This church is out of service,
consecration fossilised.
Parishoners commute, even at weekends,
or are buried by the walls.
The two locked doors are gnawed
to unsteadiness; something unruly
has been among the notices.
Walkers smear off green
to nose against the windows.
The words recited last inside
have become a tendency
in the circulation of the air.
Some dust breathes from the altar cloth
and patterns out again.
See also To the Bank
After “To Go to S’pore” by Alvin Pang, after “To Go to Lvov” by Adam Zagajewski
Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire − “the proper Newcastle”
To go to NuL. No station in NuL,
except the arena for buses, all fume and light
after dark when you stand on wet pavement
and other passengers clatter away.
To go to NuL without remembering street names
but surefoot towards the suburbs. To grow up in NuL.
To have learned to read in a fug of stories,
those spoken, those inferred. I stand as a child
looking between the slats in the cattle market,
stand as a man between pubs thinking of
slurs and arrogance of my youth, walk
with exhaustion heavy round ears and eyes
into a curry house long converted, and order
something I cannot remember. To come to NuL
a visitor, unable to find my friends,
or drift into nostalgia postcards, crossing tramlines
and entering shops where the whole family
stands rigid in front of their shelves, into
the structures of a map that blacklines roads I know
are knit with shrubberies and trees. I remember
the bloom of Christmas merry-go-rounds,
picking up blues cassettes, and the hours
after the nightclubs closed, when roads spread sickly tongues.
Laughing there, kissing girls, coming home to
a steam of dinner, tea and explanations.
How to be at home in NuL, again or then, the tiled hall,
the voices audible through sleep, to come
at last to accept the way it lies in the valley,
in deep memory, and is built up along roads
far out from its core. To go back again
into the town, in daylight, see how men stand
as if under siege, but bend to pet a dog –
not to forget NuL
except as all things fade on leaving.
See also Park Views
Commended in the Live Canon poetry competition, 2013.
Is one ant an animal? It seems to be one. Formally speaking it may be a member of the species Lasius niger, the common black ant, which lives in my garden. I fetch my magnifying glass and train it on one of the flagstones outside my back door.
Dots of reflected light shine brighter on the body. Two of the three segments, head and abdomen, taper: one to twig-like mandibles, the other to a point a little darker than the red-brown of the rest. The spots of the eyes show up indentations, the markers of a compound lens. The antennae are always mobile, socketed flexibly in the head. The middle part, the thorax, has the jointed legs of all insects, all six moving in a rapid, not-quite-rigid gait. The abdomen has rings of minute hairs. The ant changes direction often, comes back to the same spot, but never seems to be aimless. There’s always a feeling of purpose.
In build, in action, it is a perfect animal. But this ant can’t breed; it’s not pursuing the goal of most creatures. In a way it is a limb of a larger entity – the queen, or the colony as a whole. For some Victorians, possibly inspired by the biblical Proverb “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise”, the idea of human society as an expanded version of an ant nest had appeal: every individual having a place in serving a greater good – and there was no risk of any kind of disorder.
In the allotment leased by my daughter’s school there’s an ant nest under a plank of wood. Lift it (it comes away suddenly, as though held down by some force against the earth, and catacombs are revealed. But these are chambers of life, not death.
In Rome, I walked from the centre of the city to the subterranean graves beyond the imperial city walls. The guide showed paintings, symbols and ancient bodies. It was cold, and the electric lights seemed fragilely connected. For the ants in the nest, the close link between present and past I felt then does not exists. Everything is now, and the range of tunnels and rooms in which the queen’s grubs lie like white commas are immediately swarmed with workers. They lift the young gently in their jaws and prepare to carry them to safety.
This is when we put the plank softly back. Imagine the headlines about the community pulling together in the face of this alarm.
Much recent Western thought about ants has taken a different view. Reaction to the twentieth century’s addiction to extreme forms of government caused heavily ideologised magnifying glasses to be turned onto ants. Ants as communist super-warriors (Them!), ants as ultra-feminists (John Wyndham’s unpleasant Consider Her Ways), ants as faceless plotters laying the seeds of apocalypse (Phase IV).
Positive and negative metaphors rely on a perceived equivalence between ants and humans, an idea that they have a society comprehensible in a similar way to eighteenth-century England or medieval Japan. But an ant in my garden carrying a fragment of some organic matter is not the same sort of being as me, no matter how socially conditioned I might be considered. The neural biology, the question of self-awareness, prevent it.
In the world of ants, it may be that only a colony has “agency” – all the activities of queen, males, workers purely serve the nest’s needs to survive and propagate itself. So is one ant an animal, or can it only be thought of as part of a larger organism, like the photophores in a Portuguese man o’war?
Last time an ant bit me, I was thinking about these things. The unresolvable niggle of my speculations was echoed in the faint tingle of the bite, a sensation like that of the thinnest of wires being slipped under my skin. I’ve been bitten by ants a lot over the years – a consequence of many hours watching them.
A colony lived at the top of my parent’s drive. The flagstones grew hot on sunny afternoons, except where the back end of the car cast its shadow. The ants shone like fragments of quartz caught up in a wind along a beach. I would try to follow one individual’s activities, out to wherever it was going, and then back.
