Em and myself caught the train back there on Saturday. A short trip from Worcester to Kidderminster, and only a couple of miles walk to Stone from there. A wander around Kidderminster charity shops, and then, another return back into the past.
I've written before about Stone, and my grandparents' house. This was the house where I woke from a nightmare when I was five, and saw a black, cowled figure at the end of my bed. A nightmare, obviously, but it still triggered off my interest in the paranormal. I say a nightmare, but I remember my aunt, telling me what her daughter -Ann- had said, that she had 'seen things too'.
I still dream about the house, and in my dreams it is always haunted. I would like to link back to earlier posts about it, but the laptop continues to operate in what may be described as a somewhat old fashioned way.
Saturday, a grey day. Lukewarm and humid. At least it was in Kidderminster. Wandering around the numerous charity shops with Em. Shopping centres and pound shops. A long street market selling cheap watches and batteries and hats stretched along the smaller-than-remembered centre of town. Many shops closed and concealed behind the market stalls. Broken windows. I don't remember it being like this, so dismal and shabby and oddly desperate. It felt like a town that was slowly being abandoned, and only those who couldn't leave would be left.
The record shop had closed. I remember buying 'The Return of Martha Splatterhead' by The Accused and the second album by Virus there back in the 80s. I found 'The Ladies of Grace Adieu' by Susannah Clarke in one of the charity shops for £1:50, which pleased me.
We left the town centre heading, heading up Comberton Hill, a name I remember from childhood (a toy aeroplane Mum bought for me here when I was 5 - strange memories surface). The hill was steep, and more familiar than I was expecting. A strange place though, narrow shops and that all pervading feeling of emptiness. I was reminded -again- of T.S.Eliot's 'half-deserted streets', that Saturday afternoon a veritable Wasteland.
As we left the town centre, we also left behind that sense of shabby disrepair, and moved through streets of relatively affluent housing. Set far back from the road the houses were mostly detached, and again, oddly empty.
I was glad when the countryside began, and we left those desolate houses behind.
Stone is on the road to Bromsgrove, and was alarmingly busy. The lukewarm aspect of the day had now vanished and a bright sun shone down. To our left a hedge, and on the other side of that, the sandstone-stained countryside of summer holidays and a year living here in 1977. Poplar trees and voluminous bushes, crop-fields and a sense of deepness in the countryside. This was -is- a landscape as dangerous and alluring as that depicted in the film 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' but this would be an English vanishing, a summer ghost-story. August-narrative, spilling away from the paths of June, the jungles of July and into the rainy autumns that always follow. When remembering, it is always autumn.
And there, rising from the ground a church spire, a line of red brick buildings, and beyond, a hill rising up, was Stone. From this distance it hadn't seemed to have changed at all.
We approached the crossroads; one tiny lane to the left leading to a wood where Mum said she used to play as a kid, back in the 1940s... and ahead, the road up to my old school, the churchyard, and to my right the entrance to Stanklyn Lane, my grandparents house and the past.
As I walked down Stanklyn lane it struck me at how little -if at all- the place had changed. The phone box was still there, windows covered with green mould and obscurity. The houses, set far back from the road seemed, maybe, larger, and posher than I remembered... a middle class village rather than the working class village I remembered. I remembered the mock-Tudor House though, opposite the gravelly track that ran up the line of houses where my grandparents house lay. I only went a little way up the track. There was a van in the drive of the old house, and they seemed to have replaced the windows. I remember looking behind me, Em down the drive from me looking as suddenly nervous as me. What would I say to anyone if they came out?I walked back, turned around, looking at the blank and faceless windows; the living room, the back room door, the first floor bedroom where Nan died on New Years Eve of 1983...
We headed up the hill, through the sandstone-embankments shadowed road, from the top of which, when I was five years old, horse-heads would watch us, sinister and distant in their high up field.
The barn was still there to the left, but the doors had been replaced. No dark and alluring gaps to try and see pigs through, as we used to. My god. the barn has probably been here centuries; whats thirty three since I used to walk this way to school?
I couldn't see the school, just across the lane from Stone Church. The steps leading up to it were overgrown with hedges and a sign warning there was no entrance. Behind the school and the church, the vast and mysterious woods I never entered and always fascinated me seemed as deep and entrancing as ever; stream-mazes, lost manors, and churches buried under leaves and branch... The coolness of my thoughts there, like breathing underwater, an ancient pool on a summers day, shadowed by daydream and tiny nights whose small hours are nonetheless intense and concentrated...
