Dark Skies
Page 7
Instinct. The innate, primitive response buried deep in our bones that causes us to fight or fly. That winter I caught a glimpse, a taste of the same restless instinct that had driven these redwings across the dark ocean and over my head into new lands.
After many weeks living at my sister’s house, by Christmas I decided something needed to happen. I couldn’t stay here forever, and living in the south-east meant that renting a place on my own would bankrupt me. Having avoided socialising and going into town – desperate to avoid Dave and the torrent of emotions I was leaving unprocessed – I thought it might finally be time for a change, to start again somewhere new and leave my beautiful corner of the South Downs behind. It was an exciting idea, mostly because it was an actual plan with movement involved. A decision was being made. For a while I considered the dark and vibrant tors of Dartmoor, somewhere I had fallen in love with when we spent a long weekend there in the camper van a couple of years ago. At last, though, I settled on the Peak District. Aside from being the birthplace of the Bakewell pudding – a favourite of mine – it was far away but not so far that I couldn’t come home in half a day. With a renewed sense of purpose, I spent the last week before Christmas looking for jobs and houses, starting to put together a plan for the new year.
And then, on Boxing Day, I saw Dave.
He had invited me round to collect some paperwork for the Škoda. I spent half the day feeling sick and the other half convincing myself I was totally fine, both of which should have prepared me for the moment when, on entering the flat, my heart felt like it had been punctured. I stayed for an hour or two and we shared tea and teary conversation, and then I left to go back to my sister’s. I tried as hard as I could to squash all my feelings down to where they were bubbling up from, like trying to submerge a float at the swimming pool, and the next day I even drove up north to spend some time with friends and distract myself. But after two days, miserable and confused, I cut my trip short, drove back to Hampshire and got in touch with Dave to tell him how I felt, but I soon realised a Prosecco-infused half-argument on New Year’s Eve was perhaps not the best way to address our complex emotions.
On 1 January I started running. Since taking up the hobby a couple of years earlier, my sister Chloë had become a running fiend after discovering the physical and mental benefits, and she’d been gently nudging me here and there to give it a go. A natural scoffer of exercise, I resisted for a long time until I was seduced by the ‘Run Every Day’ January scheme celebrated by various health charities. It’s all in the title: you run every day in January, even if it’s just five minutes down the road and back. I love a good scheme, something you can share with others and find support on social media, and I’m foolish enough to believe in (and love) New Year’s resolutions. So I started to run.
I didn’t start pushing myself too early because I wanted to enjoy it, so my first excursion was a treacle-speed 2.5km to the corner shop and back. And dare I say it, I actually liked it. It was the first day of January so I was, of course, hungover and still processing what had happened the night before, but my tiny run filled me with fresh air and brought me slightly back to life. The next day I hopped a little further, and by the end of the Christmas holiday I had even bought a new pair of trainers to cope with the 5km ordeal I was now putting my body through each day. I soon downloaded Strava to record my routes and measure my pace, and although I was now back at work and arriving home way after nightfall, the evening air was cold and electric, and I continued running every night. Moving along streets lit only by dull orange lamps, I could smell rain on tarmac, feel the icy wind on the back of my neck and the hot thud of my heart in my chest. When it wasn’t raining I could still hear the seep-seep of redwings flying over my head, moving about the country in search of new territories. Winter would not last much longer, and soon they would be gathering together again in preparation for their long flight back to Scandinavia, where the ice would start to thaw and the earth would glow green with new life. Britain would always be a warmer choice, and a few birds would remain in Scotland to breed, but our redwings will never stay. ‘You don’t understand, naturally,’ says a swallow to the Water Rat in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows:
First, we feel it stirring within us, a sweet unrest; then back come the recollections one by one, like homing pigeons. They flutter through our dreams at night, they fly with us in our wheelings and circlings by day. We hunger to inquire of each other, to compare notes and assure ourselves that it was all really true, as one by one the scents and sounds and names of long-forgotten places come gradually back and beckon to us.
A quiet restlessness creeps into their hollow bones, and just as the swifts and swallows and cuckoos return to British shores each spring, our redwings will jump out over the sea and fly back to their Nordic homelands.
The previous winter, Dave, his parents and I had flown to the western shores of India to escape the lethargy of Britain in late February. Each day the temperature climbed to 30°C, and we spent our time slicing through the streets on dusty mopeds, past stray dogs and sacred cows adorned with flowers, our senses overwhelmed by sunlight and spices. It was a beautiful and chaotic place, but each night, almost defeated by the noise and heat of the day, we would wander down to the shore and swim in the Arabian Sea where the cool, salty waters washed away the dirt and sweat. The air here was peaceful and still, but the waves pushed down on the shore in an endless rhythm, arriving and departing, embracing and withdrawing beneath the light of the moon. Under the surface I could feel shoals of tiny fish nibbling painlessly at my legs, reviving and renewing my body in the water. We tried to stand against the force of the waves, running to meet them as they swept up and crashed down onto the shore, but resistance was pointless. We were thrown into the water and carried back to the sand like driftwood. Trying to stand against the tide was like trying to stop time; better to float through it, uncontrolled, and embrace the rhythm of the water. We relaxed our bodies and the sea lifted us high into the air and back down to earth, ready to repeat that eternal cycle again and again and again.
