For as long as I can remember this has been the sound of my days, the uplift and down-sway of fork or spade. The crack and crumble of surface. The word ‘yppan’, ‘to bring out, open, or display’, can also mean ‘to utter’. And the soil has always spoken to me. Mostly it has been the sound of rising and breaking, rising and breaking. Some things being dismantled, others forming. I have done my growing here. Out in the open is where I took shape. So it is bewildering, now, to be starting again. I think of the stumble with the lock, all those years ago. Just when I had thought I had grown up, here I was, back again, turning into something else.
‘Wyrd bið ful ārǣd!’ ‘Events always go as they must!’ ‘Swā cwæð eardstapa’: ‘So spoke the Wanderer.’ And it is the lift and drop of the fork that I fall back on, though it is my own hand now around the tines. I must bear the beat of the waves. I must hold steady through the change.
45
Zoic
I move among the irises. Yellow against blue, they sing up from the pond. I feel their bothness: their rootedness in water, their flightlessness in air. I pick one, a pulsing indigo, to take to him. In front, a golden flank bobs and veers to the side, before moving behind unconvincing cover. The deer’s fawn. I’m pleased the mother has decided to return to this spot to rear her young and wonder how many more years this will happen, and whether the fawn in turn will rear its young here.
As I follow it up the hill, a butterfly flies onto my heart. We beat together, we still together. As I start to feel anxious at having to move it, it leaves of its own accord. As I start to miss it, it returns. Straight to the heart. And the goldfinch cheeps from the telegraph wire and the long-tailed tit flits from branch to branch and the kestrels wheel over, flashing fleshy white, mercurial in the melting sun. I add some lavender to the iris, and as I pause, the butterfly returns, landing on my heart. I move and it goes; I pause and it returns. All the way back to the house with this flying heart.
‘Oh, so you’re going for a swim?’ he asks, as I settle the flowers into water. ‘Where your ancestor lived.’
‘Which one?’ I am careful to catch the conversation, to hold it still against my chest.
‘Grandfather Frank’s brother, Ben, he worked at the dockyard.’ So many places we had visited during my childhood were, I now realize, the homes of my family. As my father had followed the tracks of their dispersal, so had I, long before I had known I was doing so. Appledore’s name is thought to be of Celtic derivation, from the words ‘Aber’ (estuary) and ‘dour’ (water). It lies across the water from Instow, where I had learned to swim.
Midsummer’s Day is one of the hottest of the year, and of any of the country’s summers. I come to the dour. Water sways gold as wheat and I swoon in the heat. Even with such dense sunlight, the water still bites. But I am soon in. As I leave the shore, the person I was decades ago seems to swim towards me. And further back, the person my father was. The space between us all seems at once near and far, like a telescope pulling in and out of focus. With each stroke, self slips. I have become used to feeling different – more expanded – made up of parts that I may not at first have recognized as my own. I have had things settle in me from different places and people. Or perhaps they have always been there; I just hadn’t seen or heard from them before.
I have expanded. I am more of my fathers now. My father, his father, his father, his. I have grown towards them and our roots have touched; we are part of the same system. Now, when I breathe, so does he, and so does he, and so does he. And so does the lavender and so does the iris and so does the bluebell, the lamb’s-ear, the euonymus, the eleagnus, the oleaster, the barberry, the mountain ash, the Wild Rover rose, the Michaelmas daisy, the sweet pea, the lupin, the forget-me-not, the euphorbia, the daffodil, the dogwood, the Martin’s spurge.
The willow, the beech, the birch, the conifer, the eucalyptus, the oak, the ash, the elder, the hawthorn, the apple tree, the plum tree, the wood: they breathe. The blackbird and the chaffinch and the bullfinch and the hawk and the thrush and the long-tailed tit and the robin and the sparrow and the wood pigeon and the goldfinch and the greenfinch and the swallow and the swift and the skylark and the house martin and the goldcrest: they breathe.
