by Rob Cowen
Stop it, for Christ’s sake. The nettle. Its square stem disappears into the earth. Look at it. Clean earth. He stares. Yes. It is good earth. I might have made something of this once. A dark brown soil, dotted with insects and pale seeds. Press your ear to it and you hear ocean. And he does. Getting on all fours he hears the soft roar of sea, not shells. He smells it. Cold and pure, like wet wool. And in Bilton’s gentle fields, they are turning it up for potatoes. Potatoes. Under a September sky moving fast with cloud, three women are wielding forks, turning up sack-full after sack-full; six more are preparing the soil behind them for a winter crop. One thinks she spies something at the wood edge and straightens her back, sweeping her hair into her headscarf – I swear I saw someone, looked like a soldier rising up and replacing his hat – later she’ll say it must have been a ghost of her Edward, killed at Mons.
They will all be there by now. In the hall, wondering. Has the train been delayed? Evans, will you call? They say it ran on time, ma’am. He sinks into the undergrowth, out of sight, and lights another woodbine. The last burned his palm, unsmoked. He doesn’t want to, but he knows he must look up. Past the clump of nettles the field rises. It is there. Just at the top. Five hundred yards away. Serre. The objective. They are to take it in waves. He can see it plain as day. It’s a fucking fortress, the soldiers whisper to each other on the firing step. Stop that. They are just south of Matthew Copse. An aberration of a wood; nothing left of nature. ‘Do yourselves proud,’ the sergeant shouts, pacing behind them, slapping packs. You are Fifteenth Battalion. You are sons of Leeds. Do your city proud. Do yourselves proud … But there is nothing left of the men, either. Nothing you’d recognise. They are khaki shapes huddled in the khaki mud. Scared boys. Bags of bones and flesh and organs and emotions, loved to death by factory girls and mothers who, miles away, fill their morning kettles as their flesh and blood counts down the minutes. Waiting. Wide eyes. Far-off shouts. Close shouts. Ears ringing now they’ve blown the Hawthorn mine (heard on Hampstead Heath, he’d find out from Lizzie’s letters). A rumour whistles down the line. Rumours. Dugouts thirty foot underground, steel-fucking-lined. And he knows they aren’t wrong. He saw for himself the night before through the trench periscope beside a worried Captain Haley. The false ‘V’ shapes in the untouched tangles of wires; barbs as big as nails. Damn it, Watson, Haley whispered. The shells had cut nothing. Lucky if we even reach the wire. Pray God that we reach the wire. He’d resisted the questions under his tongue: Why are we doing this, sir? What for? Who for? 7:25 a.m. Surely his watch had stopped. How long? he shouts to Arthur, who is waiting with his section. Five minutes. Then, Good luck, Tom. Good luck. But still they hold as the smokescreen starts, falters and fails. The crack and rumble echoes along the front. Trench mortars. Grey sky. The dead land. It feels unutterably wrong. Unutterably unnatural. They will never reach the wire. Arthur’s thin smile. The whistle at his lips.
For God’s sake. Look at the nettle.
The nettle. The nettle. How long does a nettle live? A hundred years? No, more than that. How did he not see before? How could he never see before how perfect and quiet and sublime nature is? He will never uproot another thing – he promises it. Out loud. The nettle. He looks at this autumn resurrection of an ancient seed and feels sure it was first carried to this spot in the mudded hoof of a horse. Then the horse appears and he watches it plodding up an old Civil War track that once ran through the wood to the Skipton Road. On the mare’s back – who is that? Charles I bound and pale, roughly handed over by the Scots and now being escorted from Ripon to Leeds, before his long march to Newmarket. The horse stumbles. Mud and seed are shocked from its shoe. The ground accepts them. The nettle grows and dies and grows and dies for 270 years. Centuries reel past before his eyes. In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection into eternal life. Could this be real? Is anything real? He can trust nothing that appears out of the white fog that has been his vision since that morning. The way the soldiers look at him – they must know it too. You will show character, Lieutenant, or I’ll see you on a charge. The colonel was firm. Your men need to see some damn fortitude. What men? Drink if you have to. And he’d tried. But then Arthur started appearing from the fog. Arthur as he last saw him. An unbearable vision even drink won’t drown.
‘You’re quite mad,’ he says to himself aloud.
