Meadowland Page 5

  For nearly a week I do not visit Lower Meadow, although it is only four hundred yards from the house. My horizon has been reduced to the paddock in front of the house, where the sixty ewes have been gathered for lambing.

  Lambing only comes in two ways; either swimmingly well, or drowningly bad, and this year I have spent more time with my hands inside ewes’ wombs than either the sheep or I are comfortable with. I have made L-shaped shelters of straw bales or corrugated iron for the ewes to have cover from the driving rain. I like the shelter too when, befuddled at five in the morning (by experience a sheep’s favourite time to lamb), I play the live-or-die game, of trying to sort out, inside a ewe, which bony leglet belongs to which lamb. De-tangled, repositioned, the Ryeland lambs emerge in yellow slimy pods, to be rubbed with straw or rags. When they do not raise their heads and bleat . . . a blurred flurry of rubbing, air blown up noses, red stomach tubes delivering colostrum, purple spray on hanging navels.

  Our sheep have names, the names a rough-hand mnemonic to colour, type, date of birth, or an imagined resemblance to a character, real or fictional, or to a personality trait: Chocolate, Sooty, Soo, Tiddlywink, Shortbread, Cardigan, Jumper (of course), Valentine, Tess . . . You come to live with us, you get a name.

  One runt lamb is born dead, another dies within hours, and for both I grieve with clenched eyes for the life never lived. There is nothing so innocent as a newborn lamb; the scion of the sheep was not appropriated as the Christian symbol for Jesus for nothing. The lamb of God.

  All the Shetland and Hebridean ewes birth with a feral ease, the curly black lambs ‘sharp’ and walking within minutes. No, the wearing habit of primitive sheep is not their birthing technique; it is the flightiness of the ewes when mothers.

  Something comes into the paddock at night, sending the ewes and lambs into a baaing delirium. Within minutes I am out with a torch. The intruder has gone. One Hebridean ewe, who has just lambed, runs off, leaving her twins behind; over the course of a greasy grey day I try to reconnect her with her offspring, finally resorting to catching her and penning her so tight she cannot turn, and then put the lambs in to suckle. All she does is jump up and down on them; before they are murdered I let her go, and put them on the bottle.

  They live in the sitting room in a dog-crate. Sheep tamed by being bottle fed are no bad thing, since it means they will, when grown, come to food. And the rest of the flock will follow.

  21 MARCH Heavy rain. The horses in House Field stand back to the rain, the sheep and their lambs are either under the hedges or tight against the bales. The red-tailed bumblebee must be glad of the house that it has taken from the mouse. In Lower Meadow I see a small flock of forlorn redwings, the thrush with the fetching cream eye-stripe and orange flanks, in the hazel. At my approach, up into the air they go, slipping left, slipping right, drunkenly unsteady.

  They loiter for a day. On the 23rd I hear redwings ‘zeeping’ in the starred night when I’m checking the sheep. Next day there are no redwings on the farm. They have gone north, to home in Scandinavia.

  With lambing done, we visit my sister-in-law in London for a night. On the return home I am exhilarated by how fresh and enervating the air is, how lovely is the taste of spring water compared to chlorine.

  Then there are the benisons of the earth. In the uplifting sunshine I pick dandelions for dandelion wine, the cottage wine. They are the flower of the sun and their faces follow its course. They are nuclear furnaces in miniature.

  Less given to whimsy, the French persist in calling dandelion pissenlit in honour of its diuretic capability. To me as a child they were ‘clocks’, whose seed heads were blown on to tell the time and tell the future. And in a sort of fashion dandelions do tell the time: like the white, fragile wood anemones, they close their heads at night.

  Dandelions have not always been weeds. In the Victorian era they were cultivated in walled gardens and eaten by the aristocracy in dainty sandwiches.

  Then there is the silence of the night, when the dandelions are closed up.

  A dog barks somewhere down the valley, another takes up the call, then another. An aural chain reaction of barks proceeds from Clodock to Michaelchurch Escley. Presumably they have all been watching 101 Dalmatians.

