by Neil Ansell
They didn’t all make it. One year, on the twenty-foot slab of exposed rock beside my fruit tree, where the mosses and liverworts grew, I found the bloody stump of a young hare’s hind leg. Dropped there by a buzzard, I supposed, or perhaps by a hawk. I was fairly sure it had been carried there rather than killed there, as there was no sign of plucked fur, or any other remains. Just that one solitary paw. The next year, I found a skinned leveret on the track in front of the cottage. The skin was inside out, with the fur facing inwards like the wool on a sheepskin coat. The head had been eaten, but all four paws were snapped off and still attached. It was a neat job, the work of a badger, I thought, rather than a fox. Badgers didn’t often approach this close to the cottage — only once had I gone out at night and surprised one at my fence — but this drama had taken place right outside my window, in the deep darkness while I slept, and I had not been disturbed.
One late-autumn day I opened the back door to fetch some water, and there was a young hare sat on my back step. Save for the twitching of its nose, it froze in position as if I had surprised it as it was about to knock. It was already the size of a full-grown rabbit, and its black-tipped ears were longer than any rabbit’s would ever be. I stood there and waited for it to flush. After a while I began to doubt that it would, and squatted down to its level for a closer look, eye to eye. It stared back at me apparently unconcerned, chewing silently, with bulging eyes that were such a rich golden colour they were almost orange, with black depths like the keyhole of a door to another world. I tried to imagine what might be going on in its mind, whether it might be ill or injured, and considered what might happen if I tried to pick it up. It seemed like a risky survival strategy, to trust in your camouflage when you are sitting on a doorstep, and I wondered if its sibling had done the same when it had been caught out by a badger on my track. As I touched the little hare, it burst into life and raced away at incredible speed, turning on a pin at the corner of the cottage. I dashed after it and was in time to see it clear my drystone wall, fence and all: a perfect arc of perhaps twenty feet. The next day the young hares had gone from my front field, scattered. They were close to adulthood now, ready to begin their wanderings, and I wouldn’t see a single hare again until Christmas.
That was my fourth autumn at the cottage, and I felt that I had the measure of life there. All my systems were in place for the months of austerity to come. My woodshed was well stocked with drying logs; what had needed harvesting from the garden vegetable patches was stored away in the pantry; I had my thirty jars of jam, my selection of pickled and dried wild mushrooms. But there are some things you cannot prepare for. There was another storm coming: my own personal fall. I became ill. Of course I had been ill at the cottage before with colds and fevers — though admittedly not as frequently as when I was surrounded by people and more exposed to infection — and I would just keep myself warm and weather it out. This was something else altogether: a whole range of symptoms that I struggled to make any sense of, or even, to begin with, to recognize as signs of illness.
At night I found myself lying awake for hours, tossing and turning restlessly, or staring up into the dark, waiting until I could begin to make out the cracks in the ceiling and could justify to myself that it was now daytime and I could reasonably get up. I no longer slept for more than an hour or two each night, and, though I might feel physically exhausted in the daytime as a result, I never felt tired enough to sleep then. Instead, I felt jittery and on edge; I twitched and fiddled and fidgeted and couldn’t sit still for a minute. I became aware of a constant nervous tremor, like a vibration that ran right through me, to the bone. And I became almost fearful, of nothing. It felt as though there was a dark shadow that kept falling over me from somewhere behind me, from something just out of view.
This was not the self I thought I knew. I simply could not accept me as this bag of nerves; in my mind, at least, I had always been the calmest and most even-tempered person in the room, someone who could cope with whatever life threw at them. A friend once asked me if I didn’t sometimes get afraid, living the way I did. I was bemused, and I couldn’t begin to understand what he was talking about. He had to spell it out for me: I lived all alone on a remote mountainside, far from any help, in a creaky old house with cobwebs and flickering candlelight and a loft full of bats. And I had to admit that it had never crossed my mind to think of it like that; it hadn’t occurred to me that people might consider any of these elements something you could be afraid of. To my eyes it was just me, at home, getting on with my life.
But now I began to consider something I would never have thought possible previously: that I was having some kind of nervous breakdown. I looked at my life to see if there were any hidden points of stress that might have had this effect on me, and I could find nothing. My life might have been physically demanding at times, but that was as far as it went; the way I saw it, I was leading a life without any stress whatsoever. I began to wonder whether it might in fact be the total absence of stress that was the problem.
In the end, what took me to the doctor was the realization that I was losing weight, a lot of weight, and not for want of eating; I had been behaving like a squirrel getting ready to hibernate for the winter, eating four or five substantial meals a day and still being hungry at the end of them. I wasn’t sure how long this had been going on, and it probably took longer for me to recognize the change than it would have done for anyone else. I never looked in a mirror and of course had no bathroom scales — I didn’t even have a bathroom. Nor did I have anyone around to tell me I looked different, so it was only when I noticed that my ribs were protruding that I took note of what was happening. I set off down the hill, over the suspension bridge across the river and to the main road, where I hitched up-valley to the town where I was registered with a doctor. This was not the town I occasionally went to for shopping, but it was a more straightforward hitch, along just one road. I had a good relationship with my doctor; when I had first gone to register he had seen my name and come out to see if it was really me. We had been school friends, and our very different paths in life had ended up delivering us both to the same place, at the same time. I didn’t know quite what I was going to say to him when I saw him this time.
