What the Sky Sees

This place that I have grown up in is a landscape of straight lines, a field of vision dominated by the parallel and the perpendicular. The straightest line of all is the hard blur of the horizon, a single unbending line which encircles the day. When I was a child I used to spin round with my eyes on the horizon, trying to spot the places where the line curved or turned or bent; but I never could, and the mystery of the encircling straight line stayed with me, troubled me, comforted me.

All other lines find their way to the horizon line, sooner or later. The high lines, the connecting lines: the railway tracks, telegraph wires, canals and drains and rivers, all banked and lifted up above the level of the fields and houses. Years ago, playing in the field while my father worked, I looked up to see a line of boats processing grandly through the sky. I think they must have been barges navigating the Sixteen Foot to Lynn, but at the time all I knew was these boats way above my head.

The other lines are the boundary lines, the low lines. There are no hedges between fields here, only ditches. Ditches mark boundaries, and suck the water off the fields, serve as the barriers which stop the sea coming back to reclaim what it rightfully owns; and you can never go far before you find somebody re-cutting the ditches of their land, making them a little deeper, a little wider, one eye on the sky, always wondering when the rains will come and swell the rivers by those few inches too far.

Floods. Sometimes the lines of this place are obliterated, and all that is left is flatness from horizon to horizon. This obliteration is always an act of nature, weather come from the sky to erase the man-made geometry and restore a resemblance to the sunken sea this place once was. Sometimes it will be rain, swelling the rivers until they break out of the embankments and sandbags and rush over the fields, ignoring the prayers of the farmers and settling across hundreds of acres for weeks at a time so that the sky can be seen from below as well as above, clouds and seabirds gliding across the land. Sometimes it will be snow, covering everything, blocking drains and roads, muffling sound as well as vision until mothers forbid children to leave their houses for fear of them losing their way.

I don't remember my mother telling me not to go out, but I suppose I would have been too young.

Sometimes it will be fog which obliterates our geometry, hiding even the horizon, veiling the sky. Sometimes the fog will come in with the floods, and our world will be utterly alien, unmappable, precarious.

The same floods that obliterate also bring life to the land, make our soil the richest in the country. At ploughing time the smell of the earth's nutrients seems to hang in the air, a smell like apple bruises and horse chestnut shells, a smell of pure energy. Sometimes, as a child, I would put my ear to the clodded ground and believe I could hear the richness of the soil, a richness my father claimed would grow five-pound notes if you planted a shilling. I suppose it must have been a similar sound to that which children hear when they listen to shells and hear the sea, but I didn't know that at the time. I had never been to the ocean. The sea regularly came to us, after all, since we lived on land which belonged to the sea.

Flatness, straight lines, a man-made geometry; this is the landscape I grew up in, a landscape encircled by the unbroken straight line of the horizon.