The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  Field 1: Blank grass.

  Field 2: Rough green.

  Field 3: Snatches of orange and brown.

  I walk up and down the lane, repeating my inventory. Everywhere closed off, inaccessible, still as stone. I wonder who or what could tell me anything here. What is the sound of these quiet places?

  Field 1: Deep inhale of wren. Lichen and thorn.

  Field 2: There is something here. There is something and it is in the smell, pulling me down through the soil.

  Field 3: Purple tufts draw me in, off-road, illicit territory. A tractor’s roar over the hedge puts me on edge while the earth holds me here. Sprigs of sheep’s wool, summoning.

  As I return to Field 1, I begin to doubt if it is even the right field. In a new place my heart leaps and feet fly before I can hold them back and it is always these parts of the body that navigate. I usually get a sense of a place, finding my way by hunch, hunch becoming habit, and that is how I get anywhere.

  Field 2: As I try to fall down, connect with whatever is here beneath eye level, a nearby tractor emerges and stops me in my tracks. I belong because of my father: tracing his footsteps, his ancestors; following their trail of dusted bone. I don’t belong because of time. I don’t know who farms this land now. I can’t see in. So much is snatched glimpses and long thin paths – I want a flat, open moment.

  Field 3: Looking down, the field further in is brown and yellow like moorland. Though it calls me, I know it is not what I am looking for.

  Field 4: Churchills, on the opposite side of the lane. My father cites Allen Mawer as revealing the prefix ‘church’ in the name ‘Churchills’ to be a corruption of the Celtic word ‘crich’, meaning burial mound. If this is so, then Churchills was once a sacred place. There is a footpath here, so I can reach further in. In the quiet, without the tractor, it is possible to imagine reaching it – whatever is here, contained. But this busyness is part of the land now; the spiritual pushed out, or at least back and fenced off.

  Reaching Markham Lane in blustery mood, I continue my hedge assessment. At the corner, something sparkles. Craning in, I find the plastic lid of a Tupperware box. I flick the lid off eagerly, to a cluster of coordinates and dates. I have stumbled upon a geocache. From Celtic to contemporary in one sweep of a hedge. Instead of adding the usual information, I write some garbled message about researching the area for historical purposes, signing off proudly: ‘BURNETT’. It feels good to leave this name in this hedge.

  Names as mantras repeat through the generations: places for people (hill for Druid), people for places (Druid for hill), until the thing we conjure by uttering is so much an amalgamation that we cannot split the person from the place, the man or woman from the field. Though I have not been here long, the seconds feel stretched out, as they always are, by love. And that is what has brought me here; this I know, though I do not yet quite understand.

  As I have not given much thought to what to do after finding Druid’s Hill, I go first one way up Markham Lane, then the other, all the while continuing my border patrol. Through the hedge’s holes I see a different texture: rough stubble rising from mud. Where the plough has zigzagged the earth like afro hair being straightened, its tracks are a comb’s teeth pulling through a gloop of chemicals. And as the scalp stings and prickles with heat, so the land burns and the mice run and the beetles break and the worms forget themselves in the newness of sliced bodies.

  But they carry on. They send their bristles out to the displaced soil and hold. Thicken each of their five hearts, pumping their human blood with the haemoglobin that has no right to be there. Burrow and consume, extracting life from dying leaves as their tunnels form soil pores, letting oxygen and water in, carbon di-oxide out. Break down roots and stems and sunken seeds so that bacteria and fungi can feed and release their nutrients; mix soil layers dispersing organic matter through like a soft soil wind for bacteria, fungi and plants; fertilizing the very ends of the follicles. They are in the surface compost, in the middle ground tunnels, in permanent burrows deep below; tiny travellers, carrying nutrients and minerals from beneath the ground to its surface, breaking the boundary between elements.

