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Black and muttery … Blackwater River, Essex.
Black and muttery … Blackwater River, Essex. Photograph: Alamy
Black and muttery … Blackwater River, Essex. Photograph: Alamy

Andrew Motion on Stisted: ‘That’s where I first began to care about poems’

This article is more than 5 years old
The former poet laureate on the village perched between Braintree and Halstead where his eyes were opened to the world

“Fair seed-time had my soul,” says Wordsworth in the first book of The Prelude, “And I grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear.” Quite so. Beauty and fear. The essential, paradoxical ingredients of childhood. One filling us with wonder; the other threatening our hold on the world and hereby making it all the more precious.

When Wordsworth wrote this phrase he was thinking about his birthplace – in Cockermouth, on the northern edge of the Lake District. My own birthplace had no such effect – I now think because the balance between beauty and fear was tipped too heavily towards fear. Fear that my parents, my mother especially, would disappear; fear (of a more circumstantial and less existential kind)of my father’s severities; fear that as time passed everything would dilute. Fear that in all these formshad the effect of freezing my mind and making it incapable of receiving any messages from beauty. I simply didn’t take much in. But then teenage years began, and my self-confidence grew, and my parents moved from the house I’d grown up in, in Hatfield Heath in Hertfordshire (my brewer-father commuted to London), and settled a few dozen miles north-east in the village of Stisted, perched on a hill between Braintree and Halstead in Essex.. (If none of these names mean anything, think of Constable’s Dedham Vale, and drop half an hour south.)

My father chose it – partly because his grandparents had lived there, and partly because Stisted felt to him like “proper country”. A Domesday site with scruffy hedges, tractors rumbling down the main street, a village shop, two pubs, and butterflies flip-flopping in cottage front gardens. That’s where my eyes first opened. That’s where I first began to care about poems. And that’s where the things I was reading fused with the things I was seeing. I don’t mean (or not entirely) that I became a “literary” child. I mean that the passages I most liked in Marvell, or Clare, or Edward Thomas, or Hardy, or Heaney, or Hughes – the people I enjoyed at the outset – helped me find the words to enter and enjoy the things around me.

‘Stisted is where my eyes first opened’ ... Andrew Motion. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

The walk through the field outside my parents house that led over a rabbity ditch into the Ashground – bare Rackham boughs grinding together in winter, in early summer awash with bluebells that squeaked when I trod on them. The River Blackwater curling round the base of the slope that tilted down from the churchyard – a stream at this stage, but otherwise as good as its name: black and muttery and wiry as it disappeared towards Goldhanger and the estuary. The old Hall, long-since converted into a nursing home for the elderly, whose wan faces ghosted behind the windows as my brother and I trampled through the disastrously overgrown gardens, or bumped into the ruins of the summerhouse which had once revolved to take in a view of manicured lawns and well-tended walk-ways.

All tidied up now, like most of the countryside within easy reach of London. And less full of personal suggestions and secrets than it used to be – which is inevitable, given how our minds clarify and (in some respects) simplify as we get older, and lose the capacity for self-forgetting. Perhaps it was simply this sense of things being bound to change over time that added the necessary element of fear once upon a time. That made rapture feel especially valuable, because it was evidently so vulnerable. Or is that a form of wisdom after the event? I don’t think so. I think that even before I had good (of course I mean bad) reason to know how fragile our existence is, I had begun to sense it. And sensing it was the making of me.

Essex Clay by Andrew Motion is published by Faber.

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