On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  So as the year turns and the winter thrushes arrive, we don’t see them and shudder, knowing that cold days and colder nights will follow their arrival. Rather we welcome them in a spirit of fellow-feeling: like us, they have a winter before them and, like us, their goal is to survive it and reach the sweet spring.

  These birds are more comforting than ominous. The year is indeed turning, but we can cope, as we have coped before, as the fieldfares have coped before. We appreciate their gameness in throwing in their lot with us, and wish them good things: mild weather, a superabundance of berries, a safe return journey and a distant nest full of downy chicks come the spring.

  In the Luangwa Valley it reached 45 degrees at midday and, of course, there was none of that air-conditioning nonsense. Some people deal with this better than others. It seems to me that there are two kinds of people: those who fall apart in the heat but are OK at dealing with the cold, and those who are the other way round. Of course, there are always a few who complain bitterly at either end of the scale, and it’s a dreadful pity about them.

  It always amuses me that, when reporting football, British journalists see cold as a test of manhood and despise effete foreigners who find it hard to cope with football in the middle of a hard frost. He looks great in August, but wait till you see him when it’s minus five at Newcastle in February . . . And yet the same writers forgive British footballers almost any failing when they are forced by cruel circumstances to play in warm weather.

  I’ve always found hot weather easier to deal with than cold. I was relaxed and happy in the Luangwa heat, but when the cold hit East Anglia it seemed proof that the weather and the world were out to get me.

  When the weather got serious that year it did so tumultuously and dramatically. You can draw a line down the middle of Britain and make a pretty sound generalisation: on the left-hand side, warmer and wetter; on the right, colder and drier. I sometimes wonder why it is that I have thrown in my lot with the cold side of Britain – and on the bit that sticks out furthest to the east. The wind from that direction comes straight from the Urals without significant interruption, and when it shifts to the north it comes straight from the Pole by special delivery.

  I was midway through the transition period from 45 degrees at noon to something nearer five. I was out checking the horses last thing at night – a soothing ritual, at least for me – and looked up to see that absurd dome of stars that we sometimes get here: very little light pollution and, that night, no ghost of a hint of cloud. The stars seemed close enough to reach up and pluck, and there were more white bits in the sky than black. There was already a faint hint of crystalline whiteness about the fallen oak leaves, as I saw in my torch.

  ‘Frost!’ I said when I got back inside, rubbing my palms together and rotating my shoulder blades hard.

  By morning I realised I had understated the case. This was a virtuoso frost, a bravura demonstration of frostiness, a coloratura frost that set out to show the world just what frostiness could do when it put its mind to it.

  I dressed in as many layers as I could while still retaining some kind of movement, and went out to feed the horses. I found that I had exchanged them for a stable of dragons: three twin jets of smoke billowing over the three half-doors, my own hot breath mingling with theirs as I checked that all was well and dealt out bowls of goodness.

  The sun was operating as if it had been on a dimmer switch all autumn until now, and the marsh was white enough to hurt the eyes. Not the pure white of snow but a dappled light as each individual colour was picked out and set off by the addition of whiteness. The grass of the meadows was a green made pale by frost; the unwanted pool on the meadow a hard milky disc; the graceful lines of the willow twigs were brown set off with whiteness; further out, the reeds were turning a honey colour beneath the heatless sun and their seed heads were draped in delicate white lace.

  I walked out onto the marsh. The frost was so intense it had caused utterly benign plant stems to sprout lines of vicious white spines. The path beneath my feet had gone crunchy. The sun’s light was so intense that I seemed to be looking at a landscape of heat rather than cold: the reeds turning orange as I looked towards the sun, the frost on them white fire, smoke pouring from my mouth as I put vigour into my walk to keep warm. Only the vicious thump of the cold – a blow that always seems to land precisely between my shoulders – reminded me of the real temperature. On then to a tangle of vegetation that, for some freakish reasons to do with its open position, had taken the full brunt of the frost and turned stark ghostly white: great tangles of spiked and vindictive pallor that looked as if they might guard the witch’s palace in Narnia – I almost expected Maugrim, the chief wolf, to materialise at my feet and ask me why I dared enter.