The nettle. Think of the nettle. Concentrate. Uro – he dredges Latin learned at Ampleforth – to burn. A million little nails on its leaves. The woodbine, again unsmoked, burns his palm and he drops it, and then stares at the circle of shiny, scorched skin it has left. The nails on the wire. They put nails through his hands and feet. First comes crucifixion then resurrection. ‘Christ, they crucified us, Arthur,’ he says suddenly. All the sons of Leeds that went into that earth. Not a street unscarred from Hunslet to Headingley; not a road of back-to-backs spared. They say the whole city wailed the night the telegrams came. In Bradford too and all across Lancashire. Hooded houses crying through drowsy, blind-drawn eyes. And no son has risen since. Just more and more thickened, sickened, injured skins in every town. New states of existence. New shades of dark. Neither death nor life. The nail through the hand that can’t be removed.
He frowns. Somewhere back in the memory – something joyous – there was a nail. Here. A tree. And Lizzie. He looks along the edge of the wood. There! The ash is only fifty yards away. They’d hammered it there together, a nail low into its trunk, the night before leaving for training huts in Colsterdale, before Alexandria. A kiss, too, down the gully. A fumble above her stockings. Her hair, blond and curled, and her neck that smelled always of lavender. His lip behind her ear. She was everything good in that old world. Such a short time together; little did he know how quickly time would pass. He remembers it all – a day of leave on 24 September 1914. The party at the hall. The nail. He wants to see it again but when did the light change? He is scared to move. Their snipers watch for movement. Dusk has begun to pink Bilton’s fields. They must be worried now. Fires lit in the grates. All gathered. Elizabeth’s silent tears. Mother’s stoicism; the vicar holding her hand. He will be doing his duty, Evelyn. His duty. He won’t want to leave his men. What men? Of course, you’re right. Evans, will you take the sign down? And tell the maids we’ll have the beef cold. The blackness is on the horizon. He wants to touch the nail, to touch Elizabeth again, but he’s afraid. You don’t need to be afraid, Thomas. We’ll sign up together. Father says we should. It’ll make men of us. There’s a jolly tram decked in flags in the centre of Leeds. It’s our duty, Thomas. Arthur’s thin smile.
You’ve forgotten the game again.
Arthur has the whistle in his lips. Time to go. Good luck, Tom. Good luck. 7:29 a.m. The grey sky and the dead land. The crack and far-off crack of stray fire. Then deafening, shattering concussions everywhere. Impacts that shock and throw. Captain Haley with his chest blown wide open, blinking and bemused as if merely caught in an unfortunate mix-up with a reservation at his club. The earth bucking in waves, folding in on them the same way brown storm waves smash over the sea wall at Scarborough. The German artillery untouched. Their wire untouched. Pray God we reach the wire. We will never reach the wire. Boys swallowed whole by the earth; shelled before they can even leave the trench. How many? Two hundred, three hundred? Count each of them on your fingers. Each one loved. Out, out. Get up and out, for fuck’s— The sergeant sliced in half. The whistle of the shells. Cordite filling the throat and lungs. The rain of blood and damaged, rancid soil. Out, out. The scared khaki shapes scurrying into death, wide-eyed and teeth gritted. Flesh and blood crumpling, as if winded, or bursting apart. And the scream of the shells. The screams of the wounded men. The screams of mothers’ kettles boiling on stoves from Hunslet to Headingley. Out, out. Up and over. The scream of the whistle still shrilling between his teeth as he runs through the zip-zip and hailstorm of burning mud. And ahead, Arthur, on his knees. Arthur! Arthur! Get up! But his whole jaw is shot off. He is fumbling, feeling the mess of fractured bone a
nd flesh where his face used to be. Unutterably wrong. Unutterably unnatural. How silly! How silly you look now in that smart uniform and tie. How silly. How silly all of this is. Then he is gone completely. Shell and soil dissolve him into a black cloud; they reduce his kneeling form to nothing. Dust. Ash. Earth. Mist. And Thomas, hurled back through the air, watches the lines of zip-zip over his face like bees in the meadow in summer. The white fog forming over his eyes. ‘And do you know what I thought when I was lying there?’ he asks, out loud, for he is aware Arthur has appeared again behind him in the treeline, clogged and reeking, rasping and sucking. ‘I thought, Thank God the shell got you.’
Mmmmmm. Mmmmmm. The noises seem to come from somewhere else. From the ground. From the wood. But Thomas is making them. He is rocking back and forth, humming and shaking uncontrollably. The dead and dying litter the dusk-veiling wood – aaah, aaaah, aaaaah. And that sound is not the weir, but Arthur hissing. And Thomas wants to tell him he’s sorry and how, after nightfall, he slid all the way back to their lines past those dead and dying and all he thought of was swimming together in the Nidd and shooting grouse on the Glorious Twelfth and hunting pheasants in Spring Wood at Christmas. But he can’t speak; he lies on his face, moaning and shaking as the bell of Bilton church begins to toll.
