The Early Morning Walk

Turn left at the junction into Mulberry Gardens, a small development of starter homes built in the 1980s to house the commuters flooding into the area hoping to catch the coat tails of the financial boom encapsulating the nearby city. You’ll see the quaint, neat lawns, some levelled with concrete to provide a hard-stand for the car, even though the road sees little traffic thanks to its no-through-road status. The numbers run even on the left, 2-8, and odd on your right, numbers 1-9. There is a piece of wasteland, grown over with brambles and nettles where you may presume house number ten should have been, but it’s not. Perhaps the developer ran short of money; perhaps there is simply not enough room for another dwelling, who knows? It’s something to ponder while you locate the small path that runs between numbers six and eight. The sun is about to make itself known, beyond, over the hills. It’s time to hurry.

Find the oak tree. From here you can climb up through the larger lower branches and get an unobstructed view of the cul-de-sac. But there’s no moment to pause here. Listen carefully and you may catch the drifting clang of the alarm clock before it’s silenced by a hand, or pillow. There is a light in the upstairs window of number three, visible through a crack in the curtains where yesterday they were hastily tugged together to shut out the night. And, in a blink, the light is extinguished. Watch as it travels down the stairs and into the back of the house, because this is where the kitchen is to be found with its stainless steel kettle, crumb-coated toaster and the worktop stained with rings of tea from dirty mugs, spilled wine and the years of frantic food preparation while hosting amateur dinner parties.

The light travels to the front of the house again. As it’s scattered through the rippled glass panels in the UPVC door, you notice the empty milk bottles, a folded piece of paper conveying the cancelling of the daily delivery, or perhaps holding a cheque for payment of the monthly account, rolled into the top of one of the bottles awaiting the arrival of the milkman. An archaic tradition, one seen rarely anywhere but rural locations such as here in Mulberry Gardens, where the distance to the local supermarket makes even the high price of milk in glass bottles worth paying for. And then, in the flick of a switch, the light is swallowed by the eerie half-dark of dawn breaking.

Watch as a figure emerges. They turn right, coming towards you. The foliage of the great oak, and height of your perch, hides you even as the sun makes its first forays over the distant tree-lined horizon. Still you hold your breath as they pass, a smudge of black beneath you. It’s time to drop down and follow before you lose sight of them in the dark.

The soft, dew-dipped grass masks the clump of boots as we watch the figure move down the footpath towards the faint sparkle of the city, some half hour away by road. Brush past the creeping fingers of ivy that cascade like a swarm of locusts down the pitted brick wall and then you’ll be at the twisting lane that runs to the farm, its high banks sprouting thin tree trunks and hard chalk flints to catch careless drivers or distracted cyclists. And that’s when you hear it, the hoot of the train as it wriggles through the valley on its wheeled belly, so faint, like the smell of jasmine on the breeze as you pass the stile on the boundary of the fields.

Step across the wooden plank and down and in an instant long wet stems of grass shroud everything below your knees, the colour of your trousers darkening where the fabric’s weave draws in the moisture as you walk. There are large, drunken bees already out to harvest the pollen, buzzing amongst the half-opened blooms that are dotted along the hedgerows and across the grass of the fields. Solitary trees stand guard, acting as nature’s scarecrows; just as ineffective as the bundle of rags and straw flopping like a fish out of water when the wind whips unmercifully over the rutted earth, crucified on scaffold poles like some hideous parody of Christ. And there it is again, nearer this time, the same aching sound of wounded cattle too exhausted to fight against the mud that is claiming them, the train mooing out to warn early morning drivers and passengers that it is coming and to clear the crossings and prepare for arrivals and departures. It’s time to quicken our stride.

At the end of the field lies a gate leading to a tight, narrow path, the grass balding in the centre to show earth smoothed by the feet of humans and dogs. But you will ignore this and instead duck under the barbed wire to follow the figure ahead of us. The sun is up enough now that we can see it’s a woman. She is not hurrying, but she has purpose to her walk. She is dressed in a light coat and dress, her white shoes looking like rabbits’ tails bobbing in the grass. She has not noticed you and there is something in her posture to suggest she wouldn’t stop nor hurry if she knew you were there, behind her, stalking. It’s only now that you notice the rumble, the clack of the tracks as the train approaches.

The undergrowth is getting dense and more of your clothes are wet now, but you know they’ll dry quickly once the sun pulls itself up above the surrounding hills, its rays breaking through the splatter of clouds that are skipping across the sky, burning away the moisture to leave a hot and humid day. But then without warning you’re clear of the trees, the fields and the snagging thorns and stinging nettles. There is no time to react. There is the train. Loud, black, engineered metal stampeding on the rails. It’s deafening, but still a single sound can be picked out, like a flattened note in a blues scale. It’s the sound that makes you look up.

Only then do you realise it’s you who has spoken. One word. Jump. By that time it’s too late to save yourself.