  And then a clump of umbellifers, also surrendering entirely to the frost. There’s a kind of firework that hangs in the air before exploding with a dozen streams of fire fizzing out from a central point, and then, at the far end of their brief journey, the lines explode once again. These dead and dried-out stems of cow parsley looked exactly like that: an explosion of frost, frozen in time.

  My toes were frozen in my boots. That’s enough bloody beauty. Time for a cup of tea.

  Thunder from a gin-clear sky. Must be swans ascending.

  Never think that cold weather lets you off looking. When it’s still colder elsewhere birds can turn up in our icy landscape looking for relief from weather still worse.

  It was another shooting Saturday. You have a choice on these days. You can hunker indoors until the shooting starts, when you pile into your layers of clothing and your boots and come barrelling out of the house full of good intentions but a little late to do the job properly. Or you can stand about outside, stamping your feet, clapping your shoulders and breathing dragon-breaths at the stabled dragons looking over their half-doors.

  It’s the right thing to do and you know it, but once you’ve made that decision it always takes the shooters an age to get cracking, while the horses, knowing why they’ve been kept in, are bracing themselves for trouble.

  So Eddie and I were out there in the cold, breathing the sharp, clear air and looking, if a trifle reluctantly, at all the beauty we had been forced to endure as we waited for the mayhem to begin. The delicious super-frost of a few days back had gone, but in this refreeze the ground was hard and the sward before us tinged with white. I looked through the binoculars at three big white birds powering across the space towards us, filling the air with the beat of their wings. Mute swans, of course, though I gave them a hard look, just in case they should choose to be a more glamorous species. How long had my bird list been marooned on 99 species?

  ‘What’s that bird, Dad?’

  Well, quite often it’s a pigeon – not exciting – or a crow, but I turned with goodwill to see what he had found for us. It wasn’t as straightforward as I expected: silhouetted against the pale blue of the sky at the summit of a spindly old hawthorn. And the silhouette wasn’t wholly familiar: about thrush size but not thrush shape. Still, that doesn’t necessarily mean much. Crows and pigeons can often look unfamiliar till they adjust their position and present themselves at a more straightforward angle, especially when their feathers are fluffed up for warmth.

  This was no pigeon, this was no crow.

  There is a transition that can take place in birding, one that has a glorious drama about it. You go from mystery to wild certainty in the space of half a second. The bird turned sideways and, though still in silhouette, it revealed a bloody great crest.

  Waxwing.

  One hundred up! Remove your helmet, raise your bat to the pavilion and then to the applauding thousands at the ground and the applauding millions watching on television across the world. A century!

  The bird looked restive; I passed the binoculars to Eddie and he managed to get a good look. Or so he said: sometimes he humours me. But I think he got onto this one: my own pleasure in the sighting making this a big occasion for us both. Waxwings come into this
country during cold snaps on the continent, often in numbers. They are keen on berries: supermarket car parks planted up with cotoneasters are a regular spot for incongruous irruptions of waxwings; so too are suburban streets with well-berried gardens. They have a thrillingly exotic air about them, a swaggeringly foreign look, a touch of eye make-up and a strong black beard.

  The bird hopped and hopped again in the hawthorn, no doubt disappointed at the lack of berries in this ungenerous tree. He took wing: dumpy, rather barrel-like silhouette, pale rump and, just catching the light, a tiny blaze of yellow at the tip of the tail: an extra exoticism, a moment of perfectly timed confirmation. Not much room for doubt here.

