“Fair seed-time had my soul,” says Wordsworth in the first book of The Prelude, “And I grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear.” Quite so. Beauty and fear. The essential, paradoxical ingredients of childhood. One filling us with wonder; the other threatening our hold on the world and hereby making it all the more precious.
When Wordsworth wrote this phrase he was thinking about his birthplace – in Cockermouth, on the northern edge of the Lake District. My own birthplace had no such effect – I now think because the balance between beauty and fear was tipped too heavily towards fear. Fear that my parents, my mother especially, would disappear; fear (of a more circumstantial and less existential kind)of my father’s severities; fear that as time passed everything would dilute. Fear that in all these formshad the effect of freezing my mind and making it incapable of receiving any messages from beauty. I simply didn’t take much in. But then teenage years began, and my self-confidence grew, and my parents moved from the house I’d grown up in, in Hatfield Heath in Hertfordshire (my brewer-father commuted to London), and settled a few dozen miles north-east in the village of Stisted, perched on a hill between Braintree and Halstead in Essex.. (If none of these names mean anything, think of Constable’s Dedham Vale, and drop half an hour south.)
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