He was able to make a provisional diagnosis before I had even arrived at his surgery. He saw me from his window, walking up the driveway in jeans and a T-shirt. As he pointed out to me later, everyone else was already dressed in overcoats and scarves, hats and gloves. I had been vaguely aware of this myself, but had assumed this was because my time on the hill had made me hardy, while others had gone soft from years of central heating and running hot water. He took my temperature — way too high — and my pulse — way too fast, fluttering like the heart of a bird. Then he showed me the swelling in my neck where my thyroid gland was swollen to twice its normal size. There followed batteries of tests, visits to hospital, stays in hospital, and though I was able to recover without needing an operation, I required heavy doses of drugs over many months to reduce the inflammation.
It shook me to the core. I had thought I knew exactly who I was, but it turned out that a minute chemical imbalance in my body could turn my whole life out of balance and change me into a different person altogether. We tend to think of the self as something fixed, the bottom line, but it seemed now to be the most fragile of constructs. It was not until my metabolic hormones started to regain their natural equilibrium that I began to drift back towards becoming the relaxed person I had always known. So perhaps this was my default setting after all, the place I came back to when all was well with the world; perhaps this is as much as we can hope for, that the person we find when we come looking for ourselves is conditional at best.
That autumn, however, while I was ill, all my certainties blew away with the falling leaves. I was not as independent as I had thought, not as self-sufficient. The drug treatment I was on left me weak and lacking in energy; the walk to the village shop felt like an ordeal; I didn’t have enough
concentration to keep my journal, or even to read. I had friends that would have happily lent me some support, but they were far away. I had made no effort to create any sort of support network where I was. Quite the reverse: as the years had gone by I had isolated myself further and further as I grew more and more habituated to the solitary life. I had made one friend on the estate within walking distance, the sort of friend I could drop in on when passing by, and my landlord and landlady would generously offer to take me into town if I needed a shopping run or a hospital visit. But other than that I was on my own.
It would have been the sensible time to leave the cottage, but I didn’t do that. I would be there for another eighteen months yet. Perhaps it was stubbornness, but I wanted to jump rather than be pushed. The winter to come would not be the hardest in terms of the harshness of its weather, but it would undoubtedly be my hardest test. I tried to keep to my habit of going out each day, even if the walk to my postbox was as far as I could manage, or perhaps the river on a good day. Otherwise I would move slowly through my day, doing what I had to do to keep myself alive. Fire, water, food, sleep. I was not unhappy. From my window seat I watched the world outside, and the struggle for survival that was played out daily on my bird table.
What remains if you peel away all those things that help you think you know who you are? If one by one you strip away your cultural choices, the validation you get from the company of your peer group, the tools you use for communication? Then what is left behind? If you had asked me that three or four years earlier, when I was just arriving at Penlan, I imagine that I would have guessed: your true self. But I soon found that in fact I rapidly became less and less self-aware; my attention was elsewhere, on the outside. And now that circumstances had forced me to look inward once again, it was to discover that there was perhaps no fixed self to find. So what was there instead? Now, more than ever, I had the sense that my life was not so very different from that of the birds fluttering on my bird-feeder, as though a boundary between us had been broken.
Though I could not be persuaded to leave the hill for my months of convalescence, there was one respect in which I gave in to pressure: I got myself a phone. With no electricity or water at the cottage, it seemed anomalous that there was a long trail of telegraph poles already in place, spaced along the top edge of Penlan Wood, then sloping off down the hill to meet the lanes by my postbox. If those poles had not already been there then connection would have been prohibitively expensive, as nowadays you have to pay per pole — and it took an awful lot of them to link me up to the line that ran alongside the lanes — but long ago, when telecommunications were about to be privatized and it was the final chance to take advantage of the flat fee for connection to any address, a line had astutely been strung to every building on the estate, in case it was ever needed. So I had only to pay for the reconnection of an existing service, even though it had never been used before.
I took the decision with a great deal of reluctance; it felt like I was letting myself down. I had always been blithely confident, believing that nothing could possibly go wrong. I would happily scamper about on my shaky woodpile, brandishing my chainsaw and wearing no protective clothing whatsoever, serenely certain that everything would be fine, everything would always be fine. Even though the farmer’s accident with the tractor many years before had proved conclusively that here we were beyond yelling distance of any assistance, I had always felt myself charmed, exempt. But everything had changed with my illness. I could no longer convince myself or others that nothing could go wrong; something had already gone wrong, and it was me.
