The incident with the cheese has made us late, and by the time we arrive at the market it is already full of stallholders setting up their wares under green-and-white-striped umbrellas. The sun is beating down on the old stable yard as Dennis, who's recently had a hip replacement, and I, with my limp, start carting trays of herbs and plants across the cobbles towards our stand. Our second disaster of the morning: we've forgotten to load the trestle and have to borrow a small table from the National Trust. We can't fit much on it, just half a dozen herbs, four boxes of eggs, a small pile of recipe booklets, a selection of sweet herb biscuits and a dish of herb dip with some cracked biscuits. We arrange the trays of flowering white daisies and purple osteospermums, chives, parsley, rosemary, basil, sage, oregano, thyme, coriander and chervil on the ground around us. When we've finished, I walk back to the archway to inspect our efforts. The stall looks good and inviting, a leafy contrast to the tables bearing rows of jams and honey, cheeses, pies and tarts and cakes, or the mobile icetrays full of pork or lamb or water buffalo, or the table groaning with handmade chocolates which is next to the one selling fish from Bridport. The edible samples smell delicious: scallop shells full of prawns, slivers of squid in oil and smoked trout pate, chunks of black, bitter chocolate, little wedges of ewes' milk cheese, squares of stoneground brown bread spread with local organic butter, slices of hot sausage flavoured with apple, leek and herbs, crispy bacon which you can skewer on a toothpick, broken water biscuits to dip in jars of strawberry and raspberry jams.
As we wait for the market to open I walk round the stalls, saying hello to the stallholders I've come to know over the summer: Sue and Keith Warrington, Andrew Moore and his wife Lavinia, and Tanya with her wonderful display of fresh bread and croissants, as well as the organiser, Elaine SpencerWhite. At the water buffalo stand, the whiskered butcher tells me that they expect to take over £1,000 by lunchtime. Then it is ten o'clock and a sudden rush of people surge through the archway into the stable yard, falling on the food stalls with the sort of voracity normally reserved for the first day of the postChristmas sales. Supermarkets might dominate our retail world, but for the first hour of that Saturday morning I reckon any retailer would have been pleased to be there, as money briskly changes hands and food is eagerly stashed away in shopping bags. By providing people with trolleys, supermarkets ensure that people usually buy more than they actually need and I reckon that if there'd been trolleys at Montacute the stalls would have sold out of food within the hour.
Business on our stall is intermittent. Despite my certainty that snacks would boost our income, our piles of biscuits are only rarely sampled and hardly ever seem to translate into a purchase. Dennis and I shelter from the heat and bright light under our stripy umbrella and drink tepid water out of plastic bottles. I ask him if he and Anne are worried that David is overworking and he laughs and shakes his head. 'He's tired, but he's always wanted to do something like this.' David is their eldest child, born in 1968, eighteen years after Dennis and Anne married. They met as teenagers, when Anne lived in Dinnington and Dennis in the nearby village of Kington. Anne and her sisters would bicycle to Dinnington to catch the bus to Taunton on a Saturday afternoon to go shopping. Dennis and his mates would whistle at the three long-legged blondes as they cycled by. Their first date was a walk around the village. They married when she was nineteen and Dennis was twenty. Dennis's job as a cowman, and Anne's looking after the calves, meant six-and-a-half days' work a week, including weekends, bank holidays, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. His first job in the early 1960s paid £12 per week; his second, towards the end of the decade, paid £22. The days would start with bringing seventy cows in from the field, milking them, turning them out again, trimming feet, performing artificial insemination, cleaning and washing the milking parlour, hauling the churns out on to the roadside stand for the delivery lorries. They lived on the farms where they worked so they'd go home for breakfast and home again for lunch. Then in the afternoon the process would be repeated. 'You worked until the work was done,' he says ruefully. By eleven-thirty, I'm feeling exhausted. Dennis, by contrast, is chipper and engaged.
