The Blackberry Walk

I may only be twenty-five years of age, but already the England I knew as a child is gone. Where I grew up, in Metroland, in a Herfordshire village, things then were quite different. Some of the teachers at the school had colonial roots, born and raised in Kenya, old-fashioned teachers, who cared little for the vibe-shift the profession was undergoing. When I look back, something from that time feels like the twilight of an era, the twilight of an older conception of England. Every generation, no doubt, has this sense. Just as I look back to my childhood, those growing up in the Edwardian era no doubt looked back at the Victorians, mourning the disappearance of their old-fashioned ways. No doubt. But the scale of change has picked up, and I think this conception of rural England - a dare I say Wind in the Willows-esque conception of rural England, and English nature - is disappearing. Mrs. James was my teacher in reception. She was a tired old lady, tired of teaching, and wearied of the world. Each year we did the school nativity play for the infants (do schools still do nativity plays?), and each year she narrated from a microphone with all the enthusiasm of a snail. When I was a child, she felt old, lumbering, and ancient, as if she were carrying a great burden upon her back, as if all of modernity were ruining all that she holds dear. I was young and knew no better, so as I ascended the years, I remember looking upon her unfavourably. She was of a different era, tangibly, of a different culture, of the village, not of the commuter town. In her village, the food was flavourless, but the world was enchanted. Each year, Mrs. James took her class on the bluebell walk. Near the school, near my house growing up, was an ancient woodland, which each year without fail, come Eastertide, blooms into a carpet of bluebells. The bluebells of Britain are beautiful, and no photograph seems to do them justice. Something in the eye or the mind, when confronted with this rich purple, fails to discern plant from plant, and all you can see is a sea of indigo. The bluebells were close, and such an excursion was cheap and cheerful: would a teacher plan such a school trip today? A teacher today would find the bluebells pretty, granted, but would they go through the effort of planning and safeguarding such a trip? Or rather, would a teacher today see in the bluebells something important to be learnt? The bluebell walk, I've come to see, was something to Mrs. James more than just a fun excursion. It was a vaccine. Children don't want to walk slowly admiring flowers, they want to run around, they want to be stimulated. To most children, flowers don't quite cut it. But each year, she toured the bluebells with the children, and patiently showed them the beauty of the English woods. Nature is always the strongest tonic; the domestication of the city is where madness lies. This conception of England is old, but not ancient. In the days when near everyone lived in the countryside, in a village as a farmer, there was no need for Romanticism. The Romantics only arose from the shadows of the Satanic mills, from the need to recover something, whatever that something may be, that had been lost. This sentiment for the picturesque was novel. Letters written from the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King, state the view of the Alps was hideous, and that the windows facing East should be shuttered. In England, there are sources complaining about the dry stone wall of the countryside, and how ugly it is. Dry stone walling and the Alps are almost archetypal of picturesque beauty today, but these sentiments aren't eternal. What we value, what we find beautiful, changes over time. Our apperception of beauty is more than a flat, one-dimensional yearning for the past: it's a complex arrangements of factors, both earthly and heavenly. As such, Romanticism itself - whilst still extant in its original form - has changed over time. British romanticism began with the beauty of vast rugged nature, but as time went on, began to appreciate the small, the tiny. At the end of the nineteenth century, Victorian high-materialism was dying, fertilising the ground for new dreams of the future. Orwell warned that if fascism came to Britain, it would be adorned in lions and unicorns. But there was another movement in Britain, a contemporary movement of a kind of high church reaction in the early twentieth century, one adorned instead with hedgehogs and red squirrels. The persons of this movement, to name a few, included Tolkien, Lewis, Eliot, and Kenneth Grahame. Whilst authors like Tolkien wrote of a world beyond the shire, of a great expanse, in The Wind in the Willows, Grahame wrote a far more parochial, a far smaller vision of England.

"Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,” said the Rat. “And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all."

What we find in the The Wind in the Willows is a progression in what Romanticism is. The Romanticism of the Wild Wood and the Riverbank is hostile to the Wide World, preferring the sequestered woodland to the great expanse of man and nature. There may be awe in the Alps, but in the woodland, there’s enchantment: there’s magic beneath the oaks of the woods. I remember reading, I can’t remember where, that the praeternatural in art can take two forms: in the vast expanse of a landscape, against which people seem small; and in the closeness of a subject in a painting, wherein the world seems small - Millais’ Ophelia, for example. The sublimity of the expanse is far easier to experience and understand, since anyone can climb a mountain, and look out and see the small world below. You look down from above, and think about how we each potter about, like little ants down there, living our little lives, in those toy cars below. You look down on the world, aloof. Imagine what it looks like from God’s height! But the small world, the world of the Wild Wood, is harder to sense. Instead of lifting yourself up to see the small world below, one must bring themselves down, by humility, to see the little world on its own level. There is something about the model village which is peculiarly British. Looking back, Mrs. James, my tired old reception teacher, understood this, I believe. She understood the humility and beauty of the parochial and small, and wanted her pupils to understand too. Mankind has a fallen and pagan soul, unfortunately, and naturally strive for the spirituality of the Wide World, so we can look down our noses at the world down the mountain. Mrs. James didn’t believe in all that. She believed in the Wild Wood - the Wild Wood down the road from the school - where each year the bluebells grew into a purple sea. As the wind blew, that sea became choppy as the waves passed over. And if you crouched down and looked into one of those tiny bells, if you’re lucky, you might even have seen a faerie.