Earthed, p.4
Earthed, page 4
This world grows out of the clay and somewhere inside me. We scan the scene for animals, birds and insects and it takes a little time because they are shy, though they don’t yet know to be afraid of humans. What animals do you think live here? I ask. Rabbits, he guesses, worms? Yes, I say, lots of worms and lots of rabbits and foxes too. Red squirrels, dormice, earwigs, voles and owls – can you see any? We try, looking up towards where the sky should be and our eyes are so sharp when turned on this forest that we see them all. There’s a nightjar sitting on her ground nest of two mottled eggs and we watch her blending in with the moss and leaves of a clearing to the east, giving herself away only by tiny movements of her folded breast. A louder sound next: over there. A wild boar rooting for acorns and – a sharp inhalation as I see them – wolves, beyond the marshy part where willows are growing. My little companion’s eyes widen – he can see it as clearly as me: a grey wolf, less translucent with every minute. We watch the pack, a couple of cubs playing in the dust, and then I spot something large and feline: black-tipped ears and a spotted back. Arthur, it’s a lynx, a big cat, shhhh.
I think he’s hunting – I tell him – there must be roe deer nearby and my son looks upset at the thought of jaws and claws meeting a fawn’s spotted coat. I nod, understanding and feeling the same but, I say, the lynx’s mate has kittens now. I point to where the queen is occupied with washing them, her rough tongue pressing against their fur. The new family are sheltered by huge roots and the curved trunk of what can only be the greatest and most ancient of trees. A few weeks ago – I know it somehow – the mother cat lay down here to give birth, choosing this spot to raise her family because it felt like a place of protection. We look on as she lies down again now and the babies start to feed. Arthur, I remind him gently, she needs to eat to make the milk. He thinks for a few seconds: ‘The daddy will have to kill the deer then.’ I put my arms around him a little tighter as the tom lynx passes right in front of us on his murderous, life-saving quest. We stare at the canopy above and this world that has become so real that it almost obscures the sight of our tabby cat slinking through the open field on her way to hunt mice.
Late morning and the sun is high enough to shine directly outside the kitchen. We drag cushions outside to bask in the heat; remembering how nice it is when the air is warm not biting. The sky is spookily blue for February; not the usual determined cerulean of late winter but a soft summer-like periwinkle. It’s odd to see bare branches against a shade of sky that is usually paired with leaves, and even the crocuses seem shocked as they open and spin like satellites to stalk the sun.
This is all Arthur really remembers. He is tuned into the outdoor world we have foisted on him; noticing the moon’s daily changes and knowing how to hold a hen so her wings don’t flap. I wonder if he will choose something similar for himself or if, later, he’ll resent us for taking him away from the big city where his sister was born. Whether deciding between city and countryside life will even be something his generation gets to do. But I try not to project into the future today, to avoid stepping any closer to the internal agitation that would otherwise catch light.
We eat lunch early and then I open three envelopes that came in the post, happy to hear a promising rattle from within. Money is tight this year, but seeds are a cheap dopamine fix and I have a burgeoning addiction. A pound or two brings me an assurance of summer and buys my freedom from the sensory assault of the vegetable aisle. I love them and they are useful too – the perfect thing to keep my son occupied and me distracted without it all feeling like a waste of precious time.
I take out the packets excitedly and my enthusiasm spills over to Arthur who squeals and shakes them, doing a funny little dance that I join in with. I tear the paper, pour seeds carefully out onto our palms and we consider them reverently: the pepper’s pale curve; the darker, chunkier teardrop of the squash. These are the essential ingredients for a magic spell I am about to cast, and I resist the instinct to rush on. I roll them between thumb and finger for a moment instead, hoping that their ugly-duckling promise of eventual swan will rub off.
We sow them together sitting on the grass, getting seed compost everywhere. After we’ve done all the vegetables we can, Arthur agitates for more and as I can’t face a tantrum today, I fetch the jumbled box of flower seeds, taking out the ones I am most excited about: Cosmos Rose Bon Bon. They sound like something Jamie Oliver would name a child, and as we push these brown new moons into the compost, I am pressed closer to the pink, double-petaled flowers of July. Arthur must feel this forward motion too, chatting happily about what else we will grow for him to eat this summer. Raspberries, sweetcorn, peas, strawberries, carrots, beans, sugar snaps, lettuce (but not rocket – too spicy), cucumbers, potatoes, mint, beetroot (but only if I cut it into ribbons) and, finally, even more raspberries. I’d better get to work.
The next morning, both children at school and I am typing quickly. I’m skittering from task to task as if each is an emergency and yet entirely meaningless. I feel frantic but then catch myself staring gormlessly out of the window. When I get up to do something, I’ve forgotten what it is by the time I reach the next room. Finally, I settle to reading the headlines, clicking through to a story on how yesterday was the hottest in February since records began.
