21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  The music on the banks of the Otter was gentler, but that fitted in with its character: it’s a redder and sleepier and narrower river than the Dart, more crowded in by its banks. The early 1980s heroin party anthem ‘Golden Brown’ by the Stranglers tinkled through the trees from a portable stereo near a tent on a rocky inlet just downstream from the spot we chose for our beaver stake-out. Stephen, Sarah and I stood quietly in a dark spot under an ash tree and waited for it to finish and, almost exactly on cue with its final bars, a beaver of not dissimilar colour to the one celebrated in the song swam out from the opposite bank. It was far more serene than I imagined, much more serene than the otters we’d just seen, but when it clambered out onto a small sandbank just upstream and began scratching itself that serenity abruptly vanished. ‘It looks like a giant tea cosy,’ observed Sarah, accurately. ‘Is it scratching its nipples?’ A few nights earlier Sarah had gone down to the kitchen in her house to get a glass of water and seen a larger-than-average badger munching through a dish of her housemate’s cat’s food then watched, alongside the cat in question, as it waddled out through the cat flap. ‘I really didn’t think my week could get any better after that,’ she said. ‘But I was wrong.’ As for me, any bitterness I’d been quietly nursing about Hayley’s encounter with the otter on the Dart or Ru and the town seal abruptly vanished.

  Beavers are vegetarians, and – contrary to what you might have read in the fiction of C. S. Lewis – not the kind who sneakily eat fish as well. What is a little mind-boggling is that not more than twenty human generations back seeing one would have been a fairly normal thing. ‘I saw a beaver today!’ would still have been a more noteworthy statement than ‘I saw a duck today!’ but not by much – maybe, say, comparable to a person from our present British century seeing a particularly excellent swan. Beavers were last spotted in Britain in the sixteenth century. The thickness of their pelts and the fact that their castor sacs contain castoreum, which was used as a tincture in perfume, meant they were hunted to extinction. You don’t hear many people banging on about wanting a perfume that smells of castor sacs these days so you’d hope that, were beavers to return to the UK in large numbers, they’d have a much easier time. Their ability to fell trees – earlier, upstream, Stephen had shown us teeth marks in fallen willows – and dam rivers also has a positive effect on the environment, preventing floods and creating wildlife-friendly pools and bogs. After a grooming session, this one – a female – swam another fifteen yards upstream and began to munch loudly through a bank of Himalayan balsam. I thought instantly of my mum, who’d had big problems with balsam in her garden in the past, and I drifted off into a daydream set on her birthday next year: me and the beaver, driving up to Nottinghamshire, Crosby, Stills and Nash on the stereo. ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell the beaver. ‘We’ll be there soon. I know it’s a long way but we’re almost done. Try not to scratch your nipples too much.’ I pull up outside my parents’ house, leaving the car in the lane, not the driveway, out of sight of the house. I ring the doorbell then instruct the beaver to hide behind the hedge or one of my mum’s larger plant pots, just to make the occasion that bit more special for everyone.

  Whereas otters live in holts, beavers live in lodges. This is one of many things I love about beavers. It tells you what you need to know about them straight away: they’re a bit fancy but not too fancy. This particular beaver lodge had been built into the bank of the river directly opposite us, amid the roots of overhanging trees. Spotters from Devon Wildlife had thought there were three kits living in the lodge with this beaver and her far more publicity-shy male friend, but six days after my visit, a couple of days after my fruitless search for Flaviu on the moor, a photo was taken by a resident of the local village which clearly showed five kits sitting in the shallows at the edge of the river. The evening I saw this, I instantly dropped everything and drove back to the Otter and, after sitting on the bank for very little time at all, saw what I had been not quite optimistic enough to bank on: two kits swimming out, serenely, following the exact same route that their mum had the previous week, climbing the bank and chomping on the balsam, albeit with considerably less volume. After a quarter of an hour a dog walker called David arrived. David had been there the previous week, standing close to Sarah and Stephen and me on the bank, and in total had been watching the beavers for over three years, since before their presence on the Otter was even revealed in the news. ‘The male never comes out,’ he told me. ‘The female’s very casual now, though. I held a branch of willow in the water for her not long ago and she started to chew it.’

