It’s 7.45 am, misty and fresh. On the rocky, inclining path towards the train station, a procession of gaunt commuters and schoolkids plod in sequence, tiredly brushing off the spider webs clinging to their faces from the bordering hedgerow. Emerging from the heavy green trees onto a damp platform, they wait wordlessly in their designated standing spaces until two familiar headlights appear under the bridge to the right. Screeching and whirring assaults the eardrums as the train bumps to a halt, and our small congregation of villagers clamber on when the doors bleep open, joining the other bleary-eyed passengers. The 10-minute journey to Canterbury never feels long enough.
Station Road is mostly quiet for
the rest of the morning, apart from the school run when a queue of cars from
the nearby villages – Aylesham mainly, and others like Nonington – siphon down
the hill, turning left at the Pond to drop off their children at the primary
school halfway up The Street. The Pond better resembles a village green than a
body of water; yet – as all of us who went to Adisham Primary once learned –
there was indeed a Pond on the site until the 1960s. Centuries ago, a woman
accused of being a witch drowned there, after being dragged helplessly from one
of the neighbouring settlements. The vast, grassy space where the deadly water once collected
is now solely occupied by a small tree, and a handsome view of the Holy Innocents church in the
background, all of which compose the definitive Adisham scene that is captured
most often by photographers. The dank mire of yesteryear is now safely
undetectable to the cars pootling past.
Children who live in the village
tend to walk to school. Indeed, a short distance up The Street, two siblings
are swinging their blue bookbags embossed with the Adisham Primary School logo
– the silhouette of a tree – bounding down the pavement towards the black metal
gates. They live in the Ileden cottages, part of a tiny farming hamlet on the
other side of the village woods that has been around since God-knows-when. Its
existence has continued largely unchanged, except for the drone of the now ever-present
road traffic that emanates from the A2 road to the west. The Street doesn’t
reach up as far as Ileden, so every weekday the children trot down the
bridleway through the woods into the main village, past the horses at Woodlands
Farm, the grey brick Baptist Chapel, and the former Post Office, which has now
been converted into a house. Their parents moved to the village 8 years ago
with their faithful Irish Wolfhound, the largest pet you will probably ever
see, because they wanted a calmer life for their family.
Strolling dead centre in the
middle of the road, past the red brick school building carved with the names of
hundreds of past pupils, Martin’s gaze interrogates you from behind
thick-rimmed glasses, as if he’s trying to build a mental factfile. It’s
midday, and his hands are wrapped around gardening tools or maybe a
wheelbarrow, sweat gleaming from his fleshy face. The echoes of playing
schoolchildren stalk him down the road until he reaches the Bull’s Head, our
local derelict pub. Once the hub of the village community, the structure is now
a cocoon of peeling paint, mossy bricks, broken glass, boarded windows, and
cracked roof tiles. Sometimes when he’s pruning the roses, the old Bull’s Head
fades into Martin’s mind without him realising, and he is there, still able to taste the starchy ale and feel the stick of
the wooden bar on his forearm. All the old guys are there, like David, the former
station manager. They always got on well. They saw everything there: first
kisses, new years, bobbing apples at Halloween. Like dandelion seeds, no longer
here. Scattered.
Martin pauses there a moment,
then turns left into a row of tall hedges that hide one of the village’s villas. Set back from the road with
their long, green gardens, they remain mostly invisible in your mind’s-eye view
of Adisham. They’re the kind that house those parish councillors you never see,
unless you go to their monthly meetings in the Village Hall – which most people
rarely do. The person that springs to mind is Valentine Stevens, school
governor, who seemed to be everywhere when we were young. She would make appearances
at events such as the summer fete or the larger church services,
like some kind of mayor. I’ve heard that she lives in the white villa on
Cooting Lane with the tall gate and flowery front garden, up by the farm with
the big black dogs that inevitably come charging towards you from the cottage
if you make the mistake of walking past. I don’t think I’ve seen her since I
was 11, when she handed me an Oxford English Dictionary upon finishing at the
primary school, one of Adisham’s traditions.
As school finishes for the day,
bunches of kids run straight to the adjacent recreation ground (the Rec, as we
call it) with parents in tow, where the newly-painted and kitted-out play park
becomes a swarm of crawling limbs and grabbing fingers. A group of older boys
turns up shortly after, having caught the train home from their secondary schools
in Canterbury, booting a beaten-up football between them as they run
onto the spacious grass field pock-marked with molehills. After a quick
kickaround they begin playing games like headers and volleys, or taking turns
to go in goal as the others take shots. Every now and then enough people will
turn up for a full game, with two teams, which will take place in the asphalt
court or on one of the grass pitches with the rusty, flaking goalposts. They’ll
play until the latest possible moment – after dark in winter, when the ball
simply cannot be seen – and right up to the point when their parents have
already called them three times to tell them to get back, or they’ll be
grounded.
Later, just after the evening
rush hour, a steady stream of small round European cars clumsily squeeze into
the little available space on the village streets, followed by the unlucky latecomers who
passive-aggressively zoom off to a less desirable spot, probably only ten
metres further up the road. The fields behind their houses are carpeted with
pale yellow wheat, and a red combine harvester is raking neat paths through the
crop, thick plumes of coarse dust trailing behind that slowly settle into the
cooler air. Within minutes, that neighbour who works as a teaching assistant at
the village school emits a sound halfway between a sneeze and a shriek, and their
yappy fluffball dog barks hysterically for five minutes afterward in their back
garden, drawing a collective exasperated sigh from the tired Mums preparing
gravy dinners in the neighbouring semis.
On kitchen tables is the latest
Village Newssheet, a single folded piece of A4 paper of which half is taken up
by the village directory, a list of telephone numbers and addresses for all the
'important' people in the Adisham community. This leaves room for a maximum of roughly
10 snippets of ‘news’. In the summer months, one of these inevitably reminds villagers
to be considerate when lighting barbecues and bonfires. This has, after all, been the dominant subject
of hushed conversations over every garden fence. Though despite the collective
scorn, the same neighbours you confide in this time will be those you complain
about next weekend (over the other
garden fence) when they light a barbecue while your washing is still on the
line.
Bonfires aren’t as annoying; they
tend to be in the evening and aren’t usually accompanied by the unsettling
commotion of laughter and garden-chair gossip next door. Silently the smoke
swamps across the valley, spreading out in a light grey haze that dances around
the nostrils of those strolling back home from the station after work.
Woodsmoke is not an unpleasant scent, either. It is nostalgic, conjuring up wintry
visions of quaint, timber-framed houses with crooked rooftops, like Dane Court
up the road that has been sitting there for at least 600 years.
The rest of the newssheet praises
the efforts of volunteers and the turnout for recent village gatherings – Wine
and Wisdom nights, Messy Church for the kids, the Big Breakfast one Saturday
morning each month. We like to jest at the newssheet and its charming
interpretation of what constitutes ‘news’, but if it weren’t for those who are
willing to make these events happen – the young families, the pensioners with
little else to do, the churchgoers, the schoolkids, the parish councillors –
I’m not sure we would have a village community at all. Our meeting places,
where our lives intersect – the church, the school, the village hall, the Rec –
they would all be desolate; exorcised artefacts. The crumbling Bull’s Head pub
is a warning. Without at least the illusion of togetherness and common ground,
our hopes, feelings, and prayers would only find voice in the mutterings of
those hiding behind closed doors and twitching net curtains; the scroll-wheels
of those silently scanning the Adisham Village Community Facebook page.
It's here, in the lands between
somewhere and nowhere, that our spirits linger.
