Notes from a Summer Cottage

by Nina Burton

  Copyright

  Mudlark

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  First published by Mudlark 2021

  FIRST EDITION

  © Nina Burton 2021

  Translation © Rachel Willson-Broyles 2021

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

  Cover illustration © Tom Haugomat/Handsome Frank

  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

  Nina Burton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  Source ISBN: 9780008467036

  Ebook Edition: July 2021 ISBN: 9780008467043

  Version: 2021-05-24

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  Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008467036

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Readers

  Introduction – Into Nature

  1 The Blue Roof

  2 Wingbeats at the Door

  3 The Ants on the Wall

  4 A Veranda with a Sea View

  5 The Power of a Wild Ground

  6 The Guardian Tree

  Author’s Note

  Bibliography

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Into Nature

  Invisible and flourishing, fighting and loving – the many lives of Earth seethed around me. As a child I had registered my presence in the world by writing down my name, address and the specification ‘Earth’ in order to expand the walls around the centre of it all: me. I had questions when it turned out that other people, too, saw themselves as the focal point of the world. And, as if that wasn’t enough, humans were not even the only protagonists – nature was full of them.

  And what was nature? People said it was the environment and the outdoors, or the traits you were born with, but at the same time it seemed to have to do with endless birth, for ‘nature’ is akin to ‘nativity’. In short, it was boundless life with billions of centres, all sparking with significance, each one moving to its own rhythms and perspectives until it was impossible to take it all in at once.

  I studied the humanities course at upper-secondary school but took biology as an elective, and it was then, thanks to Linnaeus and Darwin sorting us among the animals, that I realised we humans belonged to nature. Later, I studied literature and philosophy at university, certain that this combination would lead me to answers about life. But literature mostly focused on individuals, and by that point philosophy was about abstractions. I longed to go back to the ancient Greek philosophers who posed questions about nature. Democritus wrote on atoms and stars; Thales knew all there was to know about water; Anaximander guessed, based on fossils, that we were distantly related to fish; and Heraclitus saw that everything shared the changeable nature of the rivers.

  After them came Aristotle with his enthusiasm for every facet of life, from physics and meteorology to language and poetry. His interests were united in two Greek words: bio for life, and logos for word or reason. Each could be linked with other words, such as when they were combined to form ‘biology’. Since he didn’t want to live solely among theories, he retreated for a year to the island of Lesbos to study nature in a more concrete way. While his student Theophrastus sorted out the relation of plants to their environment, Aristotle devoted himself to the animals, and he charted their anatomy and development so meticulously that not only did he found the discipline of zoology – in many cases, his conclusions would hold water into our era.

  While he started with ‘the animal we know best’, that is, humans, he later moved on to other species, for our greatness needed not diminish other creatures. He studied songbirds and doves, crows and woodpeckers, ants and bees, cephalopods and whales, foxes and other four-legged animals. He described the life cycle of the cicada and saw that snakes mated by winding around one another; dissected fertilised eggs and found that embryos already had eyes, veins and beating hearts. He wondered about heredity and suspected that it depended upon something he called eidos, imagining the concept as analogous to the order of letters in a word, and in doing so he came close to an explanation of hereditary DNA.

  What was the driving force behind all of this life? Aristotle believed that each creature, while it lived, had a sort of soul that animated its matter and guided nutrients through its body. To him, it seemed nature had a unique ability to create ever more complex organisms, and since all of them must adapt to their environments, it was the environment that was the greatest determinant. It was like a household – arguments might arise, but there was still cooperation. Just like the sun and moon and stars, each part of the house had its role to play. All in all, this provided a context and a balanced framework for life, almost like the walls of a house, and, in fact, the Greek word for house, oikos, later gave us the word ‘ecology’.

  I was not a stranger to nature, even though I was a child of the city. We never had our own summer house, but during summer holidays Mum would rent us a countryside cottage somewhere or another, and a similar tradition continued once my sister got married abroad. She remedied her homesickness by renting Swedish summer homes, which I shared with her and the children before her husband’s holiday time began.

  For my own part, I spent about thirty years with successive live-apart partners who had their homes in the countryside. My interests had, in turn, been divided between them, for one, as an author, knew how words can broaden the world; the other, as a biologist, was familiar with the connections of nature. Like Doctor Dolittle, he gained the trust of animals and was even able to pet a capercaillie cock that had taken a liking to his porch. I myself mostly encountered the wild animals in the biologist’s extensive library.

