, architecture and literature, Bachelard discovers a family of den-like recessed spaces – corners, birds’ nests, cellars, attics, chests, caverns, walled gardens (the
hortus conclusus
) – that continue to exert a fascination upon the mind even as it ages, because they
‘shelter day-dreaming
’. He calls the readiness to be astonished by such spaces ‘topophilia’ (place-love), but I think we might also name it ‘wonder’, ‘innocence’, or even just ‘happiness’.

~

We live in an era of diminishing childhood contact with nature, and landscapes outside the urban. A 2012 ‘Natural Childhood’ report recorded that between 1970 and 2010, the area in which British children were permitted to play unsupervised shrank by 90 per cent. The proportion of children regularly playing in ‘wild’ places fell from one in two to one in ten. In another study, participants from three generations were given maps of the places in which they grew up, and asked to mark with crosses where they remembered playing. The spread of the crosses – the so-called ‘roaming radius’ – tightened from generation to generation, until in the third it was cinched right down to house, garden and pavement. Screen-time has increased dramatically. Environmental literacy has plummeted. Nine out of ten children can identify a Dalek; three out of ten a magpie.
The disconnection from nature is greater now than it has ever been.
‘The children out in the woods
, out in the fields,’ said the naturalist and broadcaster Chris Packham in May 2014, ‘enjoying nature on their own – they’re extinct.’

Flashes from history mark the contrast with our own. My father, growing up in Malvern in the 1950s, set out at the age of seven each weekday to cycle seven miles to school in the morning, and seven miles home in the evening, along country roads (no helmet); at the age of fourteen he built a canoe in the garage and then paddled it down the River Wye from Upper Breinton to Monmouth, wearing his father’s Second World War Mae West life jacket. In the 1930s, schoolchildren from England and Wales were recruited as crowd-cartographers and sent out on foot into the countryside in pairs, tasked with mapping the use of every parcel of land, then
‘returning the results to London
where they were compiled onto topographic base maps and coloured to reveal national patterns of land use’. In
The Rural Life of England
(1838), William Howitt records how village children would
‘use the green lanes
as their playgrounds as well as scenes of their earliest employment … small children were sent out there to mind big babies, shut lonely gates for horseriders’. Robert Louis Stevenson notes in one of his ‘essays of travel’ that while out walking in the countryside in the 1880s, he heard a
‘bustle
’ and met ‘a great coming and going of school-children upon bypaths’.

These changes in the culture of childhood have huge consequences for language: most strikingly apparent in the deletions from the
Oxford Junior Dictionary
that I discussed in the first chapter. And our children’s vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of imagination as well as a loss of primary experience. For, as the novelist Michael Chabon writes in an essay subtitled ‘The Wilderness of
Childhood’, if children abandon
‘the sandlots and creek beds
, the alleys and woodlands’, if ‘children are not permitted … to be adventurers and explorers as children’, then ‘what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?’

~

In the early days at Hinchingbrooke, the children stayed among the trees, opening their doors and building their dens. There was plenty to explore in the woods. After several weeks, though, they found their way to the wood’s fringe, where it borders grassland that slopes down to a lake. They spotted a gap between two pines:
‘A door, a door
, can we go through?’ The doorway took them to ‘an unfamiliar land’, sunlit and wide, softer underfoot, light in its colours. Filip ‘lay down on the soft spongy ground’, wrote Deb of this day, ‘meet[ing] the new place like he met the land in the snow – with his whole body’. Filip reminded me of others who had lain down in the landscape to know it better: Shepherd on the Cairngorm plateau, Jefferies on the Wiltshire turf, Muir under the spreading boughs of a mountain oak, and Hawkes on the grass of her London garden.

The profusion of doorways that the children discovered, and the move into the meadows, allowed
‘the travelling to reach
a new dramatic level’, and this in turn helped Deb to comprehend the children’s experiences. She realized that they were undertaking a ‘kind of fantastic travelling, in which worlds slip easily around each other, where there are soft boundaries between what is real and what is remembered, and each place in front of us is somewhere else too’.

