21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  Summer Solstice is a punctual visitor whose punctuality, though unvarying, always takes me by surprise. Midsummer’s Day does not really happen in the middle of summer of course, and if it did genuinely mark the midpoint of the warm part of the British year, that would feel desperately unfair, but its arrival always elicits a slight sense of injustice in me: a Hold on! We’ve only just got to the point where all the leaves are green! You can’t start heading in the other direction yet! protest. As I headed home from the site of the weasel attack, this protest rose inside me more acutely than ever. There were signs that the lush party of June in Devon had reached its crescendo: nature’s equivalent of that moment on a night out when you stay out, thinking things will get wilder, and they do, but in an insalubrious way that you regret. Blood-caked bird wings and gristle lay on the path ahead of me. My bare legs had been stung by the towering bully-boy nettles of full-throttle summer, thistles that didn’t have the guts to slag me off to my face. A local foraging expert named Brigit-Anna McNeill – more commonly known as just Anna – had told me recently that the stings were good for you. In which case, I was seven stings healthier than I had been at the beginning of the day.

  A forager is much better than me at looking and listening as they walk through the countryside: they see beyond the wall of green that the rest of us see flanking us in midsummer and recognise individual species. My Scythe Fair companion Jay, who cooks a lot of foraged food, regularly walks the paths near my house sampling all manner of leaves and flowers like some kind of mystic ground-level giraffe. I wanted to gain the confidence to do the same so in midsummer 2015 I joined one of Anna’s foraging courses in the grounds of Sharpham House, on the hill above the spot where the river reaches the spectacular peak of its congenital indecisiveness. After only a few hours in a tucked-away corner of the UK’s Deep South West like this with a group of strangers, a strong sense of community sets in: a possibility in the air of being part of a new underground society. To be fair, the particular characters of the day perhaps exacerbated the effect: a towering floppy-haired mushroom expert called Louis who reminded me of the hunky rebel leader Diane Keaton falls for in the futuristic Woody Allen film Sleeper, for example, and a barefoot father–son team called Rainbow and River who constantly seemed to be climbing trees, even on the few occasions when they weren’t. In this environment a sentence such as ‘Look – Rainbow is making a spit poultice!’, which might seem outlandish in most places, becomes normalised suprisingly quickly.

  One of the bits of vegetation I ate for the first time on Anna’s foraging course was a thistle. There is a tendency to force your mind open when you eat a thistle, to prepare yourself for it to taste very different to what you expected, but what it tasted like was a thistle. At best you might have said it had overtones of fibrous, angry cucumber, which didn’t work for me as someone who’s always believed cucumber to be redolent of many of the most disappointing aspects of life as a UK citizen. I preferred my first tastes of wood sorrel, mustard leaf, Anna’s nettle tea – which she said had completely cured her hay fever – and hart’s tongue. Ancient wisdom says that hart’s tongue prevents people from having impure thoughts and, sure enough, I did not have any impure thoughts for a whole three hours after eating it, but that might just have been because I had a headache. We also found some lady’s mantle – also known as alchemilla – in the garden at Sharpham, which, Anna informed us, helps to regulate the female menstrual cycle. I noticed that at this point most of the men in the group hung back slightly from the lady’s mantle, as if concerned by the prospect of having their own cycles regulated. I am sure that I was far from the best student on the course – my decision to wolf down a bag of samosas straight after it had finished would seem to underline this – but I did notice that my ability to see through the green wall – whether I had the intention of eating some of it or not – improved afterwards. A huge teasel growing behind my back fence became no longer just a nondescript weed in the wallpaper of the land but a masterpiece of natural bee-friendly architecture, with leaves that curved to collect rainwater and form organic drinking bowls for blue tits. Strimming an unexplored patch at the far end of my garden and catching a familiar odour, I stopped just in time to rescue a previously undiscovered patch of verbascum and mint then picked a few leaves of the latter and used them to make tea.

  I often end up with stuff in my pockets during my local walks: the odd bit of wild food, but also shells, pebbles, a horseshoe, a lichen-coated stick with a fetching accidental sheep’s wool wig. Pockets become different things here to what they are in many other counties. In Devon having a large collection of twigs or a mollusc in your pocket is regarded in pretty much the same way as having some keys in your pocket is in Kent, Berkshire or Leicestershire. I get home and empty mine, finding places in the garden for the knicknacks I’ve discovered. Some of them stay on a permanent basis, often becoming mildly talismanic, and the rest gradually fade into the earth. I can’t help but pick up a long thin piece of seaweed with a bulbous head, noting its resemblance to a zombie snake, and it comes back home with me to live on a low granite wall for a while, guarding my back door until it withers and then one day is no longer there. A tiny bird skull found on a green lane near the village of Blackawton replaces it. In horror films an animal skull in or near a house is one of the early signifiers that you’ve entered the place where the Bad Folks live, but the people I’ve met in Devon who have them near theirs tend to be the opposite: some of the least scary people you can come across. A farmer will often affectionately hang on to the skull of a favourite ram. A friend who has campaigned against the cull keeps the skull of a badger, found beneath some gorse on a walk on the edge of Dartmoor, in her workroom. It is there for the same reason that the stone-floored mid-Norfolk farmhouse of the late artist and robot maker Bruce Lacey, which I visited in 2012, was full of taxidermy: it is a lament. It’s about love.

