FOR PART OF my childhood – a rather conflicted part – I shared the three-bedroom, semi-detached, suburban house in which I grew up with eight other people. My personal space was reduced to the width and length of a bunk bed. There was no common ground; or perhaps, there was too much of it. I felt like the peeled potatoes in the huge pan of water my mother had to prepare: bare, bobbing there, crowded like carp in a pool.
To escape, I lived in one long fantasy. I imagined, as I walked to school on dark winter mornings, the layers of other worlds beneath my feet, the strata of histories laid down below. I invested the reliquary green space of a strange, semi-village area that had been swallowed by the greater city of Southampton with the power that confinement lends. Everything was heightened by normality; nothing was what it seemed.
Our suburb was where the city petered out; that which the city had yet to drown. It was gravelly, hilly and drained, built on a former soft-fruit-growing area; but also one where troops had trained since medieval times, and where travellers had traded. There was a sense of no-man’s-land to it. Gypsies lived in caravans in a sub-section known as Botany Bay, separated from our quiet road by a residual wooded valley, muddy and dark and traversed by a narrow overgrown path that dipped up and down, crossing a desultory stream, usually embellished with an upturned supermarket trolley.
On other sites around here, pockets of green that the developers had somehow overlooked, Victorian houses stood empty, gently crumbling into the Hampshire heathland, where gorse and bracken still sprouted, given half the chance, re-appropriating, as if they’d been there all the time and were only waiting to take their chance. These were the places where I dawdled. They scared and excited me, because of the freedom that they offered.
This eastern side of Southampton Water was nicknamed Spike Island – a reference, I would later discover, to the vast convict depot on Inis Pic in Cork Harbour where men made criminal by the Great Famine were deposited in what was the largest prison of its time. The epithet presumably imputed that the Irish navvies and dockers who were here, in exile, in Southampton were themselves prison fodder. (Spike Island in Bristol – a city physically connected to Cork by steamer – may have been similarly named.) It was a migratory pattern which, had I but known it, also applied to my own family: my father’s ancestors had come over from Dublin and Limerick to the north of England, as strangers in a strange land. Their identities too were regarded as suspect and other, until they learned to conform.
The openness of the heaths on which our 1920s semi-detached house was built – just one of many that marched across the heathland – was associated in my mind with some archaic image of dolorous transportees chained up ready for prison hulks and their transition to other penal colonies. Now dull-eyed ponies chained to concrete blocks grazed these left-over fields. Herons perched over a forgotten mill pond that froze solid in winter. I remembered a story my mother had told me, about a boy who had walked out on the ice and never came back.
Returning to my childhood home after an adult life spent in London, I found myself reclaiming those spaces, even as they ran out. A housing estate now occupies the gravel pit where I used to play, and from where I’d occasionally see a badger lumbering across the path like a stubbly tank. Front gardens yield to the tyranny of the car; you can barely see the houses now. Even walking on suburban streets now seems a kind of subversion.
I opted out of that process. I do not drive. I don’t operate a mobile phone, or wear a watch. I cycle, like the boy I was, negotiating streets I could (and do) ride in the pitch-dark, I know them so well. They are part of my neural network, just as my body is hard-wired to my bike. These are my escape routes, and wherever I go, they lead me to the sea.
I can’t see the sea from my house. But I can see, through the trees and over the roofs, the red lights that stud the power-station chimney which stands sentinel over the waterway. It is a piece of modernist industrial architecture, solid and block-like. But peregrines circle its summit, and it summons me.
In the winter I find myself drawn there even in the middle of the night, rising with the full moon at spring tide at 2 or 3 a.m., riding down the streets with my arms open wide like a bird, daring the traffic lights not to change. Skidding through the shingle down at the shore, I watch roe deer launch out of the undergrowth; rabbits run in my lights. I prop up my bike by a sea wall reduced to rubble by the storm surges that have ravaged this soft southern coastline in recent years, a physical casualty of the ‘managed retreat’ of bureaucrats’ terminology. A testament to our abandonment of nature. The future.
Then I tip myself into the inky black water, align myself to Orion’s grid as it wheels over the vast refinery on the far side of the shore; its spires and silos are lit up as a simulacrum of some future city. Once the space station prowled overhead as a shooting star fell in the other direction. In the darkness, the cold becomes comforting, a reassurance of my physical self and intimation of my mortality. Climbing out, I cling to my hot-water bottle, shivering like a dog as I tug my clothes back on.
