The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  It watches their bodies. Some coarse, some smooth, all pumping sunlight in plain view. It thinks of its veins. Is it right to have them inside? Should it reach into its wrist and pull, until the long line of itself unravels, then thread it back together on the outside? There is so much to learn and unlearn. It likes to see what the others are doing. As it comes to know them, it forgets its fears. It is cautious only outside fields.

  Is it a joined-up thing or separate? That, it still can’t work out. When it’s left to drift across the grass, out and over, out and over, in the cold freshness of the morning, it feels that it could keep going; out and over, out and over, never coming to rest. But then it is checked. A tug at the nape of the neck. A curling finger around a rib. It is brought back. There is something that says it belongs to it. Perhaps it is words. Perhaps it is they that say: I have seen you, I have touched you, I belong to you. Perhaps it doesn’t matter which ones are used, perhaps they all mean: I have seen you, I have touched you, I belong to you.

  When it is a long way out, their gust up through the ribs and out of the head remind it that part of it is still manageable. That part of it is still very small. That all the space inside it can come, for a second, to rest in the firm shape of a word. There is a comfort in the way they all start and end. The way they have the same things, always, inside them. It can rely on a word to take a strange, shapeless sea and start and end it so glibly, as if to almost make a joke of it: this wide, unstable movement. It takes hold of it and says, when I place you here and line you up in these pebbles of breath, you become so much less.

  But they cannot be relied on. Sometimes it sees them lined up on the shore while it wings its way over waves, deep and swelling. Their bodies seem altogether too perfect, as it steers its shifting shape against the spray; sometimes flat and flapping as a sunfish, other times with the clipped beat of a bird. Words are too far off, then, to help. Perhaps, at those times, it is a colour that brings it back. The grey sheet of sea over rock, the sky falling into it. The metal. Iron wool rolled flat from moon to water. And in the colour, the cries. The gulls. The long stretch of a sound that says: I have seen you. This white sound is in the grey waves and the sound foams and the waves say: I have touched you. Sometimes that is what it takes to bring it back.

  Or, it is a clutch of daffodils. The sun’s petals fixed like the beam of a lighthouse. It is the flowers and the leaves it gathers, shade upon shade, light upon light. From daffodil to euphorbia to forget-me-not: yellow, green and blue. From sweet pea to heather to Michaelmas daisy: indigo and violet. Rover rose. Mountain ash. Perhaps it is the light of a rainbow. These are the things that bring it back when words fail; when they are too far off to harness.

  Yet they are there all the same. Lined up at the shore, or buried deep in the soil. They are there, waiting for someone to catch them, and roll them round in a palm of pearls. Some of them – the ones that keep their husks on, the traces of where they have come from – can bring all sorts of things together. Old words spill into new; forgotten landscapes fizz with dew as the word for Druid comes alive in ‘drew’.

  For the Grassling, words are the nodes of their bodies; the joins that graft. So, however far they may stretch outside them, they have a way, still, of returning. At least for the moment, they have a dirt-speckled alphabet, lifted out of the earth like a row of beans. Whenever either of them goes out too far, one puts out a hand to pull the other back. Their hands dig for letters thrown in piles of what the soil yields. Their days are measured not by suns but fields and fields and fields.

  30

  Wynn

  I take the old route to Ide, with Exeter and the Exe on the left. A train chugs past, drawing its eye to the new university accommodation that is ‘new’ only compared to my last visits along this road, in childhood. Then, I would be on my way to see my grandparents. I suppose, in a way, I still am. I arrive early at the farm, where the workers are gathered, waiting for the day. Manure and wild garlic mingle as they invite me to take a seat out of the rain. It feels strange to leave my father to come here. To be connecting with him through being here, instead of back there, physically with him. But you still have to go places, do things. Don’t you? If you yourself are a moving thing?

  An old man waits nearby while I make notes. I could be speaking to him, I chastise myself. Perhaps he has connections to this place. But writing does take you away from things, in order to come back. The man wanders off into a field past some caravans, as I sit, writing, opposite an orchard of young trees, tightly enclosed in triangular boxes.