  Completely obscured, I peer through tangles of taut twig. To my left, the white head of the Haldon Belvedere pokes up from forest like a white hart with its ears pricked up. Its presence breathes a living history on a hill. They are everywhere, these ghosts, if we only have the time and quiet to see them. A grey face peeps out from the hedge and before I have registered it for what it is, it’s gone, back down the rabbit hole. There, but not seen, ghost rabbits running through the margins. Through a twig-gap I glimpse Exeter as the boom of the A30 washes over the grass. Swimming in traffic, I fall back into the swerve of a man on a bike and both of us tangle together in the shock of each other’s presences.

  ‘Sorry, I wasn’t looking,’ he says.

  ‘Neither was I,’ I realize my eyes had been closed and my hands had been writing with half my head in a hedge.

  I turn back to earth. The magnetism of the land, not just where I was birthed, but where my father was; his father and his; pulls me to it, as if by knowing it, I should know them. Should I believe it? It has no reason to lie. Passing back through the years is like when the ‘I’ becomes detached and you’re aware of a life outside of yourself, looking down at you, incredulous that the ‘I’ should be this small body going about its business, looking so plausible. Like that, but further in. As though, if you exercised this muscle, you could get there; could feel the land as it was then, the names that lived then; find yourself hovering over some other body, some other body’s life. With apparent ease I flow backwards – not flow, it is less bodied than that – melt, from Churchills to crich to burial mound; from Drewshill to Druid’s Hill to the hill of the priest.

  And what happens to the land through these human cycles? What is two thousand years in the span of the soil? Is any part of the earth I touch now the earth that lived then, with the bodies of my family, my grandparents and their parents and a billion other organisms, for there are billions of organisms in one handful. Yet the layers of soil stay much the same in one human lifetime, unless moved or scraped or ploughed. Unless a blow to the head, or a blade, blunts the billions of lives inside you.

  I want to hear the stories of the soil; not just as human support, or as host, but as consciousness linked to a place always, unless moved by another (wind, water, ice, gravity). Do you want to move, but have to wait for others to move you; or want to stay but have no say in it? I want to know if you’re overpopulated; if it all gets too much and if so, where do you go? Do you have favourites? Particular roots or burrowing animals who treat you well and softly?

  I cannot comprehend you all at once. Your spreading and latticing; binding and breathing; dispersing and filtering; degrading and detoxifying; eating, excreting, breaking, exchanging, morphing; it is exhausting just to think of you.

  *

  I tell my father about the fields. It is difficult for him to move now, yet I am sure I found something of him there. Could he, perhaps, have a secret life? At night, when we think him sleeping, could he suddenly recover the energy of youth and strike out across country, nine miles, back to the village of his boyhood, to the fields of his grandfather?

  He thinks they once formed part of Woolmans farm, where his grandfather Frank was a labourer. He thinks it strange that I should ask so much about them.

  ‘But isn’t it interesting,’ I say, ‘about their names?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve always thought so,’ he replies.

  ‘And what did you say Burnett means?’ He’s told me many times, but somehow I never remember.

  ‘Beornhard. Beorn meaning warrior in Anglo-Saxon.’

  ‘Yes, warrior,’ I repeat, and sit with him until he sleeps.

  3

  Culm

  The Culm siltstone in my father’s soil is covered by rocks of the Permian and Triassic age called the New Red Sandstone and these Permo-Triassic rocks form the Redland soi
ls of Devon. Though these rolling Redlands may now be picture-perfect, the epitome of calm and refuge for those seeking respite, their history is full of violence. Thick-bedded sandstones, siltstones and shales drowning in sea. Whole mountains that rose and fell, crumbling into water which splayed out spreads of sediment preserved as breccia rock. Then, desert. Swathes of choking heat until the mudstones of the Early Triassic, deposited in a large continental lake.

  Rivers flowed in from the south, depositing gravel stones over the mudstones. Then, death. The end of much prehistoric life, as 251 million years ago, the Permian extinction – the worst in the planet’s history – wiped out more than 90 per cent of all marine species and 70 per cent of land animals. Scientists estimate most species loss occurred within twenty thousand years and term the extinction ‘rapid’. Twenty thousand years: rapid. To move in earth’s time is to necessarily think outside the human. To learn what happens when we’re not here.

