Tired of walking, I stop and stand
Thinking back on my home town
But that road leading up the hill
Is telling me to move on
Country road…
(Hayao Miyazaki, Whisper of the Heart)
Lenzie is one of those towns that people move away from when they leave school. Often, they spend time living elsewhere, then move back when they have experienced more of the world and maybe had families of their own. I have walked with several people who followed that pattern – Paul, Alison, Michael. I have walked with young children (including my own) and those who have lived by the Moss for decades. But this is the first time I have persuaded someone in their teenage years to walk with me. And it is the first time I have walked with someone who has lived here their entire life.
Eloise is the granddaughter of my neighbours, Marie and John. She has recently turned 18 and has just finished her exams. Having received an unconditional offer from the University of Edinburgh, she plans to accept a place studying Global Law. There are many other subjects that she could have chosen – archaeology, international relations, and art were all possibilities. In the statement she wrote to apply for the archaeology course, she wrote about the Moss and the fact that we are always so close to history.
Eloise is feeling a huge sense of relief, and release, now that her school days are over. In the final couple of years, she doesn’t feel she found the right balance. Now that she anxiously awaits her grades (although some pressure has been taken away thanks to that offer), she looks forward to spreading her wings. Eloise will leave home for the first time, live in a city, and meet people from all over the world. As her course features a compulsory year abroad, she will also be living in another country in a little over two years. I sense that Eloise is ready for all this – that she needs it.
The tradition of ‘muck up day’, marking the last day of classes in the final school year, has become popular in Scotland over the last decade or so. I have often seen pupils creating (good natured) havoc round the town, wearing school shirts covered in messages and pictures, and sometimes armed with shaving foam and toilet paper for their pranks. At Eloise’s school – Lenzie Academy – the tradition is for everyone to head to ‘the Burroughs’, a part of the Moss to the south of the trainline, where school leavers gather after school is finished to get the party started, before they move on to celebrate in houses around the town. I haven’t heard of the Burroughs before, and I can’t find any references to it online. It is good to know that some local names and locations are known about through word of mouth still, and that not everything is captured by maps and databases.
Eloise tells me that she ended up hanging out with new people, who she hadn’t spent time with before that day. While she has often been seen as shy and lacking in self-confidence, she is coming out of her shell and finding new connections and opportunities. I think she will do really well at university, where there are so many different groups and societies and different types of people doing all sorts of things.
As we walk on a very hot day in May, the air is filled – as it was on my very first walk – with floating seeds. Eloise is a fan of Japanese anime and the films of Hayao Miyazaki, so she gets my reference to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in which the air is filled with toxic spores. The Moss looks like a scene from that film today, but these floating seeds are thankfully benign. Eloise recommends the Studio Ghibli film Grave of the Fireflies and I plan to watch it soon (although I know enough about the plot to emotionally prepare myself first). I try once more to photograph the air and once again the results are unimpressive. Another thing that can’t be captured digitally.
As we reach the far side of the Moss, Eloise tells me that as children, her friendship group used to come to the Moss to act like they were older, getting up to mischief and enjoying moments away from their teachers and parents. She says that her younger brother and his friends do the same now, and she looks back at her 13 year old self with a mix of pity and fondness. Over the years, others have been there too. Both Alison and Michael recalled their childhood visits to this place. Many have had some of their most formative experiences between the heather and the clouds.
This western border was the furthest point Eloise and her friends were allowed to roam. We are at the edge of her childhood geography, then. It is a perfect place to reflect on Eloise’s new phase of life, as she steps onto the threshold of new experiences in distant places. What a time of transitions! We look out beyond the Moss to an exciting future. I am reminded of my walk with Iona, when we stood here and looked out to Bishopbriggs and the Campsies, and imagined what the future had in store for her. I called this a liminal place then, and it seems so now as well.
Another of Eloise’s favourite Studio Ghibli films is Whisper of the Heart. In that film, there is a scene when 14 year-old Shizuku and a boy named Seiji cycle up to the top of a hill in Tama, Tokyo, and imagine their future together. She will be a writer and he will be a violin maker. They watch as the sun rises and casts its light over the city. The portrayal of place in these films is so vibrant and enchanting. I have wanted to visit Japan ever since I watched them for the first time. Eloise, also, wants to spend time in the metropolises of East Asia. She wonders about Hong Kong or Singapore.
As we talk of distant places and future possibilities, a plane flies overhead and I wonder where it is travelling to. The Moss feels like the starting point of a journey that could take Eloise anywhere she wants to go. But I am sure that like Shizuku and Seiji, she will often follow the country road back to her home town again.