  ‘She’s here now,’ he calls over the field, from his vantage point above the car park. ‘Thank you,’ I gather my notes and follow his gaze to the woman approaching, who looks at me questioningly.

  ‘I’m here for the pottery,’ I explain.

  ‘Ah!’ she smiles. ‘This way.’

  We spend the first part of the day warming the barn up and swapping our stories over tea. Somehow, the question of what I want to make today takes me from soil to my father to health to words. And somehow her answer is her mother and clay and health and hands. I love talking to artists. It’s a form of speed-talking: straight to the marrow, without any fat.

  ‘Can I dig some clay?’ As I ask, it suddenly becomes terrifically important.

  ‘Yes, I’ll just borrow some boots,’ she replies with the willing practicality of someone who is used to making things. We stride out into the rain, which is sheeting in off the hill. ‘I quite like this weather,’ she says, optimistically. She points out various landmarks of the farm as we make their way over to what counts as a quarry. Bits and pieces of the place I already know from walking, and I tell her about Granfer Wills and his footpath. She laughs and says I must speak to one of the others from Organic Arts, a charity that runs farm-based learning and arts projects from the farm, who has collected stories from local people. ‘You two should have a conversation!’

  They cross over the brook and she tells me that sometimes they lay the willow there, to prepare it for working. I think about that process. Not too dissimilar to my swimming. Lying in any river I can get, hair winnowing out, fingers spreading, readying to become something more than I usually am; to become more of my potential. The quarry is in a circle of land called the Henge, banked by thirteen trees: a Celtic ritual, the man from the earlier field tells us, when he sees us heading off in that direction. ‘This is Andy, the gardener.’ Lucy had introduced us, so we had got to speak after all. ‘They planted them as part of their project,’ he gestures over to the group disembarking from a small coach and explains they were from a local mental health charity and came regularly to the farm, to garden.

  The Henge is currently overrun, as Andy had warned us, since no one has been there in a while. Lucy points to all the brambles. ‘This is what they’ve come to clear,’ she explains. But I’m still ringing with the bells of the Celtic ritual and its symmetry with my own pilgrimages to the neighbouring Druid’s Hill. I look at the trees and caress their labels, wishing there was more time to engage with them. ‘Elder,’ says one, ‘Hawthorn,’ another. I wonder how they choose the trees.

  Lucy dives down into the ditch, straddles the water and pitches with her spade. It is physical work. She shows me the part that is clay. Under grass: topsoil; under this: roots, stones. Here, and lower down, the clay, yellow from shale. I stumble down to her, steadying and scratching myself with brambles. We swap tools: her spade for my bucket. I strike soil. Ground resists. Through the tangled roots and rock, I thump, thump, until a little leeway. I press down on the spade with my foot, leaning my weight into it, still straddling the stream. My foot greets the ground below as something familiar; I have been down this low before. Then, as I strike down, the clay cuts loose: big clumps come away onto metal. I lug it up to Lucy who is ready with the bucket.

  She tells me which parts we can use and which parts to throw back. ‘We don’t want too much rock or too big roots – try there,’ she says, pointing at the water. I start digging
in water, remembering the balancing act from when I last tried to move down as well as up, bridging the elements. I fear the clay will be too heavy to lift out, with my back weakened from cold-water swimming, but in the end the exertion is no different to being on land. ‘Ah, this is the good stuff,’ Lucy beams, shaking it loose from water and landing it in the bucket. When we have our fill, we scramble back up the bank, out of the ditch, and over to the barn that is Lucy’s pottery.

  ‘We need to work it a little, take out the stones – do you want gloves?’ I refuse, wanting the feel of it on my fingers. ‘OK, be careful, some are sharp.’ I start taking the soil apart. Twines of root, sprinkles of grass, rock: these are all discarded. Once the larger items have been removed it becomes a trickier process; bits of gritty roughness spike the skin. ‘Small bits of stone are OK,’ Lucy reassures me, as my fingers sift and prick.