But I don’t remember them going anywhere. They just went around, close to the holes in between the drive and the tarmac pavement, left, right, back, forward, without any clear direction. I always hoped to follow one that would pick up a beetle or something and disappear into the underground tunnels with it. This never happened, but I did see how the ant I was following would interact with others it met. They put their heads together and rubbed each other with their antennae. It looked like a conversation, and in a way it was, but in pheromones rather than words.
Once a group of other ants appeared, and were attacked by the resident workers. I don’t know if our human neighbours had anything to say about the crazy boy always lying on the ground staring down at these pestiferous insects.
Every year the ants would put on their winged show. On normal, days I’d have to tap the ground around the nest holes to summon up a few workers, but each July or August the ants would rise of their own accord. Thousands of workers would froth at the nest mouths, living crumbs of soil. Among them glittered the wings of new queens and males, broken glass shifting, suddenly shooting up into the air and out of sight. I was transfixed. The idea of other nests deriving from this one was both exciting and strangely phantasmal. This was the nest. What could others be like?
Ants receded into the background for me for many years, occasionally glimpsed in a garden, or on TV, or in the Disney film Antz, which combined lip service to individualism and the value of difference within the community with encouragement to accept the reigning order. They also underlay the dystopian culture of Star Trek’s Borg. That reworking of the metaphor ended by implying Captain Picard’s continued entanglement in the Borg’s collective mind even after he had returned to the cosily self-determining world of the Enterprise. Can you have just one Borg, or is there just one Borg?
But last year I visited Aston Rowant nature reserve, on a chalk hill split by the M40 and overlooking the Oxfordshire plain. On the grassy hilltop are the domed nests of meadow ants. Their yellow bodies are the colour of summer grass, and of the sunlight. The field they live in is a minefield of colonies – it would be awful to trample a nest a hundred years old.
Since then I’ve taken more interest in the ants in my garden. This has been a good year for aphids, and the ants have supported them. In my youth there was a band called Alien Ant Farm. I don’t remember actually hearing any of their music, but their name comes to mind whenever I see the ants tending the aphids.
They protect the greenfly, blackfly or whitefly from predators, and corral them in feeding areas. They do this to obtain a sweet liquid, honeydew, that the aphids secrete when rubbed by the ant attendants. This feeds them and their grubs in the nest.
Aphids generally reproduce asexually, so a whole group can be genetically identical. Is one aphid an animal? Am I going mad if I think I see ants touching the ribbed abdomens of their creatures with tenderness? (Yes.)
The relationships and forms of being outside the human sphere are far more complicated and further from conventional understanding than they first appear. Is it possible for a piece of writing to tell what it is really like to be one ant?
I’m not very good at being in groups, except at the edge, looking out or in. A cousin’s wedding had returned me to a place almost outside my memory – Kibblestone Scout Camp, near Stone in Staffordshire. I remembered half the site all right. With friends I’d bored the stars with talking about Freddie Mercury, Jimi Hendrix and so on through large parts of the early 1990s. But the part on the other side of the road took me back about 30 years to Cub Scout days, when I was all toothy grin and bowl haircut under my green cap.
The ceremony was held among bluebells, with blue tits and wrens sheltering from the rain in the trees all around. Trees and bluebells are among the best things in an English summer – I like the Spanish ones as much as the more violet native kind. Here, English bluebells spread up the slope out of sight, and even in the rain there were a few bees making their visits.
Later, I climbed trees and ran up and down the hills several times with my daughter and her new-made friend. I didn’t remember these parts of the site. All I could recall was the dormitory filled with hard bunk beds, another time a tent smelling of heavy canvas with a history of damp, problems getting breakfast one morning – and rope swings, a thrilling novelty to my six, seven or eight years. They aren’t there now, but there is some exciting climbing equipment suspended in the trees.
But as the afternoon went on I felt as though I was beginning to evaporate. I went for a walk away from the main building, up the hill opposite, through leaf litter. The sun was just above the treetops. I found a huge beech that had come down in a storm, its trunk and branches laid out as if by relatives under the cracked stump. With some effort, I climbed to the top of the stump, a few metres above the hilltop.
This was a place to settle. The sky glowed with evening, and robins and blackbirds were in their endless talks about talks. Away down towards the road the bluebells spread, a huge and beautiful gathering. On the far side of the trees I could see grass jewelling the slopes. From below came the hubbub of the wedding, all the meeting, smiling and storytelling that goes on.
I leaned on the fractured wood and enjoyed the whole of it. Had I been there or not been there everything would have been the same – except that the flowers would have been unseen, the birdsong no more than a territorial assertion. All those things were what I gained.
Some places have a feeling about them – “mystery” isn’t quite right, but there is a sense, even on the clearest day, that it’s impossible to see everything. The circuit of “the caves” around Langot Lane near Croxton in Staffordshire takes in several such places.
We were there on the winter solstice, and the sun was clear and bright. There was no frost, but the moisture in the air had not condensed into mist. From the first bend in the track we could see the Wrekin, violet against the sky, and other Shropshire hills receding into the distance.
“The caves” are nothing much in themselves – a few dents in the brow of a sandstone outcrop, surrounded by nettles and plastic rubbish. But for me as a child this walk always had a thrill because the very idea of a cave meant exploration, going under and out of the world, going back in time. Now I wonder who quarried the stone, and when – and how it could have been worth their while to hack by hand this track that goes nowhere once it has broken through the outcrop. Between the mosses and the sedimentary layers, it’s easy to spot pick marks, where the cliffs either side of this muddy, leafy lane were smoothed to sheer faces.
