The Wild Silence
Page 26
‘We’ll have to just pick up what we can. What else can we do?’
‘Just me and you? We’ll never do it; there’s too many. We can pick up a few but the bulk of these will be lost. What a mess.’ We looked across the orchard at the devastation; we couldn’t possibly pick them all up before they began to rot, but who could possibly help us? There was no one to ask.
Cars parked in front of the house, packed full with people from Polruan. Sarah, armed with bags of sandwiches, bottles of wine, gloves and buckets. Other people that we’d briefly met, or hadn’t met at all, people loaded down with boots, hats and enthusiasm. Then, from the last car, Gill and Simon, happy, laughing. Together for anyone to see.
‘Gill, I thought you’d gone back to London.’
‘No, I’ve stayed. I’ll be here until after Christmas this time, unless Simon kicks me out before then.’
‘I won’t be doing that; you’ve always known you can stay. It’s always been your choice.’ Trust, such an elusive thing, but given the slightest chance it can grow and flourish. They walked into the orchards, as inexplicable but inevitable as thrift growing in the Icelandic ash. Within days the loft of the cider barn was stacked with hessian sacks full of salvaged apples, and freshly pressed juice began to fill the barrels.
The half-light of a November morning lit the horizon, the faintest slice of pink catching the underside of the clouds in a wash of colour beneath the towering blue mass. Through the smallest breaks in the cloud a pale sky held the suggestion of a clear day and unknowable infinities just out of reach. Mist cleared from the field nearest the house, dissipating in the weak sunlight, to reveal brown shapes moving across the grass. We watched the scattered forms as they came together, then dispersed again.
‘I can’t believe they’re here.’
‘I didn’t think they would ever come, but just over a year and here they are.’ I squinted into the binoculars to get a clearer look. The curlews had come. Tall brown birds with unmistakable curved bills pushed into the grass in search of bugs and insects. Birds who know where the food sources are simply by the feel of the land. An endangered bird, a rare and fragile life, feeding in a field that so recently had been devoid of all but the loneliest of worms. We watched, transfixed, until the sun burnt the colours from the sky and the curlews headed back to the creek.
Moth folded the binoculars back into their case, his hands moving as he directed them. We walked down into the orchard to find our usual seat on the goat-moth tree. The fresh wet sap that had oozed from the holes in the summer had dried into hard resin drips. Maybe whatever was in the tree had transformed and flown, or maybe they were still there, hiding and growing for years yet to come. Maybe time would tell, but then only if we were there at the right moment, on the right day.
‘Shall we go to the coast? I feel as if I want to be on the path today, to hear the sea.’
We would always need to find our way back to the path, however far away from it we travelled, to smell the salt and spread our arms into the wind on the cliff top. We walked across a familiar headland to a spot in the gorse where we had pitched our tent only a few brief years earlier, homeless, with no money or food, but, here at the edge of the land, miraculously unafraid. We sat in a clearing among the scrub on a bare patch of rocky earth, the sea disappearing into a grey horizon, still the same people who had shivered in the cold of the tent as we walked this coast – only the landscape had changed around us. In the cold wind, blowing salt-laden winter air from the sea, no doubt remained. No drugs or doctors could help Moth, but he didn’t need them. Simply by living as he was built to, his body had found a way to sidestep the failures and go on. As surely as removing heavy human interference from the land was allowing the wildlife to return to the farm, so Moth was surviving by returning to a more natural state of existence. Life re-forming and reshaping, not with man’s intervention but without it. A winter squall blew curtains of rain towards the land, a storm we’d seen coming from the far horizon. Don’t ‘be careful on the stairs’, run up them, run as fast as you can, with no fear of clocks ticking or time passing. Nothing can be measured in time, only change, and change is always within our grasp, always simply a matter of choice.
I closed my eyes and let the sounds come, let the voice come. Calm and hushed on a rising wind hissing through rocks, in clear water falling through sunlight. Carried on a gull’s cry over sea against cliff, somewhere beyond the blurred line between water and air. The sound in the leaves as I’d hung in the branches of the willow tree, and crouched in the dark woods. It had always been there, whispering with the water voles in the ditch, the deer on the mountainside, the seals calling beneath foggy headlands. The voice behind it all …
… a sound beyond connection, or belonging.
The hum of particles
vibrating to the energy of life.
The voice of the
beating
pulsing
wild silence
of the earth.
The voice
of …..
home.
It was a fortunate wind
That blew me here. I leave
Half-ready to believe
That a crippled trust might walk
And the half-true rhyme is love.
The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney
Acknowledgements
Lying on the forest floor, my fingers pushed into the leaf litter, I reflected a lot on what led me there. But my thoughts rarely moved beyond Moth and our life. I certainly didn’t consider what might be happening beneath the soil’s surface. Since then, thanks to Rob MacFarlane’s fascinating book Underland, I’m aware there’s another world down there, a world of fungus. A magical, magnificent network of mycorrhizal fungi beneath the forest floor, connecting tree to tree and one species to another, transferring nutrients, water and minerals in a maze of correlation, allowing seedlings to grow in the shadow of the adult plant and unrelated species to share resources. An invisible world of natural connections that helps each plant thrive as a part of the beautiful connected whole. Maybe, with my fingers in the earth I found a connection to that network; a connection that helped me get through the harshest times. It could also be the reason why my toenails are rotting!