  In other words, I had often been a guest in nature. I only became more than that after Mum’s death, when we exchanged her apartment for a summer cottage. As in life itself, it was an inheritance that brought something new, and it manifested in different ways. For my sister, the cottage meant holidays with children and grandchildren, and for me it was a place to retreat with my manuscripts. After all, I wanted to write about nature and life. Could the cottage be the perfect place to do just that?

  The cottage was situated on a large plot with a lively atmosphere. A small, mossy hill climbed from the south side, among pines and oaks, and to the west were hints of secret paths through
blueberry thickets. To the north, the plot steeply abutted some public land, with the sparkling waters of a sound as a backdrop. The boundary lines were unmarked, so everything was at once private and open.

  The property itself may have felt large, but the cottage was small in comparison. It was a single room that had been constructed on a whim in the traditional summer-cottage way and built out accordingly; the glass of the veranda replaced with walls to fit two bunk beds, and a kitchen and bathroom were added later in a small extension. After that, the topography prevented any further building.

  Instead, the property had small outbuildings in each corner. In one was the former privy, transformed into a tool shed; in another was a carpentry shed next to an open storage shed. In the third corner, a small hut had served as a playhouse, and in the fourth corner was a small bunkhouse that I quietly designated a writing nook.

  It was only natural for there to be certain shortcomings, especially given that the property had come with an exclusion clause. The carpenter who was brought in even muttered that it would be preferable to build new. How upsetting. Couldn’t he see the idyll? What did he see?

  Apparently, in any case, a number of repairs would be necessary. I was truly happy to deal with the craftsmen, for my books, too, feel like constructing buildings. Since the blueprints are always new, I must feel my way forward, and it’s tricky to find the right proportions among different materials. So, I spend time at my desk working on problems of craftsmanship, on a daily basis.

  I had a couple of projects that should be put to bed before I could devote myself to life and nature. One of them was about the way rivers run through both nature and culture, while the other was about how humanism in the Renaissance period united the humanities and the natural sciences. Erasmus of Rotterdam, who breathed fresh life into the essay genre, had become my hero, but I was also fascinated with the great encyclopaedist Conrad Gessner. Like Aristotle, Gessner was a student of half a dozen subjects, from zoology to philology. He wrote about thousands of plants and thousands of authors, and the relationships between animal species inspired him to examine the relationships between over a hundred languages.

  I’ve always sympathised with the concept of encyclopaedias. It gives equal weight to both big and small, for there are no main characters – rather, it allows for a presentation of the world from various angles. To me, Gessner’s perspective was echoed in the scope of life. I could devote only a few chapters to him in my Renaissance book, but I liked his methods of uniting creatures and languages, plants and literature.

  The breadth of his seventy volumes would, of course, never fit in the tiny writing nook on the property, and the surroundings probably didn’t accommodate many species either. And would I even comprehend their communication? What I knew about life on Earth had been transmitted to me by a human alphabet. The creatures that flew and crept, climbed and swam around me must have their own language, one that was suited for nature. They could literally be down-to-earth or light and winged, if they didn’t venture forth tentatively like roots. So how would I discover animals with languages older than the alphabet? Differences generally erect walls between separate worlds.

  But, as so often in life, this problem would provide its own solution.

  Chapter One

  The Blue Roof

  You could say I got to know the cottage from above. The roof was the first thing the tradesmen looked at because the roofing felt needed to be replaced and the insulation supplemented. When an infrared camera was aimed up from inside the cottage the image turned the lavender-blue of a February evening. It indicated a massive amount of cold coming in. There was also the occasional small yellow blob among the blue, and since yellow meant heat there must have been remnants of insulation up there. The images got me to thinking. Here and there around the house lay tufts of insulation, like little fallen clouds. How had they got there? Surely they hadn’t been blown out somehow?

  The tradesmen would return in late March, and in order to meet them I slept over in the cottage. This was the first time I had done so, and there was still a winter chill, so as the radiators warmed up I went for a walk in the surrounding countryside. The light threw even the tiniest gravel pebble into shadows and relief on the bare ground where everything was ready to be adorned with life. A great tit warbled above a patch of coltsfoot, and lots of other things were surely taking form inside buds and cones bursting with seed. It felt as if a thousand discoveries awaited.

  Back in the cottage, I made it just a little warmer by turning on the stove. As the water boiled for spaghetti, I dug through a few moving boxes from Mum’s apartment. There was still a great deal to organise, but I planned to spend the evening relaxing and reading. The silence felt restful and was a good match for the book I’d brought along; it was about outer space.