You’ve forgotten the game again.
Too tired. Too tired.
The nettle. Concentrate. The nettle, for God’s sake. The shaking subsides but his hands are still too unsteady to strike a match. Strike. Strike. This time he does it and it flares in the air. He draws deeply on the woodbine, turns it inward to his palm. And rocks. And looks at the nettle. How long does a nettle live? The tobacco rolls in his lungs; the fog, the white mist rolls across his brain as the bell tolls its last. Seven. How long does a nettle live? Indefinitely. And he understands that he will never see this place again. This is the end of all of this, of him, of the hall, of Bilton Park, of the world he knew, of everything. That’s what Arthur’s been trying to tell him. You don’t need to be afraid, Thomas. But he’s not afraid. Not now he understands. Not now he’s seen the sunset turning the sky orange and copper and there is the burnt-toffee tang of woodsmoke drifting from the cottages on Bilton Lane. Not now he’s felt the good earth and drunk in its smell again. Not now he knows the nettle will endure. There’s your eternal life. And not now he knows he will never be lost in that dead land. ‘For I shall leave myself here,’ he says out loud. ‘All I’ve lived; all I might have lived. I’ll leave it here.’ And Arthur hisses in agreement, Yesssssss, yessssssss.
Time to go.
Grasp the nettle, that’s what the colonel said the night before the attack. We must grasp the nettle. Right now, before that walk along Bilton’s fields and under the fire-skies to the railway, before this shell of himself is bundled back through an unreal England and onto a boat for Boulogne. Before he wanders dazed and emptied back up the line to his death, like Charles I trussed on a mare. First comes crucifixion then resurrection. He will pass through the veil. The soul into the earth. He will release the edge of his being and let it seep into the stem and slip through its rhizomes, to be locked here in this land. His land. We must grasp the nettle for the nettle cannot die. Pull them out and they’ll only come back. How did he never see before how perfect and sublime nature is? He looks at his hand and the pink burn in its centre. ‘I will stay for ever.’ And Arthur hisses again in agreement, Yesssssss, yessss. And so, wide-eyed, half-smiling, Thomas reaches for the nettle and closes his fist around its leaves.
The nettle catches in my palm as I haul my way up the bank. Wrapping my arm around an oak, I feel a sharp sting and shake my hand free. It’s a surprising-looking thing, the perpetrator: shoulder-high, gangly, old and woody with twisted stems and frills of yellow leaves trailing to the ground like moth-eaten embroidery. Toppling it against the tree is a weighty cluster of new leaves – as though a hefty sprig of mint has been stuck in its end. They are soft, small and delicate but, as my palm proves, potent enough. The burning takes a few seconds to materialise but I know it’s coming. The broken-off tips of countless needles are already embedded, reddening my skin.
I find a ragged dock, crush and spit on a leaf then rub it between my hands, leaving a green, watery stain. Sitting down on the collapsed stones of what was once a wall, I inspect my throbbing hand and then look about me. This is a handsome spot, and one I’ve walked through before: it is the edge of the wood at the far side of a field where hares run in spring. I’m just inside the treeline, by the seam that separates the mass of pines, ashes and oaks from the crew-cut straws of harvested wheat. This margin is a cascade of nettles lit with the occasional autumnal golds and scarlets of dying willowherb and bramble leaves. Brittle thistles erupt with tufts of down the colour of dirty silk. A bird I can’t discern – a goldfinch? – squawks a note from high up in the pines. Things crackle, click and stir in the undergrowth. It’s a blessed place especially now as it gets the last of the streaming sun. With evening falling the light appears to slip down the gradient of the field and puddle at my feet. But there is also a strangeness here, a keen sense of what lies beneath. A thinness in the fabric. This is a margin within a margin. And as the sting becomes a burn in my palm, an odd air of melancholy materialises; I can feel an emotional transference every bit as real as the histamine swelling my skin. There is a very clear sense of someone else being here before, someone else seeing the same views over the field and, behind, down the steep side of the gorge to the Nidd; someone else seeing the lengthening of their shadow and the lowering sun flashing along the same river gorge through the trees. It’s moments like these that make you think places have a memory of their own.
