Meadowland

by John Lewis-Stempel

  This pincushion is past its prime; yet broken open in the depth of November it is still housing minute wasp maggots.

  Some long-tailed tits are busy in the oak. There must be about twenty of them, and they may well all be related. They constantly call to each other, ‘tsi, tsi’. They are a bird whose habit of cooperation would shock Darwin.

  24 NOVEMBER A dead badger on the lane; I am certain it is the old boar. The victim of a car. Badgers are not cute to look at: the pig snout and pied facial stripes are weirder still up close.

  I drive on, leaving the badger on the verge of the lane. There is nothing as lonely as death.

  The next morning I go back with a plastic feed sack (from the inevitable beet pellets) to collect the badger and bury him in the field.

  The body has already been removed, probably by the Council, who have someone who collects badger corpses. But I like to think, in a wave of sentiment, that the badger’s family took his body and buried it. The naturalist Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald once saw a badger funeral. It was 1941, the middle of World War Two, and the badger family dug a grave, dragged and shoved the deceased into it, then covered it with earth. Dust to dust. The sow wailed throughout the moonless night.

  27 NOVEMBER Tonight I see something I have never seen before, something I never even knew of. It’s late, and I have gone for a moon-time walk around the fields, because I love the solitude of the dark. While I am looking to the west and the unbroken night of mid-Wales, an arch of white light suddenly appears in the sky and spans the earth before me. I feel afraid, as though I have been singled out for some almighty moment of revelation, that I have been entrusted with some Damascene vision, and several seconds pass before I understand what it is I am looking at.

  I am looking at a rainbow at night. A moonbow.

  28 NOVEMBER Note: ‘Morning in the field: jackdaws at 6.45am in great squadrons, wheeling. More join in. Lots of noise. Then fly off en masse, aside from a few persistent individualists who go their own way.’ Two hours later there is mother-of-pearl sunshine.

  There are birds calling greetings and alarms, but in the field only the robin sings; even in winter the robin will defend its smallholding. For all its charm as the pin-up of the Christmas card industry, the robin is a vicious little thrush. A dead robin lies on the grass beside the thicket, its head battered from pecking, one eye burst by a torturing, puncturing beak.

  This is a dying world. A nearby farm is diversifying into holiday accommodation. Their field of the beautiful aspect will grow tipis. Which is like a dog shitting on a white Berber carpet.

  The wind rakes the valley, searching into every fold of earth and unbuttoned flap of coat. There is Reynard the dog fox digging excitedly. His fur is in bloom and has the scorching-red hue of a fire ember. But so strong is the wind that it is ruffling his hair; a cartoon fox plugged into the mains would look sleeker. He does not hear or see me as I walk up behind him. The soft ground absorbs the vibrations from my feet. Childishly I cannot resist giving him a fright, and when I am almost within touching distance of his white-tipped brush I cough loudly.

  Foxes can run.

  30 NOVEMBER Warm, orange glow in the afternoon. The sigh of my feet in the frosted night grass. Wrap my coat closer, wrap myself into the ground, fold myself into the earth. As night descends I can hear the shiftless hunting of voles, shrews and mice in the hedge. Shrews do not hibernate, as they are too small to store fat reserves sufficient to see them through the winter. And spangled is the only word for this starry night of seeping cold.

  DECEMBER

  Fox

  THE FIELD IS dead. A single snap. A soundless photograph. An inverse of the bustle of summer. The grass has stopped growing.

  A black-and-white picture too with this lifeless mist. In the bottom of the Grove ditch the red campion that clung tenaciously throughout the wrong season has, at last, given up. Only in the thicket and hedges do I find colour, in the red of the holly, hawthorn and rose hips. In medieval times the holly was the Christmas tree, its scarlet berries held to be the resemblance of Christ’s blood. There are other reds in December. Robin. Hunting jacket. Fox.

  The mist wanders away, to be replaced by an exhilarating week of hoar frosts and blue skies, and the barking of a fox at the crescent, huntsman’s moon. Venus is out in the sky even before the sun goes down over the mountain. Then it snows at night.

