On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  So Helen strolled around the marsh and I watched her botanising with an admiration that’s way beyond envying. She found fleabane, marsh chickweed, and was thrilled to find devil’s bit scabious, a gorgeous little purple pompom. Also fen bedstraw, meadow vetchling, and as we walked we crushed stems of watermint and its sweet sharp smell filled the air deliciously.

  ‘At first look I’d say it was up there,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll need to get back and do a proper survey in late spring or early summer. But this place looks pretty rich.’

  I felt like one of those secret poets with an exercise book full of verse, written alone, pondered over in secret, never telling a soul about their existence and certain that no one else will ever read them . . . and then by chance they escape and become known to real poets and real judges of poetry and they say yes, this is good. This is the real thing. It may not be Wordsworth or T. S. Eliot, but it’s proper poetry.

  And that matters. It’s the words that count, but being told that you’re a real poet makes the words themselves better, richer, more tightly packed with meaning.

  This is a nice place. But I wanted it to be a CWS. Packed with meaning.

  Chores on a rain-drowned morning. Even the robin’s song is a little damp.

  Eddie and I took an after-school stroll onto the marsh. Apple juice for him, a beer for me. That sort of stroll. We do it quite often. Get used to it: it will become a recurring theme of this book: beer and apple juice and, often enough, baked beans in a jar. It was still warm enough to do this without being brave: one extra layer each, that was all we needed. On the way to our favourite sitting-place we found a shell collection: coiled and subtly coloured, this one whorled as an emir’s turban. We counted them: two dozen in all: houses from which the resident had departed to no good end. The shells themselves were largely undamaged, though a few had a small hole, as if carefully drilled.

  What brought them together? The answer should be song thrush, birds who like an escargot or two. They collect the shells in the same place because they use the same stone for bashing them: a classic example of tool-use in non-humans. Tool-use was once considered a trait that separated humans from the rest of creation, but it doesn’t. Like all such traits.

  There was no stone nearby. No easy explanation: a snail’s graveyard; a molluscan long barrow; snailhenge.

  Eddie and I took our seats and drank our drinks. A couple of herons flew rather haphazardly over us and around the marsh, lacking the sense of purpose that most herons seem to have with the slow, measured beats of those big arched wings. Youngsters, I bet, still working out what herons are supposed to do. Old term for such birds: hansaw, or sometimes even handsaw. When the wind was southerly, Hamlet could distinguish one from a hawk. So can Eddie and I; we are but mad north-north-west.

  One of Eddie’s great gifts is for contemplation. Joseph was always ready for the next thing, desperate that life shouldn’t escape him even for one second, but Eddie likes to sit still, when the occasion is right. This is not just about lax ligaments and so forth, which are part of the lot of a person with Down’s syndrome: he likes stillness for its own sake, when in the right place and the right mood. This evening was one such. I looked at the landscape and scanned the sky for birds; Eddie became part of the landscape. This isn’t just sitting like a pudding, though he can do that in other moods and other places. Sometimes out on the marsh he finds a great calmness, which becomes a shared thing, and I’m grateful for it because great calmnesses are not the most obvious part of my life. Eddie shows me as much as I show him.

  There were still red admirals on the wing. And a swallow: yes, a lone swallow, southing fast, flying from where we sat at the far end of the marsh towards the house, over it and gone. Every swallow a precious jewel now. The other morning I had seen a bird of prey, but not well enough to get a good ID on it. I thought about that dapper bird of prey I had seen a day or so earlier, obscured by the blob of bush, which was a sallow, the default tree on the marsh. The bird didn’t look quite right for a marsh harrier or a buzzard, birds we see all the time. Sometimes a mystery is a good thing, but I would have liked a better look at this one. I kept half an eye open for his return, but in that sweet, slow evening no big bird flew. And it was time for Eddie to get to bed.

  ‘Come,’ I said. ‘The sky is beginning to bruise and we shall be forced to camp.’ He doesn’t know the film – Withnail and I – or the quote, but he liked the silly voice.

