Dunstable Downs

My memory is no longer what it was, and I am increasingly finding that there are gaps in it. People's names have always been a problem for me, but it's annoying to find myself struggling to remember the telling detail of some anecdote I have unwisely launched into. Typical old man stuff, I suppose. "Hang on, was that in Normandy? No, wait... It might have been Brittany or maybe even, um, Norfolk. Anyway..." Stranger than simple gaps in memory, though, are errors of recollection that have consolidated themselves into false memories. For example, for many years – in fact until this week – I believed that the poet who lived in a friend's squat off London's Caledonian Road in 1980 – whose bed I borrowed one night when she was away and who was none too pleased to discover Goldilocks had chosen her mattress as the one that was just right – was Gillian Clarke, sometime National Poet of Wales. In fact, it turns out it was another poet called Gillian, no less distinguished, but nonetheless not the person whose name has been falsely triggering that real memory any time I came across it in the last 40 years.

The only up-side of these memory-holes is that the unexpected sometimes shines through, like ancient sunlight. I suppose I should reach for that overused quote about the crack in everything from Leonard Cohen's song "Anthem", but I won't (even though, in effect, I just have). One such long-dormant glimmering was re-kindled recently, when we met up with our son and his partner at a convenient halfway spot, Donnington Castle on the outskirts of Newbury. There seem to be places like Donnington in or near most major towns: a hill or other elevated spot where families gather for picnics, friends congregate, and solitaries sit gazing out into the landscape. Blaise Castle near Bristol is another similar location we visited recently with some old friends who happened to be in town the day after a family funeral. But what I was reminded of at Donnington was how when I was a child, just once or twice a year, we would get in the car and head out from Stevenage for a picnic on Dunstable Downs. 

My parents were never great walkers – I think they considered they had already done quite enough of that in the army during the War – but the great advantage of Dunstable Downs is that the road runs along the top of the chalk escarpment, so you can drive there, park the car and walk straight out onto the sort of grassy chalk upland, with a magnificent elevated view over open country, that otherwise requires a lot more puff to achieve. On a sunny summer's day it is a glorious place to be.

For us children in those days, and perhaps even now, one of the main attractions was simply running down the steep hill, losing your footing, falling, and rolling helplessly into a patch of rough grass, or sometimes one of the thorn bushes that stud the slope. Insane, really, but it was the sort of innocent, free, and mildly dangerous fun, like climbing trees and making "camps" in the woods, that we used to enjoy in those final years of an older style of childhood, before entertainment for children became commodified, roped off and safely-cushioned by health and safety concerns, and most "play" started to take place indoors; now, it seems, more often than not sat in front of a screen. To this day I occasionally dream of becoming airborne by running down a grassy slope. Although this may also be connected to the fact that there was (is still) a glider club on the plain below the escarpment, the London Gliding Club, where those gawky-looking craft were hoisted into the air by a cable on a motorised drum. We used to watch them rise steeply and waited for the cable to fall away as the angle approached 90 degrees and the glider was free to rise gracefully on its invisible spiral staircase of air. Which in retrospect I can see as a symbolic longing for the greater freedoms we hoped to enjoy one day, when let off the parental leash.

As things turned out, I achieved a partial sort of freedom rather sooner than many. Our family life changed radically when I was about ten: we moved to a newly-developed part of town, miles from the friends and haunts I had grown up with. Our cat hated it and ran away; I wasn't crazy about it myself. Then I started at the local boys' grammar school, where very few of my primary school friends followed, and my sister – eight years older than me, and both a companion and surrogate parent – left home for teacher-training college and then rather precipitately married and started her own family. Things were never the same again.

I suppose those years marked the end of a carefree childhood. There were no more weekend excursions to Dunstable Downs. Both my mother and father had always been at work all day during the week, but they now seemed too tired to do much other than shop, catch up with the housework, and watch TV at the weekends; unless, of course, we were visiting my sister's new family, where it was all too easy for me to feel self-pityingly surplus to requirements. Few families are good at handling moody pre-adolescent boys, especially when there are adorable toddlers to dote on. I spent school holiday weekdays alone at home, a classic "latch-key kid", free to roam, but with no friends living nearby it was a fairly solitary, introspective sort of freedom. Those were the summers of the Beatles' early hits, and I can never hear, say, the opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night" without being transported back to a street of brand-new council houses on the edge of town with bare-earth gardens, heaps of builder's rubble at the kerbside, and bright white cuttings into the chalk bedrock for as yet unlaid roads and cycleways. Fortunately, friends came back into my life when, three years later, we moved yet again – my parents were nothing if not restless, and the council always seemed happy to accommodate them – and I now found myself living near some of my grammar school classmates. It was summer 1967, and having our fourth-floor flat to myself all day suddenly became a plus as I discovered the furtive pleasures of adolescence, and began to assemble my new "elective family".

But that minor revelation at Donnington Castle helped me remember why I love high places, especially the dry, smooth shoulders of chalk upland, where the breeze ripples the grass and you can bask in the elementary pleasure of revisiting some old, familiar feelings that are too simple and too innocent to have names. But, even so, I'm damned if I'm ever going to run and roll down to the bottom again. It was such a long walk getting up here.

Dyrham Camp hillfort

site of the Battle of Deorham