Earthed, p.7
Earthed, page 7
Annoyed with the books and myself, I get up to check on the eggs. Another chick is out and it shouldn’t be long before the fourth joins its sort-of-siblings. Watching the first bird fluffing up while other little beaks work away inside their shells soothes me a little. I don’t even know exactly what it is I’m looking for at my desk, but I know it is not going to be found in these assertive accounts. I look at the egg rocking as the chick pushes on and think about the wives of these men. What it was like for them when their husbands went off on jaunts for months. Their stories would make a book I would like to read, but it’s very unlikely to exist. If the women of today struggle to get their stories heard, then those of times past are even further from reach. There’s a gap, a chasm in history. Of course I knew this already, but I feel the loss of what should be there very personally today.
Then, as I go back to my desk, I remember another book containing a social history of our village. There is something in there I half-read before and I fan the pages between my thumb and forefinger to find it. Yes, here it is. Here she is. Joane Newman: a seventeenth-century ‘thrice-married farmer’s wife’ and I really like the sound of her. I read the single page written and researched by another woman, a contemporary of mine, who has pieced Joane together from the church records and archives. Born as the English Civil War began, Joane lived through the execution of Charles I, the brief Commonwealth that followed and then it was back to the monarchy in a big way. Her life spanned the reigns of a further six kings and queens, from the time before our oak was an acorn through to it becoming a strong, young tree.
By nineteen she had a son by a married man and, according to court proceedings, a physical fight with his wife. She lived like the times she was in: tumultuously, outrageously even, with the key players changing again and again but managing, against the odds, to remain the lead in her story. One farmer husband, two farmer husbands (they kept on dying), four sons and a daughter later and, at forty-eight, she married for a third time: another farmer. She outlived him too and, other than her death, the last mark she left on paper was her ownership of a large piece of land on our road – near, or perhaps even on, this very spot. It is not much – not five hundred pages of walking and musing – but still Joane has forced her way through a gap with the help of a woman three hundred years younger.
I close my eyes and try to see her. There’s nothing on this page about her hair or whether she walked with a limp. I’m aware that she is all her ages at once: baby, child, woman. But when she finally settles behind my eyes she is seventy or so, done with husbands, ruling her own roost. Joane would have kept hens on her land, knowing exactly what they needed, when to put them in with the cockerel, how to kill and pluck the birds for the table, how to keep the broody safe from the fox. She would had been doing it her whole life: small-time poultry-keeping to feed her family and put a little extra in her purse.
This, I realise, might be why I can’t find anything about the development of egg candling. As a rule it has been men that ploughed, made machines, made agricultural policy, surveyed what they happened to see and made it truth as words in a book. A little coop, a hen, a hand and a candle won’t be found in the histories. This knowledge is women’s knowledge: passed from grandmother to mother to daughter until it wasn’t needed and the chain was broken. Along with kitchen gardens, the herbs of birth and death and all the struggles and joys they existed in and around, this is one of the quiet backstories that no man bothered to write down and few women ever had the chance to tell.
If I want to know what it was like to hold an egg to a candle, what clusters of hurt, love and hunger had led to that moment, I will have to find another way. Joane Newman was a fact – a person – and she only needs to be re-animated. I open my window, take the outside air into my lungs and let it out into her flat outline made of dusty records. Nothing. I try again and then a third time and, finally, her shape begins to swell into three dimensions: fleshy, palpable, buoyant. This work is not the same as reading a hard-edged document and making bullet-point notes, but maybe it is better. This is a record of the past whose chest expands and contracts. It – she – has a smell; her skin tastes of salt, bacteria and linen and as she moves – a creation made of her and of me – the curtains flap at the disturbance. Joane and I are meeting on earth that knows both our weights. We look, we wait and then she speaks.
The year has turned towards another summer and I’m outside in the dark again, without a lamp of course. No matter, it must be done and I like to do it – to see what others don’t. Here biddy, biddy, biddy, don’t you peck me, broody as you are. It’s only my hand, the one that gives you the corn. Good chick. She is a good biddy this one, six summers of sitting on a nest for me and when she’s done with the one clutch she goes to the next. And here they are, on their bed of hay and feather – eggs as warm as the fireside.
I’ll steal half of them – that will do – as it takes more than it did before to make my back bend this way. I’m older now – three husbands buried older – and there is a gain and a loss in all of that. I only ever really mourned the one: Robert. I think of him still and feel his hand on me. He was not my first, but he was the first to walk me into the church, the only one who looked me in the eyes and kept on looking. He’d already taken a wife, but she was in the churchyard all too soon and he had a girl child still in the cradle. I had one also – a boy – and the memory of the back of a man as he ran home to the wife he’d hidden away with falsehoods. I kept walking though, held the baby to my breast – weaker vessels, they say – ha! Oh, I’m sure the tongues wagged aplenty again over Robert and I – the two of us making the best of it; me with the baby and no man, him with the baby and no woman. But I had stopped listening to the gossips by then. And it was more than that soon – he let me find my own way across the bed to him, which didn’t take long once he’d shown me his smile with just one of his brows raised.
