The Wild Silence

by Raynor Winn

  Back in the stifling, cloying heat of the hospital wards, the nurse led me to an office where a doctor was waiting.

  ‘Your mum’s had a stroke, a total anterior stroke. It’s severe and still progressing.’

  ‘Still progressing? But she’s in hospital. Just give her the drugs to stop it.’

  The doctor shook his head, with an expression between sympathy and exasperation.

  ‘What about all the adverts? You know, “act FAST” and save the person. She’s in hospital – how much faster can it get? And total anterior – what on earth does that mean?’

  ‘It’s a large cortical stroke. We don’t know how large until we have the scans, but we can already tell it’s severe and extensive.’

  ‘Extensive?’

  She lay motionless on the bed as it was wheeled back into its place. The occupants of the other beds all watched in silent vigil and I could see the confusion in their faces. This was the respiratory ward; they were used to oxygen masks and nurses, but not this. The nurse drew the blue curtains around us and we were alone. I picked up her hand, lifeless and uncontrolled. The doctor returned with the results and spoke in a hushed voice.

  ‘She appears to have no feeling in her body; she’s totally affected. As I said, it’s a total anterior stroke; it has the effect of a hammer blow to the head. She’s retaining some organ function and her lungs are working; we don’t know how it’s affected her brain, but she’s probably not there. There’s nothing that can be done. It won’t be long; she’ll be gone soon.’

  I stroked the hair back from her closed eyes. She’d always been so concerned about her hair. Always neatly cut, and permed and set in rollers every week. Even in the potato fields she’d worn a headscarf over hair fixed with hairspray. So many of our arguments during my teens had been about the state of my hair.

  ‘Mum, can you hear me? I’m here.’ I held her limp hand, stroking her fingers, still broad and strong. ‘I’m here.’ Her eyes slowly opened; her mouth was moving, but no sound came out, yet I could see her in the blue-grey eyes. Fear, confusion, a panicking wild animal. ‘Mum, you’re on the ward, you’ve had a stroke, but it’s okay, I’m here.’ Then I saw it, a look of horror and recognition, and I felt a spasm of throat-clenching nausea. She was there, present, alive and trapped. ‘Just close your eyes, Mum, try to sleep, it’ll help.’ Help who? It wouldn’t help her.

  As she slept I cut her fingernails, filing them carefully into shape, then painting them with her favourite pearl-pink nail varnish. When I finished I laid her hands back across the bed, their pink tips looking strangely out of place on her wide hands. The lights dimmed for the night, and I sat in the blue cocoon, watching numbers rise and fall on the monitor.

  4. Running

  ‘Don’t go in the woods. The gamekeeper sets traps for the foxes that’ll have your foot off like that.’ Mum claps her hands, locking her fingers together, imitating the gin trap closing and biting off my foot. ‘You know this – how many times do I have to tell you? But get a vase anyway.’

  I carefully place the armful of bluebells on the table and go to the pantry for a vase. I’m still in there when I hear Dad come in.

  ‘What the hell, has she been in the woods again? Get those stinking things out of here.’ Through the crack in the pantry door I can see him sweep the bluebells off the table and throw them into the garden. ‘You, get out of the pantry. You do not, ever, go in the woods. Get your boots on. If you’ve got nothing better to do than that you can come and do some work with me.’

  Two days had passed and Mum was still breathing; the wild, conscious light in her eyes was fading, but her body didn’t let go. She’d been moved to the stroke ward, where the nurses better understood her needs. It seemed her greatest need now was food, but she couldn’t swallow – her throat no longer heard the messages from her brain. That morning they would insert a feeding tube up her nose and down her throat so liquid food could reach her stomach. The night before, the small, dark-haired nurse had explained how it worked. ‘Best not to come in until after the procedure, love. Looks worse than it is; give yourself the morning off.’

  So I went to Black Woods. Drawn there without thinking, without planning, instinctively, compulsively. I’d known the dangers in the woods when I was a child, I’d heard all the warnings, but I went anyway. I had to go. And now, nearly fifty years later, the same pull found me sitting on a rotting branch among the trees. In the spring the woodland would be carpeted with bluebells, thousands, millions of dancing blue heads in every direction. Although there were central strips of dark pine plantation, the bluebells gave away its history as being an ancient deciduous wood. That sense of age was still there, dark, enclosed, protected, other-worldly, and at the centre of that, in the heart of the woods, was the gamekeeper’s territory. That was where the pheasant pens had stood.

