Reference for silos

This is a piece I wrote for a life writing competition earlier this year. I don't have anything to show for it, but I liked it enough to zuzh it up and share at year's end. I hope you like it too, and here's to a merrier 2021...

Pinned at the north end of the street I grew up on, the hill on London Road banks down, sharply, giving way to the River Gipping half a mile down the road. In the valley it creates, you can see miles to the west; the tree line is barely geography’s watermark on the blurred bound of the horizon. And there they rose up, stoic: four great silos, greyed out by time and bad business.

It’s six months ago and I’m walking upriver. Something I used to do for adolescence’s sake, now an imitation, trying to draw nostalgia out from the undertow of adulthood. The Gipping is slack and in algal bloom. Just beyond the final railway bridge towards the edge of town, there is a path that veers right into a steep hillside of fresh weeds. I climb in expectation and find, at the top, three layers of fencing: each one heavier than the last. The diagonals and straight lines make for six sides of defence: peering through the hex that parcels old visitors out, I can see the shadows of those silos. The substructure, all pipe work and corrugated corridor, has totally dissembled. The factory that stood here has carried itself off into a history book. In its place, a huge white cube stands standoffish. It is nothing from all angles, no words, no signs; an impregnable identity. Not like the old silos: into a tree next to the in triplicate barrier, a successful nostalgic has scrawled “RIP Sugar Beet”.

I scramble down and walk the river as if I still know it. The white cube watches; its makers have cut the canopy so it can keep watch for Sugar Beet acolytes in stereo. 

When I get home I seek the white cube on the internet. It is a “distribution centre” for the sort of company that tries to be faceless. But its eyes watch even from London Road.

It’s five years ago and I’m walking upriver. Something I do for boredom’s sake, in that beautiful May-time lull at the end of the school year, a summer that will be out-done by its anticipation. It takes some way along the Gipping before Ipswich falls behind, so I lose some time before slinking from the shadow of its sleeping suburbs. Today, I climb in expectation and find two layers of fence, with a gaping hole nervously pried to allow occasional trespass. On the crest beyond the fence is a clean slate before the land banks into a bracken, messy, nature protecting its new domain: the great silos, switched off more than ten years before as the British sugar industry simmered down. They are sleeping like the suburbs. Three quarters of a century in commission, they have seen war and peace and, amongst other things for other people, the north end of the street I grew up on.

I salute the silos, survey the crest, and return the following day with revellers and bottles of something strong and a pack of pre-loved playing cards. We drink to Sugar Beet and scrawl on the trees in our heads.

It’s fifteen years ago and I’m walking upriver. Something I did for friendship’s sake, the first time this far along with a boy from primary school. His hair is just as blonde as mine but far longer, reaching to the nape where, on his back same as mine, sweat is collecting in the May-time heat. He is wearing a vest top and old jeans and a squint for the sun, low and auburn. The river is temporary malachite, crystalline in memory. Fishermen chip at its edges. Following the boy with the flaxen hair, I climb a bare hill I do not know without a single expectation. A single, wire-thin fence, no hex, withered by the slight of eastern winds and almost welcoming to two thrill-seeking boys. We muddle through, beyond the crest, through the nest that nature is working on along the factory’s parallel banks. The pipe work and framing sit silent but solid. Everything is in its right place. We stop short of entry, unaware of what we will never be able to see again. Stepping back, there is a grace to Sugar Beet, a gratitude in our choice to leave it observed but untouched.

Footprints left and pictures taken, we leave. Marking each individual entrance and exit we pass, discerning now-obsolete infrastructure. A smoky, caramelised whiff sticks to our clothes and lingers on the air. I walk home, a friend I know better now alongside, both of us dirtied by the tracks we’ve taken. From afar, the silos’ shape speak to their purpose just the same as their freshly fading odour. And we think nothing of how they might disappear: they seem eternal, like the emotional fortitude of our parents or the wallpaper on our childhood bedroom walls.

It’s months upon months, years on years, building upon one another: the silos’ sense on their landscape, lost fragility, face-value and use-value in one. I saw them in all directions. I travelled to sepia-tone disused factory space on what was a dilapidated, pint-can-strewn riverbank and found the absent beauties of a three-quarter-century. For what? Paul Theroux claimed in The Old Patagonia Express that “the journey, not the destination, matters” – a pull from the classic Ralph Waldo Emerson attribution. In a push up the river valley that the silos and their shadows defined, drawing from them so much more than the sweet syrup they produced, I place Theroux in doubt. To my mind, it’s not the destination, not the journey, but the reference point for the latter, that matters. And all of us, across every superficial boundary, can curse hexes of institutional fences and scrawl on our subconscious trees and trespass into fresh, caramelised experiences.

Pinned at the north end of the street I grew up on, I stare down the white cube’s gaze and dare it to smell our sentinels in shadow.