A couple dragging two thirteen-week-old Labrador puppies on leads stop to buy three rosemary plants and a white daisy. The dogs are soft and cuddly, their coats hanging loose on their bodies, just waiting to be grown into, and it reminds me that before Fat-Boy became an advanced eating machine he cost us hundreds of pounds in ruined shoes, chewed table legs and all the knobs on the lower drawers of a small chest of drawers which we keep cutlery in. The puppies, collapsed on the cobbles and panting from the heat, look incapable of any crime.
Dennis and I make £136.50 in four hours, far less than Sue Warrington with her jams and tarts and cakes and far less than Sue Tutton and her Gloucester Old Spot sausages and burgers. But, on our modest financial scale, it isn't a bad result. Back at home, the village fete is, if not exactly in full swing, at least jostling along merrily. I am pleased to see that myoId black coat with the mink collar has been sold for a tenner. The coat was left behind in the vast cold store beneath Harrods where customers used to pay to store their furs through the summer months to stop the fur from moulting. The fur fridge was in operation for over a hundred years, until one day seven years ago Mohammed Al Fayed decided to stop selling fur in the store and to close down the store room beneath. Coat owners were contacted to come and retrieve their wares but, several months later, Al Fayed was left with about thirty furs in various stages of decrepitude and he handed them out to anyone who came by to visit. I went for lunch with him and he thrust three coats into my arms as I was leaving. They were strangely cut and looked awful. Two were long gone, consigned to the charity store in Westbourne Grove, but the third, which I had worn occasionally, hung on in my wardrobe for years, gathering dust and gradually moulting. I didn't see who had bought it but I wonder if I'll see it around town in the coming winter.
Charlie is doing a brisk trade in raffle tickets and Sophie is serving cream teas with scones and strawberry jam. The bric-a-brac stall, manned by Barbara and Steve and our friend Gillie, is overloaded with the unwanted contents of drawers and cupboards and shelves. There are a pair of green chintz curtains patterned with pink roses, three rolls of white embossed wallpaper, a pair of brass oak-leaf candle-holders, a cream and white wedding hat, a set of Henna Body Art, a thousand-piece jigsaw of the Houses of Parliament still in its plastic wrapper, a watercolour of St Margaret's Bay, Kent, painted by Linnie Watt in 1879, a wine rack, a relaxation bath pillow, a pair of bedside lamps with white shades covered in yellow roses, and two electric hand-mixers with a pictures of Antony Worrall Thompson on the side. The contents of the tables have the same unexpected intimacy that comes from seeing the faded wallpaper of a stranger's bedroom suddenly exposed after a building has been ripped apart by bomb blast.
Daisy has arrived from London while I've been at Montacute and she and her friend Rowland have organised a game of cricket with Miranda's two children, Fen and Jessie (Daisy's niece and nephew), and some other children whose parents have dragged them along to the fete. David has corralled two pigs, a young saddleback and an older Gloucester, behind a wooden gate in our garage and Joss is busy selling tickets to the 'guess the weight of the pig' competition.
I'd wanted to bring the Empress over to the garage so, like her namesake, she could star in a fat pigs event, but she is now too fat to be moved in the small trailer, so smaller pigs were called up for duty. Four people ask Sophie if we're not leaving it a bit late in the day to kill the Gloucester ready for the evening's hog roast, which, as she says, just goes to show that even in the heart of the country, people know astonishingly little about how food gets to their plates.
