The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  As Maidie and I reached the bottom of the Long Track, I looked over to the steading where the farmer was working his digger, picking up loads of steaming silage, dumping it in the mangers, reversing, swinging round and repeating the same manoeuvres until all were fed. Especially in the cold winter dark, it is long and hard work. With only one other man, he runs two farms, rearing many hundred head of cows and sheep, as well as growing barley and hay in the lower fields south of us. In the summer, contractors will come and cut his crops, and he will sell the barley and store the hay as silage for the following winter, as the day-in, day-out labour turns the wheel and the cycle of the years unfold into the future.

  None of the original four houses and cottages at Hartwoodburn are occupied by farm workers. A survey done in 1858 spoke of ‘a good dwelling house with an extensive court of farm offices [meaning cart sheds, barns and byres], hinds’ [farm workers] cottages, gardens and a large farm attached’. It also described the last remnants of the Hartwood Loch as ‘a marshy bog of considerable extent . . .’

  From my grandmother, Bina Moffat, I heard stories of a very different farm life. She was born in 1890 at Cliftonhill Farm near Kelso in the evening years of high farming. Her grandfather William was first horseman, head ploughman, and in nine family houses the census enumerator counted sixty-two people living on the farm. Twenty-three were employed full time and they raised twenty-five children, the balance of this small community being the farmer’s family and those too old to work.

  Each man was employed on a six-month or annual fee, new terms agreed, or not, on the quarter day at the end of each period. Cash was paid not weekly but at the beginning and end of the hiring. What was even more keenly negotiated were what all knew as gains, payments in kind. At Cliftonhill, William Moffat had half an acre of potatoes, a large quantity of oatmeal for porridge, coal, a sty behind the tied cottage to rear a pig and the run of the steading, where his hens could forage and lay. When she was little more than a toddler, Bina’s job was to find the eggs amongst the haystacks, which, in the long grass beside the farm tracks, was not always easy.

  Cliftonhill’s gains were thought especially good since they included a significant wild harvest. On dew-drenched late summer mornings, Bina and her aunts were out early to scour old pasture for mushrooms. Fields where horses grazed were thought to be particularly likely. In the later autumn, they cleared the orchard of apples, pears and Victoria plums. After the farmer had selected what he wanted, they preserved as many as possible. Down by the banks of the River Eden, they went nutting, stripping the glossy, brown hazelnuts off the bush-like trees and also picking as many wild raspberries, brambles and elders as they could find in the hedgerows before the birds got them.

  Part of the bargain, but unfurnished, their cottage was small and Bina slept in the same box beds as her mother, Annie, and her aunts, Mary and Bella. On cold January nights they were each other’s warmth, and when I was a little boy I slept in my grannie’s bed, enveloped in her love. To avoid collapsing into the deep dent she made in the horsehair mattress, I lay on my side on the edge nearest the window. As Bina snored contentedly, I remember looking at the full moon, liking that its beams lit the room. I have never been fond of single beds.

  The great French historians Marc Bloch, Lucien Lefevre and Fernand Braudel wrote of the longue durée, the persistence of similar habits of mind and action over long periods amongst communities who were born and died in the same place. The link between what Bina called the auld life and the hunter-gatherers who overwintered by the Hartwood Loch ten thousand years ago is not tenuous, or merely genetic. At Cliftonhill Farm, just as the hunter-gatherers had done before them, they roasted hazelnuts (Bina told me they tasted better and were easier on your teeth) and around the vanished loch I have seen places where mushrooms and abundant berries could be found.

  But the precious, unconscious continuities of the longue durée are breaking down. Storm-force winds of change have blown in my lifetime, and they blow harder with every passing year. The past is being ground to pieces by instant global communication, by the rapid, ever-updating output of the internet, by blizzards of relentless novelty. We have mistaken ease of contact, convenience, consumerism and personal comfort for civilisation, and our identities, those fragile, complex characteristics that make us interesting and different, are being interpreted by algorithms and buried under snowdrifts of digital data.

