5
WHEN NATURE CHANGES
In which our author yearns for times past, tries to accept the inevitability of change, and pays homage to the great John Clare
I rmember the skylark most of all. I’d hear it before I saw it, the bubbling skirl of its endless song taking over from the engine noise as the 280 bus pulled away from the stop at the end of the lane. And then I’d look for it, scanning the blue sky for a distant quivering dot, rising and rising, apparently propelled upwards by the motor of its own sound.
Then I’d walk slowly home, hedgerows to left and right, cow parsley and nettles jostling for position in the ditch, and just before the bend in the road the trees arching over the lane, meeting in the middle, offering welcome shade and coolth in the heat of those endless childhood summer days of my memory.
It’s faulty memory, of course – in my head the skylark sings alone, unsullied by the voices of the cars and trucks that will certainly have rumbled along the road with the bus, belching leaded fumes into the air; and the sun is always shining in this fantasy world, my memory conveniently deleting the days of squally rain that no doubt blighted my summer holidays and made the slow passing of time seem a burden rather than a luxury. But it’s good to recall the fictional idyll, with its soundtrack of cooing wood pigeons, mellifluous blackbirds and the distant ker-chook of a pheasant as I whiled away happy hours pongling about the garden with a cricket bat and ball. The background to it all, in those high-summer days of somnolent heat, was the soft hum of insects, thousands of voices blending into one gentle burr, untainted by anything more disturbing than the occasional lawnmower and the contented burblings of Test Match Special on the radio. And then, as summer gave way to autumn, the excited chattering – the sweetness of the voices cut with a guttural quality – of swallows lining up on the phone lines in anticipation of their ridiculous, extraordinary journey to southern Africa.
Then one year I noticed a different note, barely but clearly discernible, clashing with the sounds of nature, jarring despite its quietness. I was a relatively unengaged child, but even I knew they’d been building it, and now it was here – a motorway, cutting a swathe through the countryside a couple of miles away, the convenience it brought undercut by the realisation that nothing would ever be the same again. This sound would always be there, a background drone I would have to get used to.
Progress has its drawbacks.
*
I could drive, but the train is cheap and quick, and Helpston not far from Peterborough. Besides, how better to get into the spirit than to explore John Clare’s neighbourhood on foot? I have my route mapped out on my phone – as direct as possible to the outskirts of the town then following footpaths through farmland and copses and along a stream to the village – and the recent torrential rain has abated for just a day to deliver fine conditions for my walk.
There’s a cockle-warming heartiness to autumn walks, especially when the leaves are doing their russet-and-gold thing on the trees rather than decaying into slimy sludge underfoot. The colours, the slight but not excessive chill, and the prospect of a log fire, a baked potato and a well-earned glass of wine, all combine to put a spring in the step.
The start of the walk, out of the station and through the back streets of Peterborough, has the plainness of suburbia everywhere. I shut out the traffic noise and concrete by focusing on every bit of greenery I can find. Ooh look a bramble. How lovely. Lovelier, in any case, than the railway siding behind it and the blank advertising hoardings alongside.
A weak late-afternoon sun slants through a mostly dull sky, a flurry of starnels* skedaddle over my head to perch on a TV aerial over the road, and the general drabness is enlivened by the bright red of rowan berries.
My pace is brisk enough, but it’s not long, as I reach the outskirts of town, before any jauntiness in my mood is replaced by a sullen muttering. It’s a situation familiar to anyone who has spent any time walking anywhere. All is well until it isn’t. The network of footpaths threading through town and country serve the pedestrian well, by and large, but then you reach a moment when you’re walking by a road and suddenly the footpath peters out and turns into an eighteen-inch strip of grass verge and before you know it you’re in danger of being toppled into the brambles by the whoosh of displaced air as an Eddie Stobart lorry zooms past at 50 mph two feet away. My feeling that this is not a world built for pedestrians is confirmed as I realise that the only way to get where I want to go is to take my life in my hands, trot across the slip road as fast as I can and hope that I’m not mown down by a speeding Audi.
