On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  When the Mad Conductor had recovered from his exertions, ceased from his labour at Los’s forge and was able, after this phantasmagorical outpouring of his life force, to take up day-to-day responsibilities again, I would press the rewind button. The tape that had dawdled through the play-heads while the music was going began racing with appalling speed back onto its home reel, as if to show that ars was every bit as brevis as vita. Uncannily soon, the leader tape would leap free and whirl around at high speed, slicking and clicking until I pressed stop and restored it to its box.

  The concert was over.

  But not the music. And there would be more music tomorrow.

  That was, I suppose, the year’s high point. Not hope but achievement. The first kiss is not the best kiss (damn it, is there really room for another metaphor in this chapter? Of course there is, bring it on), it is merely the most exciting. The best kiss is the next.

  Eddie and I returned jars and bottles to the bag and made our way back to the house. Without Eddie I wouldn’t have seen that marsh harrier. Or enjoyed it in quite the same way. Eddie too could raise his bat, Eddie too could bow to the audience. It was his triumph as much as anyone’s.

  18

  HERE HARE HERE

  Three fallen leaves in the water butt. Get back on the tree, you little traitors!

  I bumped into Jane the shepherd as she was attending to her flock on the land next door. She told us that she was cutting down on sheep numbers, and was going to give up her tenancy. Being a generous person, she was keen to let us know; she knew we had attempted to rent the land ourselves but had lost out to her five years ago. The land is in the gift of the parish, and the trustees preferred to support a long-time local person rather than a bunch of arrivistes: no complaint from us.

  But we had been here ever since, and what with the marsh and Eddie and all, it was clear that we weren’t fly-by-nights or faddists. We decided to approach the parish, tell them we were interested, and see how things went. I called Helen at Norfolk Wildlife Trust, and she was naturally keen that the place be managed for wildlife. She gave us some thoughts on the best form of management: basically, to graze the sward from mid-July onwards, until the place had been eaten off.

  We talked about this to Jane when next we saw her, and suggested that she might consider grazing a few sheep there herself, without charge, at a time we suggested. That looked like a good idea. Goodwill was cemented, and so – as is the alarming way of life – a fantasy seemed to be becoming a reality slightly faster than we were prepared for.

  Nothing was settled, but everything looked good. There were about ten acres there, varying qualities of grazing marsh crossed with dykes and some patches of reeds. A couple of old corrugated iron pig arks had been dumped there, and would be a serious job to remove. There were also some wacky pieces of ironmongery, from long destroyed gates, looking like a mildly avant-garde sculptural installation. A few bales lay around: part of the area had been mowed and at least some of it baled. Other parts glowed bright green like a golf course. This was what’s called improved grassland: treated with fertiliser and probably selective herbicide.

  In other words, the place was full of – that dreaded word in conservation – potential. It was a lovely spot, from which at least some of the loveliness had gone missing. It looked to me as if it could do with a little tenderness: and the first act of kindness would be a little benign neglect. Well, I was an expert at that.

  So we wrote to the parish again and said that we would love to take the place on. They said that should things go ahead, a five-year deal would be the thing, with a view to renewal after that, if all went well. This seemed good: more than good.

  So as the year began to shut down, insofar as a wild year ever does shut down, so the air was filled with thrilling new possibilities for the year that would follow. We would be more or less doubling the wild land we were responsible for: and if we couldn’t do anything about the long-term future of this new patch, we would be able to do something about its awkward present, if we found favour. Norfolk Wildlife Trust said they would support us. As we researched all this, it became clear that the common was already a county wildlife site – even though it wasn’t a patch on our own land that lies next door. Nowhere to hide a Savi’s warbler, anyway. But Helen also told us that she had done the research and discovered that most of our own bit of marsh is also a County Wildlife Site. Well, glory be.

  But perhaps, if it all happened as we wished, this new patch would be jumping with orchids, once the land was grazed outside the flowering season. Who knew what lay beneath the soil, locked in the seedbank, awaiting its moment to make itself known? You don’t, after all, know what happens next.

  You know that spring follows winter, but you don’t know what kind of spring. Perhaps it will be rotten and wet and late and horribly short on wildlife; perhaps it will come dismayingly early. Perhaps the Savi’s will come and breed; perhaps the Cetti’s will fail to show. Perhaps cranes will come and nest on the ground on the land next door; perhaps there will be no swallows at all. Perhaps there will be a painted lady year like 2009, when the buddleias almost broke under the weight of these lovely migrating butterflies; or perhaps it will be a wet and cold disaster.

  The only truth you can be certain of is that life will do its best to keep on living: and all you can do is do your best to give it half a chance. Being where we are, we can do this in terms of land, in terms of the actual stuff that wild things live on. We can carry on looking after an island of wildlife – an expanding island of wildlife – in one of the most nature-deprived countries in Europe.

  The moon is almost full. The barn owl on his hunting perch is not.

  College was good. No more school uniform. These days, three mornings a week, Eddie would set off in his leather jacket and his Elvis tee-shirt. He was given more scope, more responsibility for himself, and he took it on as a thirsty man takes on water. You change, you develop, you move on: it’s a process that never stops. Even if you have Down’s syndrome.