  25 MARCH The first blackthorn blossom unfurls into delicate white crystals in the hedges around the field. But even such a picturesque setting for the field cannot distract from the drizzle that is centre stage. It is the sort of drizzle that seeps into everywhere, and everything. For an hour I sit under the hedge with constantly wiped binoculars watching a male wren making a nest in Marsh Field hedge, flying in with stalks of grass, doing a distinctive cocky tilt of the tail as he lands on the willow branch. Out he flutters and off. Although the hedges are not in leaf, far from it, the trapped leaves and twigs of yesteryear and of hedge-cutting give cover to his construction. He may well build other nests, which he will display to any female who enters his territory. If she likes any of his pads she will move in, decorate, and bear his children. A slapper seeking a Premier League husband could not be more shallow.

  Mind you, he is no moral giant. As soon as he has ensconced one female, he will try to tempt another Jenny Wren into one of his spare nests, where she too will give birth to his progeny. The little cock then travels between his families, a bigamous commercial traveller in a 1930s thriller.

  ‘Wren’ has its origins in the Anglo-Saxon word wrœnno meaning lascivious; the Anglo-Saxon is linguistically kin to the Danish Vrensk, meaning uncastrated. Slightly less fun is the Latin tag for the bird, which is Troglodytes. Typically this is translated as cave dweller, although hole-plunger (trogle being hole, duo to plunge in) would be a more tellingly accurate description of the furtive wren.

  Curious how such a randy, though otherwise inoffensive little bird became an object of loathing. In parts of Ireland the tradition of Hunting the Wren is still played out. Groups of boys used to go out into the countryside to capture or kill a wren, which was then paraded around the December village with the youth chanting:

  The wran, the wran, the king of all birds,

  St Stephen’s Day was caught in the furze;

  Come, give us a bumper, or give us a cake,

  Or give us a copper, for Charity’s sake.

  Today an effigy of Troglodytes troglodytes is used.

  This victimization of the wren seems to stem from the bird’s role in alerting guards to the attempted escape of the English Christian St Stephen from prison. Other folkloric tales about the bird’s indiscreet warnings abound; in the seventeenth century it is said to have hopped up and down on a drum and warned Cromwell of a sneak attack by the Irish. The percussive sound of its alarm call gives rise to the bird’s Devon name of crackil or crackadee.

  The wonder is that a bird so tiny can make so much noise. Scientifically speaking, birds have no larynx, having instead an organ known as a syrinx. The syrinx is far more efficacious at producing sound than our own larynx and its vocal cords. Whereas a syrinx is able to vibrate almost all of the air coming out of a bird’s lungs, human vocal cords utilize a mere 2 per cent of the air passing over them. Additionally, the syrinx can produce two different sounds simultaneously (one from each half), which goes a little way to explaining the complexity of birdsong.

  Yet listening to the cock wren tune up is not a matter for science. Few other birds can lift the solitude of a damp March day when winter will not go away. On a similar day Wordsworth encountered a sweetly singing wren:

  The earth was comfortless, and, touched by faint

  Internal breezes, sobbings of the place,

  And respirations, from the roofless walls

  The shuddering ivy dripped large drops, yet still

  So sweetly ’mid the gloom the invisible Bird

  Sang to itself, that there I could have made

  My dwelling-place, and lived for ever there

  To hear such music.

  Many wrens establish winter territories, as this one has. The long forc
eps bill of the wren is designed for picking the minutest of spiders and insects from the litter of woodland floors. (Reposed in death, a wren looks to be all beak.) Damp grassland with hedges is an acceptable substitute for woodland terroir, so while there is one male making des reses by the newt-ditch willow there is another toiling on the river side of the field, where the trees surround the promontory, and where the frost does not always iron-harden the earth.

  The males are trilling against each other, despite the rain, and all the wrens of Britain are getting ready to nest, despite the rain. All 17 million of them.

  26 MARCH Plants under the Marsh Field hedge: rabbit ears of foxgloves emergent; ground elder; nettles; ground ivy, already with tiny violet flowers; dog’s mercury with white flowers; cleavers beginning to lick the trunks of hawthorn and hazel; basal starfishes of thistles; unfurled hoods of lords and ladies. In the dryness of the bottom of the hedge there are little colonies of holes for voles; because the hedge bottom is raised up by the litterfall of the decades, it is high and dry. In the copse and in the field the yellow lesser celandines are starting to shine.

