The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  Walking along the old railway line, metres down in the felled-out earth, my blood rushes at seeing what is ordinarily invisible: the scooped-out insides of the soil. Its gleaming red gushes like a wound I walk through. Its sides jut into rock and fern, ivy clings onto everything; all of them pressing at the earth’s weak point. Brambles hang down as rope from a higher canopy, while uprooted tree carcasses lie on their sides, majestic bodies on a battered battlefield.

  As I first come upon the rock face of the old railway bridge – strewn over with ivy, gaps of blackness spotting between stones – I feel something like awe. Though it is not fear that holds me fixed, immovable, but the suddenness of history stepping out in front of me. Here is something that men built. That living bone and sinew hauled and handled. A disused space carries its past with it, does not entirely give up its use value after it’s discarded. I see the men that built this bridge and railway, as much as I see the stone before it. I feel connected to them through my father, though I don’t believe any of my relatives worked on the railway. But those who did may have known my family. What if they brushed past them in the street, in the pub? I wonder how this hollowed space affects others; if it’s only me that sees these bygone people.

  My father recalls the owner of Exeter House in Ide, at the time of writing the History, as being very conscious of the atmosphere of the place. He has described to us how at times he has imagined that the downstairs rooms, where the bar-parlour must have been, are crowded with people dressed in the costume of a century and a half ago. My father takes this backward glance even further, suggesting that perhaps what he can see is one of the Parish or Vestry meetings that were held here frequently and these are the farmers drinking on an Easter Monday when they had just finished dealing with the depressing business of doling out poor relief to the paupers of the village. It is one of the rare flights of fancy that he allows himself in his research, one of the what ifs that float through his work.

  They fall in here, the little what ifs, settle in the cracks amid the stones, in the sinking subsidence of the soil. And in this soil is fine-grained breccia and sand. And in this breccia are clasts of soft purple-weathered vesicular lava and purple-weathered basalt. And in this lava is the story of the gentle stretching of the earth’s crust after the compression of the Variscan orogeny ceased, millions of years before the railway, before John, before any human structure, any human life.

  27

  Withy

  See the shell smashed in some curious knot like an offering. See the colour of sand sprinkled, the mistle thrush’s egg laid open. All the empty spaces call to all the empty spaces. Perhaps, after all the hollowing, something will hold. Perhaps, after all the fallowing, something will grow. Or perhaps that is only something that happens to other people. Perhaps now there is only this body: a place that someone used to inhabit which is now just a placeholder, left open for whatever should happen to make it back.

  It goes to all the absent spaces: the shells that birds have flown from, the flattened leaves the deer has moved off, the ruptures in the bank from rabbit, stoat and weasel, the indents in the soil along the withy beds. Even the word ‘withy’ is only a film of what it used to be, an older form for ‘willow’, passing out of use. From the Old English wīthig, to Middle English withye, through to ‘withy’, the word waits, with nothing to do now that willow is here. It lies among the branches, where it knows it once was welcome, where it knows it once had a use.

  The withies, without the man who planted them, seem leaner, skeletal; in a sea of wooden icicles. Covered over with frost, the Grassling’s limbs rattle and scrape against their wind-blown bark. It wonders if someone struck a mallet – against it, against them – what frozen music might chime. But nobody does. There is no full-bodied contact here, just a restless shivering. The marks beneath the withies from the press of passing paws hold it there the longest. It feels the shadows of hooves, leaves, fingers run all over – trailing, testing, touching. Some of them try to work out what it is, rolling it over and over between thumb and forefinger. Others just want to move past, using it as the quickest route on to somewhere else. It bristles with each passing.

