21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  Sea bishops – fish creatures with episcopal headwear – were said to rise from the deep here in the sixteenth century and raise earth-shaking storms. In 1912 the Norfolk-based writer Lilias Rider Haggard wrote to her famous adventure novelist father Henry to say she’d seen a sixty-foot-long sea serpent next door to Covehithe, at Kessingland Beach. Down south at Orford in the twelfth century a bearded man was found in the sea and brought back and treated as a pet by the villagers: a fish-like figure with no hair on the top of his head as close to a sea scarecrow who has ever existed in folklore.

  As Isabelle and I gazed back across the tilted farmland from the crumbling toffee-coloured cliff top to the village, I saw what I’d been hoping to see: a scarecrow, juddering in the breeze. There was no breeze, which made the juddering curious. Perhaps it was that phantom church breeze, escaped into the great wide open.

  ‘Tom, that’s just a guy with a metal detector,’ said Isabelle, who has better eyesight than me.

  I missed living close to this bit of sea. I missed this long straight line of islandless shore with its old shingle monsters and its residual effect on the land beyond. I missed the unimpeded sky – not that I didn’t adore the impeded sky where I now lived. I missed more about this region: my friends, the way my existence here had seemed more effortless in many ways, less necessarily toughened up, although in others less challenging and less brightly, scarily alive. There was nothing to be done about it, though. History has proved that people can’t have two lovers – not successfully, not on a long-term basis where all three parties feel equally rewarded. I had to keep choosing just one. Besides, there was an almost-four-hundred-mile gap in the middle. It didn’t make the process of two-timing easy. On what might be seen as the plus side – although not if you are currently living in one of the buildings a hundred yards inland from Covehithe’s shore – my two romantic interests were getting closer every year. Visibly so, in the case of the eastern one today. The large amounts of polite nineteenth-century-holidaymaker graffiti scratched, with excellent calligraphy, into the church windows suggested a time when Covehithe might have almost been a small resort, rather than a dystopian non-village at the rim of the planet; there was even the mark of a visitor from Buenos Aires, dated 1889. Nowadays the church didn’t even bury bodies in its grounds, anticipating the deeper more forsaken place where coastal erosion would soon take them. As well as the desolate tree corpses, a boxy red-brick structure languished, smashed and part-submerged, on the beach. I took it for an old lookout shelter I once sat in, but the Suffolk artist Kate Batchelor later told me it was a septic tank, which I had definitely not sat in. On my last visit, in 2012, the tank had still been buried unseen in the hillside.

  Back then the road through Covehithe ended in a jagged precipice over the shoreline, like a dismantled piece of unusually crude Scalextric track. That bit of tarmac, serrated by nature, had long since been washed out to sea. It was a beach with an unusually fluid exchange of eclectic paraphernalia. Plenty went out, but plenty came in too. As Isabelle and I walked south towards Southwold we found rounded glass pebbles, a sea-blasted lunchbox, various lengths and colours of old rope, a wristwatch. I remembered the second time I had come here, in 2009, when large planks were scattered all over the shore: strong-looking joists, good quality, probably fallen off a cargo ship. A group of men – opportunists in the timber trade perhaps or just people who, like me, really enjoy wood – were carrying the planks up the beach, one at a time, two men to a plank. The image had stayed with me, and I remember thinking at the time how much they looked like pall-bearers.

  5

  WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

  ‘Bees?’ asked a lady with a badge on her lapel as I entered Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum.

  It was a busy Saturday morning at the museum and I’d estimate that only about 5 per cent of the foot traffic through the front doors during this small window of time was for the bee identification course I was due to attend in one of the building’s upstairs meeting rooms. Perhaps I just had a bee look about me. ‘Yes,’ I told the woman, confirming that I was some bees, and not having a problem with that. In his book The Twits Roald Dahl wrote that if people have good thoughts ‘they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely’. Possibly, in a not dissimilar fashion, a long period of musing about bees will bring something of the bee to your personal ambience: a look that somehow combines peacefulness, industry and dopiness in equal measure. I had been thinking about bees a lot recently, ever since the day a few months ago when a stranger had approached me in the countryside not far from my house and said, ‘Excuse me. Did you know two bees are having sex on your flares?’ and I’d looked down and seen that two bees were having sex on my flares.

  What is the correct course of action when two bumblebees are humping on your clothing? Mine was to take a flyer for a local charity jumble sale from my rucksack, gently slide it beneath the two bees then place them on a low branch of a nearby mulberry tree. They were extremely involved in what they were doing and did not seem to notice the change of scenery. Who knows? I might even have spiced things up a little for them. I had considered the option of just walking on and leaving them to it, and despite the worry that they might fall off at the wrong moment, I could see the possible advantages in this, especially had I been single at the time. It would have been such a great story to tell. ‘How did we meet? Oh, I didn’t have to do much at all. Elizabeth was very forward. She marched directly up to me and informed me that two common carders were making love a few inches below my groin.’ You could imagine it perhaps being a hindrance later on though: the realisation that you had grown apart, yet not wanting to admit it, years of your life frittered away as you stayed together just for the bees and the anecdote they had gifted you.