  David is a mechanic who walks his obedient and lovely dogs along the Otter every night. He probably knows the beavers’ movements as well as anybody. The largest number of otters he’s seen in one night on the river named in their honour is seven. There was a slight worry about the otters trying to eat the beavers’ kits, but now the kits were larger that danger seemed to have passed. The otters were clearly intimidated by the sheer bulk of the adult beavers. Stephen had said that the adult beavers were around the size of a cocker spaniel, but looking at David’s cocker spaniel, Willow, I decided this was an underestimation. The adult female beaver looked like she’d be a fair match for his Labrador, Bracken, on the scales.

  The kits returned to their lodge, and David and I walked back along the river in the direction of my car. The hills roll more modestly here in the eastern part of the county, and as we walked the sun went down over those on our right, like a party balloon losing the friction that had attached it to a wall and gently falling to rest behind a squishy sofa. About forty miles beyond that, or maybe closer, Flaviu still roamed free despite the zoo’s attempts to lure him back with some ocelot urine donated by a concerned keeper. He would roam for over a fortnight more before being captured, in that time toughening up a little and committing the rite-of-passage murder of four lambs. The night felt lively, the particular buzz and hum and rustle that only summer evenings in the countryside in July contain. David, who clearly had more finely tuned hearing than me, stopped abruptly every minute or two to investigate a distant splash or a rustle in the reeds. I had to remind myself not to get complacent about what had just happened: in less than a week I had seen three examples of an animal that just a few years ago I’d assumed I’d never see in Britain during my lifetime. On top of that, I’d seen two very clear examples of another animal I’d only seen in the wild twice – and much more fleetingly – before. But now it seemed oddly normal. Maybe a lot of this was about the power of scarcity? But it was about more than that too. When I was shopping for second-hand records and found rare, forgotten albums, they excited me because they were rare and forgotten, but that wasn’t the whole story: I wouldn’t buy them if they didn’t look and sound great too. Beavers were rare, and the role they’d once played in Britain’s ecosystem had been a little forgotten, but they looked and sounded great too.

  At David’s commanding point and whistle, Willow shot off into the field to our right at speed and completed two ecstatic circuits of it. Upon returning she arrived at my feet and gazed at me keenly. I gazed back at her eager floppy-eared face, the face of a perfect spaniel in rude health. If you’d never seen a face like that, or one remotely similar to it, and you just stumbled across it living contentedly wild on some desolate moor, you’d go a little nuts. Or perhaps you knew about it, this mythical spaniel creature, but only via drawings or the passed-down, subtly altered tales of centuries of folklore. Even so, you’d be excited. ‘Oh my God! Look at this!’ you’d shout. ‘Come quick!’ But after that you’d remember you were on your own, and there was nobody to tell. You would reach for your phone and recall that it was at home on top of a cupboard. You’d shout a little more. Maybe someone was over the next ridge? But your shouts would echo coldly into the big surrounding nothing, unanswered. There would be a vague disappointment about that initially, but you’d get over it. In not much time at all what you’d seen would become your little secret: something that you’d put away somewhere wa
rm and safe for ever that was all the more special for never being touched by anyone else.

  4

  THE HILLOCKS HAVE EYES

  ‘Is that my underwear catalogue?’ asked Annabel.

  We had just arrived outside the studio where Annabel, an artist and university lecturer, worked, near Woodbridge, seven miles from the Suffolk coast. As we emerged from my car we had watched a man in off-white overalls with a sandpaper beard and darting eyes emerge from the front door of the studio. In his hand he clutched a glossy magazine produced by Bravissimo, the lingerie company that caters for women with bra sizes of D cup and above, showcasing their spring range.

  ‘Yeah, sorry, I wanted it for the men’s stuff,’ said the man, returning the catalogue to Annabel.

  ‘That’s Brian,’ said Annabel, opening the door to her studio when Brian had gone. ‘He works in one of the other buildings. He’s harmless, but he doesn’t like dipping his hands into things. There’s a water butt around the back filled with rainwater. I offered him a tenner to put his hand in it and he wouldn’t do it.’

