The Spinney

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When I was a boy, aged about nine or ten, I think, I used to ride my bicycle to a long, narrow wood. It was about a mile long and perhaps a quarter of a mile wide and filled with old, tall deciduous trees. There was a path down through the middle, from which it was not possible to see the edges of the wood in summertime. The path crossed the same stream three times along its length. It was called The Spinney.

 

A liminal space between a main road and a vast golf course, which was strictly private and where angry men in odd trousers and check argyle pullovers would shout at you if you ventured out of the Spinney and into the bright green sunshine. But it didn’t matter because the Spinney was, in my imagination, a vast and endless forest stretching for all eternity and filled with beasts and birds, hidden dangers, lurking wild men and aliens.

 

I went often with friends. We would dam the streams and race along the path through the middle. We would cook sausages on sticks over a small fire contained within a stone circle. We climbed trees and built dens. Sometimes there were other children there, rivals for this or that favourite den or river crossing. We mock-fought with home-made bows and arrows. We would yell and shout. Sometimes we were cowboys and sometimes we were Indians. Sometimes we were brave allied soldiers against cowardly Nazis. The sun shone dappled through the shimmering, rustling leaves from when school ended for the summer until it was time to return to the prison of learning.

 

We navigated the vast forest with map and compass and laid signs made from sticks for our friends to follow. We hid from the occasional dog walker, all of whom had the good manners to never see us, even though their dogs did their best to lick our mud-painted faces. We hunted with stealth; we crept, careful not to snap a twig or break a branch and give away our trail. We had endless, timeless, exhausting fun and then cycled home the mile or two for tinned salmon sandwiches and trifle if it was the weekend, or less exotic fare every other day. It was the best fun.

 

And then I grew older and moved away. From time to time over the years I went back home and occasionally visited the Spinney. As a walker now, I was surprised each time by how small the vast, endless forest now seemed. From an adult perspective, I could easily see the edges. The stream is a paltry dribble. There were no vast dams of sticks and rocks, no rope swings, no dens. No young boys hid in the bushes and there were no distant whoops as the Indians geared themselves up to attack the wagon train. Just other adults, mostly, walking their dogs and swinging their plastic bags of dog poo into the bushes. I stopped going there.

 

I happened that way the other week. The Spinney is no more. There is a long estate of modern houses, all of a similar brick and all rather tall and narrow, seeming out of proportion, bleak and rather ugly. There are no shops. There is a small, sad-looking play park with a steel railing fence around it and multiple signs explaining exactly what fun is still allowed these days and a much longer list of things that are not. It is, of course, devoid of children. Each house has a garage attached to the house next door and each garage has, mostly, two cars parked on the driveway in front of it. The cars are all very large. There was no sunshine, only dull steel grey skies and a chilly wind.

 

There are no trees, apart from a very small number of very sad-looking silver birch saplings that are planted in a line along the turf bank that separates the housing estate from the main road, along which grinds an endless line of cars going in both directions to nowhere. Most of the saplings are broken.

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