Sheer-ish. Tree roots strike deep into the rock, and trunks belly out overhead. Birch and beech bark both reflect the sun’s colours differently. Lesser roots have split the grain just behind the face, letting it crumble into the leaf litter and leaving a surface that powders to the touch. In and around the roots are rabbit runs, a network of paths leading to the network of burrows. As a child, I would sometimes see the tips of their ears among the undergrowth at the top of the cutting. Today, there’s a single raven passing in and out of vision between the bare trees. Every so often it flips upside down and emits its strange “cronk” call – perhaps displaying to an unseen mate. Ravens nest early.
If I were mythically minded, the appearance of “the dark-cloaked dismal raven/horny beaked” (from the Old English Battle of Brunanburgh) and then immediately “an old white horse galloped away in the meadow” (from TS Eliot’s Journey of the Magi) would have given this walk a decidedly portentous twist. As it was, it was quite eerie. But the horse had two companions, and the three of them danced about in the strong wind, against a backdrop of land disappearing into cloud in the distance. Shortly afterwards we reached “the hermit’s cave”.
Did a hermit live under this knuckle of rock in the 1910s? Did he crawl out of his gritty bed each morning to see the great body of the oak on the quarried hillside above him? My grandad talked about him. Now the cave mouth is strung with defensive wire, except where a padlocked wooden door hangs suspended in the middle. A wren dips continuously in the bare trees all around.
Langot Lane was my grandad’s favourite place. The hills shield out the motorway noise, and traffic is infrequent. On the far side of a hedge, now leafless and almost transparent, the fields lead down through marsh grasses to the River Sow, not far from its source near Fairoak, which turns and eddies through the valley. Beyond that, trees hide the remains of glassworkers’ fires.
Every time I think back to this lane, it’s late summer, late afternoon, when the day’s heat is easing. My grandad’s Audi is in the layby by the cottage, and he’s in his blue coat and cap, cigar smoke flowing back over his shoulders. While he looks out over the scene, I’m aware of his mind delving into the great mine of ideas he had excavated for himself, and shaping what he’d found.
“Langot” is a strange name. It may come from the French “langue”, “tongue” referring to the shape of the valley. Pennyquart Farm up the road has a more definite story behind its name. Apparently, during a drought, estimated by the Croxton Well Dressing website to have been “about 150 years ago”, the well on that farm was the only one for miles that did not dry up. The avaricious farmer then charged his neighbours for the water they needed. Memory and myth both have a tendency towards simplicity, towards a single description to summarise the experience.
Not even a summary can be given of the thoughts and words of all the people who have every walked up the path behind the layby, and in walking have worn the earth down into a hollow way. It’s as though a shadow has been scooped in the hill. Branches, trunks and even roots overhang the walker’s head.
A single tree stands on its own where the path reaches ground level again. The view along the field is like looking between two green banners blowing in the wind. Glaciation left these billowing curves in the hills. Clear solstice sky enhanced the green.
A friend of my grandad’s cleared this field of bracken; his is the first death from cancer I remember hearing being discussed, though not understanding – beside this single tree whose licheny trunk leans back a little from the path as if not wanting to overhear.
The way back to the track cut through stone leads under trees that rise from old hedge banks. Badger setts sink down among the leaf litter and stones. Oaks not much bigger than seedlings jangle galls in the wind.
Back in the cutting, I spotted that walkers here before us had put white pebbles in one of the fissures in the rock face. There’s always something of the ritual about these markers – it’s a little bit more than simply “I was here”. Together, I and my daughter each added our own stones. Then she ran on to catch up with her grandad, and hear more of his stories.
Images courtesy O and JL Leech.
“Think of this. A sword is like a bird. If you clutch it too tightly, you choke it – too lightly and it flies away.”
from Scaramouche (1952)
It’s only one line from that film, but it says something important to me. I remember the moment – only the moment, not the context – I understood what it meant. The handle of the foil nestled in my fingers and the weight of the blade seemed zero, the point angled towards my opponent’s chest.
I now appreciate the pause at the start of a fencing bout between the referee’s “en garde” and “allez”. The sword sits still in my hand; the least pressure from my fingers will direct it. The moment is one of readiness, one of potential before action begins. In times of stress I sometimes look for calm by imagining my grip on the epee handle (I’ve since changed weapon) in that still, poised state, and think of the stillness spreading from my finger ends, through my body and into my mind.
I doubt I’d hold a real bird in such a collected way. Its heat and trembling, the prickling of feathers and feet, the rapid quiver of its heart would focus me in quite different way – always already adjusting.
Late spring brings such thoughts to mind because that’s the time of unexpected proximity to newly fledged birds. The most common kind of encounter is not that far from simply seeing a bird in the garden – it’s the relationships among the birds that are most interesting.
For example, a string of jackdaws might settle on the fence, and “chack” among themselves. The young ones are a little smaller and more glossy. Then they launch off, as if on a tour. Or the garden and the house are filled with an immense racket – one mature and three young magpies are scolding a cat, which slinks away, foiled again. A family of great tits, the young ones not quite as yellow-stomached as their seniors, take turns on the bird feeder.
For me, every bird encounter is instinctively compared with two formative ones from my childhood. One is now a family legend; the other I’d barely thought about for almost thirty years until this summer: a young crow, barely fledged, was somehow injured and grounded in our back garden. For a few days I went out with some bread to feed it, and its beak scraped against my fingertips (we didn’t know that bread is not the best food for birds back then). This memory is very hazy, but I believed that the crow had got better and taken to the air. Perhaps it did.