One evening we rode to a small harbour hidden in a coconut grove and took a boat out to sea. We had been told there were humpback dolphins there, and as the sun started to sink below the horizon line we scanned the waves for any signs. I had never seen a humpback dolphin, so I was puzzled when our guide shouted and pointed to a small, grey triangle poking out of the water just metres from where we were floating. Unlike the dolphins of the British Isles (and all the cartoons) with their perfectly curved fins as long as their snouts, humpback dolphins have little stubs on their backs similar to those of the humpback whale. From the side they look a bit squashed, but their faces are still bottle-shaped and ‘dolphin-like’. We watched one, two, three of them swim about in the water. These were Sousa plumbea, a subspecies of the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin that are known to perform ‘strand feeding’, a communal feeding behaviour in which individuals work together to herd fish onto exposed sandbanks before deliberately beaching themselves to capture the doomed fish. Like other dolphins, they are also keen echolocators, using low-frequency whistles and high-frequency clicks to communicate through the water.
I was thinking about humpback dolphins one night in January, almost a year after our trip. Far from the warmth and spices of India, it had been snowing in Hampshire all day; a layer of muddy slush lined the pavements, and it was too cold to enjoy the outdoors. I was back at the flat having another cup of tea with Dave, and in between a third slice of toast and a 15th half-glance of affection we were both too afraid to fully commit to, I remembered the dolphins in the evening sun. All dolphins use echolocation to find prey, hunt, protect themselves and talk to each other in habitats that can often include murky, deep waters where their excellent eyesight is useless. They use the round part of their head – the melon – to send out clicks and whistles into the space around them; these sounds then bounce back off nearby objects, and the dolphins use special cavities in their jaws to in
terpret the echoes and build up a picture of their surroundings. It’s a way to see through the darkness around them, and as I sat talking to Dave, listening to my own thoughts pulled from my mind and spoken out loud, I started to feel a new kind of clarity; a sense of what I wanted. Sometimes it’s not until we vocalise our ideas that we truly start to hear them.
A few days later, two farmers were gathered around a tractor under the eaves of a large barn, surprisingly deep in conversation considering it was almost midnight. Dave and I had parked next to the Hare & Hounds pub in Stoughton, West Sussex, a pretty village with a Saxon church and a memorial to Polish pilot Bolesław Własnowolski who crashed his Hawker Hurricane there in 1940. From here we found our way along a track away from the road, moving into farmland and slowly towards the black cluster of trees standing over the horizon. Halfway along the track we reached the barn and the farmers, who looked upon our approach in a startled but not unwelcome manner and listened as we asked for directions.
‘Kingley Vale? Up there!’
A hand pointed into the shadows and, before we could start pretending we knew the way, the tractor erupted in a blaze of light. The second farmer had kindly turned the headlights on to light the track and, waving a merry goodbye, we left the barn and proceeded up the long, sloping path towards the forest.
Kingley Vale is a nature reserve and Site of Special Scientific Interest on the edge of West Sussex, famed for its forest of yew trees that are among the oldest living things in Britain. Established in 1952, it was one of the country’s first nature reserves and some of the yew trees that grow there are thought to be over 1,000 years old. These arboreal veterans were lucky to have survived, as some historians claim that most ancient yew trees in Europe were felled in the fifteenth century to meet the demand for a ‘yew tax’. Yew wood was thought to be one of the hardest coniferous woods, perfect for the production of the English longbow that had grown to be a favoured weapon, so the government began to demand four pieces of yew for every cask of wine unloaded in an English harbour. It is unclear how much of this is fact or folklore, but large yew forests are still a rarity across Europe, growing in solitude or small clusters instead. Other species in the Vale include oak, ash, holly and hawthorn, and the chalkland beneath it all supports a vibrant mosaic of wildlife, including more than 50 species of birds, 39 different butterflies and lots of small mammals.
Dave and I had decided to explore Kingley Vale, to see if the rumours of ghosts and haunted barrows were true, and to enjoy some time alone away from the rest of the world. When we had first started seeing each other, one of our first afternoons together was a walk in the Downs during a rainstorm accompanied by his family Schnauzer, Tinks. Walking is the best catalyst for talking, and over the years during our walks we had laughed and cried, trudged through marshes, spotted butterflies, sipped coffee and listened to nuthatches drip-drip-dripping in the trees. When it rains, the countryside is almost deserted except for those stoic few who wrap themselves in wax jackets and persevere through the drizzle. The same goes for night walks, and we knew we’d have the black trees and trails of Kingley Vale almost to ourselves – the perfect excuse to start raking through the jumble of things in our heads and thinking about what might happen next.
The lights of the tractor guided us along the field and up to the foot of a long path that disappeared into the woods, and we started out into the darkness, leaving the glow of the village behind us. Tonight the sky was only half-clear, spread over with clouds so that the stars shone out between thick swathes of grey and the moon floated in and out of them all, lightening and darkening the landscape every few minutes. For a while we walked along the path, empty except for a number of gorse bushes whose silhouettes appeared suddenly from nowhere and frightened us, their sprawling branches like the limbs of crouching figures in the dark. Finally we reached the edge of the forest, a great, looming jungle, the scent of damp earth surging out from within it. We glanced farewell to the moonlit fields and crept forwards into the vault of trees.