  A large cleared area had been surrounded by a high fox-proof fence and within that was a lower fenced section where the wooden pens were. Here the pheasants were reared from tiny chicks to adults. Crouched in the undergrowth, hiding, I’d spent hours watching him caring for the tiny day-old balls of fluff with their distinctive striped backs. As they grew he moved them through the series of pens until they were scrawny, scruffy juveniles old enough to leave the pens. Then they were released, outside the pens but still safe within the high fence. These were tame teenagers, free to roam, but always home for dinner. In the evening, just before dark, the gamekeeper would come with a hessian sack hung over his shoulder, scattering grain on the leaf litter. And whistling. A low repeated monotone whistle, but the birds knew the sound and came running from every direction, hundreds of trusting birds running to their carer, the man who had been their source of protection and food throughout their short lives. I would creep away then, getting back to the farmhouse before dark.

  Back in the woods now I’d picked up a long stick without thinking and scratched through the leaves ahead of me, rhythmically, side to side, mine-sweeping for gin traps as I had as a child. But they were long gone. Sweeping the leaves aside exposed a hole in the ground, a tunnel leading deep into the earth. Much bigger than a rabbit, smaller than a badger: the mouth of a fox den. But there were no foxes there: the entrance was covered in dry leaves; no footprints marked the mud at the entrance. They’d gone, moved on.

  I didn’t need to crawl under the wire fence of the pheasant enclosure; it was broken and curled and I could walk in where the heavy wire gate was swinging off its hinge. Inside the cage, ferns and brambles had reclaimed the woodland floor, but I could still hear the whistle. There would come a day for every group of young pheasants, a day when their flight feathers had grown and the gamekeeper opened the gate. That day he would whistle to them from beyond the pen and they would run out behind him to the wide wood, pecking their corn, oblivious to the gate being shut behind them, totally unaware of what lay ahead. An adult life where they were free. Free to live as wild birds, or to return each night to the corn and the whistle, which they did, every night, trusting the gamekeeper implicitly. Until the day he came without corn, but with noise and dogs to drive them forwards until they burst into flapping, squawking flight at the edge of the wood. On a flight path that took them straight over the waiting guns.

  Something seemed to have changed. The pens had gone, and the pheasants, the foxes and the gamekeeper. It was beyond that, something more, something I couldn’t name. I knew the bluebells were still there, waiting in the cold earth to re-emerge when the days lengthened. Just as they had that day when I’d picked hundreds of them, hoping to fill the dark serious house with their scent, and comfort my mum, crying at the kitchen sink after Dad had thrown a curled torn envelope on the table and stormed out. But as with that day, no amount of bluebells could make this day bright.

  The tubes distended her nostrils, projecting alien tendrils from a face reddened and starting to bruise. I combed her hair, trying to swallow my horror. Her eyes were closed, but as they opened tears were falling and they looked away from m
e. I sat and held her hand with a touch she couldn’t feel.

  ‘All right, dear, all in place now, aren’t we? We’ll try again with your lunch in a minute.’ The nurse turned to me, beckoning me outside the curtain. ‘We don’t think this is going to work – her stomach’s rejecting the food, probably because it’s affected by the stroke too. We’re trying again now, so just go and get a cuppa and the doctor will have a chat with you later.’

  A thought was starting to form, but I crushed it and turned away from its whisper.

  Desperate for air and light, I found myself outside the hospital, walking briskly from the grounds down the path towards the park, past the allotments and up a hill I hadn’t climbed in years. And then I was there. I sat on the stile where a footpath crossed through a hedge of hawthorn and hazel and the town stretched out across a wide river plain below. The first time I climbed that stile I’d been a teenager, decades ago. I’d walked along the muddy path at the edge of town in the dark, but as I stepped over the stile the town was no longer grey and dreary but magically lit with a million lights. He’d caught my hand then, the boy in the trench coat, his hair blowing in the cold wind.

  ‘Wait, wait here, don’t go down the hill yet. Look at this – this is what I wanted to show you. It’s transformed at night, the reality disappears and it becomes this other world.’

