The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  5

  Exe

  I soon reach the village and cross over the carriageway for the first time. As I walk over the bridge, a familiar feeling of nausea visits, a sick vertiginous swaying pulling me down; some old compulsion to jump. I make it, shakily, to the other side and see the brook stream out from an old stone bridge by the side of the road. My father says: it was almost certainly after the pacification of the West by Athelstan that development of the rich land along the Alphin brook must have got under way and the bridge built over the river which Ideites used for many hundreds of years until the coming of the new link road. Athelstan: first King of all England. I look at the now defunct bridge, over a thousand years old, and wonder that I have never noticed it before; that I have never been this side of the carriageway, despite my now frequent recent visits to the village. It reminds me just how narrow our trajectories are, even when we’re actively trying to expand them.1

  The smell of wild garlic grows as I come closer to the river. It is a strange juncture. The brook from under the road flows into a stronger one, coming from the direction of the village. There is also a weaker brook running parallel to this, which joins up with the other. This smaller one is largely stagnant, with only a mallard moving. The brooks create a sort of island in between them, echoing an area of that name positioned further up from here, back towards the village. My father describes how before 1841, this area, the houses making up the College and the fields at the back, was known as ‘The Island’. The area is not an island today, but quite recently, before the new road changed the environment for good, the houses were bound on three sides by water. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century the town names ‘The Island’ and ‘College’ are used indiscriminately in a very confusing manner. The merged brooks strengthen and flow under another bridge in front of the Twisted Oak (formerly called the Bridge Inn, the History tells me), a pub that I had only ever seen from a passing car, never realizing it was so close to the village. The meeting of Fordland and Alphin brooks seems a significant moment for some internal, bodily reason I cannot fathom, and I feel drawn to follow this thickened water on, on, towards Exeter; mirroring the Exe but not joining it; holding out stoically until its final fling into Exe, canal and sea.

  I have been dreaming lately, repeatedly, of the moment my father taught me to swim. Bright orange armbands against a turquoise swimsuit. Body as small as water is large. Arm against waist, striking out into open water. After a while, everything slackens: muscle, limbs, thought. There is only water. Time carries me gently, until I realize that the arm, the one keeping me safe, has gone. I turn to see my father at the shore, and realize I have been swimming. This was my first swim. And this flash of the north Devon coast and of childhood comes to me when I least expect it. In the middle of a city, in a week taut with work, I wake with it fresh on my mind like shingle.2

  Here, though the water is not deep, there might just be enough to swim in. It will be cold. Not summer-swimming cold; spring-chilling cold. I will feel it in my joints which will stiffen into ice, and the bone at the neck, my weak point, will crack. And I’ll be seen. By people crossing the bridge, on their way to the pub, or nearby houses. But I know, even as these thoughts flow through me, that I’ll do it. I strip quickly and drop into the brook with no thought as to how to get back out. The current is fast and strong; I’m bent and pulled down. As my shoulders go under, cold claws like a crow. Yet I want to go on and on, tight and light as a shard of glass, glinting down to the beckoning Exe. As I look back towards the island, it seems familiar yet alien all at once, as the water channels me back to another dream. This time it is the one I had in the days before reaching the Drewshill fields, back when I could only imagine them. Then, there had been a perfect pool, and now, it is here. Only the pool is made of land, not water. The weeds are grass and the body a glass to break through. As I lift myself out, I have the uncanny sensation of having disturbed more than the water.

  I dry myself with clothes I then have to wear and squelch onto a footpath that follows the brook. To my left are more fields that used to be Woolmans fields, the farm my great-grandfather Frank had worked for. I look into them, picturing him there and think of him treading this same path. What does it mean to walk where your ancestors have walked? A tall oak dominates the field. I look into its gnarled skin, the cut, marked bark; its swirling shapes hang like standing mud. It is hypnotic. Its branches reach out to me, as if to pull me back. I am walking on its very roots, some of which are raised along the path. I wonder what it can feel like to have a human walk along your roots.

  That evening, the euphorbia’s green pools in gold and I pick sprigs of its lit lime to take to him. I add a sprinkling of forget-me-nots that build their blue in my hand as their number increases. Since the 1940s, 97 per cent of UK wild flower meadows have been lost. The wild flowers most in danger of going extinct next are the corn buttercup, fringed gentian, yellow early marsh orchid, red hemp-nettle, shepherd’s needle, corn cleavers, red helleborine, tall thrift, crested buckler fern, triangular club-rush. To name them is to remember them. By the time I reach the house, a light burst of field and sky is ready to pour from my palm into his room.

  ‘Did you ever go swimming in the brook in Ide?’ I ask him, positioning the flowers.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about in any other of the rivers around?’

  ‘No.’ I think this is the end of the conversation when he adds, ‘But there was the sea, of course –’ A long pause drifts across the room. ‘Do you remember swimming? At Instow? You went so far out, I thought I’d never catch you.’

  6

  Family Tree

  She rings

  She rings like a sweet

  She rings like a sweet chestnut over

  She rings like a sweet chestnut over and over bark records

  She rings like a sweet chestnut over and over bark records time’s chords.