  Population shifts have also been dramatic. Until very recently almost everyone was directly or indirectly involved in food production, most working on the land. As late as 1800, 80 per cent of the British population lived in the countryside. Now that has shrunk to 1 per cent and there are only 150,000 farmers, the majority working alone with the occasional help of spouses and family.

  The land has almost lost its people and now its memory is beginning to die.

  5 January

  Yesterday afternoon a drunk smashed into one of the farmhouse windows, startling me as I was reading by the fire. But, having rushed out of the porch, I could see no sign, no prone body at the foot of the wall. Under the apple trees opposite the house I could see others becoming intoxicated. After the stormy weather of late November, we had left many windfalls on the grass. Bruised, they would not have kept. Instead, they turned out to be a winter windfall for the birds – blackbirds especially. I counted fourteen this morning, gorging themselves.

  As the apples begin to rot, they ferment a little, and when the blackbirds hollow them out they become tipsy. The drunk who flew into the farmhouse window was the third that day. Like the others, it recovered immediately, surviving the impact with the glass like those rubber-legged New Year revellers who collide with pavements, walls and each other, yet wake up the following morning with only a bad headache.

  Warming thoughts of spring light a cloudy day. Last year, when I was recovering from shoulder surgery and had my arm in a sling, I took up one-handed gardening. Two raised beds were built in a small paddock by the burn and they were filled with well-rotted horse muck, something that is not in short supply around here. My new potatoes were sweet and splendid, smooth-skinned and a meal in themselves with melted butter, salt and pepper. When we harvested them, I lifted my two-year-old granddaughter Grace into the beds. No graip was needed because the soil and muck had become a fertile powder, and as I pulled up a shaw to reveal a string of yellow-white potatoes the wee lass squealed with delight at this buried magic.

  Three weeks ago I assembled a lower raised bed from some wooden shuttering which would become Grace’s garden. We filled it with horse muck and well-tilthed soil from the many molehills on the lawns around the farmhouse. When I asked Grace what she wanted to plant in the spring, ‘Potatoes! Big giant ones!’ was the instant reply. In the spring we will rime out the holes with my dad’s dibble, the adapted wooden shank of a shovel that is older than I am, and bury the magic once more.

  More pressing is the need for logs. Like many old farmhouses, ours is draughty and the woodburning stoves need to be fed constantly in winter. With my son’s help, I thought we had cut plenty of logs, but now I am not so sure. What we have is so well seasoned that even the precious hardwood burns like matchsticks. Tremendous heat is produced, but we are getting through prodigious amounts.

  6 January

  This is the twelfth day of Christmas, and last night the decorations came down and the tree was stripped. Today it will be dragged into the Bottom Wood to take its place alongside the withered memories of many Christmases past. We have celebrated twenty-five in the farmhouse and this year’s tree was the most beautiful yet. Hung with some decorations that are older than we are, and some that are new, it made me smile each dark morning when I switched on the lights.

  Now we set out on the longest, slowest month of the year. And the weather has yet to snarl. Under a thick blanket of cloud, the day begins mild and windless, with no ice forming on the track and the grass green and not frosted. Some of the day will be spent preparing for the bad weather forecast for the
second half of January. Behind the stables and elsewhere there is a good deal of scrap wood that was discarded when buildings were repaired or fencing moved. All of it will go in the Wood Barn to dry off and I will pick boughs off the woodpiles to be sawn up and split.

  As I rummage around the farm, making estimates and working out contingencies, I realise that I am walking in the shadow of the long past. Beside the banks of Hartwood Loch many thousands of years ago, the overwintering hunter-gatherer bands made similar calculations as they built up log piles by their shelter. Having dragged fallen trees and broken limbs from the Wildwood on the slopes of the valley, they raised them off the ground on bearers to dry and season in the summer sun.

