Sidetracked

True to my resolution to get out in the open air more, this morning I wheeled my mountain bike out of the newly cleaned garage and set off, heading for the Farndon Road. It was one of those ‘in-between’ autumn mornings: sun and some white cloud, with a surprisingly strong breeze that made me glad I had layered up under my fluorescent yellow waterproof jacket; remind me to apologise to the Met. Office – it is pretty cold.

Along the Farndon Road, and up the short, sharp climb to the top of Warden Hill, then freewheel down to the Welsh Road (an old sheep-droving route to London) and across the A361 to Aston-le-Walls; stopped at the crossroads and was startled by the loud surf-noise as cars barrelled down the long, straight slope. An accident blackspot, so I’m always cautious when crossing here.

Safely back on the B-roads, I did a circuit of Aston-le-Walls and picked up the single-track road that skirts the old RAF aerodrome at Chipping Warden: there are ruined brick walls in the undergrowth and the patchy little woods that line the road, and concrete tracks and dispersal pans through the field gates. I always start to feel alert and engaged at this point on this ride, as my long-ago monomaniacal obsession with Bomber Command imaginatively transforms each weed-obscured, rusted oil drum into an object imbued with the resonances of the past.

On that little track, west of Aston-le-Walls, my imagination bifurcates, pulling in firstly these imaginative historical associations, and then secondly recalling little incidents from my own life. The site of the old airfield is now home to a number of logistics and distribution firms (at one point, cars were stored on one of the old runways), with the big old hangars still in use as warehouses, and with modern offices, Portakabins, covered smoking areas and picnic tables for the workers dotting the surrounding areas. From this site, during the second world war, flew Wellington bombers, aircrew and groundcrew passing their lives in these same surroundings.

During my college years in the mid- to late 1990s I signed on with a local temp agency and got work on this site in the long holidays: summer and Christmas, essentially, packing things in boxes, printing labels, wrapping palleted stacks of boxes in shrink wrap on a big machine: Virgin, 3COM, Guinness, mobile phone distributors. £5 an hour or so, but conducive to improved fitness in the summer – the old hangars had no air conditioning, and the sun beating down on the metal roof would create a suffocating, sweat-inducing atmosphere in the afternoons. I would usually do the 2pm-10pm shift, and cycle to and from work. A few images stick in my memory: cycling home in the cooler darkness at the end of a shift, you’d feel a burst of heat as you passed the long brick wall as you came into Aston-le-Walls, the red bricks giving off the heat that they had absorbed during the day; fields lit by the full moon, seen from the top of Warden Hill; a rabbit bumping against my pedals as it ran across the road, passing between the bike’s wheels; and a bright meteorite fizzing across the sky on the dark, dark night when the batteries ran out on my front lamp.

The track around the perimeter takes you past the warehouses, the hangars, the car parks and the security gates, then past some grazing land and allotments and into Chipping Warden village, from where you pick up the Culworth Road, which leads back to the Welsh Road. Riding along the Culworth Road, with greyer clouds blowing in overhead, I passed a little concrete track on the left that runs between two big fields. I’ve seen this track dozens of times, but never followed it before – I’ve always thought that it just ran up to some farm buildings. I did a wobbly 180 degree turn on the narrow road and went back.

The start of the track is rubbly and broken up, but further along the concrete is smoother, and patched with darker repair material. Encouragingly, there’s a ‘public footpath’ sign pointing along the track. You pass some pre-fabricated buildings that are half-hidden in the trees, and get a sense of a hand-built home, a mix of wood and brick, vegetable gardens and old machines rusting in the long grass, and then, after dismounting and lifting the bike over a stile, you come to a three-way junction: tracks to left and right, and one straight ahead. They’re all concrete still, remnants of the airfield’s remoter outposts, and there are trees growing much more thickly here, and it’s quite gloomy now under the twin canopies of cloud and leaves.

I explore the tracks in turn, on foot, and immediately start to see old brick buildings among the trees: many of the structures were built half-submerged in the earth, and have narrow, brick-lined entrance passages – probably shelters, bomb dumps and the like. Seventy years on, they have trees growing out of the thick earth and moss that has collected on their hump-like roofs. There are tall weeds everywhere, and fragments of fallen brick walls amongst the foliage. In the dim light, it’s like history fading back into the earth.

There’s a feeling of melancholy and decay in the air, and I have a sense of all the forgotten sites that there must be like this all over the country, off back roads, hidden by trees and weeds at the end of little-used tracks: places that were once vibrant with activity, with men and women doing their duty, living out life and death in wartime, a little self-contained town plonked down in the space between a couple of small villages, with outbuildings and concrete hardstanding dispersed across the countryside. And now it’s all crumbling away: the rendering on many of the bigger buildings is dropping off, revealing patches of brickwork underneath. In the interior of one block I can see building materials stored in the damp gloom (there’s a padlocked bit of chain link fencing across the entrance), and there are skips full of rubble and old metal in the woods.