  I knew that my grandparents, Lucy and Wallace (Wally), had lived in Dunchideock and, before that, in Ide. I knew that Wally had been a farmer and butcher in Ide and that his father was called Frank and had been a farm labourer there. And I knew that Frank had married someone called Emily, though I’d not heard anything more about her. Three generations. Not a very long time for a family history to span. I think of how much further a tree would have to go back to remember its great-grandparents. A single beech might live for six hundred years, through multiple human generations. A sweet chestnut might last well over a thousand years.

  ‘How old are you?’ I ask the apple tree in the copse. ‘How old are you?’ I ask the white blossom. ‘What do you remember?’ It moves towards me in the wind. Its flower heads open and the long, slender line of the style reaches. The white stalks of filaments sway, topped with orange anthers. The moving threads look like sea creatures, strange swimming beings, tethered to their flower basin. I sense a kind of speech in them. The petals seem like hands cupped over lips that whisper.

  ‘We remember the soil,’ they seem to say. ‘The sweetness in it, the cold and the warmth; we remember.’ Their fluttered speech is quiet and light. ‘We remember a man.’ They pause, as though aware of entering rocky territory. ‘The man who tended us, who moved the soil around us.’

  ‘My father,’ I breathe.

  ‘Yes,’ they say. ‘We remember him. We don’t see him now.’

  ‘And what of yours?’ I ask. They hesitate, moving backwards in the wind, away from me. I follow the length of their branch up to where it crosses into others, a thoroughfare of flower and intermittent sparkling leaf, catching light, aflame.

  ‘He was here,’ they say, brightening, as the sun floats through their skin, washing their white until it gleams. ‘He was in the soil and in the seed.’ A picture comes to me of an apple bobbing in a stream. ‘He travelled here,’ they say. A wasp hovers near; I am getting in the way. I mustn’t hog the conversation. I press my lips to the flower tips and part; a small quiet touch at summer’s start.

  The
copper beech is an altogether more solid prospect. The breadth of its trunk, the spread of its canopy; I am talking to an older being. I bend my ear to its burnished leaf, but colour is all I hear. A deep chestnut; a sweep of firelight.

  ‘Who was your father?’ I ask. I can barely make out the top of the tree, cannot see who I am talking to. There are parts of this tree that escape me. I look up to the plush underbelly of a collared dove. The leaves get redder the higher I look; towards the base they share more yellow and green. It couldn’t possibly tell me all it has seen; this is a tree I have known, and not known, all my life.

  I have started to covet the memories of these longer lived trees, to envy how in order to see the past they need only look to their own internal resources. And I have begun to picture consciousness stretched out across the centuries – mine and my father’s together – and to feel how depleted it would be without my father’s input. It is a recent development for me, this chestnut-envy, though I suspect it is something my father has known for some time. As a child, I recall watching him fill large sheets of paper with an evolving tree that went back centuries on my grandmother’s side. And I remember that her maiden name was Archer and that this family, hundreds of years ago, was French and arrived during the Norman Conquest. That’s not so bad, in chestnut terms.

  But the whereabouts of this family tree now, I did not know. In the absence of the documents, I probed my father for details. It was amazing to hear that he’d had grandfathers, to place him at the age I was now, looking back across the same family. I had heard, of course, of his grandfather Frank, but grandfather William – my grandmother’s father – was a new character to me. As my father recalls a poesy of primroses William brought my grandmother quite unexpectedly one day, I think of the daffodils, the euphorbia, the forget-me-nots I bring to him.

  He tells me about the different families, whose name had most likely been corrupted from Burnard, and before that, from the Anglo-Saxon Beornhard. Everything he says chimes like an old chord being struck anew. He had spoken of these things before over the years but I hadn’t been listening with today’s attention, or with the ability to piece things together as I could now. He speaks of North Devon Burnetts, of South and West Devon Burnetts, of East Devon Burnetts and Exmoor Burnetts.

  ‘It seems possible that the founding Beornhard was an Anglo-Saxon who came over with the army that colonized Devon under Athelstan. Don’t you think?’

  The question catches me off-guard. I had so far been watching this history unfold as something fully formed, simply to be received, rather than something malleable that I could, perhaps should, be helping to shape. I think about these plundering invaders: the Normans on my grandmother’s side, Anglo-Saxons on my grandfather’s. Each layer of settlement giving way for another, ideas of who and what is native ebbing and flowing with the years.

  ‘We don’t know, of course,’ he mutters, as we are interrupted by one of the many medical matters that punctuate the days.

  ‘Has anyone researched your side of the family?’ I ask Mum. My father met my mother in Kenya in the 1960s. They married there and she came back to England with him the following year.

  ‘Not directly,’ she replies. ‘But there was a cousin … a doctor … who looked into his side.’

  ‘But the family has lived in Embu as far back as you can remember?’

  ‘Yes, on my father’s side. Mother came from Kirinyaga district.’

  ‘Oh.’ I’d always thought both grandparents were from the Kikuyu tribe, and say so.

  ‘Yes, but there’s Embu Kikuyu and Kirinyaga Kikuyu, different dialects.’

