by Rob Cowen
I tell him about the kestrel and the blue tit.
‘I meant litter.’
‘Oh, no. Not really. A cigarette butt …’
‘Yeah, well. There should be litterbins and dog bins all the way along this stretch. And a seat or two wouldn’t go amiss, either. But you wait. It’s going to be better when they put the cycleway in.’
I had half switched off but his words are like a jolt. Fingers stuck in my sides. ‘The what?’
‘The cycleway. It’s going right along here.’ He sweeps his arm side to side to denote the length of the old railway. ‘Didn’t you know? It’s been in the papers.’
No, I didn’t know. I follow his arm as he swings it again, pointing left then right, towards where the track runs into the wood and the gorge, where the reinforced metal shutters block off the viaduct and prickle with spikes.
‘Oh, they’re going through all that,’ he says, reading my mind. ‘Pulling it all down. Sorting the viaduct out and extending the cycle track all the way to Ripley.’
I must look shocked because he frowns and attempts to gee me up. ‘It’s a good thing,’ he says. ‘They’re doing the place up.’
‘Who is?’
‘Council. And they’re starting soon. Cutting all this back for a kick-off.’
I have a thousand questions, but can’t get any of them out. I can smell meadowsweet again. And hear the linnets.
‘It’s a good thing,’ he says again. ‘It’s so that all them kiddies and families can come down and ride here, y’know? So they can get outside and into nature. It’s a good thing.’
The sky is blurring and shading grey.
Bored with me, the man wanders off. ‘Come on, Jess. It’s gonna rain.’
But there’s no need for the future tense. Specks are falling heavily on my coat. They thicken quickly into a downpour, worrying the leaves and shushing the fretting nettles.
Each rapid alteration in its size, colour and appearance has been profound. Moving from leaf to leaf, constructing and devouring, the caterpillar has changed entirely: the little body that emerged from its egg has swelled and thickened inside a succession of spun, silken nettle-wombs. Now, in a lull in the weather, it slips from its leaf tent in a final larval shape: a hefty, armoured, bullet-headed form that muscles over the nettle, weighing down the wet foliage. It is the same black as a male adder and trimmed likewise with zigzag yellow along its flanks. Each segment of its body bristles with defensive hairs, repellant hairs, thick, sharp tufts like gorse thorn. A chaffinch in the willow sees it, but doesn’t move; of all birds, only a cuckoo would dare swoop and take it like this, but there’s not been a cuckoo here for thirty years.
The air brightens, pearlescing the clinging damp that has dogged the old railway for days. A linnet sings hurriedly, as though thrust into a spotlight. The caterpillar continues to traverse its mutilated plant, winding down and down the central stem to reach the lower leaves of this sodden, hot clump. These are plumper leaves, but the caterpillar has no interest in eating them. Instead, it once again rolls up the edge of one and draws it together with another, binding them with wraiths of silk to form a cave of green. The sky darkens and a dog brushes past, shaking the stems. The rain begins again, drumming with increasing ferocity and running down the outside of the leaf cave to flood the shining mud. The caterpillar, a full three and half centimetres long, scales the sides to sew a small button of silk – a cremaster – between the leaf’s veins, like a spider’s web in the rafters of a barn. Into this it weaves its hooked hind feet and then slowly, as though testing its tensile strength, extends itself down, head first, until it comes to a twitching rest in a perfect ‘J’ shape.
Light then dark. A day passes. The light returns with dawn rain. A brief interlude of sun, then rain again. A ripple slips down the length of the caterpillar. And another. It becomes a slow, subcutaneous rhythm. Each tremor stirs the dark skin and reveals it to be just another thin membrane. Then a split occurs, silently, behind the head. The ripples continue like shock waves, pushing out the newer, tougher incarnation of a blunt-headed, immobile pupa – a chrysalis. Every contraction further releases it while rolling up the caterpillar’s old form until it becomes nothing more than a crumpled garment of segments, legs and head gathered at its feet. The chrysalis gyrates, twists, and kicks it off, as if stepping out of a bathrobe. Then it hangs there unmoving; a strange, ergonomic-looking shell that would fit well in the grip of a tiny hand, with its smooth plates for the palm and ridges for fingers. In days to come, it will grow nippled and sow-bellied as it dries and turns the colour of an old leaf. Inside, disintegration has begun. Digestive enzymes will liquefy all but a few hard structures as the caterpillar’s cells are recycled for a final purpose. Outside the rain keeps time in the leaves – tick-tock-tick-tock. A roll of thunder resolves into a diesel engine slowing to a stop. A Ford Transit flatbed, the council’s tree-cutting truck, parks up at the bottom of Bilton Lane. Its occupants sit and wait for a break in the weather to begin their work.
