Rather a while back, I lived in a town with hills. Doesn’t sound that exciting – lots of towns have hills. But this town was flat plain on one side, and suddenly: Hills. They dominated the town. And the imagination.
I was able to sit on my bed, look out of the window, and see a certain tree towards one end of them. It was a spot to focus on, to look up at from doing my homework. But I didn’t realise the impact until I realised that there were others with Hills in their lives.
At secondary school, I started to read Ted Hughes, and discovered the extent to which the local landscape had featured in his work. And I came to learn more about other hills, as featured by Alan Garner, whose books one of my primary school teachers had read to us.
When you live near hills, particularly stand out ones, they are part of your daily orientation. Partly, you look up to check they’re there – of course they are! It can be both dominating and comforting, depending on the the weather and the character of the particular hills.
So here I was, devouring Ted Hughes’ poems in a school anthology – and then discovering a personal link, so to speak. It seemed like a further connection, a proof that there were extra factors that could help inspire your work.
Quite a lot later, I came to see Alderley Edge, the area that inspired Alan Garner.
In his case, the hill already had its own legends, and he drew on these to write
The Weirdstone of Brisenghamen.
It is one thing to be inspired by the landscape. It is another thing to see how that inspiration affects others. As much as Garner’s book had an impact on me, an equal impact came from seeing how the story gripped the teacher reading it – how she was reading it for herself as much as for the class.
Seeing that passion for reading in an adult made a big impression. Yes, she was good at reading aloud; she wanted to encourage us that books were a great place for the imagination. But part of me also knows that it wasn’t just show, or didactics – she was caught up in the story as we were.
Words allow us a place to explore being under the spell of a particular location. They let us record the effects, big and small, of local landscape on our imaginations, but also on our daily toings and froings.
Can I do justice to my own surroundings now, when I write? I don’t know. What I write about has changed since those teenage days.
But to whatever extent the local landscape now influences me – when I read the work of Hughes, of Garner, I know what it’s meant to look like.