by Raynor Winn
As we walked across the farm in the early spring, the empty fields shone with a new green carpet. The last of the previous tenant’s sheep had left the land at the start of the winter, allowing the land to recover over the winter months. But there were no badger trails through the grass that was tentatively beginning to grow, or beneath the hedgerows showing the purple spring haze of buds about to break. Sparrows argued among the branches and overhead the buzzard circled his territory, calling into the distance, yet if there were badgers in the area they didn’t cross the farm. We stopped to look downriver, the water catching shafts of sunlight on the high tide, to a church tower and the woods beyond.
‘Do you remember how much equipment and livestock it took to farm a place this size?’ Moth was now lying on his back on the damp grass, watching clouds mass and then separate, but obviously his thoughts were far away.
‘Not really, I think I’ve blocked it out. When we were walking I tried not to remember because thinking about home hurt too much, and now if I try to remember I can’t.’
‘I can, I remember it really well.’ I turned to him and watched his face, eyes closed, concentrating, as he listed an inventory of machinery and livestock numbers that I couldn’t recall if I tried. ‘The grass is growing now, it can’t be ignored, and we’re in no position to buy livestock.’
‘But do you remember that day on the beach on your fortieth birthday when it rained all afternoon?’ How could he remember livestock numbers?
‘Of course, and we played cricket in our wetsuits because it was so wet, but the kids didn’t want to go home. But what’s that got to do with it?’
‘Nothing, but you remembered.’ I lay back on the grass. He remembered.
‘I think we’re going to have to talk to Sam about finding someone to use the grass. We can focus on resurrecting the orchards, making cider and overseeing a biodiversity plan for the farm, but I can’t see us being able to actually physically farm the whole place ourselves.’ He stood up, looking around the fields and down to the wood. Sure about what he was saying, clear in his reasoning. ‘And I need the freedom to do other things too. If we own the livestock that graze the land then we’re tied to the place, every day of the year. I need to be able to come with you to your events and do other things too.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I’ve been thinking about another walk.’
I followed him as he wandered down the hill, back towards the farmhouse. His stride still a little lopsided, but his feet finding the ground with certainty. The sun broke through the clouds, the grass grew a little greener and at the base of a hedge, untouched by man or machinery for months, a patch of snowdrops pushed through the ground.
On a dull, flat morning when the air was still and even the spring light didn’t seem to lift over the hill, I followed the newly created paths in the orchards where apple blossom was showing the first signs of swelling on the branches and in the long grass something stirred. A roe deer, a doe, clearly pregnant, trotted slowly down to the stream, disappearing into the darkness of the old deciduous trees that followed the water downhill. I reached the tree I’d been looking for. The fallen tree with the drill holes. Flicking through a magazine in a waiting room my attention had been caught by an article about the larvae of a moth that eats holes in trees, and the picture of the holes had looked identical. In the new growth of the tree, where branches covered in the buds of new growth pushed skyward away from the fallen trunk, a sticky sap oozed from the randomly drilled holes and a few insects buzzed around the spring food source. An early red admiral butterfly folded its wings, unable to tear itself away from the all-you-can-eat breakfast, but on the lower dead side of the tree the sap had dried to a hard resin around the holes.
The goat moth is huge, one of the largest moths in the country, and increasingly rare. Its main habitat is in the south of the UK, though it’s rarely seen this far west. The adults lay their eggs in a number of wetland trees, ash, birch, alder, but also apple trees. The larvae can live in the tree for as long as five years. Five years of munching and digesting the cellulose in the wood before a bright red caterpillar nearly ten centimetres long crawls out into the light of late summer. It will then quickly disappear into the grass to pupate over winter before emerging as a fully fledged moth, so well disguised that it’s barely distinguishable from the bark of a tree. Five years of hiding away from the light, of collecting its strength and preparing for life. There’d be no way of knowing what insects were in the tree until they emerged, maybe tomorrow, maybe in five years, emerged blinking into the light, ready to shed an old form and embrace the new. Five years is a long time, long enough for even the most reticent insect to transform and finally spread its wings.
The sound of a vehicle pulling into the yard gave me the familiar sense of nervous reluctance and the almost overwhelming desire to stay hidden in the orchard and hope that Moth was awake to go and see who it was. I was still struggling to shake the deep-grained mistrust of others. Few people ever called at the farm – occasional visitors from Polruan, but more often just someone whose satnav had sent them in the wrong direction. I took a deep breath and headed towards the house. How long would I need to be here, hiding from the world, before enough time had passed to allow me to spread my wings and transform?
23. Toads
The moon, white and dimming, still hung nearly full in the sky as the cloud began to break. An owl called from the dead oak behind the house, a last call before heading into the trees to sleep through the day. The last of the apple blossom had fallen in the orchard; tiny apples had formed in its wake, filling the air with the faint scent of summer. I sat on the fallen tree and watched the holes in the wood. Nothing stirred. So I spread the letter across the trunk. There’d been so many letters. So many people.
