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To the modern eye (I) - that is the late twentieth century eye, the shape of the camps seemed incomprehensible. Dwelling places these days should have soaring perpendicular lines,confident horizontal lines and wonderful wonderful windows made of suitably angled collections of 90o Blame the cathedral builders if you like: their vaulting geometry which first tempted humanity up to God, or blame the architects of the sky scraper, the glittering spikes of power: blame whom you like but the fact remains the Newbury shelters are very hard to see.
They curved to the ground and gently followed the contours of the woods: to enter any of them meant one had to stoop and bend so that the earth was the medium on which your eye focused. The mud blended all but the newest and most colourful tents to a suitable camouflage so that there seemed to be fewer camps than there actually were.
It is only when your breathing has slowed that your mind can make sense of the images from the retina. Against the haphazard patterns of trees and branches you can find many homes: their occupents emerge from the background and stand before you as suddenly as an image discovered in the patterned 3D puzzle pictures. Startling.On the periphery of your vision they blend back in to the woodlands and remain.
Only the trees can lead the eye upwards and even then the route they offer is meandering. The leads branch outwards, incline back and towards the earth before soaring. Once more the lazy brain is deceived: the round mass contained with the forking branches could be catalogued as the large nests of some ungainly birds. It is the scale which tells of the absurdity of this view. People are here too and peer down from their assuredly uncomfortable but strangely tempting surroundings.
The mud and the cold permeate everything: to protest in these conditions is not a job for the faint-hearted or those who are scroungers or those who can not be bothered to 'make something of their lives'. It takes guts and faith to exist here.
It was God according to Christians, who ultimately caused us to leave the original garden. It was He who put the serpent in and He who expelled us. His churches have taught us to look upward, to reach outwards to the heavens where He is. He did not teach us that he also lived in the land. The body and the earth were equated as one: bound by decay. Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust - the nihlistic statement driving humanity out of its body, out of its earth, out of its mind to aspire to be free. No wonder the natural landscape was seen as something to be conquered, controlled and repressed.
As this little century draws to its close and the New Millennium dawns, the Newbury protesters are testimony to a different landscape, of the mind - not only of the earth. That small shelters, which cause you to stoop as you enter, which bring the eye down to focus on the soil can cause us all to reconsider the 'dirt' beneath our feet.
This is my witness in Last Day of January in the year of our lord 1996. S.H.K
Aren't you overdoing it a bit? - Ed.
