Broads School B, Walk 3

Down School Hill, we go past the “waste” field “where plants grow”; the children don't know much about it, they don't go in there because it's closed off, though I’m told that some older kids do go in there.

Turn onto New Road; there's a “bungee bush” on the corner; “I play here, we crawl into it like dens." Why is it the bungee bush? “yeah if you go over it if you jump up and down it throws you up and down.” A boy adds, “we hide out there,” before another girls joins in. “Yeah, I used to jump on it and say bungee bush, bungee bush.”

We pass by the school field: “no-one else can go there”; they don't play there outside of schooltime because it's locked. There's a general sense that it's not seen as a particularly safe place.

Crossing over the farm, several of the children bounce into the mud, shouting “Muddy Puddles!” One boy who crosses this way to get to school tells me, “Careful, cos there's lots of moles here”, and says that in the winter the path is icy and you can even skid along. Another girl walks dogs here, and says that people cross here to go to the school in one direction and the pub in the other. I ask what grows on this field. One boy says “Looks like carrots”; another girl says “wheat”, and the Teaching Assistant agrees with her, but this is disputed by other children: “I've seen beet here, and carrots”. Asking what they think the place where we’re standing will be like in 100 years, they tell me that houses will be built on the field “to make use of the land”.

We cross the bridge over the railway line. One girl tells me “it's spooky on the train, you can see the water and it feels like you're going to go over the side”. We are heading towards the park. A boy tells me very definitively that the park hasn't been played on for 14 days. “I've been sitting in the village hall and haven't seen anyone there.” Several of the children ask if they can go through the “secret gate” to the park, and lead the group that way.

The pile of wood for a bonfire is still here from November; it was too windy to light it on Guy Fawkes, so it's just remained there. One girl knows about pear and apple trees here, and picks the fruit in the summer. Another tells me they pick blackberries here.

Crossing the farm again on route to the Riverside road, several comment on the smell “If you sniff the air you can smell cow manure”; but one girl says it doesn’t matter: “I'm used to the smell”.

We pass by the war memorial, where the children tell me they come on the 11th November. By the memorial there is a bank; one girl tells me that she climbed up there once and fell in the nettles and brambles, then starts to explain that time team had come here and excavated planes that had been shot down.

“You might want to be careful at the river because of the dead duck” - somebody had seen a dead duck there recently, and the body had apparently remained there for “weeks” - though it turned out that it wasn't there now.

Water is bubbling up from a crack in the road, and one boy thinks its coming up from the river. “I think it might flood” - he points out that they've got the flood gates up now “to keep the water out”.

We stand for the sensory exercise: the children note a couple of sounds: “I thought I heard a cormorant, and I see one so it must have been that”; “A sound like a small bell” (the children then worked out that this sound must have been the clinking of ropes on masts)

I ask what will be different here in 100 years: The children think there will be fewer boats, and that the river will change and widen. As a result, the reeds on the other side won't be there, and there'll be different kinds of birds. Also, somebody might build a bridge, and there’ll be houses close to the river. I ask whether this is because the river will get wider, or whether they mean more houses will be built; they answer “both”.

There's a lot of enthusiasm for going up Middle Hill (which wasn't planned on our route), so we do; it turns out that this is the street where several of them live, or have relations who live here, and there’s a strong sense of how important family is to the geography of Broads VillageB.

Finally, we pass by the chipshop, which one girl says she “goes to every day, and there is a dog there that comes to say hello he is always hungry”.