  ‘Of course it used to be desert,’ she muses, ‘thousands … I don’t know how long ago.’ And I am with her, across those aeons of time that can’t be measured, not really, in human terms. We just know them as further back than we can ever truly go. She talks about the different geological areas identified on the farm: clay at the bottom of Easterbrook’s, the slopes of Ashton Shales, red sands in the Crackington formation along the road, dark red iron-rich materials in the basalt in the quarry, breccia rock along the railway cutting. It is the sandstone in the Crackington formation, the original bedrock of Devon, that speaks of Lucy’s desert: vast sands that flowed into Devon’s Culm basin after being dislodged by earthquakes. In this Carboniferous period, the first amniotes (vertebrates who laid their eggs on land) came into being. These reptiles were the precursors of both modern birds and mammals. The Burnetts, perhaps, 300 million years ago, were reptiles, adapting to a new life solely on land.

  All the while our fingers work, automatic now, removing all obstacles. As the clay starts to come together – no longer isolated clumps of turf and stone but smoother rolls of something continuous – I notice the colour change too. Lighter and lighter it turns, speckled like a starling. And the specks seem like flecks of gold, as if my kneading is a kind of alchemy. ‘It’s almost gold,’ I whisper. Lucy nods and smiles. In the silence, our fingers rise and fall, teasing the gold from the ground. It glistens unbearably, as maddening as beautiful things are: separate, ephemeral, entirely out of our control.

  We commune for what must be about half an hour in our golden silence. The clay becomes softer and softer, like a person letting down their guard after constant kneading. ‘Do you want to go back out and get some sand to sprinkle in?’ Lucy asks, matter-of-factly, like she’s used to mining a field any time she wants some seasoning. ‘We can get some plants at the same time, to press into the clay.’ We pass through the farm’s new orchard, over to the old railway line. We talk about the badgers whose openings are everywhere, whilst scanning for leaves with good veins that will leave an imprint in the clay. I find a fern and, underfoot, an oak and a beech leaf. Lucy collects odd-looking lichen. Before leaving, we look down the tunnel of the abandoned railway. It’s eerie, and truly like a portal. Children’s cries come from the other end, a school party being taken on a walk, and reverberate in the space like ripples of time. ‘See, the sand is just on the top here,’ says Lucy, jolted into sound by the children’s noise. She bends down and scoops the topsoil.

  Back in the pottery, we dust the clay with the sand. ‘It might stop some warping,’ Lucy explains. She talks lots more about the heat and potential hazards, but I’m not really concentrating as the bright grains trickling through golden clay shine in little sparks of fire. First alchemist, then fire-starter. These are elemental forces, firing through my hands.

  Then we bash the clay about a bit, getting rid of the air before rolling it out. ‘This is the fun part,’ says Lucy, as we press in the plants and roll them flat. I love the look of it raw, like this, before firing. Embedded in the clay, the fern lies like a fossil, its leaves spread as ancient bones, preserved plant skeletons. The leaves are face up, so the external veins can sink into the clay, leaving their imprint. We play around with different implements. Lucy shapes patterns, while I write. I use a pointed stick, so that writing becomes an act of pointing. My hands move over a time when writing was more like this, with runes inscribed on rock, wood, metal. As I grip the wood, the word wynn is conjured through its sap. An Anglo-Saxon letter, lost in modern English, it came from this runic language. A word that represented the letter w. Word. Wood. Wynn. The letters slip between my fingers.

  And as the wood pricks into the clay, sometimes smoothly, other times having to pick its way among the grains, it says: look. This is the soil that you come from. This is the soil of your fathers. The wood says, this is your mark in it: here, and here, and here. This is your writing. The wood says, in between the grit, the different bits of ground and grain, the muzzled spits of fallen rain, the root that twists again, again: write this. The wood says, if you don’t, who will? Who else knows this soil, fat with presences? And perhaps, if others wrote their earth, perhaps we could have, as soil scientists do, a whole catalogue of charted presences, profiles, in the ground. And reading could be a many-layered thing, a digging thing: a harvest.

