The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  For me, they are currents tied to my father’s condition. The fields call when he does. Yet, because he must be well enough for me not to need to be with him while I come to them, they also hold a sense of hope. They are a place not of climax or collapse but of holding on. And I offer them up to him, differently, each time. Sometimes it is the approach to the fields that draws him – as I tell him of my walks on paths that he walked as a boy, or of passing close by sites that he has featured in his research. Other times, it is the family connection to the fields: what kind of work great-grandfather Frank might have done there; whether great great-grandfather James may have crossed them. Occasionally, it is the fields themselves: what wild flowers are scenting, what animals grazing, what grasses growing. There is always something that sparks a flicker of interest that brings him back to the living moment.

  And they fascinate me too, though I didn’t know them as a child. My childhood attachment is to my father’s own acre, so that his field and the Druid’s Hills fuse together in my belonging. It is also something to do with words, this external current that draws me and draws him; an etymological mining, uncovering the past. How we see the Druid in Drewshill; how we glimpse the burial mound, crich, in Churchills field. And we both sense the importance of this looking, this tracing of the debris of words left in language. What will happen to these words if we don’t look closely enough at them? Where will they go?

  So while I cannot adequately explain to others why I travel a hundred and seventy miles, drop to my knees and use my hands to touch this soil, I know that it is all these things: a chill in the air, a call from a father, a grandfather, a grass, a flick, a kick, an ember of a word, things vanishing calling out to be heard. And there is a hearing, too, in touch. As birds combine multiple senses to navigate, so do I.

  Birds can get compass information from the sun, the stars, from landmarks, and some, like homing pigeons, can smell their way. They can also sense the earth’s magnetic field, through methods that have long been debated. Recent research indicates the possibility of a protein in birds’ eyes that is able to detect magnetic fields,1 allowing the birds to navigate through a sense called magnetoreception. For me, this sense is in the fingertips as well as the eyes. As I brush the soil I am called to, I travel deeply into the earth’s fields, its tremors and ripples; notes, trills, trickles.

  And as I dig, the soil sears pink like a perfect steak. I scoop it into my palm, rolling like dough. Parts are gritty, sand grain particles not yet broken down. And the grass bends with the weight of its task, breaking down the bedrock as its roots join forces with fungi, dissolving minerals. I feel this too: the grass rooting in the soil; the trees’ deeper tracts tunnelling from the hedge. And I feel the moment that the ancestors of these plants arrived, perhaps 400–350 million years ago in the Devonian period, pulling up from water to land. The force of the water at the root of everything, the call from the brook at the foot of the field, from the river it will meet, from sea. I feel the water even as my feet fix fast in the earth.

  It is in this period, named after the county of these fields, that soil, the kind of soil we know now, evolved. When these early land-dwelling plants put down first roots; when larger trees tunnelled further; when deep rooting systems spread beneath the ground. The higher temperatures saw greater oxidation in the rocks, intensifying the red pigment, leaving the red rocks we see today. Then, as plants spread and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reduced, the climate changed, becoming more like what we know now. And now that it is changing again, I want to ask the soil what will happen. Will plants rescue us or give us up as lost?

  None of this now concerns great-grandfather Frank, whose own touch on this land left years ago. Nor, I imagine, do I, born years after his death. And yet there is something about his having been here, some imprint that bonds me to this field. And it matters that Grandfather Wally worked the land around here too. And it matters that my father walked through it, and in his childhood lent a farming hand.

  When the Anglo-Saxons gained Devon’s Redland soils as the spoils of battle, they pushed the native Celtic farmers uphill, further from the riverbanks. The Druid fields lie between the plush soil along the Alphin brook and the high footholds of the Haldon Hills. Although this soil is still sought after, farming here has always had its challenges. My father chronicles how the fortunes of the local farms waxed and waned between the nineteenth century and the First World War, noting the lasting impact of the Hungry Forties. In the present moment there is uncertainty over changes to farmers’ subsidies. For decades, UK farmers received substantial EU subsidies, and while the shortfall is being covered in the short term, the longer view is unclear.

