On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  There is competition between species for the resources needed to sustain and continue life – there are other creatures eager to help themselves to the invertebrates in the meadow and the fruit that lie rotting on the ground. But there is also competition within species: between the individuals of that species, between the pairs of that species, between the families and sometimes the flocks and herds and swarms of that species. It’s about gaining an edge. The Outlaw Josey Wales liked to approach an enemy with the sun behind him. The blackbirds in the meadows and beneath the apples trees are playing chicken with winter: staying as close to the breeding grounds as they can without actually dying. I could witness the struggle for existence every time I took a sip of tea.

  Evening chores. Blackbirds sound farewell to a soft sweet day.

  I suppose it’s always changing, always reforming, never quite the same from one moment to the next, and no doubt that’s part of the point of it all: what deep familiarity with a piece of landscape is really all about. But most of these transformation scenes are subtle and cumulative, hard to catch with our human perceptual equipment. You need a stop-frame camera to get the real drama of the transitions that come with weather and seasonal change.

  When I talk about landscape, you must understand that I also mean skyscape. The two things are pretty well indistinguishable in this part of the world. You can see the sky all the time, even when your head is slightly lowered. A level gaze from a standing position will more or less fix your gaze on the horizon. I have stayed in more lumpy parts of our own country and been unable to see the sky from the bedroom window: green fills it from top to bottom – soft green grass that can only be grazed by cramponed cows able to rope themselves together or fitted with one pair of legs longer than the other.

  Here on the Broads the clouds are as much a part of the landscape as the trees: looking out and looking up is pretty much the same thing. Sky, land, water: concepts that get fuzzy round the edges if you happen to live here.

  It’s also true that if you have outside tasks to perform as the daylight fades, the hard division between day and night will also get a little bit fuzzy. Like the barn owl, I am a crepuscular creature, at least at this time of year. It’s a strange thing: you’re in the house, and it looks pitch-black, but you step outside and within a few moments you’re quite comfortable in the undecided grey light that comes before the night. The vast skies make for a long and generous twilight: that luminous, nacreous grey – grey has never been a colour much loved by romantics, so perhaps we’d better call it silver – is the prelude to every winter night: a twilight that’s fifty shades of silver. Argent, you would call it, if you were using heraldic terms: you would begin your description of an escutcheon ‘on a field argent . . .’

  I brought the horses in from their field argent and gave them their food, never an act that goes unappreciated. Eddie loves to take part in this ritual, but that evening he was still on his way home from school. (By evening, I mean it was a little after four – the solstice was approaching, the afternoons short, the twilight coming earlier and earlier.) I switched off the stable lights and in the instant of darkness it was as if my own senses were instantly sharpened by the throwing of the same switch. Yes indeed. It was them. Them again. First I heard them, then I looked up and saw them.

  On another field argent – the silver expanse of the sky – a thousand geese sable. In an instant of time the landscape or skyscape, insofar as they can be differentiated, was a different place altogether, the land of softly honking geese making the same glorious calligraphic swashes and flourishes they had inscribed over the marshes to the east when I had waited there with Jake the other night.

  For a long minute I was alone with them all: how often, I wonder, can you be so far from other humans, in the company of so many non-human creatures – of such impressive size and volume – in lowland Britain?

  There are moments of intense involvement in wildlife: when the things that divide one species and another – the things that divide us humans from everything else that lives and breathes and transpires on this planet – seem thin. There is the Celtic idea of thin places: places where the boundary between earthly and heavenly things gets a little less solid than it does in normal everyday sort of places. Certainly I’d be inclined to say that this bit of marshy land is a thin place, for here the boundary between human and non-human life seem that little bit less solid, that little bit less permanent, that little bit less important than it does elsewhere. And even in such a place, there are times when the boundaries are thinner than others.

  Goodnight geese, goodnight sweet geese, goodnight, goodnight.

  Blackbirds

  by Eddie Barnes

  blackbirds

  on the ground

  in the garden

  looking for food

  in our garden

  lots of apples

  blackbirds feel better then

  happy

  they sing

  to their friends

  and tell them

  where the food is

  then the garden

  looks black

  with blackbirds

  they all fly down

  and feast

  like Christmas

  they should have blackbird crackers

  to pull with their beaks

  they could tell blackbird jokes

  wear party hats

  and run around

  laughing

  6

  TRANSFORMATIONS

  Morning chores on a slightly longer day than yesterday. Dunnock sings a song of celebration.

  ‘They even fug up the spectrum.’

  A world-weary groan of protest from one of the two schoolboy heroes at the start of Julian Barnes’s Metroland. The problem was the sodium lighting ‘they’ had installed in the cities. ‘The colours. The street lamps. They fug up the colours after dark. Everything comes out brown, or orange.’ They? ‘The unidentified legislators, moralists, social luminaries and parents of outer suburbia.’ There’s a lot of ‘they’ about in the 21st century, perhaps in all centuries, and they do a lot of fugging up.

  They even fug up the seasons.

