To see all the pleasures Flora would yield
He saw a maid dressed in a smock
Busy a-raking, all round the hay-cock.
When it is really hot I, to the children’s ire, put on a terrible Wild West voice and say, ‘It’s hotter’n hell.’
I have to get up at dawn to beat the heat, but even so, by ten it is warmer than Hades. This fierce morning light shows every detail of the mountain: each sheep, each scattered hawthorn tree, the tumbled careworn rock face of Red Darren.
More and more often I rest by the river. Spit bubbles come towards me in flotillas. Leaves roll along. The kingfisher flies past. ‘Zeet. Zeet’. The mallard mother softly calls to her four remaining chicks, now as camouflaged brown as she, and they paddle away in a safety routine now familiar to all. Walking back into the meadow I alarm a sunning gatekeeper which flutters up and off; the golden butterfly takes its name exactly from this habit of rising up, which reminded people in past centuries of the men employed to mind tolls, who would sit up when customers appeared.
It is late July, and this is the first gatekeeper I have noted this year.
The adults lay their eggs singly on grasses beneath bramble, blackthorn and hawthorn bushes where the grass stems are not grazed by animals. At night I take a torch to a corner of Marsh Field protected by a barbed wire fence. Gatekeeper caterpillars, which are nocturnal, are a nondescript brown, and feed on grasses, with a preference for fine species such as the fescues, bents and meadow grasses. Despite an hour-long search I find no gatekeeper caterpillars.
But the devil’s bit scabious in the meadow is hanging with the mace-spiked black caterpillars of the marsh fritillary.
And meadowsweet now trips lightly out of the hedge and into the damp ground by the newt ditch. A common sight in the old British countryside, Filipendula ulmaria has disappeared along with the water meadows that were its main abode. The creamy summer flowers are sweet to smell when rubbed under my nose, though an oenologist would note the hints of almond. In Tudor Britain meadowsweet was one of the principal ‘strewing herbs’, scattered on floors as an air-freshener, and the great herbalist Gerard went so far as to say that meadowsweet
farre excelle all other strowing herbs for to decke up houses, to strowe in chambers, halls and banqueting-houses in the summer-time, for the smell thereof makes the heart merrie and joyful and delighteth the senses. Neither doth it cause headache, or loathsomeness to meet, as some other sweete smelling herbs do.
It was meadowsweet, ‘and willows, willow-herb, and grass’ that caught Edward Thomas’s eye on that baking day of June 1914 when his steam train drew up unwontedly at Adlestrop station, and he made a photograph in poetry of pastoral England on the eve of war.
Some say the flowers of meadowsweet fizz, others say the blossom is spun as finely as vanilla candyfloss. All I know is that the feminine delicacy of the meadowsweet’s flowers, which are in bloom from June to September, is hinted at by the names lady of the meadow, maids of the meadow and queen of the meadow. In the Welsh mythical tales collected in the Mabinogion, the magicians Math and Gwydion take flowers of oak, of broom and of meadowsweet to create ‘the fairest and most beautiful maiden anyone had ever seen’, Blodeuwedd, or ‘Flower Face’. So womanishly graceful is meadowsweet that in Irish mythology, Cú Chulainn, the testosteroned hero of the Ulster Cycle, used meadowsweet baths to calm his rages.
Like the fair Blodeuwedd, who would turn out to be a homicidal adulteress, meadowsweet has a secret. The dark leaves whiff of childhood TCP. So the plant’s contradictory nature is also caught in such oxymoronic local names as bittersweet and courtship-and-matrimony. Even meadowsweet is misleading, because the plant is not named for its liking for meadows but for the role its leaves played in embittering and aromatizing medieval mead. Hence its appearance as Middle English medewurte in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale. Meadowsweet, it might be said, is a plant with a history as well as literature. Evidence of meadowsweet has been found in Bronze Age burial sites, and the Druids are said to have ranked it as one of their most sacred herbs. When Gerard noted the plant’s characteristic of not causing headaches he was more right than he possibly knew; the flower head contains salicylic acid, from which, in 1897, Felix Hoffmann created a synthetically altered version of salicin. The new drug was named aspirin by Hoffmann’s employer, Bayer AG, after the old botanical name for meadowsweet, Spiraea ulmaria. This gave rise to the class of drugs known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).
