10 March

A wearisome morning of chores and ferrying the children about lay in front of me today. It clearly wasn’t going to be a garden day for me; every time I tried to sneak out of the back door, I was caught and pulled gently back into family life. So I tried to grab a bit of ‘me’ time in the house, but again was caught as soon as I’d got the computer switched on. The creak of the stairs gave me away when I tried to slip upstairs to read a few pages. Fair enough, really, on a weekend, so I tried to swallow my irritation. This afternoon my husband pulled the complaining children away from the television and computer, and announced we were going for a walk. I stood sheepishly on one foot, trying to get out of it, thinking of the peace I could have by myself, but in the end I decided I’d feel left out if they all went out without me (I’m pathetic, I know).

We headed off down one of the old straight tracks that criss-cross the country and were probably once drovers’ ways. This one crosses the village green, hence is called, in typical prosaic Suffolk way, Cross Green. On old maps, however, it is marked as Pilgrim’s Way, and I like to think of those devoted souls, seeking healing or blessings, trudging the ten mile or so to the soaring Abbey. The track is a claustrophobic tunnel of green in high summer; now the canopy is still quite bare, allowing huge tracts of sky through, flirtatious buds and catkins peeping out. R and I talk of scary, grown–up things like re-mortgaging and job schedules. When did this happen, I think, I want to be engrossed in the here and now, like the children. I watch them seeing trying to get the mud over the tops of their wellies, and lines from ee cummings pop into my head: “in just-spring when the world is mud-luscious… when the world is puddle-wonderful.” We have to stop talking as we dredge our way slowly through the mud and the track leads uphill. The exertion makes us hot and thirsty and negotiating the viscous mud takes all our concentration. Thick, oozy mud, as our children call it, remembering the lines from the ‘Going on a Bear Hunt’ story. The track is flattening out now and we’ve got our breath back. But clear air and wet earth have worked their magic, as ever, and now we don’t want to talk about the daily grind any more. We’re walkers, travellers, pushing through the thickets. We’re on a bear hunt. We’re about to reach the promised land. And suddenly – we do. We live in an area known as ‘High Suffolk’; those of you in the Welsh Mountains or Cumbria would probably consider this a bit of a misnomer. We’ve hardly got peaks and mountains, after all. But the hills that we do have take on an almost mystical significance, rising up as they do out of the wheat fields. We step out onto the crest of ‘our’ hill and we are truly the kings of the castle, looking down upon a wide and moated world. The sky and the earth and the water all merge and meet on the horizon. Far below us, we can just make out swans gliding effortlessly on the water meadows. Are they real or magic, my daughter wants to know. Both, I say.