  By late summer 2016 badgers had become a regular, almost casual, presence in my garden. One morning in mid-August I was woken at four by a loud crunching sound directly below my bedroom near the living room’s French windows, where my elderly cat The Bear liked to sleep. I remembered that I’d fed The Bear a chicken thigh earlier and neglected to get rid of the bone. ‘Don’t crunch the bone, The Bear!’ I shouted, then, worrying, went downstairs to remove it. I arrived at the windows to find a small badger, its mouth full and a somewhat sheepish look on its face. The Bear sat calm but wide-eyed, two feet to the badger’s left. I began to leave the leftovers that my cats were too spoilt to eat outside for the badgers in bowls, knowing they would be empty by morning. I watched several times from the window as one of the badgers scuttled to within a foot or so of where one of my other cats, Shipley, sat on an old beanbag, a sorry-looking item long since relegated from the house, which, despite my attempts to patch it up, haemorrhaged polystyrene beads onto my lawn, but, owing to Shipley’s abiding attachment to it, I couldn’t bring myself to throw away. Shipley had always been a loud cat, unafraid to speak his mind, but his face as the badger went by suggested that they had reached some sort of arrangement and everything was totally mellow and tight.

  A little over a month later, though, I woke again not long after having an early night, and heard gunshots ringing out from the hillside. After that I did not see any more badgers in my garden. I knew it was no coincidence. All in all, between August and October almost 11,000 badgers would be killed across the UK, yet since the beginning of the cull in 2013 there had been no evidence of it reducing the spread of bovine TB. Undoubtedly losing cows to TB must be awful and heartbreaking for farmers, but scientists and animal charities have repeatedly told us that there is nothing to say badgers are more likely to spread TB to cattle than several other animals, and the initial evidence that they spread it at all has been questioned by scientists. But – when innoculation of badgers would have been far cheaper – the government had opted for mass slaughter, in the process costing the UK taxpayer almost £7,000 for every badger killed. I’d
signed petitions, tried my best to use what little influence I had to spread the word, but of course it was useless. I wish I’d been able to do more, but what? Run up the hill in my pyjamas and hurl myself between gun and badger? Over the next few months I saw just one sign of a badger in my garden: a new hole in my lawn, too big to have been made by the green woodpecker who sometimes visited and foraged for ants.

  The land was beginning to rust again. You could see it best from the top of the hills. I wonder if I have become addicted to hills, or maybe just those near me. You weigh less standing on the ones here than you do on those in other parts of the country. This is due to the granite limb that makes up Devon, Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly and part of Somerset, whose low density has the power to subtly alter gravity. The name of the granite limb is the Cornubian Batholith, which, I have decided, is also what I will call my stoner rock band when I finally get around to forming it. I sometimes think I can sense that lightness – an almost floatiness – when I’m walking. There can be a unique rhythm to walking in Devon, where you frequently reward yourself with beer for walking up hills then walk up some more hills as punishment for the beer you drank. But often the intoxication has nothing to do with the fact that you’ve incorporated a pub stop into your route; it’s about the endorphins accumulated on the clamber to a small summit, the rush of good air at the plateau. Curiously, my final walk as a Norfolk resident was to the top of one of the few proper hills in that part of the country: to Mousehold Heath in Norwich, where the angry rustics of Kett’s Rebellion camped out with their scythes and pikes in the mid-1599s, and whose shepherdfolk and scrubby hillocks were painted by Cotman and Crome in the early nineteenth century, just a little before branches of Homebase and HSS Tool Hire opened on the industrial estate to the rear. There’s a scrawled question in my journal from the day I walked to the top of Mousehold Hill, already deeply in love with Devon and excited about my new life there: ‘Can undulation be an addiction?’ Mousehold offers the best view of the best side of my favourite British city: Cow Tower in the foreground – the tower nobody wants to believe that a cow once didn’t climb to the top of by accident – then the gentle staircase of land leading up to the castle mound via the cathedral and the plague pits of Tombland. But because even the few small hills you do get in Norfolk tend to be loners and hillanthropes, you don’t get those glorious localised weather patches there that you get in an area of vertiginous topographical bunching like south Devon.

