May 1984

I took this photograph on the common land near my parent’s home, almost exactly forty years ago. Lifting the slide to the light, I believed that I remembered the place where it was taken, which was familiar to me since childhood, and which I had visited often in my early years.

So, returning to the Common, I sought it out to see what four decades had done to the tree, and to me. I believed that I had found it in that particular spot, and I wanted to photograph it again under similar light, but despite two visits and long waiting, the sun failed to appear. I took this instead:

Colder examination of the two photographs side-by-side shows, I think, that it is not the same tree. There is some similarity in the disposition of the branches but even under the rich groundcover foliage, the undulations in the land seem different, as does their relationship to the surrounding trees. It was a wishful projection, then, from the first photograph and the strong memory of place onto the false discovery of the second tree.

That projection was emotionally charged because I spent much of my childhood and adolescence playing in and wandering those woods. They seemed to us children to be places of mystery and occasionally danger: a stone shaped a little like a seated lion, always elusive, occupied one dense thicket. If you manged to find it and sat on it, the local children believed, it would grant wishes. Chalk pits, one with a cave, were also the sites of wild, animist imagination, charged with stories taken from the Just William or Kenneth Grahame.

Walking the woods now, they seem shrunken, aged and encrusted with moss and ivy. Certainly, when comparing these two photographs, the change in the seasons over decades of global heating is pronounced; and, although you cannot see it, but do hear it in the birdsong, so is the relentless thinning of wildlife, under the assault of farmers’ and gardeners’ poisons.

Yet there is projection, too, in that overall impression: the woods are seen now with aged eyes, imperfect and obstructed; the chalk pits are overgrown depressions in the ground which no longer offer the sight of their dirty white faces; the lion has fallen sideways, like a gravestone toppled by the slow movement of the earth. The years have made of the woods an alien place, and I wonder, if I was to wander into the site where the first tree stood, whether I would recognise it.