Maybe I have only myself to blame. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. There was probably a way round it that I missed, a small green sign saying PUBLIC FOOTPATH, or UNDERPASS, or COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO STAY ALIVE. But to go back and look for it feels as if it would be not just a pain in the arse but a waste of time too. I’m already aware that I need to walk briskly if I’m to make it to Helpston by nightfall. So I trot and I pause and then I trot again, and after a left turn and a right turn and another spell in the long grass I’m suddenly in open country and being mewed at by three puddocks.
*
I’ve seen bumbarrels on the wing
Full twenty flitting in a lot
And now and then on branches hing
Then peck and seek another spot.
(‘Birds Nesting’)
He was productive, John Clare, susceptible from an early age to the disease of writing. He wrote over three and a half thousand poems, not even a quarter of which were published in his lifetime. And if among their number are poems of an epic nature like the Byronesque Child Harold and Don Juan, or satire in the form of the long poem The Parish, it’s his affinity with nature for which he is best known.
The label attached to him by his publishers – ‘the peasant poet’ – does him no favours, carrying as it does the implication of simplicity and roughness, as if he were some sort of rustic genius risen unschooled from the land. But it helped establish his reputation, and if it was at best a distortion of reality, it set him apart from his more well-heeled contemporaries.
His circumstances were certainly different from many other poets. I don’t suppose Byron was ever forced, by a shortage of materials, to attempt making his own paper and ink – the former by scraping thin layers of bark from a birch tree, the latter a homemade concoction of bruised nut galls, dyes and rainwater. And while he was feted by the London literary scene for a while, and made several visits to the capital at the beginning of his career, his home was Helpston, and it was there and in the surrounding countryside that his poetry lived. There is nothing grandiose about it, just straightforward observation and description of what he saw; and he saw a lot – small details of the everyday that others might not notice or think worth mentioning.
He would tell you about an easily overlooked bird, the carrion crow:
I love the sooty crow nor would provoke
Its march day exercise of croaking joy
I love to see it sailing to and fro
While feelds, and woods and waters spread below
You’re with him as he finds a nest
on the almost bare foot-trodden ground
With scarce a clump of grass to keep it warm
and share his innocent excitement at the emergence of the bird and its subsequent identification:
– Stop, here’s the bird – that woodman at the gap
Hath frit it from the hedge – ’tis olive green –
Well, I declare, it is the pettichap!*
If you’re a birder, that process – stumbling across a bird and then identifying it – and the emotion it elicits will be familiar; if not, it’s the kind of unalloyed pleasure that can overcome your initial scepticism and draw you in, and before you know it you own a pocket field guide and a pair of binoculars and are looking for pettichaps in every bush.
If you’ve never heard a nightingale sing, then reading Clare’s attempt to ‘syllabise the sounds’ out loud will give you an idea of it, or at the very least make you smile:
‘Chew-chew chew-chew’ and higher still,
‘Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer’ more loud and shrill,
‘Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up – and dropped
One moment just to drink the sound
Her music made, and then a round
Of stranger witching notes was heard
As if it was a stranger bird:
‘Wew-wew wew-wew chur-chur chur-chur
Woo-it woo-it’ – could this be her?
‘Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew
Chew-rit chew-rit’ – and ever new –
‘Will-will will-will grig-grig grig-grig.’
And if you wanted to know what a bumbarrel’s* nest looked like, he would describe it with all the accuracy of a field guide, and a hundred times the music.
Of mosses grey with cobwebs closely tied
And warm and rich as feather-bed within,
With little hole on its contrary side
That pathway peepers may no knowledge win
Of what her little oval nest contains –
Ten eggs and often twelve, with dusts of red
Soft frittered
And if when reading his poetry I get the sense that he’s taking me for a walk through the Northamptonshire countryside, showing me the commonplace, the everyday, stopping and waiting and looking and finding and looking again, I in turn would very much like to show him the puddocks that greet me as I leave Peterborough’s rumbling metropolis behind and set out into the countryside.
