When I’m not writing

         

It’s about ten minutes on my bike to the shallow glacial valley, and downhill for most of it. I let the wheels take me fast, then chicken out half way down under the concrete flyover. The brakes squeal and the old frame judders.

The river cuts East Anglia in two forming the boundary between Norfolk and Suffolk. It’s been a symbolic divide for hundreds of years. The north is flatter and exposed to the icy winds. Its flint houses, like its people, stand square and quiet. Not like the folks who live in cities. Suffolk is softer. It undulates, its light is gentler, and many of its people still live in houses made of wattle and daub built four hundred years ago.  Roofs are covered with a thick layer of straw, each topped by a decorative ridge unique to its thatcher; or if the house is close to the river the thatch is made of the longer lasting, more expensive reed. Suffolk is closer to London, and it shows: people, cars, and life moves faster.

This river – which draws me to its banks when my mind refuses to be still – begins about twenty miles west as a spring surrounded by a sedge marsh. It’s the home of the rare fen raft spider. Like many arachnids, it has gruesome habits I prefer not to think about. This elusive creature, which favours life in the old peat diggings, injects its prey with digestive enzymes and sucks out its insides that have been transformed by some primeval alchemy into a nutritious soup. I have never seen this happen nor seen the emptied skins that result. I remain content just to read about it.

The valley is full of cattle now, as it always is in summer. Mostly owned by one family who, according to modern folklore, fetched up one day in a gypsy wagon and finding it suited them, stayed. This was forty or fifty years ago. I sometimes wonder why so few sheep graze this wide flat marsh, as they would do far less damage to the soft ground than the heavy hooves of cattle in a wet summer. But few farmers here seem to favour sheep, except perhaps the incomers from the cities – the so called hobby farmers – who often keep a handful of rare breeds that look pretty in a paddock next to the house.

The road is flat as it follows the river’s path. I stop often to look at anything – a flower, a tree, roadkill – parking my bike in the hawthorn and alder hedge, or against a stubby oak or bowed crack willow. I learned early on in my cycling career that it made more sense to dismount and watch the heron cruising silently overhead, rather than careering into a ditch with a buckled front wheel.

Part of the marsh has been fenced off into a small holding pen. A young cow stands passively, her head lowered, shoulders slumped, as she watches over what is probably her first calf. It’s dead. She has guarded it now for three days, and it pains me to look. Her water bucket is nearly empty and her udder is tight. There is plenty of grass, but she does not chew the cud. Why does the farmer not come? Should I knock on a few doors? I know I won’t because somebody obviously knows about it.

There are dozens of strange webs by the entrance to the meadow. They appear in a long line, as if by design, on the banks of a dry ditch leading down to the riverbank. They’re always there, even in the winter, but I have never seen the spiders. Their webs are funnel shaped, and it’s clear if any insect fell in it would never get out again. There are many species that weave this type of web that carry a painful or even dangerous bite, but a quick look on the internet told me they were common residents here, and quite harmless to man or woman.

I come to a small hamlet and turn down a lane towards the river, stopping by the old millhouse and its line of terraced cottages. The brick bridge, heavily discoloured by yellow and orange lichen, has two arches: one to take the weir water, the other, much bigger, is fed by water passing through an open sluice. Some of the stories I write begin their lives here. Some need the silence of a hot, dry spell to be born; others demand a violence, that disturbing energy that comes from the overwhelming river as it bursts through the arch bringing farmers’ rubbish, whole limbs of trees, and once, a bloated black and white cow. These stories always come too quickly – they bombard me and demand to be written down then and there. But unless I hold some overriding image in my head, I can’t retrieve them – even after cycling home as fast as I can and sinking into my thinking chair with a mug of tea.

                       I remember I’m hungry. Today I am lucky. The wind is behind me and pushes me up the hill.

*

Advertisement

grey cat

 

 

I once had a cat who only visited at night. He was born on the farm so I thought of him as mine, but he knew and I knew he belonged only to himself. Gerald wore the history of his nightly wars on his skin. Half an ear was gone, the other tattered. At first I thought his battle cries in the oak meadow were the shriek of a fox, and I worried for my chickens who insisted on sleeping in the trees overhanging the pond. I soon learned that foxes are quiet when they’re hungry.

A good jumper even for a cat, he would visit by leaping onto the conservatory roof  and shrinking himself thin he squeezed through the half open window onto my writing desk. He left paw prints of mud and blood on the blank page, then arched his back, waved his tail in the air like a sail pulled tight to catch the wind, and knead my chest until I got out of bed to feed him. I had been bloodied. Was now part of his gang. After he had eaten, he would sit by the kitchen door and clean every part of himself  – his hawk-like talons splayed as he stretched a back leg into the air to be washed. He sat quietly and waited for the door to be opened – he never did get the hang of the cat flap.