  These men, women and children were creatures of the land, part of the cycle of the natural world, and they knew a great deal about different woods, their uses, how to split them and cut them and how they burned. Of course, no record of their tree lore survives, but its echoes can still be heard. These are some verses of a very old woodburning poem that originated in Devon. It has been updated, formalised and prettified, but the embers of real knowledge glow through:

  Oak logs will warm you well,

  That are old and dry;

  Logs of pine will sweetly smell

  But the sparks will fly.

  Holly logs will burn like wax,

  You may burn them green;

  Elm logs like to smouldering flax,

  No flame to be seen.

  Ash logs smooth and grey,

  Burn them green or old,

  Buy up all that come your way,

  Worth their weight in gold.

  Ten thousand years ago, fires were lit by Hartwood Loch not only for heat and cooking but also to smoke eels and fish. In harsh winters, the loch will have frozen over and stored food was all that lay between a family band and starvation. And on a cold night of hollow bellies some will have fallen asleep in each other’s arms and not woken in the morning.

  Archaeology has shown that our ancestors worked hard and died very young. Probably because of fatal complications in childbirth, an annual event in an age before contraception, few women’s lives stretched beyond twenty and men did not live much longer. From later skeletal remains, scientists have been able to reconstruct their bodies. Because of heavy and constant work, prehistoric people were very muscular, especially in the legs. When a fallen tree needed to be dragged from the wood to the shelter, no help and no alternative form of traction was available. At least half of this tiny population suffered from degenerative spinal conditions, some of them children. They seem to have been set to work early. Most suffered from chronic arthritis, probably from living much of the year in damp and cold conditions.

  Life was usually harsh and short, but not every day was difficult. Just as we do, families will have enjoyed lovely summer evenings in this little valley. Their bellies full after a good supper, they will have splashed around the loch with each other, sat on logs, basked in the late sun, looked out over the green and pleasant land, and told stories, embellished them and laughed.

  7 January

  Time winds down. We move slowly through the calendar, ticking off numbers, but little changes. The long night of winter seems to be endless, when the land sleeps and waits, when little stirs, and the short, grey days come and go. In cities, bright lights and bustle fight the gloom, but here there are only the pinprick points of distant farmhouse windows, steadings and stable yards to relieve what my grannie called the dowie days of dreich Januar.

  Her memories of winters at Cliftonhill were of enveloping, inhibiting darkness. Working days – repairing tack and machinery, feeding animals, milking and keeping hungry mice and rats at bay – were short. After the middle of the afternoon the men and working women came indoors, and Bina and her family sat around the range and its warming coal fire, the main source of light. It was a time of stories. In the black darkness, the veil between the dead and the living was thin and they shivered at more than the night chill. My grannie once told me that from the cottage window she saw a wraith. Down by the banks of the Eden Water the shape of a woman rose up out of the little river and began to glow. Wearing a long dress and with long grey hair, she became brighter and brighter as she swept up from the little river and, stretching out her arms, seemed to soar over the cottage roof and disappear into the night sky. Staring out of Bina’s bedroom window at the moon as she told me this story, I was wide-eyed and cuddled in closer. I believed her. I still do.

  From an early age, my grannie sewed and knitted, but the strain on her eyes meant spectacles in later life. With no electricity at Cliftonhill in the 1890s, her family depended on oil lamps and candles. Bina had clever fingers, and even when they were bent with arthritis I loved to watch her push a darning stool up inside a sock and weave together a patch so perfectly that it seemed new, intended, more than a repair. Only threading fine needles defeated her, and by the light of the sitting-room window I was glad to take the thread she had drawn through a lump of beeswax and do it for her. When she took back the needle, she smiled and called me her wee lamb.

  It is a commonplace to assert that time passes more slowly in rural areas than it does in cities. Sometimes there is a sneer on the edge of remarks like ‘there is no word in Gaelic that expresses the urgency of manãna’. The truth is more complicated and more interesting. Time in the countryside marches not from nine to five but with the seasons. To use the imagery of the clock face, the winter sun rises at 10 a.m. and sets at 2 p.m. and that means little work on the land can be done. But in the lengthening days of spring, summer and autumn, when the year really begins with the lambing, when hay is cut and the harvest eventually brought home, farmers and rural workers are busy all the hours of light, especially when the weather is fine.

