The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  37

  Yeomen

  My great-grandfather, William Archer, was born at Sheldon: a working farm, before it was sold. And the land there has a kind of magnetic pull over me. I had felt it as a child, when I had visited; and again, the last time in Ten Acre field, before I had known of any family connection. I feel it now, where the fields flow and fold above the Teign. I walk down the hill to the village of Christow, where the church holds a cluster of Archer graves. What had caused this family to grow here?

  My father says the Archers from Poitou in France helped William the Conqueror win the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and that their names are inscribed upon the Battle Abbey Roll. They were rewarded with land in England. One branch of the Archer family was given large estates in Cornwall by William in the Lizard, and can be found in the records as ‘an ancient and honourable race’. But my father has always been more concerned with the humbler branches of the family: the yeomen. He explains how yeomen grew up from around the thirteenth century when towns and industry developed. Since these workers had little opportunity to grow their own produce, yeomen emerged as a group who devoted their lives to growing food, not simply for themselves but to sell to others for profit.1

  He reveals how some Archers moved eastwards from Cornwall into Devon in the Middle Ages, but warns that it’s impossible to establish exactly when the family arrived in Christow: the parish records begin in 1558 but the first pages are almost illegible. The International Genealogical Index shows concentrations of Archers in the Middle Ages on the estates of the Pomeroy family. Oddly enough, if we look at the map, Berry Pomeroy to Christow, through Highweek and Ilsington, is a dead straight line. So this has preoccupied him as it has me, this mapping of human over landscape, this interplay of person and place. As my roots have let me travel further down into earth, I have begun to feel that the line may, in fact, begin below the surface, that it may be geological. Some fault line where the earth cracked and something other than human dictated that this family form a life here. I feel the older and deeper periods of movement – the earth’s – beneath all the human life that surfaces. I reach.

  As we have seen, many Archer families, once so ubiquitous in Devon, have in the twentieth century died out. The social group they once belonged to, their habits and way of life, have disappeared with them, and the yeomen of England will probably in a few years from now be totally extinct. I think of the farming family I visited near Dartmoor; others at Morchard Bishop and in Cornwall; and one, only one, still in Christow. And I know the place began before them, and will continue afterwards. Yet this family has had an impact on the land as it has had on them: their farming for miles around, their care of what was in and on the soil for generations.

  My father talks about the particular beliefs and responsibilities belonging to the yeomen. In addition to their work as farmers, members of the family through the ages, starting with Edward in the middle of the seventeenth century at Christow … played their part in local government, constituting, in fact, a conscientious and unpaid civil service. Principled and independent, these old farming families have given, as they have taken, from the soil. To do this they had to have land, they had to be paid a fair price for their produce and, above all, they had to be left free to farm in their own way. If we are witnessing a time when the care of the land passes from families to corporations, with very different guiding principles, then does it reach too far to say the small personal loss of a family could be a large-scale loss for the planet?

  From the churchyard, I walk past Sea Hill, the house where my grandmother grew up. This grandmother’s father was born at Sheldon, while her husband, Wallace Burnett, came from Ide. I feel the forces that fold a family together along the earth. Could there be foundations in people – undercurrents, fault lines that connect them – that work to bring them together? The Bridford Thrust, which passes through the railway cutting near Sheldon and reaches on to Idestone, was created during the mountain-building phase at the end of the Carboniferous period. Rock formations from the south moved slowly over existing rock on a fault dipping to the south at a shallow angle.

  The earth has brought us together before, I think, as I circle back to Sheldon past the railway cutting. Placing one foot carefully before another, I wonder how long it would take me to reach him. If I kept walking now, one foot before the other – five hours? I close my eyes, one foot before the other. Five centuries? Millennia? The years line up, one era before the other. Will the earth keep us, if I ask it (one word carefully before another), together?