  I learn that Kirinyaga refers to Mount Kenya and as British settlers couldn’t pronounce it, they simply called the area Mount Kenya instead. While I read that it means ‘crest of whiteness’, Mum says it has more to do with godliness.

  When I look in again before leaving, he is sleeping. White hair spread like a sharp frost.

  7

  Grass Diaries

  I meet the same blade of grass in my father’s acre regularly.

  Twigs taper into twirls of horse chestnut. Air chokes with charcoal.

  Though you are lightest, you hold the most. Water weights you in a second skin.

  Dew passes, leaving you more lean. You are the length of your body, stretched out green.

  You are your smell: fresh dock leaf, the pure and cleaner earth between the blades.

  Birds twitter companionably around you: wrens and blackbirds, pheasant-rustles.

  Cut? Found. The field is shorn but you sparkle through. I approach. First possibility that it might not be you. It’s you.

  Glittered strips of wool spun in the night. To approach means to squat, haunches wide, seeing through the strength of my legs.

  Half-curve of tortoise shell with white neck: a snail folded inside you.

  Transparent wings wasp over you. Pear in clover, tightly wrapped.

  Beside you, last iris, head hung. Dragonfly fans its glimmering flight.

  It is OK to be a bright thing in the broad earth, you say. You do not question your own presence, as I do.

  Things I am learning from grass: glamour, confidence, poise, warmth.

  Through a fly’s wing you glow, as if through a looking glass.

  Under red admiral’s flight path; fur on fur; a warm flit.

  Your tiny patter of breath into pear, daisy, shifting silver of birch.

  Your diamond eye finds me at once, a peal of laughter in relieved air.

  Today you look up to a half-moon still visible in the sun. A blackbird swoops over to urgent business in the teasel.

  You are laughing, telling me a joke. Glamorous hostess of the grass, nestled in fallen oak.

  End-of-day light, but your head still shines.

  Pheasants in conifers ring raucous, but you hold steady, like a lighthouse, your silver beam through the blades.

  You remain you, whatever is around you. You go on being you.

  It takes a while for you to come. Then there are two of you, three. I have caught you entertaining. Three lights under the moon.

  Only the finest cut glass, the best dinner service. You clink your bubbles.

  You glint a star up from the grass, a speck of silver in the rough.

  Frost holds every blade today. I must lower to see you. At ground level you signal.

  You are pointing up. Up, up to the tissue of cloud and beyond to a sailing blue.

  Are you still thinking of the moon?

  A beech leaf by you, encrusted with sugar frost dusting its membrane.

  I crane my head to hear you, 180 degrees, the sound keeps moving. Twinkle, twinkle, little grass.

  Robin chats to chaffinch, astride the same branch. You turn to listen.

  Blackbird closes in on you with urgent news, sees me and retires: it’ll keep.

  Tiny fresh clover just sprung from earth clumps around you. I have never seen it this small.

  Today you hold a pigeon’s feather, speckled in rain, carefully.

  Even in dark you are light; tireless.

  The air is cold around you; you nestle into blanket of beech.

  A flitting to your right: a hanging leaf, catching the wind.

  Ducks wheel overhead, pulling the last of your light to wing home on.

  An instant hello, all spotlights turned on.

  In the frozen bite of morning you are valiant and clear. Other people will be other people, you say. But they can’t stop you being you.

  Drizzling; pinpricks of rain on your prickled light.

  Uncovered near you, an old flower marker, ‘Phlox flame’. A little pocket of red.

  From here, you say, light is very near, held so skilfully in sky.

  You gleam, serene, from the mossing grass. Don’t be scared to leave, you tell me. All things pass.

  I wave goodbye and you push back my shoulder blades – stand tall, you say, go soft and bright!

  8

  Harriers

  I have the advantage; his ba
ck to me as he looks across valley. As I take him in, air freshens and pulls off its skin. He turns and leaves almost simultaneously; before I quite know what I’ve seen, he is gone. And I think of him as a scent since that’s the only way I know how to process such a thorough takeover. Lit wood and moss rising through low musk. A vapour trail over pine needles; high clouds left on low air. I don’t know what I communicate, though the speed of his exit speaks its own message. Perhaps he is right to leave me. Perhaps I have not evolved well.

  Another. And another. The hen harriers soar and lope in liquid loops. I move to the spot where it had been and see what it had seen: a deep dip down past bobs of sheep to Marshall’s farm cupped in valley. ‘Marca gesella’ – ‘the huts on the boundary’, my father explains the name’s derivation and that of the road I have come along: Markham Lane – ‘marka’ and ‘ham’ – ‘boundary’ and ‘field or enclosure’. Drawing on N. W. Alcock’s article ‘Devon Farmhouses’,1 he notes that the peculiarly sinuous nature of the field boundaries immediately next to Marshall farmhouse may well represent the original British (Celtic) cultivation. And the high hedges seem like curtains preserving the modesty of the curving land and for the first time I’m glad not to have properly accessed Druid’s Hill; that whatever is contained in these fields is protected, that whatever it is won’t be disturbed.