Death paced the hospital ward, but didn’t stop at her bed. He cast a glance as she sat upright, her hair combed, her new blue cardigan clean and neatly buttoned. Not yet, not today, not on a Sunday. Today the deep, lung-shrinking wheeze of pneumonia had subsided and I sat by her bed as we thumbed through a glossy magazine. Moth was only a few days into the new term when I’d had the phone call. The hospital call that you always know will come one day, but never this day. Mum was in hospital with pneumonia, they thought she was slipping into sepsis and I needed to be there. Three days later and she’d shrugged it off and there was talk of her going home.
‘Maybe tomorrow you could bring some nail varnish and make me look glamorous like the girls in the magazine pictures? It’d give us something to do. I’m getting bored now.’
After the stale air of the hospital, the dark cold of a late January night was a relief. I closed the van door, started the engine and headed back to Mum’s tiny cottage. Along the lanes of central England, lanes so familiar I could have driven without headlights, to the warmth of her kitchen and the familiarity of her things. Her home, but not mine. My home, the place that formed me, moulded me into what I would become, was in the valley below, hidden in the black stillness of unlit countryside. I could feel its presence like a body in the room. Tomorrow I wouldn’t go to the hospital until later, maybe the afternoon. Before that I would walk across the land and follow my older, smaller footprints through the fields I knew so well.
Stepping out into the winter morning and a comforting pocket of warmth in the open porch at the back of the cottage, I reached up and put the key on the ledge, careful not to dislodge the dry and dusty swallow’s nest. Such a well-chosen spot, where the morning sun takes the coldness of night at the earliest moment. They’d be back in the spring, squeezing new mud into the cracks of their old home, diving out in surprise every time the door opened. I followed the garden down through dewed grass and bare rose stems to the path that dropped into the mist in the valley. My vision was reduced, but I could hear the Canada geese on the lake. I didn’t need to see; I already knew what the view would be. The spring migrants were arriving, stirring the complacency of the geese that chose to stay and overwinter there. They wouldn’t be building nests yet, just squabbling over space and food.
Beyond the lake, their calls followed me faintly through the fog, and then it was all around: my roots, my childhood, the source of everything I was, a land so familiar I could map it in my mind like my own skin. I wouldn’t go to the farmyard yet, I’d go through the fields first and look down at the farm, stall the moment, suck it all in.
I passed the sawmill where generations of villagers had cut the timber for houses and fencing. The carcasses of huge oaks, elm and beech had lain here, to my child’s eye mountainous and never-ending. All gone now. The timber sawn, the saws gone, double-glazed windows where there had been broken dust-covered panes, roses by the door. The mist began to clear in the early yellow light as I walked out of the quietness of a copse of beech trees above the row of cottages and on to the Mountain. From the high point I could look down to the cottages where the estate workers had lived. The Scottish carpenter and his family in the larger cottage with the big garden, overflowing with vegetables to feed their five children; the plumber in the middle with the wife that no one ever saw; and the gardener to the big house in the last cottage. As I climbed the hill away from them the first car was leaving, a commuter heading to work in the town from a smart modernized house in the countryside. The grassy slope wasn’t a mountain, just a field on a steep hill, but we called it that. From there, I knew I could see it as I turned away from the tree-lined hill top and looked back into the valley. And there it was, glowing faintly pink in the morning sun. To anyone else it might have appeared as just a farmhouse in the distance, but I could see the details. The sash windows of the formal façade, the crumbling clay bricks and slate roof, and behind, out of sight, the main body of the house jutting out and forming a T to the front. I could almost hear its presence.
