WHEN I WAS a very small child I was obsessed with a picture book called The Green Man, in which a rich young man who goes swimming in a forest pool has his clothes stolen from him and is forced to live in the wild. I can’t remember much of anything about it now, except the hold it had over me and a colour plate of the man in a green suit he’d stitched from leaves, almost indiscernible against oak trees. I’ve periodically wanted to vanish into nature too, and at the age of twenty I almost managed it.
I’d been worried about the planet ever since I was a schoolgirl, sitting anxiously through geography lessons on greenhouse gases, drawing pencil diagrams of the ragged ozone layer. Later, as a teenager, I became fascinated by New Age travellers and especially the environmental protest movement, a counterculture that was spectacularly lively before the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act criminalised its many forms of gathering and protest. First I combed i-D and The Face, magazines that were similarly fixated on the scene, for photographs of horse-drawn wagons and dreadlocked dancers at outdoor raves, and then I joined in for myself.
I turned down a place at Cambridge in favour of Sussex and its radical curriculum, moving to Brighton, the urban epicentre of the protest scene. It was an era characterised by the temporary autonomous zone. Reclaim the Streets parties on motorways or in Trafalgar Square, a bouncy castle to block traffic, thousands of people dancing to an illegal sound system housed in a tank or run from a bicycle-powered generator. Demos against the arms trade and McDonald’s. Squatted community centres in empty houses, shouting Section 6 of the Criminal Law Act through the letterbox at the police: ‘TAKE NOTICE that any entry or attempt to enter into this PROPERTY without our permission is a criminal OFFENCE.’
But all of these activities were ancillary to road protests. In the early 1990s, people in the UK had begun using non-violent direct action to prevent the government’s then-extensive programme of road building, protesting against both the destruction of wild places, among them numerous sites of special scientific interest, and the polluting, climate-destroying effects of cars. Starting with Twyford Down in 1992, they occupied land that was in the line of road-building projects, using direct action techniques to delay and prevent work – lying in front of bulldozers, chaining themselves to machinery, occupying tunnels dug perilously into the earth. Over time, the camps became arboreal, with protestors living full-time in threatened trees to protect them. Evictions were pitched battles; their cost so prohibitive and the risks of injury so high that many road projects were abandoned.
I’d been hanging around the fringes of road protests since my late teens, bunking off my English degree to steal stray weeks at Newbury and Fairmile. I loved arriving after dark and seeing the lumpy silhouettes of tree houses, a chorus of yips and whistles echoing from the branches. The passport to entry was a climbing harness. Mine was blue, with a pink and green striped cowstail. I learned to abseil and prusik, laboriously dragging my own weight up a free line to the treetops. Once aloft, we moved around by walkways: two lines of blue polypropylene that ran from tree to tree, thirty feet above the ground. You clipped onto the top line with your cowstail, and walked along the bottom, heart in mouth, restored to the perilous vantage of a hairless ape.
The summer that I was twenty I moved to a tiny protest camp in Dorset, established by locals to protect a strip of much-loved woodland from being bulldozed for a relief road. Teddy Bear Woods was a beech hanger, falling steeply to a meadow. There was a net slung in the canopy, built as a defence for when the bailiffs came. Lying up there among the leaves, you could see the glittering blue ribbon of the sea a mile south. What did we do all day? We made endless trips to gather wood and water, sawed wood, chopped wood, prepped food, washed up. Without electricity, the most basic tasks took hours.
At the end of that summer I dropped out of university altogether. Living outdoors, under the stars, the world had come to seem at once infinitely lovely and infinitely at risk. Teddy Bear Woods had been saved, but Newbury and Fairmile were gone, the ancient oaks chainsawed down, the undergrowth grubbed up by diggers. When Fairmile was evicted, I’d wept in shame, that we were doing such an appalling job at stewarding the planet, that a place so beautiful had been destroyed for a dual carriageway that might cut journey times by a few minutes. I didn’t want to be a part of it any more. I wanted to find a way of living that did no harm, and so I retreated, ending up at twenty living alone and off-grid in a way that seems in retrospect more like an animal than a human being.
Some friends had plans to start an organic market garden on an abandoned pig farm in the Wealden countryside north of Brighton. We went out that winter in Alan’s black Dodge 50 to take a look. Priestfield was at the end of a long track lined with blackthorn and scraggy elder. There was a rusty gate and beyond it a hardstanding, an empty mobile home and two or three dank barns stuffed with generations of Brighton hippies’ rubbish. We left the van there and walked on, past the wreckage of former pigsties and into a sloping field edged with ash and oak. In the distance the Downs rose up in their whaleback curves. The air smelt of wet grass and mould. ‘I’m going to live here,’ I said, and when nobody presented any objections, I gathered up my possessions and began the process of building a house. The market garden didn’t materialise until a long time later, and though there were visitors I lived at Priestfield entirely alone.
