On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester;

Author:Nicola Chester;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2021-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Form of a Hare

I put down roots again, quickly, fiercely, strongly, to make it hard for anyone - or any reason - to move me next time. I fed the birds, borrowing the perky bright optimism of blue tits until I became like that too. I nurtured a brand of wilder domesticity, where the smaller things took up my time. At home (or rather outside) with the children, the world became more intimate, even as it became more infinite - worlds in acorn cups, heavens in a red kite’s backlit wings, the thought-provoking questioning of children. The pace slowed, to allow the marvellous importance of a tussock moth caterpillar to cross the road, fully punked up and fully observed, or a muddy puddle to be completely unmapped, reconfigured and redrawn with a stick. I began to place things in the landscape, getting in through the children - and other wild things.

I saw brown hares occasionally in the young corn behind the house, but not again in the garden. I loved reading the weather coming in straight off the down and letting the washing blow in the big wind. It felt like a conversation - a kind of soft transaction I could have, if I read the weather right. If I didn’t, of course, the washing would end up being hauled back inside, in armfuls of wet sails, to be heaped inadequately over doors and turned-off radiators, or, if I hadn’t double or triple pegged it, spread over the field and hedge. With baby Evie in her Moses basket in the garden and Billy playing in the earth with the Britains Farm Land Rover that had been mine, I realised that the doe-eyed roe that appeared just beyond the garden fence mornings and evenings was leaving her own babies to lie up during the day. She watched us, cot sheets flapping on the line, like a living statue, before licking up her nose and leaving twin fawns in the long grass, as if in my care. Two new fawns for a swallowed leveret. A second chance to be trusted. I kept my distance, aware just of the flicker of a leaf-shaped ear, a sun-dappled coat tricking the eye in the waving grass. Life in the nursery.

Revisiting my own relationship with nature, I began to write in earnest to explain, explore, celebrate, mark, galvanise and commiserate it all. For me, the sombre threat of the pram in the hallway was never a problem - I was always out with it. Mostly, it set me free. I started writing a column for the RSPB’s Birds magazine (that became Nature’s Home).

Tiny hands led me back to the start of my relationship with the wild world; to explore new things and go over old with fresh eyes, a new wonder and the skewed luxury of time. Ever an unwieldy, tricksy thing for me, time spooled out at the beginning of days, only to clatter into itself irritably at the end with important, basic things left undone, a feeling of failure and a Victoria sandwich for dinner.

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