Meadowland

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Freda went missing just before noon, on a day when the sun seemed locked above our heads and the land was holding its breath. Penny – who is less prone to panic – started a methodical search of the house and garden, while I speed-walked down the fields to the river. Soon I was running. And calling. At every alien shape in the water – a snagged plastic feed bag, a broken galvanized bucket washed down from God knows where – I imagined the worst.

  Nothing. Sheening with sweat, I began running uphill in wellingtons – a feat usually beyond me – and decided to cut through the pig paddock to get to the fields leading to the lane. As I scrambled down the metal gate into the bare earth of the pigs’ enclosure I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Freda’s clothes entangled with a row of pink pigs, lying like sausages in the packet.

  I can tell you what the end of the world looks like. In a circle around you everything dissolves and melts so that you know that life is an illusion, a pretty screen over the eternal expanding chaos of the universe. For one terrifying second I thought that the pigs had eaten Freda.

  As I stumbled forward I could see that Freda was still inside the clothes. I could see that she was intact. As I reached her and touched her beautiful, rosy-cheeked face I could see that she was breathing. Colour burst into the world. Time sped up to its proper dimension. I’m probably imagining this, but I’m sure birds started singing too. Freda was fast asleep between two pigs. Feeling my fingers on her face, she opened her eyes. ‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said, before turning over on her side, the better to cuddle the pig next to her. The pig grunted its minor annoyance, before shifting its weight to accommodate her, setting off a porcine ripple as every pig adjusted its place in the sun.

  I have another memory of pigs. A memory from my own childhood. I’m about six, standing on a wooden Davies Brooke’s lemonade box, arms leaning on the concrete wall of the pigsty at my grandparents’ house. The pigs are milling around, squealing in excitement because they can smell the buckets of warm mash, boiled up from kitchen leftovers, that Poppop, as we call my grandfather, is about to tip into their metal troughs. As the food arcs down from the buckets I slyly look at my grandfather’s thin arms, leather-brown below his rolled-up shirt sleeves; his arms always fascinate me, because the tendons – after fifty years of farming – are taut steel-wire hausers.

  The pigs jostle and barge, so that the herd order – for pigs are strictly hierarchical – is maintained and the top pigs have what they presume to be the biggest and best portions. ‘Always remember this about pigs, Jahn,’ he says, and suddenly jabs one pig on the ear with a spade. There is a grunt from the recesses of time, from the primordial swamp, as the pig bites at the shovel. Poppop retracts the shovel, bends down and points to the blade, swivelling it slightly so it catches the morning light. The pig has left gashing teeth marks in the steel. My grandfather is a man of few words but actions speak louder. Any animal that can leave bite marks in steel can bite off a human limb.

  The problem with pigs is that one is never quite sure how they will react, dozily pacific or violently aggressive. The bristly Gloucester Old Spots do not like being shoved off the grass, and one whips around and tries to bite me. A shark’s mouth is tender, quaint in comparison.

  By the time I have got them back into their paddock, they have been out in the Aztec sun for too long and their pale ears are reddening with sunburn. They snort satisfiedly when I rub sun lotion into their ears.

  The Gloucester Old Spots and the truant cow are not alone in their liking for my grass. In the greyscale evening a snuffling family party of badgers dines on the stuff too.

  Young jackdaws fledged from the ruined barn at the Grove skirr in the sky. A kestrel fans the meadow; sunlight strikes through the goat willow, making the predator invisible. Below are field voles running through tunnels in the grass, dribbling urine as they go. The hawk, it is thought, can see the ultraviolet light reflected off the urine. The trees send shadows downhill on to the sighing grass. Hoverflies zip to the sudsy heads of cow parsley. Cabbage whites flock on the thistle heads. Grasshoppers and bees chant to the breeze, and the birds chorus back. The entire landscape is in motion.

  Except for the grass snake – lying peacefully on a rock slab by the gate, and looking strangely unreal. This is the only time I see the snake in this entire year. When I look back to see if the hawk is still hovering I cannot make it out against the shadow play of the sun in the willows. Then when I look again to the snake it is no more.

