‘Oh, the Sheldon that used to belong to your grandmother’s family,’ Mum states, matter-of-factly, when I tell her where I have been. Volts flow through. Tingles along the bone.
‘What?’ I ask, sharply.
‘Yes, I think so; ask your father.’
He tells me that my grandmother’s family, the Archers, had owned Sheldon for about a hundred years; that it had been bought by Samuel Archer in 1818 and that my father’s grandfather, William, had been the last of the family to live there. The Archers had farmed extensively in the Teign Valley, with concentrations in both Christow and Doddiscombsleigh, though it had sometimes been hard to prove the intricacies of their connections.
‘The Christow Archers are one of the oldest branches in the Teign Valley, but at the same time the most difficult to trace,’ he says. ‘There are hundreds of Archers in the records, but it’s not possible in more than a handful of cases to work out their relationship to one another and their place in the family tree.’
I think of these ties, knotted and stretched, and the precariousness of our methods of connection. When the archives run out of documents and people with local knowledge pass away, only the land remains. And as even that recedes, will it seem fanciful that there were ever these interlocked lives working and growing in the soil? What happens to them? Will they be entirely displaced, or will some relics remain, like the rusted carriages of a disused train.
21
Under Wood
Before her.
Before her, him.
Before her, him. Before him, holly, elder, willow.
Before her, him. Before him, holly, elder, willow. Before them,
Before her, him. Before him, holly, elder, willow. Before them, us. Before us
Before her, him. Before him, holly, elder, willow. Before them, us. Before us, nothing.
When my father bought the field from the neighbouring farm in the early 1980s, it was yard upon yard of rippling corn. The millions of English acres ‘rescued’ from their natural state by the Normans were described by W. G. Hoskins as a ‘vast area … under wood’,1 along with scrubby heath and stony moorland. After the farmer had harvested the corn, my father was left with an expanse of stubble, from which the grass grew up naturally; not from any new seed, but as a pre-existing resident. And the holly grew itself, and the elder; and, rising up the hill from the stream, the bank of willow trees. But the towering firs, the silver birches and copper beeches were planted.
‘He used to come back from lecturing in Exeter and dig the holes and we’d put them in together,’ Mum says.
‘Were they already quite large when you planted them?’ I look up at their extraordinary height.
‘Oh no, they were small, we never thought they’d get this tall, but then he kept going abroad and the trees grew taller and taller until we couldn’t control them anymore. We just let them grow and every now and then cut one down for logs.’
Then he planted shrubs and flowers, so the top half of the field became garden, and the bottom a willow copse. I remember being consulted when he planted a hazel hedge in between copse and garden, to keep the neighbour’s goats out. I’m thinking of making a hazel archway, what do you think? I nodded furiously, thinking them the most romantic things. And he had sculpted the trees into an overhanging canopy that you could walk through, transitioning from one side of the field to the other. Though I always remember the archway being there, I suppose it must have come later, when the need for the hedge to serve as a goat barrier had ended.
While Hoskins speaks of men in prehistoric and historic times clearing large tracts of woodland by burning trees, and smaller trees and undergrowth by axe and mattock, my father operated more of a live-and-let-live policy, apart from with the flowers. Though this land had been previously tilled by the neighbouring farm and did not require drastic burning or cutting, it had never, at least in the past couple of centuries, been dug for flower beds. These he would dig meticulously, throwing all his weight in. As recently as three years ago, he had drawn plans for the herbaceous beds: intricate plottings of salvia, sage and meadowsweet; rudbeckia, purple flax and euphorbia.
Many childhood holidays had been spent visiting gardens. Arlington Court, Rosemoor Gardens, Greenway and Killerton. He would note the things he liked and transfer them to the field. We both loved the country gardens where herbs and flowers sprouted seemingly randomly among the vegetables. This, he recreated in the field, and pockets of the garden still function this way, though for the most part the vegetables have disappeared. Amid the strains of life then, I remember these garden visits offering a few deep hours of tranquillity.