  A break in my battle with the inbox. A stray shard of sun has turned a black-headed gull into an angel.

  The best thing about running a website is not my irregular blogging or even the hero pictures of me in Africa. It’s the occasional emails that come from strangers. Here’s a paragraph from one such.

  ‘I took your article about Hickling Broad to heart and my daughter and I visited it in May on our way home from a few recuperating days in Overstrand following my husband’s sudden and unexpected death in late January. We only had an hour to spare and alarmed the keen birders with our brisk striding down the paths, but it was the magical place you described. The hides were silent places of joy. Thank you, and more power to your elbow.’

  The wild world is good for you. Non-human life is essential to us humans, not just for sustenance but for sanity. Eddie knows that as well as I do, as well as the widow does. But it’s easy to be sententious about this. Sure, it’s great having seven or eight acres of marshland that I can walk on any time I choose, but that doesn’t mean I spend my life in a bird-happy daze. I’ve known dispiriting days when the soft green acres make little difference, or only in a bad way, when I think of tasks I should have completed, or ways of enjoying it that I’ve missed out on: a double guilt that can make the marsh feel like one more burden I have to carry.

  There’s a popular notion that people who have enormous quantities of money could never possibly be unhappy even for a minute. It’s presumably wrong, though most of us would be willing to put the theory to the test. So here’s one more guilt to throw in: how can life ever be less than ideal when there is so much wonderful nature on my doorstep? I must feel guilty for any passing moment of unhappiness.

  But here in this email was a gorgeous and humbling message. The idea that I have helped someone at long range in a bad time is a monstrously life-affirming thing. I wrote back and said something of that. But the fact of the matter is that the way I helped had nothing to do with me, nothing to do with me at all. It wasn’t me that mattered: it was what I was pointing at. I had written of Hickling Broad, and of an encounter with cranes. After five centuries of absence – they took part in too many medieval banquets – they dropped in at random to a spot in Norfolk in 1979, birds of incomparable grace and beauty and among my favourite living things on the planet.

  But I wasn’t just pointing at cranes. I was pointing at all the wonders of the wild world: at all the stuff that lies beyond our own species. It wasn’t me that helped to console the widow and her daughter: it was Hickling Broad. It was wildness and wet; it was the places where wild things are. I had the privilege of being the signpost, the pointing finger. In the same way, this book may not give you poetry that will live with you forever, like T. S. Eliot or Hopkins, but it will point at the wild world – and that, I hope, will be a part of you for the rest of your life, and if I help in the smallest way with that process, then I am deeply honoured to play the part of the pointing finger.

  A rushed visit to a lovely spot is not everything you need to cope with bereavement – but all the same, apparently it helped. There are moments of extraordinary elation that come from the wild world: moments of great stimulus and excitement. One of these came when a flight of four cranes flew over the marsh a couple of years back. They paused, performed a slow series of 360s while making the sound of a bugle quartet, dropped a little lower and then, as one bird, they flapped those big wings again and moved on, long necks stuck out in front of them and long, long legs trailing out behind. There are also joys of the contemplative kind, of the kind th
at Eddie is good at.

  But joy is not everything. The wild world doesn’t just make life joyous, it also stops life from being worse. Dr Johnson wrote that a great book should help you to enjoy life better or to endure it more steadfastly. The wild world can help you to do both of those things.

  In a time of sadness a widow found reasons, not for being less sad, but for living with her sadness. I was a part of that process because I pointed at the wild world. Look to where I’m pointing, then, and find some of life’s joy – and also some reasons for living with life’s inevitable sadness.

  Must get on and write. Not far from my desk a shaggy inkcap awaits.

