July 9th – after an hour or two of exploring the Black Cock and canal with a good mate, I came back to Brownhills along the canal. I reflected on the changes – how the wildlife had come out of the barren, vile pollution I knew here as a child. I watched dragonflies, admired oak, beech and sycamore saplings, smelled the heavenly scent of a carpet of honeysuckle. Crab apples ripened gently in the sun, a common tern hunted for incautious fish, grey wagtails expertly pecked at insects. I scrambled up on to the bank at Catshill Junction, where in my youth had been a ditch the size of a railway cutting filled with brackish, foul water. I remembered a solitary, 45 degree telegraph pole titling forlornly with it’s wires draped in the soup that would now be 20 metres below my feet.
As I looked from the top, a group of teenagers – who probably weren’t old enough to remember the last century – were lazing on the grass in the centre of Clayhanger Common, basking in a patch of sunlight, completely unaware that had I done this at their age I’d be in the middle of a festering refuse dump.
That’s why I love this place, for all it’s faults.
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