Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
* * *
The Grassling
A Geological Memoir
Contents
Before
ONE 1 Acreage
2 Burnett
3 Culm
4 Daffodil
5 Exe
6 Family Tree
7 Grass Diaries
8 Harriers
9 Indigo
10 July
11 Kulungu
12 Layers
Soil Memoir for Druid’s Hill 13 Michaelmas Daisies
14 Nutrients
15 Osteoporosis
16 Protozoa
17 Quarter
18 Ritual
19 Stars
20 Teign Valley
21 Under Wood
22 Vinca Minor (‘Illumination’)
TWO 23 Warren
24 Waymark
25 Whisper
26 Wills
27 Withy
28 Wooded Fort
29 Words
30 Wynn
31 Xylology
32 X Absent
33 Xylophone
34 Xylotomy
35 Elk-sedge
36 Yeanling
Soil Memoir for Ten Acre Field 37 Yeomen
38 Ymbclyccan
39 Ymbgedelf
40 Ymbwendung
41 Yr
42 Yslende
43 Ȳtemest
44 Ȳþ-wōrigende
45 Zoic
Soil Memoir for St Mary’s Churchyard 46 Zygote
After
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a writer of English and Kenyan heritage. She was born in Devon and her work is inspired by the landscape in which she was raised. She is the author of Swims, a Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year, and her poetry has been highly commended in the Forward Prize.
The thin layer of soil that forms a patchy covering over the continents controls our own existence and that of every other animal of the land. Without soil, land plants as we know them could not grow, and without plants no animals could survive.
Yet if our agriculture-based life depends on the soil, it is equally true that soil depends on life, its very origins and the maintenance of its true nature being intimately related to living plants and animals.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring1
Plant bioacoustics is a newly emerged field of plant communication. Plants produce sound waves in the lower end of the audio range as well as an overabundance of ultrasonic sounds. By capturing the signals emitted by plants under different environmental conditions, I am exploring the ecological significance of these sounds to communication among plants and between plants and other organisms.
Monica Gagliano, ‘Plant Communication’
‘What a strange noise the leaves of the trees make,’ he said. ‘It’s as if they were talking to one another – telling secrets.’
‘Wisha-wisha-wisha-wisha,’ whispered the trees.
‘They are telling secrets,’ said Beth. ‘And do you know, Rick – if the trees have any message for us, we can hear it by pressing our left ears to the trunks of the trees! Then we really hear what they say.’
Enid Blyton, The Magic Faraway Tree, Book 2
BEFORE
On the shortest day, the light never ends. Conifers buffer deep gusts of air, animals cry. The sky stings of a metal or an ore; iron wool rolled flat from moon to field. No stars. Clouds ripple the darkening grey. It must be darker because colours are, but the feeling is still of light. The body and the air. Coming back to the place you know: particular trees, the same grass, the ground you have known all your life – this is in the air. This is in the cloud. This is what the eyes follow, long after there is anything to see. Ice immerses skin, hair, nail. There is no touching in this tundra, nothing can bear to. This could be a place without speech. Where no lips part. Were it not for the traces of cries in the sodden air, in the slow beat of tarpaulin over hay, gathering moonlight in the black of its flaps. No animals. Except in echoes. Hundreds of years could pass like this. With this wind, ice and blank air, hollowed of pulse and paw. Not the longest night, but the slowest light. Stars begin. Pools of moon bathe the leaves. The ice takes any beating heart.
The light is phenomenal. Clear, pristine, unfiltered. Ghosts dance in the tarpaulin. I sleep in and out of the moon. The day is always here. It is just behind the night. Clouds are urgent, the speech of the wind is feathered but strong and when the light doesn’t call it is wind. Battering against me, ‘Wake, wake, open! Come apart and open.’ Tonight is not for sleeping. It is for loosening the parts of yourself you forget in the daytime. It is for remembering that you are a force that goes on in spite of yourself. That you do not stop when you sleep. That you are not at rest when there is fury and sound in you, stretching the day clean out of its hours. And finally, when light and ice have passed beyond human tolerance, when it cannot be borne, when you are nearly lost and you almost accept it, there is morning.
Geese exit trees. Ducks fly over, not stopping. Willows stand lean: pure limb. It is then that I miss the vegetables. What would it take to dig this ground again? Muscles I don’t have, sinew I don’t own and the time to be here. Standing in the middle of the plot, thinking platitudes about change and how the soil shows this more than anything, I see it. A single rose bending over the ground; its light lemon is the sun of a hundred mornings and I still see the packet my father used as a marker under the stubs of dead branches, ‘Gloire de Dijon’, a climbing rose.
Nearby, the great beech, whose fall I saw last September, has joined a lattice of underlying branches, flattened to form a human nest. It calls out to be climbed. An aphid moves along ivy under my hands, which are tools now, propelling me. Everything slips. Rain gathers in upturned leaves; smooth bark has no traction. I reach the nest in seconds. A moment’s pause as I assess whether or not the branch that forms its spine can hold me. It could splinter and so could my legs, my shoulders.