  Looking back across the Dart Valley towards my house early on a golden morning last autumn from the tallest of the hills that circle Totnes, I wondered if this was the best season of all for light in this part of the country. In all fairness though, I sometimes wondered that in spring too, and in summer. Even in winter too, although less often. In a couple of months the reds and golds would be stripped back to reveal the ghost land behind autumn’s LSD curtain: the ivy-choked quarter barns and ruined bothies, the witches’ knickers. But now the foliage, moisturised and sun-kissed, was almost blinding. Haytor, up on the moor, was clear and distinguished – half a day’s walk away but almost touchable. Isolated regions of mist and cloudlets hung below it over the mini-valleys. The town was a bowl of hazy light. The sky – as always on the Cornubian Batholith – looked to be planning something big, even when it wasn’t. Down at the bottom of the origami fold of the jumbled land, the river looked smoky. As high as I was, I didn’t feel above the wildlife of the valley; I felt within it, no more than its equal, exactly as I should. But there was something bothering me, something in addition to the knowledge that most of the badgers that had lurked in the fields and woodland below me in summer were no longer there, something about the view that wasn’t quite right. On the town’s margins, in the nearly three years I had lived here, several wounds had appeared in the green hillsides. Famously, graffiti artists used to self-mockingly yet proudly add TWINNED WITH NARNIA to the town sign, then later, TWINNED WITH AREA 51, but recently the sign had been defaced again to read, less playfully, TWINNED WITH LINDEN HOMES, a reflection of the strength of local feeling about the succession of executive home developments being vomited onto one of the most beautiful stretches of countryside in Britain.

  There is part of me that wonders if it’s greedy to complain about these estates. Most other places in Britain are full of concrete, so why shouldn’t this one be too? A lot of people in the centre of the country would auction a close member of their family to be surrounded by countryside a quarter as unspoilt as this. But I know that’s the wrong way to look at it. You can’t evaluate a pushbike using the rules of a tank. We need some recognisable places to still be recognisable places, particularly at a time when most places no longer are. There’s nothing about these developments that smacks of necessity; they’re what you might call large uninspired expensive boxes if ‘boxes’ didn’t imply something more brutalist and original. This isn’t a weasel killing a rabbit or a hen to save its family from starving. One estate calls itself Origins, presumably to commemorate the origins of stoats, deer and owls losing their homes. Another far less imaginative one looked like it had reached its unsurpassable apex of blandness then decided to outdo itself by building the blandest wall known to man in a place where a wall did not need to be built. There’s no excuse for a terrible wall. Walls can be great, even those erected on a budget – miniature stone or brick galaxies – but you could stare at this one for hours and gain no extra vision. It’s just a wall. It will only become slightly interesting if nature kicks seven shades of shit out of it.

  Devon is a little culturally isolated from the rest of the country, and there’s not a lot of employment to be had here; the upside of that has always been that it’s ruggedly beautiful and very green. But now it’s starting to look like going down to the woods here could become like going down to the woods in most other places: you’ll be in for a big surprise, which is that the woods aren’t there any more and have been replaced with an identikit housing estate called The Woods. The building and naming of these places work on the same logic of a large powerful man killing a defenceless chicken then renaming himself The Chicken afterwards. I’ve seen the plans, the red marks scattered on a council OS map like plague pustules, and this is only the beginning. The developers are selling a rural dream while bludgeoning the dream itself – not to mention the local infrastructure – as they do so. No doubt there’ll be a break at some point, maybe in a year or so. All the roadworks will be gone, and there’ll be a brief period of respite until the next lot of protected land is sold off to make rich people richer and the next, and the next, until finally almost all the magic will have been sucked away, and for miles around dawn in the countryside will be signified by little more than the sound of people waking up and starting some car engines where badgers and weasels used to live.

  2

  WOFFAL

  A few of us were sitting around having a chat in my mum and dad’s living room in Nottinghamshire: me, my aunt Mal and uncle Chris, my mum and dad and my cousin Fay. My dad, who was wearing Chris’s jacket, having stolen it from a coat peg in the hall when Chris wasn’t looking, was telling everyone about the area’s annual festive hunt, which was taking place in the fields to the rear of the house. An hour previously, accompanied by a slightly reluctant me, he’d driven three villages east to watch the hunt begin in weather that made your teeth hurt.

  ‘COME ON! GET IN THE CAR, YOU BIG TWAZZOCK,’ he’d said. ‘I KNOW YOU HATE IT AND I DON’T LIKE WHAT THEY USED TO DO EITHER, BUT THEY HUNT A MAN IN A FOX SUIT NOW, NOT A FOX, AND IT’S REALLY SPECTACULAR WHEN THEY ALL COME OVER THE HILL, JUMPING THE HEDGES.’

  ‘But it’s the same people who did hunt foxes, before it was banned?’ I asked.

  ‘NO,’ said my dad. ‘THIS LOT ARE ALL FROM SOCIALIST WORKER MAGAZINE.’

  My feeling about fox hunting is this: if you do it, I don’t want to be anywhere near you, let alone in a situation where I might have to speak to you. Recently the prime minister, David Cameron, had been edging worryingly arou
nd the subject of re-legalising it, making noises about some kind of compromise which he described as a ‘middle way’. To my mind the only acceptable middle way for fox hunting would be if the foxes were replaced with hungry wolves, hounds were banned and each hunter was forced to hunt alone with his hands tied behind his back. But I make my living from writing about the countryside, which I know means I should take an interest in all sides of it, dark and light. There was, on the surface of things, a mixture of the two here. On the one hand, a man in a furry bright-orange suit, capering around, watched by giggling children. On the other, the parents of these children, dressed in black, some in veils, all in big hats, celebrating the tradition of ripping a wild animal apart for fun. They looked like the guests at Death’s wedding.