My love of the water – that most fluid of common grounds, the thing that connects us even as it separates us – has always been problematic. Although I grew up within sound of dolorous fog horns, and although I felt the sea close by, its presence intimidated me. Not least because I could not swim, and had no way of engaging with or entering the alien element. I’d look at the birds that scrabbled their living out of the blackened wasteland at low tide – Southampton Water has a remarkably full relationship to the swell and sway of the moon-tugged tides, its daily double tide a result of the Atlantic Pulse that surges up and down the English Channel – and I’d wonder at their loyalty to this scrubby shore.
The oystercatchers and the brent geese that occupied the suburban beach; the crows that hovered and flickered in the nearby car park; the gulls that overflew it all like a white blur: they didn’t feel part of my world, any more than I felt part of theirs. They made their space, negotiated it; occupied their liminal place. I didn’t even register them, then.
But as I grew up and felt more of a stranger in the human world – informed by that world that I was unnatural – so the natural world seemed more of a solace, since nature itself is queer. Its solitude and escape has always attracted the other, to those who claimed the common ground for its utopian prospects, proposing a future world in which their desires, like those of the rest of creation, were not proscribed. During the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter realigned their lives to different rhythms, at a time before their desires had been diagnosed or pathologised. Their otherness and their ‘back-to-nature’ impulses – partly invested with the sensuality of the noble savage – would earn them the scornful and euphemistic epithet, ‘nature-lovers’; partly because no one else had a name for them yet. In the same way that, as it has been observed, a blackbird doesn’t know it is a blackbird, so their identities were not defined by human judiciaries and the relentless categories of capitalism, imposed to sustain its own brutal progress.
Perhaps that’s what drew me, aesthetically and emotionally, to the shore: some non-genetic memory, a subvert culture, passed from hand to hand. The porous, shifting shingle of Southampton Water, overlooked by its industrial installations – petro-chemical simulacra of the New Forest on whose edge it stood – also reflected the way that Derek Jarman colonised his Dungeness beach, repurposing its stones, plants and debris in a post-nuclear vision of a garden-wilderness. For Jarman, nature elided with sensuality: for him common grounds were cruising grounds, like Hampstead Heath, another city-contained wilderness.
Like some contemporary Thoreau – his tar-painted seaside hut set, not like Thoreau’s Walden next to the new railroad, but in the shadow of a nuclear reactor – Jarman recorded his sojourn in Modern Nature, his ironically titled journals, alongside the development of the virus that would soon take his life. His shore proposed another kind of mortality. His writing spoke to a queer nature, as well as being a natural history of his infection in the way that Kathleen Jamie’s essay ‘Pathologies’ treats cancer cells under a microscope in a Dundee hospital as an equally valid subject for ‘nature writing’. Questioning what is natural, and frustrated by ‘the foreshortened definition of “nature”’ (‘It’s not all primroses and otters’), Jamie looks to ‘our own intimate, inner natural world’, a mirror of ourselves.
I thought too of Denton Welch’s writing, which I discovered in a copy of his novel-memoir, A Voice Through a Cloud, that I found in a local jumble sale when I was a teenager. Welch had the same visionary ability to evoke queer suburbia and the southern England of the 1940s, and to observe so minutely the mix of the natural and human history with which most of us live. When I picked up the book, I knew nothing of the author. I just liked the slender feel of it in my hand, the putty-grey-green cloth cover – the same colour, I imagined, as Welch’s greenish tweed suit – blocked with what Wilde would call ‘tired’ bronze lettering.
Even more enticing were the endpapers and drawings inside, spiky illustrations of semi-human, semi-animal, semi-botanical images: curling shells and blank-eyed statues, spouting cornucopia and moonish faces, all done in spidery, scratchy ink, precise and internalised, like his words. They were mythic and naturalistic in the style of other neo-romantic artists of the period; both contemporary yet retrospective, referring to a land which had already been lost. For me, Denton’s writing provided a counter-version of the mid century into which I was born; another history, pages passed from hand to hand.
In A Voice Through a Cloud, Welch is injured in a serious bike crash while riding from Greenwich to his uncle’s house in Surrey. Chronically ill, he is taken from his London hospital to the desultory resort of Broadstairs, at southern England’s most easterly edge, to recuperate within sight and sound of the beach. His bed is pulled up to the window, looking out to sea; he describes feeling surrounded on three sides by sea and sky, and how his bay window shakes in the high winds.
The expanse of sea becomes an extension of his terror and loneliness, its emptiness ‘the negation of everything living. The suck and mumble of the waves on the beach, licking and slithering and eating, filled me with a wry, fearful pleasure.’ He invents words to echo its relentless rhythm, its ‘everlastingly industrious, hopeless music’, singing to himself not so much in consolation as in despair. At night he resigns himself to the ‘washing and whining’ waves, which had by now become an extension of his own body: ‘the wonderful, booming, wriggling skin of the sea’, a phrase which recalls Melville’s image of ‘the ocean’s skin’ – the sea as a body of water, a transgressive place, in its own fluid state.