  It was the December solstice: the most southerly declination of the sun as the North Pole tilted away from the sun at an angle of 23.5 degrees, as if it were doing everything it could to shy away from the life-giving warmth of Sol. This is the day with the fewest hours of light: to be precise, 7 hours, 49 minutes and 41 seconds before ‘they’ have to turn the sodium lights back on again. That’s nine hours’ less daylight than at the June solstice. When you look at these figures you cease to wonder why we’re all a bit mad. There is a touch of bipolarity – more or less literally – about all of us who live in such extremes of daylight.

  I was feeding the horses before the sun rose: that is to say, before four minutes past eight. I would be giving them their evening meal only eight hours later, in a murky shade of silver. This was the darkest, most dismal day of the year: the bleak midwinter; the day the year hits rock bottom and then goes for the dead-cat bounce. A things-can-only-get-better feeling overwhelms us at this time of year, and that’s what brings us our great winter festivals: the year has done the hard yards and, no matter how difficult it gets, it’s going to be lighter when we struggle through the next day. More silver, less grey.

  And that’s all very well, but nine days earlier I heard a great tit singing. He was belting out the twin-syllabled song with which he welcomes the spring: strident, defiant, almost absurdly optimistic. And that’s really why I hate the ‘they’ every bit as much as the unrelated Julian’s clever schoolboys.

  The first birdsong of spring should be a moment of unambiguous rejoicing, of realising that the world is fighting back: that the days of warmth and fulfilment are on their way back again – because, more than anything else in the world, the coming of spring is an unambiguously good thing.

  But of course it isn’t any more, is it? These days the rejoicing at the first sig
n of spring has been taken away from us. The ambiguities of climate change have left us struggling, no longer knowing the difference between good and bad as the seasons change around us. There is a kind of moral fog when it comes to these moments of transition. Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov said that if you don’t believe in God then everything is permissible: there were no longer such things as good or evil. The muddle of climate change has created a similar loss of certainty: our hearts want to rejoice when a great tit sings out, establishing for himself a territory in which he will able to attract a mate and raise a nest full of more great tits – but we know that this incontinent hustling of spring into bleak midwinter is not the death of winter, as it was in times past, but the death of certainty.

  It was school holidays, so Eddie was about at the early hour required to get the horses in from the field and able to lend a hand. Dominance hierarchy is a big thing in horses, and it’s something a horseman always keeps in mind. When you turn the horses out in the morning, the first horse to go out is the last: the one at the bottom of the heap. That’s so those higher up can’t hang around at the gate and get in the way and get all hierarchical when you’re bringing in a lesser member of the group. So Molly goes out first, Norah second, Mia last. Reverse that order in the evening, for the same good practical reasons. Eddie led Norah in, a horse who takes a little handling at the exciting time just before supper, and then he took Molly, with his usual lack of fuss. He was good at this, operating with a quiet, unforced self-confidence. When Norah jumped and half-turned, he stayed calm and steady and Norah stopped messing about: without speaking he had just told her there was no need for any nonsense. No raised voices, no threats: just good, confident body language.

  Eddie had spent another day at Clinks Care Farm. This is a heaven-sent establishment a few miles away. It produces crops, and it has cows, chickens, sheep, goats, ducks, alpacas and pigs. Eddie goes there to work: and they work him all right; he comes home knackered. He does hard physical work in demanding weather. For a person with lax muscles and ligaments, this is not a straightforward business. Eddie loved it from the start.

  The place offers the privilege of tough, meaningful work in the open and it’s available to people with a great range of difficulties: mental-health problems, learning difficulties, physical problems. There are staff and there’s a network of volunteers. Eddie told me he had spent most of day cleaning out a cattle trough because there was new stock arriving the following week. It was rather a business getting that trough right: a day of scrubbing. Next time he went he would have the reward of seeing cattle eating from the trough that he had cleaned himself: that he had changed from a sable silvered to shining argent.

  Before Eddie came out to get the horses in I had done the mucking-out. It’s never a task I have resented. It would be too much to say that I like doing it: but there is still a sense of privilege in doing the work: in filling the barrow full of droppings and wet, stinking shavings, in emptying the barrow on the muck-heap, in the sweeping and clearing and changing of water and adding the hay to the boxes. It’s a serious privilege to have horses, and therefore the task of keeping them alive and healthy also has some kind of privilege attached to it. Meaningful work is a kind of privilege.

  It was dark. Eddie checked the horses one last time – ‘three happy horses!’ – and we went back in. It was colder than it had been when the great tit was singing. Not forbiddingly cold, but we were glad to get in. The Christmas tree, vast as always, its tip bent at a right angle by the ceiling – it typical of Cindy’s generous heart that she always found a tree just a fraction too large for the space – was shining gently all around. The Christmas cake had yet to be decorated, though. Eddie and I had made it a couple of weeks earlier, and quite a lot of the cherries got into the cake.

  Robin watches me at evening chores. Look, someone’s got to get the stable ready for Christmas night.

