'The Humpty-Dumpty' by Peter Hodges

The Humpty-Dumpty of my childhood was nothing to do with a nursery rhyme. Yet to me it was no less magical. It was a field, if it could be called that, for it could not be put to much use, but in there lay the name. Humps and bumps, scrub thorn and rabbit holes, gullies, pieces of iron, brick and lumps of concrete, and this was our playground. A magical place where mist might sneak up from the canal that bordered the far side. Or the wind would scurry and sigh. Or snow would fill hollows and our sledges would drop in and we with them.
Humpty Dumpty, now there was a name. As I go back to those days the name gathers a momentum of memories. Then it was just a name made up by us kids because it identified where we played. Now, of course, I know why it was like that. My village was valued for sand. Dark red and smooth, it was in great demand by Black Country metal founders. It readily took the shape of the pattern, would hold firm when the metal was poured, easily cleaned away when the casting was cool. All around my village were quarries. Open pits, sheer cliffs, made by whomsoever gained the rights, and when exhausted, gone bankrupt, or simply died, these places were abandoned. A pit or a spoil heap, a waste that to nature was never waste for long, quickly became a playground.
Now, as I look across from the stile on the cliff – or where the stile and cliff used to be for both are gone to way make for houses and mothers with pushchairs – I wonder how much I recognise. The humps and the bumps, are they in my imagination? Do I really see them? Is the old path part of my memory or is it also imaginary? Am I in the same place? The right path? From where I used to live to the bridge where we would wait for the trains. To laugh and cough as smoke blew in our faces. To wave at the engine driver who never waved back. Between hedges and old farm shedding to where I now stand. Is all this what I once knew? Where we hunted for rabbits and never caught one, raided birds nests knowing it was wrong. The canal's still there. Narrow boats now. Then it was barges pulled by horses with noses in oat bags puffing out dust at each laborious step.
Old Creswell's horse lived on the Humpty Dumpty. A large white beast that, to us, was part of the place. Never doing anything but wander and graze, never bothering us, and we never bothering it. Now gone, like Old Cresswell's gone. Like Humpty Dumpty has gone because we all grew up and left and the name came with us.