It isn't the hottest day of June, but out in the full glare of the sun the temperature is in the mid-eighties and our wood garden becomes a welcome retreat from the glare. In the three years since we first hacked out the brambles, cut down the trees that were crowding too close and built the paths and the pond, n
ature has reasserted herself and the dense greenness of it all is like a plunge into cool water, the foliage muffling and muting any noise. The willow house looks slightly crazy, with the springy leaves clustering towards the light on the top of the house, leaving bare branches down below, but the plants round the pond, the gunneras, the twisted willow, the marsh marigolds, the wild irises, with their soft blue petals marbled with delicate black veins, and the smaller marsh primulas all look like they have been growing there for years. There are ferns, which unfold their curled-up tips every spring, there is an Indian bean tree whose autumn flowers smell like lily-of-the-valley, there are some spiky dark-green hollies, red-stalked brambles, day lilies in huge clumps and hostas in their myriad shades of green. The sunlight filters through the trees, casting shadows and reflecting off the pond. It is amazing how the plants are growing to fill the spaces between the trees, forming their own complicated patchwork on the ground. In a few years, the shrubs and small trees will reach upward to fill in the air beneath the overhead canopy. Here there are no straight lines: the paths bend and weave, the outline of the pond is the sort of wobbly circle a child might draw and the great big chairs made out of tree trunks are rough and misshapen. But it is lovely and it's our creation, something we've watched grow and change, seeing how the light plays along the edges of the trees, never the same at any hour of the day. Standing in the wood, looking out at the park, where some twenty people are eating cream teas sitting at trestle tables, it feels like being underwater, the bright intense light mercifully out of reach.
By 7.30 p.m., Sophie and I have set up the pig roast on the grass outside the village hall. We've heated up three of the huge joints, weighing about twenty pounds apiece, in our oven at home. I didn't realise that the small kitchen in the hall doesn't have an oven and I've had to beg oven space off Margaret Morgan, whose house adjoins the gravelled car park. By eight o'clock there's a hungry line of people scooping up chunks of pork, placing them on fresh white baps, then smothering the meat with apple sauce and stuffing, coleslaw and lettuce, which we picked from the garden moments before leaving. Sophie carves the pork and I sit behind the bowl of stuffing, ladling out portions as I am worried that it will run out if left to a free-for-all. For fifty quid, I've hired the services of Ron, a musician from Beaminster who plays a medley of tunes on his accordion. 'My Old Man Said Follow the Van' flows into 'Galway Bay', then 'Roger de Coverley'. Inside the marquee David has laid out straw bales for seats, and by nine o'clock there must be over one hundred grown-ups and children, eating and laughing, and jigging around the tent to the strains of Ron's increasingly Scottish airs.
Inside the village hall there's a small, cosy bar, home of the Whitelackington Social Club. Behind the bar, there's a row of upended bottles along the wall: Glenlivet, Famous Grouse, Bell's, Smirnoff, Martini. On the wall beside the bottles there's an old black and white picture of one of the village houses on fire. Underneath it says 'Fire at Bill Spinks' Forge, 1935.' Another depicts the fallen Monmouth Tree, site of a legendary meal eaten by the Duke of Monmouth when he stayed at Whitelackington Manor in 1680. Legend has it that a great lunch took place under the spreading shade of a chestnut tree, thought to have been planted in the Norman Conquest. It grew to over fifty feet with a girth of twenty-five feet. Monmouth drew a crowd of two thousand who pushed over a hundred yards of wooden palings in their eagerness to hear him speak. The tree survived another two hundred years and was then destroyed in a hurricane on Ash Wednesday 1897. There are two well-loved pictures in the hall, one showing all the villagers outside the hall celebrating the Queen's Jubilee in 1977 and another showing the village again, twenty-three years later at the millennium. But tonight they're nowhere in sight, safely tidied away to make space on the walls for the paintings and photographs on display for the art show. I find a small watercolour of our house, painted the previous summer by Penny Hawkins, and I buy it for Charlie for our seventh wedding anniversary the following weekend.
I like being in the village, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have liked the village at all when I was twenty-one. I like the feeling of safety it gives me, of being part of a continuous line of people who've lived, worked, partied, married and died within the confines of this single street with its single row of small houses. It's a feudal place where Ewen, our landlord, still owns many of the houses, as his mother and grandfather did before him, but it's all well looked after, with pretty gardens and neat front gates and a sense of knowing who everyone is and where they fit in. Its cosiness could alternately succour or swamp you, and I find myself thinking of the quote from Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon that hangs on the wall of my study to the left of the window which looks out over our London garden:
Only part of us is sane; only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
If Professor Lovelock is right, then the human race is hellbent on choosing the latter option, and I know that in my life I have veered between the two, frequently pulling the plug on safety and contentment for the seductive dangers of unknown shores. The older I get, the more I realise that planning the future is a largely useless exercise, as full of the possibility of disappointment as of fulfilment. The Buddha knew that all we can really count on is today and, just for today, I am happy and I am where I want to be and that, for now, is enough.
