Another Country Diary #7

With 👻hauntings👻

Photo Credit - Iain Robinson

28/10

Everything which is not green is some shade of brown or grey. The grey of the tarmac on the lanes seems matched precisely to that of the sky, the wet sheen reflecting what dull light remains. The fields are a rich chestnut brown, sometimes tinged with the green shoots of next spring’s crops. The mud yields easily beneath the tread of our boots. We see a dog walker on the other side of a wide field, a figure in black rain clothes under the vast grey skies like a phantom in an M.R. James story dipping in and out of perceptibility. We see a rider standing astride a horse in another field, bright dot of high visibility vest, the horse seems to be going nowhere. They just stand in the field, the horse’s head nodding. By the time we get back to the village the windows of the cottages are beginning to light up. There is wood smoke in the air.

As dusk comes on we hear the fox barking again. Ceci rushes out to shut up the hens. It barks for about five minutes as if calling or warning something. Sharp persistent barks that almost sound like a hen calling when you first hear them.

29/10

I wake and start work an hour earlier than I normally would. I haven’t adjusted to the daylight saving hour. It is sunny in the morning, but by the time we go for our post lunch walk the cloud is lowering. Fighter jets tear dark hollows through the skies, in or above the cloud, their afterburners thunderous as they manoeuvre unseen. There are flashes of gold in the gloom. Gorse flowers. A few plants grow in the hedges of the lanes, survivors, I think, from the time when most of the fields between our house and around the lanes were commons, land used by ordinary villagers for the grazing of livestock and the coppicing of wood. It was all enclosed here, valued and parcelled up for the local estate at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the commoners’ estovers, the rights which made a hard life a little easier, were placed into the hands of the landowners and slowly forgotten. A neighbour told me of how, until the 1970s or so, the estate would deliver a load of firewood to each tenant. A remnant of the commoners’ rights to cut and gather for their hearths and stoves.

The track to the old farmhouse is gilded with the falling leaves of the ash trees. In hedgerows the field maples begin to blaze yellow. As we reach the lower fields the rain starts to steal down on us and we quicken our pace, past the old field oaks marking a ghost hedge, and past the strewn feathers and breast bone of a wood-pigeon.

When we arrive home a grey heron lifts its sharp spear and rises with slow wingbeats from our pond, climbing and squawking in a wide circle above the copse before settling in a tree. We lost a large number of fish to a heron a couple of summers back and the survivors have been slowly recovering their numbers. The heron is watchful in the branches.

31/10

I see the heron again first thing in the morning when I go out to the garage to bring in a bag of cat litter. It lifts up through the gap in the hedge where a hawthorn tree fell in a storm five winters ago.

The sky is light grey through my study window. Rooks move from field to hedge and back again. Three wood-pigeons are roosting in the top of a hawthorn tree behind the garage, the one I keep meaning to cut back each autumn. There are so many jobs that need doing. Fences to mend. Gates to paint. Fruit trees to prune. Never enough time. With enough time each job becomes pleasurable, a meditation. How to get time back when most of it is bought up, enclosed like the commons, owned by somebody else?

By the afternoon there is pale blue sky, hazy sunshine. The road through the village is busy with traffic displaced from an earlier accident on the A11, drivers following their satnavs too quickly so that we have to step onto the verges. We pace to ‘the top’ and then down the hedge to the bottom field. I worry about work matters the whole way there and back. I struggle to clear my thoughts. The mud is a little drier today. There are magpies in the hedges, rooks in the fields. We see a chatty riot of linnets burst from the bare branches of an ash tree.

It is long dark by the time I finish marking student work. My eyes swim with the afterglow of the screen and my mind feels fogged with the words of others. I go into the cold night air to lock up the garage and take recycling to the bin. Somebody in the village has lit their fire and I can smell the drifting smoke. In the house there are pumpkins being carved by my youngest daughter and her friend—eighties goth music pumps out of the bluetooth speaker from a Spotify Halloween playlist. We eat the first of our chestnut stews of the season, cooked by Ceci with the chestnuts we gathered in the woods last weekend.

I find myself thinking of ghosts, of the haunted present. The floods in Valencia taking so many lives feels like such a haunting, the manifestation of past errors and failures. Cars piled up in streets like a ghost wailing, ‘oil, oil.’ The present is also haunted by the future, by the horrors to come, our apocalyptic imaginings. Or perhaps we haunt it. What kind of terrors are we storing up for it with our collective and individual failures to take the necessary action when it is needed? Nobody needs to dress up as a vampire or ghoul any more, there couldn’t be a better Halloween costume for future haunting than that of an ExxonMobil executive or an alt-right climate-sceptic. In Will Self’s The Book of Dave, a future Britain, flooded by rising sea levels, is haunted by the past traumas of twentieth century cab driver, Dave, whose misogynistic ramblings following his divorce are the only text that has survived the catastrophe, and so is taken as gospel and forms the basis of their belief system. But hope exists. Towards the end of the novel Dave turns his back on London, walking out into the countryside. He writes another book renouncing the first in which he expounds an ecological awareness, encouraging people to ‘put a brick in the cistern’ before its too late, a text which once discovered in the future has the potential to transform it. We might all need to look in Dave’s rear view mirror and ask ourselves, what kind of ghost do we want to be, what kind of Dave?

1/11

The sun is trapped somewhere behind swirls of grey cloud. We are growing bored of taking the same walk, so we head off towards the church in the next village, taking a right-of-way across the centre of a field. The medieval roofline of an old farmhouse comes into view as we traverse the field, and I wonder how many centuries its three windows, nestled under thatch, have looked out on parishioners making the same journey on All Saints Day. A feast day in the Anglican church, a day for baptisms. We pass a field of alpacas, who gaze with neck stretching curiosity at us, and a solitary sheep who does not. The beech trees are laying down their gold, scatters of it across tracks and fields. The harrowed fields are peppered black and white with flint. Two buzzards fly from us, reluctantly taking to the air from their roosts, calling to each other. There is a crowd of blue tits in the lanes. Partridges explode from unlikely places. Pheasants everywhere, clucking like creaky gates—escapees from the shooting estates. The roads seem busy, a skip hire running up the track to the old farmhouse, a lorry delivering mattresses tooting its horn at us to move, move. We find a world in miniature growing on the cut trunk of an oak blocking up a field entrance—mushrooms sprouting, the external manifestation of the biochemistry at work in the fungal breakdown of the dead wood, or fairy houses, depending on your perspective.

Photo Credit - Iain Robinson

2/11

I’m still thinking of haunting. The parish is haunted. There are place names here that are the ghosts of the lost common. The name ‘green’ speaks of this, haunting a hamlet and lane. Another place name is the ghost of Old Norse ‘ock’, the sound of acorns falling, ‘ock, ock’, the oaks still growing here in the hedgerows, the hamlet abandoned long ago—it edged the common—but the name still haunts the maps. The ground is haunted by flints and pottery. Isn’t archaeology also a kind of haunting, the past nudging up to the present? Dig anywhere in our garden and you pull up the past. The wood haunted by an old brickworks. The hollows haunted by excavations for clay and lime. Ghost hedges, long grubbed up, marked by fields oaks. Ghost ponds, just shades in the summer, the merest indentations, that fill with rain and mirror the sky in winter.

👻

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The country diary can express a sort of local distinctiveness, explore a personal set of interactions with a landscape, and in doing so, almost accidentally, tease out the way the natural world is entwined with culture and politics. It can be a quietly radical and uncanny form, or sometimes just plain parochial, oddball in its specificity.

You can read the previous edition of ‘Another Country Diary’ here:

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