When I first read Robert Holdstock’s classic fantasy novel Mythago Wood, [1] I felt a deep sense of familiarity – a set of young children living on the edge of a mysterious forest, whose secrets their father long since devoted himself to elucidating.
You see, I too grew up on the borders of Mythago Wood. Ryhope was, admittedly, rather larger than our particular forest realm, but then the point of the story is really the immense expansion it undergoes the further you penetrate into it.
For us, it all started at the creek. Clay-bottomed, mostly innocuous, at times it could grow into a raging torrent of brown water, pulling down banks and – on one celebrated occasion – flooding the entire neighbouring shopping centre.
It is, after all, a tidal stream, swelling with salt water twice a day and eventually, I suppose, destined to swallow up the entire suburb around us.
When we were kids, though, we dammed it with sticks and branches, and splashed around in the water with no real fear. There was, in fact, no way across except by way of a tiny ford by our back gate.
Everything this side of the gate was ordered, controlled: my mother's various vegetable gardens, the trimmed hedges, the roses by the front fence. Over the creek, though, strangeness ruled.
I remember, one day when we were engaged in constructing a dam, a group of other children – four of them, just as there were four of us – emerging from the bush they'd apparently been exploring. We stared at them in the wary way of kids meeting strangers.
I expected one of my older brothers to warn them off as trespassers – it was, after all, part of our land – but they didn't do so. When we came back later they were gone. We never saw them again, in fact.
Gradually the wood got fenced in as the neighbourhood changed. First a supermarket was built next door. This involved piping the creek underneath their parking area – in itself a mammoth task.
I'll always remember the day when a boy sunbathing on one of the concrete pipes – soon to disappear for good underground – took off his shirt, then carelessly left it behind. We expected him to come back for it, but he never did. There it stayed, in fact, for weeks, till the pipe was hoisted to be lowered into the ugly brown trench they'd dug. Perhaps it's still there, down there in the dark.
The supermarket then built a large wooden fence between us and them. It was, unfortunately, constructed more like a ladder than an actual barrier, so it could easily be climbed by the neighbourhood kids, some of whom tried tight-rope walking along the top, teetering above the ten-foot drop to the waiting asphalt below. None of them actually fell off, but my father took the precaution of nailing barbed wire strips along it to prevent further acts of derring-do.
Not only that, but he planted a set of Albertine rose bushes along it as well. The strong green vines gradually twined themselves through the rungs of the fence till it resembled Sleeping Beauty's castle – certainly making it impossible to climb.
That was, I suppose, the first great cut into the heart of our wood.
Then the old lady, Mrs Springall – who lived in a gloomy house in one of the properties across from us, and who had a strong aversion to the felling of timber or building of barriers – died, leaving her house to a nephew.
He took the precaution of installing a burglar alarm, which had the agreeable habit of going off in the wee hours of the night, or the middle of a lazy Sunday afternoon, and squalling vociferously for hours on end.
After my father had made innumerable complaints to the elusive householder, the wires to that alarm were cut unaccountably one dark night, and after that we heard no more from that direction.
Instead, the nephew rented it out to some indigent hippies who promptly started to cultivate dope. Knowing that they were likely to be targeted by any police raids, they took the precaution of placing their potted marijuana plants over the property line, on my father's and our immediate neighbour's land.
Another argument ensued, and no more was heard from the hippies in the old shed. 'Pathetic specimens,' I remember my father saying of them – my mother had been afraid that they might overpower him when he went over there to confront them, and insisted that he be accompanied by the burly builder who lived next door.
The next thing after that was the building of a set of retirement units on Mrs. Springall's old land. There were still local ordinances forbidding the felling of mature trees then, so it had to be sandwiched between some particular fine specimens of native bush. Now, of course, the whole site would be razed and the concrete be poured on the original clay of the valley. It means that we can still see many trees in that direction, though.
So what are we left with? The creek on one side, the supermarket fence on the other, the fence of the retirement complex on our upper boundary ... but nothing's been built on the other side. There's nothing there but a large fallen tree to mark the boundary between us and our next-door neighbour.
I guess that it may be this open border which enables the land to cling to its strangeness, its stubbornly impenetrable nature.
My father was a man with a pronounced taste for wilderness – for unbounded spaces. He liked allowing trees and plants to grow wild. He loved, too, the native birds which continue to flock to our bushy space despite the fact that most of our taller trees are now gone.
Generations of jobbing gardeners haven't helped by using the far corner of the section as a dumping ground for all their prunings: particularly those from the still viciously abundant roses, complete with their flesh-rending thorns.
My father, too, loved to leave little piles of wood from the various trees he had felled scattered randomly about on the ground, like mantraps. They're completely hidden by the thick green undergrowth, so you'd never know they were there until you tripped over them.
Then there are the strangely woven nests one can find behind some of the fallen trunks: possums? feral cats? tramps? Literally anything could be living over there. We'd never know.
Seen from the air, the whole thing looks quite innocuous: a dark green square behind the roofs and the light green lawns, but I defy anyone to walk from one side of our property to the other without feeling watched, and impeded, and finally stopped altogether.
As with the explorers in Robert Holdstock's story, the only way in is along the stream. As a kid I waded more than once through the dark pipes that lead away from us, under the supermarket, under a busy intersection, then on to the not-so-far-away beach.
Upstream is harder. I did try it once, with a few friends from school. It was easy to start with, wading through the shallow water past our section and then the neighbour's – another old lady's, Mrs Cottam. After that came the bridge that leads to the tennis courts. All that we negotiated with minimal difficulty. But then we entered stranger regions.
I still have a vision of inching along the bottom of a concrete culvert, and looking up to see the curious face of one of the upstream neighbours looking down on us. It made it all seem so ridiculous somehow: our journey to those headwaters so obviously located in someone else's backyard.
In reality, of course, the streambed leads to another set of pipes under the sports fields, and from there (I suppose) back up into the ring of hills that surround us on all three sides.
We retreated, and I never tried that again. In retrospect, I can see that we left it too late. If we'd set out a few years before, there might have been further discoveries to be made. As it is, the ubiquitous concrete had already gummed up the land.
We're left, though, with an anomalous space. I don't know quite what to call it: the other side of the creek was the phrase we used as kids: an alien and yet somehow fascinatingly paradoxical space, a little like the Zone left behind by the alien visitors in Tarkovsky's Stalker.
We feared it always, yet crossed and recrossed it often. It opened out, then, on all sides, so one had to guess where (and when) to turn back – there were no obvious boundaries.
And, like the man in Robert Holdstock's story, it's my long-dead father I have to thank for it all.
Notes:
[1] Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood. 1984. Grafton Books (London: Collins, 1990).
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