The Back Mill

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He’d dive in, dump his school bag, raid the fridge and be off.

“Where’re you going?”

“Dunno. Backmill probably.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Backmill was what they called it, these prepubescent and young teenage schoolboys with more energy than sense. The little wood accessed by a rusting stock feeder converted to a bridge over the Garry Burn lies not far from the primary school. For me it was a place to find edible fungi in autumn and clouds of wood anemones in spring. For them, it was an open woodland opportunity for creating ever more ambitious bike jumps and mini skate parks, housing a roughly square, slightly sunken area they called the Curly, whose banks made a race track or skateboarding wall.

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As summer progressed, he’d pop home to borrow a spade, loppers, a bow saw. I railed, and refused the axe.

“You’re not to saw down any trees!” They did, though to be fair the old curling pond was thick with self-sown sycamores of suitable diameter for log ramps and bridges. The tracks and jumps became quite elaborate. My son and his pals were probably following a long tradition in which they were the current top dogs, and learning about engineering and practical skills in the process. Health and safety, too, I suspect.

Twenty years on, I never see a child in the woods, but the evidence indicates that to some extent the tradition continues. The burn is forded by new stepping stones, the soil is bare over the bumps and jumps, and someone’s parent has welded new metal onto the old stock feeder to keep safe-ish access going. There was a village campaign to build a “proper” skate park a few years ago. I kept quiet, but suspected an improper one would remain more attractive.

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At the end of the wood and across the burn is a cluster of old buildings and a modern barn used to store straw bales. When you look closely, you can see where a water wheel once was attached to the wall of the biggest building, though nettles and rank vegetation choke the pit where it would have turned. This is the real Back Mill, after which the wood is locally miscalled. Once, it must have been a hugely important hub of activity for the village.

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It’s a sizeable building, and across the road a second building of similar age was, I think, the granary. A door on the upper floor was probably where the grain was unloaded into wooden carts, perhaps like the one now parked in another outbuilding.

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The lower floor is crumbling, but suits the swallows and martins for nesting, and has been used for housing the beasts in winter – the old wooden manger is intact.

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But where is the water? The Garry Burn is much lower than the mill wheel, and the track into the ford now only leads to a field. Behind the mill, a stretch of level grass looks like it leads round the side to meet the wheel. Go several hundred metres up the road from the ford, looking carefully through the tangled vegetation, and you can discern a straight, broad channel. You soon come to a stone dam, and the remains of the mill-pond. From here the water would have been diverted on milling days via the lade at a slight incline to the wheel, which would start to turn and grind under its power.

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I’d love to find out more about Bankfoot’s Back Mill, and whether the wheel was an overshot or an undershot. It’ll have to wait now till the library re-opens, and I can delve again into the local history archives. Meanwhile, children of Bankfoot, keep building dens, jumps and bridges in the woods by the Curly!

On Doodling

My secondary school was very traditional, with a “good reputation”. Uniforms were strictly proscribed, right down to underwear and swimming costume, for use in the unheated, outdoor pool. Order was maintained by authoritarian teachers who had been there for decades, and prefects, who monitored behavior and whether we were still wearing our boaters and berets all the way home on the school bus. Our first homework was to take home our jotters and cover them, using brown paper – nothing else – to a strict pattern. On the front, using a ruler at all times, we wrote our names, class and the subject. Nothing else.

I became best friends with the second-in-command art teacher’s daughter. The art department was bright and modern, with lots of materials and media for us to use, and foot-operated potter’s wheels. I joined the lunchtime art club and loved making lopsided, fall-apart pots, which never came up to the scratch of being selected for glazing and firing.

Some time around the Summer of Love, our rarely seen, distant headmaster retired, and was replaced by a younger model that you kept bumping into in the corridors. The senior art master also left and a climate of staff changes, hitherto unknown, began. My friend’s dad became head of art, and the potter’s wheels were taken away overnight. Apparently, they cramped our creative style. Uniform code was relaxed – and ultimately “banned” by the headteacher. Most of the petty rules we loved to get angry about were dumped. Prefects were pensioned off. Some giddy-eyed young teachers encouraged us to address them by their first names.

Our new head of art, wings unclipped, sought recognition for his progressive, avant-garde department. It was he that first suggested we doodled on the covers and in the margins of our jotters. There had always been teachers who turned a blind eye to a smattering of doodle on the inside cover – like the thoroughly modern teacher of Russian, and the lazy history teacher who was only entrusted with the first years. Others, of the old school, would reward even a full stop after the subject name with detention. But there came an edict: doodling on and in jotters was no longer a punishable offence. It was to be encouraged in order to bring out our inner artists. Awkwardly, sanctioned doodling began. Pupils became competitive about their flower-power designs. Some gained a talent for cartoons. There was no punishment when my French jotter carried an unflattering but cruelly recognisable caricature of Mademoiselle C, the teacher.

Doodling, whatever the excuse, became a habit.

Doodling expanded onto the pristine walls of corridors and classrooms. Not spontaneous graffiti, however. On the Russian teacher’s classroom wall, we painted St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, with all its onion domes. The windows of the art department became opaque with rainbows of paint. Discarding the conventional, embracing “new” art in its broadest sense, rewarded our teacher with a visit from the Secretary of State for Education. His arrival was carefully contrived to coincide with a doodling-type dance display by two of us girls – of course – to a projected slide containing ink and fairy liquid, swirling and boiling in the projector lamp’s heat, accompanied by drumbeats from a couple of the boys – of course. The Minister glanced in, got the picture, and left rapidly.