And the stars and the planets and the constellations and the meteors breathe. And their names breathe. And the deer and the rabbit and the badger and the weasel and the stoat and the fox and the mole and the vole breathe. And the leaf and the grass and the root breathe. And the field breathes. And the worm and the protozoa and the bacteria breathe. And the earth breathes. And the topsoil and the humus and the clay and the chemicals and the bedrock breathe. And the air and the soil and the water touch and spin and touch and spin so that we breathe. All of them touching and spinning and speaking and singing and soaring and flinging their breathing.
With each stroke, the part that I know as my own evaporates. Possession sinks. But there is still a body and things outside of the body. There is still an out and an in. To strike out and out and out. Arms pull wider orbits, body flattens, lets go of strain. Always the body is calculating: how far it can go, and can let go; how far is too far, and means it won’t be able to come back. But I am only vaguely aware of this. I am still lodged in the feeling that I could go anywhere, that I don’t have to end. I don’t fight the sea but go with it, rising on each high wave, settling into each aftermath. I am an older version of myself. Before I came to land.
The midsummer sun is at its peak. I am a cell being charged: trillions. My trillions of cells syphon the light and pump it around the body. I try to keep as much of me moving as I can. I use my veins. I am aware of time only slightly, in the sense that I know I can no longer judge it. I am as far as I can go now. I can’t put a foot down. I can’t save myself if attacked. But nothing wants to attack. I am just lifted and put down again, lifted and put down again, all the way, as far as I can go.
I am laughing. The sea gets in my throat, my nostrils, my vocal chords; swims along my windpipe and giggles in my belly. What I thought was water is laughter and I gurgle the moving joy of lifting and dropping, dunking and rising, shining and wetting – sounding. I reverberate.
But I nudge a plastic bottle, and I stop. I end. How do I go on, when there is nowhere to come back to? No harbour, no shore, as ‘all the pores of the rock are filled with water, a dark, sub-surface sea, rising under hills, sinking beneath valleys.’ I hear the words of Rachel Carson pass through me as fluidly as my own. ‘This groundwater is always on the move,’ I say. And I am Rachel Carson. ‘It travels by unseen waterways until here and there it comes to the surface … all the running water of the earth’s surface was at one time groundwater.’ And I am that water.
I hold not only my own fluid but all of the rocks’ of all of the earth; I float on and in myself. I am zoic: containing fossils, with traces of animal or plant life. ‘And so, in a very real and frightening sense, pollution of the groundwater is pollution of water everywhere.’ Plastic fossils line my bones. The bottle, adrift in the dour, is the seen pollutant, plastic spectre made manifest, but how many unseen haunt the water; how many chemicals through my pores and in my soil and in my rock and in my leaves and in my sea and will I ever, ever be clean?
I flip. I face the sun. I drift. I am damaged, but it is not quite over. Whatever part of me is here is not over. Whatever part of me is not here is not over. Here is a space for salvaging. I am speaking in a thickened voice now. All the voices of the advocates. All the voices of my family. All the voices of the sea, rising. There is still time. I am still. Here. All of me gathers light.1
SOIL MEMOIR FOR ST MARY’S CHURCHYARD
When one voice falls away, they all do. The place without words is a dangerous place to linger. Where there are no words there is only rock to knock against. Where there are no words there is no join. Where there are no words there is nothing to bring it back. If it stays here too long, it will not return.
Horizons
ins.
0–9
&nbs
p; A A tiny handful, for the mourners.
9–14
(B) As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
(B)/C He is rooted Martin’s spurge is dogwood is daffodil is euphorbia is forget-me-not is lupin is sweet pea is copper beech is Michaelmas daisy is rose is mountain ash is barberry is oleaster is eleagnus is euonymus is lamb’s-ear is bluebell is iris is lavender. As a rainbow, so he flowers.