Puddock circling round its lazy flight
Round the wild sweeing wood in motion slow
Before it perches on the oaks below
(The Shepherd’s Calendar: ‘October’)
I should give them their official name, red kite, or even go for the scientific Milvus milvus, a pleasing tautonym. But ‘puddock’ is what John Clare called them, and the word has a nice pingy feel to it, so puddocks they are from now on.
They’re quartering the copse and field to my right, their rangy, fingered wings flapping without urgency. But their languid movement is soon interrupted by the unwelcome attentions of two carrion crows, flappy black silhouettes making darting attacks, punching above their weight, getting close enough to bother them, to chase them away, but always somehow dodging a physical contest they know they’d lose. Their rough corvid grawk contrasts with the plaintive mew of the larger birds, which resist and dodge, forked tails flexing.
The territorial tussle holds my interest, and by the time the crows have seen the puddocks off over the woods and away to another territory, I’m fifteen minutes down on my schedule, and need to pick up the pace. The last pale gleam of sun pokes through the cloud of a late autumn afternoon, lights up the treetops in the copse at the far end of the field, flaming the russet and lemon tinges against the glowering backdrop of dark and heavy rainclouds. Muted, compared to the lurid display sometimes on offer at this time of year, but nonetheless possessed of a subdued charm. A soft mist rises from the ground, fields in bare autumn clothes of earth and stubble. If the surrounding countryside is flatter and the views less dramatic than I would normally be drawn to, it’s doing a good job of making up for it with autumnal atmosphere. Jackdaws chack, magpies flare, a wood pigeon barges the air with its stout chest, fast white-barred wings aflurry. Two stout oaks, possibly just old enough to have been saplings in Clare’s time, stand sentinel over the entrance to a field. From a hedgerow I hear the warning chirps and clips and stutterings of wrens and robins – ‘Human! Looks harmless, but you can’t be too careful!’ A blackbird heeds the warning and bolts into low cover ahead of me with a staccato cluck.
Distractions everywhere.
A jogger comes towards me. He looks on the point of collapse, his hair plastered over his forehead, sweat dripping from every available part of him. But he still manages a breathless ‘hello’ to answer my uncertain greeting.
Subliminally spurred on by his athleticism, I pick up the pace, forcing myself to ignore the alluring chirps of a clutch of house sparrows* in the hedgerow to my left, paying scant attention to the piping contact calls of a family of bumbarrels in the branches above my head – not Clare’s twenty, but just the six, behaving exactly as he wrote them a couple of centuries ago – and callously snubbing the winsome autumn song of a robin.
This landscape isn’t beautiful or dramatic; it doesn’t inspire lyrical thoughts. Clare himself described Helpston as ‘a gloomy village’, and while the surrounding countryside would in his time have been jumping with wildlife, now it is sadly denuded, an unending vista of flat farmland with few landmarks or distinguishing features. As such it’s typical of a swathe of land that tourists mostly drive through on their way north, lured by the romance and dramatic vistas of the Peak and Lake Districts, or the rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales.
But it was his, this landscape – or at least something distantly related to it.
Enclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave.
(‘The Moors’)
It’s the old cliché: ‘All this was fields when I was a lad.’ Where I’m walking is still all fields, but in John Clare’s youth it was more than that. The ‘open field’ system had the village – in this case Helpston – at its hub, with strips of land radiating out from it. These strips were subdivided into ‘fields’,* ‘furlongs’ and ‘lands’, but the boundaries between them weren’t marked with fences or hedges – the countryside was open, and rights of use were shared between landowners and commoners. Even the poorest had a sense of ownership.
Then came Enclosure. For Helpston and its neighbouring parishes, it started with an Act of Parliament in 1809, when Clare was sixteen. Its full force took a few years to bite, but by 1820, when he was twenty-seven, the landscape he had grown up with, had come to love and depend on, was transformed. The parish was divided into rectangular fields, and local landowners given free rein to further subdivide their land as they wished, marking the boundaries with fences and hedges, and excluding the common people. Furthermore, the former ‘commons and waste grounds’, which had provided grazing land and a valuable source of fuel for villagers in the winter, were similarly treated. Where before people could roam unfettered, they were barred by NO TRESPASSING signs.
