Jane Liddell-King
Shedding Light
For sixteen years I have been photographing and writing about a place, an East Anglian ‘wetland’ called Wicken. Entering this foreign country for the first time I raged at the darkness of the water, the endlessly straight droves, the chill emptiness of what struck me as a bald and storyless landscape marinaded in sea, leaned on by a vast arch of sky and plucked from the cutting edge of time. This, I thought, was a place for sad old men, for those born fifty. The sea was welcome to it.
Now my daughter says, You need Wicken like some people need G-d. As usual she’s hit on the truth. I have told her that in Hebrew ‘Hamakon’ is a word for G-d which also means place. Oh, she says, you mean like home.
It’s not simply the gift of solitariness which draws me here but the consequent fallout of images made as sky held against the flat land goes hard, empty and concrete dead, goes bruised and puckered, goes more penetratingly blue than the wings of a damsel fly or sepal of a water germander and performs endless cloud theatre. I have struggled to catch the patterns made by silver birch trees spindling against these clouds or the shades of green which, before they settle into one of a thousand timeless modes of grass reeds willow willowed light frogs’ heads cricket’s feet catkin or hawthorn, take in grey yellow blue brown and black: a green ripe for reinvention: the translucency of a single new alder leaf blown against the March sun. Moments of light whittling the surfaces of birch dog rose wild plum guelder rose weeks before they swell and bloom.
There are times when green any green is too hard on the lens of the eye and only the memory of winter light brings relief. Snow white ice white frost white salt white the glitz of crystal; a queue of footfalls as the ice splits beneath each step and the time spent tugging a boot slowly from the clinging moist pocket of snow so that it stays in place on the foot becomes a measure of the length of a season which has surely come for good to take root to presage death. Winter lulling the senses shrinking the spectrum denuding the mind of words asserts its own time zone chooses its own cadences.
A child then can see how thin the ice is, can push his fingers through into freezing water and understand its fragility. Given summer freedom and the illusion of flight he loses all sense of his own vulnerability and in so doing raids the adult world of security.
My son dives to the ground before leaping up in triumph, four grasshoppers dangling from each hand. He watches incuriously as, freed at last from his probing anatomical examination and tender clutches, they dash for cover. Zig-zagging enormously beside the ditches he shrugs off his skinny human nature. ‘Peregrine falcon’, he whispers: ‘Kestrel - marsh harrier - fox - me’.
Please do not lose your way
Paths beyond this point are not marked
There is no short route back except across this bridge.
In this unpopulated silence the mystery of light might disclose itself as sputtering wind sends the clouds pluming across the sun and down among the alder and wild plum trees. How much changes here in a fraction of a second? The water violets which were absolutely still go grey like clay in shadow. The cuckoo flying from the wood, vanishes. Are you really seeing its profile take shape against a distant oak or merely a particular teasing disposition of branches? The woodpecker takes off from the birch tree and dives into the carr leaving its colours pinned to the mind. The reeds which you have been staring at part and come together and the arm’s length of water which lies between them is forever changed.
Flat on his stomach my son edges further and further out across the water to track a fish, catch a frog, touch a water snake, harvest a snail, interrupt the dizzy spin of a whirligig beetle - the sun reflected from the still surface dazzles me. He is ecstatically free.
In a micro-second the sun vanishes and branches skull-out of a heavy black sky. I am soaked, frozen and all memory of warmth is gone. The wind-shoved rain could take my flesh off, squeeze me to death.
In this sudden fall of darkness I can’t see my son. I race through the rain forcing my eyes to see -shouting his name against the stinging wind. And listening. Through all the noise I hear the unmistakable splash of a body hitting the water. He falls quite suddenly and the black water closes over his head. He does not reappear. It must be far deeper than I’d thought. Ten feet perhaps. For a second I am rooted to the spot, the horror of losing him hooked into each nerve. As the kicked-up water clears and quietens I see his bare feet white among the weeds.
Pushing through the reeds and diving in, I reach down and feel along the rest of his body through the dense and slippery weeds of the underwater forest to his head. Tapegrass stuffs his nostrils and his mouth. He lies bound in lily roots which trap him like wire.
I have no idea how often I have to return to the surface to refuel my crushed lungs, or how long it takes until at last he comes free. I carry his limp body to the bank. And pump the water out of him. So much water. I blow air between his blue lips. He is the colour of ash. Come back, I will him furiously; Come back - Suddenly his heart judders under my fingers.
I’ve no idea how we get back to the bridge.
How long does it take a child to drown?
The doctors don’t know if he’ll be the same again or if I took too long to get air into him. If he dies will the whole of life be devoted to trying to recover the thousand revelations of his face, how each mood unwound itself through his features?
And how quickly, in truth, will I lose the inflections of his voice, even as Ieafing through the photographs, I convince myself that I never will? Or will I find myself living with a different person? Counting the cost of an obsession?
Each dawn I am wakened by the crescendoing chorus of birds and I lie perched on the bleak edge of despair, engulfed in the reality of my own impotence, of all the futile years spent keeping watch. And yet, what more real was there to do? Even if it ends here - As the last bird gives up singing to get on with its real business of surviving, I fall into dream.
As at his birth, the umbilicus snakes round his neck. Only this time I cannot force my body to be still while the midwife’s expert fingers unwind it. I fight against her. And he lies then light against my nakedness. Tender as grief.
I wake and wait to feel him breathe. Later, I sit by his bed famished with the need to take him back to this place which so cussedly keeps its ancient tangled head above the peat dark water.