Field Tuesday August 30, 2005
As a boy, we used to go for walks across agricultural countryside leading to a woodland area called Canada Heights. I remember cold air autumns with chestnuts and wild mushrooms, admired but never picked, and what we called the boing tree. My Dad reached up from the precariously steep slope to a springy overhanging branch, wrested it down to the eager grip of me and little brother, allowing it to launch us into the air with such glee that decades later, I remember it as one of those redeeming details of boyhood delight. And my school playground bordered the cabbage fields and one summer’s day we had a nature lesson by romping across said fields, aiming for a pond I’d known on Sundays, not schooldays, to explore the bugs, critters and further boyish delights of aquatic life. I don’t miss the boing tree, or the pond life, but I do miss the fields.
My favourite landscape is wild and mountainous but for an afternoon ramble or, better still, on a lazy warm evening – English fields are a soothing and nostalgic treat. The field is tame, but at its quintessential best is surrounded by semi-wild hedges. The patchwork landscape resonant like warm beer, cricket, and Shakespeare. It changes dramatically throughout the year, reminding us not only of agricultural dependence but also of the seasons, and nature itself. For about two years when I was studying in Sussex, I had a part time job maintaining a private garden nestling at the foot of the South Downs. Less than an hour from London, the other side of the garden were the rolling fields beyond which lay the sea. There was a gentle curve I particularly enjoyed, the fields as viewed from the back door of the house, that you could only describe as a female skyline. Reassuringly gentle, soft, but also wild and natural.
I wish I could find fields like that again. I wish I lived in a house on the edge of them so I could enjoy morning coffee, watching a breeze sweep through the grasses. There’s a climactic moment in the film Field Of Dreams that took me by such surprise, and had such powerful emotional resonance, I was reduced to inconsolable tears. Fortunately I was with a sweet natured girl friend who understood it, who later conveyed that she’d seen another male friend have a similar reaction: Costner’s father returns from the dead in his magic field and he and his son shake hands and make friends, in a way they never had during his life. At the time, my father was still alive. And there’s a scene in the film where Costner walks out into his field on a summer evening, gliding his hands over the waist height grasses. “Build it, and he will come”. Costner’s other film, which I loved at the time, has stunning photography as the camera lingers over the fields of the American prairie. In Steinbeck’s lovely short novel Of Mice And Men, part of my school curriculum, the protagonists aspire to “living off the fat of the land” – independent agricultural living, dignified and autonomous. So I know it’s an American thing as well: the psychic value of the field, embodying a simpler life integrated with nature. And EM Forster, quintessentially English but with his heart living in Italy, perhaps, wrote a lovely scene in A Room With A View where the hero George shouts out “Beauty! Joy! Love!” – when relaxing in an idyllic Italian field.