  ‘Curleee. Curleee.’ The sound of the wild. I have been listening out for them for days, and they come on this afternoon of the 26th, planing down the wind as they make their plaintive cries to the souls of the departed.

  The curlews are home. To my private amusement our curlews are inverse Herefordians, in that they spend the winter holidaying in west Wales; human Herefordians go to west Wales for their summer hols.

  I fret eschatalogically about the curlews, as though it is their migratory wingbeats that turn the earth, and should they fail to appear we will have entered some ecological end time. But they are home, home to breed. Curlews are not gregarious in the breeding season, and each couple likes a great deal of space. Historically, we have had one pair nesting in the field by the road, and one pair down in the meadow – which is about as far apart as you can get on forty acres.

  A male curlew glides around performing a vibrato bubbling trill. Within two days he has secured a mate and then the curlew pair circle round the bottom field, laying claim to their territory. We love the haunting piping of the curlew with fierceness. For us, it is not just the sound of the wild, or of spirits calling to the dead, it is our personal heralding of spring.

  Curlews live for five years, and are creatures of habit concerning habitat. The likelihood is that one of the pair in the meadow was born here, as were its parents. They have taken to the air and are crying again. The elongated double note of their call is almost caught in the curlew’s name if the stress is placed on the first syllable.

  Frost. Frost so hard that the grass is as white as fronds at the bottom of the ocean. A low struggling sun makes tall, flat shadows of the riverside trees that stretch almost across the field.

  There are tracks in the frost, bright green lanes of animal traffic. The rabbits have advanced cautiously into the field, scraped into the grass, and back to their burrows on the bank.

  But again not all of them were quick enough. In this scene of pearlescent perfection lie tufts of greeny-grey rabbit fur. And drops of blood. Walking towards the copse trees where the frost is still coldly bright I pick up the surreptitious pad marks of the fox, the hind foot placed precisely into the print of the fore foot.

  My guess is that the dog fox has taken a gift to his vixen, who is now suckling her cubs. I see him that evening trotting into Bank Field, then redoubling his trotting tracks, working his way into the wind, into the dusk. (I do not think I have ever seen a fox walk except when stalking; like Labradors under the age of ten, they run everywhere.)

  I barely recognized him. Gone is the gorgeous coat of winter; his moulting fur is threadbare and tatty.

  In the newt ditch the water has again frozen. A solitary silver backswimmer (Notonecta galuca) is preserved in a crystal sarcophagus. A temporary tomb, yet dead forever. The topmost frogspawn is also encased in the killing ice.

  29 MARCH The tadpoles are not finished with trouble. When the ice melts the heron comes plunging his lightning beak into them. But he must find the oozy bottom of the ditch shiftily uncomfortable or the tadpoles unsatisfyingly titchy because he gives up after only a minute or two to flap off on tired wings.

  There is something primeval about herons; they trail ancientness behind them. As it sluggishly flies towards the Grove it calls once; a screech from dinosaur times which terrifies an already melancholic sky.

  The surviving tadpoles in the newt ditch stick together, safety in numbers, salvation in a heaving unsaintly black mass, save for a handful of brave explorers.

  This is a trick lambs are less able to pull off.

  Penny and Tris arrived home to say they saw a red kite sitting on a molehill in the top field. Except they then realized it was no molehill; it was a black lamb, and the kite was pulling it apart. The lamb had been running around happily thirty minutes before.

  When I stomp up through the bone-cold mist, the kite is still there, tearing with its beak. Only when I get to within thirty feet does the kite launch up; it makes a half-hearted attempt to carry the lamb off but only succeeds in dragging it for a foot or two, before insolently making its way towards the mountain wall.

  The black lamb in its curly astrakhan coat has had its guts slit open, pink and exposed. White heat rises from the body in gasps.

  I carry away the dead lamb by its gangly back legs. The eyeless head, heavy with skull, swings and contorts in grotesque stringless puppetry.

  Beyond the mountain is the fastness of the red kite. Once upon a medieval time the red kite was about as common in London as the sparrow, and more welcome because of its habit of cleaning the capital’s streets with its scavenging. Years and years of persecution by keepers on shooting estates beat back the bird to mid-Wales. By the 1950s the red kite population was down to about a hundred pairs. Through protection it has risen in numbers, and expanded its range.

