“Life’s a gas” sings Marc Bolan as a retro car drives through an idyllic looking English countryside in the opening scene of Wilding, the film about the Knepp estate. This simple scene has a visceral effect on me.
Among many other amazing things she refuses to write in a book, my mum was engaged to T Rex’s manager. Growing up with her incredible imagination and wordsmithing meant I feel as though I grew up in the 60s not the 90s. I have been called an old soul more times than I can count and I have a strong affinity to a slower time.
And so this combination of T Rex and the depiction of the English countryside jolted me into a strange sort of sadness, a yearning for a time that I have never known. This nostalgia is a feeling I get often and have had since I was a child when I worked out that it held a little secret, if I indulged it rather than dismissed it, I could pretend that I was inhibiting my idealised version of the past, running through fields and singing Beatles songs with my friends meant I spent the majority of my childhood in this past space.
I am an adult now and adulting forces me to spend most of my time in the real world which contains considerably more noise and less magic than that of my childhood. I am lucky enough to not just be able to watch a film about Knepp but go there, it’s just down the road and so in my adulting life I can now visit a place that not only transports me to my internal idyll (as most fields and forests do) but is a real life fairy tale.
Once upon a time a young couple were brave enough to have faith in the healers and the wise men. They put down their ploughs and modern machinery in pursuit of a reality completely forgotten. They had no books or rules to guide them, just faith, the pursuit of something better. And slowly the dead land around them began to repay that faith with life. Now, not only is life returning but magic is springing up, things people never believed possible from hundreds of butterflies across the land to cows and pigs so calm they will once again exist alongside humans. People returned to the land too, some to satisfy their eyes with beautiful things, some to fill their minds with relearning the lessons they had forgotten and some to fill their souls as they found the world they had been dreaming of is real after all. And on a perfect summer’s day in the middle of a near perfect summer, a 38 year old child smiled and whispered ‘I knew it’.
The End.
Rewilding my family 