Today I saw a fox trotting up the garden path with a fat bunch of unruly feathers in its mouth. Come to think of it I haven’t seen either pigeon for a while. And S has been out and bought rat poison, which I have to administer.
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Sitting at the kitchen table by the big window overlooking the garden, we have a good view of the rats. They’re bold and relaxed. At first, in the winter, there was just one that I noticed. An elderly rat, taking his share of the birds’ crumbs, recognisable by a distinctive patch of fur on one side that looked as if it had been brushed the wrong way. My first thought was: we’ve got to kill him! My second thought was; he doesn’t seem to be doing any harm. And then I made the mistake of giving him a name: Boris. And then I thought: that’s sexist – how about Margaret? Being a gutless liberal with a bleeding heart, naming a rat after the enemy didn’t make the thought of execution any easier for me, on the contrary. And when a younger rat appeared, climbing up the yew tree in order to dive like a squirrel across to the bird feeder, I was annoyed, but also admiring. Now there are a couple of adolescents, strolling about on what you might call a patio, but I don’t. And you can tell that they feel they’ve joined the magic circle of protected, or at least tolerated creatures. Like the two wood pigeons which I initially felt hostile towards, but have grown fond of, since I realised by their plumpness and the white dash on their necks that they were wood pigeons and not feral, or London pigeons, and that tjhey never brought their mates round, there were only ever two of them – year after year: what did they do with their young, or were they in fact the same birds each year?
Rats might think that this was a decent neighbourhood for a decent, hard working rodent family: no fungicides, no neo-nicotinoids, no weed killer, no creosote, no ant killer or wasp killer or aphid killer, no slug bait[1]. A bark worse than bite old dog to keep the cats away. Sheltered housing down by the compost heap for elderly foxes[2]. Berries and seeds in abundance. Hiding and nesting places in log piles and undergrowth. Fat bumble bees droning slowly from flower to nodding flower, hover flies hovering in rare spring sunshine, blue tits and great tits queueing up to take sunflower seeds, robins at home – in the winter the robins took to sitting outside the kitchen window looking in until someone came out with food. And if you peeped through the curtains in the evening you might catch a glimpse of Sir Dave’s long bio-diversity ballad on the TV, all things bright and beautiful (and scary too) from all around the world, an acceptance and celebration of the fullness of nature.
Now I’ve been told it’s time to poison the rats, which will be a kind of betrayal.
I’m thinking about it.
[1] ok – almost none.
[2] actually, not good news for rats. I saw a fox walking up the garden path with a large rat in its mouth the other day.
‘where moth doth not corrupt’
My memories of Yugoslavia are like gold in that they will not tarnish. Unlike the whale bones in the Hvalsalen in Bergen that Kathleen Jamie writes about in Sightlines, they don’t gather dust. They don’t have to be hoovered, sprayed with ammonia, brushed and sponged. They need no protection or copyright. They never change and will probably survive nearly all the dissolution of my brain, so that if I become senile I will still talk about the bridge at Mostar.
When the Serbs blew up the bridge at Mostar I remembered it, its steep arch, strong and delicate as a drawn bow above the little gorge where the river still ran wild through the town and along whose edges shoes and bottles were accumulating as plastic came to Bosnia and it was not prepared.
Thick scrub and woodland thickets over limestone ridges between green valleys. There must have been a lot of limestone in the hills and the summer must have been long and dry and the surface of the road must have been unmetalled, or partly unmetalled, because I remember that the trees and shrubs beside the road were thickly coated with chalky grey dust. The dusty road led from a valley of villages with churches to a valley of villages with mosques.
The children who met us at one village found us a blacksmith who welded the broken frame of my rucksack and wouldn’t accept any nmoney, then they found us a place to camp in a field by the river, and then they brought roasted sweet corn to our tent.
Political analysis from a lorry driver who spoke five words of english: ‘Communism, bad! Tito, good!’
It was only later that I realised that this was Bosnia. Now the name Yugoslavia is as quaint as Constantinople. Or Rhodesia. And all the names came back to me in the news: Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Mostar, and from Croatia, Osijek and Dubrovnik.
As we walked up a long hill in the afternoon near the top was a house and behind a hedge in the garden people were having a picnic. I’ve still got a photo somewhere. We didn’t know whether they were muslim or orthodox and it never occurred to us to wonder. They invited us into the garden where they were sitting on the grass and fed us.