I ask my father about the garden. He says that both the one here, and the one in Kenya, he really laboured in. Not just dropping in plants here and there, one by one, as and when you had the time, but more of an intense commitment. This surprises me at first, as we didn’t have much of a garden where I’d lived in Kenya. I learn, though, that he means his first house in Kenya, in Kangaru, which came with land. When I ask about the process of turning field into garden, he says he went about it ‘the Italian way’. I have no idea what this means and press him further. ‘Picturesque. And seasonal; asking yourself what you want flowering in the summer and what in winter.’ Though it’s December now, there is plenty of colour, a testament to this earlier seasonal thinking. And so it is with a developed sense of knowing that I encounter the acers, dogwood and sprigs of barberry that I pick to brighten his room, understanding now how they came to be there.
Now, under this wood, alongside flowers live rabbits, badgers, weasels, voles, squirrels and roe deer. Under this wood live bacteria, protozoa, fungal filaments. Under this wood live clastic sedimentary rocks, evaporite deposits, gypsum. These lay a rocky ribcage under the land. Higher uphill, a flush of sandstone. But here, in the sweep of claystone and mudstone, the soil runs its fine sediment over my fingers. Claystone separates from siltstone through a smooth rub along teeth.
I draw the earth to my tongue, tasting the softness of the rain of hundreds of millions of summers. Just as a wine’s terroir depends upon the geology beneath the grapes, the soil can affect the taste of other produce – vegetables, cheese, cider. From my father’s small patch of Redlands, I see out the sun with cheese from nearby Quicke’s farm, wine from Redyeates, a neighbouring vineyard, and three packets of soil. I have bought the wine from the farm next door that has diversified its farming portfolio over the years, expanding a small shop to a larger one with a deli and café. Successes like this offer optimism amidst fears about changing subsidies, declining workforces, global warming and soil degradation contributing to a new agricultural crisis. Speaking of a time of crisis in the latter half of the nineteenth century, my father had observed how in the space of a few years the countryside ceased to be a place in which to earn a living, except in the case of a fortunate few.
The first soil I taste comes from where I am sitting, from the remains of the vegetable garden. It is potent and buttery. The second is from the foothills of the Haldon Hills, at Dunchideock: woody, dense, pine. The last is from Druid’s Hill: creamy, grassy, woollen. My father concluded that whether men realized it or not at the time, it was the end of a way of life that had existed for thousands of years. Once more the land is changing, along with those who live on and off it. But there is a robustness in the ground that may continue, and pockets – like the acre I sit in – with a future still for tasting, though it may be bittersweet.
22
Vinca Minor (‘Illumination’)
On Christmas Eve, Mum cuts through the muscle of the holly tree that has grown too high, like carving the Sunday roast; she applies herself. I hold the ladder steady; she is slight between the branches. I grip, she saws. Down through the tendons, the tissue. Tree is tough, sinewy, animal. She takes short breaks between sawing.
‘I’ve got it.’ She predicts her success. Two small women holding up a tree, cutting it down; and she does it. It falls to the floor, a vanquished body. She nev
er cuts too far, wanting to maintain its foliage for decoration and, perhaps, knowing something of its mythical protective powers. As well as helping to fend off any witches who might happen to be living in the hedgerows, it is often planted close by the house in order to protect against lightning. We now know that the spines of the leaves can actually act as lightning conductors.
We look up together above the absent holly, to the sky which is just turning lemon, and linger in its widely stretching light, only for a moment. Then it is back to the scurrying of jobs, one thing following another, all the way down to the ground where the day hangs heavy in the moss, slumps into cold grass, falling awkwardly on spikes of cones. The day cannot settle: always something nibbling at its ends, work creeping through, clawing us into tomorrow.
I gather up the felled branches, thinking of the battle the Holly King is traditionally thought to have had with the Oak King about who would have dominion over winter. Inside, a battle continues. It is not my fight; I can only lend reinforcements from the sidelines. At the verge, Vinca minor, the periwinkle with variegated leaves, shines amid the day’s detritus. I drift into the yellow of its leaves, as it transports the last trickle of day into softly carpeted sea.