  After all, it was far out in space that the building blocks of life had once been born of a cosmos no greater in size than a fist. For one extraordinary second it was clasped hard around the coming galaxies and a limitless future. And then an eternal crescendo broke out. From a tangible beginning came a sky so brimful with stars, stars that spent some billions of years producing carbon and oxygen, silver and gold, and all the other ingredients necessary for life. Even the protons and electrons in my own body were once matter of radiation in space. All in all, then, I could consider myself a byproduct of dead stars, or perhaps a collection of their raw materials. There’s plenty of it, for millions of tonnes of cosmic materials are still arriving on Earth.

  I closed my eyes to think. From the perspective of the book I was reading, the Earth was part of an immense cycle of elementary particles that could be combined into rock, water, plants or animals. And as our fickle forms flickered by, our solar system made yet another circuit around the centre of the Milky Way. That circuit took between 225 and 250 million years and is called a galactic year.

  Out in space, stars and planets moved like parts of a massive clockwork. Like all timepieces, it gets out of alignment from time to time, which explains why the moon is slowly distancing itself from us. For the present moment it wasn’t changing much, as the distance only increases by four centimetres per year.

  As the book painted me a picture of these proportions, space expanded the walls of the cottage. Even the smallest object, according to the astronomer author, could contribute to the bigger picture. If, for example, you were to hold a coin about a metre in front of your eyes, a hundred thousand galaxies could fit behind it, and each galaxy, in turn, would consist of hundreds of billion of stars. In our own Milky Way, the stars are scattered across such a vast area that the light from some of them has been travelling our way for millions of years. In the meantime, the stars themselves have died, but their light lives on in more or less the same way that old records carry on the music of dead musicians.

  Where is that light going? Space has no centre point; it appears to be the same in every direction. I gave a melancholy thought to the probe that had been launched with a picture of two people onboard. Wasn’t it a bit presumptuous to think of this as the most important information about Earth? And if there even was language in space, surely it was of a different character to our own. It was a world we had approached with mathematics rather than with words.

  Perhaps a better introduction would have been NASA’s recording of the electromagnetic vibration of Earth. It has been transformed into sound and when I heard this murmuring harmony with no beginning or end, I was moved in a particular way. Was this how we had imagined the music of the spheres? Kepler had speculated that Saturn and Jupiter were basses, while Earth and Venus were altos, Mars was a tenor and Mercury had the descant. I didn’t know how they sounded in reality, but NASA’s version of the song of Earth gave me a sense of our planet’s life forms as both lovely and fragile.

  Could I see any stars out there? I put down my book and went outside to stand there for a while with my jacket over my shoulders. According to the book I was
reading, 90 per cent of the population of western Europe could no longer see a true starry sky, for the sky has been blotted out by our artificial lights. Certainly, space is dominated by darkness, but if we are, in fact, made of the stuff of stars, it might be fun to have a look at them. Only the North Star was faintly visible, twinkling through the atmosphere.

  However, I could see something closer out of the corner of my eye. Wasn’t that a shadow fluttering by? Were there bats here? I had mixed feelings about bats. They’re the only mammal that has successfully conquered the air, and they are masterful flyers. Unlike birds, they have no feathers – just wings of bare skin stretched taut between the thumb and four fingers of their hands. The skin then extends all the way to the bones of their feet to give them a broader wingspan. And that’s not all. Their winged hands manoeuvre faster in the air than my fingers can move on a computer keyboard.

  For their part, bats communicate with rapid-fire ultrasound that probes the darkness where moths are foraging. Their personal communications, though, are more physical in nature and involve audible chattering. For instance, a female bat has been observed giving hands-on birthing assistance to a relative by first demonstrating how the body should be positioned to help the young come out more easily, and then receiving the young herself. It was not unlike a human birth. So why do warm, hairy bats seem so strange to us? Is it because we associate them with nighttime, when we retire and our senses are asleep?

  After a while, I went in and lay down in one of the bunk beds. Although it was cramped, it also felt snug, as though someone else were in the top bunk. Warm bodies are protection against the desolate enormity and silence of outer space.

  But suddenly I heard a sound very close by. Was that someone moving around on the roof above? I hardly thought it was a bat, so what was it? Since it was too dark to see anything outside I tried to fall asleep, although I longed for the morning light.