Hostility in the countryside takes many shapes: here outside King’s Cliffe, between thorned hedges, is a memorial to an installation built for war. Beyond it a fence, “Keep of my land” daubed in a red of a suggestive tone you suspect wasn’t accidental, even if the misspelling was.
This autumn the Battle of Britain is 75. Ancient planes gleam, and amidst nostalgic glamour 1940 is brand new again. Few veterans remain as witnesses to the war’s true age. Soon, there will be none.
But in the Northamptonshire countryside, life gives the war a different, enduring perspective. Here, a young beech ruptures a wall; greying grass wigs tired bricks, and beneath new green skin, asphalt wrinkles and rots where once violent-named raptors took flight: Spitfire, Thunderbolt, Lightning, Mustang; metal, fuel, noise, panic.
There’s not much left of the airfield now. Roofless buildings with narrow eyes, clearings. It’s farmland, mostly. What remains hides behind summer leaves yet to atrophy to winter bones.
Cold dawn on the footpath that nooses the old airfield. Waist-high mist and dew. And silence, bar the soft rattle of corn leaves. Suddenly the hoof-hits of a deer from behind the crumbling ammunition dump; pigeons abandon a tree in its direction of flight. Then all is quiet again.
Sunrise makes everything east a smoking silhouette, the buildings sober black boxes within chaotic clouds of hawthorn. A mile away the golden stone village of King’s Cliffe glows in its crook of field-land. A bird scarer pops. The hiss of cars driving too fast nearby. Today begins.
Close quarters on the ground, the disorder of new nature disguises the discipline once here. The airfield is slowly, quietly and happily losing the war. But look at aerial pictures and you spot it: old runways, thick with youthful growth. Crossed lines inscribed on nature, like the tattoo of a stick man: the ghost of an airfield, growing old where only birds and pilots can see.