  I’d love to be the sort of person who is so close to the land and what lives on it that I could pluck delicious meals from the fields and hedges any time I chose. But I’m not. At our previous place in Suffolk we regularly had good numbers of field mushrooms – and I was always too busy or too nervous to pick them and cook them and eat them. Which was absurd. My friend Richard, who shod the horses back then, used often to leave our place with his van full of mushrooms. All I had to do was pick the ones next to his, because he knew all right. But I never did. Part of it was simple mycophobia, simple fear of inadvertently eating death’s caps instead of mushers. (Well, after all, half a cap is enough to kill an adult.) There’s an H. G. Wells story, ‘The Purple Pileus’, about a henpecked husband who amends his own life by overdosing on mushrooms and returning, maddened, to the family home.

  Eddie was helping me to muck out the stables – he has an aged pony called Molly, too old for ridden work, that he’s very close to. And we found, between the gate and the muck-heap, what looked at long range like a pair of human skulls. All the more amazing because they weren’t there yesterday. They hadn’t landed there or been put there: they had grown there.

  These were giant puffballs: a wonderfully dramatic bit of landscape. Fungi are neither plants nor animals but are classified in a separate kingdom of their own. That’s why people sometimes feel creepy about them: we feel they should act like plants, but they don’t because they’re nothing of the kind. If anything, they’re more closely related to us animals than they are to plants. The stuff that we see above the surface is the fruiting body of a living thing that has most of its being underground in thread-like forms called mycelium. The strange forces that govern their hidden lives had prompted them to create these two vast living lumps right in our field.

  We summoned Cindy to admire. We picked one so that Eddie could have his picture taken as he held it: perfect for the picture-diary he and his mother keep – we have volumes going back across the years, read often and then read again. The idea is to help Eddie with his understanding of time and place and his own history, and therefore his own sense of self. In action, they do the same thing for us all, recalling forgotten treats and expeditions that have long gone vague on us, always with pictures of Eddie littler and me younger.

  And then Cindy did a fine thing. She took the puffballs in and cooked them. As if we were quite different people: as if we lived here centuries back when there was no longer a Co-op within easy reach and no Sainsbury’s and no Organic Man to deliver stuff.

  My old friend Ralph grows stuff. His kitchen is an Aladdin’s cave of pickles and produce and preserves. Some of it grown, some of it gathered, all of it good. We talk of ‘being like Ralph’ if we ever attempt anything similar. Ralph also makes the best bread, though I can at least give him a game in that department. It’s possible to eat a full meal at Ralph’s without a single major item that ever sat on the shelf of a shop. And sometimes I wish I was like that: not just for the food but for the closeness to the earth.

  These vast puffballs could have been carved into steaks and fried – Richard Mabey, in his classic Food for Free, recommends that you fry them in batter and breadcrumbs – but Cindy went for soup. There was no need for nervousness: you really can’t mistake a puffball for anything else. The trick is to pick one that’s immature and still white all the way through. Once they start to colour they are, Mabey tells us, indigestible. I thought the soup would probably taste OK, but I was wrong. It was delicious: deep and rich and earthy and creamy: a rare and wonderful delicacy. I’m surprised the shelves of Sainsbury’s aren’t groaning with the stuff.

  ‘It tastes like heaven,’ Eddie said. A remark that made it to Eddie’s diary.

  Chores on a long sad morning. Wigeons whistle in the rain.

  Every year October comes in with a bang. Damn it.

  But let’s have a geography lesson. The marsh stands on the flood plain of one of the smaller rivers in the Norfolk Broads. The river passes us rather less than half a mile off, and goes round the two-and-a-bit sides of us in a big right-handed – if you’re going downstream – bend. You can make out the tall, grassed river-wall quite easily, standing up from the pastureland. After they changed their minds about reuniting the river with its flood plain, the Environment Agency decided to reinforce the river walls and create areas where the water can run off and be stored. This can also make you feel nervous: in 2013, the year of the great tidal surge, I remember watching the water cascading down the river wall. And as I did so I found myself looking up at two swimming swans. Something not quite right about that. There were fears that the newly strengthened wall might take some damage, and then the river would come hurrying towards us. The next high tide – and it was going to be a seriously good one – was critical. It was due between three and four in the morning. That made for a nervy night. We created makeshift loose-boxes from straw bales in the barn on the top field – on the hill – because we would need to evacuate the horses if the flood came. There was a lot of getting up and going back to bed again that night, but it all held good.