24+
C For the first time, no strain. Only the wish to hold, to keep safe; to plant in soft ground and press into him.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
But this place knows him, and the grass takes him to it like a part of itself returning. The Grassling bends into its end. It has listened to its fathers and its mothers. It has listened to the grasses and the flowers. It knows how to hear worms pulse and bark sound and how to be cut and how to be rooted. It knows all this as it lies. And as the rain splashes over its face, as it is carried down, into the falling ground, it knows what it is to reach the bottom. What it does not know is how to get back up.
46
Zygote
It had begun in a tight, light body. Midwinter ice stiffening muscle, bone, nail. When the moonlight had gathered in my crevices, the soil had swallowed all sound. Insects stilled; birds held their breath; the whole earth sighing, Not Yet. If there was to be an end, it was not to be then. I had grown through the months, turning, at first, so slowly that I hadn’t realized; later, so quickly that I couldn’t keep up – into my new form.
Part of me had been dying. I had known that all along; but to live with a dying thing takes an awful lot of life. A whole solar system plugged into the part that is slipping into darkness. And for a while it can work. You can keep the dead part with you. You can carry a strip of wood bitten by fungi, powdered in tawny dust, in your pocket for weeks, saying: It is with me, the dead thing is with me, and we are both fine.
At first, the body is only a longing. A yearning for its feet to be roots, for its roots to reach the part that is dying, for its culm to channel light, for its nodes to be the words that join them. For its stolons to reach the part that is dying, for its leaves to channel light, for its flowers to be the light that joins them. Then, the longing fills and hollows, fills and hollows, as the words come, and the flowers fling, and the light. And if they don’t come, you can find a way to coax them out. The soil, with its hoard of hidden language, had opened up the ground beneath me, once I had learned to read it.
My father had always read the soil, with his maps and worded tracks. Now I, too, was closer to the shape of it, how it has been mapped and understood. Closer to the breadth of it, to the people who have worked and lived on it. Closer to the depth of it, the lives inside, the other-than-human beings who have relied on it as closely as I have. And as I have processed these multiple convergences, my shape, and the language of my shape, has changed. Now I am a wider thing, with strange beatings. I have swallowed the light of flowers and breathed it out. I have listened to the light of grass and typed it out. My blood has changed. As my DNA carries along stem, along stolon, along leaf, along rhizome, I am zygote, a cell formed by fertilization.
But I have always known that to continue, part of me must break. I have felt the cracks form along my spikelets and moved with the strain, though only part of me has been prepared to let go. For that part, in spite of the sun, each day has been cold and painful to move through. Stiff and fractured, it has begun to feel, without bitterness, that it may have served its purpose. The spikelets edged away from my body.
As I stand now, in Ten Acre field, taking deep gusts from each compass point, each side I face brings a new roll of hill, a new air archive of wood. Here is the open moment I have been searching for, ever since beginning my strange growing. I fix my feet, only turning from the waist. A spiral begins in the body, following the land around. I let the arms follow the waist, as air twists. I remember how, from the fallen beech, I have practised falling. I remember back, past that, to the downcutting of the River Teign; bending from the waist and falling. I remember the cooling of the granite to the West, following the spiral round and falling. I remember the dissolving of the chalk to the East, dropping from the side and falling. Always letting the ground catch me. And always, I remember trying to stay, for as long as possible, in the moment before the end; in the limbo just before contact.
As the end comes, the weight breaks from my head like a bird from its shell, pushing over and out of my body. Feet buckle, legs cave; whole body lowers into grass. The cries from me draw long and coarse, creaking the air like a bow over string. I try to resist, as in the moment of falling I see the hills inverted, trees suspended, fields adrift, like the scene in a snow cone when you turn it over. I see dandelions loom larger than forests, blades of grass bigger than hills. I teeter in the yellow of petals, in the green that offers such soft relief, yet still I resist, until I am in the globes of water that hang from the blades like silver apples. I am in this water, I am in this silver, and I am chiming. No words but chiming. No hope but chiming. No end to the chiming. As, in my last defiance, my eyes flick back up to the dangled hills and the floating fields and the dark trees who seem to catch me just as much as the grass, which, as I come to land, shimmer a loving sea.
