Part 1: A Flood.

It had broken its bank twenty-five years ago: slipped its course, the river, and spilled over cattle grids and cut over the rail line that, tracking a route cross country, marked the landscape with its technology. Its creation had upturned ancient trees, and in the breaking of the riverbank, the ancients fell again, to ebb and flow with the on-rushing waters.

The waters bypassed the stark sycamore skyline of the Chase, of Tamworth and Nuneaton, the then breathing Power Stations of Rugeley, escaping, then – but not in their eyes – to the governing lands below. Cleaner waters, then, but still they dirtied the pebbled squares of townships and hamlets; still removed residents from their homes; left stranded spots of moss and red squirrels under the darkening autumn skies; had priests and vicars and clergymen calling an apocalypse that had not yet come. Punk outfits were reflected in the waters. Teenagers remonstrated along the banks, smoked in spaces created by the water’s flooding. They found gaps in the marshes where linen trousers were ripped and emblemed shirts discovered the mystery that is the feeling of a missing single button. The logos that were not then what they are now, before they became somehow indifferent, sullied; sunken like the face of a child catching themselves in the vestibule mirror on a Sunday morning.

When it broke then before it broke again and again dying blossom could be smelt on the air, appearing then in a defined season, the air as cold snakeskin, deadened, left behind and drying whilst the waters dredged and resumed position. The breaking brought deaths then, too: not war-torn deaths, these, they told them themselves. Not bloodied deaths, but scattered bodies unfound under autumnal muddied leaves; remembered by those blue hills that offered a blue sadness: settling the grief under graying skies. An unsettling resting. They dressed in bark and scattered the leaves as ashes. What is not remembered are words. Tatters kaylied. Spittle, splayed on cracked metal that glinted without winking at the sunlit skies. In the quarry at Baswich swam broken pieces of landscape. Children, excited in the chaos, skimmed stones whilst people restrained the despair that would become a timeless repeat. How could it lose its meaning if it was not understood in those moments? It would become lorried over, automobiled out of relevance.

They sat, bat-like and bludgeoned in the bleak bleariness of the darkness. Had seals wept at the sight of deadened hedgehogs sprawled sleepless on soft snow? Would they be followed in escape by the silhouettes that haunted the regenerated landscape?

A London North Western, pulling in twenty five year later, awakened them from dreams of what can be found in the dancing of thoughts. They placed the ticket against the steel barrier that allowed them access and return and, catching sight of that familiar face, placed a satchel over their shoulder. They, under a skyline of deep blue, traced the clouds that swallows swirled around and looked where once swans had sank searching beaks into stilled waters. The homeland.

Springs of icy leafless winds hovered on the air. They reflected, looking out of the car window, how the flooding had returned and observed their unsuprise at spotting the soft red of cherry blossom in February. What would this turning home involve?