Retracing my steps

Starting small… a short story for Bri... Brunel in a biographical micro fiction

Retracing my steps

“Is it a maze?”

“A lawn labyrinth,” he said. “A maze has lots of ways to reach the centre, a labyrinth only one.”
(Chapter 26, The Undoing of Arlo Knott)

Most of the time authors carefully choose their settings, but sometimes the story just revs its engine and takes you off somewhere. Hence I found, completely by accident, this one little scene in The Undoing of Arlo Knott taking place at an old workplace of mine – Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham.

Arlo lives a mistake-free life, but when he finds himself in the garden of this old stately home, he is experiencing something that is nearly regret. He has come straight from a spell in Colombia clearing landmines in his own, ethically dubious way, and walking Woodbrooke’s lawn labyrinth was the perfect way to focus his mind on the implications of not putting a foot wrong. In the book, it’s a breathing space – a green oasis amid the hustle and bustle of Birmingham.

That’s exactly what Woodbrooke is – a green oasis, unexpected white chocolate walls just a treeline away from the busy Bristol road. I went there for the first time in a few years earlier this month. On that record-breaking hot September Saturday when every instinct told me to go to the beach, I hit the M5 instead, purely to visit an old workplace – what was that about?

Earlier this year I’d heard that Woodbrooke, rather unthinkably, is closing down at the end of October, so the Heritage Open Days weekend was potentially my last chance to see the place again.

It’s ridiculous, I know, to get so nostalgic about a mere workplace, but I was barely out of university when I started there as a marketing assistant, and when you’re young everything makes more of an impression. And Woodbrooke, in so many ways, is special.

Grade II listed Woodbrooke, like a writer’s dream, was built on pen-nibs. Or rather, that was how Josiah Mason made his money and could afford to have the mansion constructed in 1830. The clay was quarried from what is now the lake. Later the house was bought by George Cadbury once he had set up his chocolate factory in Bournville, and in 1903 he gave it to the Quakers.

Since then it has hosted everyone from peace activists to celebrities, notably Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s. There was a myth that he lit a fire in his room for cooking and burnt a hole in the floor, the more genuine trivia being that he brought his own goat for milk (though it didn’t stay in room 12).

His visit is just one moment in a history that spans well over a century and is tangled with the roots of major movements – Quakers being major activists in everything from pacificism to climate change. It was a vibrant place, full of interesting, kind people. It was sometimes a challenging workplace, but in how many offices can you bring oars down to a lake at lunchtime and haul a tiny rowing boat out of its ancient boathouse?

I’ve never seen a lake so mirror-still as Woodbrooke’s, surrounded by its ancient woodland. It is, in every way, a place for quiet reflection. When I worked there we could barely move for tales of how it changed people’s lives, not only Quakers but also others who had come on a retreat or for a course, or even a conference.

So for me it was worth a few hours in a hot car to see the place again, the green oasis where Arlo Knott also unwittingly wound up while a police officer in Birmingham, investigating a theft of lead from the roof (which did happen). I spoke to staff, one of whom has been there 34 years, and felt the sadness of such a place closing its doors. I know Woodbrooke will have found its way into plenty of books, art and culture, far beyond its cameo in The Undoing of Arlo Knott. It’s that kind of place.

Woodbrooke… old and new

A few snaps from my recent visit, and some from times past. The book is a wonderful brief history of the house and garden written by gardener Barney Smith, which I helped to publish.