  In the morning, there is the peow of the buzzard over the bed-white field and a tell-tale streak of urine on a tussock. Through a gap in Bank hedge I can see the fox walking gently over the snow, ears alert. The fox stops, turns its head, all the better to hear with. Takes another few paces forward. Listens. Then rears up on its hind legs and does a diving pounce.

  A flurry of digging snow.

  A caught field vole, which is swallowed whole.

  When I was about ten my father brought a redhead home in the back of his yellow Rover 2000. The redhead, on closer inspection, turned out to be the stuffed fox that graced the window of the gunsmith’s in West Street in Hereford. The fox was more than stuffed, it was the centrepiece of an Edwardian field sports monument, a complete scene in which the snarling fox looked down on two rabbits emerging from a burrow. (The edifice was constructed from some sort of early painted plastic.) The gunsmith’s shop was closing down, and my father, sweetly, had thought I would like the fox.

  I did. So did our Labradors when it was installed in my bedroom; they used to sneak in and chew the stuffed rabbits.

  I would spend hours gazing at the fox. I would measure it, from clee to shoulder, the tip of canine tooth to jawbone, from the end of the brush to the back. The fox set me off on a trail of nature reading from the public library in Broad Street, during which (with the guidance of a master from school) I stumbled upon Wild Lone: The Story of a Pytchley Fox by BB. In a sense I owe that stuffed fox a great deal, because it was BB who, above everyone, inspired me with a spiritual respect for nature, as opposed to simple admiration or sentimental regard. (Though I can do both of those too.)

  While I liked my stuffed fox, I have never been quite so keen on the real thing, the killer of our chickens, ducks and lambs. Respect but not love. My ambivalence is perfectly incorporated in the fact that I am the only person I know who has both hunted foxes on horseback and ‘sabbed’ fox hunts.

  Only today do I fully understand why foxes make me uneasy. For a canid, the fox is disconcertingly catty. Aside from the feline mouser pounce, foxes have vertically slit pupils. The Edwardian taxidermist who stuffed my fox gave it appealing amber dog eyes.

  The fox trots off through the snow, aware of his handsomeness. He is a proper country fox. Given half-decent light I can distinguish him from all others by his size, and the possession of the purest black legs. He is three, and the father to the cubs born back in February. Sometimes I watch him from the house when he is on a circuit of his territory, which is, roughly, two and a bit farms, about a hundred acres, the main borders being the river and the road. Although he trots, his progress is slow since every fifty yards or less he stops to scent. Reynard, as I always think of him, is doing well to reach three. The mortality rate for adult foxes is 50 per cent per year. The mortality rate for cubs and juveniles is 60–70 per cent.

  I know that one of the cubs from the copse is dead; it crossed the river and entered the territory of the quarry wood foxes. The body was in plain view in the middle of the sheep field across from the finger two days ago. When I reached it, I could see that it had been badly mauled around the neck.

  Of course, my contradictory feelings towards foxes are a national tic. No other animal has been so strenuously exterminated or so earnestly anthropomorphized – and frequently as Reynard, the name coming originally from a twelfth-century Latin poem in which Reinardus torments his dim lupine uncle, Ysengrimus. He appears in Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1390 Nun’s Priest’s Tale as Rossel and fully fledged as Reynard in William Caxton’s History of Reynard the Fox published in 1481. Systematic hunting of the ingenious loner, Vulpes vul
pes, began similarly early; Edward I had royal fox hunters during the thirteenth century. Killing of foxes was not restricted to hunting with dogs; under the Tudor Vermin Acts the head of a fox had a bounty of one shilling, and no one was fussy how Reynard was killed. According to the animal historian Roger Lovegrove in his book Silent Fields, the ancient countryside of Britain, including these Welsh Marches, is where fox hunting was most energetically pursued.

  All the green, billiard-table smoothness of the meadow is gone; two days of hoar frost have left the grass pallid and listless. A moment of beauty is given by raindrops on the sedge heads glistening like rubies and emeralds in a Rider Haggard story. The hedges and trees in the copse are skeletons of their former selves. The buzzards greet the dawn, the jackdaws close the day.