  Today I wish the dam wall of the mountain had held the bird back.

  30 MARCH The month ends in a blaze of clear-skied glory.

  There is one perfect, silver-toned night, when the moon provides lighting, when the Escley has settled down to an expectant hush, and there enters from stage right a white ghost which drifts silently across the field.

  A barn owl. Tyto alba. Its pale flat face gives me an unconcerned glance. Barn owls have peerlessly acute hearing, and the owl is listening for the squeaks of rodents rather than watching for their movement. When the owl reaches the thicket it banks right and makes a return pass over the field. The barn owl is the owl of meadowland: detecting noise with its asymmetric arrangement of ears is easier above grass than woodland, with its rustling interferences. On this night nothing catches the owl’s ear, and it veers off to the Grove. Lower Meadow is not the barn owl’s usual hunting ground for it prefers the still more open aspect at the top of the farm. This protractedly chilled March is making for desperate hunting measures.

  Indisputably, there is something spooky about barn owls. They are the demon owls and death owls of country lore. Shakespeare frequently employed them to dramatic effect, and nowhere better than King Henry VI, Part III, Act V, Scene 6, when, at the hour of his murder in the Tower, King Henry tells the villainous Richard of Gloucester, ‘The owl shriek’d at thy birth.’

  The moon disappears behind a monstrous cloud. On cue, the barn owl emits its territorial cry from somewhere in the darkness of the Grove. Barn owls do not hoot. They screech, they scream. With the anguish of a dying child.

  Across the Escley in the wood of the old quarry the tawny owl, the wood owl, the ivy owl, the brown owl, emits its comforting ‘tu-whit’.

  APRIL

  Cuckoo pint

  MORDANT CLOUDS FLOOD over the mountain, and the field is wreathed in the dark that comes before the storm.

  There is a single bright spot. Today on this 2 April the first cuckoo flower in the field blossomed, to nod its pale pink bloom in the gathering wind.

  Any flower th
at comes with a host of local names is likely to be of human use, either as food or as medicine. The cuckoo flower has at least thirty local names, among them lady’s smock, milkmaids, lady’s mantle, lady’s glove, cuckoo’s shoes, which usually point to its habit of flowering to meet the arrival of the cuckoo, or innuendo-ishly, to its passing resemblance to women’s undergarments hanging on a washing line. The vernacular meadow bittercress is the most useful of names, since the needle-thin leaves of Cardamine pratensis make a peppery edible that used to be sold on medieval market stalls. Left uneaten by humans, cuckoo flower is the foodstuff of the caterpillars of the orange-tip butterfly.

  Cardamine pratensis shares one country name, ‘cuckoo pint’, with the wholly different lords and ladies (Arum maculatum). All the folky nomenclatures of lords and ladies are of eye-winking, Carry On standard. Cuckoo pint here is derived from cuckold and ‘pintle’, meaning penis. Geoffrey Grigson lists as many as ninety nudge-nudge alternative names for Arum maculatum in his book An Englishman’s Flora. So: cuckoo cock, dog cocks, kings and queens, parson’s billycock, stallions and mares, and wake robin (Robin being the medieval equivalent of ‘Dick’). Such names are saucy souvenirs of British rural humour.

  The plant’s shiny halberd leaves (with disfiguring black poxy spots) have been visible for a month in the hedges, but now the brown phallic spadix is . . . tumescent. It is a flasher in the hedge. On the warm days soon to come, midges, enticed by the meaty smell of the spadix, become trapped in the outer suggestive sheath from which it peeps. The midges will fertilize the hidden flowers, which in turn will become the beguilingly orange berries of autumn. At night the sheath will loosen, allowing the midges to escape.

  The tubers used to be made into a love potion; in John Lyly’s play Love’s Metamorphosis of 1601, he had a character say, ‘They have eaten so much wake robin, that they cannot sleep for love.’ Whatever their efficacy as medieval viagra, the plant’s roots, properly prepared and baked, made a kind of arrowroot once sold as Portland Sago, and were the main ingredient in ‘saloop’ (salep), a working-class drink popular before the introduction of coffee and tea.