  In its very material way, farming brings together the local and global. An unfavourable weather event in one part of the world may create demand for produce in another. A political decision in one country may affect trade in many. Customer demand in distant lands can dictate the growth of each tiny life within a local field. Time ripples and echoes through these issues, as my father, writing of the ‘new’ agricultural crisis in the late nineteenth century describes how the exploitation of the American prairies, the introduction of fast, refrigerated ships and the import of meat from South America and New Zealand meant that the worst fears of those who had argued against free trade some fifty years before were realized; the British farmer now had no defence against the importation of cheap corn from abroad. For centuries, the other-than-human lives in the fields have been connected to, and reliant on, events far from their locality – and the human lives bound up with these fields have been intrinsically affected.

  After moving from Ide and the Woolmans fields, my grandfather settled closer to the Haldon Hills, in Dunchideock. This place of my father’s later childhood used to have farmland: cows that my grandfather would milk, and milk that my grandmother would turn to butter. Now, though there is no farming, it is still a family home, a pocket of a British settlement, surviving in the Haldon Hills. As I stand in the Druid’s fields, I point one arm towards Haldon, the other back towards the Raddon Hills where my father is now, body prising out like a compass.

  All the skin of me, the pigment, the falling dust, is called to the soil. All the water of me, the churning motion, is called to the fish: the bony lobe-fins, ancestors of dinosaurs and mammals, whose fossils remain in the Devon rocks. All the heart of me, the pulsing inside, is called to the pulsing outside: the grass, the birds, the insects, the worms; and further, to the beating that continues beyond the earth, beyond anything tangible: to my father’s fathers. And him, on the border; a branch held out to me, as a root slips back to his fathers.

  It is all this I wonder about, as I process the pull that takes me from my seat, my desk, at a table, in a room, in a building, in a city, miles away. And wonder, here, assumes all its awestruck residue, all its retinue of surprise. So that thinking and feeling and not knowing are held together in the same space, silently filling the body with a growing pressure.

  19

  Stars

  The farm I’m visiting, on the eastern fringe of Dartmoor, came into the family at the start of the twentieth century. Before that, it had been part of the extensive Gregory estate. When I arrive, I’m shown a picture of this paternal founder, an imposing man with a prominent dark moustache, proudly holding a sheep. Since its early days in the family – John, the present farmer, tells me – the farm has grown from 150 acres to around 450.

  ‘What kind of a farm is it?’ I ask, self-conscious about knowing so little.

  ‘Beef and sheep,’ John says.

  ‘Any crops?’ I ask.

  ‘Some kale and corn to feed the animals through the winter.’

  ‘And what kind of soil is it?’

  Here everyone speaks at once. ‘Sandy,’ says John. ‘Silt,’ says his son. ‘Granite,’ says the other son.

  ‘A kind of sandy granite,’ John concludes.

  I’m pleased to find them as interested as I am in this living land that most of us
move over without thought. And of course the farmers have the closest contact, the bodily knowledge as well as the scientific. I see the rich dark grain beneath his fingernails.

  ‘How do you find it?’ I ask, ‘Is it all right for the crops?’

  ‘Well, it’s high up. It’s not very deep, not as good as clay – nothing like the kind round you.’

  ‘The Redland,’ I say.

  ‘Oh yes, nothing like that. I suppose they grow a lot of corn around you?’ John asks, wistfully.

  ‘Yes, pretty much all around,’ I confirm. ‘But you do OK with your soil?’ I press.

  ‘Oh yes, we do all right. It’s hard work, but I’ve done it all my life, you know.’

  ‘What’s the hardest part of the job?’ I ask. Once more, they all talk at once. Paperwork, hedge-trimming when harassed by impatient drivers, lambing, calving, ploughing. But the paperwork gets the longest attention.

  ‘We’ve got to go online now,’ says John’s wife, with a shudder. She has been the bookkeeper for the farm, as has often been the way with the wives. ‘Soon it will all have to be online.’

