On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  That is to say, it is Deep Time. The sort of time in which a millennium is an eye-blink. Over the course of unnumbered centuries of Deep Time, painted ladies evolved a lifestyle of constant movement. They migrate, but not as individuals. They migrate as a community, and they do so in an endless series of generations, forwards and back, forwards and back. It’s been speculated that if we humans ever fly to the stars, we will do so in the form of a breeding colony. That’s what the painted ladies do, travelling not from Earth to Proxima Centauri, but from Africa to Europe. They have reached Orkney, though not every year, and they have been recorded in the Arctic Circle, so they are intrepid beasts.

  It used to be thought that the butterflies that bred in Britain were a doomed generation: a waste, an act of inevitable folly from the blind forces of evolution. Then it was discovered that the butterflies make a reverse migration: travelling back south again, and breeding as they go.

  So that’s another parable. Don’t underestimate wildlife. Or evolution.

  Outdoor supper is good even though the little owls heckle the conversation.

  ‘Simon Barnes?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Holland.’

  A twice-daily ceremony known as Taking Register. It happened first thing every morning and afternoon at Sunnyhill School.

  Sometimes sitting out on the marsh is like that. The Maytime frenzies were over, but the breeding birds still sang out every now and then, just in case. Some species were thinking about and even already getting on with a second brood, and that requires a reconfirmation of self and of territory. The singing was now more intermittent: less like a mad chorus, and more like individual soloists taking turns, like everyone doing a party piece.

  I didn’t call out the individual names, as Mrs Holland did. It just seemed as if the birds were taking turns to announce themselves, so that I could make a mark in my notebook, acknowledge their presence and pass on.

  ‘Sedge warbler?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Barnes.’

  The unbelievable unending complexity.

  ‘Whitethroat?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Barnes.’

  A dry, hurried song from the brambles, surprisingly musical once you have come to terms with its nature.

  ‘Chiffchaff?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Barnes!’

  Saying its own name tirelessly, again and again.

  ‘Cetti’s warbler?’

  ‘Si, Signor Barnes!’

  That great, jubilant shout.

  ‘Willow warbler?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Barnes!’

  And that sweet, lisping descent down the scale, touching my heart as no other song quite does. It’s beautiful – at least I think so, for what that matters, for what I matter.

  Six species of warbler. All present and correct, and presently and correctly breeding many splendid chicks who would, I very much hoped, return to the marsh and warble and breed in their turn. And the marsh was making this possible.

  In June the year turns once again, tipping from hope towards achievement.

  And how should this cease?

  15

  LIFE IS NOT TIDY

  The air is filled with cries of falcons. The kestrels have fledged then.

  At 05.24 BST the sun was directly above the tropic of Cancer. It was the June solstice. In London the sun was above the horizon for 16 hours and 41 minutes, a few minutes longer than that over the marsh. Midsummer: the longest day, the shortest night: perhaps the year’s great moment of achievement.

  I spent a fair bit of that day unconscious. I was at last having the surgery on my knee. When I came to I felt somewhat suboptimal, as if my bed was floating on a turbulent patch of sea. From my window in the hospital I could see trees. I remembered a piece of research about hospital windows: apparently you recover more quickly from a major operation if you have a window, and faster again if you can see trees. I could see the tops of a small stand of chestnuts: call that a good omen. I wouldn’t be here long enough for the trees to make much difference: I’d be home as soon as I could stand, though that felt like a pretty crazy ambition at first. But still, the trees were vaguely cheering.

  The knee had been pretty tedious, but now I had had the op, it was of course a great deal worse: the paradox of intervention. After a while I discovered that I could walk. Just. Damn it: I should have leapt off the operating table and danced like Blake’s Glad Day.

  But that was secondary to the effect of the anaesthetic. It seemed I was now living inside a cloud of shit. The instruction was no booze for 48 hours. Still worse was the fact that a drink was the last thing I wanted. Once I was home, with immense kindness, Cindy made me a sitting place on the veranda, where I could put my leg up and see trees. Eddie brought me my binoculars; he has an acute radar that seeks out the misfortunes of others, and he believes it’s his job to try and ease them. He was the official assistant to the playground first-aider at his junior school; the children voted him as the recipient for their annual Peace Prize. He’s always the first to hug a person at a time of bereavement, and when Thomas, who’s blind, pays us a visit, Eddie is always there to offer an arm. So when I was briefly struck down, Eddie was there to help.

  I sat there looking out at the garden and thinking about my grandfather. He was a marvellous gardener. In his garden in King’s Heath, Birmingham a rockery cascaded down to a generous lawn that led to an extravagant rose garden. A kitchen garden lay beyond that, along with three beehives. Both sides of the garden were lined with blackberry bushes: a cultivated variety that gave thick, sharp, fat fruit. You were never short of honey and preserved blackberries in Vicarage Road. In my memory that garden covers many, many acres. The lawn was, of course, perfectly striped. It pleased my grandfather to look out from the French windows and savour the neatness: everything in its place.