  And then the whooping of the beaters and the frighteningly close gunfire all around us, the horses’ instant distress, our soothing voices, the pheasants hammering from the lines of maize on the next-door farm where they love to lurk, and, being no fools, heading over our heads and across the meadow to the marsh. They know there’s cover there: do they also know there’ll be no beaters and no guns? Whatever, as soon as the guns speak, the marsh becomes a bird-magnet and the flight of refugee birds continued until, perhaps 15 minutes later, the blessed relief of the whistle.

  When the men and the dogs had finished picking up the fallen birds – none on our land that day – we turned the horses out into the field. Eddie distributed hay in three piles and it was time to go in for a warm.

  And a boast.

  What does a batsman do after scoring a century? Takes a fresh guard and sets off on the long journey towards a second hundred. No matter how remote, no matter how impossible.

  5

  THE BITTERNESS TEST

  Morning chores with overhead geese. Honk honk! Is there a traffic jam in the highway of the sky?

  It’s sometimes suggested that once you reach a certain age – say 60 – you should be forced to retake your driving test. I have no view on this, not least because I’ve never taken a driving test. But perhaps at a certain age – say in your mid-60s – you should be forced to take a bitterness test.

  Bitterness was on my mind as I took a turn around the marsh on a wintry day that was full of wind and cloud but at least dry. I had received a pair of abusive emails, and they had upset me. Precisely as they were intended to.

  They were a response to a book review I had written; the subject was a book about sport. It wasn’t a particularly severe review: I’ve had many worse myself. If anything, the criticism was constructive: it seemed to me that the author had lost the thread of his narrative in his keenness to include every fact and name he had managed to research. I shan’t name the sender of these emails because I want to make a general and serious point rather than take revenge.

  I had responded to the first message, which was, let us say, intemperate. I had taken a hearty all-writers-together line, and suggested that the only way to shield yourself from criticism is to adopt one of the following strategies:

  1. stop writing books

  2. stop reading reviews

  3. grow a thicker skin

  I added chummily that I wished I had managed to keep to these rules myself.

  The second message was a curious mixture of fury and gloating. He had a job, while I was no longer chief sports-writer of The Times; he, as the proud possessor of a job, was going to drink a glass of champagne (unwritten point: which I surely could no longer afford) and forget my existence. He was going to rise above the futile jibes of a bitter old man. Though I’m not sure that he said ‘man’.

  Bitter? Was I, though?

  I sat on the bench by the dyke, pondering this subject. I had recently written a rave review about a lovely book by a journalist many years younger than me. Emma John’s cricketing memoir Following On was an original concept splendidly carried through. So I didn’t automatically hate all sports books by writers younger than me. What’s more, I enjoyed rather than resented good journalism when I came across it and I applauded all good books on wildlife. So OK here in the bitterness department – though perhaps it was an area to keep an eye on.

  But if I no longer had the prestige and the financial backing that you get when, say, leading the coverage of a major sporting event for a major newspaper, I didn’t have time to get seriously bitter. My freelance practice was absorbing if frequently frustrating, but there’s a difference between frustration and bitterness. There can be an overlap, perhaps, so again, keep an eye. But I didn’t feel bitter. Hell, I had a book to write: you can’t get too bitter when writing a book. It might be the best thing you’ve ever written, after all. Or – less likely – it might be the best book ever written by anybody on any subject. All right, perhaps that’s not really possible, but you have to write as if it was possible. And that makes prolonged bitterness unsustainable.

  You can’t stay bitter if you have a horse to ride every morning. You can’t be bitter for very long when Eddie is on good form – or when he’s on poor form, for that matter. There isn’t time, again: you have to deal with what’s happening right now. And then, when you’re sitting out in this inordinately fabulous place, with incomprehensible quantities of sky facing you—

  —what the hell was that?

  It was a plop. Something had hit the water about ten yards up the dyke, something hidden from me by a kink in the watercourse and by the height of the reeds. I moved hardly at all. I’ve got quite good at that over the years: move suddenly and you scare what you’re looking for. So I kept my head and my body still and slid my eyes up the dyke. I could just see a couple of ripples, nothing more.

