City Girl

In Leyton, we are very lucky, in that we have a lot of access to greenery.  Epping Forest; the Marshes; not too far from Victoria Park.  People consider London a grey and soulless place, or at least a polluted one.  It is grey and it is polluted but the grey is interspersed with green.  The natural spaces are generally controlled, fenced in, organised.  I know that probably isn't the ideal- but at least they are there.  And again, in Leyton we are lucky: the forest and the marshes are wide open, still semi-wild spaces.  Running across them, you can forget you are in a city.

 I remember when I was younger.  I loved going to Marshes but it was tinged with nervousness.  The Marshes contained three things I feared irrationally.

1) Dogs.  I have always hated them.  No big deal- standard phobia.

2) Pylons.  Their straight arms.  Their pin heads.  The electricity buzzing away.  Their unnecessarily wide legs, their cabled ties to each other and the yucky sensation that they move when you are not looking.  I used to call it "The Mystery of the Walking Pylon" in my Famous Five days, when everything was an adventure.

3) The utter conviction I had that one day, I would fall into quicksand. Similarly, I always knew I would be struck by lightning.  I always felt as if I had escaped death narrowly- even if no lightning had struck, even though lightning here is almost invariably sheet, not streak.  Even though, as far as I was and am aware, Leyton is not exactly a hotbed of quicksand.  American cartoons, hey.  I blame The Adams Family.

4) Trees.  Their judgmental downward glances and unnaturally thin bodies, or stretchy gnarled arms.  Looming.  Making me feel funny.

I was a strange kid, I suppose.  Considering I lived on the 20th floor of a tower block, you wouldn't think the height of trees and pylons would have bothered me.  But they did.

But I loved:

1) The space

2) The goalpoasts

3) The (non-quick-)sandpit with its longjump marker

4) All the water.  The dirty River Lea and its trickly swampy streams.

5) Sunset.  Sunset reaching really low over the flat land.  It made me feel story-book and warm-chested.  I always wanted to stay until it started to fall.

More pros than cons, then.

Same for today.   I ran across the Marshes: Hackney, Leyton, Walthamstow.  I was avoiding a woman with dogs, so I got a bit lost.  And suddenly I felt as if I had stumbled into one of my nightmares.  I breathed in and breathed out but I struggled to.  I had the sickening feeling of being closed in on by things I couldn't understand, or control.  Example: if a person wants to hurt you, you can understand what is happening.  They can speak.  You know the laws of gravity and time and impact still apply, so you have a chance.  But if trees and pylons attack?  That throws everything you know out of sync, doesn't it?  Who knows- time could suspend, quicksand could open under the concrete path, you could be swallowed into the air and nobody would know you hadn't just run away.  And you would never be able to warn anybody of the grave dangers of trees and quicksand and pylons!

I suppose I'm still just a strange kid with an imagination bigger than my body. But at least I can laugh about it after.

 The truth is, seeing grass and trees for miles and only the hint of a road makes me edgy.  When in green surroundings I like to be able to see the exit at all times.