  When the great tit calls, you have to look at the marsh in a different way. Before you know what, the damn thing will start growing on you. Literally, I mean. The plants will take things into their own hands. Some will get bigger; others will appear in places where there was no visible sign of them before. I don’t know – you do your best to be hospitable to plants and then they start taking the place over. There have been years when we’ve been unable to get out onto the marsh at all for several weeks because we missed the window for dealing with the plants. Had to wait for the autumn die-back to get back onto our own land. That’s the problem with wild things: they’re not terribly tame.

  Space and time. Perhaps every book ever written – and certainly every novel – is about space and time: a little less than 24 hours in Dublin; 15 years across Russia; a century in Colombia. What we tend to forget, in our citified lives, is that space is no more passive than time. Space is an active character in any narrative: difficult, dangerous, often uncontrollable, and having its own will on the way the story goes.

  Don’t think I’m being fanciful. Not for a second. That marsh out there is jam-packed full of its own plans, and if we left it to make all its own decisions, it would probably – in the space of a few hundred years of solitude – become a closed-canopy oak forest.

  That’s the sort of thing landscape does. And you can say – as some proponents of rewilding do – that we should leave the land to do exactly as it wishes, and that to make any intervention at all is heretical: anti-life. Which is a fair point and a strong argument, but where will the herons and the egrets go fishing when the dykes have dried out in the oakwood? True, humans dug those dykes, but is that a reason to despise them? When I saw a little egret working the dyke, with the breeding plumes just starting to get a little extravagant – they won’t be in their full glory for another few weeks yet – I was inclined to think that the dyke and this open, wet landscape was a fine thing.

  I’ve always preferred egrets to abstract ideas.

  What we’re dealing with is the natural succession of vegetation. Left to itself, the marsh – our meadow and the big one next door, the wet grazing marshes of the common on the other side, the belts of maize on the farm, planted to feed and shelter pheasants, the fields of winter-sown wheat and sugar beets favoured by many of the farmers all around us, and Jake’s hairy field margins and lofty hedges – will all join together and form that vast oak forest.

  Take the common: grazed enthusiastically by sheep, intersected with dykes, covered in rushes, classic Broadlands landscape. It is, in its way, as artificial as Eddie’s vegetable garden, where he and Cindy grow beans and other stuff, especially pumpkins, their speciality. If they stop looking after it, vigorous annual plants will set seed and out-compete the vegetables. The grass from the lawn will encroach. In the same way, out on the common, if the sheep stopped grazing, the grass would grow long and other plants would come in and start to grow up. And indeed, I’d love to see that happen, to see what plants released by the absence of grazing pressure, see what animal life is attracted to the changing acres.

  If you were to leave the common – or, for that matter, the vegetable garden – untouched for several seasons, the tougher plants would colonise, then the brambles would come in and form tangles. Within these tangles, pioneer trees, like the sallows, would grow up. Eventually the trees would dominate, and as they dry up the soil and lay down humus – ‘not taramasalata, then?’ as a friend asked when I was making this explanation – the oaks would move in. And a closed-canopy oakwood is considered the climax vegetation of lowland Britain. (Though in an atavistic pre-human landscape, large wild grazing mammals would have created and maintained clearings.)

  So if you don’t intervene, the place will change. It will become a quite different place. It follows that doing nothing is a violent form of action. Working like a slave to keep a place as it is – intensive farming, in other words – is an equally violent assertion of the will. As is mowing the lawn: you’re not just making the grass shorter, you’re stopping the lawn turning into an oakwood.

  So it was, then
, that we did a small bit of management and got rid of the sallow blob in front of my window. Not just to give me a better view but also to keep the marsh marshy. We also cleared an area of marsh on the far side of the dyke from my hut. I wondered what this small act may reveal.

  To act or not to act. When is it right to act? If ever? This is an eternal dilemma, a question without an answer, a problem without a solution. It has bothered us off and on from the moment we arrived and took possession of the first section of marsh. I have been lucky in having the advice of good friends who work professionally in conservation: notably Ian Robinson of the RSPB, and Julian Roughton and Dorothy Casey of Suffolk Wildlife Trust. All agreed that the place was special: all agreed that the specialness was at least partly because no one had touched the land for years. That’s not only interesting, that’s rare. There’s always that urge to interfere.

  They were mostly agreed that the marsh would change character – cease to be a marsh – if we allowed the willow scrub to take over. The trees would suck out the wetness and make the place into something else.

  So we took out a patch of growing scrub. Our old friend Dave Barker came over with a chainsaw to do the job with Cindy; they stacked the stuff they took down – the brash – to create more habitat, shelter for small mammals. Neither was very comfortable with this. ‘The thing about this place is that no one has interfered,’ Dave said. ‘And now we’re interfering. It doesn’t make sense.’

  Cindy was equally troubled: ‘The branches we took down had clearly been a shelter for the deer, and it doesn’t feel right to take them away. But it also seems right to listen to experts.’

  What feels right? What is right?