I was the one who heard the noises in the chimney. Soot was falling down, and there were sounds that couldn’t be explained. I have a clear image of my dad wearing big red gardening gloves half-sprinting from the fireplace to the window, and the freed crow like a slip of the pen against the hedge.
Conrad Crow, by dint of having fallen into our fireplace, became a friend of the family – at least in the stories my dad told us for years afterward. Some were recorded on cassettes we played again and again. I don’t remember the details, only the pauses in the stories (my dad says he was thinking up what would happen next!) while the ideas and adventures swirled about us. Conrad is a long-lived bird – when my daughter sees her grandparents, he is still a bedtime hero. She often tells me that Conrad’s in the garden. (I doubt the woodpigeon I rescued from the water butt last year could attain the same status.)
New-fledged birds have less fear of humans than their surviving elders, and this leads to moments when those past meetings are recalled. As I walked home down the Thames one mid-June afternoon, a whirring call in one of the bushes by the field made me stop. I wanted to see what was making the noise. I stepped off the path and down the slope to the spiked fence edging the horse field. Normally I have to search hard in the branches’ mesh to find the bird, but it sat there against the sky. A greenfinch – more a grey-finch, as its colours had not yet matured. It turned its head to the side to look at me. (I recalled the god Tash in CS Lewis’ The Last Battle.) Its weighty beak reflected the sun – and it did not fly away. We measured each other up until I had to go so as not to be late home.
Every couple of days I wash out and fill the bird bath at the far end of our garden. One day, something flickered in the corner of my eye as I turned away. I stopped, and very gradually moved back. A juvenile robin was perched on the rim of the stone bowl, the ends of its toes just in the water. It was not yet old enough for the red breast – the dark shade of the feathers on its head lightened further down its body. This modulating colour was flecked here and there with paler spots. But the eye was watchful, and the head flicked from angle to angle. Still, it clearly didn’t see me as a danger. I could have put out my hand and touched it. Each feather was visible. We stood for a few seconds, and then it hopped into the water.
The robin splashed, had a drink, and flew up into the buddleia that overhangs the bath. I saw its eye moving about. Then down the bird came again, and had another drink. I felt as though it would come and sit on my shoulder – but didn’t move, for fear of scaring it off. Eventually the robin left gradually, short bursts of wing, then another pause on a perch, its head always moving but never thinking of me as a threat.
I’ve seen the same bird up close many more times in the weeks since then – though never quite as near. Like the young greenfinch, it hadn’t yet learned to see danger in humans, unlike the magpies with their parental guidance. Research I saw on the British Trust for Ornithology website underlined the learning they would have to do. Apparently, male great tits with broad belly stripes are more aggressive and bolder, and more attractive to females – and therefore have more breeding success. But in cities the birds with broader belly stripes have far shorter lifespans than the shyer ones with narrower belly stripes. To call this “natural” selection would feel strange, and the article said it was not yet clear whether the female birds had latched onto the difference in lifespans.
Boldness versus caution was one of the important parts of the most memorable close bird encounter I’ve had in recent years. Not far from us is a pub/café on the riverbank. We’ve known it a long time, and despite its present very active owners it’s been a quite ramshackle building for many years. It’s our local and there are many weekends when the three of us end up there for tea or beer, and cake.
One rainy spring afternoon we were able to get a big round table by the back window. The view out didn’t match the ones available across Iffley Meadows, or down the garden to the river, but there was a fire in the grate – and in the wall outside were blue tits.
It was a first for all of us (even though two out of the three had had thirty years’ more opportunities) to watch the parent birds repeatedly flying in with food for the bobbing heads – grey-blue feathers, yellow bill tips. Just outside the window the wall jutted out into the pub garden, and had fallen away below a group of pipes. The parent birds had nested in the gap, and reared six offspring. We all watched attentively. The slight-bodied parents barely settled on the lip of the nest before they were gone again.
But over time it became clear that something more was happening. Gradually one chick climbed out from the others. Its wings seemed no more than curled leaves, but it flapped them vigorously – in between taking all the food its parents brought on their fleeting visits. Its first take-off was sure to be soon. We ordered another round of teas. We were certain that if we looked away that little body would drop, or fly. The bill appeared too short to feed, the colours of the feathers washed out before they’d even formed.
I don’t know if our daughter, only four or so at the time, knew what was going to happen. We older ones did, but had to adjust our expectations, built on years of edited TV footage, to how long it would take – far longer than you’d think.
The owners of the pub were fretting that the chicks would end up stood on, or eaten, as soon as they stepped out, and brought a chair round for the pioneer to land on. But that first bird knew what it was doing. Its first flight was like that of a soggy paper aeroplane and yet still landed on the chair back and sat there looking round.
In the nest, the other chicks still raised their beaks. The parents went to them, not the fledgling. It had taken the biggest step we could imagine in the life of a bird, but only we felt the sentiment. I’m sure the cheeping of the first chick out would soon have won it some attention. Until then it sat in isolation, its brain adapting to the world, its body finding a new kind of readiness.
reade docce, fealwe docce
red dock, ripe dock – broad-leafed dock
It bursts its veins against skin
on rash of pain, stringing down to fibres.