  Then comes a period when the earth tells us nothing. A break in the sedimentary record. In people, too, there are moments of erasure. Things buried, places that we cannot access. We may think that they look well, or just the same. But things will have disappeared; parts of them lost, or laid at the bottom of a long-forgotten sea. In time, the melting of the last ice sheets caused a rise in sea level and the lower valley of the River Exe was flooded to form the Exe estuary.

  My father dreams, regularly, of the Exe bursting its banks. I am there, he says, by its side, screaming for it to stop.

  ‘What happens next?’ I ask. He doesn’t reply.

  The word ‘culm’ can refer both to this rock and to a part of a plant. The plant’s culm is its stem, and in grass can grow erect or prostrate, in varying size. Usually cylindrical, they are mostly herbaceous and don’t tend to last for more than a year. In rock, the word derives from coal: col in Old English, culm in Devonshire dialect. It could also relate to the Welsh word cwlwm, meaning knot, due to the folding of the beds in which coal is found. This rock remains for millions of years. My father’s acre holds both culms, but I’m not sure about him. From what does he derive? Rock or plant? He seems so much more than animal.

  ‘Is anyone else in the dream?’ I ask. He names my brother, an old friend from Kenya, and his grandfather Frank. I wonder about the knot, or culm, of the fields in Ide where Frank used to work, the fields of the Druid. These lie further south than the Culm Measures of my father’s acre and the soil there is part of the same series as the Raddon Hills that breeze in from his open window. There, the soil is loamy and gravelly, over Permian breccia and conglomerate. It tells its own story of rock falling; when the disintegrating Variscan mountains flowed down in floods during heavy rainstorms, to be deposited by the breaking water as it left its channels, fanning out its sediment. Is it such a moment that my father pictures in his dreams? Could he have a mountain’s memories?

  The life he had before I was born – and after, when I wasn’t paying attention – felt, at first, as intangible as these falling mountains and yet there it is, buried in the soil, mine to touch and pull from the ground any time I please. And the more I talk with him of family and of fields, the more the gap closes between time and space and people. Sometimes, he dreams of vast sandscapes. Perhaps they are the Middle East, where he taught in younger days. Or perhaps they are the wind-blown desert dunes that formed the sandstones covering over the mountain sediments. Perhaps they are flashbacks to Frank’s fields, where he used to walk and where I walk now, millions of years ago. Past the time of the Druids; past humans altogether; past sand, past fish, past insects, past reptiles, past plants; past ice, past sea, past sand, past rock; past erosion, past fracture, past memory, past imagining.

  Do you remember a time when we were all together? I don’t know if it’s my father I am asking or the ground. When all earth was one continent, one landmass? The ground remembers: throwing up identical species in fossils in continents that are now large distances apart; glacial deposits of the same age and structure appearing in separate continents which would once have been joined. The Carboniferous rocks in my father’s acre, under the Permo-Triassic rocks of red sandstone, remember it. They know how the last stages in the formation of the supercontinent Pangaea occurred in the Late Carboniferous period, when Western Kazakhstania collided with Baltica, closing the Ural Ocean; and the North China block collided with Siberia, closing the Proto-Tethys Ocean. Do you remember it? I ask him. How does the dream end?

  He never will tell me the ending. But the ground reveals that this coming together, this supercontinent formation didn’t only happen once but has been a cyclical event throughout its lifetime. I wonder if that’s true of him. That he may break and that I may have to watch it. But that he’ll come back together, re-form, in a deep culm of earth and time. With no end.

  4

  Daffodil

  She cuts

  She cuts light

  She cuts light speech

  She cuts light speech a pattered petal

  She cuts light speech a pattered petalled reach.

