My ontological place

... yesterday I went to a place that holds me like no other

I can’t remember the first time I went into this landscape. Childhood photo albums provide evidence I was there before I can see it in my mind. This makes it my ever-present landscape. My ontological place.

My granny lived in the upstairs flat of a block in a small village called Fishbourne just outside Chichester in West Sussex. Three of her windows overlooked a shared garden, a stream and beyond that the water meadows that eventually stretched out to Chichester Harbour and the sea.

I have lots of memories of her flat, but one of the most recurrent is the mirror she had on the inside of her front door. I used to stand in front of it and look at how far the top of the mirror was above my head, bemused by the obvious fiction repeated by the grown-ups around me that I would one day loom above it. Of course it wasn’t long before life had shattered the illusion of a perpetual childhood and it only reflected me up to my waist. That mirror was always the perfect height for granny though.

In Summers and Christmas holidays, my brother and I used to go out into the shared garden and catch sticklebacks in jam jars in the stream while Granny kept an eye on us from her balcony. A Yew hedge that concealed the gardener’s equipment gave us a tantalising space for privacy where we went to be as mischievous as we could imagine at the time, which was hilariously un-mischievous in retrospect.

All of the other flats on the property were owned by other retired grandparents who would come out and say hello and look out for us. Sometimes the stars would align and their grandchildren would be staying with them for the holidays too. Intense friendships would metamorphose joyously into the light over days that feel timeless today.

At the far corner of the stream on the right there were stepping stones you could use to jump across to the path that led out to the water meadows. This made access to the world of water birds, insects, fish, multiple bridges, clear and freezing cold streams and endless games of poo sticks instant rather than having to walk out to the road at the front. Ten minutes was impossible anyway so we always braved the stepping stones. Even though they wobbled and threatened to spill us into the stream.

Out beyond those initial ten meters or so where granny’s balcony was still in view, the paths turned into wild grass labyrinths that dwarfed us and led who knew where? We dared each other to go further and further into the insect-filled and butterflied wilds of beyond. Eventually we would crack with the panic of finding the endless expanse of sea and run back to the safety of the stream.

That thin shallow line of water demarcating the barrier between home and everything else that formed eternity.

Those days seem to get clearer in my mind the further from them I go. Now I am forty years away, meaning has filled the spaces my memories can no longer hold.

I felt so safe there, I realise now.

I had no clue how far from that feeling of safety it was possible to feel, I realise now.

We didn’t always spend our holidays in that landscape. Throughout our childhoods and into our early teens, granny would take my brother Gareth and I on Wallace Arnold coach holidays to Europe or for weekends in faded hotels in Bournemouth or Brighton. A few times we went north on the train to Lincolnshire and the village she grew up in called Springthorpe where her brother Fred - Uncle Fred to us - lived with Aunty Joan. Fred and Joan had no children of their own and treated our arrival like Christmas even though it was August. I remember Fred defiantly shutting the curtains on any sun that dared to shine so he could watch Graham Gooch and Geoffrey Boycott grind out an opening partnership while trying to explain the wonders of cricket to me.

Years passed but granny’s roast dinners remained a constant, her wheeling in the beef and Yorkshire puddings into the dining room inside her hostess trolley and my dad ceremonially sharpening the carving knife.

‘If you leave me nothing else mother, leave me this carving knife’ he always used to say. And then after lunch we would all yomp down into the water meadows as a matter of routine. As the years clicked on Granny would stay at home and watch us from her balcony as she had done so many times when I was a boy.

When Granny got ill with Parkinson’s disease many years later, I moved my young family down from London to Fishbourne to help look after her. But in between selling our flat in Brockley and finding somewhere to rent in Chichester she died.

We spread her ashes in the far reaches of the water meadows where the sea begins. The place I had always been so nervous about reaching as a child. Now I know why. Each time I had been running back from her resting place to spot her reassuring presence on her balcony before it was too late. Maybe I realised this at the time. Maybe that was why the thought of not being near her felt so frightening.

With nowhere to live finalised, we moved into her flat for a while. I needed that time, I now realise. I wasn’t able to let her go and living within her imprint helped ease me into life without her. Her death made the rest of the world encroach somehow into my mind. My perilous sense of home has never been strong at the best of times but I tentatively grew the idea of one day having roots of my own while we lived there that Summer. It is also the only time in my life I have ever lived by the sea. Instinctively knowing the tide times felt like keeping touch with something primal and necessary I have missed ever since. But all too soon the flat had to be sold and my time in my granny’s extended embrace came to an end.

I didn’t go back to the water meadows much after that.

Until yesterday.

I took my wife and four children and our dog to see Granny’s flat and wander down through the water meadows to the sea. When we came to the path that led to the place where granny’s ashes were scattered I told them all I would meet them around the next corner where the track and their path would re-connect.

I got a few meters away but then my two youngest - who knew what all children know without knowing - insisted on coming with me. And so they followed me into the mud, through the grass that had been battered down by the wind, and took us down to the sea. Laughing excitably as my brother and I had always been. Asking ‘why are we going down here?’ as we slipped along through the mud.

We stopped by the waters’ edge and I looked back. Because the wind had flattened the grass I could almost see granny’s balcony. It felt absurdly close. Closer than it had ever truly been. After much pressing from the two of them I explained why the spot we had reached mattered so much to me. Articulating that in an appropriate way to a nine year old and a five year old was a helpful process for me, it turned out. We had a hug. The three of us. And the tears that would have arrived had the two of them not been with me evaporated away.

The sun was shining right at us. I took this picture. And one of them in that place with their faces blurred in the late afternoon sun I have kept just for me.

In the place I will always be.

Ends.

Much love,

Dan x