by Tom Cox
If you spend enough time out walking and witnessing this stuff you realise that there was always a predestiny to the ghosts and monsters that have, for centuries, spilled from the imagination of rurally situated British writers: if the people who invented them hadn’t made them up, someone else would have, or at least ones not unlike them. The countryside – particularly the gnarly, craggy, knobbly countryside of the Deep South West – and the creaking, weather-blasted architecture of that countryside, especially when stripped back by seasonal change, is too rich with spooky imagery for it never to have happened. I am hugely inspired by this on my walks, to the point that it can send me into a minor state of witchy rapture, and I welcome its onset, but, even so, winter is not my season. It claws at me with its mucky nails and strips me back until I’m in the proper fallow state to best receive and fully appreciate my true season, which is spring.
I love spring. I feel it in every fibre of my being. This is not an unusual feeling of course for a human who wants to feel warm and sensually switched on, but there might be an extra, biological factor to it for me. I was born in May, the middle part of the month, when everything has usually fully kicked into gear, and May is when I feel most alive, most me, and never more so than here in Devon – because it’s more fertile and wild than anywhere I’ve lived before and because that makes you feel more entrenched in May’s essence.
I love May so much, I attended three Devonshire May Day festivals last year. At the most memorable of these I walked down Lustleigh Cleave – a dramatic cheese-wire slice in the wooded land on Dartmoor’s softer south-eastern edge – on the first roasting hot day of the year to watch the crowning of the Lustleigh village May Queen, a tradition revived in the early 1900s but stretching back unknown centuries prior to that, and a perfect day out for anyone who tends to see the original 1970s version of The Wicker Man less as a horror film and more as a sweet, well-meaning documentary about agroforestry. After descending the Cleave’s soft wood-sorrel paths past standing stones and glistening streams, I and my five companions for the day entered the village orchard, where a maypole awaited us. To the maypole’s immediate rear was a large rock with a stone seat on top of it and five decades of young female names carved into it. A person could perhaps find a scene in Britain more suggestive than this of the declaration ‘We are ready for the sacrifice’ but it would be difficult. Outside the village hall old black and white photos of previous Lustleigh May Queens were displayed, and out of the ingrained habit of a person who has watched The Wicker Man fifty-seven times I could not help but check to see whether or not the 1972 photograph was missing. ‘They do love their divinity lessons,’ said my friend Andy in his best Christopher Lee voice. It was always only going to be a matter of time before somebody did.
May’s pay-off is felt even more acutely on the edge of the moor, the celebration of it perhaps even more necessary. Suzi and Fergus, whose hard-to-find house we have walked down the Cleave from today, have been snowed in for long periods during all but one of the twelve winters they’ve lived here. In that time, Suzi – a careful driver, like most people who live on or near Dartmoor – has written off three cars on these narrow lanes. Even the psychedelic moorland spring comes with its dark side: this time last year Suzi and Fergus had a weasel slaughter all but one of their thirteen chickens in two days flat. Deeply traumatised, the lone survivor had since moved next door. As I climbed back up the Cleave to my car, I was followed by a special Dartmoor sun: that sun you feel is palpably closer to you than it is elsewhere in the county, simply because you’re a little nearer to the roof of the world. The air had a slow, sparkly quality, as it often does on the moor, and this seemed to follow me home then stick around for the next few days. Cherry blossom and dandelion seed heads floated through the air in my garden, adding to its psychedelic reinvention. My cat Ralph, who has fantastic sideburns and a rugged late-hippy-era look about him, walked lazily through the blossom with a beatific expression on his face, and I felt like I was watching a dream sequence from a road movie made in 1969 by cats about cats.
All around us, everything was growing frantically. The garden’s copper beech hedge went from rust to dazzling green in barely more than a day. I mowed the lawn, nipped inside for a shower and a cup of tea, and it seemed that while my back was turned another twenty daisies had appeared. I mowed it again soon after, shaping two thick new border areas and leaving them free do their own thing where I’d scattered wildflower seeds, a decision that, though relieving me of part of a weekly chore, was made out of a wish to encourage more bees and butterflies into the garden rather than pure laziness. My current lawnmower had been a birthday present from my parents two years previously. Along with its assembly kit and instructions, the mower arrived with a lined pad marked ‘NOTES’. In here the true mowing connoisseur was presumably intended to make observations on the quality of his mow. My dad told me not to mow any pebbles because a bloke his friend Jeff knew mowed one and the pebble shot up and sliced off one of Jeff’s friend’s Labrador’s testicles. I don’t have a Labrador, and if I did and it was male I would almost certainly have it castrated at the earliest possible opportunity, in the normal legal manner, but the advice stuck with me, and I am careful not to mow pebbles. I viewed the notes section in the mower handbook as absurd for a long time, but I adore notebooks and can’t stand to see any of them empty and unloved, even – and perhaps especially – if they’re plain and dull, so I began to put it to occasional use, recording my user experience as a weekly handler of the Bosch Rotak 43 Ergoflex.
