I am standing in a walled garden in Kent that belongs to a Jacobean mansion; I am far away from anyone else. It is a grey day. The house is now a school and I am in part of the grounds not permissible to students. It's not a school day. The wall surrounding me is around two meters high and made from crumbling sandstone blocks that are heavy and strong, the wall is thick and secure. It could have been there for a hundred years. Every thing is a dark wintry green, it feels dank. The surfaces of the stones are slippery and covered in moss due to the wet weather and it being autumnal. It's a mild, but rather windy day in October.
I am standing opposite one of the corners of the garden. It is a rectangle. The garden is the size of half a tennis court and with the high walls it possesses the feeling of such. In the centre of the space there is a disused swimming pool. It is shallow at one end (opposite) and deeper towards me. As I'm looking straight ahead and standing at the bottom left corner of the pool I cannot see the water at its deepest, but I can see where it fills up the deep end and levels out half way, brown and thick like treacle, because it's full of leaves and years of sticks and rotten insect bodies.
All of the tiles in the pool are relatively clean, from the recent rain, they are mostly white, with a row of sun stained blue ones, one from the top. A few have fallen away and some have small plants growing from them. Roots reaching down to little pools and flowers and weeds together ascend for light. Orange and brown soggy leaves litter the bottom.
From where I am I can see steps near the edge on the long right hand side, stainless steel loops over to three rungs on the inside, they are slightly rusty. There is a smooth discoloured tile about a foot long all the way around the pool, with a rounded smooth inner edge, and then two meters of concrete that reaches the sandstone wall that has split here and there and has weeds breaking through.
The wall also has creepers and ivy's hanging down from the top edge, which is flat and has large trees and rhododendrons around the edge, making the whole space feel enclosed. Some willow hangs from so high up that to my left on the periphery of my vision it seems to create a fantastical peppermint wall. The flower beds are also filled with plants.
With the pool empty and the high walls it feels like an amphitheatre. There is the bottom half of a green glass bottle, no longer sharp about a foot away from where the willow branches can reach no further.