On this furnace-hot afternoon, when no bird can be bothered to sing, and I am unsure whether the metre-tall meadowsweet looks more like debutantes gathered for a ball or a cresting white wave, I have picked twenty full sprays of meadowsweet for cottage country wine. So deadly intoxicating is the nectar that hosts of hoverflies will hardly let go their sucking tongues even as I put the flower heads in the carrier. Meadowsweet is beloved of insects; the gall midge Dasineura pustulans has already burrowed into the leaves and left unseemly yellow blisters; and the plant is the larval food for all manner of butterflies and moths.
Moths might be the plain cousins of butterflies, but surely they have the poetry in their names? Among the moths whose young feed on meadowsweet alone are lesser cream wave (how suitable a name for a meadowsweet-loving moth is that!), bilberry tortrix, glaucous shears, Hebrew character, least yellow underwing, scarce vapourer. And who wouldn’t want to see a powdered quaker? But it is the rather prosaic brown-spot pinion that is the commonest sucker of Lower Meadow’s meadowsweet.
Late that night I take the dogs down with me to check on the cows in Marsh Field. The Labradors rush through the gate into the meadow and away, racing to where the meadowsweet stands illuminated. A little owl rises up from the hedge top with a shriek of annoyance. An owl in Welsh is blodeuwedd, because Flower Face’s punishment for her crimes was that she could never show her face again in the light of day.
The very whiteness of meadowsweet is a beacon to moths. My torch beam shows fox moths nectaring and one which I think is a satyr pug, another splendid name.
AUGUST
Rabbit
1 AUGUST LAMMAS DAY, from the Saxon Leffmesseday, meaning loaf mass. This is the traditional day for cattle to be returned to the hay field to graze the aftermath of hay mowing. Not in this field, not this year, for I am still scything away, still turning and hauling.
It has become a battle. I am not sure whether I will finish the field, or it will finish me. As an alternative to scything, I bring down the brush-cutter, a heavy-duty strimmer.
Something about strimming makes me tighten my jaw in concentration. The brush-cutter does well enough, except it does not leave the cut grass in windrows but all scattered, and with double cuts that make the hay more like fluffy chaff.
And in the noise and fumes I lose the peacefulness of it all. I do a morning’s worth of mowing with the brush-cutter, then turn the damned thing off, to listen to the sound of one moment:
Breeze.
Huzz.
Peow.
Buzz.
And the cautious pitter of the Escley, where it steps down a foot from one rock bed to the next. Not a car, not a plane, not an internal combustion engine. White castles of clouds make a stately procession through the sky.
I’m not sure of the exact time; I don’t wear a watch. Farming isn’t a by-the-clock job; it’s a job determined by light and weather. And anyway the thistles act as good enough sundials; they are casting little shadow, the sun is overhead. Around midday then.
Heat and dust. The meadow still to be scythed is running and hopping with butterflies. A wood pigeon is mesmerically cooing from deep in the ash, its mate sitting on the rickety raft of twigs that passes for a nest. This is the second brood of the year. Where the first grass was cut is a parched shade of brown, save for where two goldfinches are pecking inquisitively, gleaning the fallen heads of grass and flower seeds, a strangely peasant act for such a courtier of a bird. They have two young with them, brown nondescript balls, not ye
t clothed in gold-and-scarlet finery.
So, it’s back to grim reaping and aching tranquillity. Long days and red-rimmed eyes, a face-mask of grey pollen. And a stupid peaked-cap to wear, bought on a family holiday in the Dordogne, emblazoned with the advert ‘Camping Soleil Plage’. I hit a patch of meadow with an abundance of sweet vernal grass, always distinctive because of its cylindrical flower spikes and the vanilla incense it emits, and which almost transports me into sleep. It would be the sleep of Caliban. When I waked I would cry to dream again.
Unfortunately, I have already run out of space to store the hay. Loose hay takes up an improbable amount of room. I have filled the stables, and most of the cow byre.
