It was as if we were plants growing in the soil of the street so deeply rooted did we feel in our home.
Sometimes my mother would bake bread and I have a feeling that before we had the bath taken out of the kitchen that she used to use the oven in the side of the fire in the front room to bake the bread
What a wonderful smell there was when we came home from school . My mother was a teacher but she had different holidays sometimes and that’s probably why she was making the bread.
Once her sister took us out into the country into a wonderful place with a river I think it was called Turton Brook
Along the banks were masses of bluebells. I had never seen them before and it was almost as good as the first time I saw lake Windermere.
We walked through the woods by the brook which was actually a small river until he came back to the road after about three miles and it seemed rather magical that there was a Catholic church there and I think we might have got inside and said a prayer
I didn’t know what religion was then I just believed whatever my mother and father believed and my school teachers.
But knowing that Jesus died for our sins had a bad effect on me because when my father died when I was eight years old I thought that he must have died to atone for my sins and it had a permanent effect on me fortunately after 60 years it began to abate.
When we got back home mum had made some potato cakes. How delicious they are covered in butter when they have just come out of the oven If only my mother was here now, I would be well pleased.
So as well as the street itself and the local park we began to build up a little collection of beautiful places that we went to at the weekend up on the moors or by this river any quiet place where there were no cotton mills
Later on when my nephew is were growing up I think they craved for towns and nightclubs and cities but we craved for the countryside
The purple heather and in some places there were berries+(they were rather like bilberries) called whinberries.
There were sheep on the lower slopes that’s where we saw lambs for the first time.
Up on the moors are walking through the Riverside to a country village that was a place of transformation or possibly it might have even been what the famous child psychoanalyst Dr Winnicott called a transitional space. It was not an interior space it was not an exterior space it was somewhere in the space of an illusion but a necessary illusion because only in such a space could 0children play and later adults could create
I admire this man very much because he made play the most important thing in life and as I played with my mother’s button collection on the kitchen table I think i began to develop my feeling for mathematics although I had no notion of it at that time I could only count I didn’t even know what a negative number might be nor do most of the human race and it doesn’t seem to do them much harm
I think it’s a writer walking in a place like the ones I have described above could be the place where your ideas come freshly to mind.
New ideas born in a new place neither here nor there
Neither inside nor out
Can we imagine this?