  It is not uncommon for insects to have it off on me. A few weeks after the bees shagged on my flares, two flying ants landed on my hand and went quite hard at it doggy style as I sat in my garden and attempted to concentrate on an intricate novel about a century of family life in the American Midwest. But I felt particularly honoured to function as a bee knocking shop. I’d always loved bees, a love that has burned more brightly since I moved to Devon, where there appear to be as many bees as there were in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire countryside of my childhood. Sometimes one of them will fly into my front room, headbutt numerous items of furniture and leave. I would not put up with that kind of behaviour from a human friend, but from a bee it feels like a compliment. I would probably even go so far as to say that I’d fight anyone who thinks bees aren’t great, were it not for the fact that loving, not fighting, is the bee way.

  There was a time when my friends would have been surprised if I had told them I was doing a day course identifying bees. Actually, that’s not true. There wasn’t. The course I attended at the Royal Albert Museum was taught by Stephen Carroll. Stephen is the county recorder for hymenoptera, which essentially means he is in charge of all the insects in Devon. When insects are obscure and aren’t sure what they are, they can go to Stephen to find out. As well as showing us how to identify more regular bumblebees, such as the common carder and the buff-tailed bumblebee, he told us about bumblebees particular to Devon, such as Bombus muscorum and humilis. I decided that of all of these the buff-tailed bumblebee was my favourite, having a certain satisfying chunkiness about it. I pictured myself befriending one and teaching it to sit on my shoulder like a fat stripy parrot.

  Later on during the course we learned about some other rare bees who hang out in other parts of the country but don’t make it this far south-west. At this point I found myself bristling and getting a little Devon-proud. Why does Northamptonshire have red-shanked bees, but we don’t? What is so good about Northamptonshire? I wondered. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to nip up there and bring a few back in a medium-size van? We traipsed out into Northernhay Gardens with perspex bee pots, gently trapped some bees inside them, identified the bees with Stephen’s help then set them free. It
was amazing how many bees you saw, even here, in the heart of a small city, once you truly opened your eyes. A couple of homeless men who had been sleeping under some blankets in the gardens also joined in at one point and seemed equally fascinated.

  Most of the bees I see in my garden are bumblebees, but every so often a honeybee will turn up, probably on a reconnaisance mission from my friend Hayley’s bee sanctuary, less than a mile away. The sanctuary is behind the graveyard of an extremely old church, an apt home for creatures indelibly associated with death and birth and so crucial to our continuing prosperity as a species. In the ancient custom of Telling the Bees, which dates back to pagan times and is still practised to this day, bees are viewed as highly intelligent, sensitive beings who should be informed of all big life events, as you would a close human friend. If any flying insects are good listeners, you sense it is bees. I like the idea of keeping them abreast about the significant stuff happening in my life.

  ‘Hello. Is that the bees?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I am having a big party for my fortieth in May.’

  ‘Great. Thanks for letting us know. Remember, it’s better to overestimate on food than underestimate.’

  Hayley seemed unsurprised when I told her about the two bees having sex on my flares. ‘It happens a lot,’ she said. I assumed she meant generally, rather than specifically on flares, but wasn’t totally sure. ‘I watched two of them going at it for ages recently. They will often last an hour. They tend not to suffer from premature ejaculation. The guy wiped himself off very carefully afterwards.’ Hayley has just one hive, built with great love by her carpenter boyfriend Tom, which sits amid ox-eye daisies, lady’s mantle and dwarf comfrey. Hayley cuts the grass in the sanctuary with her scythe. I know this because when she gave me a lift back from the pub once in her van she said, ‘Mind you don’t sit on my scythe!’ when I got in and almost sat on her scythe. Whenever I’ve sat in Hayley’s sanctuary with her, honeybees have buzzed gently around us and a special soft quietness has been in the air. Hayley does not wear a mask when she’s around her bees, and I did not feel the need to either, even when a bee landed on my earlobe. A few days later as I drove past the sanctuary with my car windows open one of her bees flew in and joined me. I wondered about turning round and driving it back home, but it flew back out again after less than a mile. I have to assume it made it back OK but I can’t be sure.

  There are all sorts of dangers for Hayley’s swarm every year. Bees from elsewhere can come in and hijack the hive. Many years ago Hayley opened one of her hives and found a mouse corpse inside, which, in self-defence, her bees had entirely encased in wax. The previous year she’d lost her swarm when wasps drove them out. I think I know the exact wasps she means too: I’m pretty sure they were the same ones who’d been waging war on my garden furniture, weakening it to the extent that one of the chairs finally gave way beneath me, sending me crashing to the ground. I doubt my weight was much of a factor in the breakage since I am, in the words of a man I once paid to adjust a shirt, ‘built like a whippet’. The wasps had been nibbling industriously at the wood for two and a half years, and although they are very small and their work is gradual, my hunch is that their adherence to a diligent long-term plan weakened the structure. The chair was the second part of the patio set to break in the space of the year – the other being half of the sofa section, which came in useful as fuel in an unusually cold late spring, when I ran out of logs.