There now, that’s enough: enough eggs, enough evening reverie about the dead. I am needed by the living for a while longer. I push the door and settle down to see what the biddy has been up to. Take care, Joane. Slowly. I have known myself long enough – too hot and hasty – and it would not do to bring this shell too close to the flame. It takes a while for my eyes to turn this light in the dark into something, but I think I see it. I did tire myself today though – gathering wood betony to dry – and my eyes are not as sure as they used to be. I’ll call the moppet in, she must be good for something and it isn’t sweeping, that’s for certain. Careful, girl! I wait. Never the thing I like to do, always the thing I have to learn. Good. She sees it too, she says: the start of life and the lines trailing from it. Thanks be to God, thanks be to the biddy and thanks be to me – for now, that is. I haven’t journeyed through so many winters and failed to learn that nothing is certain. But this is a good sign: the cock is doing what has to be done and there’s a hope of the year turning, new biddies and another nest. And I’m sure, then as now, I’ll hold the eggs up to the light of candle to spy a little on the future. If He allows me to stay.
I watch Joane put the eggs into her apron – keeping them warm with her body – and a few minutes later, in the distance, she slides them back under the hen who gives a growling squark, but still doesn’t peck the woman who feeds her. Then she goes back into the house to live until she’s eighty-five– more than most, but not as much as she deserves. She has returned to this place now though and I think we get to carry on our conversation.
The computer screen has gone to sleep and I see myself in it: happily drained by the late night, the hatch, this quest and now by something else – an infusion of shared imagination and memories that aren’t mine. Underneath there is still a fast heartbeat and something that could be the moment before panic, but it is spring and I have chicks and I want everything to be fine. I want to be fine. I want to be like Joane: wise, stubborn, brave, tough. That’s why I press the keyboard one more time – I want to know more and be certain that this tale she and I have just told is true.
Then, and I’m not even sure of the series of mouse movements that makes it appear, I’m looking at an oil painting. The scene it depicts, the caption tells me, is from seventeenth-century Sweden, but it’s not – it is a glimpse of what has just played out for me. The brush strokes work to show an evening kitchen: the lamps are glowing and the sides of the room are dim. There’s a young woman in the foreground with a linen cap and apron. She wears a look of anxious incompetence – the moppet (sharp eyes, bad at sweeping). She’s not looking at me but deferentially to her left, where another woman sits. This figure is turned away, but I know her face – though only a sliver is visible – and it matches her greying hair: practical, a little wayward, wiry and full. She holds herself with power and contentment, a could-be-unleashed-any-moment energy and a tiny hunch that speaks of new stiffness. This is the body of someone fully present in their life, a life that has been quite the thing. She sits in front of a basket that looks like my own. The woven willow is full of white eggs and she is holding one up to the light of a candle. I zoom in and see the cracks on the oil paint’s surface and the curve of the side of her face as the flame illuminates it at the very moment she sees the red veins. The start of life.
Here she is – Joane Newman – and I was right. This painting is enough for me to feel sure. She did candle eggs, women candled eggs and shone their lights on many other hidden things besides. I will make myself responsible for finding more of the gaps and colouring in where their lives should be. When I can’t, I will try and enjoy the uncertain blackness, knowing that it is made of layers of thick, dark velvet to wrap around my shoulders as I walk my two acres. I’ll find their threads myself with a candle in the dark.
The children and I are visiting the three-day-old chicks who have been successfully adopted by Frisbee – my best broody hen. Once the little creatures were ready to leave the incubator, I slid them under her, using darkness as my cover, and hid in the corner to keep watch. She raised her head in what looked like surprise when she heard a chirp and felt a movement – but was happy to go along with it. And today, both chicks and hen seemed delighted with each other as we top up their food and watch the little ones taking speedy dashes around the cage before pushing themselves out of sight under the hen’s breast.
I head back inside with Sofya and Arthur to where my parents are sitting on stools in the kitchen – an Easter-holiday visit. It is bedtime and there’s no fuss from the children because my father has a story planned for them: one of the famous ‘made-up’ stories that my younger brother Liam and I used to beg for. An unstoppable, overflowing milkshake machine has probably flooded the high street with an ensuing river of strawberry, chocolate and vanilla and someone will have to drink a heroic path through it and swim to the off switch before the world drowns in artificially flavoured dairy products. I tidy up a bit, glad to hand over bedtime while Jared makes dinner for the grown-ups. My mother is hard at work too. Washing up speedily, staying busy as ever. As I scoop up ‘Catty’ the toy cat, ‘Doggy’ the toy dog and Owly (yes, a toy owl) I notice she has frozen with the tap running, midway through using the scrubbing brush on a green mug. The kitchen light spotlights the copper in her brown hair – still her own colour and only a suggestion of grey.
It is hard to look away, so rarely is she ever still like this. A human whirlwind, a woman of constant motion who has been suddenly stopped. I tell myself that she’s thinking about a new plan for her garden or, more likely, an idea for mine. The reassuring voice inside my head chatters in a similar vein about what I am doing. It insists that I am getting on with spring, feeling better, turning what’s needed to the light. And some of this has the look of truth. But. I know my mother is not thinking about gardens. She’s thinking of Liam and, in this very temporary cessation of distractions, she is letting herself feel his not being here and thinking about why.