You refused to believe me –
after the nettle’s knife, not another leaf pressed on.
The long ears’ soothing green
still in the hedge keeps the lore of this one leaf
for lucky children stung to the potency of green.
The friction of treatment burned.
Later, you asked me for the root of its name.
The bloodspots of its flowers
are lapped in a collar of green.
If nettles didn’t hurt, we wouldn’t know this cure.
scearpe docce
sharp dock – common sorrel
You’ve always hated sauces.
We’ve not yet braved soup, broth, curry, stew.
But try this – a nutness,
a knife of leaf brought by knife to this dousing,
its name a rhizome branching.
Your mouth shies from it, though,
curious, a corner of your tongue
has dipped into its pool.
Best you don’t go too deep –
the last of it swirls in the sink.
Oxalic acid, I announce,
in doses large enough, will kill
a child, a man, a horse, yes
an elephant.
Sharp: a knife. You make the leap.
docce seo þe swimman wile
dock that likes to swim (or float) – water lily
Do you think of the effort it makes –
the push of its name –
to stay there, soberly,
while skaters and pond measurers
run about like children?
You say, that is all it does. It just floats.
Its name hangs like a knife between us.
Not a swan, like its flower.
Not a hand, pushed up.
You are looking past, to pondwater’s nameless life:
things moving in and out of light.
They are really swimming, you insist.
Note: Old English names from Sweet’s Anglo Saxon Dictionary
Highly Commended in the 2014 Lumen/Camden Poetry Prize
See also A Guide
I cannot paint
What I then was.
—Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey
Walking is such an integral part of my perception of the world that it’s hard to point outside myself to identify people who contributed to making it so. My parents took me out for walks as a child, and writers like James Herriot, Colin Dann and Tolkien – who dealt with the outdoors, what lived in it, and how you would cross it – informed my thoughts as I read them again and again. But one particular schoolteacher also shaped my sense of the idea and aim of walking.
He was a very old-fashioned teacher – in the best sense: his vocation was teaching, he did it instinctively and he had no interest in what “the authorities” thought children should learn. He just wanted his pupils’ understanding to grow. He did that for me, helping me grasp how the interactions of the present and past become visible in a landscape walked through.
It was my last year of junior school (Year 6 in current terminology) and one of those times when the edges of my world went galloping away over what I’d believed were fixed horizons. Much of that sense of discovery came from my teacher’s insistence on getting us outside. This was mostly through games, football and especially cricket (which I loved despite being terrible at), but for me the transformative experiences were walking ones.
This was the time when health and safety regulations were starting to proliferate, so my class was lucky to be taken on the very last Saturday Hike. It seems incredible now that one teacher was willing to drive a minibus full of children out to Hanchurch Woods, a few miles from my school on his own.
I’ve written before about Hanchurch, and this was one of my formative encounters with the place. We had no sense of its history at first – woods were woods. I remember a sticky-hot day, the deep-green ranks of pine trees, a pile of rusted ordnance beside a wire fence among tussocks of stringy grass. He warned us to give this reddish heap a wide berth, but mentioned that it came from “the war”, which we always associated then with his account of his father’s experiences in a Japanese POW camp. I also remember the path, a pale brown line of crusted mud split by a narrow stream. The clear water had written the action of its current into its sandy bed.
There must have been continuous noise from all those children wandering about, but I remember none of it. Even the pine cone battle between two factions of the class, each using fortifications made from the husks of felled trees, has no sound. Only the heat, and the yellow light on the rusted shells and colouring the surface of the stream.
One day in the summer term, when we already knew that this was his, like ours, last few weeks at the school (he’d resigned ahead of the introduction of the compulsory national curriculum, which would have strangled his free-flowing approach), a friend and I knocked nervously on the staffroom door. My friend had caught a mouse at home and for some reason had brought it into school in a cardboard box. I can’t remember why. Perhaps he just assumed our teacher would know what to do with it.
Why nervously, if we trusted him so much? He wielded absolute authority in the classroom, courtesy of a voice that could blast you like black magic. And of course bringing a mouse into school was not a normal thing to do.
The clearest memory I have of our teacher’s face is of his beard, which had touches of white around the chin, and a smile. This bottom-up impression must be a reflection of the difference in our heights. On this occasion, he smiled.
It will seem insane what he did next – but this was the action of someone for whom the pre-regulation, self-governing world was not a place in which to take advantage, but to do exactly what was right. “Let’s take him to where no one will bother him.”
Our teacher sometimes told stories in school assembly. He’d written them himself, and their theme was always that you should be true to yourself. They never ended happily for the central characters because they had bowed before fashion or peer pressure. We were gripped by them, though I don’t know how many of us held to that particular principle.
For him, the mouse had to be allowed to go out to where it belonged. And he had to be true to his vocation. We boys deserved to see that being true to yourself was possible despite everything. (Of course, I interpret, reflect, analyse, speculate.)
The three of us went out to his car in the shadow of the school’s brick clock tower. The mouse had the front passenger seat and my friend and I were strapped in the back.
He could have released the mouse somewhere near the school. He could have taken it away and dealt with it as he pleased. It was his lunch hour, his free time. But he drove out to Hanchurch, and we walked along the stony paths (white stone, dusty, the grass along the verges stained pale) until the brambles and bracken grew thick. Here’ we let the mouse go. I remember its back legs and tail vanishing into the leaf mould. I wouldn’t call it a lesson in the primacy of nature, but in the value of all forms of life and ways of living. Even as we walked back to the car, I knew I would remember this.