That is the aspect of the golden age which is burnt into us: all the travellers from the sixties and seventies and later have stories about the generosity of the poor, about hospitality and trust, the meeting between us who were passing thorough, playing with nomad notions, and those we saw as settled, rooted, limited, content. They took us in, smiles stood in for words, in their kitchens and stables and gardens we experienced little glimpses of paradise, even though we knew their life was very hard. We had no idea that they loved their homes and valleys so much they would defend them by murdering their neighbours.
I read that during the war Serb volunteers in training were taken to farms where the peasants demonstrated on pigs the correct technique for cutting people’s throats.
I said they don’t tarnish, those snapshot memories. But they do, when I try to write them down. they become clumsy and sentimental. And the icon becomes a cliché. In french, a cliché is a snapshot.
In another friendly province, Northern Ireland, I was walking between lifts one summer evening in the 70’s along the Antrim coast road near Cushendall. I was taken in for a cup of tea by a working class republican family from Belfast who were staying in a little cottage. There are a number of little catholic enclaves in the glens of Antrim, though the county as a whole has a big protestant majority. They spoke of their political struggle and sang republican songs. They had their own culture, their own music; they wouldn’t listen to pop music. When I left, the eldest boy, who must have been about 16, set me on my way by walking up the hill with me, and just before he turned back he stopped, threw his arms to the hills and asked how Ireland could ever be divided. In the landscape he saw the evidence for his convictions. Until that moment embracing the landscape had for me been a Wordsworthian thing. In the sixth form we’d hitched up to the Lakes to get a fix of something we could recollect in tranquillity.It was a serious joke. But this boy wasn’t going to get any tranquillity from the Irish hills. I thought about him often over the next twenty years. It’s unlikely that he came through them alive or without a long prison sentence.
What I love about Hackney is that it’s unloved. No one is prepared to die to defend these streets against imaginary enemies. I never liked those ‘I heart Hackney’ badges. Why go sticking love in where it does not belong.
Before the metamorphosis of Michael Portillo into an entertainer I heard him on the radio, when he was Home Secretary, it was in this room, which looks out onto Manor Road, and it was the afternoon, and he said that there are three letters which drive fear into the hearts of Britain’s enemies, and those three letters are SAS. (I don’t know what the SAS was doing at the time, were they running around in the desert before Blair came to power?) The secrecy of the SAS is a gift to propagandists: the evidence for Britain’s decline as a world power can be ignored by those who believe in a band of super heroes covertly working their military magic, killing terrorists we didn’t know existed, and unaffected by defence cuts because their very name undoes the enemy.
There was a close relation between the home secretary’s love for both his country and the conservative party, heightened it seemed in his case by his being half spanish, and his passionate hatred of Britain’s enemies or those he decided were Britain’s enemies and his devotion to the professional soldiers who would attack those enemies and whose every action could be justified. Could love make someone so odious? I looked out of the window and saw the usual two or three or four or five hackney residents: probably a couple of orthodox jews, one or two muslim youth, an old lady with a shopping trolley. How easily populist rhetoric is deflated by the plod or stroll or shuffle of someone just going to the shops or walking the dog. I could tell that none of them believed passionately in the SAS, or Queen Elizabeth, or cottage gardens and village greens; they didn’t lament the passing of red phone boxes, they didn’t believe that Britain had fought the Germans practically single handed, they’d probably fail a citizenship test, even the ones who were born here, because they just didn’t care. Most of them don’t even love a football team! I could be wrong though. For all I know they were all wearing union jack underpants.
For someone fond of a different national myth they are refugees from oppression and poverty who have found security in a free country. (It’s a free country being one of our favourite slogans.)
(is there an ending? what untarnished memories for the residents of hackney….) am I saying that isolation is what saves us from nationalism or fascism? that’s sad. that to save themselves from isolation in a hostile world people pick up their feet and march shoulder to shoulder, do a goose step even to show how far they’ve come from a quiet stroll to the shops
So I’ve looked a little into Portillo’s career and here are a few of the things I’ve found:
from an article for the Sunday Times, January 4, 2004:
‘The most disastrous day of my political career occurred in 1995 when I was Secretary of State for Defence. In a serious lapse of taste I cited the SAS in a speech to the Conservative Party Conference. I strayed into absurd chauvinism because I knew what the Tory activists wanted to hear, and I was fixated with getting a standing ovation. It wasn’t just the speech that was foolish: I had made an idiotic calculation. I thought that approval from the thousand Conservatives in the hall was more important than the impact on the general public through television, or on political commentators, or on those in the armed forces whose trust I needed.