  Now every Wednesday he went to Clinks Care Farm. He would come home both knackered and ravenous, scarcely able to speak. ‘Are you the farmer?’ I would greet him as he returned. That’s one last Withnail joke, but so far as Eddie is concerned, it is a proud acknowledgement of his new identity. So what was happening today?

  Feeding the pigs, he would explain. Building a bonfire. Collecting the eggs and sorting them into sizes. Looking after the shop.

  The year was turning, the autumn jobs were in full and urgent spate, and Eddie was a part of it, locked into the natural rhythm of the world.

  A vast bowl of pasta would be a matter of urgency, or maybe pancakes: load up those carbs. Some non-taxing television. A computer game with his generous brother. And then a vast and steaming bath because the pigs and the rest had left their mark on him, and tomorrow was a college day.

  After that, hair soft and smelling of shampoo, in the contentment of weariness, I would read to him from a mildly testing tome of natural history, and we would discuss such important matters as why toothed whales differ from baleen whales, and then it would be goodnight.

  A last goodnight from Cindy. She came downstairs – Eddie apparently asleep before she reached the landing – to report that he had said something significant.

  ‘I love my life.’

  Morning ride. Almost under my horse’s feet, two baby stoats playing chicken.

  Roger Wilson was a great conservationist. He was never one to brag about it much, and his name is not a famous one; he just did immense amounts of fantastic work. He worked with Dian Fossey and the gorillas in Rwanda, he worked in many other places in Africa, and latterly he worked with World Land Trust and was a mentor and an inspiration to the new generation of conservationists. He was a visionary and a wholly practical man; he was an idealist and a cynic. And above all he loved the wild.

  A casual caller would have assumed his job at World Land Trust was sentry. I’m a council member as well as a long-time supporter
of this fine organisation; I often dropped in to their headquarters in Halesworth, and most times I found Roger on guard outside: smoking a cigarette with the air of a man doing his duty. Whenever we had a pint in the Angel, he would take out his tobacco pouch and roll cigarettes: for the pleasantly therapeutic nature of the task, and as if he was planning to smoke them all one after another as soon as he got outside. Alas, the fags got their own back, and he died from lung cancer: death followed diagnosis with horrible rapidity, and there was devastation and dismay throughout World Land Trust.

  His life was formally celebrated by a gathering at the Royal Geographical Society in London, which lies hard by the Royal Albert Hall. I was asked to speak. Honoured, I prepared my brief talk. It was when I started practising it that I realised I had written it as a joke with a punchline: therefore I needed the nerves of a stand-up comedian to deliver it properly. And that’s not what I’m best at. When it comes to public performance, I make up for lack of flair by conscientious hammering and copious rehearsal.

  But I remembered that when Cindy worked as an actor, she had been in a farce called They Came from Mars and Landed Outside the Farndale Avenue Church Hall in Time for the Townswomen’s Guild Coffee Morning. It played for three weeks at the Pleasance at the Edinburgh Festival and toured for a year afterwards. Cindy worked on her comic technique with the play’s author, David McGillivray, who was called, in one review, ‘the master of timing’.

  One line of Cindy’s consistently got a laugh, but not as much as David believed it should have done. Cindy was encouraged to take a beat – a pause – between lines and the joke did better. She then tried two beats – and each night she got a real shout of laughter. But give it more – she never did – and it would get no more than a titter, David said. So I bore that in mind when I went up to the podium at the RGS. Here’s the first chunk of that address:

  Roger was a wild man. Wildness flowed in his veins and filled his heart. In a suit he looked like a man togged out in fancy dress; in a room he looked like something in a cage. Lord knows I can tell a few tales of the wilderness myself but, without ever trying to be competitive, Roger could beat me hands-down every single time. One tale alone shall have to do for the lot: and it tells of a wildness so deep that it is obvious that Roger had gone a million miles beyond puerile ideas like trying to conquer the wilderness, impose his will on it or use it as a proving ground for his manhood.

  The tale involves a little bit of African lore, so I’d better give you the footnotes before we start. It’s about a long-drop. This, as all old Africa hands know, is a camp latrine. The name gives you a pretty good idea of the science behind it, and you will easily understand that the longer the drop, the better it is for all concerned.

  I have encountered long-drops with decadent luxuries like a sawn-off oil-drum fitted with a real lavatory seat, but the hard-core tend to shrink in horror from effete nonsense. Such people have always preferred the simple cross-pole. You will easily understand that it’s a good idea to choose a stout pole, and then to anchor it reasonably securely. There are plenty of tales of those who neglected such precautions.

  The second footnote involves the spitting cobra. This is a genus of venomous snakes with a dozen or more species in Africa and Asia.

  These catch their prey by the approved serpentine method of injecting it with venom, but they also use venom for a rather drastic defence mechanism, one that they exploit when cornered. They turn themselves into a highly dangerous water-pistol and shoot their venom at whatever has disturbed them. They can fire a remarkable quantity of the stuff for a good couple of metres.