He always encouraged my writing. His notes on my descriptive pieces were full of supportive comment. My best academic achievement ever may have been 20/20 for “An Old Man on an Upturned Boat”, an exercise that played to my eye for detail, and which I structured around an imagined walk at dawn. The newspaper blowing in the hotel courtyard at the beginning and the grief-stricken eyes of the old man looking out to sea are vivid to me now, 25 years later. But wheat my teacher always aimed for was a reconciliation of my facility with words with the experienced world – something I still struggle with.
Nonetheless, he helped me achieve this aim in that year through a few days of adventure – the Scarborough trip. We had had at least two terms exposed to his authority and his inspiration, and we other good teachers also came with us. But this trip was so perfectly attuned to my mind that it set me off on my first extended try at working with words.
It started as a thank-you letter to a great-aunt (is this too a thank-you letter?), but spiralled into a sprawling memoir of at least three or four long missives – and my handwriting has always been irritatingly spidery and small. I’m not claiming correspondence on the level of Keats, Hopkins or Hughes, but I do remember that this was the first time I sat writing until I ached.
Yes, we visited Jorvik Viking Centre. Yes, we sand cheery songs on the bus. Yes, we held a sandcastle competition on Scarborough beach. But two things defined the trip for me – the hike, and the hunt for fossils.
The walk – again I remember heat. Several of the children went all wobbly, and a good friend of mine carried their backpacks. Some kids went missing in a pine forest, and we waited in the light freckling through trees for an incredibly long time until they were found.
Also, on the spine of a hill we came across a Roman road. Its bricks, baked again by the heat, pushed their warmth and rough feel up through our boots. The surface was a dull, smoky red. Whenever I encountered such roads in my reading after that (Rosemary Sutcliffe), I thought of that colour, the parched grass, and the heather dropping away into valleys.
The fossils – the weather seems cold, misting with rain. I know I already had a collection of ancient shells at home, carefully packed and labelled by the mail order business they came from. Despite this, I was indiscriminate when I got down to the shingle beach of Robin Hood’s Bay. No doubt now there are, or ought to be, restrictions on how many fossils can be removed, but back then I stuffed my pockets with any of the black slate pieces that had any kind of marking. This collection ended up unsorted in a cardboard box on my shelf, and sometimes I’d sift through it in my room, but I don’t know what happened to it afterwards. I recall the sense of achievement though, that in just going up and down the beach I had brought so many species back from vanishing into the sea. The other collection, the ordered one, now sits on my daughter’s shelves.
What was it like, collecting those bits of rock? The rain was light but persistent, and each stone reflected the white of the sky. The cliffs shone in the same way, though cracked and scored with deeper, blacker marks. I think we prised slates apart with our cold fingers, or dropped them in the hope of breaking them open. It was a consuming hunt, and I didn’t notice the tiredness in my legs from all that walking and scrambling until later. There was a chilly wind on the climb back up to the coach, and we walked in a straggling line along a moorland road. The sky seemed immense, and the smell of the sea followed us.
That trip also gave me the first sense I can remember of mortality. Back at home I felt drained because I realised for the first time that this adventure would never happen again. I knew that even if I was one day as happy as I had been for that week in Yorkshire, it would not be quite the same happiness. That was all past.
If my teacher is not prominent in these particular memories, it’s because he was the overwhelming figure in my life that year, ever present in my thoughts – and the Scarborough trip would not have happened in anything like the form it did without his guiding hand. I can’t look back and say he planted the seeds of the person I would become, but I am grateful for the way he gave my sprouting consciousness something to grow into. It may be that as I bring up my daughter, with her attachment to “nature” and determination (from age four) to be a palaeontologist, that his influence is at work again through me, helping encourage another mind to reach out into the world.
There was time to look at the leaves before the rain arrived. It was one of those days when we should have listened to the weatherman – showers, he said, “with a lot of rain”. It came with an insistent air, which I mean literally. The space between the drops, of which there wasn’t much, seemed thick with wet.
We’re lucky to have a permit for Wytham Woods, north west of Oxford. My daughter always says she doesn’t want to go, but secretly she loves to look for animal tracks. My intention in going there was more elevated – spatially. Autumn’s turn ought to be well advanced by late October, and I cherish a memory of looking out from Ilam in North Staffordshire onto a hillside of changing trees.
But as recent work on phenology (the study of cyclical changes in the natural world) shows, the mean date of many seasonal indicators has shifted in recent decades (see, for example, 18:153-9, British Wildlife). So my desire to see this ancient, semi-natural woodland in its colours was slightly out of key with the reality. Still, in the sheep field between two arms of the wood we could see where the trees had begun to turn. The colours stood out against the deadweight of the clouds. Lime, beech, oak – not all had started to change, but enough had. In between, pigeons reinforced the grey and rooks hauled it down to black. Toadstools in the long grass worked on their own autumnal range. But blackberries were also ripening. It’s a mingled season.
The idea of “turning” contains that mingled nature – as Fortune’s wheel might turn. The way I was taught the story of Demeter (Ceres) and Persephone (who for six months of the year must live with the King of the Underworld while her mother, goddess of fertility, pines in the world above) laid emphasis on the descent into autumn and winter as a time of grief and loss. But really the story is about endless reunion as well as parting, that autumn is a harbinger of spring.
