IN THE WOODS

Prologue

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small town in 1950s.This is none of Ireland's subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur 's palate,watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-floated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue.This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass,your own clean sweat,Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaked bottles of red lemonade pinicked in tree houses.It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face,ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash line; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls,bees,leaves and football-bounces and skipping chants, One!  Two! Three! This summer will never end.It starts everyday with a shower of Mr.Whippy notes and your best friend's knock at the door,finishes it with long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways calling you to come in through the bats shrilling among the black lace trees.This is Everysummer decled in all its best glory.

Picture an orderly little maze of houses on a hill,only a few miles from Dublin.Someday,the government declared,this will be a buzzing marbel of suburban vitality,a plan perfect solution to overcrowding and poverty and every urban ill; for now it is a few handfuls of clones semi detacheds,still new enough to look startled and gauche on their hillside.While the government rhapsodized about McDonald's and multiscreens,a few young families--escaping from the tenements and outdoor toilets that went unmentioned in 1970s Ireland,or dreaming big back gardens and hopscotch roads for their children,or just buying as close to home as a teacher 's or bus driver's salary would let them-packed rubbish bags and bumped along a two-track path,grass and daisies growing down the middle,to their mint-new start.

That was ten years ago,the vague strobe-light  dazzle of chain stores and community centers conjured up under "infrastructure" has so far failed to materialize (minor politicians occasionally bellow in the Dail,unreported,about shady land deals).Farmers still pasture cows across the road,and the night flicks on only a sparse constellation of lights on the neighbouring hillsides; behind the estate,where the someday plans shows the shopping venter and the neat little park,spreads a square mile and who knows how many centuries of wood.

Move closer,follow the three children scrambling over the thin membrane of brick and mortar that holds the wood back from the semi-ds.Their bodies have the perfect economy of latency; they are streamlined and unselfconscious,pared to light flying machines.White tattos-lightning bolt,star,A-flash where they cut Band-Aids into shapes and let the sun brown around them.A flag of white-blond hair flies out: toehold,knee on the wall,up and over and gone.
  

The wood is all flicker and murmur and illusion.Its silence is a pointillist conspiracy of a million tiny noises -rustles, flurries,nameless truncated shrieks;its emptiness teems with secret life,scurrying just beyond the corner of your eye.Careful: bees zip in and out of cracks in the leaning oak; stop to turn any stone and strange larvae will wriggle irritably,while an earnest thread of ants twines up your ankle.In the ruined tower,someone's abandoned stronghold,nettles thick as your wrist seize between the stones,and at dawn rabbits bring their kittens out fron the foundations to play on ancient graves.

These three children own the summer.They know the wood as surely as they know the microlandscapes of their own grazed knees ; put them down blindfolded in any dell or clearing and they could find their way out without putting a foot wrong.This is their territory,ans they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long,and all night in their dreams.

They are running into legend,into sleepover stories and nightmare parents never hear.Down the faint lost paths you would never find alone,skidding round the tumbled stone walls,they stream calls and shoelaces behind then like comet-trails.And who is it waiting on the riverbank with his hands in the willow branches,whose laughter tumbles swaying from a branch high above,whose is the face in the undergrowth in the corner of your eye,built of light and leaf-shadow,and there and gone in a blink?

These children will not be coming of age,this of any other summer.This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of thr adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life.This summer has other requirements for them.