Even after the lawn had been mown short and smooth, a dark diagonal line remained visible across the largest segment of it. This line led to the place just beyond some brambles, through a hole in my garden fence, where a group of badgers had made their sett: the most direct route there from the copses on the hill above my house where they went to forage for grubs and rodents at night. I’d first noticed badgers in my garden the year before last, when one took a similar path across my lawn at dusk. It looked like an animal surprised at its own ability to run. Soon afterwards, another badger went through my recycling and separated plastic from aluminium: a needless gesture, since it all goes in the same bag in this part of Devon, as dictated by South Hams District Council. The following year, close to Summer Solstice, as I was taking a long cut across the hill overlooking my house to the post office, engrossed in a Garrison Keillor podcast on my iPod, I very nearly trod on a much younger badger, who scuttled away into the thick hedgerow. As the afternoon wore on a mixture of emotions set in: annoyance at my absent-mindedness, elation and that special remorse that only comes with almost treading on a very young creature that resembles a small snouty folk-rock bear. I read up on badgers a little when I got home and discovered that they are omnivores and not, as I first thought on a hasty misreading, ‘omnivoles’, which, being not a real word, does not in fact mean a vole who is in every place at once, which to me seems a shame and a missed opportunity. A couple of foods that badgers especially enjoy, I learned, are peanuts and cat biscuits, both of which I had a decent supply of in the house. At dusk that night I took some of both up to the hillside in bowls and sat in the long grass where I’d almost trod on the badger, determined to make amends. A bonus sight greeted me a few minutes after I arrived and scattered some of the peanuts and cat food: not just the reappearance of the original young badger from earlier, snuffling about on the shorter turf, but a shyer, smaller sibling, in the long grass and weeds a few feet away. Neither seemed hugely bothered by my presence, perhaps not yet being fully schooled in the lesson that human beings are massive bastards. I crouched in the grass and watched the two badgers for a quarter of an hour or so then emptied the remainder of my peanuts and cat biscuits from my bowls, which they duly chomped, the bolder one coming within about a foot of eating from my hand.
Over the ensuing days, without any special effort on my part, my life became very badger-themed. The following week I visited the annual summer Scythe Fair at Thorney Lakes in Somerset.
To remind myself about the fair’s imminence, I wrote ‘Scythe Fair!’ on the appropriate day on my calendar. ‘Why does it say “Scythe Fair!” on your calendar?’ my girlfriend asked, and I told her that it was because I was going to a scythe fair. The Scythe Fair featured several stalls selling scythes, old and new, while children romped in freshly scythed grass heaps and competitive unisex scything took place in the central arena, some of it (male only) topless, some of the competitors surprisingly youthful. This gave the place the slight look of a Grim Reaper Hogwarts. Jay, my companion for the day, who suffers from the most virulent hay fever known to man, had not quite allowed for the results of this in his planning, so I took refuge with him and his ever-reddening damp face in the far corner of the fair, away from the scythed grass. Here I got talking to Leslie on the Dorset for Badger and Bovine Welfare Group stall; who was raising awareness about the government-endorsed badger cull, which, based on deeply questionable scientific evidence and with a ludicrously wasteful budget, was moving further into the South West. I told her that I’d recently fed my local badgers peanuts, and she said she went a step further and made peanut butter sandwiches for her local ones every day at dusk. The badgers had come to expect this and, with time, even view it as their right, but one evening when they arrived in her garden with their typical punctuality she realised she was fresh out of peanut butter. She searched her fridge and freezer but the only slightly appropriate meal she could find was a dish of oldish ratatouille from her freezer which, if she was honest, she wasn’t sure if she was ever going to get around to eating. ‘They loved it,’ she told me. ‘But they ran off with the dish afterwards.’ She paused and a wistful mood appeared to overcome her. ‘I really liked that dish,’ she added. At one of my spoken-word events only a couple of days after this a member of the audience told me about a close friend who’d been bitten on the bottom by a badger in the garden at a house party in Exeter, which made me wonder not just about the finer details of the attack but whether I was going to the right house parties. A couple of initial small signs of a sett appeared in my garden a week or so later. The badgers reconsidered and abandoned this but in early spring 2016 the other sett, at the end of the diagonal path in the lawn, appeared. Intrigued, I set up a trail camera not far from its entrance.
