To pass through the cracked and splintered oak-wood doors of the cider barn was to pass through time. To another world, where dark stone walls, barely visible in the low light, still held the sweet smell of centuries of crushed fruit and fermentation. Through lofts where apples fresh from the orchards would stand in hessian sacks, past cobwebs hung low, cloaking every beam and corner, forming curtains across doorways, where generations of farmers had stacked the press with crushed apples and watched as the juice ran. Oak barrels lined the walls, racked in rows of deep, musky anticipation. Waiting for the moment when the cloudy sharpness of fresh pressed juice refilled them and the cycle of production would begin again.
But the sense of the past had been hidden in more farm waste and plastic bags, until Moth worked his way through the barn, slowly brushing, sweeping and bagging rubbish. Washing the walls with water until the smell of cider returned and with it a breath of the barn’s history. As he closed the door, the shadows in the darkest corners could almost have been of monks, tapping the barrels, tasting the pink fermenting liquid. It was nearly time.
In the farmhouse, the rucksacks stood in the bedroom propped against the wall, exuding a faint smell of sulphur. It had been three weeks since we’d returned but neither of us were ready to unpack. We still carried something of the vast, wild turmoil of the volcanoes in our thoughts, a sense of uncontained horizons that we weren’t ready to put back in the cupboard. Outside, apples hung full and ripe on overladen branches, the warmth of the low autumn sun tracing patterns of light across their damp red skins. I cupped one in my hand to see if it would easily leave the branch and it came off with only the slightest twist. It was time; they were ready to pick. Soon they would be in the barn and the cider season would begin.
I gathered the first few into a basket as the yellow leaves began to move on the tree, the wind slipped into the north and, almost without warning, the soft tones of autumn picked up a harder, sharper edge. Before darkness had fallen angry gales were ripping over the hill, battering rain and hail powering through in relentless waves.
When it finally stopped, tonnes of apples lay on the ground, bruised and broken, the trees were stripped of leaves and the weak sunlight held the wateriness of early winter.
‘What a waste. These need to be off the ground and into the cider barn before they rot.’ Moth squatted under a tree picking a few undamaged apples from the ground and putting them in a bucket.
‘We’ll have to just pick up what we can. What else can we do?’
‘Just me and you? We’ll never do it; there’s too many. We can pick up a few but the bulk of these will be lost. What a mess.’ We looked across the orchard at the devastation; we couldn’t possibly pick them all up before they began to rot, but who could possibly help us? There was no one to ask.
Cars parked in front of the house, packed full with people from Polruan. Sarah, armed with bags of sandwiches, bottles of wine, gloves and buckets. Other people that we’d briefly met, or hadn’t met at all, people loaded down with boots, hats and enthusiasm. Then, from the last car, Gill and Simon, happy, laughing. Together for anyone to see.
‘Gill, I thought you’d gone back to London.’
‘No, I’ve stayed. I’ll be here until after Christmas this time, unless Simon kicks me out before then.’
‘I won’t be doing that; you’ve always known you can stay. It’s always been your choice.’ Trust, such an elusive thing, but given the slightest chance it can grow and flourish. They walked into the orchards, as inexplicable but inevitable as thrift growing in the Icelandic ash. Within days the loft of the cider barn was stacked with hessian sacks full of salvaged apples, and freshly pressed juice began to fill the barrels.
The half-light of a November morning lit the horizon, the faintest slice of pink catching the underside of the clouds in a wash of colour beneath the towering blue mass. Through the smallest breaks in the cloud a pale sky held the suggestion of a clear day and unknowable infinities just out of reach. Mist cleared from the field nearest the house, dissipating in the weak sunlight, to reveal brown shapes moving across the grass. We watched the scattered forms as they came together, then dispersed again.
‘I can’t believe they’re here.’
‘I didn’t think they would ever come, but just over a year and here they are.’ I squinted into the binoculars to get a clearer look. The curlews had come. Tall brown birds with unmistakable curved bills pushed into the grass in search of bugs and insects. Birds who know where the food sources are simply by the feel of the land. An endangered bird, a rare and fragile life, feeding in a field that so recently had been devoid of all but the loneliest of worms. We watched, transfixed, until the sun burnt the colours from the sky and the curlews headed back to the creek.
Moth folded the binoculars back into their case, his hands moving as he directed them. We walked down into the orchard to find our usual seat on the goat-moth tree. The fresh wet sap that had oozed from the holes in the summer had dried into hard resin drips. Maybe whatever was in the tree had transformed and flown, or maybe they were still there, hiding and growing for years yet to come. Maybe time would tell, but then only if we were there at the right moment, on the right day.
‘Shall we go to the coast? I feel as if I want to be on the path today, to hear the sea.’
We would always need to find our way back to the path, however far away from it we travelled, to smell the salt and spread our arms into the wind on the cliff top. We walked across a familiar headland to a spot in the gorse where we had pitched our tent only a few brief years earlier, homeless, with no money or food, but, here at the edge of the land, miraculously unafraid. We sat in a clearing among the scrub on a bare patch of rocky earth, the sea disappearing into a grey horizon, still the same people who had shivered in the cold of the tent as we walked this coast – only the landscape had changed around us. In the cold wind, blowing salt-laden winter air from the sea, no doubt remained. No drugs or doctors could help Moth, but he didn’t need them. Simply by living as he was built to, his body had found a way to sidestep the failures and go on. As surely as removing heavy human interference from the land was allowing the wildlife to return to the farm, so Moth was surviving by returning to a more natural state of existence. Life re-forming and reshaping, not with man’s intervention but without it. A winter squall blew curtains of rain towards the land, a storm we’d seen coming from the far horizon. Don’t ‘be careful on the stairs’, run up them, run as fast as you can, with no fear of clocks ticking or time passing. Nothing can be measured in time, only change, and change is always within our grasp, always simply a matter of choice.
I closed my eyes and let the sounds come, let the voice come. Calm and hushed on a rising wind hissing through rocks, in clear water falling through sunlight. Carried on a gull’s cry over sea against cliff, somewhere beyond the blurred line between water and air. The sound in the leaves as I’d hung in the branches of the willow tree, and crouched in the dark woods. It had always been there, whispering with the water voles in the ditch, the deer on the mountainside, the seals calling beneath foggy headlands. The voice behind it all …
… a sound beyond connection, or belonging.
The hum of particles
vibrating to the energy of life.
The voice of the
beating
pulsing
wild silence
of the earth.
The voice
of …..
home.