The yellowing of the leaves might look like death, but in fact it’s a sign of a tree’s readiness for winter – they withdraw chlorophyll into their woody stems to preserve it through the shorter days. It returns with the new leaves. The death of worker bees and wasps among the social insets could be seen in a similar way: the organism, that is, the collective entity, withdraws into the one part that will start afresh in the spring – the egg-laying queen – the better to ensure its longevity through the cold times.
But it is a mistake to think of autumn simply as a standard change within a fixed cycle. I’ve already mentioned the phenological changes, and of course the wider effects of climate change are likely to result on greater extremes. What will autumn mean after a few more tens of seasonal cycles?
Some changes that look autumnal also speak of non-cyclical change – they indicate actual death. Dutch elm disease, ash dieback and sudden oak death all involved a withering and dropping of leaves but mean permanent loss. Some such changes are inevitable and natural, but others are at least partly the result of human actions. The recent invasion of ash dieback results ironically from the public love of trees – demand led to infected saplings being imported from the Netherlands because not enough trees were being grown within the UK. The importers even included some conservation charities. It seems a strange world when native tree species are being imported. Other permanent changes are affecting the social insects. It’s well known that honeybees, for example, face the verroa mite, the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides, loss of food sources from the countryside (though ironically not from towns) and again changes in climate.
In Wytham Woods, where much research into these changes is carried out, stacks of timber lie beside the main path, and also at the intersection of cyclical and permanent change. These trees are pine, felled as part of the regeneration of those parts of the woods that were commercially planted. I’ve written about the ecological void created by commercial plantings before (see Bank and Lowe). The pines are being replaced by broad-leaved trees, and the timber will be used. The new trees should fit into the ancient woodland around them, given enough time, enough cyclical change, and will form an integral part of it.
My daughter is fascinated by the rings visible on each log. These too show the cycles of the years, but also the vagaries of chance and the linear passage of time. I am instructed to crouch at the end of the fattest logs and reel off the numbers of rings. I identify the broad years of good growth, the thin years of bad, and make a guess at which family member might have been born while a particular ring was being formed. There’s a strange interplay between the precise annual boundary of each ring and my speculative comments on it. I’m sure a dendrochronologist would be horrified.
There was less of this during our most recent visit because the long rows of felled wood shone with the moving cloaks of water as the rain lashed down. I do like being in the rain (see Rain Pleasures), but this was the sort of rain that writes off an afternoon, as our daughter made very clear – in between the fascinations of finding sweet chestnuts in their prickly cases, fat acorns and the trails of interloping muntjac.
Although the vastly increased population of deer represents a serious challenge to conservation management efforts, I can’t give up my affection for them. Muntjac wander almost in the very centre of Oxford, and in our previous house, which looked out on “waste” land beside the railway line, we often saw roe deer resting among the willows and nettles. For me they still carry that breath of “somewhere else”.
My daughter’s delight in tracking animal prints in mud stems from another rainy afternoon – not as wet as this one – in a nature reserve on the Oxfordshire/Buckinghamshire border. That day we spotted the hoofmarks of a doe and fawn side by side in deep mud at the centre of the path. They went along in parallel, close together, beside a narrow stream. We looked closely at their sharp marks while the trees dropped big blobs of water on our backs. The tracks were so crisp they could only have been a few minutes ahead of us. Sometimes we lost them, as they drifted onto the patches that separated the path from the little the dip the stream had cut, but they came back to the path a few metres on, fawn beside doe, close all the time.
Eventually, having mixed with other prints for a while, their tracks left our path. They turned right, down into the stream, where the bank had disintegrated into thick mud. Here they jumped, into equally thick mud on the other side. Then the tracks disappeared into the leaf litter. We looked out among the trees and speculated about where the deer had gone.
On the afternoon in Wytham the rain had demolished most prints before we found them. We were hoping to find a badger’s trail, but just got more muntjac, and the marks of boots left by all the walkers ahead of us. Our own footwear was crusted with the thick earth, which took much scraping off. We also had to peel off the soggy remnants of fallen leaves that were well on their way to returning to the soil.
(So many of these images are in winter.) The door of the church opens, and a child enters the gloomy space. The height of the door is absurd against her size, but the light, what light there is, is drawn to her, and she hurries up the nave – not like a flame, but like a leaf in spring. Following her is a man, tired footed, nose immediately affected by the candles’ thin smoke. The child crosses into the chancel, and through the gap in the altar rail. The man keeps his eyes on her in between glances up at the pillars and arches of the building. The child waits in front of a carving, patient, silent. When the man reaches her, she points without looking round, and says “These are the angels, Daddy.”
This was my daughter introducing me (and, a few minutes later, her mother), to a carving that she had been the very first person to see complete, apart from the stonemason himself. Her grandparents had happened to bring her to Iffley church just as the new aumbry (a cupboard for storing holy vessels) was finished. As the mason stood back, he asked her to come forward, and so she saw the fresh angels before anyone else.
This set a cap on my family’s engagement with the church. As none of us is a practising Christian, the importance of this corner of southeast Oxford to us has to be explained in other ways. I can’t speak for the others, so these are some of the things that matter to me. I can see that my daughter’s relationship with this church is complicated, deep and strong. But it’s also her own construction, built from the materials of the place, and how adults talk about it. I’ve constructed my own set of associations. Many, of course, are connected with her – for example, we always look together at the carving of the bird at the foot of one of the pillars marking the division between the chancel and the nave. Like much of the Norman and pseudo-Norman stonework all round the space, it’s very tactile. She can touch the smoothed plumage, adding her hand to that of the mason and of everyone else who has touched this image in the intervening centuries.