The first letters came when The Salt Path had been out in hardback for a few months, but after its release in paperback they began to come every week. Letters from people whose lives had taken a wrong turn and fallen apart, people who’d lost homes, families and businesses. Letters from the sick and dying, people struggling with disease whose fears were not for themselves but for their families and how they would cope. And from the families trying to cope without their loved ones. But all of them holding out hands full of care and concern for Moth in a mass exhalation of hope. Each letter I opened held words of compassion and empathy, offers of help and homes. I breathed all of them in, each envelope adding a layer of restored belief. But this letter was different.
Invitations to speak at events were coming thick and fast. More stages to be sat on and audiences to be faced. Fear gripped me every time the lights shone in my face and the first question was asked. But in the queues that formed after the talks, queues of people waiting to have their book signed, there was no fear. Just stories. Stories of lives lived, loves lost and walks that changed beliefs. But something else was happening in the queues. Not for those waiting patiently with their copy of the book, but for me. As I signed my name again and again among the birds that flew through the endpapers, the shared stories joined my own in a unity of hope, fear, trauma and pain. Feelings as unfathomable as humanity, as old as the cliffs we’d walked on, part of the complexity of existence, but feelings that united us all into a collective hand, gently moving the sofa away from the wall and lifting a small girl out into the light.
Moth wandered through the trees, a mug of tea in his hand, picking his way through long grass and cut thistles, past fallen branches and a bed of nettles covered in butterflies that had appeared from nowhere, hatching in their thousands in the morning light and clustering over the seed heads of the tall grasses. The meadow brown is possibly the UK’s most common butterfly, small and faded brown with a flash of orange on their white-edged wings. As the air turned brown it was easy to see why these grass-feeders could explode in numbers if the grass stands far enough into the summer for the seeds to ripen.
‘What are you doing down here? I was going to make some toast, but I thought
I’d find you first.’
‘I’m waiting.’
‘For what.’
‘A goat moth.’
‘You’re waiting for a moth? What are you talking about?’
‘It’s a moth that has a five-year larval stage and I think it could be in this tree.’
‘So you’re going to sit here for five years?’
‘Might have to.’
‘Just come and get some toast before the teapot’s cold.’
I spread the latest letter on the table while I buttered toast. Reading it to Moth between mouthfuls. ‘… I knew I would be arrested this week, so in preparation I looked for a book to read in the cell, and yours seemed the obvious choice …’
‘I’m not sure but reading on I think it’s about taking the wild with him into a closed space. You know, looking at it now, I don’t think I was really writing about nature at all.’
‘I’m not sure about that; it’s a multi-layered book, perfect for book clubs, hospital visits and prison break-outs. If it wasn’t nature then what were you writing about?’
‘You. It was always just about you. As I was writing it I thought it was for you, so you wouldn’t forget our path, but now I think it was more than that. I think I was putting you permanently on the path for myself. Like Murray did with Dick. So I could keep that time, keep you in that time with me. Always, even after …’
His hand reached past the toast and held mine.
‘You’re an idiot – you’ve reread Copsford far too many times. I think we should do it again, another walk – maybe not quite so far this time though … What’s that noise?’
‘Probably the mice.’
‘No, not mice, something else, more like a croak.’
‘Where, in the house?’
‘Not sure, it’s gone now.’
‘Where do you want to walk? Have you thought of anywhere?’
‘Haven’t really thought about it in depth, but maybe we should go with someone else, you know, just in case.’
‘In case of what? And who? I can’t think who would want to go with us.’
‘What about Dave and Julie? It’d be great to be on a trail with them again.’
‘There it is, I heard it this time, definitely a croak.’
The reddish-brown colour of her coat blended almost invisibly into the long grasses, but flashes of her white rump gave her away. The roe deer stepped out of the undergrowth on to one of the mown pathways and began to graze on the short grasses that now criss-crossed the orchard. Pathways of green among the nettles and scrubby tufted grass: her ideal home. Easy grazing, easy walking and cover to hide in when she needed it. And she needed a safe place now. Behind her, on tentative legs that sprang and jumped seemingly without pattern or reason, a roe-deer kid. Tiny, red and frail, and yet leaping with life and summer strength. I watched them wander slowly to the stream, wrapped in the hum of insects carried through the air on a breeze of nectar and warmth. A deep glow of noise, moving like a whisper across land freed from pollution, lifting over pollen-filled banks of new-sown flowers. The earth breathing.
One last mound of plastic sat in the barn: buckets and feed bags pulled from the stream where the deer drank, tangled in a heap with rusting wire and other rubbish. One last load to go to the tip, and then the land would be free, its polluted surface cleared. Time now to hope that the earth could regenerate and life would find its own way back.
‘What time’s Sam coming?’ Moth tipped a wheelbarrow of silage wrap on to the heap, the final lot of waste pulled from the soil. We stacked the old tyres against it to prevent it blowing away. In the days before big silage bales and wrapping machines, farmers regularly made silage clamps, huge piles of cut grass that fed the cattle through the winter. The clamps were often covered with plastic sheeting to protect the grass crop and weighted down with old tyres to stop it blowing away. These tyres hadn’t come from a silage pit, they’d been all over the farm, emerging from every hole and corner, but the last of them now stood in the barn, waiting to be taken away.
