visit to epping forest

While in London this week I met a friend for a walk in Epping Forest. We walked from Chingford Plains to High Beach and it was thrilling to experience an unfamiliar aspect of the forest and notice many instances of sympathetic management and habitat creation. Since I left the area in 2018 greater numbers of English Long Horn cattle have been released and we saw small herds grazing and relaxing in the grass. This sight is part of a thousand year history of people having commoner rights to graze cattle in Epping Forest, a working landscape. 

The forest where I grew up has a different feel: huge pollarded beech tress, deep leaf litter and wide tracks. This part felt more intimate and varied with winding, slow streams, boggy areas and clearings. It's been years since I walked in Epping Forest and my eyes felt fresh with the wonder of it, realising anew that this is a very particular place and surprisingly, that I'd forgotten something of its power and beauty. I would love to visit again with more time for exploration. 

it is hard to lose your mother

Last Monday it rained ALL day. 

I'd planned to visit Epping Forest, near where my mum lived for 42 years but not fancying a soaking I postponed until the following day. So on Tuesday I traced the journey made on frequent visits during the final months of Mum's life, cycling to Leytonstone tube, traveling 6 stops on the Central Line to Debden, then cycling the mile or so to her home. Setting out on my journey I passed an undertakers and saw a wicker coffin being respectfully transferred from a van into their premises. It was like the one we selected for Mum last year. I felt little. There is a numbness in me at times, where I observe what I could be feeling but the feeling doesn't come. I'm aware of a level of self protection and wonder if the years anniversary of her death will allow a turning of this tide. The feeling is akin to holding my breath, and soon I may gasp for air and grief might bloom.  

Slightly to the side of and separate from reality, I cycled through Debden, turning left and swooping down Willingale Road, swerving to avoid pot holes and cracks in the road. Then right onto Etheridge Road, left along Colebrook Lane, then a final right onto Pyrles Lane. The roads were quiet and clear. I cycled up Pyrles Lane dropping gears on the incline. When passing Mum's house I felt nothing. It is a Council House and we always knew the keys would be handed back one day. The house is so familiar but Mum is no longer behind that door, watching TV in her chair, the memory already feels distant. A quick glance, noticing ornaments on the windowsills, the garden scruffier. While peddling I recalled this time last year and my fears about what I would find, turning the key and opening the door, gently calling Hello Mum, worried that I'd find her in distress, fallen, dead. 

Onwards to the forest, memories of walks over the years. Mum surprised me once by asking to join me on a walk to Theydon Bois and back with Jessie our beloved Battersea rescue dog. A photograph from that day sits in my living room of Mum holding Jessie's lead, posing for this now precious photograph. Climbing off my bike, I wheeled it into the muddy forest. There is a wide path into the woods and I enjoyed its familiar gradient, noticing the still bare trees and dark trunks caused by persistent rain. A tree creeper alighted onto the trunk I was looking at, I knew its name because my sister had told me on a walk in the forest a few weeks earlier. 

Delight! I was alone in the woods and all around me birds sang, revving up, stating claims for territory, for mates. Underneath their song an unseen stream ran at full spate, swollen from the previous days rain. This wood so familiar, a 10 minute walk from my childhood home and still the trees stagger me, old pollarded beech trees, human in their knobbly forms. It is a very special place, unlike any other forest I've experienced. This part of my life is closing down, my links to the area gone with Mum's death, the neighbours we knew gone also. The thing I dreaded has happened and I survive and move on. It is hard to lose your mother. 

A couple of weeks ago I attended a drop-in healing session at the Spiritualist Church in South Woodford. As the healing came to a close a radiant green light filled my closed eyelids and the words, It is hard to lose your mother came into my head. It was an incredible moment and filled me with hope. 

capturing a robin

The forest opposite my childhood home

I'm reading my favourite book for the third time. It is a buoy in an unsettled and uncertain moment in my life. The story so captures me I forget about this day, and am transported to an age before cars, before World War 1, when a passing bicycle would create such a stir that folk would run to their gates to gawp and wonder. The book is Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson. 

A memory was sparked as I read of a village woman catching birds for the sport of it. Hidden, patient, holding the end of a length of string in her hand, the string tied to a stick, which had a sieve propped upon it and a sprinkling of crumbs beneath as bait. When I was small my father taught me how to catch a bird using such a method, just once, crouched behind our honeysuckle hedge, capturing a robin red breast and letting it go. Now I understand, from the vantage point of passing years what he was teaching me. My father didn't give me much in the conventional sense of what fathers are meant to be for daughters but he taught me something beyond words that day, a childhood in rural Scotland, a childhood where he hunted to eat, a childhood of ingenuity, responsibility and patience, of soil, and rain, and cold. 

My dad drew a circle on our dust path once, explaining that the Earth was hot at its core, together we uprooted a dead tree for our fire, we caught a robin and then let it go and all these things cause this 47 year old woman's heart to ache. I was born a month before his 55th birthday. Sieve, stick, string, crumbs. My Dad was odd in Essex, always mistaken for my Granddad, rake thin, venturing into the forest to drag home trees to burn.