It’s hardly a theory, more a feeling born of so long spent outside, but what if landscapes somehow become repositories of personal and collective memory? What if traces are imprinted or stored in an imperceptible or intangible way, and the land itself retains the culture of a place? Then, what if when a certain set of stimuli is triggered, a kind of molecular union occurs between that place and a person whereby memories and experiences are passed on like the sting of a nettle? You may laugh and perhaps it’s all overactive imagination, but this is what it feels like as I sit and look out tonight from the edge of the wood – the sense of a presence, an emptiness and sadness, not of my making but occupying the ground, as if time is flicking back and forth and beyond worlds, long since committed, buried, forgotten, are leaning into mine.
In the self-indulgent because you’re worth it tone of our times, the birthing books instruct couples entering the last few weeks of pregnancy to get a few things out of their system. Namely to enjoy all those things that they won’t be doing for a while – seeing friends, having dinners out, trips to the cinema or the theatre, late nights and long lie-ins. Your world will soon be shrinking, they advise, horizons narrowing to a small bundle in a Moses basket. The walls of the house will become locked-down borders of your own little, happy, bleary-eyed country where time becomes a surreal concept and a rare commodity. Just finding a second to wash up or go for a shower will feel like an impossible task on top of keeping a tiny baby healthy and happy, alongside the pressures of earning a living. And there are plenty of warnings aimed specifically at expectant fathers: even if you’re not the one doing the feeding, don’t expect any downtime when you clock off work, mister. You will be in a whirlwind of nappy changing, clothes washing and cleaning up. So enjoy yourself now. Go out before you go in.
Self-indulgence or not, Rosie and I take the books at their word. It’s a good excuse, anyway. Autumn is busying itself with politely but firmly evicting the now-destitute summer, apologetically brushing its belongings into the gutters and replacing them with its own ornaments: the dried, browned, straw sculptures of the hedges, roadsides and gardens, the ash keys, the bright, bloody haws and the inky orbs of elderberries; the scatterings of beech mast and conkers. In the wood it has already nailed-up its own curtains. They are threadbare compared to those that hung here a fortnight ago,
but exquisite nonetheless, dotted with reds, lemon yellows, greener yellows and all stitched through with the holy light of golden sun. Every night for a week we walk through the edge-land and drink in the long evenings after work, moving at what seems an appropriately sedate pace with plenty of rest stops for perching and watching. We move at Pregnant Speed. Our quiet, slow tread surprises a roe deer walking through the field by the holloway; it hesitates and then whips its whole body sideways and runs, stroking the stubble with its hooves as it passes beneath a pylon and vanishes into the wood. Swallows on telegraph wires are unfazed as we pass below; silhouetted against the grey sky, wire and bird become Franz Kline abstracts of black line and sharp brush dabs and strokes. Rounding a corner at the top of The Lane, a thunderclap of riotous applause greets us as hundreds of little hedge birds burst from their roosts in a cloud flurry, like flies from a cowpat. They bounce away along the hawthorn and blackthorn, barely touching it, the way a finger tests a red-hot surface. In the fields we watch rooks rise and mass in the sky like iron filings around a magnet, pulled westwards over the viaduct to settle again down into the rusting trees.
On Friday at five o’clock I’m outside a pub carrying a round of drinks through a sun-flooded beer garden. The struts of the bare pergola above me turn the ground into a grid of light and shade. Rosie has driven south for the weekend to visit her sisters and I’m catching up with an old mate, Matt. He has plans for dinner with work colleagues in town, but there’s still plenty of time for a pint or three. It’s always the way with friends you’ve known for ever: you see each other far too rarely, and then when you do, you wish you had longer. We’ve hardly spoken since I moved north despite the fact that he only lives half an hour away, so we drink too fast, trying to make amends for lost nights and missed meetings. More rounds are fetched. And more. The light shifts and shadows stretch; we hop tables to keep in its warmth. Talk turns from babies to what’s been occupying my time. I babble about the edge-land and its extraordinary variousness, about following the fox and the owls and the hares, about Sir Hare and Bilton Spring, about the deer leaping over me, the stoned kids and the mayflies, about the swifts gathering at the sewage works and the butterfly landing on my forehead in the meadow. I tell him about the edge-land’s fragmented human histories and try to bring to life its topographic delirium. ‘Here, here,’ I say eventually, pulling out a notebook and flicking through to the first map I drew. I push it across the table. ‘Do you know where I mean?’ I run my finger along the old railway. ‘They’re putting in a cycle-path here.’