‘Can’t believe that’s the final load. Two o’clock, I think.’
‘Don’t believe it, rubbish keeps working its way out of the soil every day.’
‘It’s not just here though, is it? You can’t really blame the last tenants, most farms are the same. Mind you, we never had mountains of rubbish on the farm when I was a child. I think we burnt everything and a scrap man always came for the metal.’
‘But that was before plastic.’
‘Careful. I’m not that old.’
A vintage Triumph motorbike revved at the gate, its rider’s hands still on the handlebars, his helmet on but the visor up as he slowly looked around. Still revving.
‘I daren’t turn it off, it might not start again.’ Sam revved the engine again. ‘Wow, I don’t know what to say, just wow.’ Was he going to get off the motorbike, or was that it? ‘Just got the bike out of storage and the battery’s flat. I can’t stop. I’ll be back later.’ Were they tears running down his face, or sweat inside the helmet? It was quite a warm day. Wasn’t he happy with what we’d done? Did he think we hadn’t done enough? The Triumph revved up the hill and was gone.
There’s an innate vulnerability in renting the place where you live. To allow yourself to like your rented home too much is a gamble. It’s a one-sided relationship, a poker game where the other party holds all the cards and all you’re left with is a fear of commitment and the probability of loss.
‘That was weird.’
‘Very.’
We didn’t need to discuss it. The weeks, months of cleaning, clearing, strimming and mowing had been a huge commitment of time. But finally the land was rising again, straightening its back after years of carrying a heavy burden, clearing its throat and finding its voice. A family of goldfinches landed on a patch of grass where the seed heads had dropped their seeds before being cut. A group of eleven dazzling birds flashing yellow and red as they fed on the seeds, chattering loudly. In the fields grass had been left to grow later into the summer than with conventional farming, offering food for birds and insects that hung over the grass as it swayed in the wind and roe deer that showed an occasional head above the savannah of green, testing the air before continuing to graze. Even the ground-nesting skylarks had had time to rear their chicks and see them fledge before the flailing blades of the grass-cutters came into the field.
‘Feeling a bit vulnerable now.’ I sat on the small wall outside the house, feeling not just vulnerable but suddenly quite foolish.
‘We’re renting, we’ve always been vulnerable.’
‘I know but that’s just a house. If Sam wanted us to leave, I’m sure we’d be okay. We’ve learnt enough about surviving over the last few years; we’d work it out. It’s not that, it’s the land. It’s starting to breathe again – I can almost hear it coming back to life. I’m afraid he’ll change his mind, say it’s not financially viable and just sell it.’
‘It’s not ours, Ray, you have to remember that. Don’t let yourself get attached.’
‘I know, I know.’
The roe deer and her kid jumped down from the long grass to a ditch that passed into a lower field, slipping away into the undergrowth.
An iconic pale blue camper van pulled up outside the house. Sam driving, but another three passengers inside. He got out, looking around again, this time without a helmet, so his expression couldn’t be hidden.
‘I’ve got to say it again: oh wow.’
‘Is everything okay, Sam? Is there a problem – did you think we’d have got more done by now?’ I couldn’t hold back and talk carefully or tactfully around my fears. If the idea of a truly biodiverse farm was over I needed to know right now, without hesitation, before I slipped any further under the spell cast by the land.
‘Are you joking? I’m stunned. I never thought the place could recover like this, I just hoped. And you’ve done so much work. Thank you, thank you.’
Behind him the goldfinches took off in a c
hattering cloud to land in a row on the telephone wires. His wife got out of the camper van, smaller, compact, giving me a hug that held a casual, assured resilience.
‘Hi, I’m Rachel. These are the kids, Jack and Lottie. Nice to meet you, although I wouldn’t have said that a few months ago.’
‘Oh no, why?’
‘I wanted Sam to sell the farm. I was adamant that he should let it go, get rid of all the problems and just walk away. So I was furious when he suggested you should move in. He’s been so let down, I couldn’t bear to watch him be disappointed again – I didn’t think he could take any more. Since I was diagnosed with breast cancer I tend to just think about the here and now, and the farm, well, it’s been a huge financial and emotional black hole. I wanted to live for the moment, enjoy my children, not cling to this place. His dream; my nightmare. I even refused to read your book. But I have now and at last I think I get it. You and Sam, you share a passion for the land and sleepless nights worrying about your partner. No wonder he felt such a connection with The Salt Path. That’s why I agreed not to sell it. I think I finally understand.’
I watched Rachel as she looked across the land, a woman who had the power to end a dream or fan the flames. I could have doubted the permanence of her decision, but as she linked her arm through Sam’s I thought I understood why she had opened the stove door and allowed the air to reach the fire.
‘Well, okay, that’s good, shall we have a cup of tea then?’ Practical, be practical before they see that your knees are weak with relief.