By my estimate I am getting off more than 1.25 tons of grass per acre. I still have three acres’ worth to house.
I am going to have to build a hayrick.
I also have another field to mow, the six-acre Road Field. There is no physical possibility of my doing it by hand, so I phone Roy Phillips, the agricultural contractor. The children are delighted, since Roy will turn the grass into big round silage bales, with modern black plastic wrapping.
I resume field philosophy: the green sameness of modern grassland could be a metaphor for rural life. Where are the characters in the village? As late as thirty years ago, when I caught the village bus home from school on market day it would bulge with old women in tweed coats with cardboard boxes containing indignant chickens on their laps. The aroma of vintage cloth, medicated soap (all country people used medicated soap until the 1980s) and chicken excrement was thick and unforgettable. The chickens had been bought from the livestock market in the centre of Hereford. The livestock market has now been relocated in favour of a shopping centre. And there is another metaphor.
Sometimes Julie, the daughter of Mr Preece, would sit on the carpety seat next to me. Mr Preece – never without turned-down wellington tops and red braces – ran the smallholding at Woolhope from which we always obtained our Christmas turkey. I was never sure whether it was Julie’s boss eye that I disliked, or that I somehow got her mentally confused with the turkey. There is not much glamour in poultry farming.
In a photograph of two of my aunts when young, they wear white dresses and white ankle socks. Presumably it is their confirmation day. This is some time in the 1940s, when my grandfather was a farm manager for the Prudential. Behind Josephine and Madeleine is a row of tall detached houses end on.
It requires a second look to see that the houses are actually perfectly constructed and spaced haystacks.
When I went to bed, my haystack (at a mere fifteen feet in height) was fine and upstanding, and had a quite fetching pitched top. By morning it has taken a distinctly Pisa-ish lean. I am pondering what to do when I hear a hellish rattling and a white DAF van appears over the brow of the track down to the farm and eases forward in slow motion. There is a tatty brown rope around the middle of the van, like a belt, to keep the side doors on. I have not seen this van since we moved here from Abbeydore, six miles away, more than half a decade ago.
Geoff Bridger is known to all as ‘the black-and-tan man’ because his black-and-tan Jack Russell bitch constantly goes missing, leaving Geoff to knock on neighbourhood doors to ask, ‘’ave you seen a little black-and-tan dog?’
But he has never had to search this far for her before. The van coughs to a halt on the yard beside me; the driver’s door shoots back. A face with just two teeth, the bottom canines, peers out.
‘’ave you seen a little black-and-tan dog?’
Geoff squints at me harder, pushing his head further out from his stained check shirt.
‘Oh, it’s you. So this is where you’ve been hiding yourselves.’
Geoff fell out with our friends, Nick and Alice, when he was doing some garden digging for them; Nick accused him of working too slowly. Geoff took umbrage and decided to fall out with us too.
‘Well, if you see ’er maybe you could bring ’er back. If it’s not too much bother,’ he adds.
As Geoff begins to close the van door he catches sight of the hayrick.
‘Oh, what the hell you wanting to do that for?’
Before I can say anything, Geoff is out of the van walking around the stack. He scrutinizes the bottom. ‘Well, you’ve got it up on pallets, that’s good and dry.’
Geoff has a strange brightness in his eye. ‘I haven’t seen a haystack for’ – he shakes his head grimly – ‘what? Forty years?
‘C’mon,’ he says, ‘let’s get the bugger propped up before ’e slides away.’
With some old railway sleepers and a couple of field gates, the stack is propped up.
‘If anyone says anything, tell ’em you lost yer watch and had to take the side of the stack away. That’s what we always used to say when it went arse over.’
Getting back in his truck (a van is always a truck in Hereford) he says, ‘Good hay though, that.’
Which, from one of the last country characters, is praise indeed.
I shake his hand, and hope he finds his dog.