  In the week my father turns eighty, we both have the flu. Tongue is yellow, dotted red; tonsils puffed and sore. Limbs are hard to carry, the body pulling back to a standstill every chance it gets. I have been trying to decide if I’m well enough for the journey. I decide I’m not, then book the train ticket anyway. Shivering, I pack, and think about yellows.

  My birthday present is going to be a list of everything yellow I see on the journey. It had started with the daffodils in the copse I picked when I last saw him. They had held the young year’s rain close inside their trumpets, hoarding freshness. The same day we had squeezed lemons over pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, savouring their zest. And the broom around the garage wall had shone, and the primrose in the hedge switched on, and the undercooked apples in tight branches clung. Yellow had seemed the right colour to bring him then, and still does.

  But I wonder where they should start. If it’s from here, in the body, then it must be with the tongue. And the orange juice on the table, and the sun through the slats, and the Post-it note on the windowsill, and the croton leaf on the mat. Through the glass, I see it gleam. There it is on the tips of the grasses, in the one dandelion in a crack of concrete – its head laid softly on the ground, a fuzz of strength, a celebration in a cup of leaves. There are also yellow soil horizons, as iron forms small crystals in the soil. The deeper in, the yellower it can become. Mycobacterium vaccae, a genus of mycobacteria in the soil, reduces anxiety. If I put my fingers in the soil and press and scoop, and press and scoop, could I reach it? A magic dust to hold in my palm and release into his room, a gust of calm.

  It’s easy, seeing a field of daffodils, to believe in colour therapy. To sense the power of the strident singing yellow and even to see how each of the spectrum colours might resonate their own energies. I bring him flowers. And if colour is light, of differing wavelengths, I wonder, do I bring him light?

  There is always a rush to see the first flowers in the field. While the snowdrop bears the most relief after the long dark, the daffodil is the first time we dare to believe in summer, as the days fill with its quiet suns. It is thought that if you’re the one in your neighbourhood to see the first daffodil, your home will receive more gold than silver that year, and that if you take care not to step on one, you will be favoured with prosperity. A gift of daffodils is thought to bring good luck.

  On the journey, this yellow vigilance helps occupy the mind. Attentive to one speck in the spectrum, I become attuned to it. In the city, yellow belongs to warnings, transport, construction. In the country: plants, birds, estate agents. As I cover the distance between us, I ask: how do you travel to another person? Physical presence gets you somewhere, but once together, verbal language can fall so short.

  Combining blocks of chemicals to create new meanings, nematodes use a chemical syntax in much the way we use words. So, as with the chemicals between worms, a quiet language of accumulating repetition: there are ways of travelling witho
ut words. The soil begins to show me new ways to reach him. We will short-circuit speech through colour, gathering our yellows while we may (Old Time is still a-flying).1 I resume the vigil. Everywhere: sun. Even on a cold March day. Everywhere: light.

  EIGHTY YELLOWS

  for my father’s eightieth birthday

  All the yellows from Birmingham to Tiverton Hospital

  tongue CCTV cloud edge lemon

  orange juice JCB sun dip broom

  sun through slats high-vis jacket office windows daffodil

  Post-it note pay here car light telegraph wire

  croton leaf CCTV alder tractor light

  grass CCTV poplar daffodil

  dandelion Willmott Dixon poplar daffodil

  bus bell pelican crossing forsythia primrose

  no stopping high-vis jacket lemon balm sweet wrapper

  neighbourhood watch grit lemon balm car number plate

  CCTV security tape mahonia apple

  Morrisons gorse house sparrow pussy willow

  crocus lit larch polyanthus corner sign

  city centre bunting alder warning, forest operations

  double yellow daffodil primrose for sale

  CCTV straw daffodil danger, deep water

  stay in lane eaves chiffchaff laurel

  HOLA! Birmingham! pussy willow great tit traffic island

  Spain’s waiting!

  bus lane lichen great tit Morrisons

  JCB max. headroom reed warbler sunlight