With long, grey fur that made him look like an expensive lap cat, he collected burrs and twigs and bits of broken shell from the snails he liked to eat, but unlike his sister, he never had the temperament to sit still for long. But I was happy he didn’t spend much time in the house as he left his stink everywhere: on doorposts, on laundry straight off the line waiting to be folded, and on me. Even pots left to dry on the draining board could not escape the stench of his tomcat urine. Perhaps he didn’t know where he really belonged, so he marked everything anyway.

But the last time he visited he broke his night time rule. He came in the afternoon. I regarded it as a compliment. He walked in through the open door and stretched out on the sofa. Grown thin overnight, his fur had an odour I did not know. He shivered so I wrapped him in a towel. His body leaked fluids – yet he kept his dignity. He had come home to die.

I think he had been poisoned. I still think of him sometimes – particularly when I hear the night time yowl of the fox, or a tomcat from a neighbouring farm comes to mark out his territory on the vacant patch.

Things are different now. The chickens are gone, and I sleep with my window closed because these days I feel the cold. I miss the deep purring from his chest and the bloodiness on mine – and sometimes I wake and cannot be sure he’s not there. Perhaps he wants to be let in. I get out of bed, wrap myself in a blanket and open my window. I sit at my writing desk and listen. But now there are other noises – sounds that demand nothing of me. The wail of the curlew, the sharp cry of a rabbit being taken by a stoat – simple sounds of other lives not connected with me. So I close the window, and take up my pen.

~

 

cut off

 

 

On the shortest day the rain came – flinging itself at the valley and blackening the earth. Water seeped up the brick path into her garden and last year’s grasses waved aimless as old paddy fields. Her breathing came too quick, too thin. Worms drifted, torpid and white, bees floated on their backs spinning dizzy like coracles. The violence quietened her spirit, and giving in, she turned in on herself and ceased to see.

Her energy stripped bare, her body slowed. She grew the thick fur of a dormouse. Taking blankets, she made a nest and surrounded herself with books and warming soup. Lighting a fire in the hearth, she began to dream. Taking a pen, she wrote of things that no longer mattered – remembering events that could not possibly have taken place. Her consciousness became continuous, day and night fusing seamless. Nothing stopped, and no thing remembered to begin.

There was no brightness to touch or gather on those short grey days. Clouds hung heavy and full pressing down on her like an unwanted lover. The river meadows became bogs that might swallow her, her trees poking out like sentinels, roots holding their breath for a sun almost forgotten. Rats swam mindless of the farmer’s gun, and swans gathered in loose. No streets, no paths to roam. Only silence.

There was no one to explain, so she used her ears. Climbing the stairs to open the long thin window that faced the river, she cocked her head, holding her breath tight in her chest. No birdsong to justify, no swish of wind to condone, no sense of coming or going. Sounds that had always been there – telling all yet demanding nothing – were gone.

And as the waters stirred, she became indifferent, and her being grew light.

…

Inspired by ‘The Being Of Nothing’. Samuel Beckett

they say

 

 

I sleep deeply the night before I go to the wood. The final dream tantalizes, staying only for an instant as I wake before it vanishes like a slippery brown trout in the muddy depths of the river.

With the dreams staining my mood, I climb the padlocked gate into one of the oldest woodlands in England. I am now in another world. A place of ancient oaks, a vast thicket where animists and Druids still chant peacefully in celebration, and I am free to dream whatever I want. The wood feels alive with something I can’t quite articulate. Some may call it magic, a place where shape shifting happens, others will say they are simply unnerved to be walking in something so like the primeval forest that once covered our crowded island. The past is written on the bark of these trees like a pristine memory, and I feel as if I am being watched.

The trees are packed close together, their branches entangled. They say there are over four thousand oaks in this medieval deer park, and many are over four hundred years old. There are many legends of wrong doings and murders, but the one I like best I want to believe is true. Monks once owned the land, and when they were evicted in the sixteenth century they were allowed to plant one more crop: they chose acorns.