It was all done in the name of efficiency, to make the land more profitable – but the human cost was ignored. By portioning off the land, and giving control of access to the landowner, the act drove a stake through the heart of the community. Whatever the economic arguments – some analyses show that the poor were in fact slightly better off after Enclosure – nothing can gainsay Clare’s personal experience. These were formative years – he was making the transition to manhood – and for someone whose relationship with nature couldn’t have been more intimate, whose poetry was soaked through with a sense of place, encapsulating the character of the local and charting and recording its minutiae in exquisite and personal detail, the result was catastrophic. In effect it was a straitjacket for his soul.
Where Enclosure features in Clare’s poetry, it imbues it with a bitter, sullen rage, a despair and regret for what has been lost. It changed his life, and the effects were devastating and long-lasting.
. . . I had taken such a heedless obseverance of the way that lead over a cow-pasture with its thousand paths and dallied so long over pleasant shapings of the future . . . that twilight with its doubtful guidance overtook my musings and led me down a wrong track in crossing the common . . .
There comes that moment when you’ve been walking a while and you still have a while to go and you check the map and suddenly the route has sprouted an extra mile and a half you didn’t realise was there and your walking shoes are sodden and dirty and probably a bit smelly and never mind the glories of nature, that hearty feeling is wearing distinctly thin and can you have that drink right now thanks very much.
No, you can’t.
My walking shoes have served me well, combining the requisite sturdiness with extreme comfort. But in recent weeks a crack in the fabric has appeared in the left foot, and while their waterproofing was never absolute, all it takes now is a short spell walking through a wet patch for me to feel the ominous seeping warmth of growing dampness that presages a squelchy walk ahead. I’ve come to embrace this feeling, safe in the knowledge that any discomfort will be temporary. But just now I could do without it.
Other things I could do without include the two-hundred-yard stretch of mud in front of me, rapidly falling dusk and a phone battery at 1 per cent.
I’d been keeping track of my progress on the OS map on my phone, the convenience of GPS outweighing the more traditional charms of a paper map. The old-fashioned ritual of spreading an Ordnance Survey map on the kitchen table and working out your route in advance has been replaced by technological progress, and very handy it is too, except for the obvious limitation – when the battery goes, you’re stuffed.
I use the remaining bit of battery to memorise as much of the route as I can. It looks pretty simple, a matter of lefts and rights and straight-ons, the grid system of fields enforced by Enclosure all those years ago working in my favour. I just need to remember where to go left, and where right.
The paths are mostly well signed, and I have a general idea of where Helpston is – over there somewhere – but a part of me wants to do away with the footpaths and fences and gates and stiles and not worry about whether I’m allowed to be in this bit or if I’ve gone wrong and am going to be confronted with a barbed wire fence at the far end and will have to retrace my steps.
Freedom is an illusion – someone, somewhere, is making rules.
The air is getting colder, thick clouds have rolled in, the light has almost gone, there is no moon, and it really is rather dark. My eyes will, no doubt, adjust to it, but oh dear here’s a puddle. A muddy one at that. Distracted by the now extreme wetness of my feet and the rhythmic schlurping sound I’m making as I walk, I momentarily lose track of where I am. It really is a barren, featureless landscape, but through the murk I can see the looming shadows of a wood ahead of me. It suddenly occurs to me that this is Rice Wood, known to Clare as Royce Wood, one of his favourite haunts – ‘the wood is sweet, I love it well’ – and just to the south west of Helpston. I’m nearly home and dryish.
It is not Rice Wood.
This realisation dawns on me some twenty minutes later as I emerge from whatever-it-is wood in some confusion and almost total darkness. There was a moment, while stumbling around in it, the righteous path long since abandoned, that I thought I knew where north was again, but it was fleeting, and now all I have to guide me is the sound of a car rumbling past on a road some way off to my left.
A road. That’ll do it. Find the road and follow it to Helpston. Easy.
A distant tawny owl hoots its approval of the plan.
I walk carefully towards where the sound came from. It’s uneven ground, and I stumble a couple of times, but I’m making progress.
