Journey One - This Hidden Valley (1)
What connects the green hills of the South Downs with the mountains of North-West Iran? Me of course....on my first walk with you.
The deep rumble and growl of an HGV storming past my window at 6 am wakes me. The lick of metallic fumes on my tongue. I blink into faint daylight.
The lamp post’s sudden orange glow marks my time to arise and write. My ears explore the soundscape of this main traffic artery into and out of town, sounds which I try oh so hard to imagine are those of ocean waves, there to wash me gently into start of day.
For a few seconds this works, but then the vibration shifts, confirms we are most definitely inland, here on the fringes of a vibrant market town, encircled by the ancient chalk downlands of the South Downs National Park, continuous hills curling themselves effortlessly into each other’s navels as they stretch over towards the sea and sideways in both directions.
I pack up my notebook, pen, phone, sitting mat and flask, cross the forecourt over to our immediate neighbour, the BP petrol station, to pick up juice. Do you want fuel with that? Have you got a reward card? I stare at the card and wonder why its emblem is shaped like a flower, green and yellow.
I would choose brown, black, blood red …say it straight, to evoke everything that petrol, this accidental by-product of oil, has generated. Yes, I just think of black, oozing, as I hold the card I will never use in my hand.
A black that has shaped the Britain I was born in – and Iran, my mother’s homeland, where this multi-national was founded. A child of the Anglo-Persian oil company; British colonial, offshore trade struck lucky, they said, through goldened handshakes back in 1901 between a British millionaire, rich on Australian mining and the indebted Shah of the time, Mozaffar al-Din Qajar, planting the seeds that grew and grew..and eventually felled the modern Iranian state.
As a briefly democratic country daring to take back its own oil, it was slapped with a Coup in 1953, with the heavy helping hand of Britain and the US. A hand not lifted until after the Shahs of the Pahlavi dynasty were installed and then eventually toppled in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. An event which changed everything for my mother’s diaspora, and for the world.
How darkly poetic, as I now work on my mother-daughter, artist memoir here, that I’ve been living in the shadow of this formative imperial project, right next door.
As I prepare to cross the river of fumes towards the hills, ready to exchange my plastic reward card for the promise of real leaves and blooms, I think of the ripple effects of that change in Iran on its beautiful land, on the conservationists of a once thriving environmental movement there now being persecuted and imprisoned for defending the rights of threatened species, and of the wildlife that could sustain them; the Asiatic cheetah, the Caspian seals, the drying lakes, in favour of dams, extraction, pollution. I think of Iran’s recent president killed in a helicopter lost in fog on his way back from opening another of those dams. I think of all citizens under threat there as long as the regime continues, who are still pulsing, still resisting through the unstoppable Woman Life Freedom movement, seeded in decades of repression and dissent.
Then I abruptly pause, needing to find a safe gap to cross the onslaught of cars, and once over the road, I slip out of my own thinking skin, remember it’s my time of day to empty and reset, refuel…and head now into a haven which I will call the Hidden Valley. Time to breathe.
At the far end of a cul-de-sac through a narrow gap between two houses with no signposts, I slide through a wooden gate into a different universe. Beyond it, two sharply steep hills, facing each other rise like open thighs.
When I first discovered this place, it was early summer. The whole area was parched and it felt very much like North-West Iran, where my mother was born and I first travelled with her, aged 21. So I was immediately at home amid these local hills-come-mountains as my knowing elders, soothing the gaps of my second-generation patchwork identity.
Now…which path to take today?
I choose the right-hand one, in shade…ascend slowly over blackening, mulching leaves, sprinkled with chalk at the edges. It’s deep autumn; crisping flower heads, blackberry, juniper, rowan, hawthorn all greet me. Through the oozing, vulva crack of the valley floor below, my eyes drink in the allotment’s palette of olive, lime and mint green, dandelion yellow, nasturtium’s flame orange, the purples, pinks and reds of this year’s harvest.
I eventually reach a spot, level enough to perch upright and I sit, just breathing. Focusing my gaze fully across the yawn of the valley. I follow the scratches and wrinkle lines of the hill opposite, in full sunlight, as if on an ancient’s face, her skin, magnified under the eye of a giant microscope. I myself a tiny, moving mark, on the scalp of this earth; I sense how we age and that there are no end points in nature, just processes of constant change.
Around me here, the miniature rainforest of the downs is shaped by the presence of chalk. I don't easily recall the names of all these tiny plants. I wasn't born rural, I don't own a country house and garden. We always lived on the outskirts, suburbs. Once adult, I went to the city to live among the wider world, at ease in the metropolitan mix. When we headed back down here, we chose town, the middle way. The prospect of country living had carried for me the fear of social isolation, mono-culturalism and terror of the rural dark.
When I walk, I perhaps have very different concerns from the lone male, striding confidently through the pastoral landscape.
But these are all barriers to the freedoms of the outdoors which I am determined to gradually overcome. Traffic now faint, birdsong comes finally into full focus. The drift of a cloud shadow passes overhead, en route to the back edge of this valley, as if a giant is waving a huge palm leaf high up above me. Some call this part the Snout, and others the Fat Lady’s Belly peppered with the pubic fluff of her foliage, yellow gorse, vetch and scrub.
I make my way up to her peak, she welcomes me into myself.
At the top, I settle on a bench and gaze back over towards town, now just a tiny cluster of brick red triangles. I recall my first memory of sitting in this spot - at a family ceilidh wake for Anna Campbell, who died fighting for Rojava. She was the daughter and sister of beloved friends, a seismic loss. We sat here, as her father Dirk played the sunset down on his bagpipes, a dispersing cloud of bright, white sheep fleeing over the far lip of the Snout, his music echoing around the goldening valley.
I focus on her mother, Adrienne, also part of the Earth now. A pioneer in her field, the first I knew to speak the language of ecological loss and repair; permaculture, peak oil, transition towns. It was she who taught me to walk with a question into the wild, so that the land can give you space to find answers.
So, reaching for the question, I rise and then circle the rest of the valley, as it arrives.
How wild and far can I go alone… where is my edge and what can I write there?
And I know where I need to go now, to answer that …
A remix/ re-edit of a walking essay originally commissioned for ‘Into the Wild’, part of The Essay series on BBC Radio 3. Part 2 of this journey to follow this weekend.
To listen to me after Part 2 as I sit in the Hidden Valley and offer up thoughts and writing prompts for you, upgrade to a paid subscription.