  On the far side of a river there is a flooded area: 100 acres of open water. This holds good numbers of geese and ducks in the winter, also breeding great crested grebes and common terns in summer. A very nice spot. It takes up a good deal of water and holds it, and at the same time provides a home for some great wildlife. What could possibly go wrong?

  Here’s one of the sad things about life. If you choose to live close to wildlife, you will find yourself in close proximity to people who want to kill as much of it as possible.

  Across the river the wildfowlers know neither mercy nor restraint. Such is their right. The sound of gunfire ushers in October. The season of death is upon us.

  The difference between an acre and a hectare is that one is a measure of heart and mind and meaning and race memory while the other is unit of area. A hectare is 10,000 square metres; an acre is the area of land that can be ploughed by a yoke of oxen in a day.

  Estate agents working in the gracious suburbs are always desperate to tell you that the house stands in a spacious, mature garden of approximately one third of an acre. One third of an acre – buy it and you’re not a householder, you’re a landowner. You have become a part of landscape, part of history, part of the future. You’ve no idea how much one third of an acre is, but it sounds about the size of the Serengeti. You have space and green all around you and it’s measurable – in acres. You feel as if you could barely walk round the place in a day.

  Land comes cheaper out in the countryside. It’s an adjustment of scale, not of finance. But you still measure in acres.

  An acre measures one furlong by one chain: 22 yards by 220 yards, 66 feet by 660 feet. That can also be expressed as 40 perches by 4 perches; note that a rod, a pole and a perch are all the same length; different terms for the same thing. As I’m sure you’ve already worked out – in the unlikely event that you didn’t know it already – that adds up to 4,840 yards or 1/640 of a square mile. Either way, it’s an acre.

  That traditional notion of an acre as a long, thin piece of land goes back to the plough: you can plough more quickly and efficiently if you don’t have to keep turning. I once drove a horse plough, and while keeping it straight is hard enough in all conscience, it’s making your turn that’s the real bugger.

  But
that doesn’t help you visualise an acre, does it? You probably don’t often use a plough, and only hear about furlongs when you watch the racing. A football pitch has no standard measurement – just minimum and maximum dimensions – but a proper grown-up pitch will usually be around 110 yards by 70. That’s about an acre and half. Our patch of marsh is about five football pitches. It’s not quite the size of the Serengeti: yet when I watched a barn owl, the one patch of brightness on a murky evening, cross this little bit of land, whispering down onto dinner below, it felt big enough.

  All the same, I feel a need to apologise. To talk about acres and ownership can sound as if I’m swanking about immeasurable wealth, especially when there are horses involved. Please rest assured that we can afford horses because we prioritise them; we economise elsewhere. Eddie’s pony cost nothing, a second pony cost a few hundred, my own horse a little more. Cheaper than a car anyway, and I haven’t got a car. We keep the horses at home, which is cheaper than paying someone to look after them. If we had eight acres of land and three horses in, say, North London we’d have to be shockingly wealthy. As it is, we live in Norfolk, and get by. We lack many of the things that London offers, but we have the wild world on our doorstep, sometimes in the most literal fashion. It’s all about choice.

  Perhaps I should also add that any impression I might like to give about the perfect marriage and my own brilliant parental gifts should also be set aside at this point. The usual rows – and the other stuff – that mark every marriage won’t get much of an airing in these pages, nor will the times when I’m away from home or too busy – or too grumpy – to do stuff with Eddie. The reader will have to imagine them. Not too hard a task, I suspect. Cindy – I should make the point with immense emphasis, hoping it will stay with you, dear reader, until the book’s end – has taken on far more of the load of parenting than I have, at the expense of all kinds of personal ambitions and goals. She is the book’s most important figure: the sun around which the solar system of marsh and family revolves.