  It imagines itself without him. It has to. What then will the body be? Not an upright frame, that is certain. A sagging slump. Amorphous. There is no water in the pond. It is covered over with dry sticks, rotting vegetation hanging in solid cobwebs. The odd boggy patch. Skins have broken and bodies poured out. Slumps of fat and gut. Muscle stretched out of shape and discarded. Intestines curled like worms, disturbed. Proteins, fats, simple carbohydrates will be the first to go, leaving the more fibrous cellulose, lignins, tannins. Most will disappear in a matter of weeks or months, but for some, it will take years. New matter will form, as the micro-organisms excrete organic compounds, themselves adding to the organic matter after death. These excretions and decomposing remains form humic substances in the pond sediment, similar to humus in soils, slow to decompose. Is that what the body will be? Slowly slopping under, slapping its skin against mud, flailing and flapping, waiting for a hook to land it.

  It can either catch itself or let itself be caught. Not sinking but saving. There is something in the ground before this picking off of flesh; in a different layer, another part of the cycle. It glints, now and then, from the pieces of a shell, or the pristine sheen of a withy. It calls the Grassling until its stem brushes against the whispering runes, the pulsing of moons, the grass overheard, the Old English words; it is a densely wooded speech. Even when it can’t hear it, it often now senses its light, or feels its movement. It has learned where language lies, with buried trinkets in the ground, intermittently breaking the surface.

  It puts out a hand. Words begin to rise. Verbs pelt. Move. Lift. Sound. Swim. Things start to happen. It listens to the motion in the ground. The thump and the leap, the dart and the creep, a rock writhes, a eukaryote dives; all of this is happening. The slow pull of a worm along its crumbled bed. The secretion of its chemical sentences. The actinomycetes, bacteria and fungi, also changing the chemistry of the soil. The ants, beetles, centipedes, millipedes, mites, rotifers, snails, spiders, springtails, slugs; biting, sucking, tearing away at it. All of this is happening. The leaf leaves behind its lignin, its midrib, laid out in the path like a tooth in a glass. The fungi breaks down the rib, the feather-winged beetle eats the fungal spores. The ground beetles crunch at snails and chew at slugs. The clover comes away from itself. Things are leaving and things will not be the same. He is leaving and it will not be the same.

  Now they are clamorous. Words honk and cry, in bellows. It wants to take their air out. It wants to draw them out from the ground, haul them out onto the grass and say: Quiet. Here are pieces of a shell that cannot be put back together. Quiet. Here are holes all over that will not close. Quiet. Here is a dead bee, its wings flecked with gold like stained glass windows laid flat in a mossy cathedral. But the ground will not let it. The ground sees that it is only masquerading at emptiness. That it is a living thing that will fill again. Sun, air, scent will come back, even sound. You cannot till the body. What will grow will grow regardless. What will leave cannot be made to stay.

  28

  Wooded Fort

  ‘Is Granfer Wills buried in Ide Church?’

  ‘No, Dunchideock,’ my father reveals. ‘A peaceful place. I’d like to go back there sometime.’

  As I make my way along the lane, my lungs fill with the scent of my grandparents. Visits to their house in Dunchideock always smelled like this. I look round for the source and see high yew trees behind a laurel hedge and remember how the laurels had required constant trimming, a particular and ongoing concern of my grandmother’s. As the smell disperses, so does the memory and I refocus on what is around me. Past the laurels comes the church. It is Grade 1 listed and a very smart affair. On this occasion its red tower built from local sandstone blazes against the evening light. As always when entering a graveyard, tasked with finding a particular stone, I am jittery. How will I find it
among so many others? How will I manage not to step on someone? And always the undertone of trespass. ‘Ever so sorry,’ I hear myself saying as I land on someone’s shoulder.

  The only Wills I see is on the other side of the church, but the stone bears the wrong first name and date to be John’s. During my survey, I keep an eye out for some of the more interesting burials noted by local historian Archie Winckworth.1 His list provides an eclectic mix of accomplishment and folly, including a ‘Direct descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh’, someone who ‘In his Will left “My beloved wife the bedstead”’, another who ‘Corrected the works of Sir Isaac Newton’ and one who ‘Attended Church as a child with a placard on [its] back [reading] “Pray for me. I am a liar”’.