  38

  Ymbclyccan

  I wake to the blackbirds in the small of the morning. A thin strip of blue just above the hill, then apricot, then lemon, then blue again. Mist swirls over the fields, making a sea between land and sky. My culm is tender from field swimming, lungs tight from soil swimming. I still feel the dust along my windpipe. When I look at my arms I notice raised rivulets; the soil has imprinted me with a second set of veins, of bones, like an exoskeleton. I try to unknot but it’s too painful: my spine is bunched up and over like gnarled branches of an ancient oak. I trace the hills of the body: behind the neck, the small of the back, buttock into leg, the quarry of the navel. With my hair up and baked browner from the sun, I look just like a hare and wouldn’t look out of place popping out from a hedge.1

  I have always wanted to sit in a hedge. The overlooked passageways between field and road that buzz and bulge with hidden life. The rabbits popping in and out, the scurrying bank voles and harvest mice, the flutter and call of bursts of birds. In the Ide hedges, I think of the long-tailed tits with their electronic beats, the silent speech stirrings of bats. The sense of age a hedge brings, having been here, some of them, since the Bronze age, when ancient farmers cleared the woodland, leaving strips as boundary lines. Now the sight of a very long hedgeline may indicate such age. Though it can be difficult to date these to the Bronze era, many of these long Devon hedgelines have been traced to the Anglo-Saxon, when some landowners were simply confirming the boundaries of existing Celtic settlements. I am at home within these Celtic boundaries, with my strong affinity with the Druid’s hills.2 But the pull back even further, to a Bronze era when the areas of land under cultivation expanded, adds a new intensity.

  Through the slow lifting night, a hedge starts chattering. Not with the patter of birds, but of water. I swipe sticky weeds away to find a pool, gathered inside, and out from it, a running stream. Needing enough force to break through bramble and nettle, yet holding the body steady enough so as not to cannon into the pool, I advance. I meet darkness, but with a slight light dappled through the breaks in the branches and glinting off the groundwater. I crouch, not wanting to disturb the floor. As the sun grows, more lives begin to take shape. What had looked, at first light, like nettles, are the heart-shaped leaves of garlic mustard, or Jack-by-the-hedge. Its white petals begin to shine, while heads of cow parsley glint higher up, and a shimmer of blue builds as bluebells come into focus. I pull the blue into my palm, breaking a little off; a few bright bells to take to him.

  To be classed ancient, these hedgerows only have to have existed before the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century, and to be considered species-rich, contain five native woody species, or be rich in herbaceous plants. I wonder how many humans have been logged inside a hedgerow. But even here, in this tiny hideaway, are threats. The pesticides used in the fields are seeping in, threatening the wildlife and plants within. Cases have been charted of bees consuming pollen from neonicotinoid-treated crops and wild flowers, ingesting lethal doses of fungicides and insecticides.3

  I curl inside the trees, inside the word the hedgerow breathes: ymbclyccan, from the Old English word meaning ‘to surround or enclose’, ‘to encircle or embrace’. It is a lovely word to hold inside a face. I let it roll around my mouth, behind my teeth, and into air; and once it’s there it trickles down along the limbs, all earthward-bound. Its circle is a sound so round, ymbclyccan all the grassy ground.

  I
unfurl from my hedge-held form. Roll my head around the pivot of the neck, let my leaves sweep out wide, circle; smoothing the air, spreading myself out flat. Sun pours through my shoulder blades, pushing them back and down. Spaces grow around the neck, between the toes. Every gap in and between the body has potential. Here are the soft parts of myself that will grow if I let them. If I make enough space and protect it. Flowers do not come from strong, open poses. They come in the small, protected bulbs of the body. They grow in me like a silent radiance.

  And as I look across the wide expanse of field and hill, out to the shine of the Exe and the distant sea, I think about the language of this place, of myself, and how I must keep it open. How I must stay out, out in grass voice, in field voice, in open-throated hill voice. ‘Soil voice’ is a cough. A release. A cough-it-all-up, get-it-all-out, with a widening of the throat, a glottal opening, into chasmic voice: an outburst! An ungovernable quake of a voice; vowels shaped into an eruption of e’s and h’s, into a stream of ‘ehhhh’ as in the breath of the earth, as in the coughing up of clumps, of fur balls of blackthorn, of blackbirds, of history, of mourning, of hope, of new mornings; of all this the soil sings – of all that has been held in.