Another car goes past. I up my pace. The bumpy ground coalesces into a discernible path – smooth, tarmacked, welcoming. A silhouette emerges from the gloom – the silhouette of a tall gate, the kind of gate you can’t climb over. Each side, an equally tall chainlink fence, guarded by a thick sward of trees.
I reach the gate and give it an exploratory tug.
It is, inevitably, locked.
I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
(‘Lines: I Am’)
There exists just one photograph of John Clare, taken in 1862, two years before his death. I see his large forehead, the straggly side whiskers, the quiet half-smile; but most of all I see an air of quiet benevolence, a gentleness, a man with whom you would want to spend time – the character shining through, even from behind the bushy eyebrows that half shield his eyes, even through the depths of confusion.
The depression from which he’d suffered for most of his adult life resulted in two stints in asylums. The first, in Epping Forest, ended after four years when he walked out one day and returned home (eighty miles or so) on foot, arriving, understandably exhausted and confused, four days later. His readmission to an asylum in Northampton a few months afterwards proved permanent. The asylum, far from the image it might conjure up to a modern person (especially one whose introduction to such places was through the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), was a place of refuge, of safety. In both places he was afforded freedoms, able to walk freely into town and the countryside, and he continued to write until shortly before his death. But even though he was treated with care and respect, he felt incarcerated and unhappy, writing about ‘the Hell of a madhouse’ and ‘captivity among Babylonians’.
The links between nature and mental health are nowadays well established and scientifically proven. Clare would have been able to point them out in a flash. It’s almost as if nature – and in particular the countryside around Helpston – was inextricably connected with his mental condition. Even the move to Northborough, just three miles away, in 1832, had him yearning for the different landscape of his home village. And while he had suffered prolonged bouts of depression before then, they only intensified and lengthened as he grew older.
If there’s little about the physical world today that he would recognise, there’s every chance he’d find common ground with many people in the area of mental well-being. And while correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, the increased acknowledgement of mental health problems has coincided with a time when disconnection from nature is also a growing concern.
There are other reasons. Of course there are. Mental health is enormously complex, and I’m not pretending that a walk in the park is going to miraculously cure everything. But for some people, that contact with the natural world gives them a daily lifeline, a thread to keep them connected in a disconnected world.
Not many of us will experience the intensity of Clare’s relationship with his environment – to the extent that when it was taken away from him it felt as if he was being deprived of a part of himself – but anyone who has ever felt a moment of uplift at the sight of a tree or a bird or a mammal or any other thing of what my friend Stephen calls ‘The Nature’, or who has been shaken out of the doldrums by a walk in the park, or whose heart sinks at the prospect of concrete and metal and the constant smell and din of passing traffic, will at least have some inkling of it.
Wrens cock their tails and chitter loud and play
And robins hollow tut and flye away.
(‘Birds in Alarm’)
It’s relatively simple in the end. Retrace my steps as far as I can remember, then take the obvious path out of the woods, the one I missed earlier even though it was right there in front of me.
I spend the night at the Bluebell pub, next to Clare’s cottage and where he worked as a potboy as a young lad. It has good wine, an excellent venison burger, and its warmth and cosiness are altogether welcome; and if I bring a whiff of the bog into the pub via my muddrenched boots, they’re polite enough not to comment on it.
The next morning I visit John Clare’s cottage, using the audio guide selectively as I wander through the rooms where he lived with his parents, wife and six surviving children, and wondering at people’s ability to live cheek by jowl.
