Recently, the word "headland" came up on the blog Language Hat (no relation, as I always feel obliged to point out, despite the fact that this is perfectly obvious). As an American, blogger Steve Dodson had not come across this word before in its specific British usage as the unploughed area at either end of a field, where the tractor (or horse team in the past) turns round, as it makes each freshly-ploughed "land" on the field.
I don't suppose many Brits have come across that sense of the word, either, but I grew up in a New Town plonked like an island of concrete onto the claggy arable fields of North Hertfordshire where a good many of my ancestors had laboured away their brief and muddy lives. On Sunday visits to my grandparents' village I used to play in a field just over the road, where I was told to stay on the "hedluns", and not venture out into the deep ploughed furrows, waist-high to a small child and treacherous, even after harrowing and the crop had grown. Did you ever put a whiskery head of barley up the sleeve of your jumper, by the way, and wait for it to reappear at your collar? Crazy but slow fun: we used to make our own entertainment in those days.
I was also reminded of one winter's day at school when our class had an outing to a nearby field – a literal field trip, you might say – where local magistrate, school governor and farmer Mr. Powell-Davis inducted us into the theory and practice of growing stuff in mud, standing on a cold and windy headland, dressed in flat cap, tweeds and wellies, and gesturing with his stick like some socially-awkward general briefing his troops, while we shivered in our school blazers and leaky lace-ups. I have no idea why this visit had been arranged: it wasn't as if this was ever likely to be something that lay in our futures.
Although, for some, it did. Several of my less academically-inclined friends left school at the first opportunity and started their working lives as agricultural labourers, and they enjoyed teasing us townie swots with their newly-acquired skills and jargon. It was not a life I envied. One Christmas I earned a few pounds stretching the necks of turkeys and plucking them as they hung by their feet from a noose in a cold barn; it was a horrible job, and after a couple of days I packed it in. Working as a temporary Christmas postman was much more my style, and better paid.
One of these friends – I can't remember who – eventually had a "tied cottage"; that is, a building on the farmer's land that could be occupied by a labourer for the duration of his employment, but no longer. It was the first of a series of similar rural hideaways where our little gang of about a dozen friends and associates could gather safely out of the public eye, united by our primary hobby, which was getting as stoned as possible, listening to records as loud as possible, and talking gibberish for hours. We were young, it was fun, and there wasn't much else to do in North Herts.
I remember one occasion in particular. Several of us were home from university and we were getting down to the usual activities one evening in one of these cottages. A friend called Nick was living there, and had arranged on the wall various agricultural implements he must have found lying around. One of these was like a short spade handle, but tipped with a metal cone rather than a blade. I wondered out loud what it was; Nick said it was a dibber, anticipating incomprehension. But when I said, "Oh, of course!", he countered, scornfully, "OK, then, clever Dick, what's a dibber, then?" But, to his unfeigned amazement, I did actually know. [1] As would any clever Dick, of course, who had enjoyed a teenage obsession with rural folkways – I was a keen reader of the books of George Ewart Evans – as well as the lifestyle and art of various indigenous peoples (surely not just me?).
Now, I don't suppose anyone else who was there would remember that exchange of dibberish (sorry). Frankly, I'd be amazed if anyone had remembered anything about that evening at all, even the very next day. But I do, mainly because I received two insights – revelations, really – that were both saddening and sobering.
As an urban flat-dweller, I had long hoped one day to live somewhere like that, an anonymous little house up an unlit private lane and remote from any neighbours, in a spot that was truly dark at night beneath a full starry sky and open to all weathers. I still do, but probably never will now. But what struck me that evening was that, if I ever did, for me it would always have to be a quiet and very private retreat, and never the setting for raucous gatherings like these. Second, and not unconnected, it dawned on me that, as an over-educated clever Dick with academic career ambitions, I was only ever tenuously and temporarily part of this aimlessly hedonistic mob. I was feeling that bitter-sweet blend of regret and impatient anticipation that marks the passage from one phase of your life to the next: the sense of an ending. [2]
I have written before about the ways we are sent onto different paths by education. In the post I'll Never Forget Old Wotsisname, for example, I wrote this about a former best friend from primary school:
But that friendship came to an abrupt end when the secondary school selection process sent us on separate paths. My friend went through the door marked "secondary modern", and I went through the one marked "grammar" (or "snob school", as it was more generally known). When that door shut behind me I looked back, and all but a couple of my closest playmates had gone; the door might as well have had "EDEN – NO RETURN" written on it in letters of fire. It was the first instalment on the price of seizing certain opportunities (or having them thrust upon you), and in particular of choosing to walk the steep and poorly-signposted path of "social mobility".
In those years of the mid-70s when I was away at university I would only return home as briefly as possible in the vacations. My father had been made redundant, and my mother had suffered a disabling heart attack, forcing her to give up work; the atmosphere in our little two-bedroom council flat was oppressive, and I would escape as often and as soon as I could. But they would worry if I didn't come home at night, and more worry was not a burden they needed. Which meant that when out at one of those fun-fuelled rural gatherings I had to rely on at least one car-owner being "together" enough, as we used to say, to drive me home in the early hours. Which was obviously unfair and unpopular, and that sense of an impending ending became ever more acute. It was painfully clear that I couldn't both be at home and be my emerging adult self at the same time, and that, anyway, my future was taking shape in another, more exciting place, among a new and different set of friends; I needed to be back there, getting on with it, not marking time in a scene that had, for me, finally run its course. [3]
As I also wrote in that old post, nobody ever warns you that to choose social mobility is also to choose a form of exile; many thousands of us have experienced, and presumably do still and will always experience the truth of that. I never did return to live in that flat, and by the time my parents finally moved away to Norfolk, to live out their final years in a static caravan in my sister's back garden, my few closest friends had also moved on. I no longer had any reason to go back to my home town, and I never did.
Except once. Driving up from Southampton to my mother's funeral in 2007, I thought I'd make a detour to take a final nostalgic look at "our" flats and get some decent photographs, and maybe even take the lift up, if it was working, and knock on the door of number 47 to see who was living there now. It was the first time I had ever actually driven a car through the streets of the town where I was born and grew up, which was an odd feeling, like one of those lucid dreams where you are aware you are dreaming and yet have a certain degree of agency over events. Then, turning a very familiar corner in this very unfamiliar way, I discovered to my utter amazement that the entire block had been demolished, and building work was already under way on the site.
It was hard to take in. My bedroom, the theatre of so many vivid teenage dreams, fears, aspirations, and fantasies, had simply become an empty, dusty space, fifty feet up in the air. Gone! But I had no better response than to laugh... It was one of those ridiculously overcooked movie moments in life when you simply have to ask yourself: who writes this stuff?
1. Feigned amazement was very much the style in vogue, as in "Oh, wow! That's amazing!" Not sure by whom or how this started, but it took me years to shake off...
2. As Corey Mohler of Existential Comics puts it: Your childhood is over when you first get the feeling that you've wasted a weekend because all you did was mess around and have fun.
3. The amusing thing is that to my new university friends, many of them privately educated, my tales of sybaritic scenes among the lower orders were as fascinating to them as their hilarious and hair-raising accounts of the goings-on in our most prominent public schools were to me. The truth was, though, things could get pretty sordid. I'll never be able to unsee the time that ... But no, Watson: that is a story for which the world is not yet prepared.
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