Today’s Nostalgia Bulletin

I grew up in Dumpstable, in a house that backed onto the Downs. Not the Dumpstable Downs, but a kind of tributary Downs, called Blows. It was Grade III farming land, good for a few cows or sheep, not much use for anything else, probably no good, even, for housing, though god knows there were enough rumours over the years about housing estates going up there. They never did, though the land has visibly eroded in the years I have been alive, and the trees have grown.

Between our back garden and the Downs was the railway tracks. Used to be a passenger route between Dumpstable and Luton, but they took a dose of Beeching’s Powders in the 60s, and it was a Goods line only. But, in the words of the Steve Earle song, I was born by the railway tracks / The train whistle wailed and I wailed right back. Completely true in my case: I wasn’t born in hospital, but in the back bedroom on a cold winter night (3 weeks late).

Up the garden, through the fence, over the allotment, across the railway line, up the embankment, through another fence, and I was on the Downs. I had my places, the easier climbs up the embankment, the bigger holes in the fence, the in and out spots. I used to play up there: with family, neighbours and friends, often, but also, quite often, on my own. Ten years old, I might have been, and I’d be up there on my own, running about the hills, visiting favourite haunts, hiding places in the trees, dens, dirt slopes to slide down.

Just behind the first row of hills, a chalk pit scarred the hillside. The soil round there was very chalky, and the area of the Blows Downs had, long before, once been a lime quarry. What remained was a deep crater with a central mound topped with a head-shaped chalk boulder. We called it the Bull’s Head. It was chalk white scarred with brown, rusty, stains, which gave the head the appearance of features. My older brother, RGM, used to scare us all as kids with tales of the little boy who had climbed up there and disappeared.

If this story had the intent of keeping me from going up there, it worked, all the way up till I was a teenager. And when I did go there, I was not disappointed in the scariness. You’d climb the hill, then scrabble up the steeper incline of the Head, finding yourself on a chalk peak with a view all around. The steepness of the slope gave the optical illusion of the world falling away into space, and on a windy day it really was terrifying to be up there, with nothing to hold on to.

When I was younger, before I braved it, I did once think I saw a trunk-like appendage swinging out from the top of the head, like an arm beckoning or waving for help. But as long as I watched the spot, I saw no other sign of life or movement.

Now, as you drive down the M1 towards junction 11, you can see the chalk pit from a distance, and what remains of the Bull’s Head, which has, by now, eroded to almost nothing.

The highest point of the Downs was over the back of the chalk pit. Beyond that, a grassy meadow led to farmland proper, Zouche’s farm, which included Bluebell Wood. Farmer Zouche liked to patrol his fields with dogs and guns, taking pleasure now doubt from the terror he inspired in the local children. But from the top of the chalk pit you could see right across our end of town, and it was possible to find details like schools, shops, estates, and the houses of the girls you loved. I’d run up there and sit on the edge, buffeted by the wind, and just look across the town, tracing the lines of the streets with my eyes, not leaving till I’d seen everything there was to see. Lonely summer afternoons I’d go up there, kill a couple of hours, and then go home again.

You learned to put your ear to the track and listen for trains, though after a few years there were only one or two a day, and the trains became a route, a walking route, to take you into Luton or into the centre of Dumpstable. I walked home along those tracks one afternoon, 19, slightly drunk on pink champagne, heart broken by A., who was scared to go out with me, but later changed her mind.

There were ruins up the Downs, we called them that, and there were remnants of bomb shelters, and pits and tunnels dug down. You could play games of dare and crawl the length of tunnels. And there was an old iron bell, it must have been a bell, left there to rust, and we’d play with that, climbing inside it, trapping ourselves, requiring assistance to get out.

My more social hours were spent up the Rec, Bennett’s Recreation Ground, it was there we played kiss chase and tinpanalley and all those other games. Sometimes we played sophisticated and wide ranging games of Hide and Seek up the downs, but what I remember mostly is being there on my own.

When my then-best-friend was about to get married, he came round, and we went out for a walk along the train tracks. We walked all the way to the bridge that was no longer there, the yawning gap of emptiness where the ghost tracks went across the road. We threw stones against the rails in the twilight to make sparks, and we smoked and talked. I hadn’t seen him for six months or so, while he was dating the girl, and I wouldn’t see him again for quite a while after the wedding, until just before the divorce. We sat on the tracks in the dark and he told me all about it. That was the last time I went up there.

On visits to my parents in the years after I’d look up there, but you couldn’t see very much through all the trees, which seemed to have accelerated their growth after I left. You’d see the occasional dog owner out for a walk. But I wonder if any eight or ten year olds get to go up there on their own these days, whether anybody goes up there for something as innocent as solitude.