As I emerge into the sunlight, a horse plods past on the other side of the road, well within the 20 mph speed limit. It brings to mind Thomas Bewick’s ‘improved cart horse’, and is the kind of horse Clare would have known – large, grey, with a long floppy mane and an unhurried gait, somehow exuding an air of great patience and fortitude, and redolent of an age long gone – an impression slightly undermined by the ultra-modern hi-vis garb of its rider, a policewoman who answers my ‘Morning!’ with a friendly nod. What Clare would make of the vibrant yellow jacket is anyone’s guess. The Helpston of today is littered with signs of the modern world – things that have stealthily accrued over the years and that we now take for granted: cars, trains, wheelie bins, electricity pylons, phone booths, level crossings, bus shelters, satellite dishes, traffic cones, meal deals at the pub, laminated sheets in the church porch with details of next week’s harvest supper, electric gates, frozen meals, TWENTY IS PLENTY signs, churchyard mowing rotas, mobility scooters, discarded granola crunch-bar wrappers, burglar alarms, CCTV cameras, defibrillators, lottery adverts, sticky plastic banners on telephone junction boxes proclaiming FIBRE BROADBAND IS HERE, and convenience stores with posters advertising three for two on bottles of Vimto. Bewildering stuff, even to the initiated, once you start noticing.
But then it’s impossible to predict what would seem strange about our present to some putative time-traveller. For all we know, he might take the cars in his stride but be bewildered by a manhole cover.
What he couldn’t fail to notice, though, is the extent to which nature has been despoiled since his lifetime. If Enclosure was enough to disrupt his life, his reaction to the state of nature today hardly bears thinking about.
Perhaps his natural confusion and trauma* could be eased by showing him the things that are the same – the song thrush doing battle with a snail, the crows rowing their way across the sky, the bumbarrels and the puddocks and the crow-flowers too. And if that weren’t enough (and I suspect it wouldn’t be) then I would take him to the cottage of his birth and show him the quiet veneration and love for him and his work and I would say, ‘There, see?’, and it would be all I could do and I’d just have to hope that it helped.
I visit his grave. It’s a small country churchyard, similar to the one twenty yards up the road from my childhood home. You can chart the story of a community from such places, reading between the lines of the simple epitaphs. If you look carefully, you can just make out the engraving on Clare’s stone: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN CLARE, THE NORTHAMPTONSHIRE PEASANT POET. Then his dates, BORN JULY 13 1793 DIED MAY 20 1864. And on the other side, A POET IS BORN NOT MADE.
The stone is blotched black, white and grey all over, the evidence of two centuries of weathering. Two patches of yellow lichen have colonised the ‘R’ of ‘MEMORY’, and everywhere there are little clumps of green moss sprouting from the crevices of the engraved letters, which have been rendered almost illegible by the passing of time and the accretions of nature. But the John Clare Society, with the love and pride common to all their activities, and aware of the needs of visitors like me, have erected a discreet and elegant pillar at the foot of the grave, etched with the same wording.
I sit on the bench a few yards away. A blue tit calls – tsee tsee – and from behind me comes an answering chip from a great tit. And then, as if sensing the mood, a robin starts to sing its autumn song, a more melancholy and downbeat affair than the spry, silvery spring version. We like to ascribe human emotions to these things – the goldfinch’s song is cheerful, the curlew’s cry plaintive, the barn owl’s screech fearsome. Never mind that the science tells us that the robin’s autumn song is territorial, and not, as we’d like to believe, performed for our benefit, to induce a melancholy tinge as the days shorten and the cycle of life reaches the decay phase – it’s the anthropomorphism that counts.
Nevertheless, the sound does impart a mood, and I, already in the mood to be in a mood, am carried along by it. Difficult not to be struck by its timing; difficult not to succumb to feelings engendered by the occasion; difficult not to see it as a sign of something or other. Resolutely unsentimental, unmoved by faux spirituality, unimpressed by supernatural gubbins, I still allow myself to be quietly moved by the synchronicity of a bird choosing to sing at just that moment, a thread of connection spanning the centuries. You could write a poem about it, if you were so inclined.
That was how Clare expressed his love of the natural world around him – in the way most intuitive to him. And his words – like Thomas Bewick’s images – endure for future generations, speaking for and to people who might not have either the inclination or means to express themselves in the same way. For many people, their relationship with nature is not only deeply personal, it is internalised. When we see someone looking at a tree, we have no way of knowing what’s going on in their heads. Maybe they’re silently composing poetry; perhaps they’re wondering if they left the iron on; or they might just be thinking about the deliciousness of really good chips. It is, and should remain, a mystery. But sometimes the Thomas Bewicks and John Clares of the world see fit to record their reaction in the form of art, and that in turn affects people in different and unknowable ways.