Before we could even pretend to feel comfortable in the dark, a barn owl screeched to our right, the pearlescent banshee of the woods. Historically, barn owls were once Britain’s most common owl species, but today many are killed on motorways or through eating rats that have ingested poison, and only one farm in around 75 is thought to host a barn owl nest. Conservation organisations are working hard to increase their numbers, aided by the fact that these owls are not territorial and will often overlap home ranges, meaning there is space for a lot more in our countryside. Their magnificent heart-shaped faces collect sound in the same way as the human ear, and ornithologists believe the barn owl’s hearing is one of the most sensitive of any species ever tested.
To see one of these creatures floating through the sky, serene and pale in the half-light, it always comes as a slight surprise to hear them shriek out. Contrary to the myth that all owls hoot, barn owls emit a loud, high-pitched screech instead, giving them their common name: screech owl. In the folk tales of many European cultures barn owls were thought to be associated with evil spirits, and many were killed and nailed to the doors of houses afflicted with illness or death. Fortunately they are now a protected species, but I won’t pretend it didn’t give us a shock to be immediately yelled at by a fluffy white orb squatting in the trees above our heads.
The beauty of a forest as ancient as this one lies in the complexity of its layers, slowly woven together over thousands of years of growth to produce a unique and irreplaceable cocktail of living things. It’s why it’s so crucial to protect ancient woodlands and why, when they are destroyed, merely replanting new trees elsewhere is almost pointless. I remembered from my last daylight visit here how the ground was smothered in mosses, each one a differing shade of jade, turquoise, fern; springy and soft to touch, a vital part of the ecosystem. The Finnish author Tove Jansson wrote in The Summer Book of the frailty of moss, suggesting that it weakens drastically with every human footprint. There is truth in her words. Justin Bieber recently came under fire during filming for one of his videos in Iceland, when park rangers in Skaftárhreppur pointed out he had trampled over extremely sensitive moss, potentially causing irreparable damage. Some of the mosses in Iceland are so fragile that even footprints and tyre marks can take a long time to heal. Perhaps other species around the globe are a little hardier. They may not seem like the most exciting mounds of greenery, but mosses are crucial for maintaining healthy ecosystems, retaining water and humidity in their habitats, fixing nutrients in the soil and helping to control flooding.
Spread across trunks and rotting timbers, lichens are also one of the most underrated elements of the woodland, recognisable as those squidgy green things stuck to trees that are weirdly fun to peel off. At a glance they look like a plant or fungus, but the truth is they are the result of both of these organisms functioning as one, a symbiotic relationship formed between algae and fungi. Each one needs the other to survive; the algae produces carbohydrates through photosynthesis that feed the fungus, and the fungus protects and hydrates the algae. They can live almost anywhere in the world from tropical rainforests to the Arctic tundra, and they also indicate the health of the surrounding air, from which they absorb everything from carbon dioxide to heavy metals. Scientists consult lichens as the first indication of air pollution and toxicity, while garden birds peck beneath them to find insects hiding out of sight.
Beyond the mosses and lichens, larger plants colonise the ancient woodland floor, making use of the unique conditions that have evolved over their long existence on earth. Wood anemone and wild garlic love to grow in the shade, as does wood sorrel, dog’s mercury and guelder rose shrubs, the latter producing succulent red berries that make an excellent homemade jelly. Between the plants and flowers, badgers, mice, stoats, foxes and rabbits weave their lives through the forest, while toads creep stickily through the leaf litter and bats sweep through the air in search of insects, eating up to 1,200 mosquito-sized invertebrates in one hour. And below thei
r flight paths, holly and hawthorn spread out beneath towering native species like oak and (what remains of our) ash trees, and spindle bushes extend branches adorned with coral-coloured fruits that look like blushing nuggets of popcorn.
In the dark I could barely see the path in front of me, let alone a spindle tree, but I knew we had stepped into an ancient space. The square, predictable farm fields were left behind, and I could smell the energy, the dynamism of this place; roots and tubers buried deep in the soil, centuries of decay and regrowth, a sense of new life emerging from the old. We were lost in a labyrinth of shrub and thicket, our boots sinking into mud tracks as we walked, our ankles engulfed in a thick, writhing substance filled with living memory. How many creatures had walked, slithered, hopped and flown through these trees? How many people had fallen in love, murdered each other, laughed, cried and buried their treasure here? To wander into these places is to step away from our modern world; even the oldest towns and cities in England are infants compared to the oldest of our forests, where it’s not only the trees that are veterans but the earth itself, feeding and sustaining the ecosystem with its collective of earthworms and bacteria. We think these are the lowest orders in the animal kingdom, but in reality they rule over us all; take them away, treat them badly and everything will be gone – the plants, the air, the water. It feels wonderful to protect the most charismatic members of the natural world, our giant pandas and clouded leopards, but in reality it’s dirt that needs the most love.