Category: Writing

Discreet encounters

For day 4 of Paul Brookes’ Wildness challenge.

Discreet encounters

When first we came to this house, it was wild. Wilder than now. The old one who had hung on here alone after the old man died was in a home, and the house had been empty. Always peaceful, the meadows were unvisited by humankind for years, and badgers, deer, martens, hares, owls and foxes with nothing to fear had sidled up to, or sidled into the house. Those first seasons, I don’t know how many times I blundered across animals I didn’t even recognise. Later, they grew wary and once again kept their distance.

The first to leave were the owls in the attic. Then the hare that left her young ones by the house moved them out into the meadow. I trod on one in the long grass under the study window. The scream of a hare is a pitiful sound. A marten hunting by the hedge, I mistook for a cat. The martens knew me though. Evenings, we’d meet badgers using the driveway as an easy route through the meadow. Until I took a torch with me, I thought they must be stray dogs. Who knew badgers had tails? They use another route these days.

But the foxes still come up to the house. They still sit waiting to see if there’ll be food scraps put out, just beyond the light from the windows. Sometimes we hear the squabbles, the chatter of a marten, the high-pitched squeal of a hedgehog, the roar of a badger. It’s enough to know they are still there, and if they keep a discreet distance from us, we have only ourselves to blame.

Things that make a mess in the kitchen

Just an update on the visitor situation. The hedgehog hasn’t been back indoors, though it’s been leaving its calling cards all round the outside. I think it lives in a pile of masonry with a tree growing out of it outside the barn door. This is conveniently exactly where I put out the food at night.

After lunch I put out an over-ripe nectarine, a piece of pear, some dry bread and a few walnuts. An hour later, it had all gone except the nectarine. Fussy.

This morning though, someone had been in the kitchen. Husband is rebuilding the fireplace, replacing the bricks and other rubbish that held up the iron base which is slowly sinking back into the ground. He has just the middle section to finish so there’s a neat tiled area still open, mortared on three sides. This morning, between him leaving to go to the market and me getting up, someone had been at the neat mortaring, dug chunks of it out and paddled sand and bits of mortar all around the kitchen. Then left. Neither the dogs nor the cats seem to care.

To be continued probably.

Things that go bump in the night

A couple of winters ago, we had a fox roaming around in the attic. It must have been getting in through the barn and come through the hayloft. All the old doors in this house have bits cut out of the bottom. Possibly for cats, but obviously, whatever fancies the adventure can make its way all round the house even when the doors are closed. We used to hear the fox running around upstairs, and husband met it outside the bedroom one night on his way to the toilet. When we blocked up the hole in the door between the hayloft and the attic, we didn’t have any more visits.
Earlier this spring, we were kept awake by garden dormice, woken up after their hibernation, messing about above our heads in the attic. They have since gone back to their summer habitat outdoors. We often find shrews wandering around inside with a lost look on their blind little faces. They seem to blunder back outside on their own. The cats see to the lizards that come in through the walls. The plague of fieldmice the neighbourhood suffered at the end of last summer is long over, and the mice have all gone back to their fields.
The latest visitors are a bit stranger. A few weeks ago I tripped over a huge toad on the doormat when I went out one evening. A few nights ago, letting the dogs out for their bedtime pee, I found a toad by the door, on the inside this time, waiting to go out. I have no idea how it got in. Possibly the same way the hedgehogs do.
We have hedgehogs round the house. We see them quite often, and through the autumn I put food out for them. The other day I found some surprising turds in the cat tray. Hedgehog turds. No mistaking them, small, black and brittle, mainly made up of bits of beetle. It was too strange to be true so I ignored it. Yesterday, by the cat tray, there was another one. It seems we have hedgehogs coming into the house at night to use the facilities. The door is glass, aluminium framed, and does not have a cat flap. However, the walls are full of holes. If anyone has ever experienced a hedgehog infestation, I’d love to hear about it.

Poppies

How the poppies glow! Baked earth scorches, brown-stalked, criss-crossed with tracks. Smell of fox. A clump of cottony hair, and a hare crops grass high on the ridge. Crows shout commands to unseen troops, kites scream like whizz-bangs, and the poppies burn. A lone oak remembers cows and green pasture, the pond, in deep shrouds, shaded and sheltered by willows and dogwood, plum, cherry and medlars, remembers hooves on muddy banks. Fox comes now and hares, tunnelling though the bramble brakes. Kites scream remembering nothing of any interest, and the poppy-blaze spreads year after year.

Blue

‘The clouds are blue as angels,’ you said, as we trudged the rutted lane, you in corduroys colour of peat in the rain. But your face was full of the fickle winter sun. Bright as crab apples. ‘There’s ghosts up there too,’ you added, ‘all with their secrets. That’s why they’re blue, so you can’t see through them.’
There were puddles in the cart ruts where frogs ducked out of sight and the wind from the sea bowled over the cliff with its cargo of gulls. Our faces were salted sticky, ears whistled.
Rocks sprouted in the short grass but the wind worked its way around. You climbed one, bending to steady yourself. I scrambled up beside you. Below, there was only gorse before the cliff then the sea.
‘If we were angels we could fly,’ I said, unconvinced.
‘Or gulls.’ You stretched out your arms. Your jacket smelled of tobacco, and I imagined you flapping like a cormorant with wings the colour of sodden peat. ‘But we’re only ghosts with our secrets. The kind that tie us to the ground.’
The wind stuck its fingers in my ears, tweaking them so they rattled like icicles, and I zipped up my jacket.
‘Another reason they’re blue,’ you said. ‘It’s so fuckin’ cold.’