  I was going nowhere. It was the most intense moment in my young life as Moth opened his long blue coat to let me shelter inside and we looked out over the glow of the town and the rushing lights on the dual carriageway.

  ‘You know I’ve never felt this before, but I think I love you.’

  I rolled his words in my head, over and over until they grew into a bright ball of warmth. I’d never heard those words spoken before. Not in real life, not in my house, not in my life. They were words from books and films, words that conjured colour and passion and fullness and I let them wash over me, bathing me in a cloak of beauty, safety and possibility.

  I pulled that cloak around me now on a dull, cold January afternoon and let the comfort of it soothe the panic. The stile was rotting, barely taking my weight, and the town hung in dank dampness, the roar of the traffic below increasing. But I could feel the warmth of the cloak that had wrapped me every day since that night and I held it close as I walked back on to the ward and sat in the doctor’s room.

  ‘I’m afraid the feeding tubes aren’t working. Her stomach is rejecting the food. Now, we’re not sure if that’s because the whole stomach has stopped functioning, or just the upper part.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ He was so casual, so matter of fact: was he saying what I thought?

  ‘We think the nose tubes should be removed as it’s clearly causing her distress.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘We can surgically insert a tube into her stomach, but there are problems with that. Still, we’ll be doing the best we can.’

  I couldn’t grasp what he was saying – problems?

  ‘I can’t take any more of this niceness. Just tell me what’s happening. Tell me the truth.’

  ‘The problem is if we insert the tube her body might continue to reject the food. And if it doesn’t then there’s still the problem of infection. Eventually, at some point, infection will be the cause of death.’

  I couldn’t speak, but became transfixed by the shape of his mouth as the words continued to fall out. Textbook words that he was totally unmoved by, but I’d asked for them.

  ‘What will happen if you don’t do the surgery?’

  ‘The stroke will kill her. She can’t survive for long, it’s too severe.’

  ‘So you’re saying she can’t survive, it’s just a matter of now, or later.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But infection will eventually kill her if you use the tube. When, how long?’

  ‘Nine months maximum, that’s if her stomach doesn’t reject the liquid and if her digestive system is still working.’

  ‘And if you don’t use the tube?’

  ‘We’ll stop the antibiotics and the fluid drip, the pneumonia will return and due to the inability to swallow she’ll aspirate.’

  ‘Aspirate?’

  ‘Choke on her own saliva. She’ll probably die in two to three days.’

  Those words again. It had taken months after Moth’s diagnosis for the nightmares about the meaning of those words to stop. I tried to close my mind to the sound of them. But the words reared back into my consciousness with their roaring whisper.

  ‘Why would you do that? Why would you stop the antibiotics and the fluid – that seems insane?’

  ‘Because without the stomach tube she’ll starve to death, so we’ll be moving into a phase of non-intervention unless there’s some other organ failure before then.’

  ‘Well, what do you think should be done?’

  ‘We think we should insert the tube, tomorrow or the next day, because that’s the next step. But it’s your decision.’

  My decision? I stood to leave and had to grab the chair; my legs were fluid. He’s telling me to decide how and when my mum should die.

  Back at her bedside and she was sleeping. I tried to catch my thoughts but they skidded by too fast, half a century of memories. How could I decide anything that wasn’t coloured by our past? I needed space and sky and the roar of wind in trees and crows tilting as they were blown off course and rain on my face; I needed real and I was running, running.

  Through the wet meadow that always flooded in the winter. Past the dyke that I used to climb into, wading through water as high as my wellies, with earth walls above my head, poking sticks down the water-vole holes. Across the tiny brick bridge over the river where the mallard ducks collected. Through the gateway where Mum would put the tea flasks on hot summer afternoons when the field was full of the busyness of haymaking. Beyond the clay pit with the smooth wet sides that I slid down in wild, childish, mud-crusted abandon. Up the hill with the ridge in the middle that gave a perfect lift to a fast-flying sledge on snow. Beyond caring that this was someone else’s land now, that it had never been ours anyway. Running, running.

  To the woods. The dark, still quietness of the pines. No life there, no dancing bright leaves on summer days, no call of birdsong in spring. Silence. I lay on the dried soft ground and crunched handfuls of crisp dead pine needles until the pounding in my head subsided. Real: this was real. This earth, this land, these trees. Real, safe.

