Dark Skies
Page 23
We stood over the still-used A3 outside Steep and stared out across the road, which was deserted, empty of the thousands of cars that commuted into London and back every day of the week. We had discovered the one quiet moment when the road was unused, and it felt like we had stumbled into a zombie apocalypse. As much as I find traffic disruptive, it was strange to see such a busy highway so empty, and we moved on without a word, back into the forest and away from the world of tarmac and satnavs. Although the light of dawn had started to creep into the sky, the trees were still so thick that barely anything could penetrate them. The forest floor was bursting with twisted roots and lumps of chalk, some fixed in the ground, others loose and slippery. Unable to see, we were forced to tap into our other senses and, rather than flumping my feet down without a thought, I used them to gauge steady ground, touching them lightly to the floor and only allowing my weight to settle when they told me it was safe to do so.
Onwards we climbed, crossing from the woodland thicket out onto the last stretch of road before the final ascent. From the road we followed a chalk path along the boundary of a field, strands of wheat swaying like grey fibres in the morning breeze, before finally crossing into the last patch of trees that stood at the bottom of the hill. We stopped and gazed up at the path, climbing the Shoulder of Mutton, a hill so steep that I had never mastered it with ease, no matter how fit I might be. I knew I could make it halfway before pausing for a breath and turning to look back at the developing view as we climbed. With the birds still silent in their nests, we started the final hike up to the Poet Stone and the end of our starlit journey.
This was the walk that had inspired Thomas to write his poem ‘When First’, an ode to his beloved hillside, one that lifted the heart of a man who was, almost certainly, vulnerable to the complexities of life and troubled by what was expected of him. Nature seemed to provide some respite from this, a constant friend, an educator and a source of inspiration. His many walks up to the peak of the hill culminated in the publication of this poem:
When first I came here I had hope,
Hope for I knew not what. Fast beat
My heart at the sight of the tall slope
Of grass and yews, as if my feet
Only by scaling its steps of chalk
Would see something no other hill
Ever disclosed. And now I walk
Down it the last time. Never will
My heart beat so again at sight
Of any hill although as fair
And loftier. For infinite
The change, late unperceived, this year,
The twelfth, suddenly, shows me plain.
Hope now,—not health nor cheerfulness,
Since they can come and go again,
As often one brief hour witnesses,—
Just hope has gone forever. Perhaps
I may love other hills yet more
Than this: the future and the maps
Hide something I was waiting for.
One thing I know, that love with chance
And use and time and necessity
Will grow, and louder the heart’s dance
At parting than at meeting be.
I could imagine him here at the base of the path, gazing up at the hillside, desperate to reach the top and look out across the Downs. It would have looked slightly different 100 years ago; now it was bare of trees but full of wildflowers, a flat incline with nothing to obstruct the view, but then it was speckled with towering beech trees that were uprooted in the hurricane of 1987, five years before I was born. I didn’t know much about the Great Storm – only that when I was young, we would walk through the ancient woodland around my grandparents’ house on Sunday afternoons, and every now and then stumble upon a gigantic oak or beech tree, ripped from the ground and strewn across the forest floor. Most of the time they had become a new part of the ecosystem, a rotting paradise providing nutrients for insects and beetles, a place to hide and for fungi to grow. But sometimes the roots were still intact and a tree would continue to grow aslant, a beautiful, broken anomaly among the rest. One of the trees that had fallen locally was later used at Butser Ancient Farm to carve into a log boat – in the time since the Great Storm it had been left to rest where it fell, and it had seasoned just the right amount to be carved with Bronze Age tools.
A lot has happened since Edward Thomas died on the battlefields of France in 1917, and in many ways the Hampshire landscape has changed almost beyond recognition. Towns and villages have spread to accommodate the sprawl of Londoners looking for a rural retreat from the city, and farming practices saw an overhaul after the war, when farmers were encouraged to maximise yields using artificial pesticides and fertilisers that, although successful in meeting human food demands, also began one of the greatest mass extinctions of wildlife in human history. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and revealed to the world just how much damage was being done to the environment and human health by artificial pesticide use. Today, 50 years later, although we are more aware than ever of both the fragility of the ecosystem and our dependence on it, things are not changing quickly enough. In the 2016 State of Nature report published by more than 50 conservation organisations, data collected revealed that 56 per cent of UK species of wildlife are in decline, and around 165 of those species are considered Critically Endangered. The green and pleasant land we are so proud of in Britain is actually a product of one of the least biodiverse countries in the world.
It’s easy to become so depressed at these statistics that we give up altogether. Why bother to save the world when it is already so damaged? How can we change the course of the future when almost every powerful industry in the world seems intent on destroying the planet? How can we persuade others to care about nature when we have become so disconnected from it? I’m an optimistic person, and even I sometimes despair at the situation. But nature is not something we can choose to protect, because the moment we give up on nature is the moment we give up on humanity. The simple fact is that we cannot continue to live on the planet if the environment is damaged. We rely on healthy ecosystems to feed us, clean our air and water, provide oxygen – and these are just the essentials. Can we really live in a world without bumblebees and oak trees, great white sharks and luminescent plankton, capuchin monkeys, polar bears and Venus flytraps? Can we sincerely teach compassion, kindness and responsibility to our children and grandchildren if we ourselves aren’t willing to fight for a better world for them?
