On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  At my desk. If the stoat would kindly sit still, the rest of us might get some work done.

  I saw a stoat, though only for a few seconds. It’s said that a ninja adept can walk through a crowd without being seen. In A Taste for Death, one of the great Modesty Blaise thrillers, Willie Garvin, Modesty’s sidekick, brings two killers into the range of his knife by means of his immobility. ‘There was no expectancy in his waiting. His mind was empty, and as still as his body. Apart from the unblinking focus of his eyes, he did not exist. He was the tree, the ground, the air around him.’ He stands in plain sight, and the first killer’s eyes pass across him twice before he realises they have walked into danger.

  Like a bird of prey, a stoat’s eyes are set forward on the head: as with birds of prey, that intense arc of stereoscopic vision is the key to the way he makes his living. A rabbit’s eyes are set on the side of the head: he can see all around him without moving his head. So rabbits are better at detecting movement than colour and form. A stoat travels jerkily: move and freeze, move and freeze. In that moment of frozen invisibility, who knows what creature might betray itself? The stoat crossed the grass in front of me, freezing twice as it did so, and then vanished into cover. A stoat’s power is vanishing.

  And then astonishingly the stoat was on the far side of the dyke. I saw it briefly in the cleared patch of short vegetation: how splendid that this small piece of management should be rewarded. The dyke is six feet wide, Lord knows how impossibly deep, and there is no bridge. Yet the stoat, as dry and as sleek as when I had seen him before, had somehow transported itself from one side of the dyke to the other.

  Some time later – it’s good to be courteous to stoats and allow them time to get on with their own business – I went and checked along the dyke. I could see no place where the reeds or the brambles or the sallows leant across the dyke or met in the middle. I have seen stoats make some pretty hefty jumps, but surely the dyke would require a leap of Bob-Beamon-like athleticism. I wondered fancifully if the stoat was capable of willing himself across, of dissolving his body into constituent atoms and reassembling himself on the far side. I have sometimes had the same feeling of incredulity when watching sport: marvelling at a piece of action that didn’t seem physically possible: Lionel Messi with the ball at his feet, running full pelt at an opposing player and then, without breaking stride or altering his direction of travel, continuing on the far side of the player, the ball as ever his companion. The skill is too quick for easy observation: like Modesty Blaise drawing her gun.

  One of the pleasures of writing about sport, as I have done for many years, is that the action takes place in front of you, in circumstances designed to allow you a good view of everything you need to look at. But in wildlife there is seldom such luxury. This startling moment on the cleared ground was a rare example of nature as a kind of sporting spectacle. Mostly, though there is the same sense of glorious action, you never see all of it, you never know all the circumstances, and quite often you have no idea who won and who lost: only that the action had you enthralled.

  I have often been asked what sport and wildlife have in common, since I make my living by writing about both. I have never come up with an adequate answer. The nearest I have got is to answer: nothing at all, obviously – that’s the whole bloody point. But I think I might have caught onto something when I began to keep a notebook about magic, wondering why on earth we require the concept of magic in our busy, rational, 21st-century lives.

  Time and again I have heard words like magic and magical used to refer to great moments in sport and in wildlife, to great individual performers in sports, to extraordinary, charismatic species. Sharing a dawn with a herd of elephants or swimming with dolphins is generally described as a magical experience. Virat Kohli, after a great innings, might be described as ‘a magician’. Jose Mourinho’s skill in motivating players is routinely referred to – in ‘serious’ newspapers – as magic.

  Magic is not what we can’t explain but what we don’t want to explain. Both sport and wildlife are reckless – profligate – in supplying this kind of magic.

  And it’s not something any of us want to live without.

  Sunlit morning walk. Winter raises the white flag: a brambling’s bum.

  Sometimes people who suffer from depression – the real thing, the fully Monty – end up at Clinks, sometimes for a while, sometimes as part of a routine that keeps the blues at bay. Hard physical work is a good thing, but hard physical work in the open air in all weathers on behalf of animals has always seemed to me a deep privilege. Even on the worst of days – bad weather or the blues – the horsey chores tend to put me in a good temper.