My daughter calls it “the Mark church” because high on the tower is carved my name (and that of the Evangelist). The building was constructed on a rise above the Thames in the early 12th century by a Norman landlord, apparently on the site of a Saxon church. It stands in a graveyard/garden behind a rambling vicarage and a high wall that hides it from the tarmac lane that runs outside. I’m not going to attempt a history here, but it’s worth saying that this church stands largely unchanged, despite the attentions of the Victorians, in a village that morphed into a refuge of the rich even as it was engulfed by the city. In the Ashmolean Museum there’s a 1930s aerial photograph of Iffley Lock on the river. Then, the village was surrounded by fields. Now the suburb of Rose Hill is a literal stone’s throw from the Lock, and houses in Iffley flaunt grand architecture from behind high gates and extravagant alarm systems.
Apart from my name on the tower, the church also sports a dead ringer for the Gruffalo, and by its south door a moustachioed face that my daughter securely identifies as King Arthur, her mythic alter ego. There’s another, peculiar face that she says is me, and a griffin who’s her mother (I think this is meant as a compliment). In front of the west door is an ancient font, into which my daughter likes to be lifted, while Mum or Dad explains the idea of baptism.
Iffley church rises about the surrounding flood plains just south of central Oxford. Its square tower is eerily visible above the tree tops from the ring road. On summer evenings it glows with the same orange-red as the old buildings in the centre of the city. When I see it like that, it seems a constant, neither benevolent nor malicious, but simply itself, whether the road is choked or almost silent.
When I think of the interior of the church it’s always winter and either night or in deep grey cold. There’s a big square font just inside the door, with a dark stone top you can catch your hip on in the gloom. There’s a modern stained glass window whose Latin-speaking animals are hard to make out.
My daughter likes the carved lamb and angels in the chancel. I like the barred doorway – almost crevice – through which I can see steps heading up into shadow. These once led to the rood loft, from which a great crucifix hung before the Reformation, separating the parishioners from the clergy. There’s a second door high up in the south wall, and masonry protruding from the chancel arch to support the loft. Like one of Derrida’s erasures whose presence/absence resonates through the surviving text, the space between the chancel pillars where the image hung speaks to me of there being past lives that cannot be wholly understood even as I read their imprints on the world. Also, a set of steps rising and turning into darkness always seems to be offering peculiar adventure, as if in an Alan Garner novel.
Perhaps unimaginatively, on these winter visits to the darkened church, I also think of Annora peering in at the altar. Annora was an anchorite (anchoress?) who attached herself to Iffley church. Attached – almost literally. According to the guidebook her cell was built against the chancel wall, and a window cut into the flesh of the church so that she could participate in the Mass without leaving her isolation. She lived this way for about 10 years in the 13th century.
Nothing above ground remains of her cell. But there’s a sealed-up gap in the chancel wall. Below it is a pale lozenge-shaped medieval tombstone. This is supposed to be Annora’s.
I do wonder what went through her mind in all that time in contemplation. But what sustained her in her vigil is not something I could even know. I have no clear idea of who she was.
My 21st century mind is, however, able to make an irony from the circumstances of her life. A few metres from the south wall of the church is something really old – a yew. It may be 1,300 years old – more than 500 years old in Annora’s time – and was already growing into maturity when the present church was built.
The irony I’ve constructed is that, as I have read and heard, yew trees have a pre-Christian significance. It may be that they were planted, or encouraged to grow, in important places because they were poisonous to animals and so deterred unruly grazing. Their presence in many churchyards is a consequence of Christianity’s willingness to co-opt pre-existing cultural phenomena to further its acceptance among newly converted peoples. If the estimates of this tree’s age are right, it took root not all that long after Augustine brought the Roman church to Saxon England – that is, when it began it was invested with a pagan value long before it cast its shade on the roof of Annora’s cell. Of course, the vast majority of its history since then has been during Christian times. And perhaps “Celtic” Christianity already existed in what was to become Oxfordshire. All places start to become indeterminate if you look at them too hard.
My daughter loves the tree because it’s big and bristly. She can be lifted up into its aged branches to stand on the rim of the immensely wide hollow trunk, or even drop down inside, so that the wood hides her. She’s intrigued by the concrete in its base and some low-slung branches, which is holding the old thing up. She likes to play hide and seek in the huge, spiny circumference of its limbs. She believes families of foxes ought to live among its roots. Once, she and I were sitting the branches when a robin settled less than a metre away – her favourite bird. We watched it watching us for a while until it decided to peck for mites and beetles in the scaly bark. All those different lifespans in such close proximity.
It’s very hard to imagine a place as other than it is, unless you’ve seen it change yourself. I mean really imagine – the different sounds, smells, creatures, plants, and people. It’s hardest of all to see a place through other eyes – Annora’s, for example, or those of “Oliver”, the second recorded priest of the Norman church. When I think of how my daughter will see Iffley church when she grows up, I’m drawn back to a memory of my own: that indistinct leaf of a child moving through the dark and smell of candlewax towards the new angels. Something remembered and imagined with the same force.
Image courtesy of JL Leech
Open Field 