Ghost

June

Ashtead to Berrylands

Going back isn’t history, or herstory but a ghost story. We haunt the landscapes of the past, unpacking memory and emotion by connecting to place.

Now my journey returns to spaces once known. The child me is still fishing for sticklebacks and tadpoles from the banks of the Hogsmill, she rides ponies through the fields of summer in a little piece of country surrounded by Friday Night Dinner suburbia.

This wildlife corridor is also a human-paced entry to the big city. The Thames Down Link and London Loop paths squeeze their way through the built environment like a plant in a pavement, finding a little green space to grow.

The Hogsmill is a rare chalk stream, determined to reach the Thames, hiding behind back gardens and playing fields. It used to flood and so kept some green space around its banks where wary builders gave it room. This suburban stream was once the subject of great painters, out from London and looking for countryside. Millais’ Ophelia lay singing in the Hogsmill, although she didn’t because he painted her laying in a bath tub, but he did spend five months in 1851 painting the stream and its plants. Other members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood visited and painted landscapes. Now our contemporary artists paint the scene by tagging signs and benches. I looked in vain for O heart H carved in the trees.

Now I have walked back to where I came from. I spent 15 of my first 16 years here but had no idea of how the places connected. As a child I walked to the shops, bus stop, school and the Hogsmill. Everything else took a car or a train to reach. I never ventured under the A3 to discover where the Hogsmill came from. I never considered that I could walk from home to central London.

My journey isn’t over but it now etches a thin walking line that joins my present home to my childhood. In my mind I can retrace that walk and connect the places and my ghosts across the landscapes. I hope they will walk the final sections with me.

For more on landscape and memory, I enjoyed The Blue of Distance in Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

River

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