But the wood is more famous for its holly trees. They are the largest I have ever seen, and bear little resemblance to those grown in suburbia. It is the holly that takes away the light. It seems to suck it out of the air and swallow it. Thick, tangled bracken grows in these dark places underneath their evergreen canopy, and impenetrable bramble reaches out with its long, spiny tentacles to tear at my skin. But the wood is kinder underfoot, made soft and spongy from hundreds of years of leaf mould and so-called neglect. But I still have to watch where I put my feet, as the ground beneath the leaves hides wandering tree roots waiting to trip me up.

It’s hard to walk upright. I must crouch and creep as if I am in an unfamiliar cave. It would be easier if I were child-size as there is a distinct line above where the deer cannot reach to graze the leaves, the bark, and the young shoots. The holly and oak live close together. Some even appear to be growing out of the same root. I do not understand why this should be so, but I doubt human hands are responsible for this strange coupling.

There is death here, as well as life. Many of the oaks are hollow, their heartwood long dead. I choose one and wriggle inside. Full of cobwebs, it is pinpricked with hundreds of holes where insects have lived and will live again. It smells of damp and fungi. Each tree is an entire city, an ecosystem that I would have missed if I had not crawled inside.

The oaks are neglected pollards. The upper branches were removed every few years and harvested as a vital crop for house and barn building, for tools, for virtually anything. This makes the oaks grow into strange shapes, squat and wide, with thick curled limbs like mythical serpents for branches. They are giants with faces. I see the head and trunk of an elephant, a wolf howling at the moon, a creature, almost human with eyes and mouth, and one large ear of bracket fungus.

A fox calls, but there is no echo and no reply. Someone has draped a yellow glass necklace on a branch, pigeon and crow feathers have been sewn together in the shape of a cross and hooked over a low branch with a piece of red ribbon turning yellow with moss.

I am in a green cathedral, and somehow I expect to see a Green Man. Perhaps it is him watching me while his giants sleep. I flush a pheasant from beneath my feet and it flutters noisily away with the clacking noise that makes my heart race. The spell is broken. Something shifts in my head, so I turn and quickly retrace my steps.

~

death

 

 

 

It stirred between the folds of the curtains the day I left the heating on. The red admiral flew circles around the orb of my japanese lantern – but it was not the sun. It settled on the painting of red and blue and green – but it was not a nectar garden. It flew again and again at the window – but it did not feel the light of spring.

It would have stayed forever on that cold pane. I opened the window. The butterfly flew towards the full moon rising over the oaks – already rimed with frost.

~

They say

I sleep deeply the night before I go to the wood. The final dream tantalizes, staying only for an instant as I wake before it vanishes like a slippery brown trout in the muddy depths of a river.

With the dreams staining my mood, I climb the padlocked gate into one of the oldest woodlands in England. I am now in another world. A place of ancient oaks, a vast thicket where animists and Druids still chant peacefully in celebration, and I am free to dream whatever I want. The wood feels alive with something I cannot quite articulate. Some may call it magic, a place where shape shifting happens, others will say they are simply unnerved to be walking in something so like the primeval forest that once covered our crowded island. The past is written on the bark of these trees like a pristine memory, and I feel as if I am being watched.

The trees are packed close together, their branches entangled. They say there are over four thousand oaks in this medieval deer park, and many are over four hundred years old. There are many legends of wrong doings and murders, but the one I like best may well be true. Monks once owned the land, and when they were evicted in the sixteenth century they were allowed to plant one more crop: they chose acorns. But the wood is more famous for its holly trees. They are the largest I have ever seen, and bear little resemblance to those grown in suburbia.

It is the holly that takes away the light. It seems to suck it out of the air, then swallow it. Thick, tangled bracken grows in these dark places underneath their evergreen canopy, and impenetrable bramble reaches out with its long, spiny tentacles to tear at my skin. But the wood is kinder underfoot, made soft and spongy from hundreds of years of leaf mould and so-called neglect. But I still have to watch where I put my feet, as the ground beneath the leaves hides wandering tree roots waiting to trip me up.

 It’s hard to walk upright. I must crouch and creep as if I am in an unfamiliar cave. It would be easier if I were child-size as there is a distinct line above where the deer cannot reach to graze the leaves, the bark, and the young shoots. The holly and oak live close together. Some even appear to be growing out of the same root. I do not understand why this should be so, but I doubt human hands are responsible for this strange coupling.

There is death here, as well as life. Many of the oaks are hollow, their heartwood long dead. I choose one and wriggle inside. Full of cobwebs, it is pinpricked with hundreds of holes where insects have lived and will live again. It smells of damp and fungi. Each tree is an entire city, an ecosystem that I would have missed if I had not crawled inside.

