Jon McGregor - This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

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This place I’ve grown up in isa landscape of lines,

a world ofthe parallel & perpendicular.

The straightest line of all is the hard blur of the horizon.

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A single unbending line which encircles the day.

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When I wasAs a child I would spin around

with my eyes on the horizontrying to catch the place where

the line turned or bent but I never could

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the mystery of the straight, encircling line.

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(All the) other lines find their way to the horizon sooner or later

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High lines, (Years ago, playing in the

connecting lines: telegraph wires furrows while your father

railway tracks watched, you looked up +

canals saw a line of boats gliding

drains through the sky. The fear

rivers you felt, seeing those

boats above your head.)

Low lines,

boundary lines: ditches (No hedges or walls

roads between fields here,

paths only the ditches + roads.

Ditches to stop the sea

reclaiming what it owns.)

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The lines of this place are sometimes washed out by floods.

Obliteration.

Water erasing the (Cornelius the Dutchman

manmade geometry digging his way through

restoring this place the 17th century.)

to the sea it once was.

Sometimes it will be rain, swelling the rivers until they break

through

and rush over the fields,

settling across hundreds of acres for weeks at a time,

sky below as well as above, clouds & seabirds gliding overhead

sky above as well as below, clouds & seabirds gliding overland.

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Or snow will cover everything, blocking drains & roads,

……….

Mothers forbidding their children to leave the house.

Lost children in the fields.

You said you don’t remember your mother telling you to go out,

but you would have been too young to remember/to go out.

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Sometimes the fog

will

come in with

the

floods and

our world

will

become

unmappable, alien,

precarious.

I didn’t say you said it was my fault

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These same floods that obliteratebring life to the land, make

our soil the richest in the country.

At ploughing time the smell of the earth hangs in the air,

a smell like apple bruises and horse chestnut shells.

A smell of pure energy.

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Your father claimed this ground

would grow five-pound notes

if you planted a shilling.

That I would like to see.

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Flatness | straight lines | a manmade geometry.

The sound of metal on soil // the sky above

This is the landscape you Iwe grew up in.

This is the landscape which grew uswhich made us.

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The sea wants to be here. we shouldn’t be surprised when

will give to that

Our engineering gives way before the sea’sdesire.

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You didn’t say that. That’s not what you said

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to name these places

The words we’ve been given by our ancestorshave no poetry.

Our waterways are called drains,

not rivers or streams or brooks or burns:

Thirty Foot Drain

Sixteen Foot Drain

(and the closest to grandeur, this) Hundred Foot Drain

our farms named for anonymity: Lower Field Farm

Middle Field Farm

Sixteen Foot Farm

People don’t come here because they’ve been

People are not drawn here by the romantic sound of the place.

People don’t much come here at all, and so the landscape

remains empty and

retains its beauty and

the beauty of this place is not in the names but the shapes

the flatness / hugeness / completeness of the landscape.

Only what is beneath the surface of the earth is hidden

(and sometimes not even that)

andeverything else ismade visible beneath the sky.

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When the dawn comes

when the first light slides in from the east

the sky is the colour of marbles.

A thin, glassy grey.

Everything is dark away to the west,

silhouettes & shadows clinging to the last of the night,

but at the eastern edge of thehorizon there is light.

AndIf you have the time to stand and watch,

you can trace the movement of the light into the morning.

The lines of fields & roads creeping

towards you and then away to the west

until the wholegeometry of the day is revealed.

AndThe water in the drains begins to steam & shine.

And you’ll noticeThe workers start to arrive,

stepping out from minibuses and spreading across the fields,

shadows crouching & shuffling

along the crop-lineslines of the crops.

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When the mid-morning comes

the sky is the colour of flowering linseed

a pale-blue hint of

the full colour to come

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Sometimes there will be clouds, joining together to form arches

from horizon to horizon

stretching

tearing

scattering patterns across the fields.

Sometimes these clouds bring rain,

and the sky will darken

But the rain will pass

the sky be brighter clearer

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The workers more visible,

returning to their trays & boxes after the rain,

lifting food from the ground,

sorting

trimming

laying down

moving along the line.

Occasionally one will stand, lifting cramped arms to the sky before

returning to the soil.

Those lifted arms, that arching back.

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When the noon-time comes

(when there’s a moment of stillness and silence)

the sky is the colour of the summer noon:

a blue with no comparison

the pure deep blue of the summer noon in this place.

No clouds

no movement

you hold your breath and turn and follow the circle of the

unbending horizon linehorizon’s circle.

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The workers eat their lunch in silence, gathered beside the road,

looking out across the fields

the way fishermen watch the sea.

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Celery &

spring onions &

leeks &

lettuces &

fragile crops which would be ruined by machinery.

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When the late afternoon comes

(when the light is only beginning to fade from the dayfall)

the sky is the colour of a freshly forming bruise.

The workers are slowing their pace

pausing more frequentlyto savour

the warmth of the soil in their hands

aware nowof the slight chill in the air

waiting

for the word that the day is over.

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What placement can do.

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When the evening comes

(before the embers of the closing of the day)

the sky is the colour of your father’s eyes.

A darkening, muddied blue,

hiding shadows

turning away. Awake, still;

alive, just;

but going.

Going gently.

The workers have left the field and collected their pay,

measured by the weight of the food they have gathered.

The marks of their footprints are fading,

dusted over with soil blown in by a wind from the sea.

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What he thought he’d find.

There is no history here.

No dramatic finds of Saxon villages.

No burial mounds or hidden treasures.

No Tollund Man.

Only the rusted anchors our ploughs drag up,

left when these fields were the sea.

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Those rusted anchors have been sunk in the soil

eversince before it was drained, and sometimes

the turning of the earth brings them closer to the surface

and sometimes

it willsends them further down.