When he fell, it was not from anything as stupid as climbing trees. Yet I want to risk it. To sit on the spine and fall back, head in branch; to look up, cradled by wood. But the branches themselves seem to speak, to coax me back. ‘We cannot bear you. We cannot help you.’ And I know they are right. I edge backwards down the trunk: so easy to climb, treacherous to descend. Feet find no hold; jumper rucks up and bark on belly is cold, as leaves are, to the skin. I have no choice but to relax: tension bears a weight that unsteadies. Muscles retract enough to make subtle negotiations of buttock over hip, the swing of both legs over, until only pelvis touches wood. I jump and land. Sound leaps.
Wood cracks as it’s split apart for logs. The thump of it falls into barrow; the shuffle and slide of things being put into their proper place. Over it all a light ‘tseep tseep’ as little birds fall in from wherever they have been. And as the day drains, the sounds of the world close. Engines end; dogs quiet; squirrels’ purrs edge under fur. Insects slow their clicks. Staggered hoots and deep lowing. More than the day is ending. Evening fire dulled to pastel, dusting over hedges. Moon-gasp. Electric orb fringed by firs. That great moon going on. A perfect round, pulsing to the bat flicker, trickle river. That great continuing. Glow.
ONE
* * *
1
Acreage
Tonight the light from the cottage on the hill is the last to go, as the rain beats against the windows. Pulled and pummelled, I wake somewhere in the storm; where, somehow, there is singing. In the wide blast of rain, a twinkle of sound chimes its resistance. In the short respites from the wind, sudden darts as chaffinch, blackbird, bullfinch get where they need to go, like people running for cover in the rain. The eightieth year
after my father was born is a strong one: bullish, stamping its way through the calendar. It is a night full of fight and I hope some of it reaches him; that he breathes in deeply and is charged. I can’t tell if the rain has stopped or is just part of me now, but it falls like a blessing and I sleep.
In the morning, rain coats as thick as a pelt, as I stay out completing my fieldwork: my inventory of the night, and the deer, and the time since I was last here. The word ‘acreage’ denotes arable land, though is not necessarily measured in acres. But here, where the field is an acre in size, the word encompasses the field. An acre of age, where prints of all description are held in the ground: the heavy hoof of deer; lighter treads of badger and rabbit. They press the soil with little animal touches. Some soil is dispersed, caught in the ridges of hooves, in clumps of fur – only to re-settle a little further off. Some is nourished, with manure from their tactile bodies. And the bodies, in turn, feed from the soil, picking plants whose roots stretch across the first few inches. And so this has gone on for centuries, this lifting and falling of the earth by the lifting and falling of paws. So this gentle ploughing continues. As I look into this patch of ground, I wonder how long it has been there, where it came from, when and where it will go. Lately, I have been questioning many things I used to take for granted; that I used to think would always be there.
I run to the copse for cover, crying out as I slip in the soft mud, sending a racket of pheasants up. Trees creak and sway above, clashing branches like antlers. The sound of the wood is a fire, everywhere catching alight. Bird nests lurch high in the wind, their inhabitants facing the bends and swerves of a blustery rollercoaster. I follow the deer I have missed, by Mum’s report, by two days. I sense where they broke through: two gaps in the hedge I crawl towards. Crouching down to the tracks, I find myself at eye level with clumps of elderberries. I stand in the stream, my head level with the land above, eyes full of ivy and deadly nightshade. A tunnel runs away from me, a highway for small animals. I have stumbled on a little town of voles, a thoroughfare for tiny feet. To the left, an exposed tree root twists like a bone: a knee joint or elbow, covered with moss glowing high green in the dappled sun. Strips of tree lie loosely attached, pulled out by the wind.
Then it sounds like the wood itself is speaking. It is hard to tell the creak of the wood from the squeak of the bird. Other little birds fall in around the noise: thrushes, wrens, robins, but it remains unseen. It seems like the bark is tearing open, pouring its sounded sap onto the twigs below. Then nothing. Periods of intense activity fall away as quickly as they came. As I head towards the house, red bursts through the winter rose. It rips through the rosebud cherry, the cotoneaster, the Martin’s spurge I pick to take to the hospital. The hedge roars. The orange dogwood, also known as ‘midwinter fire’, calls out to be taken too. It is a fierce flare of a garden. I am still here, it shouts. There is no arguing with its presence.
In the evening, he rallies. The last sun flutters him over like a blackbird. Our eyes follow the leaves brought from his acre out over the sideboard, past the curtain, the sliding doors, the city’s walls; back to the place we have known all our lives. There, clouds end in bullfinch pink. Slices of hot colour peel from the sky, exposing the soft air beneath. Crumbling like charcoal to the grass, the colours fall. A bird ticks into stillness and we breathe.
*
The soil that my father’s fathers farmed lies in the Devon village of Ide. As I plan a return to this soil, I find I am increasingly guided by its Celtic layers. The mapping of these settlements seems to have preoccupied my father, who authored a local history of the village, A History of the People and Parish of Ide.1 The book includes a linguistic tracking, following the derivations of place names.