In the morning, frost on the fields shines rose-pink. Webs cling to fence posts, to fallen wood: great clouds of silver dust. The sun is high, just over the brow of the hill, spilling apricot. It bounces back off the low grass and periwinkle leaves in a field of Turkish delight. Lemon pours out and glistens the sky which spreads in liquid gold. A flood of sparrows bursts by; a swerve of goldfinches, flash on flash, finch on finch, high in the gold rush.
I break into a run; wetness soars through the toes; underfoot: pine cone, fir, twigs; moss and cinder, blanket of beech, the sigh and sway of oak. I run on a thousand chandeliers, as each blade sparkles with frost; a field of glass underfoot. It is as though the elements are reversed: sky is ground and ground is sky, and I am running on the pinheads of constellations, leaping from star to frosted star. I take deep lungfuls of sun. As I pause to move through some exercises, a robin watches me from its usual hedge. It gives me a look of intense scrutiny, followed by a casual side-eye once it sees that I’m onto it. As I start muttering motivational words to myself, it decides it’s had enough and flies away derisively, while I continue, my eyes level with the hills, sun just a little higher. I raise my arms as if in worship, doing sun squats.
I fall back into running, over the ground that my father crossed so many times; do I feel the same to it? Does it recognize the tread? The load? The weight? I feel I could run to the ends of the earth, or the body, whichever comes first. And it is always the body. The heaviness of limbs, the pinch of a pain, breath not coming as fast or as freely; the signs of the body that it cannot keep up with the rhythm of the earth or the speed of the planet. The body calling you back from the sun, from the rhythm of the detached mind, from abandon.
Today I bring him gold. Fringes of oleaster leaves, eleagnus (‘limelight’), euonymus (‘sunshine’) gathered in a gilt-leaved glow. This is the smoothness of luxury, of not having to work so hard; let it snow through the room in gladdened air, in drifting ease. The glitter of it settling on the furniture; a golden snow that warms as it falls and melts as it stores all the day’s light, all the days of days of light.
TWO
* * *
23
Warren
One eye first, a half-lid, squint. Both pull fully open. Blue! It had forgotten the breadth of the colour. Sky! The regal spread of it, all-commanding. It pushes up from the soil. First its forehead rises from earth; air laps over it. Nose, lips, chin lift, as if into fresh water. Shoulders, breasts, back. Now it is a rush to get out. Thighs, heels, the back of the neck. Then, a darkness; not black but orange, as the light of its days in the soil stays with it a while, dancing in the retinas. It remembers the warmth, how it cushioned, pulled it down, baked into the folds of the earth. Still. Red. A-glow.
In through the snowdrops, past new spurts of dock leaf, lily of the valley; it longs to return. But in the centre of the copse it finds itself too exposed and moves further down towards the fir trees. Here, it notes the gaping holes of erupted earth belonging to the badgers. Beside them, in a shallow pit, their faeces squat, territorially. Though this is a place it had thought it might stretch, over soft fallen needles, in rooted contours, it seems it is already occupied. Moving over the badgers’ turf, through the tent of twigs that the fallen beech has made, it feels this too could be a place to stretch. Up to canopied twigs and the running water of the stream in front. But piles of dark feathers line the bark to the left – the scene of some earlier conflict. A stump of silver birch further down exposes a base fretwork of fungi, and to the right, another blanket of feathers. Rabbit droppings rest like a clutch of eggs; twice it becomes impaled in overhanging brambles. This is not the place.
Down along the stream, a set of pawprints presses into mud: it has not yet moved off the badgers’ earth. Here are the only visual traces of the animal it hears but doesn’t see. It had first thought their snuffling from the hedge to be a neighbour’s horse, though it had seemed to be coming from the wrong side of the border. The snuffling and snorting had continued, interspersed with growls so unnerving it had turned its torch full into the source of the noise. No sudden leap or confusion. When the torch switched off, the snuffling continued, undiminished. It was only then it had thought of the badgers, their dull eyesight untouched by its thin beam. It had read about their calls: chitters, whickers, growls. The whicker, like the whinny of the horse, is often used in frustration; the low rumbling growl: a warning.
