Down a lane filled with memories
In a two-part special prose poem, David Hill takes a nostalgic meander down a much loved lane on his family farm
SHAPCOTT Lane – a boundary between the two hay meads of our farm and a neighbouring farmer’s field and copse – was one of my favourite locations in the parish. I spent hour upon hour walking it and I think it fair to say, that by the time I was eleven, and went away to boarding school, I knew every inch of it. This long prose-poem is a painting in words, and although written by a man of seventy-three it is written as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy. Hopefully it conveys the same excitement and innocence I experienced when I first explored it. Each morning at dawn, echoing over the lane from across the valley, the scythe-sharpening screams from the flock of gleanies renting the air. My father’s dry joke, “It’ll cost you a guinea per fowl to buy those noisy birds.” Shapcott Lane, named after Shapcott Barton farm. Once, the home of the Shap cote family, accused of being Delinquents during the Commonwealth, it was connected to our village by the stone, rutted, trackway.
In one hedge a fine oak tree which I climbed and carved D JH into the trunk with my two bladed birthday present penknife. Root and twig nest of the screeching jay, a speckled egg removed, needle-pierced, blown, and added to my boxed collection.
Neatly laid out on a cotton wool bed next to the eggs of crow, rook and magpie. Each labelled in copper plate writing. In another, handed down, inlaid cherry wood box, feathers. The jay’s, a Bassett blue dot sweet of a feather. Eggs and feathers, the emblems of a country boy’s childhood. Ruler of the roost, the boy who had a buzzard’s egg. The size of a small child’s clenched fist, this was the egg you coveted the most.
During winter, a hawthorn bush clotted with scarlet berries for a foreign invading force of redwing and fieldfare. The morning skirmishes with the resident army of blackbird,
stormcock and song thrush, their angry war cries echoing up and down the lane. At the end of winter a drift of snowdrops thawing, replaced by daffodils trumpeting the arrival of spring, before bluebells chimed in the beginning of summer. White violets in a secret clump, to be picked and given as a small bouquet by my father to my bun-baking mother.
Here grew fox gloves towering over me in a skulk of stalks. This was an estate of luxury apartments where a thief weighed down with heavy sacks bumbled across patterned pink floors. Squeezing a finger-sheath to make the bee buzz furiously. Releasing it. A wing-flight of anger. Later in the year the hedge ignited, the pink flames of an alien species flaring skywards. As the flowers died, the hedge became white with feathery ash; an invasion by rosebay willow-herb, the fire weed borne on the wind from the cities.
The summer picking of wild strawberries, raspberries red and yellow. A few weeks later braving the bramble barbs for blackberries to turn into pies, tarts, crumbles, jam and jelly. The gathering of hazelnuts for the traditional cracking around the inglenook fireplace at Christmas At the end of each summer, three buzzards, steeds riding the thermals, high over the lane. The squire, his Lady and their son and heir surveying their realm as the wind took them in a circle soaring tour. Lift, drop, lift again, before riding off into the clouds.
The berries on the blackthorn were a temptation each autumn, the purple berry carefully placed between my front teeth, plucking up the courage to bite into the green or yellow flesh. An ooze of juice and my mouth and lips instantly drying, as once again I had completed the self imposed ritual of autumn.
The lane hedges were home to the nesting robin, blackbird, song thrush, chaffinch, chiffchaff and wren. Each nest crafted with either foliage, feathers and leaves or a combination of all three. The eggs of an occasional less common nesting bird identified in my Observer’s Book of Bird’s Eggs, bought for the princely sum of five shillings from pocket money of thrupence a week saved over twenty weeks. This was my nature Bible, always with me during the spring and summer months
The lane, used in previous decades by walker, rider, horse and cart, became partially overgrown during my childhood with nettles brambles, and five feet high parasol bracken fronds. Only the section from East Furze Close, known as Lane Field, and leading to the village remaining open.
Gorse once grown in two fields for winter fodder and to heat our farmhouse inglenook cloam oven where bread was baked, before grey metal gas cylinders were installed for the newly purchased oven in the early nineteen fifties.
In April the unseen composer penned his pastoral symphony for soloist and choir to fill the lane each morning. Building through spring, it culminated in a crescendoing climax in the early summer morning dawn chorus. From an elder bush the faultless melody of the blackcap accompanied by the happy song of the garden warbler crammed full of liquid notes. The first strains of the returning choristers. Almost filling the air, the blackbird’s song. A master soloist whose faultless notes rang out from dawn til dusk. The song thrush with his words of hope, and the holm screech in the rowan delivered the boldest songs. On the blackthorn bush the robin handled his limited range with tremendous skill, not yet the tender wistful notes of autumn. Delicate was the hedge sparrow’s contribution, so underrated, a shy song from one of Nature’s finest choristers. Occasionally the copse cock pheasant, a wood pigeon or rook punctuated the performance just as the sun was rising. Finally, the defiant notes of the wren’s shrill song. Boldly projected, it punched it’s way into my head and woke all the creatures still asleep.
The daily morning song echoed through the lane and the trunk pillars and branch-vaulting of the, over-the-field, copse-cathedral. Choristers clothed in the finest surpluses, singing their anthem of a new beginning in praise of their creator.