  I sat there for a while longer, hoping to solve the mystery. I made a shortlist of suspects:

  Water vole. Jumping into the water: they can sometimes be noisy. I had never seen one on the marsh, but had found their droppings – tiny pellets scattered between the stems of the reeds – more than once. And besides, one look at the place tells you they must be there in numbers, the habitat is perfect. Also, there are routinely marsh harriers cruising the dykes and they’re not doing it for fun.

  Moorhen. These busy and highly splashy birds are always about on the dykes, but they are bold and confident, never furtive. I’d have seen a moorhen, surely, or heard a call.

  Mallards. These are also regulars on the dykes, and frequently feed on the surface weeds. But if I’d heard one sound from them, I’d surely have heard a lot more: especially the pattering sound of them filter-feeding, forcing water through their beaks to sieve out the goodness.

  Otter. Very possible: a single sound as an otter slithered vigorously into the water. If he was heading away from me, no chance of seeing him or of catching sight of the ripples he created. I have seen otters very close from exactly this bench, and there is a slide kept open by the regular use of the residents.

  Kingfisher. Also seen many times on this dyke: occasionally fishing quite unaware of my presence. That’s what stillness can do for you. They will make a single, rather hollow plop, emerge – more often with a fish than without – and fly off to eat it at a convenient perch, usually quite a different one from their hunting perch.

  So on the whole, that’s where my money was. It would have been nice to see it, of course, but it’s not essential. I have been breathing the same air as a kingfisher – a possible or perhaps even a probable kingfisher – and that was good enough to being going on with.

  Mustn’t get self-satisfied, still less smug. Life has its dissatisfactions: that’s part of being alive. But bitter? Hell, there are kingfishers in the dyke. Bitterness can be postponed for another day at least.

  Cindy is a doer. Idleness bothers her: she always feels she should be doing something, usually something for other people. Her relationship with the marsh is not about contemplation, and seldom about silence. More often than not, when she is out on the marsh she is doing some work there. And right from the start, she was deeply struck by the place’s integrity: the way it just was, the way it was its own place, the way it seemed almost hostile to humans who misguidedly believed that we ‘owned’
it. ‘At first I was actually scared,’ she said.

  That was not just the fear of an alienating atmosphere, a place humans had had nothing to do with for some years. It was also a wholly legitimate physical fear. ‘I was scared of driving the tractor into dykes and ditches. Before the paths were established I would be driving into vegetation taller than I was. It was truly wild – unlike the wildness we often talk about – and often almost impenetrable. I had no idea what was ahead and I just had to keep driving forward, hoping for the best. At times I got stuck on fallen trees, but luckily I didn’t sink into an unseen dyke.

  ‘The thrilling thing about doing this was that, in all of the noise of the tractor which blotted out the birdsong, there were all the astonishing smells, watermint and meadowsweet in particular. Sometimes when I was cutting the paths in late evening I felt I was invading, that I shouldn’t be here with this noisy vehicle. One part of the marsh seemed especially creepy. I remember one evening stopping the cutter and driving as fast as the little tractor would go – back home, leaving the rest of the path uncut.’

  The marsh is a powerful place. It’s as if the marsh has a strong sense of self, like certain powerful personalities who – garrulous or silent – dominate any gathering just by being themselves.

  Another piece written. Modestly I acknowledge the applause of a flight of swans.

  There is a mighty ash tree on the bank of the dyke that divides the garden from the marsh. I can see it from my bed: in the leafless seasons I can make out in its branches the features of D. H. Lawrence and Charles Darwin. It shows no sign of Chalara, the dreaded ash die-back disease; long may that stay true. My writing hut stands 15 yards from its impressive trunk, around which two people could just about touch hands. The trunk rises for ten feet before dividing into three, each separate course making its own spirited attempt to reach the sky. It follows that the tree has been in the way of many glassy stares between sentences as I write in my hut.