I am conducting fieldwork in this village and in my father’s present home of Stockleigh Pomeroy and corresponding with him about it. I operate in twenty-four-hour marathons slipped in between teaching in Birmingham, making notes on the back of shopping lists and around the borders of tissues. This may not be quite what early topographers like William of Camden envisioned when they encouraged later writers to continue their work. Camden’s Britannia, the first chorographical survey of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, explored the Celtic tribal areas within the counties’ boundaries.2 Yet his methodology, a mix of archival and anecdotal research, is not so dissimilar to mine; though to his maps and records I add scribbled observations, feelings, phonemes: little edges of words that poke out from the landscape, that shoot up from the pit of language. For oral testimony, I start to wonder who else might be speaking. What might the grass tell of the ground? Or worms, of earth? Could the soil itself speak?
I take up my father’s History and come to rest on a sketch map at the back: ‘Field Names near the Dunchideock Boundary’. It is the focus on the names that intoxicates, that sends me shooting back through time, wrapped in the language of the fields. Based on an 1803 Survey Map of the Manor, the sketch shows a division of land that has been in place for at least two hundred years, with the field names tracked back further. In his History, my father asks of the fields First, Second and Third Drewshill, ‘Is it fanciful to see the names of these fields as a corruption of “Druid’s Hill”, i.e. “the hill of the priest”?’
‘No,’ I breathe.
‘This would be further indication that this was a religious site in pre-Roman times, and what is more –’
‘Yes?’
‘– continued as such, long into the Saxon period, as, otherwise –’
‘Yes?’
‘– the name … would not have survived.’
Weeks pass before I can reach Druid’s Hill and I have to make do with virtual visits from Birmingham. Navigating online, I come quickly to Exeter and, from there, pass on to Ide, home of the Druid. I float over what I think are the Drewshill fields and wonder about their size. I zoom out to compare them with their neighbours. The second Drewshill looks compact, nestled between the others. It seems filled with grass, but a lighter shade than those around it. I wonder if it holds a different species, or if it’s just at a different stage of maturity. Who does it feed, I wonder. Who grows in it?
I flick across to my own village, where my father is now, and chart our house where it lies in its acreage; aerial zooming through a human hawk-eye. The rush of affection at seeing a field I have known since childhood beam down electrodes to where I sit in an unknown city – as I become a yellow stickman avatar, wandering the country lanes I am too far from to walk in person – is startling. I see the neighbouring farms, and the different tones of their fields. Because I know them, I know what each colour means: potatoes, carrots, onions, swedes. And I know some of the people they are feeding and have encountered birds and insects who grow there too. I wonder about a map that could go deeper into these fields, that could tell me what’s there, how it feels and what it has to say.
Yet even at this surface level, the map bears a kind of thrill. When W. G. Hoskins said in The Making of the English Landscape,3 ‘There are certain sheets of the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps which one can sit down and read like a book for an hour on end, with growing pleasure and imaginative excitement,’ he had yet to encounter Google Maps. I am completely immersed, swooping over the landscape. Now I see it as if from an aeroplane, a rolling patchwork of greens. You can drag and drop this avatar; fly in from Birmingham, down into the specific field you are looking for. Day after day I hover over one landscape, while living in another.
During this time, I dream deeply of the earth: men in armour, women fading in and out of focus. I dream of boundary lines and farmers telling me which people belong to which earth. Whether it is one acre, or thirty, or hundreds, the sense of ownership is the same; the sense of self so deeply tangled in the soil that it is impossible to say who owns who. Pointing out the hedgerow and the channel of earth that runs beside it, the dream segues into another, earlier one I have had about swimming, where the river is nothing more than a ribbon along a hedge for miles until I find t
he right spot, where it deepens into what looks like an actual place I know on the river Exe – only the dream version is magnified into a perfect pool. Submerged, I taste the water, the weeds and the soil in the water. There are people and fish I seem to know, swimming towards me. While we are from different species, other centuries, it’s not too unsettling, just like meeting cousins you’ve only met once or twice, or relatives of your best friends. As I break the surface of the river and the dream I gasp: what fills my lungs is wider than breath could be. It is a place and a language torn, matted and melded; flowered and chiming with bones. That breath is that place and until I get there I will not really be breathing.
2
Burnett
As I puff up Pole House Lane, my father’s words ring through the hedges. Presumably not many Ideites today would be very keen on walking to the top of Pole House Lane every time they wanted to attend a function. According to his speculation, the first settlement of what later became Ide parish may have been here, where this road meets Markham Lane. A heavy-set farmer brushes past in a van, sending me into the brambles. I glimpse a ruddy face and snowing hair. Would my father have known him, I think, would he have known my father? Spotted with cuckoo spit, the hedges glow, and for the first time this winter I see that it is spring. Breathing in buttercups, their soft warmth nestles in my throat, brightening the body.
But when I reach Druid’s Hill, I deflate. High hedges obscure it; here and there a glimpse of grass; no flowers, no rivers, no dreams. Consulting the sketch map from my father’s book I see the three fields that take the name of a Druid and move onto the one now called Second Drewshill. No better. By the time I reach Third Drewshill, I have abandoned all romantic place names in my notes, reducing them to Field 1, Field 2, Field 3.
The Grassling Page 1