Box Hill

Box Hill where the bikers go, on a Sunday. Box Hill near Leatherhead in Surrey – jewel of the North Downs, rising almost 400 feet sheer above the river (that’s the river Mole). A cliff densely covered with box and yew. It’s the steepness of the gradient means only box and yew can get a foothold. It could just as easily be called Yew Hill as Box Hill, except box trees are so much rarer.

Box is the heaviest European wood. It doesn’t float. The roots were traditionally used for knife handles. Box trees are poisonous, same as yews. Only camels will eat the leaves, not because they’re immune but because they’re stupid, they don’t know what they’re doing. Box trees are used for mazes because the foliage is so dense, and they can be trained all the way down to the ground. A maze isn’t much cop if you can lie down on your belly, see where you are and wriggle out of it.

The leaves of the box are ovate, entire, smooth, thick, coriaceous and dark green. I looked that up. It sounds like a poem you can’t quite get the sense out of.

At Box Hill there’s downland grazed by sheep. A rich chalk flora. Orchids for those who know them when they see them. It’s a beauty spot overrun one day a week by motorcyclists and their beautiful machines. Bikes that whine, bikes that roar.

The Sunday of my eighteenth birthday: 1975. I went to look at the bikes. Because life at home wasn’t much fun, just at that moment, with Mum in hospital and Dad being unlike himself. Because I was going to get a bike of my own, one day soon. Because I liked to look at the bikers. Because it was my birthday, and I didn’t need a reason.

As far as riding my own machine, the closest I’d come to date was making the pilgrimage from Isleworth to Lewis Leathers in Great Portland Street, off Oxford Circus, to pick up a catalogue. Not very close. Tucked inside the catalogue was a leaflet telling you how to take your measurements for a one-piece suit. It had an outline of a human figure with arrows going this way and that, shoulder to wrist, inside leg.

I didn’t think the one-piece suit idea was going to work. The outline didn’t look much like me. A jacket in a standard size, once I could even afford that, would be a better bet. It would cover me up, though even so I wasn’t sure. If it was big enough for me to get the zip done up over my tum, the sleeves would be much too long, and I’d be swimming inside the shoulders.

I fell over him. I tripped and fell over him. When he told people about how we met, Ray always made that clear: Colin didn’t fall for me, he fell over me. Then he would continue the story with the bit that always made me uncomfortable. Ray would say, I took one look at him, and I saw what he really wanted.

I didn’t think I knew what I wanted, and I’m still not sure why he chose me. I was never a looker. I never had a waist. But Ray was dead drop gorgeous, though people didn’t say that then. It wasn’t a phrase. I didn’t think Ray was dead drop gorgeous in 1975. I was still reading teen magazines, and in 1975 the word in my mind was the word that teenagers used then. Ray was tasty.

I fell over him, just as he said. There’s a side of Box Hill I call the shorn side, near the panorama, where the grass is short and neat, and this was the other side, where the grass is shaggy and not so tidied up. He was sitting against a tree with his eyes shut – not that I saw him – and his big feet crossed in front of him. It was the feet I fell over, the size twelves.

He was probably sleeping off a late night with a stomach full of fry-up from the café at the bottom of the hill, where everybody was wearing leather but nobody wore their leather as well as he did. He was so used to being looked at that he didn’t notice any more. It would have been just like him, the person I came to know, to sit there reading a book after he’d finished eating. Military history. Something about the ocean and its creatures. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen who could turn a page wearing leather gloves and not fumble.

(…)