12
The Return of the Large Blue
Charlie and I spend the evening of our seventh wedding anniversary, 1s July 2006, crouched together on a tartan rug, waiting and watching out for badgers. We are with my old friend Mike McCarthy, who was the news editor at the Independent on Sunday when I first became editor and is now the environment editor of the daily paper. Mike and his two children, Flora and Sebastian, are sitting on an adjacent rug, under an overhanging tree beside a stretch of open water in nearby woods. David has assured us that it is a good place to see badgers.
There is a strong smell in the air, not the sharp, slightly acrid earthiness of foxes, but certainly of a wild animal. The day has been hot and the sky is quite clear of clouds. A fuzzy crescent moon is slowly shifting through the lower part of the sky, moving towards the west as the darkness falls. We sit quietly, listening to the furious chattering of the rooks, the crows and the ra vens who are settling for the night in the trees above our heads. The darkness comes gradually, gently sucking the blue out of the sky and reducing the trees to outlines, just shapes, the curves broken by tendrils and branches. As the details fade, the English woodlands become as thick as any tropical jungle. A heron flies across the pond, its cry more like a dog's bark than a bird's call; settles heavily on to the branch of the fir tree that hangs over the water and perches there, poised against the darkening sky like a Japanese painting. Suddenly, the birds fall silent, as though they've all decided it is time to go to sleep, and in the sudden silence we hear rustling noises from the trees behind.
Charlie sees it first: a snout peeking out from the long grass and the brambles which edge the wood, barely discernible amid the dark shadows of the overhanging branches. But then it moves forward and is out on the path in front of us. It isn't a big badger; he was probably born earlier this year and he moves at a fast trot, low slung to the ground, his thick tail bumping along behind him. Flora and Sebastian gasp. He looks almost pure black but a badger's fur is actually white with black tips, and as he moves there is an occasional flash of lightness. He heads first towards the pond, but then he hears us or senses us nearby and breaks into a run, passing in front of us towards a dense thicket of brambles.
Round us, badgers are the most common road kill. Several times, driving home late at night down narrow Somerset lanes, we've come ac
ross one on the road, startled in the car's headlights. My friend John Mitchinson, who lives in my cousin's village of Great Tew, has eaten badger ham, which he said was delicious, and we once sat next to a woman at a Sunday lunch party who claimed to have made an edible stew from a dead badger she picked up off the road. We stay there in the darkness long after the badger has made his brief appearance. Flora and Sebastian fall asleep. I watch the moon move across the sky towards the west, sinking lower and lower till it disappears below the level of the trees and the blackness becomes complete.
The following day we meet Martin Warren, head of butterfly conservation in Britain, and Jeremy Thomas, author of Butterflies of Britain and Ireland, to visit the sites where the Large Blue, officially extinct in 1979, has been reintroduced to the countryside. We meet in the car park behind the pub in Compton Dundon, a small village just north of Somerton. Our destination is a steep bank at the southern end of the nearby Polden Hills. We climb up a hilly path, through tangled trees and bristly shrubs where wild pale-blue irises peek out of the boggy places under the heavy branches, through a hunting gate and on to a dramatically sloping, south-facing meadow above the railway line where the London-Penzance train, the First Great Western, whistles by every twenty minutes or so. The precipitous field is carved into tiny terraces, created over the centuries by snowfalls and etched further by the travels of sheep. At first site it looks uninspiring, just an ordinary meadow, the grass kept trimmed by grazing sheep, a scattering of trees and brambles breaking up the turf. But in the hands of our guides, it becomes anything but, and for a moment I'm transported back to that day in Africa, looking down at the insects with Daisy beside me, touching my elbow and saying, 'Mum, it's nature's SimCity.'
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 27