The shelving of rules, the constant changes, the abandonment of distance and discipline left those pupils who had started under a very different ethos confused and sometimes angry. So were many of the staff. What do you do with a teenager, programmed to rebel, when you take away all the small stuff that’s been joyfully resisted by generations of adolescents? Some turned to bigger and more dangerous stuff to prove they were different. Sometimes, we took direct action against the new liberal order – such as holding an “illegal” Christmas carol concert when the traditional one was axed.

I left school early. The progressive trend lurched on, at least until the headmaster ran off with one of his sixth-year pupils. The art teacher left to be creative in Devon. About six years later, I found myself teaching in the same local authority, and had cause to visit the school for some event or other. I noted the blank, crisply-painted walls in the corridors. Clear glass sparkled in the windows of the art block. Uniforms, I observed, had returned. The backlash was in progress. It would have been a relief for my generation of rebels in need of tiny causes. I’m not sure if that still holds true – today’s young students have so many big causes to fight and need all the help they can get.

I never lost the doodling habit, though. It helps me concentrate, focus, relax – and learn.

Walking in Vectors

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A large, traditional primary school on the east side of London. Thirty-four eleven year olds, in their last year before going to the big school. Smart wee souls, most of them, and entranced with learning. Teacher, relaxed, confident, experienced but already thinking of a new career. We’d been talking about grid references, and maps, in preparation for a week-long field trip to the Isle of Wight. Our inspired and quirky maths specialist had entered this preoccupation by introducing them to vectors, what they were, how to define them. To facilitate understanding, I’d abandoned the classroom layout of loose groups and large desk-space and put the single desks, relics from the 1960s, back into rows, forming a grid, with my desk formally in the front by the blackboard. Technically off-grid. Of course. The class thought it was a great laugh.

Simon, in the back row, had some point in his creative writing he wanted my opinion on, so I called him over. We all stopped what we were doing and watched with interest as he took off his shoes, climbed onto his chair, then his desk, and proceeded to step precariously from desk-top to desk-top, preceding each move with a warning for the occupants to lift up their work. It took a while for him to reach my desk, and step off-grid too. Another time, another place, this behaviour might have alarmed both teacher and children. But this wasn’t that sort of class and I wasn’t that sort of teacher. Simon, brainy, cheeky, totally engaged and preposterous, certainly wasn’t that kind of pupil.

“What was that about, Simon?”

“I was walking in vectors. I had to use two different ones to get here because Keeley wouldn’t move her stuff.”

“I didn’t want his smelly feet on my desk!” protested Keeley.

We got Simon to tell us what vectors he’d used to define the straight lines via which he’d reached the front. It seemed a pretty good way to get your head around the subject, so we played about with it. Kids took turns to walk the vectors either I or their classmates suggested, starting from wherever they were.

“Your go, Miss!”

I turned a withering gaze on Simon, and joined in, “walking” to the vector destination he specified. Then they carried on with creative writing until lunchtime. Our maths specialist was very gratified to find the class’s understanding of vectors was now 100%.

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bristol1 Decades later, I still “walk in vectors” – and remember Simon – in many situations. Getting across tracts of city is one such. Townscapes forbid, direct, coerce the pedestrian.

Who wants to be coerced?

Traffic willing, I take the shortest distance and move in a straight line as far as possible to where I want to be. Car parks are my favourite, the bigger the better, with cars more or less forming the grid that our classroom desks did back then. (I draw the line at climbing the bonnets and walking on the vehicles, though. Even I concede it’s not appropriate behaviour for old women.) The urban environment (with some exceptions) is not, for me, one that I wish to meander in. Walking in vectors is efficient, and gives me something to think about while I’m at it.

In open countryside, or hillwalking, I am reassured by well-defined paths, and fingerposts. I figure they reduce the risk of large bovines, bottomless bogs, and getting lost. I don’t mind if they meander. This is not the place for cutting across fields and fences and the corners of peoples’ gardens, nor those coastal rocks and beaches where deviation from a proscribed route might end with me being cut off by the tide.

But woods are different. They are one of my comfort zones. Paths go round trees and skirt the edges. I make paths. I go through the wood, from tree to tree, or glade to glade, with no final destination but what I may find on the way. About the same time that my primary school class were physically exploring vectors, I was having a relationship with an SAS-type survivalist. Going for a walk with him meant going straight through the bramble thicket, river bed or steep rocky incline that separated us from his destination (usually a choice edible plant, a secret beach or a prehistoric relic). David walked in vectors without noticing; I followed, protesting, and emerged covered in bruises, arms torn by brambles, feet wet and shins muddy and scratched, twenty minutes later.

I slowly got used to it, and began to enjoy the sense of power that came from the determination to arrive at a destination of which most people would remain forever unaware. My senses were heightened by the necessary awareness of the landscape through which my straight lines were taking me. I saw more, listened harder, breathed in scents. Today, when I push through clearings of grasses taller than me, I feel the soft brush of their flowerheads, catch my breath on clouds of pollen. I mind small frogs and mushrooms underfoot, and insects living in the bark of the trees. I hear where water trickles invisibly; I sense and hear the warning aura of the wasp byke. I emerge into sunlight or thunderstorm, on the other side of the wood.

Meandering paths or the allure of straight tracks, ley-lines, history and mystery? It doesn’t really matter, but it’s good to be willing to do both. It’s no coincidence that I am writing this on the Cross Country train between Edinburgh and Exeter. Going via London would not make sense to someone fixated on travelling by vectors.