  As I cut the edges of the clay to turn it into a tile, I see little bits of root sticking out at the seams. I pull on them like thread.

  31

  Xylology

  X marks the spot

  X marks the spot of its join

  X marks the spot of its joints.

  It comes to map the copse, to see who is talking to who, to eavesdrop. It sees it is in an inner circle of six trees, but it is hard to count which are inside and which outside; slightly extending the boundary, the six become sixteen. Then it forgets which ones it has counted and which it hasn’t, dizzily encircled. This central point has known many interior battles. The tree immediately in front curves away to the left, almost doubled over. Most trees are bent the other way from past storm-damage, but as it shifts to the tree in front it sees that too has a low branch jutting out in the same strange direction.

  The two craning trees seem to join together at the tip. The top of the branch has grown up towards the leaning tree and their branches clash. As it moves under the point of their join, it no longer looks like one of conflict, but of support. Like the beginnings of a wicker basket that someone has left unfinished, or a magnified, abandoned nest. The branches lock in a wooden embrace. As it follows the tips of them, it notices a gathering of buds. Looking closer, it sees these belong to a third tree. This one is leaning into the embrace from the opposite direction. It is a silver birch, a different species, yet all seem happy interweaved. It breaks off its study as a buzzard comes so low it wonders if it is on its radar. At this proximity it sounds like it’s laughing, the wheezy cackle of an elderly man.

  Then it’s distracted by the pheasant that lands, letting out a loud report to which others of its kind reply from the neighbouring field. Then it’s called by the long-tailed tits, burst after burst, they fly their pied wings over like sudden shivers. It wonders what the birds are to the trees. Do trees hear? Can they sense colour? What do they make of their flashy, darting, winged inhabitants? Its spot in the inner circle is dark and cold, as high branches of ivy and tops of birch and willow form a canopy. It looks out with envy to the open floor in front, out towards the stream. If it wants to listen to the trees, it is best to be in them, it reminds itself, not out in the open fringes. Yet the sun is falling like treacle on the ivy outside, and beyond that pussy willows shine like cut glass. It needs to be in the lit space. A plant, straining for the light; it gives in and moves.

  It is immediately rewarded, glimpsing a robin swimming in the falling water. It darts under the flat stream, dips and shakes, before hopping down into the waterfall. Its panicked flit as it descends seems to say, ‘this was a bit of a mistake’. It has to stop itself from crying out laughing at the exuberance of it all and look away. But in the instant that it does, the bird moves; and when it
turns back, it is gone. It becomes clear that it must abandon the trees for the birds. The ones who scurry along the grass, the ones who dip and dart among the branches; those on the highest tree tips, those in the hedges. Those whose cries are so throated they are like animals. Those who are all a-flutter. Those whose singing is a wheezing that seems to worm out of the wood. Those with a light tseeping. Those with a call and response; those with an alarm. Those asking if someone is in; those passing the gossip. The darters, the divers, the rockets, the swoopers, the jitterbugs; the ones that go off like a gun. Those who let themselves be seen and those who don’t. How can you listen to anything else? Back comes the buzzard: weow, weow. The Grassling is so close to a wren it sees the speckles all along its wing.

  Rain settles in the buds; shining little bud-bulbs turn the tree into a chandelier. Hawks pass overhead, sending their shrill signals. ‘Weow,’ one suggests; ‘Weow,’ another answers. Moving back to the inner circle of trees, it passes the badgers at the southernmost tip of the circle, then the stream, then the clump of daffodils on the border. At its radius is the sloe thicket where it had stretched a few months ago, tapping on the roots and hearts of the earth, straining to hear. Though it has not rained for hours, everything is wet, but it pulls itself down and in. Who is in? It wonders, who is there? It trails out its fingers. By now, it knows things by touch. The spring of wet moss, the papery ivy, the pliable softness of twig. The scarlet elf cups everywhere, little pockets of fire, turning forest into fairytale. It lies among them, feeling the red rise and the pink soar of the land beneath.