The oaks are neglected pollards. The upper branches were removed every few years and harvested as a vital crop for house and barn building, for tools, for virtually anything. This makes the oaks grow into strange shapes, squat and wide, with thick curled limbs like mythical serpents for branches. They are giants with faces. I see the head and trunk of an elephant, a wolf howling at the moon, a creature, almost human with eyes and mouth, and one large ear of bracket fungus.

A fox calls, but there is no echo and no reply. Someone has draped a yellow glass necklace on a branch, pigeon and crow feathers have been sewn together in the shape of a cross and hooked over a low branch with a piece of red ribbon turning yellow with moss.

I am in a green cathedral, and somehow I expect to see a Green Man. Perhaps it is him watching me while his giants sleep. I flush a pheasant from beneath my feet and it flutters noisily away with the clacking noise that makes my heart race. The spell is broken. Something shifts in my head, I turn and quickly retrace my steps.

~

rook

A soft thud. A muffled squawk. The riffling of frightened feathers. A bird has fallen three storeys down the chimney and cannot get out.

Anything that flies terrifies me. I have no idea why. It is something primal, a visceral response I have no control over. The longer I leave the bird in there the more likely I am to panic. I fetch gloves, an old towel. Lifting the cast iron inspection hatch of the old fireplace I feel my way in with one gloved hand. I touch tail feathers. Moving my fingers up the body I feel a backbone, wing joints. Keeping my hand still, I reach in with the other. Then suddenly I grab the bird, afraid it will flutter away, afraid I will injure it. I feel its lightness beneath my hands, feel its bones full of air. I remember the heron skeleton among the reeds on the marshes; each bone like a brittle sponge, full of air pockets, weighing nothing.

Now the bird is still. I cannot read it. It’s holding its breath. Perhaps defeated, perhaps waiting for its moment to escape. I bring it into the sunlight, and in a violent rush of energy it pecks me. My hands shake. I hear my heart. I put the bird firmly on the towel beside me and cover it. Wrapping it tight as if it’s a dangerous animal. It cannot escape.

It is one of this year’s rooks. Its plumage is not black but the darkest iridescent green or blue depending on how the light catches it. Its adolescent beak not much bigger than a blackbird’s. Rooks are clever birds; although this one, probably due to its youth, was not clever enough not to fall down my chimney. They are not aggressive – I know it will not mean to hurt me. I had a friend at university who kept one in his room, and it seemed utterly benign. But like jackdaws and humans, they are thieves. They will steal twigs from one another’s nests, but never put up much of a fight. There are always other twigs to be had. I like to call the male chivalrous at courting time. After choosing his mate, or reuniting with her from the previous spring, he will follow her around with a small gift in his beak.  If she accepts, she is his.

And they like to play with the wind. Reminding me of aerobatic pilots in biplanes, they take pleasure is barrel rolls, flicks, tight turns, and dive bombing – pulling up at the last minute and stalling above their nest, tail feathers splayed like air brakes.

I wriggle through the broken fence into the wood. It is not my wood, but no one ever goes there except the odd muntjac. It has not been managed for many years. Dead trees have been left where they fell, the coppiced hazel gone wild and spindly. There is much debris underfoot – a soft and nutritious mulch from years of leaf fall. The few dead elms still standing are home to many insects, but the rooks, usually preferring this species to nest in, will not make their homes in the brittle, leafless branches.

I head towards the rookery. There are maybe twenty nests. Some say rooks sing, but I would not call this music. They chatter, they squeal, taunt and complain. They remind me of the end of a children’s birthday party when too many games and e-numbers have got the better of them. My rook squirms inside the towel. I hold it tighter and walk into the glade beneath the rookery. All that remains of the bluebells are spiky withered leaves. There is plenty of dog’s mercury and red dead nettle. The birds raise the alarm and cackle, scattering into the sky in all directions as if I were a predator.

I unwrap the bird. It seems to be half asleep. Its eyes stare blankly and it doesn’t move. Setting it on the ground, I walk backwards and sit, leaning against a tree. Minutes later the birds return to their nests, making sounds that seem to signal the danger is past. My rook makes a small noise. Like a chirrup, it’s a baby sound. It’s saying, I am back, come and get me.

It calls for what seems like a long time. Venus is shining through the thick canopy, and the sky is turning to ink. The youngsters request becomes more insistent. A rook glides silently down and hops from side to side. There is more talk, and the baby half hops, half limps towards it. The adult splays its tail feathers. Something has been decided. There is yet more conversation and the rookery joins in. Then both birds flap noisily, and the adult leads the way back home.