It took a team of telephone engineers days to get me reconnected. The wire had broken in several places on its way down the hill, and overhanging trees had to be manicured and cut back to give the cable a free run. On the first day the team made the mistake of trying to get to me from the lane by my postbox by driving their Land Rover along the old cart track. It cost them as much to get the farmer to tow them out of the mud with his tractor as it would cost me to get my phone installed. On the second day they came better prepared; they brought two vehicles and drove up to me along the track from the farm, following my directions. One of them still managed to get bogged down in the thick mud of the rutted track in front of the cottage, but they had thought to bring a chain to use as a tow rope, and after much pushing and shoving and spinning of tyres in the churning mud they managed to save themselves the embarrassment of having to go cap in hand to the farmer for the second day running. I don’t know what they must have thought of the way I lived my life. Eventually the job was done and they were gone, leaving nothing but the mess they had made of my track, and my connection to the rest of the world in the shape of one thin wire.
I sat by my fire and tried not to keep glancing over at the phone in the window, the elephant in the room. It lurked on its windowsill, glowering at me reprovingly, ready to shatter the silence and remind me how I had surrendered my higher ideals. Of course I knew it didn’t really lurk, or glower, or reprove; it was only a phone, after all. It wasn’t even about to ring; I hadn’t plugged it in and had no intention of doing so. I would use it for outgoing calls only. But any difference it made to me practically was far outweighed by its psychological impact. My life felt less isolated now, less remote. It felt like the first step of my rehabilitation into the world of men.
As autumn turned to winter I retrenched, withdrew further inside myself. My recovery was slow, and my life became centred around the conservation of energy. Even the walk to the postbox felt like too much of an ordeal. My overcoat came off only when I slept. I felt ill and I felt tired, but I knew what was wrong with me now and I knew that I would recover — it was just a matter of patience. I could wait it out; the days would lengthen again, the sap would rise, and my strength would return. It was all a part of the same cycle, it was all good.
I had not planned to mark Christmas that year, but when I woke on Christmas Eve and looked out to see that several inches of snow had fallen overnight I relented. Of course I already knew there had been a snowfall without having to look out; I would always know from the moment I woke, before I had even opened my eyes. From the snow-light on my eyelids, from the muffled quality of the hush. Even the cold air on my skin was its own peculiar kind of cold. I wrapped up warm and took my bow saw from its hook on the woodshed wall. I would head up the back field to the pine wood at the hilltop ridge. At the northern edge of this wood was a handful of stunted spruces that would never amount to much in such an exposed position. There would be no harm in cutting one, and there was something appealing about marking the depths of winter by bringing a tree into your home. Not just the conifer, but the holly and ivy and mistletoe too, every plant in the woods that stayed green all winter long. It seemed an expression of hope that better days were coming, an act of defiance against the long dark nights.
The snow had not long stopped falling. It was pristine, an open book, an unmarked page. It felt festive: deep and crisp and even. I waded out into it and set off up the back field, in the perfect stillness, the perfect silence. About halfway up the field my foot kicked against a clod hidden beneath the snow. The clod burst into the air, showering me with snow, as if in a surprise snowball attack. It was a hare, the first I had seen since the hare on my back doorstep months before. Perhaps it was even the same animal, there was no way of telling. The hare raced away up the hillside at incredible speed, unhindered by the incline or the deep snow, its forelegs and its hind legs criss-crossing with each bound. I would be able to follow its trail all the way up the hill to the pine wood where I was headed. I looked down at the little impression in the snow where the animal had been sleeping; I squatted down, took off my glove, and felt the hare’s warmth still in the hollow of the grass. It must have settled there at the end of the day, in the middle of the open field. And in the night, when the snow had begun to fall, it had not gone to seek shelter, but had carried on sleeping regardless. As the snowflakes settled on its fur, as the inches of snow slo
wly banked up over it, it had just stayed right where it was.
Epilogue
Penlan Wood is long gone, and I had a hand in its demise. The estate supplied me with a brush cutter, and gave me a season to take out the understorey in preparation for the wood being sold for clear-felling the following year. Before the spruces grew up, the wood must have been an impenetrable thicket of rhododendrons, like the streamside thicket over the old bridge where I liked to sit of an evening. As the spruces had grown tall they had starved the rhododendrons of light, and all that remained of them in the dark heart of the wood were their brittle skeletons. But all around the wood’s fringes they had continued to flourish, and encircled it with a ten-foot-thick belt of tangled branches that was hard to breach. They overhung the wire fence all round the wood, and they overhung the gulley along my side of the plantation where the woodcocks sheltered under their leaves. Rhododendrons are not native, and they are invasive, so they receive a lot of criticism, but their flowers are glorious and they reminded me of the beautiful montane forests of the Himalayas, which is where they originate from, and that felt like a good place to be reminded of.
The next year the team moved in. The timber was shipped out from the bottom of the wood, so I never saw the foresters, and at no point did they need to come along my track. I think they got a good deal; as it had never been thinned they got a lot more timber than they had bargained for. On the day the chainsaws started, a big mixed flock of woodland birds emerged and spent all day milling around my cottage. Tits and finches, woodpeckers, treecreepers, nuthatches, wrens and robins and goldcrests: between fifty and a hundred birds in all. Who would have thought that those few acres of unappealing spruce would have been hiding such large numbers of small birds? The farmer asked the loggers to leave a line of trees at the top of the wood to act as a shelter belt for his sheep. They left rather a generous swathe of mature trees that included the sparrowhawks’ nesting site of at least the past three years, but the change was too much for the hawks and they elected to move elsewhere.