Sweyne Park
By Janet Baldey
Early one morning, decades ago, I remember lying
sleepless in my bed. A momentous event
lay ahead, one which I hadn’t planned for and my happiness lay in the
balance. Knowing this, I had tossed and
turned all night and now lay exhausted, staring into space. As daylight crept
into my room, I heard a single cheep and turned to the window, where my
curtains were now rimmed with gold. That
first chirp was rapidly followed by others until it seemed that every bird in
the universe was shouting out their joy at the start of a new day. Back then – in what is now called the past - this
full-throated explosion of birdsong was taken for granted and either delighted
or exasperated and I’m sure there were those who, with muffled curses, pulled
their pillows over their ears and tried to get back to sleep. As for me, as I
lay surrounded by a symphony gifted by nature, my woes receded and lulled, I
was able to sleep.
In
the past there were many occasions, like this, when one could experience
moments of wonder without having to spend a penny. On many a rose-tinted evening my husband and
I would walk down to Southend’s sea-front and stand spell-bound watching as thousands
of starlings looped and plunged in smoky arcs across the sky. While
at harvest time, the formerly green hedgerows near our cottage were transmuted into
shades of brown as a twitter of sparrows descended, each anticipating a meal of
scattered grain as combine harvesters rolled their dusty way across the fields.
Then, there was the magical event that
happened in Leigh-on-Sea every October when the Brent Geese arrived from Siberia to overwinter on the Eel grass. On one particular morning, I’d spent the
night on my father’s barge and as the mist dissipated and the air warmed, I
decided to drink my morning cuppa on the deck.
As I sipped my tea and thought of nothing, I stared into the distance,
past the mudflats and the yachts, their masts at odd angles as they lay at
anchor, towards the horizon where a black line separated the sky from the
sea. As I watched, the line thickened
and very soon a dark stain was spreading towards us. I felt my heartbeat quicken. Dad must see this. I turned towards the hatchway.
“Dad,”
I called. “The geese are coming.”
I
heard a scramble of movement from inside the barge and a few seconds later up
he popped like a genie out of a bottle.
He raised his binoculars towards the moving cloud and I knew that he was
smiling even though most of his face was obscured by binoculars and beard.
“I
thought it might be today,” he announced.
“You can almost set your watch by them.”
But
that was yesterday when the mud flats were covered by hungry geese and their
music filled the air. I haven’t been
back to Leigh recently. The last time I
did, the geese had arrived but in patchy numbers and it broke my heart to see
them so depleted.
These days, the place that’s
special to me has no soaring ice-tipped mountains, no far-flung purple moors
filled with the sound of silence, no coves with golden sand beaten flat by the
ebb tide, it’s just the place that I walk the last dog I shall ever own, and as
such, it’s very dear.
Formerly 57 acres of
wartime agricultural land, Sweyne
Park has been transformed
by Rochford Council into a leisure park for the local population. It has two ponds, islands of twelve species
of tree, Willow,
Oak, and Alder to name but three, and is surrounded by four km of
hedgerows. Stitched cross-wise by paths,
it’s a popular place for dog-walkers and I’ve seen it in all its moods. In spring time, the branches of the hawthorn are
cocooned by sweet-smelling blossom of the purest white, that could transport me
back to the snows of winter, were it not for wind that has lost its power to
scour the skin. In summertime, the sun
blazes down from cloudless skies for days on end, baking the earth and
shrivelling the Timothy grass. On days
like these, I seek shelter in the cooler parts of the park by following the
path over a small bridge, underneath which the remains of a stream, a sluggish
relative of its former winter-lively self, feeds into the lower of the two
ponds. Here Willow
trees flourish, planted especially to help to drain the marshy soil and their
shade is a welcome relief. However, respite
is short and soon sweat is stinging my eyes as I plod up a hill that seemingly
has the same power to exhaust as Everest.
But however long the days, time passes at an ever-increasing speed, soon
the nights are drawing in and it’s autumn again. Autumn has two faces. At first the leaves of the trees change from differing
shades of green to shades of burnt orange, amber and scarlet, their colours burning
against the sky like brands held by Olympic athletes. Their beauty is breathtaking but it is a
doomed beauty and soon the leaves relinquish their hold and spiral down to
earth where they form a frayed jigsaw of colour. As the days pass more follow disintegrating with
their fellows into a uniformed mulch leaving the bare bones of their mother-
trees shivering against the skyline with no defence against the raw winds of
winter. And so, the cycle starts afresh.
This is as it should be, it is expected and
comes as no real surprise. But what does
worry me is what I haven’t mentioned. When
the park was first created forty years ago, it was home to at least ten species
of birds – blue tits, long-tailed tits, greenfinches, black-caps, starlings,
blackbirds, collared doves, whitethroats, green woodpeckers, and sparrow
hawks. There was no mention of magpies,
those strutting bandits with their harsh cackling cries, or of crows, their
gangmasters. Now these thugs seem to
have taken over and I suspect have subjugated the smaller birds who may still
be seen but in rare and fleeting moments.
But where are the sparrow hawks and the starlings who used to be so
infinite? Sadly, we humans have sucked
the life out of our natural spaces and not enough people care.
But
maybe I’m wrong. Maybe in times to come folk will tear their eyes away from
Facebook, or TikTok and maybe even the internet will bore them. They’ll look around and realise there are
empty skies to fill. Books will remind them of all the wonders that once called
planet Earth their home and we will pine for all we have lost. But our species is very good at making
demands and maybe, for once, our demands will be for the good of the
planet. As in the film, extinct species
will be brought back to life and once more wolves, tigers and bears will roam
the forests. Science will have found a
cure for plastic and the seas will be cleansed so that sea creatures can flourish. We will learn to cherish all natural life,
not just for its sake but for ours. And
wouldn’t that be lovely?
Copyright Janet Baldey
