Trespass

As a child growing up in the country , a field was a space where we played, hid, dozed, read, kissed, lost oneself and avoided – if there were cows . It was a performance space. In ‘A mid-summers night dream’ Peter Quince says – ‘This green plot shall be our stage’. Our presence however was always as the interloper. Fields always belonged to someone else, and yet the trespass and the danger brought both fear and thrill. I listened to Stiff Little Fingers reading my history books in a field one ‘O’ level summer til I was found by a boy in the village who tore the book from me and squashed worms between the pages.