  Annabel and I were about to head off to find two scarecrows she had seen a few miles north, on the edge of the village of Blaxhall, but first she had to check on her zebra finch, which was currently living in the rafters of the spare room next to her studio. The zebra finch did not reside at Annabel’s smallish house in Ipswich, as there was no room, what with the amount of Annabel’s art stored there plus the giant collection of 1980s pornography dominating the first floor. This collection did not belong to Annabel but to her recently deceased landlord, or more precisely to his daughter, who had inherited it and had, for sentimental reasons, declined all requests for it to be removed. Annabel’s studio was in a former school built in the mid-1800s, featuring tall rooms with high windows purpose-built to begin their ascent to the ceiling at the average head height of a ten-year-old Victorian child, to prevent pupils looking out of them and becoming distracted. The dark places behind the beams in the zebra finch’s annexe – a bigger room than Annabel’s studio – were ominously quiet for two or three minutes when we entered, but the finch eventually fluttered out from his hiding place to investigate the latest fatball and seeds that Annabel had provided for him. He had been part of a pair but had recently, in Annabel’s words, ‘shagged the girl to death’. Prior to this, in happier times the two of them had made a nest in Annabel’s first-aid kit out of needles from last year’s Christmas tree, cotton wool buds and the clippings from Annabel’s fringe left on the cold studio floor when she had self-tamed it with her art scissors, but, not being in need of first aid during this period, Annabel would not find this nest – adorned with two perfect cold eggs at its exact centre – until several months after I visited her. At my birthday party the following month she would bring me a gift of half a dozen owl pellets, attractively presented in cellophane-topped tissue paper, which, already under the influence of alcohol, I would incautiously place on top of the sideboard in my dining room amid beer bottles and cake. ‘Do you think Tom will mind if we have a couple of these truffles?’ I overheard my friend Seventies Pat ask my friend Louise later in the evening, when I was still fortunately just about steady and swift enough on my feet to move across the room and intervene before Pat had fully removed one of the pellets from its packaging.

  Annabel could not promise that the scarecrows she had seen would be out today, as they sometimes hibernated, but she had high hopes that we might see them, if we were very quiet. If you are going to spot a pair of scarecrows in Norfolk or Suffolk, the part of the year we were now in – early spring – is as good a time to do so as any. Both of the Blaxhall scarecrows, a male and a female, used department store mannequins as their base and like all proper self-respecting mannequins were known to regularly change outfits, their preferences usually being clothes of a 1940s or 1950s vintage. Despite their local notoriety they were not the best-known instances of esoteric agricultural spookiness within the boundaries of Blaxhall. This distinction went to the Growing Stone at Stone Farm. Allegedly the stone was first excavated by a Blaxhall ploughman in the nineteenth century, at which point it was no bigger than two fists, but it has been expanding steadily ever since, to the extent that it has far surpassed liftability. Old Blaxhallians swear by this legend, although there is no photographic evidence of the stone’s diminutive childhood, nor of its adolescence, when, according to an old man from the village who spoke to the oral historian George Ewart Evans in the mid-1950s, ‘a cat could not walk under’ its now formidable lip. Arguably more than its alleged growth, what makes the stone eerie is that it stands alone in a part of the country that is anathema to big rocks. You could comb the whole of England and not find a less craggy place than here. Stones – flints specifically, the picking of which provided an important income for poverty-stricken villagers in the area before the metalling of roads began in the early twentieth century – are an important part of the terrain in Suffolk and the eastern half of Norfolk, but they are as a rule small, just like almost everything here except the sky. It is a countryside of sleepy waterways, geometric fields, gently rounded churches, satisfying meetings between stubble corridors and spirit-level horizons. If you return here after a long time away in a more vertiginous place, doing so can make you a peculiar kind of dizzy. I can’t quite compare the feeling to anything else in my own experience, but I imagine you’d get a similar sensation if, after living in a normal-size place, you were shrunk and given the chance to explore a model village for a weekend: maybe not shrunk really small so you were to scale with the houses and parks and shops, but reduced to perhaps the size of a hare or a young fox. Everything seems so soft and mild here, but to put it down solely to the flatness would be an error. Where East Anglia is at its flattest, from west Norfolk into north Cambridgeshire and south-east Lincolnshire, a distinctly harsh and unmild ambience is created. By contrast the delicately sloping fields of the rest of Norfolk and Suffolk can feel like a Trivial Pursuit Young Players’ Edition of the south-west of the UK, with hillocks taking the place of hills, and heaths functioning as bonsai moors. It is possible to be lulled into the erroneous belief that it is a place where nothing bad could ever happen.

