by Crane, Ben;
*
In 2010, at the age of thirty-six, I had a baby with my long-term partner. My son took an extraordinarily long time to be born. His mother is tough and, after nearly ninety hours of labour, he finally arrived in the world. I was not prepared for the vast confusion a birth precipitates. The experience was violently overwhelming – deeply complicated. Too many people became involved – family, strangers and medical staff. There was too much noise, too many internal voices, self-invented scenarios and conflicting destructive thoughts zipping and zagging within my mind.
After a few hours my son turned yellow and became jaundiced. He was placed in an incubator and I looked at him from a distance. Bathed in ultraviolet light under smooth, cast plastic casing, he was an odd little chap, with tiny nails, pink, flaky skin and a grumpy face. As more and more people became involved, I felt very much out of control. Terrified and marginalized, I was suddenly a minor character in a major life event and felt forced into a role I did not understand; I felt as if I were falling headlong into an abyss. I had no time to decompress, to take it all in and to work out the meaning. I wanted everyone to leave him alone. To leave us alone. It never happened. I had no time to bond. Any love that may have been present was squashed. Overshadowed by the vertiginous fear and complex inter-family dynamics that a birth triggers – my son was a Pandora’s box built out of wrinkled pink-and-white human flesh.
On his arrival home I kept looking at him. He was certainly interesting, and he smelt wonderful. He just did not seem to belong to me. He was nothing to do with me. I knew this to be terribly wrong. I searched endlessly for some positive emotion and sincerely struggled to find a discernible connection. I never experienced the famed rush of love common to those who have children. Quite the opposite. The only tangible emotion was a rushing urge to get away. The guilt and sheer magnitude of this void, the weight of not having a normal reaction or range of emotions, was petrifying. Every time I picked him up I felt deeply inadequate. I felt dead inside. I had absolutely no idea how to be a father. As the days and weeks passed, the weight of this mounting dislocation grew. Men never mention having a lack of feelings towards their children to this extent, and I had no outlet to express how I felt. I did not dare. In comparison to the emotions expressed by the rest of my son’s extended family, I felt abnormal, inhuman almost sociopathic.
Unable to express anything other than fear and shame, I shut down, mentally locked myself away, became indifferent, resentful and angry. I hated myself and the situation with a rage and fear beyond safety. I was not a fit human, let alone a parent. I didn’t even want to be a parent and said as much to my partner. Over several months, my behaviour, reactions and conduct were understandably too much for his mother and she eventually took her son and left.
Within a few weeks of their departure, and without warning, I was handed a redundancy notice. The school I taught in had been earmarked for closure. I had been there for over a decade, had been successful and achieved consistently outstanding results. The job – a vocation – was creative and free. It was who I was for twelve years. I defined myself by my job. The forced removal of this locus, with its set routines and success, pitched me into an even steeper sense of crisis. Without pause, on autopilot, I tried to do what was right. I moved from a place I loved to the southern edge of England, to be near my son and start a new job.
It was an unmitigated disaster.
In a vain attempt to re-create the best bits of my previous life, I rented a house at extreme expense to be near the countryside. To anyone of a normal mindset, a country lane is a country lane, one field similar to another. But landscape is not generic for me. Location and environment are specific and particular, the comfort and security arriving in the shape of resident animals, plants and geography. In my previous home I had a clear mental and physical picture of my location. I knew where everything was, where to find things, where things grew and under what rocks to find particular animals. In this place I only saw a simulacrum of a view; there was slippage, it was uncanny. At a distance, it seemed welcoming and unspoilt; up close, a different version presented itself. I walked the lanes and fields trying to connect, to find some form of recognition. Instead I found a dead cat in a black plastic bag, fur falling and peeling from bruised skin. No bigger than a finger, her soggy newborn kittens were suffocated beneath her. I found litter and endless fly-tipping. I found old, rust-coloured tampons on paths. I found discarded fridges with black meat bloated and floating in yellow fluids. I found stained mattresses, dead ponds, dirty vibrators and discarded condoms. I saw dog shit in bags on posts or thrown into trees. I heard nothing except the hissing roar of motorways, saw nothing but extending, encroaching buildings, burnt-out vehicles, barbed wire and no-entry signs. Instead of cycling to work, my commute was long, dull, pushing along tarmac. At the end of the road, my new job. The antithesis of what I knew education to be. Owned by a corporate conglomerate, it was a business. The art department redesigned for the modern world, open plan, an office of glass, steel, strip lights and smooth walls. I followed strict units of work, implemented other people’s ideas, producing forced, confined and prescriptive art. The chaotic, hilarious, beautiful children were the only respite from a job that was just a job. The school was built simply to contain and condition pupils and teachers alike.