  39

  Ymbgedelf

  Since the mapping and drawing, rolling and swimming, I have been feeling, in some way, like a living map. An evolving, human sketch of my father’s pencil sketch, which I now long to feel physically. My father’s sketch was based on the 1803 survey map of the manor located in the cathedral archives. When I get there, I am admitted by a suspicious woman who informs me that you usually need to make an appointment.

  ‘Got a young girl here,’ I hear her explaining from behind the door (‘young girl!’). The archivist comes out, immediately welcoming, and within a couple of minutes has brought me what I need. In fact, she has brought two books. But I’m puzzled to find no map in either. Some further investigation shows that the archivist has brought item 68C rather than 86C, and I wonder if it is my father, or the archive, that has made the transcription error. The second of the books seems to have the right title, Manor of Ide, Survey by Alexander Law, the closing words to which, ‘with Map’, leap loudly.1

  ‘Where do you suppose the map is?’ I ask, nonchalantly, masking palpitations.

  ‘That’s strange, I’ll have another look. What exactly are you looking at, in Ide?’ I have no way of answering her. She returns in a few minutes, saying she is having trouble finding it.

  ‘Are you local?’ she asks, by way of ascertaining whether it will be possible to come back another day if it can’t be found today – again, with no idea of how large a question this is, how impossible to answer. As I wait for her return, I look at the books in front of me. The one that is not a survey is the Book of Court Rolls. It contains page after page of references to Ideites’ dealings with the court: money due in ‘homage’; licences granted. On one page is a table entitled ‘Lands in the parish of Ide in the County of Devon’. It contains a small list of names, some now familiar – ‘Drakes Meadow’; others not – ‘Over Meadows’, ‘Path Meadows’. A ‘Cultivation’ column gives insight into land use: ‘arable’ for one, ‘orchard’ or ‘meadow’ for others.

  I scrunch my eyes to decipher new fragments of writing, thinking how much of the work of a historian must be deciphering handwriting. The book varies widely in neatness; some sections are entirely illegible, so that it is like a cool stream when you come across the neatness of others. On some pages, the author has copied out again what was previously written, as if to show that they realized it was illegible. I wonder if it is the same author or a later one. I find myself imagining the life of whoever it was who wrote so messily, who scratched out whole pages in frustration, even cutting off the end of one page completely, as though sawn. Handling the heavy paper, the ink scratched in laboriously, saying something of the writer’s moods where things have been blocked out, I think about how these elements have been lost in electronic writing. The writer’s mood, personality; whether they are in a hurry, or cold, or at ease. And I think of Rebecca, scratching paint into – not just onto – the page. How does that depth and layering get into the digital? Even if you use a digital pen to write, or scan in your handwriting, or layer typescript like a concrete typewriter poem, it’s all artifice, not necessity, as computers offer page upon page of uniform boredom.

  And we sit. Three women in a room, poring over old paper, muttering dates. The odd triumph, smile, involuntary burst; but, more often, a steady, monotonous mining. Centuries-old ink lifting up from pages as our fingers probe – ymbgedelf or ‘digging around’– the tattered corners of the past. The frequent inscrutability of the ink reminds me of the sixteenth-century parish records my father described as almost illegible, unable to reveal the family names that may have rested there. What power writing has to mark a history. The woman who had reluctantly admitted me has mellowed now it is apparent that I too am involved in ‘serious work’. She smiles at me in between muttering. An older lady sits behind them in the sun. I wonder what she is working on. I wonder how it is written. I shift in my seat and feel colour come, from the flowers deep inside me. They will be a different texture to my own, thinner and more precarious. They will uncurl and stretch into space and I will have to move with them to release them. I feel this, as I sidle more fully into sun.