  14 DECEMBER My daughter’s school carol service, in Hereford Cathedral: the first part of the service is held in the dark, save for a ring of isolated candles hanging above the middle of the transept. Later that night, I go down to the field, and stand there in the vertiginous dark, with the lights of the stars above me. The mountains make for high walls, the stars for candles. There is no difference between the cathedral and the field.

  I rage against the coming of artificial light. To stand in an immense starred night is to be a citizen of the universe. To see its immensity. Stars made Australopithecus gaze up in wonder and dream. London has not seen the stars since the Blitz.

  The next afternoon, a cheery troupe of starlings travels over from the village. They are bright with their winter plumage, which itself is a stars-in-the-night design.

  16 DECEMBER The field underground: I’m digging out a hole for a fence post after a drizzle that has helpfully defrosted the land. I find digging into the meadow intoxicating, the way it reveals the meadow’s hidden underself.

  There is a surprising amount of life in the bottom of a tussock: a C-shaped cockchafer grub, a wolf spider, minute club-headed yellow fungi, the pupae of butterflies, then as the spade goes in you can see all the workings of the worms, each an organic plough pulling leaf matter down, composting, constantly sending casts to the surface. The workings go down 40cm or so, deeper even than the swollen roots of the dandelion. Sap rises in the spring; the goodness of plants sinks into the roots in winter.

  A heavy Sunday afternoon with an unmoving off-grey sky, a chainsaw gnawing away far upstream. Edith and I take a turn around the field, around the edge. As we near the newt ditch Edith puts up a snipe, which zigzags off.

  Back in the house, I look through my diary and write down all the birds I have seen in the field this year. First, those on the ground or in the hedges and trees:

  snipe, song thrush, blackbird, chaffinch, robin, buzzard, bullfinch, raven, magpie, skylark, curlew, wood pigeon, goldfinch, rook, pied wagtail, common partridge, nuthatch, spotted flycatcher, chiffchaff, blackcap, greater spotted woodpecker, green woodpecker, wren, long-tailed tit, redwing, fieldfare, meadow pipit, house sparrow, jackdaw, mallard, yellow wagtail, carrion crow, blue tit, great tit, lapwing, heron, house sparrow, tawny owl, barn owl, little owl, yellowhammer, starlings.

  Flying above or alongside: red kite, kestrel, mandarin duck, heron, canada goose, swift, swallow, house martin, merganser, kingfisher, sparrowhawk, great crested grebe, dipper.

  There are two more species overall than last year, though there are a couple of conspicuous absentees: tree sparrow and brambling.

  In the mood for lists, I also collate all the flowers in the meadow: cuckoo flower, pignut, yellow rattle, meadow vetchling, tormentil, bird’s-foot trefoil, bugle, meadow saxifrage, devil’s bit scabious, eyebright, white daisies, red clover, white clover, bluebells, lords and ladies, red campion, yarrow, dandelions, yellow archangel, foxgloves, camomile, thistles, stick mouse-ear, ragged robin, ground ivy, cleavers, wood anemone, dog’s mercury, stitchwort, dock, cow parsley, hogweed, cowslip, primrose, wild roses, honeysuckle, bush vetch, ribwort plantain, hairy bittercress, rough hawkbit, common meadow rue, nettles, meadow cranesbill, autumn hawkbit.

  17 DECEMBER Through the field blows a relentless wind. Now the foliage has died back or been torn away, smaller birds are more visible. In the lichen-encrusted apple trees in Bank Field a tiny treecreeper ascends, pecking with its beak, which is decurved like the curlew’s.

  A fast-darkening day, and a badger appears by the copse. Almost instantly three travelling carrion crows mob it, and it disappears. When I go over, I see that the badger has dragged some uncollected hay towards the fence, presumably for bedding. This is ambitious, since the sett is hundreds of yards away. But clearly life goes on in the sett, as it has done for countless years past.