Now I am thinking about it too. That he and I don’t stop milkshake machines together any more, that I did not invite him here for Easter, just as I didn’t invite him for Christmas. He’s probably alone while we are all together, my father telling the family story to my children, my mother doing our washing-up. We have been using the dimmer switch so that the reality of this doesn’t make its way out of the shadows but occasionally, inevitably, it does. It is clear to me, from the angle of her shoulders alone, that she struggles to bear it and I don’t blame her – because sometimes, when I forget to distract myself, I struggle to bear it too. Not now though, not in this moment. As I look at my mother’s back and the sliver of the side of her face I feel very little, even less than the blankness I have cultivated all month – as if the present gleam of her emotion switches the last of mine off.
I am protecting the dahlias from what I hope is the last threat of frost. As we have got closer to the end of April, the plot’s growth has gained momentum. We’ve started eating from it again: salad, radish and asparagus. We already have enough flowers to fill the vases: welsh poppies, bluebells, tulips, irises, aquilegia and even a rose in bud; the beginnings of abundance.
Our chicks are growing fast: feathering up and revealing something of what they will look like when grown. ‘Have you fed Frisbee and the Chicks?’ we ask each other, as if they are a girl group from the 1960s. As I weigh down the dahlias’ protective fleece with stones, Jared, Sofya and Arthur watch the chicken family take a tour of the garden. The one that Arthur has named, for reasons unclear, ‘Shetland Pomp’ finds a worm and legs it away from his siblings who give chase. They all get lost and start hollering: high-pitched emergency chirps that make Frisbee spring into action and round them up in moments. She’s a good hen. A good biddy.
An hour later, as I finish up outside, she’s waiting sensibly by her house. The chicks are all beneath her and one blond head peeks out from under each wing. She is so in tune with their every step and noise; balancing their need to learn and explore with protection. She makes her body into their home – a bed, a hot-water bottle any time they need it. I open the door to the coop and the chicks stream in after her as if they were one creature. Part of me wants to shrink and join them, burrow underneath and stay there, warm and simple. The numbness is lifting, the springtime distractions are going over and I can feel the destructiveness of March still inside me, where it has been growing, a fruiting body of dry rot in the cellar of a seemingly well-kept house.
I worry that I won’t be able to keep it at bay much longer. Whatever happens to me, by the time the leaves finish unfurling on the trees that overhang this little wooden henhouse, the feathered family will have been dissolved. Somewhere around eight weeks after hatching Frisbee will decide that she’s had enough. She will switch in an instant; her maternal noises and welcoming wings turning to vicious pecks and chases. At first the teenage chicks won’t be able to believe it and will keep trying to cuddle back into her. It won’t take that many stabs of her sharp beak to drive the message home. The bond will be broken swiftly and brutally and those early-spring nights warmed by each other’s bodies forgotten, a convenient amnesia in their place.
PART TWO
SUMMER 2019
MAY
MISMATCH
It is finally warm and dry enough for us to walk the children to school across the fields. We tell them the plan and Arthur’s face becomes a little pointy-chinned circle of anger and misery. He tenses his body and then releases it repeatedly in a jerky explanation of how unreasonable we are being. He feels things deeply, this one. His husky laugh is generous and frequent, his concentration and interest in things deep and wide and he matches this with regular quick flips to furious – a place he has the stamina to stay in for quite some time. There was an eighteen-month period when he was angry about breakfast every day. I thought those start-of-the-day rages would never end, but they did of course; in that slow way children have of not letting you notice or mark another something that has gone forever. Every gain in parenting seems to come with a loss that takes a while to understand.
Eventually the four of us leave the house together and as the children open the gate, any thoughts of hating walking vanish. They run to the top of the field with the goats leaping alongside, thrilled to see their playmates so early in the day. It’s the kind of morning that puts a daisy-and-buttercup filter on everything. I pull on Jared’s arm when he’s midway through scrambling over the fence and kiss him; loving him for making the forty-minute round trip a priority. I am very into the idea, but it often feels like too much of a bite out of my day. I watch the three of them head off down the hill and see them stop after the first stile to watch a startled heron desert his fishing spot and fly off over the woodland of Devil’s Hole.
When they are out of sight, I head back to the garden. The old roses – a collection of cerise Rosa rugosa – are in flower near the kitchen doors. They’ve finally recovered from the inexpert prune I gave them during our first winter and their scent is something else, like the Turkish delight of my seven-yearold imagination. Though I should be inside getting ready for a phone call, I can’t help pausing by the flower bed that I’ve been working hardest on. I’ve planted groundcover plants such as lamium to fill in the gaps and please the bees, removed a manky-looking rhododendron (which would have killed the goats with a single bite) and added things I love: salmon-coloured lupins, white cosmos and ranunculus. It is a wonderful wait for them to fill out and bud.