I turn to watch the robin. It’s perched on a cypress tree in a garden behind the churchyard, its silhouette crisp against the clear blue autumn sky. I admire it for a second. Then, master of bathos, it stops singing, does a little poo, and flies away, and the cloying sentimentality of the moment is mercifully tinged with earthy reality.
Four decades on, I revisit the village of my childhood, driving along the same motorway whose incipient rumblings clouded my summer afternoon all those years ago. If I notice the changes, they’re at least partly offset by the things that have stayed the same. The skylark fields – also homes, back in the day, to flocks of lapwings billowing up behind tractors, fieldfares feeding in their droves during the winter, and grey partridge blending in with the stubble and loam – are a golf course. I navigate my way round unfamiliar roundabouts and slip roads, past a motorway service station and along what we used to call ‘the main road’ but now feels like a puny imitation of one. My impression is that everything is more crowded, fuller of the stuff of modern life. Part of this is the natural shrinkage of your childhood world brought on by adulthood; but perhaps it’s also to do with my general impression of the countryside being stifled, given less room to breathe.
But the horse chestnut by the churchyard is still there, its spiky offspring dropping to the ground in autumn and scattering conkers to trickle down the slope towards our old house.
The extent to which my memory is faulty can be measured in the little misrememberings: this gate was further on, surely? And weren’t there four houses there, not three? And there was definitely a copper beech by the war memorial. A handsome, well-proportioned tree of age and majesty, its maroon foliage giving way in winter to dark straggly limbs reaching for the sky.
There was. I’m not misremembering. But age and disease finally caught up with it, and it’s been cut down only recently. It’ll be replaced, and the cycle will begin again, and in a hundred years, with any luck, a twelve-year-old might just walk past it and up the lane, clutching a pair of binoculars and hoping to catch sight of a yellowhammer.
I park by the churchyard, and walk through the village, which, in accordance with the laws of ageing, seems 10 per cent smaller than when I was a child. Swallows and house martins by the dozen bounce and swoop around above my head. Flattering that they chose to mark my return with such a winning display.
I walk beyond the war memorial, past the beech-no-more, up the lane and left and right and left again and over the gate and through the fields, and if it’s not the same as it was forty years ago it’s doing a decent impression of it. And when I reach the river and see a heron I stop a while and really look at it, take in the Dumbledore beard and dagger bill, the avid eye and stilt legs, the grey cloak of long, straggly feathers down its back, the impression it gives of great age and wisdom – a false impression, given that all it’s doing is waiting for a fish to move and provide it with lunch. You could invent this bird, make it up out of your head and draw it on paper, and people would look at it and nod and say, ‘Yes. Good.’
And then, with a hoarse croak which only serves to reinforce its prehistoric credentials and remind me that in the grand scheme of things forty years is the barest speck of time, it rises and flies away on slow, heavy wings, and I take it as a hint that the meeting is over, and head back to the car. And when, as I stroll back across a wheat field, the summer sun warm on my skin, there’s a flurry up ahead, and three birds, small and brown and scruffy, fly up and bounce across to my right with a skrriddlup and a skrrrr, it takes me a second to realise they’re young skylarks, and for the most fleeting of moments I’m eleven again and it’s as if nothing has changed at all.
* Starlings. So imbued am I with the Clare spirit that I start calling the birds by the names he would have used. Don’t worry – it’ll pass soon enough.
* This could be any one of a number of warblers – it seems to have been a catch-all term. I’ve encountered it used variously to mean a chiffchaff, willow warbler, garden warbler or lesser whitethroat. It’s also the name of a shop selling ‘shirts for squirts’ in Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books.
* Long-tailed tit. Black and white and pink and cute as all get out. Its many folk names included jack-in-a-bottle, hedge mumruffin, bottle tit, oven bird, fuffit and prinpriddle. But bumbarrel is the best of them.
* Clare kept a pet sparrow called Tom when he was a child.
* Open arable land, rather than the meaning we now understand.
* Not to mention the effects of time travel, which I’m told can really knock you for six.