Across the still-busy road the new churchyard. I found my grandparents grave, and also of Ann my cousin. The mystery of names. I thought my grandparents surname was spelt Luit. It was in fact Liut. Gwendoline Liut. Gelindo Liut. My cousin's full name Ann-Marie Elizabeth Parry, 1973 - 1994... There was a poem she had written (embossed to protect it against the elements) lent against the tombstone, about her reflection in the mirror, having an independent, disembodied life. A strange and haunted thing, a line stays with me about 'her room the precise twin of my own'. The last time I saw Ann would have been October of 1987... twenty four years ago. A quarter century.
I was glad when the countryside began, and we left those desolate houses behind.
Stone is on the road to Bromsgrove, and was alarmingly busy. The lukewarm aspect of the day had now vanished and a bright sun shone down. To our left a hedge, and on the other side of that, the sandstone-stained countryside of summer holidays and a year living here in 1977. Poplar trees and voluminous bushes, crop-fields and a sense of deepness in the countryside. This was -is- a landscape as dangerous and alluring as that depicted in the film 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' but this would be an English vanishing, a summer ghost-story. August-narrative, spilling away from the paths of June, the jungles of July and into the rainy autumns that always follow. When remembering, it is always autumn.
And there, rising from the ground a church spire, a line of red brick buildings, and beyond, a hill rising up, was Stone. From this distance it hadn't seemed to have changed at all.
We approached the crossroads; one tiny lane to the left leading to a wood where Mum said she used to play as a kid, back in the 1940s... and ahead, the road up to my old school, the churchyard, and to my right the entrance to Stanklyn Lane, my grandparents house and the past.
As I walked down Stanklyn lane it struck me at how little -if at all- the place had changed. The phone box was still there, windows covered with green mould and obscurity. The houses, set far back from the road seemed, maybe, larger, and posher than I remembered... a middle class village rather than the working class village I remembered. I remembered the mock-Tudor House though, opposite the gravelly track that ran up the line of houses where my grandparents house lay. I only went a little way up the track. There was a van in the drive of the old house, and they seemed to have replaced the windows. I remember looking behind me, Em down the drive from me looking as suddenly nervous as me. What would I say to anyone if they came out?I walked back, turned around, looking at the blank and faceless windows; the living room, the back room door, the first floor bedroom where Nan died on New Years Eve of 1983...
We headed up the hill, through the sandstone-embankments shadowed road, from the top of which, when I was five years old, horse-heads would watch us, sinister and distant in their high up field.
The barn was still there to the left, but the doors had been replaced. No dark and alluring gaps to try and see pigs through, as we used to. My god. the barn has probably been here centuries; whats thirty three since I used to walk this way to school?
I couldn't see the school, just across the lane from Stone Church. The steps leading up to it were overgrown with hedges and a sign warning there was no entrance. Behind the school and the church, the vast and mysterious woods I never entered and always fascinated me seemed as deep and entrancing as ever; stream-mazes, lost manors, and churches buried under leaves and branch... The coolness of my thoughts there, like breathing underwater, an ancient pool on a summers day, shadowed by daydream and tiny nights whose small hours are nonetheless intense and concentrated...
Across the still-busy road the new churchyard. I found my grandparents grave, and also of Ann my cousin. The mystery of names. I thought my grandparents surname was spelt Luit. It was in fact Liut. Gwendoline Liut. Gelindo Liut. My cousin's full name Ann-Marie Elizabeth Parry, 1973 - 1994... There was a poem she had written (embossed to protect it against the elements) lent against the tombstone, about her reflection in the mirror, having an independent, disembodied life. A strange and haunted thing, a line stays with me about 'her room the precise twin of my own'. The last time I saw Ann would have been October of 1987... twenty four years ago. A quarter century.
I wonder what she saw at my grandparents house?
After lunch we headed back down the hill, and into Stanklyn Lane again. We crossed a stile, and took a path across the fields, but there was no path, just a field of wavy grass, a crop of some description, so we stuck to the sticky red-soil edges. Eventually came to a small opening in a tiny patch of trees that led to a tiny stream. Across the dark and trickling waters, a few planks of wood sufficed as a bridge.
There was a call of wood-pigeons, and something drifting in the air, indistinct and effusive.
We walked back to Kidderminster and caught the train back to Worcester.
