Another Country Diary #4
Another Country Diary #4
With the 'worm that flies' and The Death of Grass.
3/10
The turn of the leaves is more noticeable now. Some of the young ash trees along the hedges of the lanes are brushed yellow as we pass them on a walk after work. I’ve been working from home today after three days in the seminar or meeting room, but most of the day has been spent hunched over print outs of student writing or typing emails. The light is already golden by the time we are in the lanes, sharing the last hour of daylight with occasional joggers and the distant sound of commuters gunning their engines home on the main roads.
We walk up past the old farmhouse and leave money in the honesty box in exchange for two jars of honey, one set and one runny. The hens and sheep watch us over the fence in a strange menagerie. We talk as we walk, easing out the tensions of the day, the niggles and worries of our jobs. One of the cable routes has finally arrived in our parish, heralded by a party of archaeologists who have set up camp by the lanes, with a portacabin and a temporary vehicle hardstanding, in order to pick away at the land that will be bulldozed and stripped back. They’ve been using the footpath up to ‘the top’ to access the site and the clay heavy soil is churned up from the wheels of 4x4s. I can see a digger parked in the field where the cabling will pass. The sight of it makes me feel uneasy. This is where the hares run and box in the spring, where the skylarks sing.
The sun is low by the time we walk back. It paints the hedge oaks a radiant blood-orange, picks out the reds of holly and hawthorn berries. We see a single pink wildflower of some kind blooming in seasonal confusion in a field entrance. A woodpecker flies to the ancient hedge oak in a dancing series of parabolas.
4/10
The last of the apples are off the trees. The pears are still hanging, unripe.
In our vegetable beds the courgettes are still growing, albeit with less vigour. I cut five but there are as many still on the plants. We will have to move the squashes under glass soon.
Before lunch I step into the garden for a screen break and hear a shrill cry from overhead, followed by a deeper more recognisable call from a Red Kite. There were four of them, possibly two adults with juveniles, far above the village, milling briefly together on a thermal, before separating out into glides that took them east and out of sight.
We have nettle soup for lunch, the leaves harvested by Ceci from some fresh growth in the copse, and then set out for a circular walk. In the lanes we find a caterpillar suspended from an ancient oak like an abseiling commando, on a strand of its own silk, spinning and swaying in its efforts to either ascend or descend—it wasn’t clear which. It is the colour of freshly cut oak, a pale almost pinkish brown. It sways and spins, spins and sways, hypnotically determined beneath the spread of leaf and branch. The ‘worm that flies’ says Ceci, quoting Blake. It seems to me it has no choice, it must fly or die.
At the big hedge we pass a neighbour walking his sausage dog and taking a work call on his AirPods—the 4G is good here. The archaeologists are moving about in the next field in high visibility workwear. We speculate about the route of the cabling, hoping it misses favourite field oaks and hedgerows, that the skylarks won’t be disturbed from their field margin nesting grounds come springtime, that nature will heal quickly.
5/10
The morning is crisp and sunny. We go to our nearby market town to buy hen food from the farm and pet suppliers. The sack is large enough to need to be shouldered, which causes my cracked rib to twinge. When we get back I split the sack with my Opinel and tip the contents into the metal food bin with the hens looking on, hopeful of apple or some other treat. The smell of layer pellets reminds me always of my first primary school trip which was to a mill that made animal feed on the edge of the Dorset village where I spent my early childhood. The mill was a vast building (or so it seemed) clad with corrugated iron and full of machinery and silos, noise and dust. I have no idea what a bunch of five year olds were supposed to learn from this or if it was even safe for us to be there around the conveyor belts and forklifts. The hen feed we buy is soya based and has a sharp dusty smell, not unpleasant, but not appetising. I guess it isn’t meant for humans, but I can also understand the hens’ evident disdain when it is a handful of pellets that I toss them rather than an apple. Our seven hens get through about a sack a month and in return we get about 90 eggs. At the moment four of the hens lay roughly three eggs a day, one hen (Mrs Wintersea) is in retirement, and two youngsters on the cusp of laying, so we can probably expect about 120 eggs per month from the spring onwards, assuming they all get through the winter without a visit from the fox or the sparrow hawk (we lost two to predation last winter).