There was no discernible space or time for me to accommodate or understand these very serious changes. Struggling with the complexities of having a son, grieving for the loss of my previous job and 300 miles from home, I was physically isolated and floating alone inside my mind. I saw no way out, no way forward and certainly no way back. Frozen in panic, I carried around a relentless, raw anxiety, manifest in a self-destructive dysfunctional anger. I was deeply unstable, fractured, adrift and helplessly lost. Not wanting to stay, unable to leave, I slipped into a weird liminal space between being present and being disturbingly detached. Any spare time I had was spent aimlessly driving around the south coast, then up and down England, occasionally sleeping in the car at remote, isolated spots.
From this fragile half-existence I ran towards anyone that looked remotely stable and normal. The woman I met was an immediate emotional and physical release. Within a few weeks, I literally ran away. Leaving a lot of my belongings in the house I rented, walking out of my job, I turned my back on the whole situation and married her.
It was insane.
The relationship, built precariously on the shifting sands of my injured psyche, constructed for all the wrong reasons, was never going to last. Within eighteen months the initial fun and momentum had gone, superficial charm had been exchanged for reality and the cracks appeared. On the final day she turned up with a white van to collect her belongings, so I left. On my return, everything had gone. Water poured out of pipes across the kitchen where the washing machine had been removed. Where the carpets had been glued, patches of grey foam underlay remained on vile yellow linoleum and bare patches of concrete. Electricity about to run out, the phone line due to be cut, going by any standard measure of success, the résumé of my life was total failure: a career, a family and a marriage all burned out, done and dusted within four years. I was forty, unemployed, penniless and about to become homeless. I had not escaped. My choices and conduct had merely compounded and concentrated the pain. I was in a space and place of my own making, I was unknown to myself and utterly exhausted. Statistically, the biggest killer of men between the ages of twenty-five and forty is suicide. I sincerely felt its draw, felt the attraction of oblivion and of blank freedom far beyond the situation I was in.
*
Before my son was born I lived in a small house in the grounds of a dilapidated stately home. It was here that I brought my son home from hospital. It was his first home. It was where I trained Cody and witnessed the sparrowhawk chasing a blackbird through the garden. Slowly, the surrounding coach houses, stables and, finally, the manor house itself were developed into an exclusive gated community. Over the course of construction I befriended one of
the bricklayers who lived on site. He owned a small 300-year-old tumble-down cottage nestled in the nearby woods. I had seen it on numerous occasions when walking and felt an instant affinity with it. It reminded me of the cottage I had lived in as a child, and I had always wanted to live there. Throughout my travels and the birth of my son, I remained intermittently in contact with the owner. In a last-ditch attempt at finding a home, I emailed him. His reply was succinct, two lines providing a doorway, a small grain of hope and a literal lifeline. The cottage had been empty for six months; I could move in if I wanted. So I ran again, only this time on my own, to a place of safety and solace, carrying a small amount of cash, art materials, a fishing rod, a bed, books and a dog.
*
The Cottage
My earliest memory is from around the age of two. I am holding a crayon over a picture of a fire engine and the sun is shining through a window on my right. My first original work of art is a viridian-green chameleon with blue claws painted at the age of three. I know this because it still hangs on the wall of my father’s home. I have been a visual artist for as long as I can remember. Painting is good therapy. It requires a focused routine. You have to relax and let yourself go. The process connects to a vast inner space, a peaceful and powerful place where the fuzz and pop of a busy mind stops. Travelling to it through brushstrokes and pencil marks, as an image builds, the feeling of release and sense of self-worth art gives me has remained consistent ever since I pushed a black crayon across a fire engine in the sunshine.