My mistake in rick building is thrown into cruel and sharp relief by the success of another tyro, John Stewart Collis, down on the farm in the 1940s:
The thing in building is to get your walls up straight, which I found easier to understand than to do, since there is a strong psychological feeling against putting the hay out – one always feels it will fall over, not realising how strongly it will be bound by the hay that goes behind it (for hay binds like brambles, as you find quick enough when you try to take it out). This tendency against the perpendicular is most strong at the corners when it is most necessary to oppose it and be bold. The great thing, I found, was to put two helpings at the corners, and not be faced with the psychologically distressing sight of a sloping margin. However, it all went well, and I roofed it in the approved Gothic style. It needed no props – and, I believe it who will, ’E was heard to say – ‘One of the best ricks we’ve done.’ It was on the highest level of the field, and so as we went away in the evening when it was getting dark, it looked wonderful, to me, against the sky – all those untidy bundles that I had been dealing with throughout the day now compressed into a pure solid, the pointed roof traced blackly and with geometrical straightness and sharpness against the light. Going away from it, down the sloping field with the others, I tried not to turn my head too often to have a look at it.
3 AUGUST The last waving, dew-glittering pool of grass to be scythed. Close to the thicket, the understorey of the grass has been tunnelled along by short-tailed voles (Microtus agrestis); the blade of the scythe exposes their hidden, much trodden runways to the light. Ahead of me the voles flee, squeaking, a petty plague. The heat of summer has boomed the voles’ numbers; young are weaned after fourteen days, and females may have four broods in the middle months of the year. The blade decapitates a doughnut of finely woven grass; inside are four naked vole babies. I cover them up.
There are 80 million field voles in Britain, a grey and unassuming mammal that is the meal for almost every land predator. I can almost feel the eyes of foxes and raptors fixing on the scene.
Across in the grass islands left for the pipits young swallows skim the meadow, learning the art of the chase. The blackbirds work the margins of the field, staying close to the hedge; they are moulting and their flight is hampered. The hedge is safety; a buzzard drifts over on the breeze, and the fearful blackbirds flutter to the hedge, perching with their trademark steadying tilt of the tail.
Clouds creep over the field in the afternoon, threatening rain.
4 AUGUST After nine days I am done, the hay-cutting is finished. Four and a half acres are as smooth as baize, with two long-haired islands floating in them. I think I can genuinely say I know every blade of grass in this meadow.
Roy Phillips has cut and baled the Road Field, and thirty or more black sheathed bales are lying around. Freda and Tristram are delighted. They like jumping and climbing on the bales; there is something of the playground or school gym about
a round bale. Best of all, as far as my son is concerned, is that I will allow him to move the bales down from Road Field when needed by pushing them along with the jeep, in a sort of automobile football dribble.
5 AUGUST I am not sure whether I am inspired by Collis, or thrown into competition across the decades. With the last thirty hauls of hay, I build another rick; it is hardly a skyscraper, but for a bungalow it is, I venture, rather neat.
7 AUGUST The day blows up black. House martins spark over the field. The rain comes swarming over the mountain from the west. (The Scandinavian forecaster was correct to the day.)
According to folklore, the purple foxglove is so called because Reynard dons its flowers on his feet, so as to be able to creep in magical silence up to hens and nab them. Perhaps the fox which stole the fluorescent white chicken used such guile. Lying slap in the middle of the meadow is a yobbish scattering of feathers, and the hollowed-out corpse of a fowl. For one mad moment I think someone has put a joke-shop rubber chicken in the field.
No, on close acquaintance the body is real. I leave it for the rain and buzzards.
The Herefordshire name for foxglove is bloody man’s fingers. The plant grows haphazardly along the exsiccated back bank of the Grove ditch.
The chicken is not ours but our neighbour’s. Our chickens are surrounded by an electric fence, which is a reasonable although not infallible deterrent. The foxes yelp when their wet noses touch it.
There is something more the foxes may have in their memory, genetically passed down the generations. I am an Old Testament poultry-keeper. I say a life for a life, and have a gun that speaks death.
And how many of the mallard young have cheated the fox’s snare-trap jaws? I have not seen the wild ducks for a fortnight or more.
12 AUGUST The evening is ‘close’, humid. Down in the meadow, where I take a rest from trimming sheep’s feet, a can of Ruddles for reward, I touch the aftermath pea-green grass. It is fine, tender, new.
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