  I can’t say that he wouldn’t have approved of our lawn because he would. He loved new ideas and radical solutions: the idea of gardening for wildlife would have enthralled him. He might even have taken it up himself. All the same, there was an impressive contrast with the bowling-green lawn he cultivated and the shaggy expanse of long grass and wildflowers that lay between the house and the first line of dykes. It would have been nice to explain it all to him, though I have never threatened to be the practical gardener he was.

  The way to make a wild garden look acceptable to human eyes is to mow paths. We like to feel that the landscape of home is under our control. We want it tamed – humanised – at least to extent. If you mow a series of paths across and around your areas of shagginess, it becomes clear to any observer that you have done this on purpose. You actually want it to look like this. It’s not that you’re lazy: this land reflects your own deliberate choice.

  I looked out from my place of rest, right leg propped high, a cup of tea to hand, and I saw a bird fly low over the tall grass and take a perch in the old oak that stands on the right of garden, hard by the house.

  I raised the binoculars, and at once I had a perfect view of a little owl, staring straight back at me, its yellow eyes glinting like a pair of little suns in his little cross face as he perched there in the first hints of dusk. He was clearly on a much-used hunting perch, and the life-filled long grass beneath him was part of his private hunting estate. Little owls will hunt in daylight when it suits them. I knew that this one had other beaks than his own to fill: there was a nest in the one of the big willows along the fenceline.

  It was a gorgeous, glorious and inspiring moment: the bird so close, thanks to my stillness, and his eyes so bright, giving me a sort of death-ray stare that seemed to burn through the binoculars, gathering intensity as it travelled through all the lenses and prisms. You can damage your eyes if you stare at the sun through binoculars: I fancied that little owls could pull off the same trick.

  There are no statistics on the way little owls expedite recovery from minor operations. But from my examination of a sample of one, I can report that the patient responded with good vibes and positive thoughts.

  My 48 hours w
ould be tomorrow. Maybe the smallest of small drinks would be an option.

  Are they red admirals on the buddleia? Or red air chief marshals?

  In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the narrator – ‘Chief’ Bromden, sometimes called Chief Broom – talks of the power of the fog machine, which the people in control of the psychiatric ward switch on to incapacitate the patients: presumably a reference to drugs used to treat the patients or to keep them quiet. I had been affected by the fog machine for some days after my op, but it was clearing. I was even limping a little less.

  And of course, back to work: scribo ergo sum, and all that. Also scribo ergo I can pay for the groceries. Back to work as soon as I could get back down the garden to my hut.

  How many notebooks on my desk? Two related to this book; three if you count last year’s diary; four if you count Eddie’s Wild June diary. Another one to do with some notes about magic I’ve been making with no very constructive aim in mind. Another with ideas for a novel I may or may not get on with: it might be nice to do another. Another notebook about wildflowers, which I started in an attempt to lower my levels of ignorance. Yet another containing a record of commissions and the names of editorial staff in various different publications. Two notebooks, both of which I use for, well, making notes: a big one that stays on the desk and a small one for travelling. A number of books not actually on bookshelves: about 40 altogether, at a quick count, five of which I am reading for interest, three of which I am reading in order to write a review, others I have consulted and not yet returned to the shelves, still others that are lying about for no good reason at all that I can remember. Some fossils, two of which I found myself. A bowl Joseph made many years ago, now full of paper clips. Receipts. Blank paper. A set of proofs from another book. Binoculars. Bat-detector (what’s that doing here?). Dad’s Army mug (Don’t Panic!) full of pens.

  You get the idea. Untidy. But it’s an untidiness that reflects busyness. You can say what you like about my organisational skills, but if you step into this hut, you know that this desk and its surroundings are used. This is a working place, and it’s a space that’s full of life.

  It’s the same with the garden and, to an extent, the same with the marsh. Untidy, sure, but full of life. If I had mown the grass down to bowling-green length and chemicalised it to monocultural perfection, there would be no small mammals and large insects in the grass – so there would be no little owl in the tree. The owl was a tribute to our purposed untidiness: to the way in which we have purposefully loosened a little control.

  Untidiness is life. Tidiness is death.

  You visit a friend’s house. It’s tidy, of course – why isn’t your house always tidy like that? – but they finished tidying it ten minutes ago, knowing you were on your way. A living house is a tribute to the life that goes on inside it: therefore it’s seldom seriously tidy. Toys, garments, one of Joseph’s guitar-cases, a palette and paintbrushes in the sink, newspapers, books. Did you mean to leave the flour out? Yes, I’m making pizzas. Shouldn’t those books be down in your hut? No, they should be back on the bookshelves up here, but I can’t get to the shelves because of all the stuff in the way. Eddie, what have you done with your shoes? I do wish you’d put things away sometimes. And preferably in the right place . . .

  That is the nature of our house, of most houses. And it is also the template for a living countryside. Not hedges flailed to buggery or grubbed out altogether, not trees mercilessly pruned or cut down, not fields ploughed right to the very edge, not gardens concreted over for car-space, not green spaces with a furiously mown sward and trees like lollipops. These are all tidy. These are all very ordered spaces. And to a greater or lesser extent they’re dead.