One of the roofless bigger buildings has trees growing inside it, and a still-roofed part with a thirty-foot high ceiling and runners for big sliding doors; I imagine cranes and little tractors for loading bombs/towing the bomb trollies, but now there’s just a bare concrete floor, a wheelbarrow, and a bright cast of light from the sun-side window.

Further west along the track, the buildings are more decayed, more actively destroyed, and, in some cases, burned out (piles of twisted corrugated metal roofing, collapsed joist constructions, a chimney stack on its side). I realize why all of this is so familiar: from far back in my brain, memories of darkened brick buildings and pill boxes creep forward – the childhood haunts of a second world war-obsessed kid and his best mate.

Freddie and I used to play ‘war’ a lot, and we fancied ourselves as putative commandos. A few hundred yards from the end of our street, and just past the junior school that we both attended, was an area that we called ‘The Barracks’. It started just beyond the housing estate and its supporting facilities (school, a couple of shops), where the pavement stopped and gave way to rough grass, concrete tracks, low shrubs and, further in, broad concrete pans and high mounds of grass and earth, secured in brick-walled bases. This was a dream playground for us, full of broken glass, the odd rusting car, metal hatchways that opened onto drains and who-knows-what, shells of buildings, pill boxes, and the high mounds, down which we would careen on our little bikes. Many of the ruined buildings showed crude signs of recent habitation: empty bottles and cans, ashes from fires, the ever-present smell of urine and faeces, and, in one case, a perfectly deposited coil of poop that mimicked the towering structure of the Walnut Whips that we would take with us on our missions as ‘rations’. There are darker memories, too: of the time that we got into a big hut that was clearly being used by some people/organisation (there was a padlock on the door and made-up camp beds inside) and panicked when we heard voices approaching outside; of being bullied/robbed by bigger boys (which sullied and contaminated what we thought of as ‘our’ playground); and flying over the handlebars of my bike when the chain seized, and landing on my forehead, hard…I remember getting home, feeling dazed and ill, but I never told anyone what had happened. (This could explain a lot about my cognitve abilities/emotional retardation.)

This is all echoing in my mind, all afresh, as I follow the last bit of path through the woods, and on to the stile that lets out onto the pastureland. After hefting the bike over the high, rickety wood-and-wire fence, I pause for a minute to get my breath back. The pasture drops away, all rich green grass still, to the Welsh Road, on the other side of which rises Job’s Hill. I suddenly notice a couple of birds whizz by, and as I look down I see that there are swallows skimming past just above the top of the grass, a couple of dozen of them doing circuits, passing just a few feet from me. I watch them for a while, wondering what they make of the sudden fall in temperatures, and trying to picture them making the flight to their winter grounds in Africa.

The wheels of my bike leave a trail through the ankle-high grass as I push it along the footpath and down to the field gate. After crossing the road,  I make the steepish climb up the western edge of Job’s Hill, staying close to the fence and dipping in and out of the sheep tracks. As I go higher, I start to feel the force of the cold wind.

At the top, I pause and look back, down past the scooped-out side of the hill, to the woods that I’ve just been walking in: they look sealed and uniform from here, the autumn foliage (just starting to yellow in places) concealing all of the buildings and the decay. Further off, I can see the hangars and ancillary buildings of the logistics centre, as well as the line of poplar trees that were planted along the axis of one of the old runways.

Walking to join the bridleway that skirts the edge of the next field, I look at a tree in the hedge: a bit of blue nylon rope has been tied around it at some stage, and the tree has expanded to fill the rope loop to bursting – the bark is starting to bulge out beyond the nylon.

Rain is starting to fall as I ride along the tarmac track that leads past a couple of cottages to the Farndon Road, but I stop to take some pictures of a big bird that’s hovering above the roadside verge. At first, the bird puzzles me: it’s hovering like a kestrel, but it’s too big to be that, and its wingbeats have the wrong rhythm. It moves closer to me, and eventually I realize that it’s a buzzard. (I’ve never seen one hover like this.)

The rain is falling more steadily as I reach the last mile of my ride. The drops are sharp and cold on my face, and the rainfall is making a silvery curtain that mists the trees at the top of Eydon Hill. Suddenly cold, I find myself thinking about how nice it would be to have a cup of chocolate and some buttered toast when I get home. And then my mind wanders on to memories of rain-greyed Sunday afternoons in childhood, fading into dark nights full of dread of the inevitability of school on Monday morning.

It’s good to take a neglected path and find new things (as well as reminding yourself about things that you’d forgotten). I might try and get sidetracked again soon.