  40

  Ymbwendung

  In the soft pull of petals, the scent is sweet. If you let it in, the sweetness travels deep along the nostrils, the throat, the windpipe, the culm, the lungs, the leaves. The mellow breeze laps the flowers’ lips open to lime stigmas, powdered in pollen. The honesty’s petals are white near the centre, lighter pink further out, and lined with purple veins, though most would simply call the flower purple.

  My first second in the honesty, I grow accustomed to colour: the different shades that humans reduce to one. The purple depths, flecked with green and white and pink, pull in the body until it sinks. I flounder in the silky sway of flowered foam and freshening spray. The head is caught. It hangs from my neck like a jewel. It glints in the speckled water. The flower’s Latin name, lunaria, means moon-like. The seed pods that develop after the flowers have dropped are white, round and lunar. But these are not here yet. The head is not a moon that steers the tide, but a stone that drops in purple light.

  In the next second, I come to see all those I share the flowers with. Wasps, hoverflies, aphids. All manner of winged things I still do not have the names for. I try to store their images like figures in a line-up. To remember their shade and sound and shape. But I am pummelled by their movement. Their tiny flapping seems so far removed from flying. That a soaring upward drifting might need this small repeated lifting, this furious fling of wing is perplexing. There is an endless rushing and beating, a perpetual bringing together of parts, like a door that won’t swing shut – but just for a moment it does – and the smallest touch is enough to make it all worth it; all the running and beating and rushing and the fleetingness of it.

  Next, I notice other plants: the sticky willow, stinging nettles, forget-me-nots. The last come as a shock. It is startling to find a whole stretch of blue has been obscured by the purple. I notice this as you do a face that strikes you in a crowd, not of anybody you know, but of something you have shared, a face that shows the signs of a sorrow you know. Though it is a cheerful flower, with the speckled blue chintz of a school summer uniform, still it says to you, Don’t forget me, and I feel, all at once, like crying. I think of the first clutch of this flower I took to him, of the sky they made of his room. But only for a moment because that is just one of the notes in the purple that is thick and leaved and light and gloved and this purple is a purple that I love.

  Now I register birds. Their song flows into the petals whose strokes are smooth as seaweed and the first is a robin, tseeptseep chip chippychippytsippychippychippy chuppachuppachuppa then it is a wren: trptrptrptrptrptrpprrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrprrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrts
weetsweeesweesweesweesweeeeeecrrrrrrrrrrr tsweetsweeesweesweecrrrrrrrrrrrrr Then sparrows and long-tailed tits. Their notes cup its face, drawing it right up to them; notes as gentle, probing, as fingers.

  Then, as I fall forward into flower, I feel only fear. Only the dread of being separate from the ground is real to me now. Though I know the earth is not far, a fall is still a fall, no matter the distance. I feel my tongue poised in my mouth, breath leaps, everything readying for the scream. But my hands find the ground and chest falls as the sweetness takes over everything. Ymbwendung, ‘reviving’, is a word smothered in this flower. This: the flower my father had brought from his field to the hospital on the day of my birth. This: the colour that had greeted me, the smell, the taste, the soft landing.

  And so my heart flips whenever I come upon honesty, as I do now, looking up from my book, glimpsed through the library window. This is the rush that comes, the purple flood, the longing. And, this time, the rest of my body has to follow. I must pull into the flight of the bee, whose own map is rich, stitched strict into spatial memory. I must fly straight and quick, out of the room, into the tossing of petals, the surge and sway of fluttered surface. Letting my chest rise and fall, rise and fall, into the rhythm of the flower’s call, something flows. Something comes to rest. Colour floods into scent. Notes of mown grass and vanilla; lavender, clover, cherry. Apricot and strawberry drift and warm. The bee’s path draws me in, as I summon a strength I have been building. With a long exhale, my flowers join the air: the tseep of birds, the sweep of clouds, the back and forth of sunlit hours; they are part of this now, until the end.