The Pillar In The Woods

Why relics of the past can captivate you, your whole life

I grew up in a suburb of Plymouth. This neighborhood was what you might call “punchy”—the kind of place where you could get punched in the face by a passerby for seemingly no reason. But that was probably as bad as it got, aside from occasional smashing and stealing of milk bottles. Plymouth’s suburbs were built rapidly in the 1950s, as World War II had devastated much of the city. Town planners seized the opportunity to reinvigorate society, inspired by visions of a booming, futuristic modern landscape. The city centre would be rebuilt and everyone now will live far away, a new network of roads and buses, prefabricated homes, new modern schools, shopping centres, and even a new sense of optimism emerged. But this was 1988, and optimism was often frowned upon, much like the mild vandalism.

There were endless rows of housing estates, houses designed as simple, flat-roofed cubes, each accompanied by a modest garden. These homes were meticulously arranged in neat rows and assigned street names after various British poets. We lived on Poets Corner, right beside the corner shop, a nexus of local kids buying crisps and coke, of course only 2 kids allowed in at a time. What had once been 15 square miles of green, rolling farmland became an urban sprawl. Our house perched on a large hill near the corner store, and most of my friends lived about a 20-minute walk away in any direction. We spent much of our time exploring the scattered patches of woodland around the estates, building small dens out of broken furniture and whatever else we could scavenge.

In one particular area of woodland was my school, separated by a highway that cut deep through the hill, with the school on one side and a bridge leading to the housing estate on the other. Within these woods, we would push into the undergrowth, searching for new spots to build forts. Instead one day we often found old stone stone pillar, must have been 10 ft high, made of flat stone. All of us being only 12 years old, wernt really able to question its existance too much or really acknowledge what the stone pillar was or why it was there. It bothered me however, It made me uncomfortable because it didn’t seem to belong, these woods were a local garbage tip, no one came here but kids, but the pillar seamed alive, quietly waiting. Ormaybe I felt like we didn’t belong, It made me feel like I was trespassing.

The school across the highway bridge was very large, occupying another hill with an extensive green valley of woods on the other side. This was the kind of school in the 80s where teachers could no longer hit you but could openly convince the rest of the class you were useless. It had endless dilapidated corridors of asbestos and mold. Every corner you turned could turn out to be punchy.

There was one teacher tho, one who was kind and interesting. Mr. Jefferies gave the best talks in school assembly. One day, he held up a weathered brick during assembly and said, “I just found this. It’s one of the bricks from the old house that used to stand here.” “This brick,” he continued, “is from a house that once stood right here on these grounds, before it was destroyed in the war.” He went on to explain in details that there used to be a large important house here at the school and a farm just across the highway bridge, the house took a direct hit from a bomb in 1942, was never rebuilt and finally demolished in 1956. He then said the house and farm had been here for 1000 years and every now and again a brick turns up. I was transfixed by that idea, I always thought history was something that happened somewhere else, but now suddenly my school was interesting, for some reason I needed to know more, who were living in this house?, did they die when the bomb dropped?. What did the house look like? How can a house be 1000 years old? I never asked my Jefferies any follow questions, although I wanted too it would be just too embarassing to show interest.

Life in the estate rolled on like that, everyone bottled up without even knowing it, one day I went out to my friends house, I would always run, some kids came around the corner, as I sped past I punched the leader of the group hard as I could in his face.