  19 DECEMBER One of those curiously mild, almost spring days that December can throw up. In the morning the entire field is woven with spider webs, so much so that the low sun reflecting off them is blinding, like moonlight lying on the sea. The air fills with drifting gossamer strands, each carrying a juvenile spider leaving home.

  23 DECEMBER It is getting towards prime mating time for the foxes, and the night is alive with barking. Foxes have a wide range of vocalizations, though they mainly ‘yip’ in a staccato style or bark ‘woo-woo’. They also emit a ‘waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’ howl to raise the hairs on the neck.

  I walk down to the field in the moonlight. Now I can hear another fox sound: ‘gekkering’. This is a clicky chattering interspersed with squeaks, more parrot than dog. It is used in aggressive encounters. The noise is coming from the river, and is discernible even above the background babble. My advance across the field is hardly silent: two days of rain have left the clay sodden and this has now frozen. The moon’s rays pick out flickering diamonds in the grass. Peering over the bankside fence I can see the silhouettes of two foxes either side of the river, eight feet apart. Red foxes are highly territorial. I skirt out into the promontory and around. They are so preoccupied, and my loud advance sufficiently confused by water noise, that I get to within ten feet, and the fox on the shingle across the Escley is perfectly illuminated; I can see the breath from his snarling mouth, the flatness of his ears.

  Foxes have been doing this for a long time. Remains of the red fox have been found in Wolstonian glacial sediments from Warwickshire, meaning they were around between 330,000 and 135,000 years ago.

  Something in the atmosphere changes, and the fox on the far bank looks up and sees me, and bounds off. Reynard disappears into the shadow of the thicket.

  Then I go to my earth.

  27 DECEMBER At night the temperature dips below freezing. The pulse of life is stilling, slowing. Over the field sits the rusty-iron smell of the year’s finish. The field would be an almost empty scene if I could not see my memories superimposed upon it. This is the field I cut by hand, the field I was part of, where I learned the pleasure of simple things. If you want to know what happiness is, ask the fellow who cut the hay.

  31 DECEMBER New Year’s Eve. I put the sheep in the field, and a load of hay in their feeder. In a sort of virtuous circle the hay is from this field – the hay I made in the summer, pulled down on those now indispensable tarpaulins.

  The sheep and hay are in. The raven croaks. I shut the gate and leave. This is how it is, has been, how it shall be evermore.

  Flora

  alder

  apple

  ash

  autumn hawkbit

  bird’s-foot trefoil

  blackberry

  blackthorn

  bluebell

  bracken

  bramble

  bryony

  bugle

  burdock

  bush vetch

  camomile

  cleavers (goosegrass)

  cock’s foot

  common bent

  common meadow rue

  common vetch

  cow parsley

  cowslip

  crab apple

  crested dog’s tail

  cuckoo pint

  dandelion

  deadly nightshade

  devil’s bit scabious
<
br />   dock

  dog violet

  dog’s mercury

  dyer’s greenweed

  elder

  elm

  eyebright

  field forget-me-not

  field maple

  field scabious

  fir

  foxglove

  goat willow

  ground elder

  ground ivy

  hawthorn

  hazel

  hemlock

  hogweed

  holly

  honeysuckle

  ivy

  Jack-by-the-hedge

  Jew’s ear mushroom

  knapweed

  lady’s smock

  lesser celandine

  liberty cap mushroom

  lords and ladies

  marsh thistle

  meadow buttercup

  meadow cranesbill

  meadow foxtail

  meadow grass

  meadow vetchling

  mistletoe

  mouse-ear

  nettle

  oak

  pignut

  primrose

  quaking grass

  ragged robin

  red campion

  red clover

  red fescue

  ribwort plantain

  rosebay willow herb

  rough meadow grass

  rye grass

  saxifrage

  sedge

  sloe

  snowdrop

  sorrel

  St George’s mushroom

  stitchwort

  sweet vernal

  thistle

  timothy

  tormentil

  tufted hair-grass

  turf mottlegill mushroom

  velvet shank mushroom

  white clover

  white daisy