  I may well have missed John in my rapid search, racing the light, not wanting to still be out walking the lanes in the dark. As I look up to a line of crows, something swoops across the lane. Speed. Darkness. It is unfolding. Width. Hands in its wings. Fingers in its sides. Touch made multiple, drawn out wide. Silent. Higher than the trees, or the stretch of an eye. It passes over like a chill, a trillion raised hairs, a glitch in the matrix. Did I see something I shouldn’t have? A different kind of life, where touch is prioritized, where fingertips stretch down the ribs and stick to other bodies like Velcro?

  A greater horseshoe bat’s wing bones are mostly hand-bones and most of its body is its wings. Its speech is often too high for humans to hear. A whole species covering the earth through touch and sound, with no interest in speaking to us. But the greater horseshoe needs cattle-grazed pastures, hedgerows, broad-leaved woodlands, diverse grasslands; in short, a helpful human stewardship of the soil. At West Town Farm, a few miles down from here, there are bat boxes, encouraging safe spaces to roost, and marked trails for walkers to look up and view them. But bats come out at dusk, after many walkers have safely returned home; and they seem altogether different to the kind of animal you might stand and stare at. The only mammal to fly, really fly, can do so many things better than we can. They move faster than we can see and speak higher than we can hear. You do not watch or hear, but feel them.

  I know what it is to travel at speed. Back into my father’s memories, into Granfer Wills’ footsteps, into traces of places. Sometimes it is a material movement. And to have part of my body raised to the light but part anchored below ground is a difficult balancing act. Sun floods lightly from the top down, wisps around my fingers, feathers my pores. It is like trailing a hand in the sea, in the wide, unending blue, pressing fingers down into water. Sunlight strobes, as though over seaweed, as skin dips, in and up; while an opposing current runs down along the leg, the toe, the root, down against rock. Other times, it is just the mind that moves. That swings back and forth against the head, rarely coming to rest.

  As I cover the last bit of road, the fields throb with owls. Their willowy warble shakes the air, one after another, after another. I hope they are not passing on the whereabouts of the bat. For tonight at least, I hope it swoops safe over the woods to roost, telling stories of its travels in its private language that we cannot speak.

  When I wake to the hills my father woke to year after year of his life, I am acutely aware of the top of my body. From my head, down my neck, to my shoulders, there are invisible strings, tethering me to the floor. My ribs rock with birdsong. It is a peaceful place, he had said, and I feel it. The land accepts me without question; sky too, as it bustles its pink in over the horizon. Day! Day! It surges and spills, flooding me with blushing lightness.

  Then comes the sun. A golden wash over everything. Like the flashback or plot twist that makes you realize you are only just now seeing things the right way, this colour makes a mockery of all the light that has come before it. This is the daylight. This is how things are meant to be seen. The trees that extend their golden veined fingers to me are older than Granfer Wills; he would have seen them too. Just then, the clip of horseshoes clatters in along the path and little separates this scene from one he may have seen.

  I follow the horses along to the church where they part ways. If John is here, today I will find him. I enter the church and am relieved to find a map of the churchyard layout, ‘based on plan of March 1958’. I scour the names attached to each plot, but the only Wills I see is the one I had found before. However, it seems a very large plot, compared to those around it: the length of about four regular ones. I wonder if John could have snuck in somewhere there.

  Returning to the gravestone, I see Joseph’s name and Elizabeth’s underneath. Pushing back the ivy, I uncover another one: Emily, and just make out the word ‘Daughter’. Further down, at the very bottom of the stone, the ivy gives up one final name, something like ‘Walter’. Still no John. Even if he’s not here, there is clearly a clan of Willses, who I spend a moment talking silently to. As the mist rolls off the Haldon Hills in waves and the sun starts to break through, it seems like a pretty good spot to come to rest.