‘Childhood is a branch of cartography,’
suggests Chabon, but surely – again – we should reverse the terms of his proposition:
‘Cartography is a branch of childhood.’ Children are intense and intuitive mappers, using story, touch and paper to plot their places. Deb and Caroline listened in the mornings as names were given to places within the park (‘The Living Room’, ‘Snap-land’, ‘Den-land’, ‘Spiky Land’), and they watched in the afternoons as the children drew maps of the park that were also documents of realms beyond sight: for in their Hinchingbrooke Country Park wolves lived in tunnels deep within a mountain, dolphins sang below the surface of the lake, there were tree-houses and air-cities, and the sky held cold suns and hot moons. In the final weeks, Caroline drew a huge outline of the park in chalk on brown paper. This was taped to the wall in the corridor, and became a canvas on which the children could place their individual maps, like tiles in a mosaic. In this way a collaged atlas of the park came into existence – a
‘map of maps
’, a ‘map of the mind’s adventures’.

The children’s explorations of place were also, of course, explorations of and in language: they
‘weaved words and ways together’
, creating new terms (playful, specific, personal) to account for the changeable world they were inhabiting. They coined toponyms and nouns:
‘honeyfurs’
, beautifully, for the soft seed-heads that they gathered from the grasses. Their speech was also rich with the magical thinking of early childhood, whereby things imagined true
are
true, and the distinction between the dreamt and the real is shimmery at its strongest. Like Vainamoinen, young children utter words of bidding, confident in their sense that if one points, names, declares, then the terms of the universe are changed by the declaration:
‘My name is Kian
and I’m going to jump over the whole world!’ ‘I was born in the climbing tree,’ declared a girl who had spent weeks gaining the confidence to climb into the branches of a cherry. ‘I was born in space and Mars,’ said another, the most confident tree-climber in the group (a natural Cosimo). They told stories of masterful miniaturism, brimming with make-believe:
‘This is the mountain
, now it’s the wolves’ home. I wanted to fly – I didn’t want to wake the wolves, they just climb up here.’ They were narratively at ease with what adults would see as contradiction: paradox was, instead of a tool for collapsing meaning, a mean of holding incompatibilities in rich relation. Gracefully accurate, their utterances rarely required extension.

After they had finished their cold spring at Hinchingbrooke, Deb and Caroline began to try to find a means of recording what they had witnessed. So together they made a slender and beautiful book composed largely of the children’s speech, stories and drawings. They called it
A Fantastical Guide
in recognition of its subject. Every time I read the
Guide
, I am amazed again. For to open it is to see again through young eyes, and to hear Childish spoken. The
Guide
offers a map to the park’s doorways and portals, but also to how all landscapes might be seen childishly, such that a wood – or a field, or a garden, or a house – can
‘hold infinite possibilities
in a single unfolding place’, and to enter a place is – as one of the children put it – to go looking ‘for a secret tree, and an invisible door’.

Shortly after first reading the
Guide
, I found myself recalling the story of the T’ang Dynasty artist Wu Tao-Tzu, who is said one day to have gathered his friends to show them his most recent painting. The friends huddled round it in admiration: it was a vertical scroll painting of a mountainous landscape with a footpath that led along the bank of a stream, and then through a grove of trees to a small cottage or hut.

But when the friends turned to congratulate Wu Tao-Tzu, they realized he had vanished. Then they saw that he had stepped into the landscape of the painting, and was walking along the path and through the grove. He reached the entrance to the hut, and on its threshold he paused, turned, smiled, and then passed through the narrow doorway.

Left blank for future place-words and the reader’s own terms

The day before writing the final sentences of the last chapter of this book, I received an extraordinary letter from a scholar of languages living in Qatar. For the past fifteen years, he explained to me, he had been working on a global glossary of landscape words. His fascination with the subject went back as far as he could remember. He was born in Cyrenaica, now eastern Libya, where his father trained King Idris’s household cavalry. He grew up among the kopjes, vleis and veldt of rural southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He was schooled in the Dorset countryside, before beginning a period of extensive travelling in Africa and the Middle East.