At school, I excitedly shared capturing a bird with my father, writing about it or telling the teacher. I remember my confusion and shame as the teacher told me it was a horrible story and cruel, with classmates pulling faces. As is the way of small children I wasn't able to ask why she said that and became withdrawn and quiet, realising something of otherness, oddness and unbelonging. 

tempo

While walking on Wanstead Flats yesterday I was fascinated by the trees in open ground, could feel their fizzing energy. Tens of thousands of leaf buds on the verge of bursting, nature felt as an elastic band stretched to its limit and about to ping! Trees in the forested areas have pinged into leaf, sheltering each other from the winds that whip around the more exposed and bud filled trees. 

I thought about tempo, and remembered the quote by Ezra Pound, The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.

As I continued to walk I passed a mature horse chestnut and was made tiny by it! Thinking about the best way to describe it, hulking settled into my mind. Questions tumbled - how much do the leaves weight? How much does the tree weigh? How much water is lifted up through the trunk in a day? Transformation, energy, connectedness.

With leaf the trees have become dense, inflated, huge. They stand their ground.

alone

Without the green of the forest I don't know how I would have turned out. Crossing the road from my house and entering the wood did not scare me, it was simple. 

This summer I created new work and entered the woods alone once more. This time I experienced fear and trepidation. I was nervous. While sitting on a fallen tree amongst a copse of young birches it dawned on me that this was my first time alone in Epping Forest since childhood. My fears about being vulnerable, unprotected, far from others were present.

Still, close to the forest floor, I breathed in constancy, timelessness, rootedness. No one disturbed me, not even a dog walker. On some unseen path beyond my trees children pelted through the wood on bikes, voices raised in excitement. As I arranged my work Army of Me by Bjork played in my head and I thought of my twenties and my friend Marianne. 

Hand stitched arms, 2015
Wanstead Flats, London

This image is a prelude to the work mentioned above. I wandered over to the Wanstead Flats and found this secluded spot to test my idea. 

sign

parents

The only little girl in the woods, she liked it that way. Young, very young, safer here than there and not recognising the tragedy of that yet. The forest provided clear sight lines and space above her head, the opposite of hemmed in. Her fledgling mind was safe there. Not that she had thoughts of safety, this is the adult retelling, reframing a natural inclination for a calm environment.

The green-ness felt as home, her favourite colour in so many shades and textures, cosseting her tender body. So small, so lost and yet settled within herself in this place. When older she was told that green was her grandmothers favourite colour and that she would have liked her. By this time she was tall, startled at her woman's body, so much did she feel that small girl inside herself.

There were no rules in this space. The earth beneath her feet did not ask anything of her. The trees stood in their places, unchanging, their moods stable, predictable unlike anything else she knew. The forest was constant and her heart needed that.

Her mothers leaves shimmered in the slightest breeze, she was slight, delicate, glowing silver in the forest. Her skin smooth, pale, her trunk easily encompassed by small arms. The girl felt shy with her, tender, careful. Her father was tall and broad, he touched the sky. Cracked and fissured, her arms when pressed against him held his texture for a time, he impressed her skin. The canopy he provided was a home, a shelter. She did not marvel at his great age, his acorn beginning 300 years before hers, before the estate was built, before anyone living was a twinkle in a long dead eye.

new work

Army of Me, 2015
Large Format Photograph
Epping Forest

the past in the present

From the age of 4 I was brought up in an estate in Loughton, Essex. It's a green and leafy place built after WWII with solid council houses. My bedroom window framed the edge of Epping Forest, a mostly oak boundary that runs along the end of Pyrles Lane. At night the piercing cries of foxes and hotting of owls can be heard, in daytime cooing wood pigeons and traffic replace the night creatures. I remember looking out of this window during the Great Storm of 1987 and seeing trees bowed and felled by the wind, and to this day remember the trees that are missing from this view.

Yesterday I went out for a walk, tracing most of my old route to primary school, then beyond to Debden Broadway. A series of memories floated into my head as I walked:

Betty and Bill.

Street parties on Cleland Path.

A friends mum who would bite their dog if it bit her.

The same friend singing Police and Thieves and claiming she made it up on the spot, only years later did I discover her lie.

The now demolished wall that we used to balance on outside St Gabriel's Church.

My little sister being hit by a car outside St Gabriel's Church.

The once open land with a marvellous old oak that I loved, still there but behind fences, deadly nightshade grew near it.

My primary school where I was most happy in education, its once huge open field now covered in houses. The bird that flew into our classroom window, sat dazed for a moment and then flew away.

The eccentrically decorated house with a hand painted sign outside declaring, 'Beware of the tadpole'. I liked it but the neighbours weren't so keen.

Angela and Barry who treated me like a daughter and gave me so much during my teenage years (and beyond).

Debden's pie and mash shop, unchanged through the decades.

Where Woolworths used to be.

Sprays the bakers, sold out of my favourite Bath bun.