‘Everything up to the ash. Stop at the ash,’ bellows the older man. If he’s not in charge, he certainly gives the impression of it. He is talking to a younger lad who looks a little confused. There are two others further on, dressed identically: high-vis tabards and white hard hats. Ear defenders fixed over the top and toughened Perspex glasses. They have the same squaddie tan – the arms and neck. They know what they’re doing, though. Their chainsaws drop from high whines to resistant growls as each bites into the bark of bigger trees down the track. Two cuts either side, one higher than the other, and they step back. A silver birch slumps backwards with a crash.
‘The ash?’ shouts the young man.
His mentor coughs and wipes some dust from around his mouth. He walks over. ‘This one,’ he says, slapping a trunk.
It’s hard to believe this is all happening so quickly.
The gate at the crossing point is unlocked and flung open. The ground either side of the old railway is covered by a wet, orangey sawdust skin. A large red storage tank has been lorried in and sits just beyond the concrete block of the old platform. For a good stretch down the track, and two metres to either side, the vegetation has been cut and cleared. Everything has been chopped back, hacked down or dug up. Stumps lie on their sides, brown, wet-rooted with pale egg-yolk hearts sliced open as if to reveal their ages. Not one of them as old as me.
There are stacks of branches and brambles, and piles of strimmed nettles. Just beyond the red container is something I’ve never seen before – it looks like the base of an old lamppost.
The men work surrounded by safety cones and signs. The track has been off-limits for days, but I approached here from the back way, through the wood and over the meadow so I could watch them from the other side of the willowherbs. I feel like I should be here. Someone should be here. Someone should do something.
‘Don, what about this one?’ The young man’s voice is loud over the chainsaws. The bush he stands next to is taller than him. Its leaves are spear-shaped and burst out at intervals from its mess of long, arching, flex-like branches. At the tip of each is a large flower cone that looks almost furry. Even now, at the death of August, they are an iridescent lilac-purple; the whole bush looks like a can of paint midway through being exploded. Jets of colour shoot everywhere, too vibrant, too alive, to be hacked down. And that’s what’s thrown the lad for a minute.
‘It’s just a buddleia,’ yells Don.
‘So … cut it, yeah?’
‘Of course cut it. Then dig its roots. It’s a bloody pest.’
Not that it matters now, but it was Bill Varley who first laid eyes on this shrub. Varley who’d been initially unsure as to what it might be (the shoots only had a few leaves on them and his eyes weren’t what they’d been), but after checking his RHS Encyclopaedia of Gardening, he was convinced. Varley who’d written in his notebook: 27th Aug – I’ve found Buddleia davidii growing on the dismantled railway! That was 1990. The species had come a long way since its seeds were sent t
o London’s Kew Gardens from China almost a hundred years earlier. Becoming renowned for its late trusses of colourful flowers and a honey-rich scent irresistible to insects and butterflies, it had earned the colloquial name of ‘The Butterfly Bush’ and quickly spread throughout England as a much-prized garden shrub. But buddleia wasn’t content to be contained for long. Pavement cracks, waste ground, development land, walls, chimneys and shingle banks turned out to be ideal replicas of the rocky screen of its native Sichuan province. By 1922, it had jumped the fence and wild bushes were being reported in all manner of strange and sheer places, rampantly colonising Britain’s railway network. Erupting from trackside tunnels and bridges, its rootstock was decried as weakening surfaces and structures and the plant swiftly fell from favour. A black mark was made against its name and rail operators, then government, sought a reclassification. The good-looking, fragrant guest had changed into an uppity, invasive nuisance requiring large amounts of money to control.