When I was flying back from India the year before, I watched the documentary Before the Flood on the plane (ironic, considering the carbon emissions I was emitting). The film was a collaboration between National Geographic and Leonardo DiCaprio, documenting the devastating impacts of climate change and exploring humanity’s ability to reverse what might be the most catastrophic future we have ever faced. I had heard about it many times but, assuming it would make me utterly miserable, I had not been able to bring myself to watch it until I was faced with a 16-hour flight and a limited selection of in-flight entertainment. The film was bleak, shocking and mesmerising, but to my surprise, it was also full of hope. In the final scenes, a climate scientist tells the audience that we can reverse the damage done by global warming and that we can stop the temperature of the earth rising to unsustainable levels. Not only this, but he claims we can actually reduce those temperatures back to where they were, literally restoring the planet to a much more habitable condition for every living creature. There is, of course, an enormous amount of work to be done in order to reach this point, but the important thing is that it is possible. We don’t have to surrender ourselves to fear and despair at what the future will inevitably bring because it isn’t inevitable. The power to change the world is still up for grabs – and we need to fight for it.
As we ascended the Shoulder of Mutton, past the wildflowers of summer, past the swathes of grass where beech used to grow, I wondered how many of the trees in the forest surrounding the hill had been seen by Thoma
s and Frost as they walked through the Downs day and night. Most of the great oaks within the woodland would have been here, their thick round trunks swelling over time, grown from saplings sprouted from dropped acorns, which in turn were missed by the red squirrels that lived here before the greys were introduced in the nineteenth century and pushed them out. Just down the road grew the red helleborine orchid, a flower that was now so rare in Britain that it only existed in three places, one being Hawkley Warren in the Hangers. I wondered if it had always been so rare or if, like so many species, its fragility was yet another casualty of modernity. To walk through a place this old was like drifting through a time portal, reminding me of a forgotten England that we could never go back to but bringing hope for a future that did not yet exist.
I was halfway up the hill; as always, being much fitter than me, Dave had gone ahead to the top. From there I had calculated the sun would rise from the western side of the viewpoint, behind the hill and over the top of the trees, so that we would feel the glow of sunrise before we saw the sun itself. I kept walking, one step at a time, and realised the birds were still not singing, despite there being only minutes to go before daybreak. Perhaps the heatwave had hit them hard, too, and they were still asleep – just five minutes more to enjoy the cool stillness of early morning.
Onwards I climbed, breathless and warm, until finally, just metres ahead, I could see the Poet Stone. Engraved on the front was the final sentence from one of Thomas’ essays: ‘And I rose up, and knew that I was tired, and continued my journey.’ And beside the Stone, smiling in the peachy glow of dawn, was Dave, perched on the wooden bench that had been placed there when the Stone was first erected. I stood for a few seconds at the top, clawing for breath in the morning heat before pulling the flask of coffee from the bag and handing it to Dave while I took a photo of the view. The light was perfect – like crushed velvet on the sky, lifting the landscape out of the darkness of night, revealing the forests and rivers, the grass and flowers, the horses, sheep and the shepherd’s hut that had become a pleasantly permanent feature of the view. All was quiet and at peace.
And then, out of nothing, deep within the mottled canopy of a silver birch, a voice sung out in the darkness. Ripe, silky notes floated through the air and out into the ether, the first symphony of the morning bursting from the dark feathered chest of a male blackbird. For a few moments the hillside was his stage alone, one solitary voice pouring through the trees. One by one, he was joined by the voices of the other birds, until the air was ablaze with the beautiful chaos of birdsong chiming through the Downs like a thousand silver bells.
It was the sound we had been waiting to hear all morning, and as I turned to Dave, smiling at the riot triggered by one sleepy blackbird, he knelt forwards and asked me to marry him.
I had never felt more at peace, nor more connected with the living, growing world around me, my breath still short from hiking up the hill, my blood warm with oxygen, the light wind of July moving through my hair and across my skin – and the man I loved telling me he wanted to wake up next to me every day for the rest of his life.
We sat together by the Poet Stone for an hour, drinking coffee and watching the sun leap over the beech trees, pouring warmth onto the hillside, onto our bodies and faces, onto the wildflowers that had started to open up their petals for another day of uncompromised light and heat. We’d each spent our whole lives in the South Downs, this enchanting, half-wild corner of England that had somehow escaped the London sprawl and remained our secret, sacred home, a labyrinth of ancient forests, chalk streams, red kites and rose hips. To the right, I could see the pylon shimmering at the top of Butser Hill, miles away towards Portsmouth, and directly before us lay Steep, the sleeping village that Edward Thomas had called home. To sit here together was like watching all the best moments of our past, two lives lived in the same quiet town, merged together by one chance encounter at a friend’s birthday three years before. Life can lead us anywhere and we should never be afraid of where we might go, but there on the hill, with the Downs stretched out before us like a shimmering, emerald lake, I hoped I would never live anywhere else.
