Tracking back to childhood adventures

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jun 23, 2007 

Speeding through the eastern English countryside on a train to Cambridge yesterday, past tangled hedgerows and buttercups and fields exploding with poppies, my heart lifted. At the same time, I happened to be reading a newspaper report saying that more and more of today's children are out of touch with nature because their parents are too scared to let them play outside.

Parents need to encourage them to learn about wildlife, the report said. They should take them to parks, show them frogspawn and insects, let them run around in the open air. True, I thought, but it's not just about the open air, is it? Municipal grass isn't really enough and neither are supervised, educational ponds. What children actually need is something else, something that it's becoming harder and harder to give them. What they really need is to be allowed to stay out alone for hours and hours, get covered in dirt, risk life and limb and generally terrify their parents by running wild.

I was eight when we moved from the middle of Nottingham out into the country. The move changed my life. Our house was on a small arable farm that my parents continued to rent out to the farmer who had always farmed it. There were 10 acres of fields that we technically owned - and beyond that, many, many equally enticing ones that we didn't. There was an orchard with a rickety bridge and a dried up pond and long, whispery grass that came up to your elbows. There was a tiny wood, no more than a copse really, with a magical brook running through it. And there were vast brick outbuildings filled with sacks of grain and dangerous-looking, oily machinery - as well as rats. Even on wet days, our mum would frequently push us out of the back door and tell us not to come back until tea time. Life had never been more perfect.

Looking back, as I fell in love with that flat, mauve, tangled land, I slowly turned into someone else: a person who'd be up and out of bed as soon as it was light in order to go wandering through those fields looking for clay pipe heads and stems discarded by farm labourers in a mysterious long-ago age and now sticking up like treasure among the newly ploughed clods of frozen earth.

I looked for birds' nests too. Early one morning, cloaked in cow parsley, I watched a moorhen's eggs hatch out and never forgave myself when I returned the next morning to find that the mother, clearly aware she'd been watched, had abandoned the nest and left her babies to die.

I fished in the stream for sticklebacks, knew where the water rats had their holes and watched the dizzy blue blur of dragonflies over the banks. My sisters and I would wander away over the fields with the single aim of getting lost - really lost. The more hopelessly lost we could get, the better. We wanted to suffer; we wanted to be scared. If we set out in bright sunshine and then the rain poured down, well it just made the game feel that bit more real. It meant we had to choose between taking shelter in some scary-looking shed or else braving the elements to get back home. Of course we always took provisions: a few biscuits, a bottle of orange squash, maybe a slice or two of bread.

I still remember the wholehearted relish with which we sought danger. The unexpected barbed wire fences, the sudden fields of cows (could there be a bull?), the angry men on tractors who shouted at us, the dumps full of broken green and brown glass bottles. I remember crossing what we thought was a small stream, only to find ourselves in up to our waists. I remember my little sister slipping down the river bank while we tried to hold on to her. We loved the drama and we never believed that anything could happen to us, never believed the danger might be real. I remember coming home late on summer evenings, exhausted, muddy, chased by farmers, scratched by brambles - and supremely, wildly happy.

Yesterday on the train I was feeling overtired and overworked and my head was full of problems. But as I hurtled through those English fields, something happened to me. I watched the greenness roll by and I began to notice stiles and paths, dog roses, dull furred clumps of nettles, the glint of a stream - all the grainy up-closeness of the countryside. And slowly I relaxed, my head unfurled and I was back somewhere else, in a place I haven't really been for years but which, I now realise, I access easily, all the time, whenever and wherever I need it.

Just a glimpse through that train window was all I needed and there I was - intensely, eerily there. I could see it and I could smell it too: the musky earth, hot morning sun on leaf mould, the shiny harsh husk of a bright beetle clambering over the edge of a blade of grass, the green-smoke sharpness of dock leaves. It was the restoring power of the countryside, bringing with it all my long-ago childhood adventures: terror, excitement, gloriousness, happiness and dirt.