Then, during the 1970s, Buddleia davidii’s benevolent side once again came to the fore. Not so much pest as provider. A ferocious depletion of natural habitats in and around Britain’s towns and countryside was taking a catastrophic toll on wildlife. As meadows, grasslands, farmlands and forests experienced large-scale deterioration, the wild-growing oriental shrub proved to be a vital resource for the rapidly declining populations of pollinators. Conservation charities, initially wary of the risks an invasive species posed to biodiversity, recognised that buddleia’s abundance was creating crucial feeding sites for many species of bees, butterflies and moths. And it was the same story in gardens, for despite its demonisation in official quarters, buddleia had never ceased to be cherished closer to home. Being an exotic-looking shrub, a magnet for wildlife and requiring little or no looking after, it had been planted continually by gardeners, including the green-fingered residents of Bilton’s new housing estates. Even when fashions shifted in the 1980s and many outdoor areas were paved over with patios, decked, covered by conservatories or turned into parking spaces, buddleia thrived. Residents would find it poking out from what they’d assumed to be soilless spots. And so it happened that when a south-west wind blew through Tennyson Avenue in autumn 1989, it shook a wild buddleia that had burst from a crack in a backyard paving slab. The rustling of its dry flower head loosened a winged seed, which the breeze carried north and deposited in the stony earth beside the old railway.
After discovering the seedling growing there the following year, Varley had kept a vigil as closely as he could, recording its progress among the nettles and wildflowers as they capitalised on a late spell of hot weather. Whether he reported his findings back to the Bilton Conservation Group is unknown. Certainly no surviving newsletter makes mention, and it’s entirely plausible that he didn’t. The argument over whether buddleia should be eradicated or celebrated had split the room in previous discussions and, in any case, Varley had started to miss the Wednesday-night meetings; rheumatism gnawed at his hips and ankles, and his failing eyesight was a constant source of irritation. He grew tired quickly. Just walking up the road was a painful and potentially hazardous journey. Vanessa worried about him. She felt his rapid changes as if they were her own – the shrinking shoulders, the thinning skin, the breathlessness – and she did as much as she could to offset his frustrations, including painting scenes of the edge-land that she hung in their lounge.
‘You just never think your body might become a prison,’ he confided one evening as she helped him from his chair. She had managed to hold her small smile until he’d left the room, then buried her face in her apron and burst into tears.
By May 1991, Varley noted that the wild shrub was shooting at an impressive rate and easily outgrowing the competition. Over the following weeks he visited as much as his stiffening, sickening body would allow, inspecting the nettles for signs of rolled-up leaves and caterpillars. It was a gloriously hot summer and when not picking painfully through the edge-land, days were spent resting in their garden, Vanessa painting and Varley listening to the cricket. Their own early-flowering buddleia – Buddleja agathosma – crawled with insects and day-moths, ladybirds and peacock butterflies.
‘I feel it’ll be a good year, this year,’ Varley said suddenly one afternoon over the chatter of Test Match Special. It was June and England were beating the West Indies at Headingley.
‘It will, dear,’ she piped back too brightly. ‘It will.’
Her chirpiness was an attempt to mask her nerves. Varley’s appointment at the specialist in Leeds had been set for ten o’clock the following morning, but as Vanessa told Gladys later at church, she already knew. In the end, she didn’t need to hear the consultant’s gently delivered words. She could tell from his joyless smile as he guided them to their seats in the carpeted, white-walled consultation room. He wasn’t long enough in the job to have perfected a poker face.
Liver, colon and lung. Started in the liver and spread. Quick. Invasive.
‘We will of course schedule an immediate appointment with an oncologist to discuss any possible treatments, but I’m afraid it’s very late …’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Varley had said. ‘That won’t be necessary. I’ve had a good innings, thank you.’
It was his ‘thank you’ that set her off.
He had held her right hand in his all the way home on the train. At Burley Park station, they watched small tortoiseshells and commas swarming the trackside buddleia only two feet from the window. They were drunk with its nectar, sleepy, seemingly unafraid of the great beast that threatened to engulf them. Strange as it may sound, they appeared content.