That day of personal infamy is merely a vivid illustration of a choice that faces politicians all the time. Should we say things that please our party faithful, and maybe shore up our position on the greasy pole of promotion, or should we risk disappointing them by taking more moderate positions, that might attract new voters?
I argue that whilst it’s not very important to have distinctive policies, what do matter greatly are the party’s tone, behaviour and appearance.’
You can find this on his own website. The notorious speech itself is not on the site. But it soon pops up on youtube. Quoted separately on a Daily Mail site are the words I remember; they don’t appear in the extracts from the speech on youtube:
“Three letters send a chill down the spine of the enemy: SAS. Those letters spell out one clear message. Don’t mess with Britain!”
So I got the anatomical detail wrong, it was spine not heart. And this, also from the Daily Mail, and from 1995, but I don’t think from the same conference speech:
“Anyone, they say, is entitled to change his mind. Not about the defence of Britain, you’re not. You either feel it in your heart, in your bones, in your gut, or you don’t.”
Ah, the gut! That subtle, political instrument….
We’re getting back towards the beginning now, with heart, bones and gut, back to the untarnished, the unalterable. But he’s confessed that the fervent expression of his innermost convictions was a lapse of taste, was absurd chauvinism, and that the only things that really matter in politics, (this article having been written during the triumph of New Labour,) are tone, behaviour and appearance. And that he’s changed his mind about the very thing you’re not entitled to change your mind about. But that’s ok, because he didn’t believe it anyway. Anyway, soon after that he decided the best thing to do was to make television programmes about great railway journeys. And other stuff. You can read on the Guardian website an article he wrote for the Observer about his Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella….
Strange, the naivety with which he lays bare his ambition and lack of moral principles and political beliefs. Or is it me who’s naïve to be surprised by any of this?
He reveals his ignorance of history by expressing surprise at finding romanesque churches in northern Spain; he thought they’d all be gothic or baroque. The point is of course that during the romanesque period southern Spain was occupied by the Moors, so churches came later; but the north has a much longer christian history. (I only mention this because he bangs on about history in his conference speech…)
They’ve brought ibex back to parts of the French and Italian Alps where they’d been hunted to extinction, they’ve reintroduced beavers to the Scottish highlands and the great bustard to Salisbury Plain. The red kite has been a great success and even the white tailed sea eagle has settled down in a couple of Scottish islands. So why just charismatic creatures? Can’t we have a few sparrows? And anyway, isn’t the sparrow charismatic? Has it not at least acquired charisma in and through its decline? Give us a few. I promise I’ll look after them.
january 26 Yesterday along with a group of ducks and a couple of bad tempered swans, on the New River, a heron. They were all feeding on bread that someone had thrown into the water for them. As I came closer I expected the heron to stretch its wings and jump slowly into the air, but it didn’t. It stood in a few inches of water and with its beautiful and dangerous beak slurped up the soggy bread. When I used to walk by the river Avon in Wiltshire as a boy you’d rarely get within a hundred yards of a heron. Usually the first you saw of one would be when it lifted into the air in the distance and rose above the willows.
I was reminded of a story I wanted to write about foxes. A young garden fox, tired of living on the run and eating junk food and worms, decides to pretend to be a dog, and learns to wag its tail and look sweet. He succeeds in getting adopted by a family in Crouch End but they take him to the vet because he’s still smelly and verminous. The vet pronounces the fox unclean and unredeemable; he’ll have to be pts. (I learnt this on the internet, finding out about dogs and strokes. Geddit? put to sleep.) Hearing this the fox, who of course has not lost his balletic athleticism, jumps out of the consulting room through a high window and is run over by a car. The story was spoiled not only by its inescapable miserable ending but by daddy fox who can’t stop swearing:
‘fucking dogs! fucking tossers! dickheads! I hate them, the cunts’ etc
Walking down Manor Road I look up to see two dogs in nose to nose greeting with tails wagging boldly, I look to see who’s on the end of the other dog’s lead, and this young black guy and I smile at each other, reflecting the dogs. Would make a good pair of photos.