It’s confusing to look at the still-seductive blue sky and know there’s something sinister about it. Everything feels easier when the air is balmy, the light streams in and no one needs a coat. Being reminded that this heat is a symptom of a climate lurching out of balance makes these simple joys feel like betrayals. I should be outside now working the plot to make our lives less reliant on things that make the temperature climb. But – the follow-up thought comes quickly – surely it’s absurd to even try to meet a problem of this scale by growing a few broad beans?
I read on and discover that yesterday’s temperature record was logged somewhere not usually famed for its good weather – the place where the idea for our smallholding life first germinated. While Arthur and I sowed our seeds, the thermometer in the Trawsgoed estate in Ceredigion, 8 miles east of Aberystwyth, West Wales, crept up to 20.6ºC. Less than three years previously on working holiday we’d passed that very spot and it was near there, with the children in the background running happily towards a stream, that Jared and I first talked about making a shift to a more outdoor life.
I remember that summer as one continuous picnic in the August grass – the memory already heat-hazed. Days passed and we turned browner and our hair sun-bleached. The world of trains, laptops, cafes and shops drifted away down the River Teifi and out into the sea. After nearly ten years of marriage Jared and I smiled more easily again, laughed often, played with the children in the day and talked and loved at night as if we’d discovered a secret compartment in one another with something new within every morning. I recognised a difference in myself too – not completely novel but a return to something I’d lost and then forgotten.
Soothed by the sounds of crickets, we found the space for thoughts usually pushed aside by work, hoovering and getting to the childminder on time. Late-night fireside chats evolved into a plan that felt like the only logical response to where we and everything around us seemed to be headed. I don’t know who said it first – the wish to capture some of the freedom and energy we felt then and bring it to our everyday lives. But there was a shared certainty, I know there was, a realisation that we didn’t miss much of the life we were away from and that there was a lot to gain in beginning again a little closer to the earth. Both our heads swivelled in a new way when we passed solar panels, vegetable patches and farm ‘for sale’ signs. And, as the fire turned to embers and we turned our feelings into a vision, we found that we were also talking about our biggest fears. That this plan we had somehow segued into making contained the worries we had about our family, our town, our country and our world.
I was thirty-four that summer; the summer when we started to sketch the life we wanted. The summer that Jared and I stood up from the fireside at the same time, scooped up the sleeping children and set off into the night without a backward glance. The summer of 2016: the Brexit vote and the Trump presidential campaign. The summer when, belatedly, climate change and the wrecking of the natural world transitioned from abstract worries to active threats. The summer when I started to tense against a feeling that there was a point of confluence ahead for which we needed to be ready. When, after six years of riding the peaks and dips of my little brother’s destructive life, I was still surprised to discover the latest drop and find myself pulled down towards it.
I was thirty-four that summer; the summer of striding out towards a life of open fields and sacks of corn. And I brought my kids, Jared, two cats, three jobs and a confused black hole of something pernicious but not yet acknowledged along for the ride.
This afternoon, as I walk to the shed to search for seed compost, I take note of the welcome extra light. The days have lengthened by a full two hours since the start of the month and once again today the last of the sunshine lands a few minutes later and a ray or two further on the daffodils. I can see the summer garden emerging from pots in the propagator and on windowsills. Sweet peas are snaking up canes and the garden peas that overwintered in a plastic pop-up tent are already beginning to reach the top of their short stakes. The extra light is helping me tick off some long-overdue chores and I finally feel a little satisfied as I take stock of the garden and my plans for its year to come.
I am trying to focus on the progress I have made and not let myself think about the rest of it: everything else still to be completed, and how I feel when it piles up. This is why I am looking for materials to sow yet another batch of seeds. The tangle of energy, certainty, ambition, thoughtfulness, panic, self-loathing, anger, confusion – and all the other things not found or named – is pulling me in too many directions. Over these impossible feelings I choose the anticipation of a speck of green against black every time. I want to watch each one become a seedling, noticing its cotyledons, the temporary first leaves, open as if trying above-ground existence on for size before making a commitment. It feels as if identifying the precise moment that photosynthesis takes over could make the expanse of my thoughts manageable.
Despite these efforts this wide internal space opens up now. I see Jared and I sharing a mouse-infested shithole of an East London flat with five others. Just-out-of-university friends, thrown together as we tried to persuade the others to move further out for more space and light. We fell in love in my messy bedroom looking out over the twenty-four-hour Beigel Bake on Bethnal Green Road. Six months later we decamped to a tiny flat overlooking a courtyard, then another with a sliver of outdoor space in which we immediately, unnecessarily, installed two rabbits. The dense undergrowth of our current life is seeded in these beginnings. Getting married the week after my twenty-fifth birthday, a curly-haired baby at twenty-seven; always wanting to tangle ourselves up with where we lived. Jared keener to stay still for a while and me always restless and ready for the next thing.
The lurching strangeness that’s becoming obvious in me must have been present in the soil throughout. And it’s the same out there in the world – the leaves of this month’s record-breaking heat having their moment of vernation one hundred, five hundred, perhaps a thousand years ago. Once I start, it is hard for me to stop this trail from broadening and dragging my thoughts to the uncertainties of the future; the demand for a response and solution following quickly behind.
