The Ned Wood Archive

You said you want someone to play with

But the right playmate’s hard to find

Shadows of Knight

If you go back 150 years you’ll find all the Woods working as farm labourers.  Me great great great grandparents and their mates.  Scores of them spread over Staffordshire working on the land.  And it had been that way for generations.  Son followed father, year after year, down to those fields by the Trent to sow and to reap.

So it’s in me blood.  I can’t walk down by the side of a cornfield or across a meadow without feeling like I’ve come back to where I started from.  I get a kick out of big nature, like climbing hills and standing looking down on wide open valleys, but the pleasant green fields are my home.  

I took Annie to show her one time when we went back to see my folks.  This would have been sometime in September or maybe it was at the beginning of July.  We went back two or three times.  Once to see Jonathan Richman at the Birmingham Odeon and another to see Peter Gabriel.  The Jonathan Richman gig was almost a disaster cos we’d planned to get to the old dears’ by mid afternoon and eat before the gig, so with my usual careful planning I’d left the tickets there so they didn’t get lost.  And then me and Annie had tried to hitch from Southampton, but had got stuck at Reading and were so late we had to ask our kid to drive in and meet us outside the Odeon with the tickets.  Looking back that was a cool thing for him to do, but I had to return the favour after the Gabriel gig, cos he was starting at Oxford on the day after, so I drove him down at seven in the morning so he could get to his first lecture.  We’d queued outside the Odeon for those tickets over night so we couldn’t miss it.  At least we’d planned to queue out all night, but no-one else had turned up by one in the morning so we went home and slept for five hours.  We still got middle of the front row for both shows.  It wasn’t like in 74 when loads of folk queued up outside the Hippodrome for Genesis tickets all night and we could only get a handful up in the balcony, and I had to skive off school all day to get those.

That was when Genesis were OK to like.  But I’m not supposed to be prattling on about boring old prog bands.  I was going to tell you about taking Annie round the fields near our place, where you cross the railway line and all of a sudden you’ve turned your back on town and you’re in the country.  Country like it hasn’t changed since the eighteenth century.  You could almost expect to see me great great great Uncle Tom come by.  I’d sit on a fence or lay back in a field and breath in the air and dream about what it was like for my old folks.  And try and get Annie to do the same.

Another place that I sort of grew up with is Wenlock Edge.  We’d make the odd trip there when I was a kid – go to places like Ludlow or Church Stretton and then play on the Longmynd or walk on the edge itself.  Whenever we went to Wales along the A5 for a holiday, we’d spend an afternoon walking around before we got there.  I think the old dears did it so me and our kid would fall asleep in the car afterwards and not give them grief about how long it was taking to get to the seaside.  But I really got to know that area well when I stayed there one summer and worked at a youth hostel.  I’d have pretty much all day to myself, so I’d just walk over the hills.  Gentle, rolling hills, so green and fertile, and fields full of wheat and barley waving and dancing in the breeze.  It seemed as if it was all just put there for me alone.

Well, one day or maybe a couple of days after I’d finally woken up to what Annie was all about, me and Bernie went out for a walk, but instead of the real countryside: fields and the like, the best we could find was the golf course north of the hall.  It wasn’t the same as back home.  I was so happy that morning and I wanted to celebrate.  I wanted to walk across fields and sit on fences and watch the wheat grow.  So I got frustrated and started complaining about things.  Just anything, you know, like ‘they should do this’ and ‘they shouldn’t do that’ without really saying who they were.  And Bernie started on about ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ like ‘don’t listen to boring old farts’.  You know, really important stuff.

And then he asked me about Annie and wanted to know if she really liked Wishbone Ash.  And why didn’t she want to put the world to rights.  And why had she lost interest that day when me and Bernie and Son had been talking about the Rights of Man.  And about her smoking, although I didn’t know that she was about to give up.  And about her not knowing or not having the slightest interest in knowing about football.  And so on. 

“Ned”, he said, “can it really be love?”

I wondered if it was a test.  I thought he disapproved.  I wondered whether it was like all that crap I mentioned other folk coming out with about Helen and Chris.  That’s how it felt, but looking back, it was just Bernie putting his foot in it.  Nevertheless, I kept thinking about what he’d said and that night had a dream about a guru.  It must have been Chris with a white sheet slung over him, but my dream told me it was a guru and I didn’t argue.  

In the dream, this guru was stood on the edge of the fourteenth green and looked across the manicured grass and artificial clumps of trees and bushes and said:

“You know, man still thinks he’s the centre of the universe.  Too many people think that everything revolves around mankind.  They think all of this” and he encompassed the whole of nature with a sweep of his arm.  Not just the golf course, but the whole wide and wonderful world.  ”They think all of this is for their benefit.  What arrogance.  If only they could realise that if they could identify with nature and be one with nature, they’d gain so much more.

“Some people still think that the Earth revolves around them.  That everything is laid on a plate just for them and if they don’t like it, they can change it.  Really, Ned, you just have to take life as it comes and not get so wound up about it.

“Look, maybe she doesn’t like your going on about football, because she thinks you can’t distinguish between the beauty of the game and the violence of the nutters that sometimes turn up to watch.  Or to be more accurate, maybe she thinks you should disown the hooligan element more vociferously and not play along with them by singing football songs.  

“Abandon Violence Ned,” he cries.  But I’ve always drawn a line.  And stayed my side of it.

“And don’t go on about smokers because every one has their own choice.  And every one gets their own karma.

“And six months ago you weren’t exactly a paid up member of the CPGB, so your poacher-turned-gamekeeper approach to Annie’s lack of politics isn’t altogether reasonable.”  Fair point.  Anyway, I was slightly confused about my new found radicalism on account of Paul Weller having said in last week’s NME that he was going to vote Conservative next time round.

So that just left the Ramones.  “If she likes the Ramones, it’s love” I said.  And he smiled through his ragged beard because he knew the answer.

Everyone who knows the Ramones knows the answer.