  There is an extraordinarily pleasant atmosphere at Clinks. It’s something I’ve noticed a lot when doing stuff with Eddie. Being in such places is one of the privileges of being Eddie’s father. At Clinks, at other places Eddie goes to – his swimming group, his drama group, his riding group, social events with his friends – there is an atmosphere of easy tolerance: a sort of man-of-the-world acceptance that people will be different and that they will do the things they do. (I should note here that Cindy does about 100 times as much as I do in this sphere.)

  There is a natural tendency for the fortunate to feel ill at ease among the less fortunate: to feel alarmed, imposed on, unsure of themselves when forced to deal with a person with Down’s syndrome or autism. That is surely a trifle self-indulgent: after all, it’s the people with the problems who have the problems.

  But when you are in places where such difficulties are taken for granted, you find this astonishingly pleasant vibe. It’s like being at a gathering with a lot of famous people: there is a tendency for those who are not famous to feel unsure of themselves, uncertain how to treat this apparently different race of people. The answer is the same in both cases: treat ’em like human beings. It’s easy: it’s just that it takes a little getting used to.

  After Eddie was born I no longer had the luxury of leaving disadvantaged people in the hands of saints. I had to get stuck in myself. And blow me down, behind the conditions and the difficulties and the disabilities you find human beings. I have helped out a few times at Eddie’s Riding for the Disabled group – RDA is a great thing, for an astonishingly small sum it’s possible for people with considerable problems to get on a horse and for once look down on the rest of the world. I have helped those with uncontrollable twitches, a silent girl locked up in herself but finding real release in her communion with her horse, an autistic lad who required constant conversation, another who required two or three repetitions of every instruction. And it was easy, not just because I am used to being around Eddie, but because the essential vibe of this sort of gathering makes light of something that would be a big deal in other places. To spend half an hour with a troubled child: well, it would have been an ordeal 20 years ago, but I am a different person these days. There has been no option.

  These places are valuable for those who have the problems: they are also pretty good for the people who do the helping. Perhaps the most shocking thing I have learned from being Eddie’s father is the unexpected number of good people there are in the world: people with real spiritual generosity. Eddie sometimes attends a kayaking club, one not specifically for people with disabilities. The instructors were hugely generous with their energy and their time, and seemed to understand Eddie’s needs more or less at once. The process seemed to give them as much satisfaction as it gave Eddie. He made their day better by being who he is.

  There’s a link with this phenomenon and with the wild world: you can’t fake the real thing in either. I have travelled widely to write about wildlife and conservation, and again and again I have found people to share the wonders with. Out there, in rainforest and mountaintop and savannahs and desert and inner-city park, I have met people and felt that instant good vibe. The shared and unfakeable love of nature, being in it and helping it to carry on. There is the same unmistakable good vibe at places like Clinks.

  So
here is a gloss on my remedy for depression: learn birdsong, yes, but if possible, learn birdsong with Eddie as a companion. Don’t take a field guide, take Eddie.

  ‘What’s that?’

  We were on the marsh, it was evening, well wrapped-up: cheese sandwiches and apple juice and beer.

  ‘You know that one. But it’s a while since you last heard it.’

  Again: a bark with a slight break in it: a hard, strong monosyllable.

  ‘I’ll give you a clue: they nest in that wood over there, all together—’

  ‘Heron!’

  Much praise. And much joy: it seems that the pigeon-shooters hadn’t put the herons off the place altogether. We could see two of them on the marsh, ghostly grey shapes standing still in the way that herons do: stillness is a heron’s power. They have two speeds when it comes to fishing: none whatsoever and warp. Stillness works for them as it does for a stoat: when they’re motionless they are invisible to a fish: a grey cloud in a grey sky. They will, very slowly indeed, increase their angle of lean, till it seems they must fall beak-first into the dyke. And then the stab, too fast to see, like Modesty’s gun: what you generally see is the recovery stroke, often enough with a fish athwart in its beak. Herons don’t use the great beak to stab with: it’s a not a spear, it’s a grab, and the length of the bill is the margin for error in the strike. It’s as if the gun appeared by magic in Modesty’s hand; it’s as if the fish leapt sideways into the heron’s bill.