  ‘Will that be difficult?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh yes, a lot of these farmers don’t use computers, you know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ It’s a phrase that recurs often through our conversation. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

  ‘All the cows have passports,’ one of the sons interjects. A collective eyebrow is raised.

  ‘Passports?’ I repeat.

  ‘Yes, I’ll show you if you like.’ He comes back with two kinds of cow passport, an older kind and the most recent. Each animal has its own document, complete with barcode. I start to understand the scale of the paperwork. We laugh about it, but it’s a dark humour, the kind only possible in adversity.

  ‘And is the farm doing OK at the moment?’ I ask.

  ‘The price of lambs is down a bit – it goes up and down – it all depends on what the supermarkets want,’ one son says.

  ‘A lot of people are vegetarian now,’ I observe. ‘There’s a growing call for that, environmentally. What do you make of that?’

  ‘It’s up to them, isn’t it?’ he shrugs. ‘People can do what they want.’

  ‘But what will they eat?’ John demands. ‘What will we feed people on?’ Some speculation follows about different food sources. ‘Well then, how will they keep the forests down,’ John persists, ‘without the animals grazing?’ It is interesting to listen to this conversation between generations: John in his eighties, and his sons, continuing into a very different world.

  ‘What are the plans for the farm,’ I ask, ‘will it carry on in the family?’

  I don’t know what’s going to happen, their faces say.

  ‘It may go to the niece and nephew,’ one of the sons ventures.

  ‘Is anyone else in the family still farming?’ I ask John. He names three other farms, including one in Christow, where I knew my grandmother had come from but I now had no personal connection to. The sense of things coming to an end is pervasive; a whole way of life obscured, as if by snow – adrift.

  ‘What are the best parts of working on the farm?’ I continue.

  ‘Harvest,’ they all chime. ‘It’s hard work, but if the weather’s good, it makes all the difference. Silage’s not a bad job.’

  ‘We had an early spring,’ his wife says, and I think about the environmental changes that may have brought this. ‘And dry. So harvest started well. But after that, it got worse and worse.’

  ‘The bluebells,’ John says. Everyone smiles. ‘And here, you can get on the hills and see for miles. With flat land, it may be easier, but you’ve not got the views,’ he continues. ‘Here, it’s hard work, but I’ve done it all my life, I’m used to it. And father used to do it, with horses.’

  ‘There’s Hingston Rock, that borders our land,’ says his wife, as the panoramas come to life around them. ‘Even better’s Blackingstone.’

  ‘Oh yes, you get to Blackingstone,’ John agrees, already there in his mind. ‘On a clear, dry day you can see Torquay. On a clear, dry day, you see it all.’

  That night, there is a full moon, a super moon. So far, I have witnessed all the year’s lunar events in Birmingham, where light pollution saps the brightness (or, as Mum would put it, Don’t you get moons in Birmingham?) but tonight, I’m in Devon. Leaving John’s farm, darkness thick as rock, we crawl our way back to the house, careful of what we cannot see. I go to bed, but can’t settle knowing it’s out there: the great white pulsing. I don’t want to wake the house but know I must go. Pulling on socks and coat over pyjamas, I pad down the stairs.

  As I open the door, the moon has a bewitching quality, quite unlike the sun. Its light is less airy, more liquid. A falling star shoots down, a rush of white against the gloom. In the instant I see it, I send a wish for his health; even before I fully realize what it is, I have wished. How ingrained upon us that superstition must be, as quick as fight or flight; fall and wish. The cloud is fast-moving in front of the moon. My father coughs and mutters to himself; I can’t tell if he’s awake or asleep. As I pull the door shut, another shooting star falls, high over the pear tree. Clouds shift fast beneath the stars, keeping everything moving.

  I stand out in the wide night. An owl hoots from further down the field. The grey cloud moves under the moon like smoke from a fire. When it clears, the brilliance is intense. It is like nothing else. As I gaze up, I see three stars in a row on a diagonal under it: Orion’s Belt. I wonder if I’m seeing any planets.