The rookery is quieter now. It’s nearly dark, and still they talk. But their sounds are becoming quieter, more hesitant, as if they know the others are trying to sleep. A tawny owl hoots, another replies, and I pick up a stray feather and put it in my pocket.

~

Image courtesy Nat Morley

This piece is a revised version blogged spring 2014

Nature’s ordinary artistry

It’s nothing special within the grand scheme of things: an old path sandwiched between two large fields. Gaudy, scentless commercial roses grow in long, straight rows to the north, acres of insipid yellow rape that makes a poor honey, to the south. Probably ancient, although there are no obvious signs of this – the path was shrouded in tarmac maybe a hundred years ago and turned into a single track road. It links the small market town with a tiny hamlet two miles away where there was once a railway station. After the Beeching axe fell on the rail network in the mid sixties, the station was closed and the lane became largely redundant. Eventually it was blocked off at either end and became a pathway again.

Each year more and more wild flowers push like small miracles through the cracks in the bleached tarmac, and the rich verges become thicker and deeper, overflowing onto what becomes an increasingly narrower track. Nature is silently and gracefully taking back what is hers.

The current hedgerow is not so old if one goes by the rule of one species for every hundred years. Most of it is hawthorn; the remainder blackthorn, the berries of which produce a heady drink when steeped in gin. There are a few specimen oaks, which may be up to two hundred years old. They are beautiful and healthy, and grow in stature and presence each year, in the way that trees do. Today I found remnants of an older hedge the other side of the northerly ditch – the only evidence I have found so far that the path could be much older than it seems.

I cycle here nearly every day, except when the snow is too thick:

But today it is not:

The verges are full of rustling creatures, of yarrow, stitchwort, garlic mustard, dead and stinging nettle,

dock, and masses of frothing cow parsley. Nothing rare or unusual, but enough

to give anyone pleasure who can still their mind for an hour or so in this haven that has escaped the brutality of monoculture.

Soon the lane will look like this:

And this:

Why is this ordinary place so special to me? Partly because I regard it as a benign familiar. A wren may flitter on the edge of my vision like a ghost of a moth as it hunts for insects, a weasel may cross my path intent on some business I would prefer not to witness: all appear mindless of my spinning wheels. The trees, hedges and the fecundity of the place, silences the movement of traffic less than a mile away.

I know the spots where the garlic mustard will soon be ready to pick for salads, where the cow parsley gets the most sun from the gaps in the hedges and grows bigger than the rest, and I know where I can reach the best blackberries without getting scratched.

It is a place I trust, and it is always generous in its giving. As I cycle along this small insignificant track, I immediately feel a sense of belonging. I feel calmed and cleansed and cradled. And it is here when the ideas often come for the day’s writing; and if my mind still races, I’ll find a gap in the hedge and sit in the meadow until I can breathe deep and long.

~

The Day The Rains Came

First the seagulls arrived. Mewling and shrieking, tracing steep turns around my chimney pots – their wings stiff and wide as if they were aerobatic planes. They seemed to be arguing, undecided. In the late afternoon as the clouds scudded thick and grey from the north west, the sunset hidden, they glided into the meadow close to the house, spreading out to sleep in loose circles like fairy rings.

The barn owl stayed silent that night, and the blackbird that had been waking me for a week with her hopeful song, was gone. Before the rains came, the wind grasped the few leaves still on the trees and hurled them to the ground, and the gusts rattled the old casement windows so violently I stuffed bits of cardboard in the cracks to quieten them.

In the morning I went to the old mill. I always go there when I’m disturbed. The river was rising. Water heaved itself under the bridge making whirlpools in the mill pond, it’s character suddenly vigorous, aggressive, uncompromising. The branching tips of the leaning willows swirled above the broken surface of the water in the river’s turbulent wind.

Later the wood upriver of the mill would flood, and the top heavy willows

would lean as their roots lost their grasp in the sodden ground.

But the snowdrops would survive.

Emerging from their submersion, muddy, no less worse for wear…

After four weeks of rain, the stretch of river where the otters live slipped over into the glacial valley.

It became a lake. Fences hidden, swans everywhere.

And for now it remains, in all its beauty.

But today the sky brightens. The animals know,  and the blackbird returns to sing.

…

The Being Of Nothing

An irresistibly beautiful paragraph from ‘Watt’, Samuel Beckett (Grove Press, 1959).

Courtesy Wikiquote

        The long blue days, for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exhausted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day long into hiding. And all the sounds, meaning nothing. Then at night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again all over the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.

Media courtesy of shimmeringways.wordpress.com