Deep in the woods

The Cox's walk entrance is gradual, like an audio fade, the horrible traffic  sounds on the South Circular attenuate as you walk up the steep pathway. The wide path is lined with sessile Oaks, two or even three deep on the cricket field/golf course side and two deep on the church/allotment side. The oak trunks on the allotment side are covered in Ivy, as are the outbuildings of the rotting Evangelical Church. A colony of rats scurries between the church and the cricket pitch. At the height of summer you also sees Nuthatches, Robins, Green Woodpeckers, Jackdaws, Crows, Grey Squirrels, Paraquetes, Magpies and other birds I don't know the names of.

The ground has a purple brown hue like expensive chocolate powder, steely blue stones have been pounded into it,  as I imagine they would have been when the railway line to the Great Exhibition was still active. Golden patches of sunlight break through the canopy of oak leaves. In summer you can hear flies and other insects buzzing around. In films and wildlife documentaries the sound of flies often signifies the imminent representation of a corpse, but in real life, at least in South London, it usually indicates the presence of a turd, canine or otherwise. The sounds of summer cricket matches irritate me, they seem pretentious and elitist, as fake as Morris Dancers and wenches. I hurry past the cricket field towards what I think of as the real woods.

At the top of Cox's Walk I cross the old railway bridge and pass through a high metal kissing gate that takes me into the 'proper' part of the woods, here there are more oaks and hornbeam  as well as huge trees from the time when grand houses had their back gardens spilling into the woods, with designer items like Cedar of Lebanon and Monkey Puzzle.

Information plaques dotted around the woods advertise the fact that there are 200 species of  trees and  plants here. I can smell wild garlic and bonfire smoke, it's the signature scent of Sydenham Hill Woods in summer.

At one end of the woods there is an abandoned railway  tunnel full of bats and debris. When I was at school myself and a group of friends crawled into the tunnel and walked all the way through it to Crystal Palace, half way through the tunnel we fell into a deep trench. For a second or two we experienced abject, cardiac, horror. Within a few breaths we all returned to a normal state. The incident is a vivid proof of emotional resilience, a psychological plasticity I wish I could invoke on demand.

Deep In the woods you can hear fragmented snippets of conversation as other people wonder along the densely lined pathways. The conversational fragments often have no visible people attached to them, though there might be brief flashes of non-green between the overlapping trees,  incongruous, man-made fabrics and bright Wellington boots. 

When I was a child there were no real pathways through the woods, even the old railway line was heavily overgrown. The woods felt far wilder, more dangerous, though it's unusual now to see a child playing on their own.  Most of the voices you hear in the woods are adults, middle-aged women like myself,  habitually drawn to the tiny wilderness.  When you do see people they are frequently the same ones - an old man with half his face paralysed, a tall man dragged along by a brace of huskies,  the odd stray dog walker from Streatham Common, extending their professional repertoire into South East London. The ragged rope swings and car tyre amusements of my youth have largely disappeared. There are no boys on motorbikes, habitual flashers or adolescent drinking parties, at least not by day. The woods have been thoroughly sanitised since the 1970s.


I'm drawn to the centre of the woods, a musky cleft  where the bird call is most resonant, where avian and human voices waft around me.
"I was trying to have an alcohol free weekend and realised the trick is to"
"Did I tell you about the strange man who came looking for my father?"
"Oh no, I  never do that"
The conversations fade into layers of green.

Sometimes I see and hear no one else in the Woods, at those times the woods are often like a stage set. The folly, in particular is sometimes more artificial than a real stage, more like a paper model. I have a profound astigmatism that tends to flatten objects, I do not benefit from the binocular disparity that helps most people to judge depth in objects, the world is not very real to me. I often experience it as shallow and contrived, more like a pop-up book then a convincing realm of 3 dimensional objects. The folly is an artifice deliberately constructed to resemble a ruined chapel. One day this summer it was covered in little green leaves like helicopter blades. For a few seconds I was filled with wonder.The green blades fell over me in their thousands, emitting papery rustles as they glided in spirals to the ground.