Dorset

Revisiting England after four years a part

This particular time in my life feels relived. Returning to a country that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, a second home to my adolescence which unfolded before me in lecture halls, Tesco lines, rows of uni student flats, and train stations. I can still recite the journey that I’d take so often down to Portsmouth—train to St. Pancras, Piccadilly line to Leicester Square, change at Leicester Square, take the Northern line to Waterloo, from Waterloo take the South Western to Portsmouth. I cannot, however, remember the route we took from Brighton to Seven Sisters, or if it was the reverse. The quiet, afternoon warmth of the empty seaside train station still lingers, but little else.

I’m learning to write about periods of time that have felt like lapses in my memory. For so long, L has felt pronounced when I think of England, like a long sigh that hangs in the back of my throat. I came to Dorset, to both write and let go. A place that embodied this sense of familiar and unfamiliar; somewhere that I had never been, but dreamt myself into so many years ago. When I arrived, the cottage’s silence was punctuated by the seagulls’ caws taunting the church bell’s song. Their lyrics were interrupted by the weighted thumps of my bright pink suitcase as I hauled it up the narrow staircase that turned sharply away from my feet on the seventh step. In the hallway hung three spiders by the invisible hairs of their webs. I left them alone after we came to an understanding that none of them would crawl into my mouth as I slept; it was after all, more their home than mine. I was a guest of the yellow and white diamond knitted tablecloth, the water boiler that groaned as it woke to heat my bathroom faucet that I mistakingly kept turning hot.

Archie, who I hadn’t seen in years, drove his late father’s mini cooper down the quiet winding roads of Dorset farmland. He was my best friend during my time at university. It was orientation day for English Literature students, and I saw him in a cramped hall inside the Arts Tower looking quintessentially British next to Sam who introduced himself. After a year of glancing at Archie in lectures and across the table in seminars, I mustered up a false sense of confidence and followed him on Instagram. Our mutual interest in music was the prelude to our inseparability. Before the train inched towards the station in Axminster, I took my glasses off and put in my contacts, trying to balance the small, watery disk on my shaky finger. At some point, we had both stopped wearing our glasses and Archie grew a beard, but his ears were still pierced from when we went together on West Street. Now we were here, amid the rolling, unbroken hills that I first imagined when I moved to England, bucolic landscapes birthed from the pages of Hardy’s Wessex. The narrow roads wound around hedgerows that danced wildly with the cars’ tailwind. At every turn, we would drive upon worn country homesteads nestled within bright pastures specked with cows and sheep. I watched Archie’s directional precision guided by the car’s seemingly ancient wired satnav as he slowed so I could admire the green mounds of the horizon. A whimsical romanticism, and nostalgia of sorts, that evoked a feeling of melancholy for what I saw outside my window, and for what I knew no longer existed. To be 18 again, in the passenger seat of L’s car. Racing along the country roads of high summer against the blackened, sleeping fields blanketed in strokes of mellow, orange light. A spontaneity born from boredom, which was dressed in a mischievousness and arrogance that is only ever realized at that age. And a period, which Proust writes as, “the only period in which we learn anything.” I meditated on what I learned as the expanding mouth of the Bride Valley swallowed the car. We parked at Bredy Farm’s restaurant, The Parlour.

In the rural Dorset countryside lies this rustic, Italian farmhouse restaurant. The kitchen counter is ornamented with worn blue and white tiles that match the backsplash, where dried leaves hang above serving plates, and old milk churns sit atop hood fans. An Italian flag moves with the doorway’s breeze and young servers stand at the counter waiting for the restaurant to fill. I hadn’t eaten properly since getting to Dorset from Gatwick, so Archie and I were ambitious with our order. Freshly baked sourdough focaccia that we used to soak up any juices left from the clams, which were steamed and tossed with lacy, delicate sea greens. Plump aubergine and bright red and golden beets. Smokey, charred, tender fatty pork belly souvlaki with chunky greek salad and tzatziki. We were served a whole butterflied mackerel with a crisp watercress and courgette salad. Everything tasted freshly of summer. As the woodfired pizzas came out of the kitchen, I wished desperately for my stomach to expand just a little more. But, once my face turned pink after finishing an Elderflower cider, Archie and I took a walk down the farm’s winding lanes and remarked at how strange it was that we were once again together, this time in Dorset, as if no time had really passed at all.

I woke up the next morning to shadows of pink light creeping from under the curtains. Everything in the cottage was silent. Down the lane, plants and flowers spilt from their urns as leaves took root in white brick crevices. I was on the way to Soulshine, where I’d have breakfast before my walk to the coast. Soulshine is my favourite kind of café, doubling as both a restaurant and a market. Wooden shelves are stocked with miso paste, yellow split peas and smoked quinoa, farm fresh eggs, Thursday cottage jams, pear vinegar, lion’s mane powder, and natural wines. I walked to the back of the cafe where the long room opened to natural wooden tables circled by pink, blue, and yellow painted chairs. Each time I see buttermilk pancakes on a menu, I instantly develop a sweet tooth for their thick, doughy comfort. They came crowned with salty bacon that took refuge atop the pillowy hill, escaping the pool of maple syrup. After eating, I walked east.

The coastal meadows vibrated with the hum of cicadas. Overgrown, brazen grass that as a child I believed to be wheat, stretched to embrace one another across the trodden footpath. They teased my calves as one of my mother’s fugues trailed behind me, “I will have to check for ticks when I’m home.” I had been here many times before, traversing the solitude of English pastures. A short walk from L’s childhood home in Hertfordshire were small expanses of hilly farmland. I’d escape there somedays in the summer, running along country paths chasing my breath. On others, we’d play in the field like restless children climbing trees overlooking the mud and grass at the bottom of the hill. But here, in Dorset, the hills seemed to rise and fall against the waves exasperated momentum. The earth was fragrant with sea mist and wild grass sweetened by the sunlight. In the distance, sheep were resting atop each other in an old stone water trough that had become overgrown with vegetation. I sat for a little while in the deepened arms of this sloping flat, whose curved chest sheltered this region of purple thistle and grazing sheep. Against us, the hill moved steeply uphill towards Thorncombe Beacon.

By the time I reached Seatown, it was late in the afternoon and my hunger had set in. There was a choice of three: wood fired pizza, a pub meal, or an array of seafood—shrimp, whelks, crab, and cockles—from the stall on the pebbled beach. I ordered a Dorset crab sandwich and listened to the waves exhale and crash against the rust-coloured pebble beds. There was nothing remarkable about the sandwich, but I ate it happily next to a woman’s scruffy dog who was waiting for a whelk to slip out of her styrofoam cup. Beyond Seatown, Golden Cap stood boldly with its steep-sided sandstone edge and dark, mudrock cliffs descending into the sea. I walked along outstretched paths thick with bracken to open grassland dotted with sunny ragwort and lounging cows. Another hill was to be conquered, where a zigzag track of wooden stairs and Jurassic green ferns would lead me to the summit. The gales forced their way through my hair as I crept my neck over the cliff, staring down at the sea, pale blue and clouded by the sky’s moodiness. I stood there alone, so high, so far from the murmurs of my world and thought, it’s beautiful here, a good place to let things go, where the past can be left to fossilize into the earth.