  29 JUNE Clouds race their shadows down the mountain, across the valley, across the meadow, and up the criss-cross of fields on Merlin’s Hill. Something else is stirring, moving. There are so many little shiny frogs in the newt ditch that they make the sedge grass in and around it tremulous.

  30 JUNE The time for mowing is nigh. The hay-cut is when farmers wheel out their vintage tractors from dusty barn corners, and I am no exception. I spend the day servicing our 1978 International 474. And the finger bar mower, which looks for all the world like a horizontal garden hedge-cutter, which attaches to the tractor’s rear. And the bailer too. A long day of grease and spanners. The baby blue tits which live in the crack in the breeze blocks of the stables are companionable, though. They have not yet learned fear, and cheer me on.

  JULY

  Devil’s bit scabious

  ALL BIRDSONG HAS stopped; the noise of the field is a low insectoid drone.

  I take a survey of the grasses: common bent; perennial rye grass; crested dog’s tail; meadow foxtail; sweet vernal; quaking grass; red fescue; cock’s foot; timothy; rough meadow grass. Where there has historically been grazing only: tufted hair-grass. A good deal of the grass has gone past seed, to leave empty purses. The hay would be better as fodder if it was headed, but cutting when the wildflowers have set seed means those wildflowers have a chance to reproduce because their seed is cast as a by-action of the mowing process.

  2 JULY The morning mist is shattered by five green woodpeckers, a family party, exploding out of the promontory. One of the flying jewels laughs madly as it goes. Green woodpeckers feed upon worms and ground insects; the sparse light-deprived grass under the alders is pitted by the marks of their bills.

  Like everyone who works the land I see auguries in living things. The green woodpecker is the ‘rain bird’ of British folklore; in France it is still called pic de la pluie and its mocking cry known to herald the storm:

  Lorsque le pivert crie

  Il annonce la pluie.

  According to the ornithologist Edward Allworthy Armstrong the green woodpecker was once the subject of a Neolithic cult, with woodpecker worship being superseded by other religions and eventually Christianity. Some trace element lingered on in the minds of men, for stories about the green woodpecker going against God’s commandments are widespread. One German folk tale tells how the Picus viridis refused God’s command to dig a well because it would spoil his gorgeous green-and-red plumage. As punishment, the bird was forbidden to ever drink from a pool or stream. Instead the green woodpecker must endlessly call for rain and fly into the air to receive the slaking drops.

  Later: a thunderstorm. Doubtless whipped up by the green woodpeckers.

  3 JULY The six-spot burnet moths are hatching. What urge persuaded the caterpillars back in spring to crawl up grass stems, spin papyrus cocoons around themselves, and assume there would be time in which to take wing? While I ponder the ineffability of it all, a metamorphosed creature crawls from its Expressionist cabinet in the sward; it is a decrepit black being, and impossible to relate to the chubby yellow caterpillar that entered pupation. The afternoon sun makes the moth beautiful, its wings dry and expand, and the crimson spots that give this day-flying moth its name become visible. Except that the spots are not exactly crimson; the spots are more scarlet, the scarlet of Cabaret and Berlin brothels. The red lights on the moth’s wings are not just a come-on to other burnets, they advertise the being’s inedibility. Burnet moth caterpillars absorb hydrogen cyanide (HCN) from the glucosides in their princip
al food plant, bird’s-foot trefoil. The HCN is retained during pupation into adulthood. The moth’s gaudy dress warns that it is unpalatable, maybe downright deadly. (In the jargon, this warning coloration is ‘aposematism’.) As the six-spot burnets emerge into this blissful afternoon of boundless hope, so do the flowers of their beloved thistles reach their purple peak; bird’s-foot trefoil for their forthcoming young is already in bloom in the bottom of the sward. Everything is in perfect, synchronized order.

  The meadow does a good line in thistles, though I try to restrict them to a five-foot-wide stand along the north end of Marsh Field hedge. Thistles have distinct Lebensraum inclinations. Dotted around the meadow, especially in the finger and by the newt ditch, is marsh thistle, a biennial which is hard to ignore: it grows to a metre and a half in height. A particularly splendid example is drenched in cabbage whites, which fuel themselves on nectar before floating off dreamily in search of a mate.