We go for a long walk before sundown, through the lanes, past “the top” and around the bottom fields, then back again. The archaeologists have left the door to their portable loo open. The toilet seat is up. I imagine the wildlife exploring this after dark—owls perched on the cistern, badgers rifling through the toilet paper. We see a kestrel over the edge of the large field pond again, probably the same one as last week. The sun is setting behind the church at the next village and we have to pick up the pace to get back before the light fades too much. The human eye sees well at dusk, but the same can’t be said of the drivers of cars on country lanes. By the time we reach the lanes the sun has dropped below a bank of cloud on the horizon. On the edge of the corn field we see a roe deer bounce out from the crop and recoil at our proximity. It freezes for about ten seconds, taking us in, assessing the threat, before bounding along the field margin towards a muntjac deer—unlikely companions? Two hares part and run on the other side of the next large field, one that has already been ploughed and harrowed. It is so often the case that you see more mammals just after sunrise or just after sunset. In the decades I lived in various towns and cities I missed the sunsets. The drama of them was always for someone else in a better location or a higher vantage, occasionally glimpsed between buildings or reflected in glass. In the relative flats of Norfolk, with no great hills to cast shade there is something of the African savannah in the drama of them. Everything glows. And in the afterglow the light fades slowly.
6/10
We have sporadic short power-cuts with no apparent cause. The electric oven, the Wi-Fi, and the timer for the central heating are all unsettled. I spend the afternoon deep in reading and prep for my teaching in the coming week. The day feels so much shorter when it rains.
In the garden a young blackbird hops away a little too slowly, easy prey for the cat, so I clap to scare it enough to make it fly low into the undergrowth. I clear up the old seed heads from the foxgloves and lupins and dig out the accumulation of last year’s oak leaves from alongside the oil tank.
The sky slowly greys over, and then produces a fine drizzle by the time I collect my older daughter from her friend’s house in the city. I see a coppice worker with a bundle of freshly cut hazel poles on the roof of his camper-van at the turning onto the Norwich Road. It reminds me of all the jobs I never have the time to do in the wood.
7/10
It is another grey afternoon. Occasional pools of sunlight play across the garden. I taught a seminar on the short story in the morning but had to come home early rather than work in the office due to a sick daughter being off school. I sit hunched over book and laptop.
I’m preparing my seminar on John Christopher’s 1956 novel The Death of Grass. Along with John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids it is often labelled a ‘cosy catastrophe’, though exactly what this means is open to debate. It does begin in a cosy enough fashion, a visit to a family farm and a modern (for 1950s men) conversation about the role of women in the workplace, but as the crisis, the viral death of all plants related to grass (so wheat, rice, barley etc), escalates, the upper middle class male protagonists (an architect and a civil servant) team up with a sharp shooting psychopath and the story becomes very bloody. The familiar trope of a party of survivors fleeing catastrophe by running to the hills is followed here, with the protagonists leaving London with their families on hearing that an atom bomb will be dropped on the city, a mass murder to prevent mass starvation. The countryside they traverse, England’s green and pleasant land, is now a dustbowl unsuitable for a new Jerusalem, and as their journey progresses the violence escalates into rape, murder, and kidnapping, culminating in an armed battle to secure the family farm where food can still grow. In this world the women grow silent, shrinking to the margins of an apocalypse marked by gendered violence, in a manner that feels ambiguously treated in the novel but which seems to reflect the treatment of the female body in ‘The Book of Revelation’. The land (nature) in this novel is a place which can only be raped and exploited so many times before it bites back in the form of the virus, and yet in the end the only way the main characters are able to secure the fertile soil of the valley farm is through the symbolic sexual violence of penetrating it with guns. It is an odd novel, fast paced and unpleasant, haunted by the recent wartime experiences of a generation, and full of uncomfortable and outdated language, but it does reveal an arrogance, an attitude of British exceptionalism that ‘this country’s more disciplined’, which is laid utterly bare by the depiction of a rapid societal collapse. I can’t help but feel that this looks a lot like the world today as we witness climate disaster through the distance of our screens and the illusory safety of our homes. It won’t happen here, we lie to ourselves, just as many did as Covid crept closer to our shores. We can continue as normal, we say, we’d be okay. Perhaps this is what cosy catastrophe is like, the comfort of complacency, the indulgence of denial.
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The previous diary entry can be found here:
Lovely writing.