But writing a book has connected me to a network I am aware of, enabling me to thrive as part of a system where everyone matters, and no one person succeeds without the help and support of the whole. Without every person involved in The Wild Silence’s development it would still be just a seedling that had yet to grow.
Huge thanks to Jen Christie of Graham Maw Christie, who holds all the details together. To Fenella Bates, the irreplaceable Olivia Thomas, Jen Porter, Aggie Russell, Richenda Todd, Louise Moore, Dan Bunyard, Catherine Wood and everyone else at Michael Joseph who make working with them such a pleasure.
Thanks to Dave and Julie for their friendship and for sharing wet tents on cold hillsides. To my Polruan friends who have opened their hearts and their doors in ways I thought I wouldn’t experience again, and to Sam and Rachel for having a dream and the overwhelming generosity of spirit to choose to share it.
But most of all thank you to the Team. All three of you. For the time, space and love it has taken to create this book. Time without end, space without borders and love without restraint – the most important network any of us can have.
Read on for an extract from Raynor Winn’s beautiful and uplifting first book, the Sunday Times bestseller The Salt Path
1. Dust of Life
I was under the stairs when I decided to walk. In that moment,I hadn’t carefully considered walking 630 miles with a rucksackon my back, I hadn’t thought about how I could afford to do it,or that I’d be wild camping for nearly one hundred nights, orwhat I’d do afterwards. I hadn’t told my partner of thirty-twoyears that he was coming with me.
Only minutes earlier hiding under the stairs had seemed agood option. The men in black began hammering on the door at9 a.m., but we weren’t ready. We weren’t re
ady to let go. I neededmore time: just another hour, another week, another lifetime.There would never be enough time. So we crouched togetherunder the stairs, pressed together, whispering like scared mice,like naughty children, waiting to be found.
The bailiffs moved to the back of the house, banging on thewindows, trying all the catches, looking for a way in. I couldhear one of them climbing on to the garden bench, pushing atthe kitchen skylight, shouting. It was then that I spotted thebook in a packing box. I’d read Five Hundred Mile Walkiesinmy twenties, the story of a man who walked the South WestCoast Path with his dog. Moth was squeezed in next to me, hishead on his knees, his arms wrapped around in self-defence,andpain, and fear, and anger. Above all anger. Life had picked upevery piece of ammunition possible and hurled it at him fullforce, in what had been three years of endless battle. He wasexhausted with anger. I put my hand on his hair. I’d strokedthat hair when it was long and blond, full of sea salt, heatherand youth; brown and shorter, full of building plaster and thekids’ play dough; and now silver, thinner, full of the dust ofour life.
I’d met this man when I was eighteen; I was now fifty. We’drebuilt this ruined farm together, restoring every wall, everystone, growing vegetables and hens and two children, creating abarn for visitors to share our lives and pay the bills. And now,when we walked out of that door, it would all be behind us,everything behind us, over, finished, done.
‘We could just walk.’
It was a ridiculous thing to say, but I said it anyway.
‘Walk?’
‘Yeah, just walk.’
Could Moth walk it? It was just a coastal path after all; itcouldn’t be that hard and we could walk slowly, put one foot infront of the other and just follow the map. I desperately neededa map, something to show me the way. So why not? It couldn’tbe that difficult.
The possibility of walking the whole coastline from Mineheadin Somerset, through north Devon, Cornwall and southDevon to Poole in Dorset seemed just about feasible. Yet, in thatmoment, the idea of walking over hills, beaches, rivers andmoorland was as remote and unlikely to happen as us gettingout from under the stairs and opening the door. Something thatcould be done by someone else, not us.
But we’d already rebuilt a ruin, taught ourselves plumbing,brought up two children, defended ourselves against judgesand highly paid barristers, so why not?
Because we lost. Lost the case, lost the house, and lostourselves.
I reached out my hand to lift the book from its box, andlooked at the cover: Five Hundred Mile Walkies. It seemed such anidyllic prospect. I didn’t realize then that the South West CoastPath was relentless, that it would mean climbing the equivalentof Mount Everest nearly four times, walking 630 miles on a pathoften no more than a foot wide, sleeping wild, living wild,working our way through every painful action that had broughtus here, to this moment, hiding. I just knew we should walk.And now we had no choice. I’d reached out my hand towardsthe box and now they knew we were in the house, they’d seenme, there was no way back, we had to go. As we crawled fromthe darkness beneath the stairs, Moth turned back.
‘Together?’
‘Always.’
We stood at the front door, the bailiffs on the other side waitingto change the locks, to bar us from our old lives. We wereabout to leave the dimly lit, centuries-oldhouse that had held uscocooned for twenty years. When we walked through the doorwe could never ever come back.
We held hands and walked into the light.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published 2020
Copyright © Raynor Winn, 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Artwork © Angela Harding
The Cure at Troy © Seamus Heaney, 2018, Faber and Faber Ltd ‘so the peleton passed’ © Simon Armitage, from the forthcoming collection New Cemetery, Faber and Faber Ltd
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life of the author. In some limited cases, the names of people or detail of places or events have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such respects, the contents of this book are true. Any medical information in this book is based on the author’s personal experience and should not be relied on as a substitute for professional advice. The author and publishers disclaim, as far as the law allows, any liability arising directly or indirectly from the use, or misuse, of any information contained in this book.
ISBN: 978-0-241-40148-4
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