  There’s order out there on the marsh and there’s order in the wildness of the garden. But it’s not human order. It doesn’t look like human order or feel like human order. The order of the marsh is deeper and more serious than anything humans can dream up or create with machines and chemicals. It’s life. And life is a mess.

  Then a sudden din: three oystercatchers charging across the sky, piping and squeaking at top of their voices, and for no good reason apparent on the ground. Because they can, no doubt. Are these birds new-fledged? That’d be my bet. They flew across, making the place took untidy.

  There’s an old euphemism for untidy: lived-in.

  On a sun-basking morning the path is paved with butterflies.

  Lying in a hammock is a deeply stressful experience. That’s because it’s accompanied by an eternal and unsolvable dilemma. Do I place my hat over my face? Or not?

  Hammocks should be sold by specialist wildlife suppliers. The Natural History Book Shop has sold me books, the bat-detector and refugia – tins – for reptiles, and they offer many more excitements that bring you closer to wildlife. But they don’t sell hammocks: and the hammock is as good a device for studying wildlife as the moth-trap and the entomologist’s pooter.

  In the warmer months the hammock lies in the shade of the big ash, a few limping paces from my hut. It hangs from its own frame and offers the sublime comfort that only a hammock can bring. But it also brings this appalling dilemma. The strain of this piece of decision-making almost overwhelms me every time, but in the end, I rise to the occasion like a man.

  It’s a delicate calculation based on the brightness of the light and the mood of the hammock-born human. So I was lying there hatless, which means you can open your eyes and look at the sky, and that’s always worth doing. There’s a lot of sky to choose from round our place, and you never know what might turn up in it.

  This time there was the classic birding moment: long-winged, elegant, silhouette like a huge swift. That, as birders will at once recognise, is the standard – and vivid – description of a hobby in flight: a falcon with wings that are long, sharp and slender even by the standards set by fellow falcons. They come to Britain for the warmer months to breed, and they are virtuoso fliers, specialising in the most difficult kinds of aerial prey.

  They are adept at taking dragonflies from the air, and they eat them on the wing; occasionally, especially in late spring, you will see a party of them over a wetland, circling and circling and helping themselves to flying dragons. But they will also take swallows, martins and swifts, which always seems to be going out of the way to make trouble for themselves. I know! Let’s find the fastest and most agile of all flying birds – and then specialise in taking them on the wing.

  They will make the stoop, in the falcon’s anchor shape. They’re not as fast as peregrines, but they are highly manoeuvrable: well, they’d have to be, wouldn’t they? They are a slightly more esoteric version of the swifts, in that they’re globe’s-still-working birds. Seeing a hobby always seems like a good omen.

  One of the plusses of the hat option is sensory deprivation: if you’re not distracted by flying falcons, you’re more likely to get a doze. But that theory doesn’t work in a decently wild spot because when you deprive yourself of sight you emphasise sound.

  And so, with the sun squinting through the latticework of my hat, I lay suspended between heaven and earth, and the most glorious music came bursting out: a solo of low-key extended virtuosity. At first I thought it was a blackcap, but as I got my hearing into focus and my brain more fully engaged, I realised it was nothing of the kind. It was a garden warbler: no doubt the same bird that was singing earlier in the year, still present. There was a good bet that he was half of a breeding pair: which would make seven species of breeding warbler in these scant few acres.

  A new one for the register, then.

  I am the master of horizontal birdwatching.

  I leave my writing hut and the first thing I find is a comma.

  There is a sort of extended lean-to around the kitchen door, copiously windowed, with one closed-off sitting place and then another sitting place out in the open. Both can work as inadvertent traps; freeing confined animals is an accepted part of family routine. Birds get stuck in the closed part. Us
ually it’s enough to open all the doors and wait for them to find their own way out. If not, a little gentle guidance will normally get them out. Just occasionally it’s necessary to catch one. It’s a tremendously difficult thing, holding a small living bird in your hands: you are acutely aware that too much pressure will crush the poor thing, but if you don’t apply enough, you will lose the bird, making it more frightened than ever, and twice as hard to catch. Once a cock pheasant got stuck inside: I caught him in the manner of a scrum-half and made a dashing pass back into the wilderness; the creature thanked me by drawing blood from my left thumb.

  The more open area is no trouble for birds, but big insects get trapped on the translucent ceiling, caught in the angle of beam and plastic roof. Eddie, being a caring person, is particularly vigilant here: as soon as a dragonfly gets caught up in the architecture, those big, brittle wings fizzing and drumming on the roof above, Eddie will summon one of us to show the way out. There’s always a net leaning against the wall on its long bamboo handle, but freeing dragonflies is not always an easy task. They are highly mobile, with excellent vision and they’re very wary of the net. Often you will move them two, three beams closer to the open, and they will perversely fly back in again. Eventually you succeed: and the dragonfly is off, trying to make up for the time lost beneath our roof. Keep a watch for that hobby, fella.

  ‘Dad! Come here!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Big insect!’

  ‘Dragonfly?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Meaning it probably wasn’t a dragonfly. If it was he’d have known.

  I’d been sitting out in the garden, and I was too comfortable to get myself any refreshment. I got up with slight reluctance – and found the insect of the year.