Window on the outside world

(My offering for a recent Woodland Trust competition)

Nearly half a century ago, due to my Father being in the Royal Air Force and being posted to Thailand to work for SEATO (South East Asia Treaty Organisation), at the tender age of 9, I was sent to a boarding school in deepest Kent.

Although perhaps Kent isn’t known as an area of true wilderness, this school was, particularly to a young 9 year old boy, in the middle of nowhere - a large ornate Victorian structure of the kind that a film director might find useful for adventures of a Transylvanian nature involving “creatures” of the night.  And ... indeed having left the security of my own bedroom and been thrown together into a large dormitory with boys of a similar age, most of whom had been at the school for a year or two longer, the regular night-time ghost stories did little to put an impressionable and imaginative young boy at ease.

The school was in true Dracula style, approached past a Gothic gate house next to impressive iron gates that led to a very long wooded drive and was largely surrounded by huge tracts of dense deciduous woodland.  It’s amazing to think, in this day and age, that the large gates usually stood open and the extent of the school grounds “the bounds” were marked by a roughly circular mud track that coiled its way through the “middle” of the wood and around the school, not a fence in sight and only the stories of gypsies camping in the woods, ready to take wandering boys away, on the other side of the track that kept all but the most adventurous, or should that have been foolhardy of us boys clearly on the school side of the track.  Memory tells me it was only a few that escaped and those were the boys perhaps destined for psychiatric treatment rather than those who might subsequently explore of the wonders of our planet.  That was reserved for those who stoically survived the privations of a 1960’s preparatory school, which in many ways was back in the previous century at the time of Bram Stoker’s Gothic horror stories, if not with the 15^th century southern Romanian Prince on which his character was based.   It would be interesting to return to see how security is dealt with now, at a time when parents are led to believe that the “gypsies” in the wood aren’t now waiting for a young boy to happen upon them, but rather now out to actively get them!  

Suffice to say the woods, at least those “out of bounds” were deep, dark and foreboding, whilst those nearer to the safety of the school and within sound of the bell that ruled our lives, summoning us to lessons, meals, prep (homework), bed and all manner of other things, became our outdoor playground and in a move, somewhat forward thinking for an establishment such as this, part of our school uniform was regulation blue boiler suits and black gumboots, to allow us messy play out in the woods without getting our school uniforms dirty.  (This memory has just returned to me whilst writing this reminiscence, but more of that later!)  Interestingly, for the first time since leaving all those years ago I have just googled the school, found it still in existence, albeit with another name and their website now says: “Our buildings, park and woodland provide wonderful spaces for children to enjoy their educational journey, whether it is in playing in the woods, camping out, following the pioneering ‘Outdoor Leadership’ programme or developing a strong interest in their natural surroundings.”  So perhaps even back then the school was more progressive than I gave it credit for!

It was natural then, even if not seemingly planned, that the woods became our adventures, our explorations, our areas of discovery, (if only that the creepers growing over the trees behind the school kitchens could be lit from the groundman’s bonfire and smoked like a cigarette, with more often than not literally sickening consequences!!  I’m sure it accounts for why I have never had the urge to try smoking proper cigarettes!!), our brush with nature, our imaginary lost kingdoms, our outdoor classroom which we rushed out to as soon as the lessons we were supposed to be learning were finished, quite simply our freedom within our incarceration!!

It was then that I discovered what was to become “my tree,” which as far as I know, was not known at that time to any of my contemporaries, although I was to share it with one friend over the coming days and months.  On the face of it, certainly at ground level it wasn’t that special and now all these years later I’m not really sure what sort of a tree it was, although I have a strong feeling it was one of only a few Scot’s pine in an almost exclusively deciduous wood.  What for me made it special was its relatively easy climbability, once you figured out how to get up the first six feet or so, and as a fairly adventurous young boy prone to getting up trees and finding myself stuck and needing to be rescued by my Father, I did have a good eye for an easy ascent, that didn’t always work in reverse!!  This first six feet in itself was no easy task as I was a large child, not particularly agile and still to this day find it very difficult to pull myself up by my arms – it took me ages to master rope climbing in another memorable tree (but that’s another story!) and even at the peak of my fitness ten chin ups remained a distant dream!!

It was quite simply, although that in this case isn’t really the right word, a case of holding on to that short stub of a branch with one hand, another with the other hand, jumping up and struggling to find that first foot hold and walking up the next few whilst hanging upside down, getting your legs over the first branch and then by super human effort “walking” my hands up the next few hand holds, before finally sitting out of breath on the first significant branch, anxious to climb the easy steps above, oblivious of how I might get down and with my Father, my normal rescuer, on the other side of the world.

As I said the next part going up was so easy, like climbing a staircase and very quickly you were high enough to be out of sight from the surrounding woodland, climbing around my own woodland tower.  But, there was more to come, as still recklessly ignoring the inevitable descent, I climbed higher and higher until quite suddenly I was above the canopies of the surrounding trees, with a far reaching view that confirmed there was a great wide world out there and I was alone in the middle of nowhere, civilisation as I knew it was nowhere to be seen.  The feeling was one of immense elation, similar to that experienced when many years later walking out on the top of the Rockefeller Centre in New York and seeing the “world” of Manhattan stretching out before me, in both cases not only did it take my breath away it quite uncharacteristically rendered me speechless!   A glimpse perhaps of adventures to come, as in the years since, having managed the descent from my special tree on numerous occasions, the last jump down being the trickiest part, I have been lucky enough to travel to some of the amazing four corners of the world, with others on the list, once we have finished renovating the French house, with fine views of some stately trees, including a large mulberry tree in next door’s garden, where we are currently lucky enough to live.

Not only did this, my special tree, come to symbolise my window on the outside world, it also in a strange way intensified my feelings of loneliness, being separated by many miles from my family, the first few of which I could glimpse from my eyrie in the sky.  Thinking that my memories may have dulled over the years, I have just google mapped, or to be more precise, “satellite” this area of deepest Kent, and although the road passing the other side of the vast forest has been upgraded to a dual carriage way, the vastness I remembered wasn’t extended because of my young age, as often things seem bigger when you are younger, the school was indeed and remains largely surrounded by large mature trees with a huge tract of thick woodland behind, in the middle of which hopefully my special tree remains and may have been discovered by subsequent schoolboys, keen to glimpse the outside world.  Perhaps I should try to make a pilgrimage, as I’ve often said that trees and woodlands are my cathedrals and spiritual places.

Incidentally, just a month ago, my rescuer – my Father, died quite suddenly after a short illness, not only leaving an enormous gap in the lives of all who knew him, not least my Mother, his wife for 63 years, but also as one of the letters of sympathy said; “You will over the coming days, weeks and even years, find yourself having moments / memories of times past, I still do after 36 years!”  That I found is so profound, as I have found distant long forgotten memories such as this, often with quite tenuous links to my Father popping into my head, prompted by simple things like the Woodland Trust’s “share your favourite tree memories” and in writing this at least four others have come to mind, but those will have to wait for another time!!  

Roger M. Higgs

July 5^th 2013