Later, as a semi-invalid, Welch lived in a kind of blur of rural-suburbia, contained by war and fitful peace. England, always a place of ruins, had been ruined anew, destroyed to save itself. In the spaces the destruction created, Welch’s imagination flourished like opportunistic weeds on a bombsite, in the shocking pink and purple of buddleia and rosebay willowherb. A place in which beauty might be preserved, and yet slowly decay; where what one used to be and what one had become were one and the same thing. When he watches, voyeuristically, young men with pale flesh diving in the river and lying on the grass, the scene might come from Ovid, or a Powell–Pressburger film, while his description has the distance of anthropology and the intense observation of a ‘nature-lover’:
The first boy lay flat on his back and half shut his eyes. He looked charmingly coarse and young-animalish now, with thick brown neck, smooth arms and hairs round each brown-red nipple … ‘He dives too deep,’ I said to the friend.
Welch’s writing gave me a new way to look at suburbia. A generation after him, I lived in the lee of the Second World War. Common ground, in a blitzed city such as Southampton, was what the bombs had left behind. Like Welch, the neo-romantics of the 1940s such as John Piper or Graham Sutherland (with his ‘unfinished world’, as seen by George Shaw, the great contemporary artist of abandoned spaces of modern Britain) created sublime landscapes out of this destruction, just as their predecessors – from Turner to Constable and Palmer to writers such as Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray – had romanticised ruined Gothic abbeys and overgrown ancient sites as a reaction to the lumbering inevitability of the Industrial Revolution and the enclosures that John Clare protested, a slower sort of destruction.
It was another way of reconfiguring common ground with the other; the recreation of an imaginative or even an imagined landscape. In those lonely, dark places, the natural world of plants and animals inevitably adopted – or were invested with – anthropomorphic identities, assimilated by the human need for narrative. Another kind of imposition.
That is exactly what I, in my teenage manner, did to the empty spaces where I lived, the unfinished world in which my imagination could thrive.
One of the wildest places I knew was the cut that ran along the end of our garden, ostensibly connecting the backs of the semi-detached houses. About three foot wide, it had long since lost its navigability, like some overgrown jungle path into the heart of the suburban darkness. In the process it became a conduit for wildlife, a runway for foxes, hedgehogs and grass snakes that crept and crawled and slithered, protected by a tangle of high privet hedges and haphazard brambles. George Shaw’s paintings, created using the ultimate teenage medium, Humbrol paint usually reserved for model kits, encapsulate that sense of the reliquary world in which he and I both grew up. To an imagined soundtrack from Joy Division or the Smiths, his work – superficially glossy, three-dimensionally dark with the adolescent imagination – sees what is at stake in the edges of things. The end of the twentieth century. What the future had left behind.
If common ground means anything, it means freedom. And yet to some what they regard as common good reduces the individual to a body in pursuance of political or even totalitarian aims. In his book, What a Fish Knows, Jonathan Balcombe refuses to call his subjects ‘fish’, collectively, since the plural is reductive of what he regards as sentient, social animals; rather, he insists on calling them ‘fishes’. Anyone accused of turning their back on the human world, the better in order to study the natural, can, in these times, retort that the abuse of the animal is directly analogous to, and intimately connected with, the abuse of the human.
The ultimate denial of common ground – the control of everything, the development of all land and even sea towards total human dominion – is the terrible future dream which we must resist and subvert as it denies our identities. Our common ground is our commonwealth: the shared resource of a fragile planet. In the microcosmic is the macrocosmic. To Thoreau, Walden Pond was an ocean. Whitman, walking with his ‘electric self’ on the beach at night alone, saw ‘All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds / … / All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe’.
I learned to swim in a dank, echoing Victorian baths in east London when I’d washed up in the city unemployed. And when my widowed mother needed me, and I needed to escape, I came back to this shore, substituting my life in underground nightclubs for the nocturnal allure of this interzone. The darkness, far from an absence, is itself a reclamation: an intimation of what was, a seceding to primeval rhythms. Even though the sodium street lights prompt blackbirds to sing through the night.
Now I feel more at home here than I do almost anywhere else; unless that anywhere else is the sea. Shifting, shaping the land, constantly re-inventing itself, the sea doesn’t care about me. It leaves me behind, even as it bears me up. But it, and this grubby, desolate, lovely shore, overlooked by a petro-chemical refinery, by container ships and the rumbling of the docks, has become my common ground. It is everything and nothing.
And I like it here.