At the cottage I painted what I saw for up to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Orange-and-black great-crested newts, horses, leverets and hares, lapwings, sparrowhawks, pigs, pheasants, bats and birds. As the work began to build, I hung everything on the outside walls of the cottage and made two signs. I hammered them into the roadsides at the top and bottom of the lane and began fishing for commissions. On the first Sunday I sold a large drawing of a goshawk. The following week it was a picture of a dog. With the money I built a portable exhibition space and took my work to country fêtes, horse events and agricultural shows. What started as a way to clear my mind, a way to deal with failure, slowly became a living. As the summer rolled around I supplemented my painting with seasonal ground work and gardening on private estates, or for anyone who needed help, and became self-employed; never again would I be made redundant, but I would remain poor.
There is no romance in poverty. Or indeed in hunger. Context makes a marked difference to the degree of fear any individual experiences when confronting both. I have no idea what a single mother with little education trapped in an innercity flat feels like when facing her own personal wasteland of distress. I know homeless heroin addicts die young. I will never feel their subtle decline or abject despondency. I was not John Healy in The Grass Arena, nor George Orwell on The Road to Wigan Pier. But in the overlap between arriving at the cottage and becoming self-employed I experienced the shame and humbling irony of sitting next to my ex-pupils (the ones who had been written off as never going to amount to anything) in a council office. I experienced the impossibility of attempting to survive on Jobseeker’s Allowance. I learnt that in cold weather turning off a stand-alone heater will only prolong the inevitable: the electricity still runs out. That hot water from an immersion tank is a luxury I cannot afford if I want a freezer and a fridge. I know what it means to be unable to afford a television licence or a television and still receive endless warnings of imminent visits and court charges. I felt the abject fear of not being able to afford car tax, an MOT or insurance while still driving out of necessity. I know how fast letters arrive for a single missed payment of council tax. How it feels to pick up discarded cigarettes from pavements. To get caught up in the bureaucracy of emergency loans and food banks. I know the vulnerability of being desperate, cheap labour, and the humanity of people who pay more than expected. I learnt the subtle difference between the resolutely altruistic and those who do not care. I experienced the joy of being given free clothes, out-of-date food and gifts of neighbourly generosity. On several occasions, when it got truly hard, I learnt that sugar sandwiches help to stave off hunger, as does thick, black instant coffee. I also discovered that a kilo bag of flour lasts longer than a loaf of bread and a small amount mixed with water makes a soft dough which, when fried quickly over an open fire, produces a delicious, chewy flat bread. That a 20kg bag of knobbly, bumpy, odd-shaped carrots used for horse feed costs £2. The same amount of money buys a net of onions and a sack of dried chickpeas in similar quantities. I learnt that, under the cover of darkness, potatoes, swedes and turnips can be pulled from the fields and that hens’ eggs are plentiful for a handful of change along country lanes. I also learnt that, if stored correctly, and if I ate only one meal a day, these ingredients will last a long time. More importantly, I came to know that anything extra could, with observation, ingenuity, self-reliance and a bit of hard work, be found for free.
Almost from the first moment I moved into the cottage I began to harvest wild food seriously. The knowledge gleaned from a lifetime of learning turned a walk in the woods from a delightful waste of time into a focus of the senses, and with this as with art, came a profound respite from the unresolved turmoil flicking back and forth in my mind.