It looks up as a fat raindrop lands in its eye. In need of cover, it moves to a leaning oak, whose stretched torso offers a less soluble surface than soil to lie on. Its body fits comfortably against the oak’s body. Reclining, it looks up through ivy to the fork of the higher branches, up to a canopy of latticed twigs. Wings pass over. Steady beeps of birds. All the nearby trees strain in this direction. Roots here would get little rain; instead, it would seep in from the nearby stream which is flowing fast and frothing. It would not want to be anywhere else. Everywhere roundabout seems exposed, except for this small bank of trees.
At its feet is a thicket where sloe and holly have nested. It seems the driest place to stretch. As it pulls itself down, ready to navigate into it, it sees a hole in the roots of the tree it has been leaning on. Too large for a mouse, perhaps it’s a stoat or weasel. The thought unsettles it. The field is full of them, it knows, from their sound, just after dark. Not witching hour but weasel hour, when the night quivers with their spectral cries. ‘Never leave the baby unattended,’ its grandmother had told its mother when they first moved here. ‘The weasels will have it.’ As it gazes into the doorway, it is difficult to know who would be more scared if the owner’s head popped out now. As it is, it can only see a couple of inches in, to a crumpled bed of leaves. What looks like a seed rests by the entrance, like shopping delivered to the door. It picks it up, finds it covered in a soft, white, downy fur, then replaces it. It is difficult to find anywhere that is not already taken; where some other animal does not have a prior claim: faeces marking territory; pawprints; the open holed doors of non-human homes.
It gathers itself up and moves back up the field in search of a less claimed resting spot. Rain builds. It is entirely reliant on trees for shelter. Some are not so welcoming: the willows rise tall and lean, with no warmth to spare; others take it to them, fully maternal. The fir beckons with outstretched leaves and presses towards it. When it loosens itself slightly from its hold, it notices it is near a large oak it has known since childhood. A whole family is sheltering here. The blackbirds in the oak’s lower reaches; halfling human by the trunk; little flittings in the thicket. When the rain lightens enough to move past the tree’s protection, it nudges some branches by its base. Hair tangles with twigs and rain spots its skin like a deep cleanse.
Inches from it, the long-tailed tits bounce and peer but d
on’t retreat. The nearest one, about two inches away, inclines a muzzy head of white feathers, glints black eyes. Then, out of nowhere, sings. Little electronic bird beats, like the start of a trance track. It is surrounded by these beats, like little crickets chirping, a tinny warble. It realizes these are the birds it always hears in the Ide hedgerows. Though it can’t bear to leave the sound, the rain has thickened and the wind is whipping into it. It starts to move and the tits flutter back further in the thicket. By the time its body is out of the twigs, their singing has stopped and it glimpses them fluttering further out to field.
At its feet, spots of crimson mushrooms gleam. With their waxy texture, completely out of place in their surroundings, they seem to ask if it couldn’t try harder to be a fixed point, to root. Their brazen scarlet caps embolden, and it thinks that perhaps, after all, this is what it could do: find a piece of land to lie in; to make its own and to claim. Not to fight the badger or the bird or the weasel, but to lie alongside them, to coexist. It finds a patch, underneath a thatch of sloe, a burst of white, wet flowers; lies over a covering of ivy and looks up. But there is barbed wire here from some earlier enclosure. Grown over, gnarls rusted to the colour of brambles, the wire catches at its hair. It has to slide itself out and then around, in through a different entrance. To manage this, it must exit rear-first. Growing closer to soil is teaching it so much about movement; it is using so much more of the potential of its body.
The next entrance is smoother. It trails out its fingers and seeps and spreads into sloe, to the white trailing blossom, to bramble. The fingers, the arms, the legs; spreading into earth, into soil, into wetness. It is entering its dreams. Its dream body. Snowdrops. Not thin or muscled or beach-ready, its dream body is stretched and wet and snowdropped. From the tip of an eye it sees a bird’s nest. It feels dizzy, though it is lying flat on the earth. It is not used to so much ‘up’. It lifts an arm to the nearest branch and holds on to steady itself. A nettle nudges its nose, its hands brush over ferns, its fingers want to touch everything. The caress of moss over branch, the slenderness of twig; it feels more careful of everything it touches, now that it is touching it.
The Grassling Page 8