It was while studying Arabic, he said, and walking the black lava fields (
harrah
), deep wadis and granite domes (
hadbah
) of the Hejaz in western Arabia, that he decided to begin gathering place-words from the Arabic dialects, before they were swept away by the rapid modernization and urbanization enabled by oil money. But Arabic’s rich relations with other languages soon caused his research to ripple outwards, and his task began to grip him with the force of an obsession. He moved into neighbouring Semitic and Afro-Eurasian languages with heavy Arabic influence (Turkish, Berber, Persian, Urdu, Swahili, Maltese and Spanish). The entries for individual words grew, some of them to several pages in length, as a meshwork of cross-reference thrived between languages and usages. He turned
to Sanskrit, Bengali and the many other languages of the subcontinent, then to Latin, and then the Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Nordic and Slav language families.

Then he decided to extend the temporal range of his research backwards from the present day to the first Sumerian cuneiform records of
c
. 3100
BCE
: a span of more than five millennia. This required him to work with ancient and extinct languages, and reconstructed proto-languages: watching as terms sprang into being in one tongue, then tracking their passages through centuries and in cognate forms. Geographically, he journeyed across the Afro-Eurasian lands from the Atlantic coast in the west to the China Seas in the east. Topographically, he ranged from micro- to macro-scales, covering the natural features of the earth’s surface (from mountains to rills); the man-made environment (cities, settlements, buildings, farms, ditches, tracks); the names of trees and plants; the names of regions and territories; terms of relative position, size and colour; and compass directions and measures of distance. Linguistically, he worked through around 140 languages, from Afrikaans to Zande by way of Comorian, Chinese, Hebrew, Tagalog and Uzbek. His hope – as he spent tens of thousands of hours in libraries and at his desk – was to show that ‘the landscape is an enormous repository of language, preserving a lexicon of words as diverse, intricate and dynamic as the land itself … an ancient yet evolving text that tells the stories of its places and the histories of its peoples, for the land is layered in language as surely as the rocks are layered beneath its surface’.

The work became so vast in its form, he told me, so complex in its structures and so infinitely extendable in its concerns that he did not envisage ever completing it, only bringing it to a point of abandonment that might also be a point of publication – though what the physical manifestation of the book might be was hard to envisage.
‘The project has,’ he said, almost embarrassedly, ‘something of the fabulous about it.’

Later he sent me, as an attachment to an email, the section of the glossary covering those words beginning with the letter ‘B’. ‘I hope the file-size can be accommodated …’ he wrote. I double-clicked it. The document opened in Word, and I watched the page-count whirr up as my computer ascertained the extent of the text. The count hit 100 pages, then 200, then 300 … it settled at last on 343 pages. Three hundred and forty-three pages in eleven-point font, just for ‘B’. Then I read the note preceding the first entry, ‘
bā
(Akkadian, jungbabylonisch lex.):
water
’: ‘This glossary is a work in progress. At the present time … it is some 3,500 pages long and contains around 50,000 separate terms or headwords.’ I sat back in my seat.

It was a strange and haunting moment. It felt as if I had wandered into a story by Borges or Calvino. At the end of the second chapter of
Landmarks
, I fantasized about the existence of a ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the world’, a ‘glossary of enchantment for the whole earth’. I first indulged in that thought-experiment in 2007 on Lewis, when I read the Peat Glossary and imagined extending its qualities of precision, poetry and tact drastically upwards and outwards in scale. I knew it to be an impossible dream, but nevertheless resolved to begin forming my own small and partial place-word lists.

But here, now, the day before finishing the book begun by that Peat Glossary, I learnt that a world-sized Counter-Desecration Phrasebook was actually coming into being – manifested by the brilliance and diligence of this extraordinary scholar, out there in the desert, gathering and patterning a work of words that might keep us from slipping off into abstract space.