  As I walk back towards Ide, my father’s prediction returns: it seems possible that … pockets of Romano-British settlements survived in the Haldon Hills. I look behind to where the rain is held over the black trees. He grows in confidence as he expands: from ‘possible’ it becomes ‘likely’ that the south-western edge of the later parish of Ide, lying immediately below the Haldon Hills, provided a home for a small British settlement long after the conquest of the rest of Devon by the Anglo-Saxons. I warm to this defiant longevity. Though there are few place names in Devon that pre-date the Anglo-Saxons, Dunchideock, meaning ‘the wooded fort’, is one of them. I hold my father tight inside this place, this fort, the gathered sap of over a thousand years, as the mist heaves in white, like rolling snow.

  Little flicks of white kick in and out of the hedgerow, as long-tailed tits rattle and trill. To the right, a flash of ruddy feathers hovers and floats. It lifts and falls along the air streams, weightless. It must be a hawk, but is not one I am familiar with. As I move closer, it glides upwards on an air current, as effortless as a kite. Kite. Red. Red kite. Once extinct in most of the UK, the red kite was reintroduced as part of a release programme in 1989. It’s now an amber conservation priority, rather than red, showing its progress; though it’s not thought to be particularly established in Devon. The birds introduced as part of the release scheme have been tagged; I can’t see a tag on this one. Could it be part of a native population? It is a landscape of survival, of beating the odds. After one more blast of breast, the colour of the soil beneath it, it glides further into the field, away.

  Then, a flurry of movement across the fields. It’s a bounding, animal motion and for a moment I think they are horses, that a race or hunt is mid-flow. But as I focus, I see they are smaller and that no people are involved; four deer lope across the lime grass into the copse at the end of the valley. I want to watch after their little white bobtails, but traffic is busy here and cars unsympathetic to me standing in the road. I want to go on watching and to go on being a part of this scene; this glimpsed wildness now hidden in the trees that nobody else knows is there.

  The rain that has been threatening finally catches up with me at Markham Cross, the place now known to me as the land of the harriers. Here I shelter against the hedge until the sun starts to break through. I shift my feet back and forth, lightly over the earth. If I were fungi, I could absorb this light and pass it onto those around it. I feel myself soaking in sun, but cannot yet pass it on. I stretch my fingers, tangled in ivy, moss and twists of bark. I want to help the things I touch but am not yet close enough, am still too separate. Yet, as I watch a lamb gambol as only a lamb can, not worrying that it is not earth or grass, it suddenly feels quite wonderful to have a body. A moving thing that can show itself visibly, that can state publicly that this is what it is. That can gather all of itself up at once and gambol on at a moment’s notice. For a moment, I am satisfied being separate.

  Then I think of my father. From this vantage point he advises: look back over your shoulder across the land belonging to Pynes farm to modern
Ide and then down over towards the estuary and the Cathedral in the distance … Here are the origins of a settlement which disappeared (or almost disappeared) some two thousand years ago. I think of him as he lay, the only movement his breath: in, out; taking in the air that came through the open window from his acre, from the far fields, from – here? Is this where he came when he couldn’t be found? Like the red kite, or the unearthed rocks of ancient homes, did he find himself tethered to this place? Almost disappeared. But, as all hardy perennials lost in the autumn, he had returned.

  29

  Words

  To be blown away. To have nothing to shoot down, nothing coming from the body but air. Nothing tethered, nothing stable; all outward facing, outward casing; chasing only an outline of a body. It is like this for weeks. Moving only through corridors, sticking to the corners of rooms, edging out only when it has something heavy to weight it down. It starts filling its pockets with stones. It stops wearing clothes. In place of skin there is a rough covering people start to see through. It is a colour that doesn’t know a name.

  It becomes cautious in fields. It could be easily stepped on, or eaten. There is little to differentiate it now from the other stems, except that it is less stable. It notices that others do most of their moving below ground, while it still does most on top. Perhaps that is the trick to not being so precarious in air: to do more of its work underground. They group together; it seems to be the only one out alone. It wonders what they’re doing huddled up like that. Are they talking or are they listening or are they dancing or are they thinking? Or is it some new activity that lies somewhere in between?