Free Playing with Water by James Hamilton-Paterson

which is the more child-like in that it is the response of a culture obsessed with loss. Nostalgia is very much the home province of the English and when they tap into its rich vein they become adult–children perpetually grieving over some indefinable passing, a whole nation inmourning for the pre-lapsarian. How easy it becomes to view a landscape in these terms and how full our school poetry-books were of its afforded vision.
    ‘Right. First ten lines of
The Deserted Village
by tomorrow bedtime, word-perfect, or I’ll send you to be caned.’
    Thus a thirteen-year-old school prefect to a ten-year-old transgressor. Back it comes thirty-odd years later, word-perfect at bedtime in a bamboo hut in the South China Sea:
    Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
    Where health and plenty cheer’d the labouring swain …
    It was a homogeneous literature, a homogeneous landscape. Goldsmith’s leas were such that Gray’s lowing herd could have wound slowly over them without feeling remotely lost. What did it matter that Gray’s darkness was occasioned by his sexual melancholy or Goldsmith’s polemic by brutal landlordism? The lament for happiness lost descended once more on the English landscape – which could take it, being quite used to acting as a metaphor for this sort of thing. Less than two centuries later it afforded the poignant scenery for Housman’s doomed bucolic lads in the depths of an industrial age, and half a century or so after that it supplied heather-tufted mounds and adolescent gloom to an unwilling recruit in the Scotland Hills.
    Decades later I descend Tiwarik’s uplands, barefooted on the baked steep soil that extrudes thick waves of grass which flow snaggingly about the shins. I am wading through the island’s hair, up here on its crown with blue calm ocean on three sides and the mainland passive in the torrential afternoon light. Do I feel nostalgic? Is there anywhere in me an ache for a glimpse of England? I can be quite specific now.
    The nostalgia is undeniably there for a lost time, for imaginary lost content, for an actual long-ago happiness botched. It exists as a cultural trait defining my nationality, age and – let it be said - class. But whatever I may mourn it is revealingly not resident in any of the landscapes of my past. I do not miss the smallest heather-tufted moundof the English scene. I do not care if I never again see the South Downs, the tennis courts and patios of Beckenham, the hills and hopfields of Kent. Neither do I wish to revisit the dank water-meadows of Oxfordshire, de-poplared Binsey, the ivy-clad alma mater. I wish very much to avoid Postcardland: Haywainland and Kendal-Mint-Cake-Words-worthland and West-Country-Family-Holidayland.
    I am aware of missing something, though; something which I was brought up to expect or to be, something nowadays so unfashionable and discreditable I almost find it hard to mention at all. For, unexpressed but implicit throughout my childhood and adolescence was the idea that sooner or later in this life one would have to
fight
. One day I should go to war. We warbabies born during the Blitz who grew up in a world of ration books, gasmasks and uniforms breathed a pungent atmosphere of evacuation and alarm. Our fathers were away being heroes, just as our grandfathers had been heroes in the previous war and
their
fathers had distinguished themselves in South Africa … India … the Crimea … and so on back for centuries. Not a generation but hadn’t grown up knowing it would be called upon to fight.
    As it turned out my own anxieties about National Service were unnecessary: it was abolished just as I was beginning to resign myself. Suddenly all that marching with the CCF, the Armourer’s course at Catterick, the annual pilgrimage to Bisley stopped being training and overnight turned into grim recreation. We had been playing at soldiers after all. The promise of rigour and comradeship was back where it had always been, in the cockpit