The Garners don’t travel. Mostly they stay around the slopes of the hill of Alderley Edge in Cheshire, on the square mile known as the Hough, where they have been since at least 1592, when the first parish register mentions the burial of William Garner “del hough”.
As a child I lived in a cottage at the foot of the Edge. The hill was my playground, school and world. It was where I learned to see, hear and feel: the grassness of grass, the rockness of rock, the treeness of tree, the skyness of sky. From the cliffs of the Edge I saw fields, villages, hills, mountains, Manchester, Wales; but they were shapes and patterns that had nothing to do with me.
Then, at the age of 11, I passed an exam and had to travel to school in Manchester every day.
I was terrified. The trains, the trams, the din, the crowds of strangers, the smogs, they were too much. And I couldn’t see the Edge. Each morning, as the train carried me away, I glimpsed it before it was lost. Each evening I pressed my face against the window of the carriage so as not to miss the instant of its return. And this went on for more than a year. I came to think that if I was not there, the Edge could not exist. Without my witness it could not be.
Then, one clear day, I looked out from the Art Hall, the highest room in the school, and I saw the Edge. It was far off, but it was still there, and always would be.
I grew up in the moment.
My path took me to Oxford. Oxford was where I thought the future lay. Oxford was what I loved. But something began to irk. Was this the place for a whole existence?
There is a folktale about a poor pedlar whose life had become a misery. One day, feeling sorry for himself, he sat in his garden against a tree and fell asleep.
He dreamed that if he went to the city he would become a rich man. And when he woke he decided he would do as the dream had told him. He cut a branch from the tree to make a stick for his journey, and he set off to walk.
But when he got to the city he saw no riches. So he sat in the road and wept.
And as he sat, two gentlemen passed by, and one said: “If that fool knew what wealth lies beneath the roots of the tree from which that stick came he would weep no more.”
So the pedlar got up and walked home again. He went into his garden and dug beneath the tree, and there he found a great treasure.
That is my story, too. Only by learning much and travelling far, but coming home to work out my life, did I truly find the Edge, and the gold in my own backyard.