The edge-land’s buddleia flowered that August, flushed with the keenness of youth. Vanessa helped Varley down to the railway to see it. It was the 8th and nature was taking its course. He’d grown too weak to walk any further, but he leaned on his stick and smiled as she nipped back to the car for a couple of folding chairs. Then they sat beside each other a few feet from the shrub – her snapping a roll of photographs for future watercolours, him writing out a few slow, sluggish sentences in his notebook:
It feels like 30°C. But then my temperature can’t be trust [sic]. All over the place. A woodpigeon heads west. Hoverflies. Cabbage whites. Orange-tips. Jackdaws chatter. Pheasants. I want to catch it all, but I’m too slow. Or it’s too fast. Writing is a pain. My hands move at half-speed. My body is disintegrating, although (mercifully) I feel nothing. (Good Painkillers). No pain. I only wish my eyes were still good. So much to see. So much we should all see …
‘Bill. Bill,’ Vanessa was whispering.
Varley paused, blinked and turned to her. She was sitting, camera lowered. Stock-still.
‘Look,’ she said, nodding at the foliage.
The nettles pulsed. A blur of green. Thistle flowers. A twist of pale bryony.
‘The buddleia,’ she barely said.
Varley narrowed his eyes and moved them across each of its iridescent flowers. The highest cone moved suddenly as though its tip had taken flight; even his clouded vision registered it. Hovering, it settled on another spike and then opened its wings again. Dark brown wings, almost black in the brightness of the day, save for the stark orange-red bands and white dots at its tips.
Whirr. Click-click. The camera blinked. The photograph would be a wonderful one. Zoomed in tight so that the red admiral and the buddleia filled the frame. Hung on a hospice wall a month later, it was the last thing Bill Varley ever saw.
I’ve been hiding for a week. Moping is probably a truer verb. The rain has given me a good excuse to stay inside and avoid witnessing the destruction happening down the road. And yet it is constantly on my mind. I’ve kept pushing the chair back from my desk and beelining for the skylight, flicking its bar and sticking my head out, looking off in the direction of the edge-land. I’ve strained to hear the chainsaws, but caught only traffic, the beep of a reversing lorry on the ring road, the caged cries of fattened lambs and done-for ewes, and always the digital burble of starli
ngs on the chimney pots and roof ridges. It’s evening now and I’m here again, head out of the window, watching the clouds break and bloom like ink in water. Each swirl temporarily exposes the flat, gold of sunset far off west. It seems from another time, like a memory you can’t quite recall trying to form itself but forever being thwarted by darker, more pressing thoughts. This whole week my head has felt the same, as though there’s something trying to get through to me. But each time it begins to shine through, the anger and frustration clouds over again. All I can think about is how I don’t want those men hacking away. How I don’t want them interfering, cutting down things that they don’t know or care about. How I don’t want any part of the edge-land, my edge-land, to be ruined. And how I can’t do a thing about any of it.
I try to rationalise these thoughts. Why do I feel it will be ‘ruined’? I suppose I’m just uneasy about the appropriation of places by large organisations, councils or charities, especially when it includes the creation of ‘official’ pathways through a piece of land. They may encourage people to visit more frequently, but it still feels like a prescribed process. Controlled. Passive. Distanced. Everyone who follows that pathway will experience the land in a very similar way: guided, like a tourist being ushered through. Everyone will see the same trees, the same views, and the same undulations from the same two directions – there and back. It will discourage access to the wider ground and the slower exploration of its space. As a result, it will restrain and deny, creating another form of boundary. The edge-land feels like the antithesis of such management because it has been left to itself. It’s always felt abandoned to me, and that’s part of its allure. It falls outside the normal governing rules, unaffected by the structured control and design you find everywhere else. Instead, to those who know it, the edge-land has its own tracks, the ‘desire-paths’ formed by unofficial movements of people like me and the people who came before: Bill Varley and the Bilton Conservation Group, the farmers, the commoners and the millers, the miners and the drovers, the woodsmen and the huntsmen, the lovers and the wanderers. The countless runs of its animals form desire-paths too. All of us have cut our own routes from A to B, crossing the ground in the manner we see fit and not the way a council or landowner wants us to. It’s the control; I hate the control, I tell myself, shutting the skylight and heading downstairs to bed.