glimpses

when inspiration comes from the edges

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Once, I papered the walls of my kitchen with poems.

It was 2020 and my middle son wore a grey sweatshirt that read ‘home s’cool’, but neither of us were feeling it. We were locked down and the days were long so I turned to what I knew — poetry. Each week, I found a poem for us to read together, copying them out and sticking them to the wall, a patchwork poetry quilt beneath an airer hung with socks. Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, John Masefield: I chose poems about the woods and the sea, hoping the words would seep into my boys’ minds and offer them an escape. One was ‘From a Railway Carriage’ by Robert Louis Stevenson, a poem about the fleeting sights seen from a carriage window, its rhythm the sound of the train:

Faster than fairies, faster than witches

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

Writing the lines at my kitchen table in purple felt-tip, a train journey felt almost as unlikely to me as a ride on a witch’s broomstick — an impossible dream.

I don’t know if the poems found their ways into my childrens’ heads, but they live on in mine. This week, travelling up (and then down) the country by train, the rhythm of the rails lulled me as ‘all of the sights of the hill and the plain’ flew by out the window and I allowed my mind to wander. The shadow of my hair made shifting tangles on the seat in front and sunlit reflections danced across the lowered blinds on the other side of the carriage. I found myself once again suspended in train time, between origin and destination, a liminal state

As golden flashes of train-light shivered through the carriage, I lifted my head from the book I was reading just in time to catch sight of an enormous, long-legged white horse running across the side of the hillside. Blinking into the shimmer, I looked again, expecting a trick of the light, but it was there, unmistakably — an elegant-necked, slender-legged horse. Like a zoetrope, the flicker of the light across the glass made the horse run, long legs moving in a juddering trot. In that moment, it felt to me as if the train was standing still whilst the horse cantered backwards into the distance. Incredulous, I pulled out my phone to check my location and saw an unmistakable name: Uffington.

Uffington White Horse is Britain’s oldest chalk-cut hill figure. It was carved into the hillside around three thousand years ago, formed from deep trenches filled with crushed white chalk. The horse runs alongside the Ridgeway (familiar to me from

Clover Stroud

’s brilliant memoir The Giant on the Skyline). In summers past, I have dropped my sons on the side of this ancient hillside for their Duke of Edinburgh expeditions, but I had never before seen the horse. Folklore tells that she is a mare, her invisible foal running alongside her, and that once every hundred years she gallops across the sky to be re-shod at Wayland’s Smithy (a nearby Neolithic long barrow, said be the workshop of an invisible elvin smith).

My train — as magic to me now as a witch —flew on, over and through the countryside. The land beneath the rails carried me lightly as it revealed its secrets. In the blink of an eye, I had been given a gift that that I would otherwise have missed, and the landscape had opened up to me. Outside the train window were the hidden, the unexpected and the lost: ‘each a glimpse and gone for ever’.

A glimpse is a partial view but it can also be a brief insight. Sometimes, we search for inspiration and sometimes it comes to us from the edges of our vision. Pencil in hand, I reached for my notebook, trying to catch the white mare’s meaning. Golden early morning sun, low in the sky, was warm on the side of my face: a suffusing glow. A trio of roe deer skittered through the middle of an empty, hoar frost glittered field. Across the page of my notebook, a triangle of light danced and I traced it with my pencil.

The white horse galloped on through time, into an uncertain future.