  I take slow, deep inhales, eyes closed; exhaling into moon. As they open, my eyes fill with whiteness; I blink in the showering stars, pull eyelids over constellations. I want to move towards the moon but the loud cacophony of pheasants departing trees as I approach prevents me. My heart rackets out of my ribs as I walk into a tree just as a pheasant is exiting. The breeze is gentle and unseasonably warm. Moon laps like milk over my skin and I sink back into its softness: Cleopatra of the moonlight.

  This is the Geminids’ meteor shower. The meteors have been predicted without enthusiasm by astronomers, since it was thought the full moon would make it too light to see them. Slower moving than most meteors, these are, unusually, formed from the debris of an asteroid rather than a comet. Though the December full moon, also known as the Oak Moon, Cold Moon or Long Nights Moon, is brightly out, the meteors are visible here. The December moon always shines near the stars of Taurus, the stars of my birth, and it glitters like a birthday present.

  Tonight is the only night in the month when the moon will stay in the sky all night long. I stay out as long as the raucous pheasants and the worry of disturbing those inside the house will let me. At the precise moment that the moon is at its fullest, I retreat, leaving behind me a new influx of owl song, a faint fluted rippling. To fall asleep watching a meteor shower is to feel the lids sink and vision blur, only that blur is not sleep but speed: the swift shimmering of an asteroid. It is to adjust the eyes to motion and the heart to joy. Sudden sparks dismantle me, leaving only the good parts. I fall and sleep and wish in the silvering.

  20

  Teign Valley

  ‘All right if I look around?’ I ask the man shuffling around one of the many disused railway carriages.

  ‘Go ahead.’ He looks me up and down. ‘You’re not interested in railways, surely?’ Once more, as with the Ide villager who could not picture my relation to the place, I long for a cyborg attachment making external form match internal.

  ‘More interested in the area,’ I concede. ‘My grandmother was from Christow.’ He brightens.

  ‘Oh really, when would that have been?’

  ‘Well, she was born in 1911.’

  ‘The railway would certainly have been here then,’ he chuckles. I think we are about to settle into a nice nostalgic reverie over what the railway would have been like then, but instead he asks, ‘Would she have taken the train?’ I have no idea.

  ‘Oh, possibly,’ I hazard.

  �
�It’s amazing how people take their cars now, for distances people would think nothing of walking before. A couple of miles. What’s a couple of miles over a hill? It’s all cars now.’

  Should I tell him that I walked a couple of miles to get here, that I don’t own a car? I think better of interrupting his flow. He looks fondly at a picture of the railway from the 1950s and points to the station building.

  ‘This is what I’m rebuilding now. Just this building and these water carriers here, where the water would be used to …’

  I nod appreciatively but cannot remotely picture these mechanics. He shows me the map of where the railway used to run and all the parts that have now gone. He enthuses about the recently reopened track in Scotland. I’ve heard about this and say so; he reports how it’s been so successful they’re looking to extend the line now.

  ‘If they can do it there using our money, well …’ It’s only then that I realize he plans to reopen the Teign Valley railway line.

  ‘Are there any focus groups working towards reopening the line?’ I venture.

  ‘Yes – me,’ he laughs desperately.

  When I leave him, I take the footpath up through the fields towards Sheldon. Now run by the Society of Mary and Martha, Sheldon offers retreats to support people in Christian ministry, often at times of crisis. It also offers broader private retreats and educational resources. I had visited once as a child, and the atmosphere of the place had stayed with me over the years, so much so that I had immediately thought of it when planning a trip to this area. A short distance along from the village, it is part of Doddiscombsleigh rather than Christow and I remember my father calling it ‘Doddy’. The air in these Sheldon fields at this height is pure, like life downed neat, in straight shots. All around, dark green grows and looms and holds and breathes, a living border. Out of this, the Belvedere gleams white – seen from a new angle now, which also seems like a very old one. I wonder if my grandmother saw it from here. And her grandmother.