I force my focus away from this searching scan, leaving the shed, tipping the compost I’ve found into a bucket and concentrating on some weeds I’ve just spotted. I kneel down to tug them out and my thoughts drop to where these roots in my hand have been growing. Since the forest told itself to me in a story I am looking anew at what’s under my boots, doing research and trying to understand my land a little more. The need to pull things apart, to examine them and try to make sense of now by understanding then is not new to me. I don’t know why I’m compelled to spend time I don’t have on these investigations, but I have given in and jumped back as far as I can. The sun has risen and fallen 46 billion times on this clay since it was laid down 130 million years ago. The earth has stayed solid here as land that became sea that became land once more. Next, it hosted a warm, wet jungle that was ended by the suddenness of extinction and followed by almost endless winter.
The thickets that grew out of that eternity of cold became the prehistoric, prehuman forest of the Weald – the blanket of leaves I spun for Arthur is a true story. Bacteria, plants, birds, insects, reptiles and mammals emerged, altered and gradually disappeared. In time creatures whose descendants would eventually stand up and usher in the Holocene moved across its leaf-mould floor. And it was only in the forest’s yesterday that the slow pace of everything picked up again. Its sucking soils and dense woodland had long acted as a barrier but by and by – a little over a thousand years ago – this place, untouched for longer than most, felt the force of permanent human inhabitation. Small clearings for pigs and tents multiplied and expanded; a tsunami of change had started. Axes met saplings and large trunks alike and eventually even the Mother Tree – the oldest in the forest, charged with protecting this woodland (with a sideline in sheltering generations of lynx) – was felled. Within three centuries, 500 square miles had shrunk to 150 and sunlight hit grass more often than leaf.
Coit Andred. Andredesleage. Andredes weald. I mutter these words as I pull more weeds up: the oldest names I can find for the forest that used to grow where my house now stands. Looking up, I see a clearing – sky, grass, meadow, field and a place to grow food – a felled forest reflected in our windows. The past doesn’t seem keen to step aside here. The more I look and listen, the more clearly it comes into view. Holes in the canopy, paths through the darkness, the smell of woodsmoke and human voices getting louder, life getting better. Land that had just existed, just was – a place to walk across, scurry on, climb up or fly over – becoming somewhere that was owned. A safer world of hospitals, welfare state and life-saving vaccines, yet one where trees became the exception and fields – dotted with houses, bordered by roads – the rule.
By the time our family began our new life here, there were only 23 square miles of ancient forest left – half damaged and a quarter over-grazed. As we explored the nearby countryside, we had no idea that many of the villages, roads, shops and holiday cottages had names that came directly from those of the earliest settlers and the first clearings they made. I didn’t realise, as I made a start on turning the soil with my fork, that I was digging myself into a past about which I had no idea.
Until I was thirty-four, and those warm weeks of summer in Wales did their work on me, I was convinced that I couldn’t successfully cultivate so much as a layer of mould on jam. Our last home – a tall, narrow townhouse – had a garden that pleased and terrified me in equal amounts. I wanted our family to be out in it and for it to be lovely, but I didn’t know where to start.
With no practical experience I was afraid of doing something wrong. How was I supposed to know what to feed and what to prune? When to water and when to stop? I worried that I would kill the plants and break the rules, not realising that they were my plants and my rules, so it didn’t matter. I left it, concentrated on stopping the house from falling down, on working, looking after a toddler, then being pregnant again and having a new baby and tried not to look outside too much. Eventually, when the mess became oppressive, I paid my gardener friend Catherine to design and plant a low-maintenance bed and panic-turfed the rest.
Catherine’s quiet work did pay off, despite my ignorant refusal to spend money on topsoil and compost. We had colour to look out on and a set of very comprehensive instructions, which meant I did remember to water – at least sometimes. Looking at those plants, noticing the buds form and turn to flowers and knowing I’d played a small part in that transformation, began to do something to me. I found I quite liked it out there, by myself, with only the hose and a ladybird for company.
One late-spring day I felt ready to take the next step and create something of my own. I remembered the impulse-purchase strawberry plants I’d picked up the previous year, found them looking half-dead at the bottom of the garden and planted them up in pride of place near the house. For the next two months I watered and fed those strawberries, tenderly snipping off brown leaves and evicting weeds. It was my first real taste of gardening and I was proud of how well it was going. By the time we set off for our summer in Ceredigion my soft fruits were in rude health and had quadrupled in size and Catherine, who was watering in our absence, promised to pay them special attention.
When we returned five weeks later, muddy, happy and ready to ditch town life for the call of the countryside, the strawberry plants were covered in reddening berries which we stood in a circle to admire. I felt the addictive sense of achievement and self-reliance that comes when the work of tending to a plant turns it into food and it seemed like a validation of the decisions we’d made while we were away. If I could rescue those almost-dead things, maybe I could do anything: raised beds, a walled garden, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon perhaps?