Father fox on humans. (This might be another character since his speech is elaborate and not studded with curses. We’ll call him grandpa fox.) “What you might not know, as an animal, or a bird, is which list you’re on. You might be on their list of creatures to fed and housed and cared for, or you might be on the list of things to shot or poisoned. If you’re a rat you could be on both lists! That’s confusing. Take a peep inside those houses. You might see fish swimming round in a bowl, guinea pigs or rabbits in comfy cages lined with straw, and cats and dogs of course. Thousands of dogs. You know, the ones that race round the bloody garden barking and pretending to be savage, then it’s back in the house – ‘feed me! feed me! I’m hungry! ‘ you know what they say about dogs – their bark is worse than their bite. I could take on any of those dogs any time. Even the big ones. Especially the big ones. they’re the first to whinge and whine.”
“So why don’t you?”
“Can you imagine what people would do if we started killing and eating their dogs? We’d be slaughtered. They’d be round these gardens with guns and poison, they’d attack our dens with flame throwers – we’ve just got to put up with them. And it’s so easy to run from them. We go up over a six foot fence like a monkey, they just stand there barking.”
Tuesday. It snowed a lot on sunday, after friday’s snow had half melted and the streets and pavements were dark and dirty, and it’s still here, still white, though it mostly dripped off the branches in yesterday’s brief sun. Yesterday I cut a path on the pavement from just beyond the pedestrian crossing to roughly number 47, more than a hundred yards; and brushed it clean and as it grew dark and the street lights began to show tiny glints of frost I sprinkled half a bag of cooking salt which I found in the cupboard, less than a kilo, and that was enough to dampen those crystal lights and give the surface friction. It doesn’t take much salt. Today the council workers are out with their barrows which distribute rock salt like one of those devices you wheel over grass to spread fertiliser.
As well as the sunflower seeds the birds have peanuts, which they’re not so keen on. I brought the peanut feeder down to near the Irish yew and filled it before christmas but there’s still plenty left. Are the peanuts too old? They were at it just now though, tits and the woodpecker. And I’ve started putting out breadcrumbs and other bits and pieces for the birds that don’t cling or eat big seeds, so now we have dunnocks feeding, blackbirds, the pair of wood pigeons and robins of course, as well as great tits and blue tits, the occasional chaffinch, the odd coal tit, and the glorious woodpecker.
James Sweeney! the romantic life of a roadie in the seventies and eighties, the old banger of a guitar. Alcohol: ”can’t live without it, can’t live with it.” He always had kind words for my gardening, and joined in sometimes. I’ve a photograph somewhere of him in the greenhouse, a watering can carefully lifted up to water plants on the bench. I gave him a copy of it, he said, “I could give that to my mum, if I knew where she lived.” Not so unusual maybe to have lost contact with your mother, though I remember I found it shocking at the time, more unusual to then still want her to see him doing something, making himself useful. He does something he feels good about, and immediately wants his mum to see him doing it. And his Birmingham accent, his heavy, soft face, the shoulder length greasy hair, still dark. In all the raucousness and aggression and boasting at Cedar’s, his mildness and passivity stood out. He made me feel that my work was worthwhile, he probably did more for me than I could do for him. It was he who made me first feel that a lot of what we do is more like working in a hospice than anything else, easing the way to death rather than setting out on the road to Recovery. James died quickly in the end, of liver failure.
As I was getting up this morning what made me think – If Osama bin Laden was evil, in his merciless pursuit of what he saw as wickedness, how many of our generals and other soldiers, kings, judges, inquisitors and other religious leaders were also evil? And that trick which licences cruelty, the denial of the humanity of others, of black people, jews, communists, heretics and also fascists, gypsies, paedophiles, murderers, drug dealers, witches, industrialists, soldiers, policemen, man united fans – there are so many ways in which other people fail to be human, there’s nothing we do quicker than cursing. Then I remembered a time at Millennium Green when I caught the dog once again bloating herself as fast as she could with a pile of disgusting old rotting food, and I lost my temper with her kicked her into the van and hit her in the face as she cowered, until she bared her teeth at me, like an uncertain grin, frightened and defenceless except for that gesture, and I was overcome with shame.
In 1964 when I was seventeen I spent three weeks staying with a family on a farm in Hülptingsen, a village near Celle, a town near Hanover. One sunday afternoon some neighbours came round and I was introduced to one man with whom I shook hands, and then someone said (something like) ”there! That didn’t hurt did it! You’ve just shaken hands with an SS man! Not a monster, is he?” and everybody laughed except me. Of course he wasn’t a monster. How much easier if he had been. The problem is that he was fully human, fully banal. This was two years after the Eichmann trial, and I must have already been familiar with the phrase ‘the banality of evil’. After the war, before he escaped Germany, Eichmann had spent two years living in a remote village on the Lüneburger Heide, the Lüneburg Heath, close to Celle which was later used for tank exercises by the occupying British forces.