With the night over and the warmth of the sun on our backs, we left the Poet Stone behind and walked back down the sloping track towards home – blackbird song on the wind, a cloudless sky above our heads, and the sweet aroma of wild roses drifting through the soft morning air.
Acknowledgements
Thank you …
To Kate Bradbury for helping me shape the idea for this book and Tom Cox for showing me the Otterton beavers. To all who inspired me at the Grant Arms Hotel in March 2018, especially Mark Cocker for his wisdom and guidance, and Louise Gray for a magical morning run with the red squirrels.
To the wonderful team at Bloomsbury who have made becoming an author so utterly enjoyable. To Jim Martin for giving me a chance, to Julie Bailey for believing in me ever since, and to Charlotte Atyeo, Hannah Paget, Hetty Touquet and the rest of the gang for all their hard work.
To all my creative, passionate friends who continue to inspire and educate me, especially Imogen Wood, Victoria Melluish, Hannah Khan, Amber Banaityte, Mark Ranger, Matt Williams, Megan Shersby, Freya Haak, Katy Livesey, Charli Sams, Emily Joáchim, Hannah Rudd, and Catherine and Lizzy Ward Thomas.
To my mum and dad, Ian, Nana, Grandad, Jim and the rest of my lovely family. To Chloë, Hollie and Christie, the ultimate sisters. To my niece Meredith, brother-in-law Simon, and everyone at Butser Ancient Farm, my favourite place in the world. To Chris, Tony, Andy, Jenny, Paul, Eva, Tinks and Sparkle for welcoming me wholeheartedly into the Baker tribe. To our Spanish rescue dog Pablo for making the world even brighter.
And to Dave, my best friend.
Further Reading
Barkham, Patrick. 2014. Badgerlands. London: Granta.
Brontë, Emily. 2015. The Night is Darkening Round Me. London: Penguin.
Cox, Tom. 2018. Help the Witch. London: Unbound.
Geddes, Linda. 2019. Chasing the Sun. London: Wellcome Collection.
Masefield, John. 2012. The Midnight Folk. London: Egmont.
Mosse, Kate. 2015. The Taxidermist’s Daughter. London: Orion.
Stoker, Bram. 1983. Dracula. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wills, Dixe. 2015. At Night: A Journey Round Britain from Dusk Till Dawn. Basingstoke: AA.
Yates, Chris. 2014. Nightwalk. Glasgow: Collins.
References
Brontë, Emily. 2018. Wuthering Heights. Glasgow: HQ.
Byron, George Gordon Lord, and Jerome J. McGann. 2008. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carson, Rachel. 2000. Silent Spring. London: Penguin.
Christie, Agatha. 2017. An Autobiography. Glasgow: HarperCollins.
Cobbett, William. 2001. Rural Rides. London: Penguin.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 2008. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Conan Doyle, Arthur. 2012. The Hound of the Baskervilles. London: Penguin.
Conrad, Joseph. 2007. The Secret Agent. London: Penguin.
Du Maurier, Daphne. 2003. Jamaica Inn. London: Virago.
Du Maurier, Daphne. 2003. Rebecca. London: Virago.
Ekirch, A. Roger. 2006. At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime. New York: Norton.
Grahame, Kenneth. 2014. The Wind in the Willows. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hamsun, Knut. 1998. Pan. London: Penguin.
Jansson, Tove. 2003. The Summer Book. London: Sort Of.
Leonard, John, and John Milton. 1998. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin.
Pullman, Philip. 2011. His Dark Materials. London: Everyman.
Shakespeare, William. 2015. Macbeth. London: Arden.
Shelley, Mary. 2003. Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin.
Tennyson, Alfred Lord. 1983. Idylls of the King. London: Penguin.
Thomas, Edward. 2004. Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 2007. The Lord of the Rings. Glasg
ow: HarperCollins.
Wells, H. G. 2017. The War of the Worlds. Glasgow: Collins.
White, Gilbert. 2013. The Natural History of Selborne. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wordsworth, William. 2008. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Index
American Philosophical Society here
amphibians, light pollution and here
anchoring here
ancient woodlands here, here
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle here
Ann Veronica (Wells) here
arachnophobia here
Aristarchus here
Aristotle here, here
Arthur here
Ashford Hangers, Hampshire here, here, here, here
astronomy here, here, here
astro-tourism here
aurora borealis here, here, here, here
badger skull here
badgers here, here
Bat Conservation Trust here
bats here, here
Battle of Watling Street here
Bayeux Tapestry here
bears, polar here
beavers, Eurasian here, here
Before the Flood (documentary) here
Beltain Festival here, here
Bersu, Gerhard here
Bieber, Justin here
bioluminescent plankton here
birds
barn owls here, here
blackbirds here, here
cuckoos here, here
dawn chorus here, here, here, here