AFTER
Where the deep crevice of me leans into land; where valley ends, through rough red and gorse green, all fields meet and give way. In my father’s coat I walk uphill, for it will always now be uphill, through worn-down thistle and broken oak, up to Churchills. This, the first field in Ide entered two years ago. The dark hills of Haldon stretched in front, the wide white of sky held above, crows lift off the field and circle: glossy globes of dark in pale light. And I stand, upright like the Belvedere rising before me, now that there is nothing left to fear. It has already happened – the worst – and this is what’s left. A skylark’s flight, the flooding white, the glistening light: my father.
As the cathedral chimes the morning in, the sound of the bell is timeless, centuryless. Unending, unbeginning, unravelling, unpersoning, ungrassing, unbuttoning: my father’s coat stays on. I finger a blade of grass and take his pen from his pocket. I write his name along the leaf. My finger rests beneath the blade. I feel myself through the leaf, the texture of my own body. As I leave, I leave a part of us there.
Back in Drewshill, I think: I have not lost him because I never had him. People are not ours to own. We coexist, if we’re lucky. I reach the spot of my summer-rolling and field-swimming. Although there was a joy in it, the sadness was already there, and the fear of this very moment I am in. But still it was a time of becoming, of beginning, of bepersoning, begrassing. Now, it is a letting go. What is it the Grassling leaves here? That awful earthly clinging, that desperate human need to say ‘mine’ and fence in what was never yours to fence. But I had the joy of coming near – that is what I had – and that is what does not end. Perhaps, if anything, it is even closer, when you realize there is no possession, only ever drawing near.
I lie back in the wet grass and my eyes close into his image. At the sea, where he taught me to swim; in Kenya, in the long savannah; at the races, in the coat I am wearing; young, digging in the garden; old, bedridden, eyes full of questions about what his body could no longer do. I open my eyes to the bright white light: they say that is what you see before death, but here it is only sky. Then, land falls in, big chunks of it, rolling and coming to rest in the valley, tied in a deep knot of itself. And it is no longer about what I know but what I have the capacity to feel. And, oh God, let’s all have a capacity to feel. Let our work be towards expanding our capacity of feeling.
I write, slowly, the names of my family on the grass. From my father to the first traced descendant, Mary Burnett, and before her, to Beornhard, the warrior. Sometimes, ink won’t settle in the wetness of the grass and I have to wait, then slowly begin again. I continue with the Archers; my grandmother; ba
ck to Samuel from Sheldon; back to Edward, first yeoman at Christow. My fingers numb and lock and it is difficult to move. I wait, then slowly begin again. When it is done, I rest on my knees and call out to my father. To my family. To the ground that gives and takes them. The smell of the grass is sweet and full of earth and flower, water seeps in at my knees and I am all dew all field all hope. More than the day is beginning. Morning fire smudged to pastel, dusting over hedges. Sun-gasp. Electric orb fringed by field. That great sun going on. A perfect round, pulsing to skylark’s flight, unending light. That great continuing. Glow.
Notes
EPIGRAPHS
1 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: First Mariner Books, 2003; first published 1962), p. 53.
Monica Gagliano, ‘Plant Communication’, Monica Gagliano Online, at
Enid Blyton, The Magic Faraway Tree (London: Egmont, 2014; first published 1943), pp. 9–10.
1 ACREAGE
1 Donald Burnett, A History of the People and Parish of Ide (Exeter: Strangaton Books, 1992). Subsequently abbreviated in the text as History. Quotations from my father in italics refer either to this book or, as the context should make clear, to Donald Burnett, The Archers of the Teign Valley (n.p., n.d.).
The Grassling Page 16