  Hidden in the darkness of the straight, vertical trunks I was invisible, my existence blurred. These trees had always been here for me, bushy and low when I was young, tall and swaying now; I’d come here through every twist and turn of my young life to be in a wild place, an animal behind a screen of bark looking out on the human world. A lifetime, from childhood to middle age, all of it compressed into one moment, one choice. Looking through the trunks, I saw the village spread out through the valley. From the farm below, to Mum’s cottage and the churchyard beyond: her lifeline laid out from start to finish. And in between the trees and fields, my life was interwoven. With my eyes closed, I let myself feel the wind in the tree tops, and the sharpness of the needles, and the faint scent of pine filling my aching head. So much loss. I needed the soft earth to suck me in and fold over me, to hide me from any more loss.

  My thoughts began to calm, to settle into the quiet hush of early afternoon. There was no choice; I already knew the answer. And yet even the thought of it felt like the ultimate betrayal. This ninety-year-old, strong, independent woman had proudly told the story of how she was the first woman in her village to wear trousers, of how the other villagers had reviled her for it. She had been a teenager in a pre-war world that was soon to be invaded by a group of drinking, smoking, trouser-wearing land girls. They were women set free from the confines of their restrictive lives and seizing the freedom of the new world that was opening up to them in the vacuum left when the men went to war. Reading between the lines, it seemed Mum had been both horrified by their counterpoint to her strict
Victorian upbringing, and excited by the possibility. One woman especially seemed to have had a lasting effect on her life: the artistic, book-reading Glin. They had become close friends and she’d visited us throughout her life, appearing annually, unannounced, in a camper van with piles of books for me and chocolates for Mum. She always brought the possibility of the different, with her short-cropped hair and men’s jackets. She would stay for a day or two, during which Dad would stay in the fields all day, only coming to the house for food and sleep. Then she would be gone; I’d wake in the morning and the camper van would have left, and I’d begin to read her books.

  Over the years the pile of books from Glin grew, and so did my ability to annoy my mum. The greatest punishment in her arsenal was to send me to my room, where I had to sit and read on sunny afternoons when I wanted to be outside, or sometimes for whole days at a time. When I was very small it was an irritation, but soon it became like no punishment at all, and there were times when I’d do something wrong as early as possible in the day so that I could finish a book. Climbing trees and wading through streams, safe in the knowledge that Jack London’s Call of the Wild was waiting on top of the pile that had yet to be read. Or I could always go back to Ring of Bright Water, or Watership Down, or any of the other books that took me to places where the wild animals lived. I began to dream of writing my own book, and instead of reading started writing stories and imagined holding my own book with a picture of a penguin on the spine. Until I found the letter; then the dreams were put on the shelves with the books and a harsher reality stepped in.

  In the cottage, I folded her clean nightie and towel, putting them in her bag. Bed socks: her feet were like ice; I should take socks. But they weren’t in her drawers. All her other clothes were there; I looked again and, as I lifted up the neatly folded cotton hankies, there it was, the curled, ripped envelope. Looking exactly as it had when I was a child. She wouldn’t tell me what was in the letter, so I’d searched for it. For years. I’d given up looking, thinking it must have been thrown away, but when I was twelve I’d found it by chance in a sewing basket. It was the moment of finding a hidden tomb on an archaeological dig. That moment when you know you’ll see through a doorway to another world, one that’s always been there but hidden from view. And now, all these years later, she still had the letter. I didn’t need to read it, I knew what it said, but I took it out of the envelope one more time. Those familiar words that were no more than black lines on white paper, and yet I’d spent half my life thinking what the contents of that letter meant and how it had coloured our family life. Years of piecing together my own version of the story, using it as the answer to so many questions. The fields, the woods, the land on which I grew up weren’t ours. It was a tenanted farm. Dad had asked what the procedure would be for the tenancy to be inherited and he had received his reply. The tenancy would not pass on; when the estate owner died, the estate, with all the farms and houses that it held, would be sold and the tenancy would end. To be renewed by the new owner, or not. I wouldn’t stay on the farm forever; I would have to leave, to work away from the farm and create another life. That was when I put the notebooks and pens away; there’d be no more stories about the wild things.