  There are so many thistles in the gateway to Marsh Field I doubt I’ll be able to open it. I have waited until now to chop them down with a hook, because the most ancient rule of British farming is this:

  Cut thistles in May

  They grow in a day

  Cut them in June

  That is too soon;

  Cut them in July,

  Then they will die.

  9 JULY I take Edith with me to shoot wood pigeons on a glistening, curiously electric afternoon rising out of a sodden morning. The high wet grass uncomfortably soaks my jeans above my wellingtons. Patrolling the field edge under the sheltering twin oaks, Edith, bedraggled to her neck, suddenly stops, with her hackles springing cartoonishly upright. She’s spotted one of the fox cubs – well a juvenile, now – fast asleep, nose tucked into brush, on a parched ledge between the roots of the oaks. A fluffy carmine cushion.

  To Edith’s disappointment, we let sleeping foxes lie. The pigeons also turn out to be safe from harm; I don’t get within fifty yards before they clapper out of the copse.

  12 JULY High summer and one can hear the universe; so overwhelming is the accumulated sound of growing in the meadow and in hedges, of pollen being released, of particles moving in the heat, that all the minute motions together create a continuous hum: the sound of summer.

  Meanwhile swifts tear the fabric of the sky on scything wings. The yarrow flowers are tall, the hawthorn flowers have turned to hard green haws. Blackfly fasten on the thistles, so too slender marmalade soldier beetles (Rhagonycha fulva) mating, tail to tail.

  In the sitting room my son has left a pile of photos on the sofa; one shows him and his schoolfriends holding a daisy chain of prodigious length. Which makes my mind wander to flower culture.

  Many field flowers used to be regarded by girls as love charms. Daisy petals were plucked to the rhyme ‘He loves me, he loves me not’. Picking the grains from the rye grass was used for the rhyming verse designed to find the nature of your future husband: ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief . . .’ Field scabious (Knautia arvensis) buds were each given the name of a suitor, and the first to open was the man who would become your husband. Knapweed (Centaurea nigra) was stripped of its flowers, tucked between the breasts, and if in the morning it had regrown blossom your love was true.

  Slightly more sophisticated, one feels, was The Language of Flowers, a guide to the means of communicating secret feelings through the sending of flowers. Published by Charlotte de la Tour in France in 1819, it was madly popular. Queen Victoria herself wore ivy leaves in her hair to symbolize fidelity to Albert.

  There are girls’ names, of course: Daisy, Poppy, Primrose.

  There are flower games, such as do you like butter? Shining a buttercup under the chin to determine whether the subject liked butter. A tall buttercup flower against one’s neck on the night of a full moon, or simply smelling the flower, causes insanity, hence the folk name ‘crazy’ or ‘crazy bet’.

  Cleavers were stuck to the back of blazers.

  And my favourite: a thick blade of grass between pressed thumbs so it forms a reed, which is blown by the mouth. The noise, depending on delicacy, is either a raspberry, a curlewesque wail, or the tuba in Beethoven’s Fifth.

  The deep veins on the leaves of the plantain have earned the species the name ‘ribwort’. Alternative names reflect the use of the stubby black flower head in a game akin to conkers, among them ‘soldiers’ and ‘fighters’. Yet other names refer to the fact that farmers used to judge whether a haystack would be likely to catch fire by feeling a leaf of ribwort plantain to see how much moisture was left in the hay. Thus ‘fire-leaf’ and ‘fire-weed’.

  Pollen analysis has shown that ribwort plantain spread as Neolithic farming increased and the wild forest decreased. I cannot help but assume that Neolithic farmers found plantain as useful as I do in determining when to mow the grass for hay. When the plantain head is good enough to play soldiers the grass is good enough to cut. And after all, this is July, the month for which the medieval calendar advised ‘With my scythe my meads I mow’.

  16 JULY Under the hazels in the copse a fox (the vixen, I think) sits washing its front legs, a small red ember in the dying sun. Ten yards away a rabbit sits on top of an anthill, wholly in the view of the fox. The rabbit is also washing itself, paws to face. They ignore each other. And the lion shall lie down with the lamb, the fox with the rabbit on this fantastic honeysuckled evening.