I headed on through High Ways field, the largest field on the farm, always kept for arable crops. I’d spent summers there, following a potato spinner as it passed up and down the ridged rows, throwing white soft-skinned new potatoes on to the damp earth. Walking bent over, collecting the potatoes into a bucket, emptying the bucket into a bag, the bags on to trailers, off the trailers into the sheds, from the sheds to a lorry, from the lorry to the shops and the chip shops. And winters, in the cold, damp and frost, cutting tops off turnips with a billhook and throwing them into a small wooden trailer to take back to the farm and tip into a shredder to feed to the bulls in the pens. When the other children from my school were playing with toys, or in the playground, I was here. Mud on my hands, in the sun and the wind, alone with the thoughts in my head. On the rare occasions when I did spend time with the others, it was as if I viewed them from a distance. Later, as a young teenager, I’d thought I wanted to be the same as my school friends, to focus on make-up and clothes. But, hard as I tried, I couldn’t shake the sense of having one foot on the disco floor, one foot in the mud.
Down from the arable fields, through the woods of tall deciduous trees, carpeted with bluebells in the spring and lined with campion and cow parsley in the summer. I’d spent days at the edge of these woods. Ten years old and I should have been playing with friends, but instead I sat alone where the woods became field and watched the rabbits moving across the grass. Hundreds and hundreds of wild brown rabbits grazing in the grass fields and moving across the winter corn like locusts. I’d loved the power of standing by the fence, almost obscured by the turning post, until I could see a haze of brown across the hillside, and then dashing out of hiding to clap my hands and watch the blanket of rabbits look up from eating before rushing towards their warren, like brown water sucked down a drain. As I grew older, I stopped clapping and instead spent hours just watching, observing the hierarchy of their brown world. The older ones venturing into the wider field, the young ones staying close to the mouth of the burrows, and the watchers. The rabbits that didn’t hunch over to eat, but stayed upright, looking, listening and then sounding the alarm. Stamping their strong hind legs against the ground, creating a thudding noise that connected all the others with its signal, causing them to stop eating and, as one, run to the holes on the hillside and vanish.
When I reached the gamekeeper’s cottage at the edge of the wood, I scanned across the field, but could see only green. I stood and instinctively clapped my hands, waiting for the brown movement. There was none; the field was still in the cold, damp winter air. The gamekeeper kept foxhounds for the hunt here, in kennels with outside compounds made of high iron railings. They bayed in loud voices that echoed around the valley whenever anyone passed. Strong, muscular, powerful dogs, but the gamekeeper could walk among them as they licked his hands like pets waiting for a treat, not the ruthless killers they were. I’d seen them rip a fox apart and I didn’t need to be told to stay away; nothing could have made me go near them.
The gamekeeper’s cottage stood at the furthest corner of the Park, a field where the sheep were held during the lambing season. The field dipped down behind his house, forming a corner between the kennel and the wood, and this is where the sheep would come. Sheltered by the woods, but exposed to the foxes living just beyond the treeline and right next to the hunting dogs whom they should have run from in fear. And yet, day after day, ewes chose that spot when their lambs were close to being born. Taking the risk that the foxes would be held at bay by the presence of their predators, they chose this place because when they were at their most vulnerable shelter was everything. A contradiction at the edge of the wood. But the railings are gone now, the kennels are a bungalow and a brand-new four-wheel drive stands outside the gamekeeper’s cottage. Something else has changed too. As I walk over the ground that’s so familiar I could have left it yesterday, something’s different. The villagers have gone, replaced by commuters and retirees, taking the working heart out of the estate. But they’ve been gone for years; it’s something more than that, something more fundamental that I can’t quite put my finger on. I shrug it off with the thought that maybe it’s me, and my response to the land; maybe I’m viewing it with different eyes.
To the Park. When the old farmhouse was the main house on the estate this would have been its formal entrance, with a gravel drive lined by oak trees. But in the eighteenth century a new hall had been built, leaving the old one to become just a large faded farmhouse. Only two of the oaks still stand, bark split with age, branches distorted, but still pushing to the sky, still searching for that one last ray of sunlight. The roots lift in swollen mounds around the base of the trunks; one is so pronounced it forms a lumpy seat around the base. I sat down to take in the best view. I could hear the echo of my own footfall, circling the tree for hours on late-summer days, hopping from root to root as if they were stepping stones. Not bored or listless, something else – something like mesmerized.
