From Dudley Road to Lunar Landscapes via Ditton Fields

Nicola Anderson

A soft rain falls in Dudley Road. The children on the silver climbing frames and the vertigo-inducing, green-painted roundabout run to their homes for shelter as their mums call them to come in out of the rain.

For me there is no call. My mother works with my dad in their hairdressing business and I am a latchkey kid. At five years old, I am left to roam where I please over the fields to Fen Ditton and the River Cam where the University boat crews practise. In a vegetated backwater, a mouldering houseboat serves out its final days, the rank odours of damp wood, decaying water weeds and the malodorous rotten egg smell of hydrogen sulphide emanate from the anaerobic sludge, competing for ascendency in my nostrils. Paint peeling and wood crumbling, as the saprophytic bugs and fungi ravage the skeleton of this structure of a past, where, perhaps in the 1930s, the elite held their cocktail parties, cheering on their favourite boat crew, while the less well-off looked on with envy.

Now the floorboards are rotten. Some have already fallen into the silted-up waterway below, while others lay in wait as ankle-breaking pitfalls for the unwary, the foolhardy or even perhaps the brave. There is often a fine line between courage and stupidity.

In Dudley Road silence falls, leaving the world to me and a scurrying ant that steers a circuitous route around the wet splashes on the pavement left by the raindrop bombardment as millennia ago asteroids pounded the moon, leaving the pockmarked scars we see today.

To the ant each raindrop must seem like a tsunami or a giant’s sputum but to me the liquid circles form a random pattern of mini pools, turning the white concrete slabs to a sandy brown. The musty petrichor scent of damp earth, the product of plant oils imbued within the dry stone assails and engulfs me. A not unpleasant primeval scent that our ancient forbears would also have experienced after a dry spell followed by rain.

Safe and cosy in my womb-like cocoon formed by the thin curtain of rain that seems anathema to everyone else, I feel a frisson of warm, sensual pleasure in the pit of my gut as I watch in fascination as each wet sphere fills in another empty space and I count the seconds until a selected spot fills up with overlapping, interconnecting splashes to form a uniform canvass of wet footpath, save of course the spot where I have been sitting. As I stand, the dry patch begins to infill, and the magic is gone. But the memory lingers on.

Steve Parnwell