I wanted to build a bender, once the traditional summer dwelling of Romany Gypsies and a structure loved by travellers and eco-activists for being both low-impact and warm. Benders are like rustic tents, made of bent poles of coppiced hazel covered with canvas or tarpaulin. I stole my hazel from a wood up the road, sneaking in with a pruning saw and taking perhaps forty whippy fifteen-foot poles, cut at an angle so that the trees wouldn’t rot. I persuaded a wood yard to give me six unwanted pallets, bought two green tarpaulins from an army surplus store, and was given a little pot-bellied stove by my mother, with old washing-machine ducting found in a skip to serve as a chimney. These were the skills I’d learned from my years on protests: how to climb, how to build my own house, to tie knots and lash beams, to light a fire, to scavenge useful things from other people’s rubbish (much of what we’d eaten on site came from making nightly raids on the giant bins behind the local Co-op, before they started dousing the contents in bleach).
By the time everything was assembled it was February. One still, cool day my friend Jim came up to help. I’d chosen a spot at the top of the field, nestled in against a double hedge of stripling oaks. We laid the pallets on the lumpy grass, covered them with carpet and planted the poles around this rudimentary floor, binding them into interlocking arches with lengths of twine. Soon it resembled the ribcage of a dinosaur, and then a giant upturned basket. Within a few hours the frame was finished. We hauled the tarps on top, rolling them back around a wooden window I’d found on the street. Then I dragged my things in: a sofa, an old bookcase, two foam mattresses for a bed. I tucked throws and quilts behind the frame, hanging trinkets from the twigs.
I lived that spring in a way that has few parallels in the urbanised world, and as such it’s difficult to integrate it into the more conventional life that followed. I washed in a bucket of water, cooked my vegan stew over a fire, used a compost loo and slept in all the clothes I owned. I had a pager – if mobile phones had been invented then, nobody I knew owned one yet – and when I wanted to speak to someone I’d walk two miles along the river to a red phone box that stood dusty and untended on a country lane.
I barely spoke, and my quietness allowed the world to emerge. It was a time of strange, almost dreamlike encounters with the wild. At dawn and dusk, deer would sometimes graze a yard from where I sat. At night, I squatted by the fire and watched the stars turn their slow wheels over Wolstonbury Hill and Devil’s Dyke. One day I walked past the heaps of broken concrete and bindweed and disturbed an adder that rose up on its tail and hissed into my face. It was the sort of experience I’d longed for, but still I slept with an axe under my pillow, though in reality the only enemy I had were the mice that ate everything I owned and woke me at night by running through my hair. I was frightened all the time. I felt more exposed than I ever have since, almost unravelled by it, paranoid that I was being watched by the inhabitants of the scattered houses whose lights I could see winking through the fields at night.
The pleasure of being there was about escaping and effacing myself, and though it had ecstatic elements, in retrospect I wonder if there was also an element of punishment, if I was serving a sentence of solitary for the communal crime of environmental despoliation. The environment then was the sole province of cranks and hippies. Roads, pesticides, plastic, petrol: these were regarded as the scaffolds of civilisation, to be used infinitely, without consequence. I thought all the time of the future, a world without water, animals, trees. Civilisation seemed the thinnest of veneers. Even though the camp at Teddy Bear Woods had been successful and the trees were safe, like many ex-protestors I’d begun to buckle under the strain of trying to avert – trying even to articulate – an oncoming catastrophe.
I left the bender in June. Protest culture was tribal and nomadic, almost medieval in its calendar. People lived scattered in small communities on camps, traveller sites and in London squats, wintering in canal boats, trucks and benders and coming together each summer at festivals and raves. I went to Cornwall, living with a street theatre company who travelled horse-drawn from village to village. I’d planned to go back to the field in September, but out in the world again I’d realised I wanted to be more useful, and much less isolated. I missed people, and was no longer so sure that the best thing I could do for the planet was to efface myself or live according to such austere, punitive standards.
That autumn I moved, half reluctantly and half with relief, into a housing co-op on the outskirts of Brighton. The garden backed onto the Downs and the landlord let me install my old wood burner in my bedroom, but the house also had central heating, a bath and an indoor loo, all the luxuries I’d done without. My feral spring was over, though even now if I catch the smell of wood smoke I tumble back through time.
Thirteen years after I left the field, I saw the film Into the Wild. It’s based on the life of a young man, Christopher McCandless, who in 1990 destroyed his credit cards, gave away his possessions and went to live in the wilderness, moving further and further away from people until he ended up living in an abandoned bus in the Denali National Park in Alaska, with minimal equipment. After three months, he realised, as I had done, that isolation can eat away at you, and that living with other people is a source of sustaining happiness as well as conflict and stress. McCandless had walked in over the Teklanika River, then a stream, but by the time he decided to make his way home to his family, it was in spate and no longer fordable. He was trapped, though if he’d owned a map he would have known that there was a bridge less than a mile away from his bus. He ran out of food, and tried to live off the land, gathering wild plants and hunting game, until he starved to death.
Watching the film, I felt an uneasy thrill of recognition. Though the field I’d lived in was by no means a wilderness, for a time I’d contrived to pitch right through the trappings of civilisation, reaching a ground zero most people don’t even know exists. I don’t just mean physically. Like McCandless, my motivation was at least in part a kind of undoing of the self. I didn’t want to be a person back then. I was sick with guilt about how human behaviour was damaging the planet. I wanted to live in a way that did no harm but I also wanted to lose myself, to be reabsorbed into the wild, to disappear beneath a canopy of leaves.