Each of the three springs I’ve experienced in Devon has been markedly different from the other two. When I arrived from Norfolk in March 2014 it rained relentlessly for weeks, transforming low-lying fields into lakes, then a fierce sun finally hit and the whole place exploded in fluorescence, giving me unrealistic expectations of just how many primroses and bluebells I might find squeezed into an average South West Peninsula woodland copse from here on. After a dark, dingy winter, spring 2015 brought a strange, stark heatwave. With April barely under way, the footpaths near my house were full of walkers in shorts, and the trees, still largely leafless, appeared almost harassed, like people being hurried out of the house to an engagement when they have not yet finished getting dressed. But last spring was just about perfect: mist that seemed to paint itself over all the right bits of the land then got burned away slowly by an assertive, calm sun, creating tingling days that were warm but not too warm in their middle then cool and atmospheric at their close. Days that made you realise that the chief reason people talk about the weather a lot in casual conversation is not out of dullness or awkwardness; it’s because somewhere deep inside we realise that weather is our one true leader. I want to grab days like this hard and wring every bit of goodness out of them, which is why spring is a time when I am not always the working beast that I should be. I am a Morning Person, whose best creative energy comes between the hours of 6 a.m. and noon, and must, vitally, be bottled during that period, but when I sit at my desk on a bright morning in spring it’s invariably with the febrile sense that there’s a party going on outside and everyone but me has been invited. Oscar Wilde said, ‘Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast,’ which is nonsense, but sounds pithy and smart and makes you seem devastatingly hip to actual dull people if you quote it in your favour. Announcing ‘I’m a night owl’ is full adulthood’s equivalent of a flamboyantly lit underage cigarette. It’s a statement designed to impress: all people who say it naturally seem more interesting and mysterious. Perhaps they frequent jazz clubs and consort with beatniks and intellectuals? Certainly they must do something fascinating with their lives and not just, say, stay up late scrolling through Facebook. I know a penchant for waking early is going to win me few friends, but I’m not going to hide from it to try to make you like me. My love of mornings is as undeniable as two or three of my limbs. But it is not synonymous with any antipathy towards night-time or Night People. I can happily go to bed late but I’ll still invariably be awake at dawn. If I choose an early night, it’s out of a mixture of self-knowledge and self-preservation, and if I am doing spring in the best way – which I do not always have the self-discipline to – early nights become increasingly important.
On a Sunday in the early part of spring 2016, a couple of weeks after I’d first arranged the trail cam near the badger sett in the garden, I skipped down the lawn to retrieve the memory card from it. The sun was peeking over a row of beeches like a pastoral equivalent of the classic graffiti of Kilroy and his wall, and the owls of the valley had just handed the avian noise baton over to the Dawn Chorus. This morning the band, which was rapidly becoming one of my all-time favourite British ones, right up there with Led Zeppelin, Pentangle and the Stones, was working on a fuller sound: lots of new session players were chipping in and trying out new ideas, including a pheasant, the ensemble’s answer to a notoriously unreliable bagpipe player who stumbles in, still drunk from the night before, blows a couple of off-kilter notes, then leaves. Still in my pyjamas, I walked down to the river, inhaling overpowering wild-garlic stench, and immediately saw a kingfisher zipping along above the surface, fish in beak. As I walked back along the lane, a small white van pulled up beside me and its driver wound down his window. ‘Bloody hell, the things you see around here in the morning!’ said the driver. ‘I thought you were an escaped convict from Dartmoor prison, dressed like that.’ It was Ian, my plumber. Ian is a Morning Person too, and it was his trail cam that I had borrowed to film the badgers.
‘Any luck over the last couple of days?’ he asked.
‘Neh,’ I said. ‘Got a magpie yesterday. At least it was the right colour scheme.’
In a fortnight of striving to catch the badgers on film I’d so far managed to get one good clear eleven-second video of one scuffling around and another of a tail – thick and almost certainly badger-owned – wafting about in the corner of the frame. I’d also managed to record six other moving things that were manifestly not badgers: that magpie, two field mice, my left leg, a fox and my industrious female cat Roscoe returning from a hunting expedition with a mole dangling from her mouth. The mole, although assuredly deceased, wobbled slightly from side to side, so if you counted it as a moving thing too, that made seven in total. I said, ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie, and how’s your wife?’ to the magpie. I always say, ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie, and how’s your wife?’ to solitary magpies, as popular superstition dictates that I must, for good luck, but doing so can become very tiring as there are a lot of magpies where I live and very few of them are in steady relationships.