Riot and ruin

Today: Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks and The Way to the Spring.

Issue No. 141

A Run In Mousehold Heath
Ben Ehrenreich

A Run In Mousehold Heath

by Ben Ehrenreich

Nature is a smaller thing in England than we’re used to in the U.S. There are no great, soul-shattering vistas, no real mountains, no mesas or canyonlands, no skies so vast they pour in through your eyes and spill out the back of your skull. Here they love a muddy path through ferny woods, a green patch of meadow on a half-sunny day. The earth has its own vocabulary, compact words that don’t put on airs: moors, gorse, heaths.

My wife is English and her family is in England and somehow it all made sense, moneywise and childcare-wise and otherwise, to spend most of the summer in a Victorian terrace—it sounds fancy but isn’t—in the working-class outskirts of Norwich, about two hours north of London. Parallel lines of long, two-story brick buildings with steep, tiled roofs snake off to the east and west, curving with the gently sloping hills. They’re divided into homes, each about 12 feet wide and three or four times as long: cramped, cookie-cutter workers’ housing from the turn of the previous century. It’s densely packed but weirdly hushed even on the weekends. Kids don’t shout. No one turns their music up. If people fight, they do it in silence.

Reading historians like E.P. Thompson and Peter Linebaugh when I first started to spend time in this country helped me to understand the otherwise infuriating English indirectness, politeness, conformity, and alcoholism as remnants of a lengthy trauma: products of the long, brutal disciplining required to turn a proud and unruly peasantry into a class fit for industrial labor. Even when the alternative was hunger, few human beings have ever been eager to exchange their freedom and dignity for an hourly wage. The conflicts have been largely erased by centuries of indoctrination, but thousands died on the gallows before the English poor had been transformed into a class capable of keeping the new machines of capital running at a suitable profit. People learned to keep their heads down, and called it manners.

Just down the street from where we’re staying there’s a park called Mousehold Heath. It’s mainly wooded, a maze of shady trails through oak, birch, and hazel trees, opening at times into swathes of shrubland spotted with gorse, a spiky bush that blooms a showy yellow in the spring. Or so I’m told. In the mornings I go running there in an effort to push back at the sense of doom that accompanies this latest geo-historical turning point. My in-laws chuckle that American politics has been entertaining lately, which I understand to mean that it’s a florid fucking nightmare that the entire world is forced to suffer. I smile and politely agree.