SUMMERHILL

I used to fly kites on these hills. The one’s we made down at the Summerhill centre from soaked vine and colourful plastic wrap bent to the shape of butterflies. I’d fly above the rolling farmers-fields combed with wheat and rapeseed, and reach toward the miniature houses, freckles of horses and scribble of roads. In the distance, a vague outline of sea only demarcated from the sky by the power plant- which like a plant- spouts above the powder-blue line in urban spurs. I am a kite. I remember soaring on the ground too: on a sledge down the farmers’ fields erased in snow. I was racing in my flimsy red sledge, when I was derailed by a rock and made course for the trees. A spectator to my own fate, I watched with fear as I entered the woods and was then halted by a silver birch, sitting on the woodland floor awaiting rescue.

I feel a wind’s whisper away from those childhood times, only stirred into the reality of ephemerality by the new housing estates and fenced-off areas which interrupt the rolling view and line of thought.

Of course, much has changed in Summerhill. Its ageing seems to have developed faster than mine- like a sick friend, it pains me each time I return and find it worse. To see another marker of my youth effaced, and realise my childhood with it, erased too. The climbing rocks are no longer rocks but graffiti sites and a smoker’s paradise. The zipline- which my dog used to run alongside as I zoomed down and tug at my leg, trying to pull me off- is now itself fully pulled off at the tether by vandals. The wooden monkey bars I would routinely fall from and re-attempt- now itself fallen, the height of a depleted haystack, drawing a black wound in ashes on the grass after being torched by arsons.

Perhaps the saddest to me though, was the landmark that died of old-age naturally, as if to remind me that change is inevitable. The singing lamppost (as we termed it, but is officially called the ‘Longscar Sound Beacon’) was the mid-way point of the walk, at the highest peak of the hill. We would circle around the post like larks in the morning sky, prompting a tune from the steel singer. ‘I’ll Be Watching This Shore’ by Alison Burns would play and we would walk over to the hill edge: where the trees part and the park meets the outer landscape, sloping down, and across and all around. We would stand there, not uttering a word, just listening to the singing lamppost. But as the beacon was solar-ran and not made to last, it eventually stopped singing. It had the most sentimental meaning to my Dad as a place of mourning and reflection. Her website reads:

The beacon’s resemblance to navigational beacons at sea and to lighthouses, links it to its name, Longscar, which is also the name of a rock formation, just off the Hartlepool coast, that has caused many shipwrecks…. From the Longscar beacon you can see the coast of Hartlepool, the Middlesbrough chemical plants and the edge of the Yorkshire Moors. The eeriness of the song and its position in the landscape enable the visitor to enter a different space: gazing at the horizon and thinking of new departures for the area and for our time.

I am happy we can hold onto this song if nothing else, but I am also still happy to walk around Summerhill today for all it has left. As I reach the top of the hill, less of a height to my lengthened legs now and less of an endurance to my grown lungs; I look at the lamppost, now like any other lamppost, I realise the naturalness of temporality. Some things are only intended to live as moments in your life. New play sites have been built, and new kites will be flown. But not by me. Childhoods belong to new generations and parks are often their arenas. To be marked as much as to be markers, to age as much as their users.

I suppose memories fade like places do. Like songs in the wind.