  You’re unharmed, if somewhat startled, if the venom merely lands on your unbroken skin, but the cobras tend to go for the eyes and they’re pretty good shots. A direct hit can cause temporary and permanent blindness.

  Roger and I were swapping Africa stories. He told me of a camp he had lived in for some time. ‘That’s where we had a spitting cobra in the long-drop.’

  Well, what would you do? Would you kill it? Would you take the more risky strategy of removing it – and be forever after fearful that it might come back to a place it clearly had a fancy for? Or would you request others to get on with the job while you had urgent business elsewhere? Well, Roger – what did you do?

  One beat. Two beats.

  ‘Wore goggles.’

  I got my shout, or rather, Roger got his. So we raised glasses – rather than goggles – to Roger, and vowed that if we wouldn’t see his like again, quite in that way, we would do our best to make sure that we saw something reasonably similar, at least in terms of commitment and ability.

  Nicola Davis – author of Bat Loves the Night and Big Blue Whale, already quoted in these pages – is a trustee of World Land Trust as well as a friend of the family. She called the occasion ‘a rededication’.

  I felt the same thing. Sometimes a couple choose to renew their wedding vows; the people who take part in the first Mass of Easter renew their baptismal vows. It’s not that you had forgotten them, or set them aside, or wilfully broken them: it was more an acceptance – or perhaps a realisation – that you believe in the things you had made your vows for more than ever. And more than ever, you wanted to keep doing what you believed was right.

  So yes, as the year on the marsh – a year since we had taken on those extra acres – came to a conclusion, it was a realisation or an acceptance that managing a piece of land for wildlife was a good and right thing to do. We must carry on doing all we can to keep the place singing.

  It was the same with the stuff I was writing. The loss of biodiversity and bioabundance is a greater threat to the planet than climate change. But as I write my stuff, I must make it clear that fragility and importance are only part of my subject – for the wild stuff out there is also wonderful beyond description. As we live with less and less non-human life in our lives, so our lives become poorer. We are increasingly living in a monoculture. That not only impoverishes us: it makes us less human.

  So, rededicated, I resolved, among other things, to write this book as well as I could, so that I could tell the world about gorillas, spitting cobras, marsh harriers, Savi’s warblers, bats, Sowerby’s beaked whales, bumblebees, hawk-moths and bonking beetles. Without such things, we are less than ourselves.

  Julian Roughton from the Suffolk Wildlife Trust paid us a visit. He and I had been looking at the incredible Carlton Marsh project: one that involves more than 1,000 acres of marsh, with scrapes and pools and dykes and bunds and miraculous volumes of Broadlands sky: and all of it filled with birds and the cries of birds. It was half an hour’s drive from our place: not much more as the harrier flies. It was a little more connectivity for nature in our nature-deprived land, and I was thrilled by the place for itself – and also thrilled by the fact that it was Julian’s personal achievement. I had written to him when the purchase was completed: ‘I know you will tell me that it’s all about the team, and that you’ve got a great team and that nothing could have been done without them, and of course you’re right. But there comes a time in a football match when a striker scores the winning goal. At that moment he is entitled to acknowledge the applause of the crowd: applause that’s for him alone. So perform your knee-slide, remove your shirt and wave it above your head: because you have done something great.’

  So yes, Julian is one of the really good guys – and a man worth listening to, a man of easy manners and open mind. So Cindy confessed to him the worries we often felt about managing the marsh, and how so many times we felt we had fallen short.

  ‘Look, the reason this place is special is because no one has done anything with it for years,’ Julian said. ‘It’s fabulous. And it’s OK to let it get on with doing whatever it’s doing. Don’t worry about the list of jobs. They’re just a guideline, a perfect-case scenario. It’s a wild place: if you just let it get on with the job of being wild, you’re doing a good job yourself.’

  Listen while I tell you about the hare in the garden. All ears?

>   The hare in the garden was no longer a stranger. He had become a local character, nothing less. It was clearly the same hare seen many times, rather than a series of different hares. We had watched him grow from a leggy leveret to a slightly less leggy adult. He seemed content with a solitary life: and I wondered if or rather when that would change. Come spring, would his urge to be with others of his kind prompt him to move back to the uplands? Or would wanderlust drive others down towards this fringe habitat? For this wasn’t classic hare country. These days they exploit big open areas of farmland, preferring dry country and light soils. But down here on the marsh, they had a place without huge vehicles, without much disturbance, without dogs, and where the only workers were us. No one would be shooting at them. The hare was certainly not considering these matters: but he had found a place where he could make a decent living and was in no itching hurry to leave.

  And as for us . . . well, we were sharing our living space with a hare.

  Hares have their witchy side, like all creatures of the night, for they are mostly nocturnal. All the same, I see half a dozen of them most days when I ride out: generally they cower under our hooves, breaking cover at the last minute to streak away across the field. I have always loved that moment when they raise themselves up on these long levers, when they change from possible rabbits into definite, undeniable, for-all-time hares. It’s that transition from bunny to antelope that I take most delight in.