And there it was. In the dip below, at the base of the bowl, the bottom of the valley: the place from where all the paths of my life run upwards and away. The sun was higher in the sky now and the bricks had lost the pinkness, turning to their true orange-red. Whenever I took this walk and sat in this spot I was surprised. As I looked down at the house I still expected to see the immense weeping willow tree that had stood in front of the façade, obscuring its face, keeping its secrets. With my eyes closed I can hear the clattering hush of its branches, swooping in tendrils to the ground. I’m running towards the curtain of green, my small hands reaching out and grasping bunches of whip-thin growth and swinging in the air through the height of the tree, or just hanging hidden in the leaves, watching. And my mum’s voice: ‘Get down from there! How many times do you have to be told?’ But I don’t get down; I swing through the green to the firmness of a branch and watch through the delicate whispering elongated leaves as they search for me, pushing the tendrils aside.
‘This needs cutting back. Cut it so it’s out of her reach.’
So every spring the tree was pruned until the whips hung in a short-cropped bob. But the willow’s growth is like no other tree and by midsummer the leaves were sweeping the ground again and life inside the green dome was mine.
The mobile phone ringing in my pocket brought me back to the moment. As I opened my eyes Mum’s voice trailed away and the tree was gone, the house face exposed. A perfectly proportioned face of five windows and a Georgian entrance with polished steps. Nothing to hide now, no secrets kept behind the leafy veil.
‘Your mum’s had a stroke. I think you need to come to the hospital straight away.’
‘But how? She’s coming out on Wednesday – you said she was better?’
‘Just come now; we’ll talk about it when you’re here.’
Back in the stifling, cloying heat of the hospital wards, the nurse led me to an office where a doctor was waiting.
‘Your mum’s had a stroke, a total anterior stroke. It’s severe and still progressing.’
‘Still progressing? But she’s in hospital. Just give her the drugs to stop it.’
The doctor shook his head, with an expression between sympathy and exasperation.
‘What about all the adverts? You know, “act FAST” and save the person. She’s in hospital – how much faster can it get? And total anterior – what on earth does that mean?’
‘It’s a large cortical stroke. We don’t know how large until we have the scans, but we can already tell it’s severe and extensive.’
‘Extensive?’
She lay motionless on the bed as it was wheeled back into its place. The occupants of the other beds all watched in silent vigil and I could see the confusion in their faces. This was the respiratory ward; they were used to oxygen masks and nurses, but not this. The nurse drew the blue curtains around us and we were alone. I picked up her hand, lifeless and uncontrolled. The doctor returned with the results and spoke in a hushed voice.
‘She appears to have no feeling in her body; she’s totally affected. As I said, it’s a total anterior stroke; it has the effect of a hammer blow to the head. She’s retaining some organ function and her lungs are working; we don’t know how it’s affected her brain, but she’s probably not there. There’s nothing that can be done. It won’t be long; she’ll be gone soon.’
I stroked the hair back from her closed eyes. She’d always been so concerned about her hair. Always neatly cut, and permed and set in rollers every week. Even in the potato fields she’d worn a headscarf over hair fixed with hairspray. So many of our arguments during my teens had been about the state of my hair.
‘Mum, can you hear me? I’m here.’ I held her limp hand, stroking her fingers, still broad and strong. ‘I’m here.’ Her eyes slowly opened; her mouth was moving, but no sound came out, yet I could see her in the blue-grey eyes. Fear, confusion, a panicking wild animal. ‘Mum, you’re on the ward, you’ve had a stroke, but it’s okay, I’m here.’ Then I saw it, a look of horror and recognition, and I felt a spasm of throat-clenching nausea. She was there, present, alive and trapped. ‘Just close your eyes, Mum, try to sleep, it’ll help.’ Help who? It wouldn’t help her.
As she slept I cut her fingernails, filing them carefully into shape, then painting them with her favourite pearl-pink nail varnish. When I finished I laid her hands back across the bed, their pink tips looking strangely out of place on her wide hands. The lights dimmed for the night, and I sat in the blue cocoon, watching numbers rise and fall on the monitor.