  If the weather is dry, in the warmer months the wasps and I often sit on my broken garden furniture in the morning and have breakfast together. I normally have muesli. The wasps are quite content with wood, which they take straight, without milk. I look carefully at what I’m eating and drinking before I put it in my mouth, as I don’t want my tongue to get stung and swell up and suffocate me, but I don’t think the wasps want any trouble. They get on cheerfully with their thing, and I get on with mine. They’re in good spirits in spring and summer, far different to what they’re like later in the year, when their tempers flare due to being, in the memorable words of my gardener friend Andy, ‘drunk and out of work’.

  On paper I have more reason to be nervous around wasps than most, and as any wasp worth his salt will tell you, paper is important. When I was eight, a few days after I’d fallen through a garage window, ripping open the underside of my arm and getting rushed to hospital for several stitches, an Italian wasp planted its sting deep inside the fresh wound. I should point out that I was in Italy at the time of the sting, and the wasp had not travelled overseas specifically to hurt me, although I sense that its malevolence was such that it probably would have thought little of doing so. If I close my eyes now I can still feel the spiteful acid furnace of pain I experienced. It was one of many examples I’d seen of just how formidable insects were in Italy, a country where on the same family holiday I’d witnessed thirteen ants successfully carrying a whole baguette along a medieval wall. Wasps then left me to get on with my life in peace for many years after childhood until one day in Norfolk in 2013 when four of them simultaneously stung my bottom while I was in my garden. I had just mowed over their nest though, so who could blame them? I hadn’t realised the nest was there, but you know what it’s like with wasps: they are not interested in going back over the nuances of a fracas.

  I have since come around to wasps. They’re formidable architects, they kill lots of garden pests, they pollinate much more than people tend to believe and they helped humans invent paper – a fact that contradicts the long-held view of them as the anti-book thug counterparts to bees’ gentle selfless intellectuals. In mid-summer any defects they might have are also put into sharp perspective by the horseflies across the road from my house. To date I have never encountered a nice horsefly. Even the one horsefly I met who seemed sort of OK and didn’t bite me probably later turned out to be a Scientologist. I must have been bitten by fifty of them when I went alpaca trekking in Norfolk in 2011. ‘I will never forget what your legs looked like on that day,’ my friend Will told me. ‘Oh, Will. That’s such a beautiful thing to say,’ I replied before realising he was referring to the runnels of blood that turned my shins into a painted horror show as we walked along the North Norfolk Coast Path. I don’t know how the Jersey cows who live near me cope. If I had as many horseflies around me as they do in July, I’d be sarcastic and hard to get on with, but they’re always up for a cuddle when I walk the footpath through their field.

  Insect Day arrived behind schedule last summer. This is the twenty-four-hour period when all the insects in the south-west of the UK get together and agree to all crawl and fly into my front room at exactly the same time. I remember the exact day, as it was the one when I saw my cat Roscoe pummelling a small creature against the French windows of the room with her paw. I hurried outside and removed Roscoe from the creature, which turned out to be the biggest cockchafer beetle I had ever seen. The cockchafer flew into the air, its wingspan covering such an area it could have been mistaken for a dragonfly. It was a warm night and I was drinking beer with my friend Charlotte, who had never seen a cockchafer before. ‘Do you get many moths here?’ she asked. ‘I have a bit of a phobia of moths.’ Remembering the two hundred or so that make my house their home between June and October, I felt it was best to phrase my answer carefully but without factual inaccuracies I might be called on to account for later. ‘Some . . . but I haven’t seen any so far this year,’ I said, opening a window and watching seven of them fly in at once, in the direction of Charlotte’s hair.

  I save a few of these moths from an early death at the hands of various foes – cats, running bath taps, spider’s webs. ‘Good moth!’ I told one not long ago. I praise moths so they distinguish good behaviour, such as leaving the house through open windows, from bad, such as flying at lamps. But in many cases my efforts will be futile: over the course of the summer many moths will be eaten by bats. Moths are a favourite snack for bats, along with cockchafers, dung beetles and gnats. A pipistrelle bat – the most co
mmon breed in Britain – will eat around 3,000 gnats in one night. I know stuff like this because last summer I went on three guided bat walks in the space of three months in the fifty square miles surrounding my house. Most of these revolved around lesser and greater horseshoe bats, species once common in the south-west of Britain, whose numbers dropped dramatically through the twentieth century but have risen again in recent years. Seventy per cent of Britain’s current population of around 10,000 horseshoe bats can be found in Devon. They like the mild climate here, and the hedgerows, which as Anna, a member of Devon Wildlife Trust’s Greater Horseshoe Bat Project, told me, ‘make for excellent bat commuter tunnels’.