The Peripheral Life

Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands (Jonathan Cape, 2011), 266 pages, £12.99.

Here is a book, lyrical, observant and enchanting. Two English poets travel to different regions in their homeland seeking out a type of landscape and from their discoveries they tease out some of the weird textures of modern living. This new landscape is both utilitarian and outlandish, somehow discomposed and yet occasionally magical. It is also one wilderness supplanting another in fact and in idea.

Farley and Roberts examine periphery, that part of country to be found between the edge of the city and the start of concerted agriculture or protected wilds. In their own words this periphery is: 

untranslated landscape … part of the gravitational field of all our larger urban areas, a texture we build up speed to escape as we hurry towards the countryside, the distant wilderness. The trouble is, if we can’t see the edgelands, we can’t imagine them or allow them any kind of imaginative life. And so they don’t really exist. 

Essential to their story is the process by which this terrain has been transformed during the past fifty years from a feral Arcadia of nondescript lands, paralysed in their use perhaps by their very proximity to the burgeoning urbs, to the opportunity-land where commerce relocated itself in its escape from the impossible rents and parking that overtook town centres. We know this as the “doughnut effect” of city planning. So these former fallow margins have come to resemble space-stations, vast, floating, wholly assembled. Here are supermarkets and warehouses with the indoor acreages of viable farms, business parks with their faceted offices and manicured grounds, landfill and waste reprocessing plants where the seagulls swarm. Here is power station and pylon country, the utilities “we can’t live without, but don’t want to live with”. On graffito’d bridges across motorways the cattle will cross from one pasture to another, oblivious of the hurtling traffic below them. At floodlit ranges men will arrive, always singly, for night-time “swing” practice, paying money to send dozens of golf balls curving into the icily lit, rain-flecked space—in a ritual that, as the authors observe, “has more in common with yoga or dance than it does with golf”.

Nicely, and at all points, Farley and Roberts have an eye for the bizarrerie of this new wilderness. The narrative of their twenty-eight chapters, rendered to us in short cinematic takes, is always in the one voice, for with regard to literary style their collaboration is seamless. Into this fabric they weave the findings on edgelands of many poets from Wordsworth, Clare, Eliot and Auden to their own contemporaries, as well as citing the work of many visual artists. But more often we are aware of the two of them at their watch, their car ranging over England, one poet at the wheel, one at his laptop, and a landscape unfolding before them, new for all that it is generic, its particulars recorded and made vibrant for the life of the imagination.

So what happened to feral Arcadia? In my case its presence migrated to idyll.

I was born a British Army brat so my upbringing took place on postwar garrison estates invariably located in the midst of lands for which no one but children had quite defined the use. For us here were feral playgrounds and at one of them, Bushey Heath, aged seven, I was ready to go feral.

What this meant, in effect, was that I had reached an age when I was willing to trust myself to boundlessness, and the patchwork of fields, hedgerows, spinneys around our comfortable army quarters allowed me and my pals just this sense of space hived with intrigue. From the tops of trees we could see three counties as we swung across twenty degrees of arc on branches thinner than our wrists. In the hedgerows we burrowed dens and stored the provender for runaway lives, or found birds’ eggs which, delicately with a thorn we could pierce the blue or green speckled thing and blow out the yellow gunk for the junior naturalist among us to add to a collection. Or we could watch Barry on his bicycle ride down some fleeing enemy, leap from his saddle to floor the fellow, his bravura every bit as thrilling as the antics of Cowpoke or Redskin on the black-and-white televisions that (in 1956) British houses had begun to possess.

Who was Barry, you ask? Barry may have typified an edgeland dweller. Gypsy? No. And yes. He lived with his mother and some chickens in a caravan and did not appear to attend school. He knew all the lands around The Little Sandy and The Little Bushey Lanes, the abandoned farm and its avenues of escape if we found ourselves on its upstairs as the farmer’s men came looking for us through the downstairs. With Barry I constructed tomahawks by binding a wedge of slate into a split stick, whereupon we could go among his mother’s chickens. O peculiar, a fleeing chicken that has left its head behind in the grass. I stared, aroused from my fantasy of weapons by something real, and foresaw trouble with his mother. But Barry lived at that edge where he appeared to have nothing to lose, and to be in his company was hair-raising and compelling.

Yes, this feral Arcadia was where we might crawl astride an old white horse on a chain, or step widely around a bull as we composed its myth, at the same time as we converted the serials of 1956-57 television—Ivanhoe, Lancelot, Robin Hood, Lone Ranger—to our wargaming phantasmagoria on a set whose amplitude matched the open prospects of the outlawry and Wild West depicted on screen. This was the chemistry.

Some encounters could quieten our play and perplex. For instance here were Robin and Susan, two or three years older. It seemed they liked to lie down on the grass, he atop her, and with a length of grass connecting their two mouths, mutually nibble along it until their mouths met. There were many blades of grass. Why did the spectacle both bore us and command our respect? Then one day Robin broke his wrist while swinging from a tree and it would be true to say our emotion at this mishap was true grieving. A little later he vanished altogether, to boarding school we heard, and Susan’s presence also seemed to recede from us, as though having lost its necessity.

These edgelands, by which I mean both countryside and a dimension of experience, were discovering in us children the vital and the strange emotions, of risk, of wonder, of freedom, and perhaps more quietly rousing an expectation that the natural place to be alive, whether child or adult, was somewhere where community encountered the natural wild. I am certain that my early sensations at Bushey Heath, and similar experiences in Northern Ireland and Germany, predisposed me lifelong to locate my dwelling at such margins. My home today backs onto one of Canberra’s mountains and is alive with feral bustle and mystery, only some of it animal. And through this early acquaintance with 1950s edgelands I have never been able to imagine inhabiting an inner city without a sense of suffocation. Such is the effect of idyll on well-being.

By contrast, Paul Farley and Michael Roberts are fascinated by the manner of change that has come to such margin lands and their former usages. Their book records vibrantly and meticulously what it advertises, “journeys into England’s true wilderness”. It is a new take. Nonetheless, their study joins a venerable tradition in English literature, of books that scrutinise the condition of their homeland or part thereof. I think of Edward Thomas’s essays in The Heart of England and other titles, of Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, the histories of Peter Ackroyd and the investigations of George Ewart Evans, the recorded travels of Borrow, Cobbett, Defoe and many more throughout the British Isles. For all that such accounts must discover examples of despoliation along the way, the broad effect of them is to show how a land, in its particulars and processes, is loveable. Farley and Roberts’s Edgelands does this for the landscape of modern England, giving to gross and weird structures and behaviours their place. To describe them is to integrate them. In this sense their book gives substance and renewal to that most complex and mistrusted of emotions, patriotism. Edgelands is a wonderfully intelligent expression of love-of-country.

Alan Gould is a poet, novelist and essayist who lives in Canberra. More of his “Short Takes” series of literary reflections will be appearing shortly in Quadrant.

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