  Old time was reckoned differently. Until the Industrial Revolution created the great cities and large towns, earlier cultures measured years, months and days but came very late indeed to counting hours and minutes. The most reliable clock was the cock-crow. As a result, punctuality was a very vague concept, one that has persisted. I still say, ‘I’ll see you at the back of twelve’, meaning sometime between twelve and twelve-thirty.

  Equally, the concept of being busy puzzled country people. It had little meaning since they did the jobs that the seasons demanded, when they needed to be done. And there was usually no point in working at speed so that more could be crammed into the day. Barley could not be persuaded to grow more quickly or lambs to fatten faster. Harvest was the only time when speed might matter. If the weather was due to break, reapers might race against the rain to get the corn home dry.

  8 January

  I saw a shooting star this morning. Stepping out of the porch at six with Maidie, I happened to look up at the open, starry sky and a streak of brilliant white light suddenly shot from the southwest quarter to the north-east. In only two or three seconds it burst out of the darkness and disappeared. Shooting stars are not stars but pieces of rock, or even dense clouds of dust, that enter the Earth’s atmosphere and are burned up in moments. Larger fragments that survive and hit the surface of the planet are meteors and, even larger and thankfully rarer, asteroids.

  I stood awe-struck, replaying that moment of celestial brilliance and violence. The streak of light was much thicker than other shooting stars I had seen because the piece of rock or dust was closer to the Earth. Perhaps it might have become a meteor. Spending almost all the days of the year on our small farm, a world of only eighty acres, knowing the land, its creatures, plants and moods, I was much taken with the contrast of scale, comparing the detail of our speck of a planet with the vast, unimaginable majesty of the universe. Of course I know that the planets orbit the sun but that has a stately rhythm to it. Where the burning rock came from, travelling at thousands of miles an hour, I have no idea, but the notion of out-there, of infinite darkness, of eternity, awes me.

  The sky dominated the morning. As the dawn washed over us, its colours changed in moments. A very pale blue with go
ld on the undersides of the horizon clouds turned to darker blue and a copper-like pink against dusty grey. And then, over the dark green of the eastern woods and the waking world below, the clouds became much larger as a high altitude breeze blew up. Their undersides began to glow a hot pink that reflected on the white bark of the silver birches that line the Top Track. Behind the clouds, the sky turned a cerulean blue. It was a glorious sight, moving, rich, one of the heart-filling joys of living here.

  Cerulean blue is a colour from my past. When I was a little boy, I liked to visit a shop that sold oil paints for artists. The names of the colours on the small, silvery metal tubes seemed to speak of another world: cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, carmine red, vermilion, crimson, burnt sienna. I had no money to buy these paints and no wish to be a painter, but I loved the idea of the colours. Now I see a spectrum of epic beauty some mornings that taxes description.

  We have mice. At least I hope we have mice. A few years ago we had a plague of rats. In the field to the west of the farmhouse, across the boundary fence, the farmer had planted pease as an alternative winter feed for cattle. But persistent bad weather meant he could not harvest it and the field was colonised by rats. I could see their holes below the plant stalks. They infested our stables and a huge one stripped all of the plastic insulation off the wiring in the horse lorry, causing £4,000 in damage. A pest control company with the wonderfully direct name of Surekill got rid of them, but I kept finding half-decomposed, poisoned corpses I had to bury in case the dogs got to them.

  When the porch door was left open overnight, mice, I hope, had come into the relative warmth and gnawed a hole in the skirting board. I installed a sonic repellent and baited two humane traps (I didn’t want dead mice and their blood in the porch; the dogs would have gone postal). But when I picked them up this morning there was nothing in them. The sonic device had worked. Hooray!