  And so I rejoiced for the herons, though as always in these cases, it’s possible the fish had another view.

  When you live as a family – when you have that immense privilege – everything that happens is about the family. Writing, artwork, music, school, Clinks Care Farm – everything. That includes the life of the marsh and its management. A few years earlier, the plans we had for the marsh had to be put on hold: Cindy’s sister Cherie was going through a long and eventually fatal illness, and Cindy was constantly commuting between home and Cherie’s flat or hospital in London. Joseph went through a health scare. Eddie went through great troubles at school: there were times when he went into lockdown and could neither speak nor move, and the teachers – some of them – thought he was just acting up. They acted as if he was deliberately misbehaving: write out 100 times: I must not have Down’s syndrome! And me, well, the freelance life is never straightforward and some days were better than others.

  All of which meant that, although the marsh gave us all, in our different ways, great comfort and great meaning, it didn’t always get the great management it would have had, had it been run by a major conservation organisation. The place was inevitably affected by the ups and downs, the mood swings, the fortunes and misfortunes of the family that owned it. There were times when it had no choice but to get on with the task of being itself: something it was able to manage in a very satisfactory manner.

  That’s how it went, that’s how it often still goes: we want to clear scrub to create new habitat, but I have a deadline to meet and then I must organise supper for Eddie because Cindy needs to be with her sister. And so family life keeps on keepin’ on in its own wild way, while the marsh carries on doing the same thing.

  Song thrush at his morning workout. How many reps today?

  When we moved in we found ourselves rather unexpectedly the owners of half a dozen enormous koi carp. They lurked in the dykes that border the garden, their egress blocked by judiciously placed chicken wire. We made a few attempts to catch them because such fine ornamental fish would give great pleasure to those who love them. They are also worth decent money: some top specimens go for more than £500. Even if ours weren’t in that class, they would be worth a few bob, so Cindy got nets and buckets and tried to persuade them to leave the dyke. But they were canny things, or perhaps not so canny: a friend came with a great net to whisk them away, but they at once sank down to the bottom and became invisible.

  This was a short-term success for the fish, but a long-term error. The people we bought the house from had a taste for large things: if they liked something, they liked a lot of it, and as big as possible. So as well as the giant koi, they also had three colossal dogs of immense vigour and volume. Their presence was enough to keep the wildlife of the marsh restricted to the marsh, but after we moved in the boundary between garden and marsh grew less defined – and a lot more quiet and a lot less bouncy.

  It was, I think, during our first spring at the place, that we looked for the koi and we looked in vain. We checked several times after that, until we were sure of it: they weren’t playing coy, they had gone. It’s possible they had staged a mass breakout and gone feral, but I doubted it. And they were too big even for the most ambitious heron. So it was almost certainly the otters that got them: no longer with the dogs to worry about – their oppressive presence, the sound of their barking, the lingering scent of their existence – the otter could come into the garden without fear. Several times I found droppings near the house: otters will often travel across land between waterways. And I suspect that these great, fat, charming, slow-moving fish had formed a banquet for the creatures that are really the seldom-seen soul of the marsh.

  Morning ride. In the sunlit stubble a hare thinks about going mad.

  Those who live urban lives seldom if ever experience the joys of the country store. Which is a great loss. They’re huge and draughty and cold and full of immense hammers, wheelbarrows of Brobdingnagian dimensions, sacks of feed for every known domestic mammal or bird, and all kinds of clothes suitable for the most reckless forms of reckless dressing-up. In our favourite, New Atlantic Country Superstore, there are also tanks of fish to marvel at – and should we wish to please the otters, there are plenty of koi for sale. When I enter such a place on legitimate business my boyhood in South London seems not history but deranged fantasy.

