Up from paradise...: New writing by Alinah Azadeh
Posted on 16 August 2024Towner commissioned artist and writer Alinah Azadeh to imagine and describe what visiting Black Robin Farm might be like in the future. You can read an extract below, but the full piece is available to read here.
Alinah has written this short fiction from the point of view of a child visiting Black Robin Farm in years to come.
She promises me that on this first trip, as Spring rises, it will feel more like flying than walking once we reach the top of the Downs.
I am still quite young and she isn’t yet too old for journeys like this, like her mother, so we can do this she says, we have the energy. As always, she makes it all an adventure, like walking through a poem. She tells me it will be like crossing an invisible bridge, not only from town to countryside, but into another world.
Her proof is that we begin at a PARADISE DRIVE street sign at the far end of town. My small, bright green trainers lead us up the red brick steps, the bumps along the flint walls graze my fingertips, my right hand in hers. We stop to sniff the lichen in between the flints, they look like fluorescent paint splodges but smell woody, or fishy in parts. Then we follow the fingerposts over the shaved carpet of the golf course, and already it feels like a treasure hunt.
Steeper and steeper we climb, through the shredded light shadows back into the woods, or what we come to call The Time Tunnel, which then blows us out into the free, open space of the Downs. Or the Ups and Downs as they soon become – we both love renaming things, making them our own. Once up there, we face the sharp, fresh wind, pass spiky gorse all dotted bright yellow, which smells just like coconut now the weather is warmer. A few sheep stare hard at us and her favourite birds, the skylarks, sing their electronic symphony, as she calls it. As we head up towards Beachy Head road and over towards The Farm, she tells me you don’t hear the roar of motorbikes and cars as much nowadays, in what she calls these fading years of fossil fuels, it’s more the hum of electric buses and hydrogen-powered cars, alongside the cyclists, walkers, hikers and wanderers like us.
We twist back round to see how far we’ve come, take in the downward rush of the hill towards the sea, flashes of creamy wave crests, the pier glistening white and gold, stretching out its fingertips towards France. She was right about the flying, and here we are, at The Edge of the World.