The tracks and marks of folded grass where rabbits sat in the early-morning sun indicated more than the presence of a common animal. It told of frequency, numbers and their size. Without a gun or nets, trapping a rabbit is difficult. Rabbits can detect the small traces of sweat and particles of skin on the wire and will avoid the trap. To disguise the smell, I buried the wire snares in the earth for a week. It is easy to butcher a rabbit. The skin peels from the carcass like a leather glove from a hand; the two front legs, held only by a loose slither of mucus-covered muscle, shear away from the ribs. The tenderloin muscles along the spine are trickier to deal with. The muscular back legs are the choicest part. In a stew, rabbit flesh falls from the bone like pulled pork. A whole rabbit stuffed with two onions and a handful of wild garlic, thyme or rosemary and wrapped in foil cooks quickly over a grill in a log burner. I gathered the wood myself and learnt that each species has particular qualities, a particular character. Elderberry and willow burn fast and hot; other woods burn slow and cool. When you’re hungry, it takes only one charred rabbit to work out which wood to use next time. It was not only rabbits that I caught. Experimenting, I placed the traps along the trunks of trees and on branches. Grey squirrel has a similar taste and texture to rabbit, but with less meat and more thin shards of bone.
I followed the hoofprints and droppings of deer to quiet spaces away from humans. These places were full of natural life and abundant food. A heron in the same place at the same time each day has a reason to be there. Under the curve and whorl of water, shifting shadows revealed multitudes of fish. To catch them, I used flour paste, elderberries, worms, maggots, slugs and live insects. Becoming overconfident and for fun, I glued tufts of dog fur and feathers to a bare hook to imitate dry flies. Small fish with a light batter in a hot pan are ready in four to five minutes. Eaten whole, like sardines or whitebait, they taste of fresh ozone and soil. I stockpiled the excess. Frozen in groups of three or four, they last a long time but sadly lose the taste of nature when defrosted. I also caught bigger fish. A large pike produces several thick fillets of firm white flesh. Grilled, steamed or pan-fried, pike is a match for cod and easily surpasses the taste of Texas bass.
On the cusp of a full moon, fishing on the edge of an old weir pool, I hooked a huge sea trout. Monstrously strong, it took ten minutes to subdue and pull up on to the soft, grassy bank. Held to the moon, the fish glowed in a bejewelled, blue-silver sheet of organic chainmail. Fresh from the ocean, sea lice twisted and wiggled across its smooth, white stomach. Protected by laws designed to stop poor people poaching, only those rich enough to fish in exclusive private waters are allowed to take them. It took me two days to eat it.
Restless and unable to sleep, I would watch the early-morning es
capades of otter and mink as they snaked up a grass bank to a nearby reservoir. Following them, I found the discarded shells and empty carapaces of crayfish. A dozen crayfish flash-fried in a wok and allowed to simmer in water until soft-shelled are filling and fun to pick apart.
An explosion of wood pigeons from conifers as a fox prowled below the trees pointed to nests containing eggs or young squabs. Pigeon is criminally undervalued, the flesh of a higher quality than fillet steak or venison, and even more so if cut from fledging youngsters. I also caught and ate other feathered creatures. Crows are surprisingly small when skinned, as are coot and moorhen. Ducks are almost impossible to catch without a hawk or a gun. Roadkill pheasant is far more productive than rabbit in terms of the meat it yields but can be flavourless in comparison.
Other than meat or fish, I found other free food to pick and take. The rings on grass, dark circles and marks, told of mushrooms before the fruits emerge. Ramsons, or wild garlic, has a short season and is common, as are rosemary, sage, horseradish and hawthorn. All provide light, fresh textures and flavourful additions to almost any meat, vegetable or egg. Others made a more substantial meal. Bypassed and forgotten, the Judas’s Ear (a vile name that needs changing), a brown, slippery mushroom that grows all year round, can be cooked and eaten with flat bread. Twisting all over my garden and in the woods were wild hops. Eaten raw or boiled it was like having access to my own private field of asparagus. Ground elder, gathered in quantity and boiled, tastes like spinach. Burdock roots roasted on a fire are a match for any potato. Twenty feet from my front door comfrey grows in a wide green tidal wave. Shredded, they turn omelettes into bulky frittatas. The choicest leaves of comfrey have microfibres, a delicate fur perfect for holding batter. Fried one after another, they make a full meal with the tang of cucumber. Hogweed can be grilled or steamed. Wild daffodil bulbs look like spring onions and, added to eggs, they taste odd but delicious. Daffodils are poisonous. Within twenty minutes of eating them, I felt dizzy and vomited violently.