  There is a treachery to this place but it is a subtle treachery: the treachery of a dastardly hypnotist with a kind face. Scarecrows to me are a big part of this treachery: disorienting comedy humanoid figures redolent of death, shaking in deceptively flinty breezes on distant hazy cotton ridges. You see so many of them in these lowlands, and I don’t think it’s just because they have fewer places to hide. I hadn’t come to East Anglia looking for scarecrows, but they soon found me, as they would anyone who truly seeks to get to know the place on foot, which to my shame I did not until 2008, by which point I had been a resident of the region for almost seven years. That was three springs before I went to Blaxhall with Annabel, and in that time I had photographed over a hundred scarecrows, or mawkins, to use their old Norfolk name. Admittedly some of these were at village scarecrow festivals – such as the one in Barton Mills, at whose 2008 celebrity-themed festival the class system of the village was inadvertently revealed in fake humans on sticks, from the Stephen Fry scarecrow in the north (big detached houses) to the Katie Price scarecrow in the south (1940s council houses) – but these never interested me as much. They were overdone – the commercial ‘all the gear and no idea’ side of scarecrow culture. I far preferred the more rudimentary, minimalist kind I chanced upon on walks, made by farmers and vegetable gardeners with few raw materials and a barnload of imagination. Upturned paint buckets on dusty boiler suits under cloth skies. Gnashing faces from the crypt scrawled in black Sharpie marker on polythene stuffed with old newspaper. Angry one-armed junkyard freaks with car-door-panel torsos. Millennial CD heads on eerie ripped safety-tabard bodies, drenching a fussy allotment in the macabre. Collecting pictures of them became a compulsion in the way that collecting anything lovingly made and not easily located in the mainstream can become a compulsion. I acted decisively on tip-o
ffs, abandoning engagements ostensibly more beneficial to my time. A text arrived from a friend who was almost certain he’d seen a couple in a cornfield just south of Attleborough while travelling back to Norwich from London on the train. I was there within the hour, pogoing a ditch, ripping my best jacket on barbed wire, to get the money shot: ominous greatcoat, traffic-cone wizard head. When Annabel told me about the couple in Blaxhall I did not waste time. As it transpired, they were nowhere to be seen. All we found was an austere allotment. An upturned rusty wheelbarrow. An inkling of young carrots. She comforted me and I tried not to act as disappointed as I was.

  We continued towards Snape, making the most of a bright almost warm day with a breeze made of small needles, the dusty-coloured countryside fervidly evolving to mustard and green all around us. Near the church we stopped to say hi to some sheep. Blaxhall has a good strong sheep history, and these ewes seemed aware of it, upholding their heritage by wandering over to gently headbutt our fists. The name of the inn in the village, the Ship, comes not from a vessel on the sea or the nearby Alde estuary but from the old Suffolk word for sheep. In the nineteenth century the man responsible for dipping the sheep in the village proudly displayed the sign CHARLES SMITH: SHEEP DRESSER outside his house. The shearers here drank lots of ale, sang songs and slept outdoors. In the off season they found what other work they could. Poaching, smuggling. One, legendarily, cut the villagers’ hair, using his shears to ‘take off the rough’ then trimming the rest up with scissors. I told Annabel about this and took a second to admire her fringe. She’d cut it herself again and it was looking particularly smart and sharp. In my bag was my phone, which still displayed an unreturned text from my hairdresser in Norwich, a hairdresser about whom I’d initially felt quite positive before having the cold realisation that she was just like all the other hairdressers I had met in the past and only pretended to listen to me when I told her about the stuff that was important to me. I resolved to return the text later in the evening, explaining assertively that I had moved on and since our parting had found out a lot about who I was and what I truly wanted in life.