  Eddie and I were there to get new boots. I favour construction boots for work at home: you can pull them on and off without bother, and they put up with all kinds of abuse. They also have steel toecaps, and if you have ever been trodden on by a well-shod horse, you appreciate the mental comfort the steel brings. My current pair had gone beyond the picturesque distressed look and were now shipping water in quantity; walking around the marsh in such footwear had become a suboptimal experience.

  Eddie needed a pair of boots to wear at Clinks as well as around the stables and the marsh. We found a pair that was waterproof and with Velcro straps, which meant he could take them on and off himself: good for now and also, as you never stop wondering about, it’s a good step for the future, and greater independence.

  My own new boots were dark brown and lined with fuzzy fake fur: they slid on easily and, once on, felt good and solid. Eddie wore his boots out of the shop.

  ‘Do the horses tonight,’ he said. ‘Snack on the marsh.’

  ‘Getting late,’ I said. ‘Snack on the marsh tomorrow.’

  As I finish the evening chores the heronry barks a good goodnight.

  Those koi we had seen in their big tank at the country store, looking up at the light with such mournful expressions: should I regret the part they had played in the otter’s banquet? The other day I had seen a sparrowhawk – neat, small and dapper so certainly a male – working the edge of the dykes. Sparrowhawks are not much loved by the tender-hearted.

  I remembered a piteous description of a sparrowhawk’s successful raid on a generously supplied garden full of bird feeders. I had written a generally approving piece about sparrowhawks: this letter was supposed to be a refutation. The sparrowhawk had caught a starling and devoured it in full view, and the cries of the starling, who died comparatively late in the course of this banquet, had pierced the writer’s heart. Such cruelty should not be permitted.

  And yet the sight of that lithe male sparrowhawk, flying so low to the banks of the dyke that it seemed impossible that his wings wouldn’t strike the ground with every downstroke, seemed to me a wholly admirable thing.

  Later that same day I had seen one of the female mar
sh harriers making a low pass over the grazing marsh that lies beyond our own chunk of land, and 20 curlews had leapt into the air in response, calling boisterously. I could see the long decurved beaks, the sharp white vee on their backs. Should I cheer for the curlews who got away? Should I condemn the marsh harrier for disturbing them? They are both, in their different ways, magnificent birds: do we have to make a choice about what kind of magnificence we like best?

  Predation is an emotional business. I have many times been with people who have wept bitterly and inconsolably when witnessing a lion kill. They all tucked into their meat when they returned to camp.

  On the marsh, as on the savannah, death is everywhere. The otters, the harriers, the sparrowhawks depend on death for their lives. So do the blackbirds for that matter, so do the robins and blue tits and great tits and wrens.

  Nothing to get blasé about. Nor in the main to weep for.

  Morning chores with a train to catch. Hurry up, says the song thrush. Hurry up, hurry up!

  Sometimes on evenings in late winter and early spring, blackbirds will chink. There’s a curious ambiguity about chinking. When they settle down in a spot to roost for the night, you’d have thought that silence was essential: after all, you don’t want to tell every predator of the night that you’ll be helpless for the next 14 hours. But blackbirds chink, and as they hear the chinking of others they chink back. It’s about joining in. It’s about being together – and yet not being together. It celebrates differences as well as unity, for there is something competitive in it. There is a hint of territorial behaviour, but also a sense of group solidarity. It’s a contradiction.

  You can see the same kind of restlessness when any species of bird settles into a roost. They are competing for the best places – safe in the middle rather than isolated on the edge – and that’s a slightly grim business because they are competing as to who is least likely to be eaten or to die of cold in the course of the night. But at the same time they need each other for their own protection: the more birds there are, the safer each individual becomes. The birds are competing and co-operating at the same time.