  19 JULY Flying Ant Day. Out of the nests in Lower Meadow and Bank Field thousands and thousands of winged meadow ants are pushed into the balmy afternoon. This is an orchestrated Republican revolution; despite being two hundred yards apart, the prole ants in both sets of nests eject the winged queens and their winged male consorts at almost exactly the same time, 5.15pm.

  The tops of the mounds seethe with insects, which groggily take to the air in a nuptial flight whereby males chase the queens for sky-high mating. The 100 Metre Club. Soon the winged ants are rising in smoky plumes, and are flying and landing everywhere, in my hair, on my arms, and the more I brush away, the more they seem to land. The plumes dissipate to leave the drifting air over the meadow tinged with grey.

  The watchmaker’s synchronized timing between the nests is a clever wheeze. With ants from several different colonies in the air at once, the incidence of inbreeding is lessened. Also, predators cannot cope with the sudden glut of food; pied wagtails are taking their haul of the insects, the spotted flycatcher is leaping off the fence at the stream of ants passing before her, and the sky is beginning to swirl with swifts, swallows and house martins. But the birds can only eat so many.

  Some fertilized queens will survive to found a new colony somewhere. And nothing in nature is wasted. The bodies of the dead meadow ants will go to nourish the soil of the meadow. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Flesh to flesh.

  The yarrow heads in the grass are white, discs of intricate clustered jewellery. But it is the extraordinary leaves that are the key to identification, these being long, multi-divided, thus millefolium or ‘thousand leaf’ as part of its Latin name. There is probably more folklore attached to yarrow than any other plant. For the ancient Greeks it was the plant Achilles used to bind the wounds of his troops at Troy; for the Chinese the counting of dried yarrow stalks was held to be the means of divining in the I Ching, the Book of Changes. The Celts were convinced that the herb had psychotropic tendencies that allowed the imbiber to see their future spouse. The medieval English were altogether more down-to-earth: the bitterness of yarrow was found to be ideal in the flavouring of ale.

  I pick it because it makes a rather refreshing tea.

  Mowing grass for hay always brings a headache, especially if mowing an old-fashioned meadow the old-fashioned way. Not until the third week of July are the curlew fledglings grown enough to take wing; I see them leave one morning when I’m in Road Field and happen to look down on the meadow to see four curlews circle around, and then come up over my head, line astern, and out over the mountain, going steadily west. They
are unconscious of me; this, however, does not stop me stupidly suffering the pride and sadness of a parent at their departure.

  There are other wild things to take account of in the timing of the hay cut. Not until the last week is the yellow rattle seed properly set, and this is one of the plants I wish to encourage. Then there is a skylark still sitting but I peg out a plot around her so she will be left unharmed in an unmown island. The meadow pipit is on her second brood, so she too gets a private island.

  At no other time is there a greater disparity between the superficial peace of the countryside and my state of mind than when I’m ‘on the hay’. Make hay while the sun shines, runs the adage. But when will the sun shine here under the mountain in the west of England, where the average rainfall is 40 inches a year? I obsessively listen to weather forecasts on the radio, and nerdishly google weather reports on the internet, especially Scandinavian ones after our friend Annie convinces me they are the most reliable. Like their cars. I’m looking for the Volvo of forecasting.

  And I find it. A Swedish forecaster who is right about almost every aspect of weather in south-west Herefordshire grants me ten whole dry days, starting 24 July.

  I begin mowing at midday when the dew has dissipated, and the rising temperature is bringing up the pollen. The field smells like honey.

  Funny, the things that take you back. A few years ago, I took the doors off the tractor cab, plus the back window, so sitting on the tractor was a cooler, more authentic experience. (And the de-pimping made it easier to bail out from; the electrics in the cab once went up in flames, and I had to jump for it; the dashboard still looks like something drawn by Dalí.) So every time I get in this almost open cab I am reminded of a photograph of my grandfather. He is driving a Ferguson T20, staring intently over his shoulder at the plough behind. The T20 is shiny, and is extra-shiny because of the rain. My grandfather is wrapped up in a grey raincoat. There is no cab.