We visited the church of St Michael in Hildesheim which was framed with wooden scaffolding as it was slowly, patiently restored with blocks of pure, white limestone hauled up block by block by rope and pulley, in the same way as it had been built a thousand years earlier.
Frau Bode sat me down and told me that they knew nothing of what was happening during the war. And she was worried that I ate so little. Actually I was stuffed. I got terrible constipation to which I could not confess. In the end I almost shat myself when I got back to Southampton.
They’ve brought ibex back to parts of the French and Italian Alps where they’d been hunted to extinction, reintroduced beavers to the Scottish highlands and the great bustard to Salisbury Plain – they tried at least – and the wild boar has reintroduced itself after escaping from captivity in the south west. Can’t we have a few sparrows? What is it about ‘charismatic’ creatures – the red kite and the white tailed sea eagle are two others which have been reintroduced successfully in recent years. But anyway, isn’t the sparrow charismatic? Has it not at least acquired charisma in and through its decline? Give us a few. I promise I’ll look after them.
Peniarth-uchaf
I was reluctant to write a conclusion, because of its banality, and because I’m embarrassed that I didn’t read the landscape more clearly at first.
The combination of order and confusion, of care and neglect, gives a special feeling to the estate. The agricultural buildings are all dilapidated, but the main house and cottages are kept up. The woodland is thick with both saplings and dying trees and fallen branches, but the paths and verges are neat, and the grass in the almost empty walled garden is mown. Mowing and strimming stand in for all other kinds of maintenance and management. The wilderness of the woods has clean edges. There are no vegetables in the walled garden but no nettles and thistles either and mown grass lends a sense of orderliness.
I googled Peniarth-uchaf to try to find out about the history of the estate and found the web sites of book cottages, cottage choice, cottage reservations, cottages4you, welsh country cottages, visit midwales, travelpod, drivingwithdogs, accommodation britain, apartments.oodle, uk holiday shop, world stay.com, wales.olx.co.uk, self catering.travel, trip advisor, wales directory. So that peculiar combination of neatness and decay is the world of the holiday rental. And the friendly notice on the door of the walled garden, allowing us entry if we bolt the door behind us afterwards, is addressed, not to the curious traveller, but to the tenants.
Yesterday I woke up writing.
that’s the cover of the book.
and this could be the last page:
There are two years, could maybe be twenty, between these photographs, which were taken on a dilapidated estate called Peniarth-uchaf in the Dysynni valley, which runs up from Tywyn towards Cader Idris in North Wales. Here’s an aside, before approaching the garden: this is what dilapidated means:
Sorry – I got that wrong. Dilapidated means ‘de-stoned’, but now I see that it’s the stones that fall last; first the windows, slates and timbers break, rot, slide off. Gardens go first, but the idea of the garden might remain. The root idea of a garden is an enclosure. The walled garden at Peniarth is an almost empty box. The wall is capped by slates with a silvery sheen, similar to the Welsh sky, in even the weakest sunlight. The bark of the trees has the same sheen.
I meant to write a very simple little piece about gardens, but I’m very shy of approaching the subject directly and am immediately taken with the meanings of the thickening tangle of branches obscuring the plain but distant rectangle with its silvery gleam, and was distracted by the pedantic possibilities of ‘dilapidated’. I remember that coming up to Wales on the train I saw that same grey silver in a thousand cars in Birmingham. I’ll start again with the story.
The walk began with a different kind of garden in Llanegryn. Is this a garden? If not, what is it?
The silent estate at Peniarth, where on three visits I have never seen a living soul, is approached through woodland along public footpaths which give confidence to those whose walks in the British countryside can feel like recces through battlefields of class conflict and fear they might be threatened or prosecuted as trespassers, (especially if they are with a dog, however well behaved.)
In the middle of the estate you come to a dark thicket of yew trees, and behind them a gleam of light:
On the door is a notice, and you think it’s going to say KEEP OUT! GO AWAY!
But it doesn’t:
And inside is an old apple tree snowed under with lichen:
having made heavy weather of that, (more grey than silver,) I’ll leave it there for now
 | Cody on Peniarth-uchaf |
| Cody on january 22 |
| Cody on Cypripedium calceolus |
 | Caro on january 22 |
 | Antony on photos of the Kindertransport… |
