The job of an explorer, a real explorer is to go into a country where the locals only have silly long names or stupid to the point words like ‘river’ for river and ‘sea’ for sea and give them lovely nostalgia inducing names usually those of old world places or names of their relatives or their kings and benefactors back in smokey old London or other places of where dreams and teeming desires are brought to the boil by sheer pressure of population numbers, impacting on the city, compressing the ideas of everyone into something that becomes real and solid on another continent half a world away.
When I was six we moved to the country to a wonderful house with an orchard and stream running down one side and willow trees that had once been pollarded but had now long shot their crown with great high fat fingers of branch stems reaching skyward and swaying in the wind. (The symbol of pollarding may be something important as oddly enough my father had lived his teenage years in a house in Croydon on Pollard’s hill.) These willows had been pollarded for basket making perhaps fifty years earlier, anyway that orchard was a great place and beyond it were fields of wheat and some barley that stretched away for miles. There was track you could follow along a stream that lead to a sewage farm and a pond with a beach we played on but we never got to the end of the track for years it seemed as it was too long then one day, on a holiday I decided to ‘go on an expedition’ and see what was at the end of the track and beyond. I had by then- I was maybe eight- learned how to read an ordnance survey map- kind of- and using my dad’s map and taking my notebook and magnifying glass all in the army surplus gas mask case that I treasured I set off to on my first expedition.
I went across the fields when I came back and my shins were all scratched from the cut stalks of corn in the fields. But going out I stuck at first to the track which was a dry rutted tractor track that lead past the sewage farm that mostly entirely unmanned. It had a chainlink fence we sometimes climbed and once I got one of the ‘shit stones’ from the bed being watered by the sprinklers but then I threw it away. I went on along the empty track past the empty sewage farm and empty fields of just cut corn. The fields had been burned only a few days before and they were black and burned but the stalks still stood up. When they burned the leftover straw in the fields it was very exciting and the roiling black smoke and encroaching lines of fire made us scared but also pleased that we were in the midst of real farming and understood it.
The fields were empty and there were empty drums of pesticide and fertiliser at every gate entrance. The streams were all dead and you never saw even a stickleback or a newt or frogspawn. I didn’t see a frog until I visited my cousins who lived in surburbia, far from any farm. One stream was called the ‘polio stream’ because people still remembered the polio outbreak in the 1950s and how it could be spread by bad water. The polio stream had slow muddy water in lazy shit coloured swirls that hardly moved and made it hard to tell what was water and what was the bottom of the stream. We were careful to stay out of the water and only fell in a few times.
I was going along the track and checking the OS one inch map that I used all the time, or looked at all the time and though I knew the signs for Church and train station and other such things easily learnt from the key at the side I was not good at guessing how far I had come from looking at the map and I was also almost unable to orient myself in a landscape using the map. But still I loved and cherished the OS map with its beautiful colouration, contour lines as fine as banknote illustration and precise coded secrets of the landscape. I also loved my compass which was a small brass compass about the size of a watch and good for little except finding out where north was.
I realise now that the game of exploration, the game of travel started then, along that track and then further past the huge abandoned quarry which I just stumbled upon (the faint markings on the map I had missed altogether, did not realise I had come that far till I got home and used a thread to measure my distance gone- almost the best bit of any walk). A couple of seagulls wheeled above the quarry and it felt as if I had come a huge way, perhaps near to the sea even though we lived about as far from the sea as you can get in England. The promise of seeing the sea over the next hill was one the most powerful feelings generated by any holiday we went on. The sea, the sea- more than simply a place to play with boats and floats it was the way wilderness could enter our unexciting lives. Apart from the imagined wilderness and pockets of overlooked undergrowth between fields and marked out woodland this was the only wilderness I knew then.
By acting as if I was an explorer, making notes in my small notebook with a wire spiral so I had to be careful not to detach the pages, I became an explorer. Following the instinct of children I gave my own names to places. Past a wood of wheeling birds and discarded 12 bore cartridges I named it Pigeon Poacher’s wood. The old quarry was simply that, the word quarry was charged enough. At the end of my wanderings that day, when the track frittered away to nothing but large field scored with the arrowed prints of tractor tyres, I clambered under a barbed wire strand and jumped a ditch to find myself on an island about 100 square metres with a single willow tree low enough to sit on an outstretched branch. The island was formed by two streams, diverted with ditches going off but leaving a central half wooded wild patch of land. Big enough to stand or sit upon or light a fire. I called this place Compass Island.
The naming of places I had no doubt assimilated from Arthur Ransome, who makes it an explicit part of his books. Dick and Dorothea are somewhat reluctantly accepted by the Swallows and the Amazons because of willingness to invent names that weren’t too bad. Dick was the silent egghead professor figure of the later books and I idolised him, especially when, despite the handicap of specks and wimpy physique (compared to the literally Amazonian Nancy and the butch maturity of John) he performed some heroic act of endurance. Early on, owing to an inability to run more than a few yards without getting wheezy, I switched my attentions to acts of toughness and survival rather than athletic prowess.
Returning over the fields as the sun was setting I had been out for hours. In long corduroy shorts my shins scratched from the stalks of corn I strode through I looked forward to the ritual of checking the distance walked with a piece of cotton thread, drawing my own map in my notebook, writing up my ‘notes’. The act of walking and looking for strange islands locked in the farmed and regulated world. And then naming them with my own lexicon of names the ones that just came to me, there was no thinking about it. The right name always appears when you need it.