‘Brock of the clan wild’
THE VALUE of this connection with nature is apparent to all that make the jump, and even to many that don’t think they have anything to do with the wild, especially when they get down to thinking about it. That moment when you kick your shoes off in the park on your lunch break, the uplifting song of an unnamed and often, I suspect, only subconsciously noticed bird that puts a spring in your step, and we all crave a holiday, don’t we, a weekend by the sea or a walk in a cool woodland on a summer’s day… all these are what we are meant to feel. Yet when I look around the world, I can clearly see symptoms of what some ecologists refer to as the sixth extinction, an anthropogenically driven loss of species and an unravelling of ecosystems – something that we humans are entirely responsible for. We live in a time of daft political decisions, the call for culls of otters, gulls and badgers. Ecological mitigations to alleviate the guilt of another ‘much-needed’ housing development, or some other false progress, all at the expense of something that is priceless and that we need in so many more vital ways, not just the ‘ecosystem services’ that they provide.
The anticipation was killing me, and the midges and mosquitoes that had plagued us since the sun submerged into a pool of tangerine light were doing everything in their power to do the same. Exsanguination by a million bites.
For an hour and a half, I had perched on this old fishing stool, desperately trying not to fidget and cause its tired aluminium legs to creak. I had fought numerous sneezes; I had gently blown away, through tight lips, insects from my face; I had staunchly resisted the biting midges burrowing into my inner ear; staunched several burps, although the borborygmi had got the better of me – there’s not a lot anyone can do about burbling stomachs. My grandpa was the other member of this intrepid badger-watching duo – he had foolishly agreed to accompany me into the twilight.
So here we sat, watching and waiting, under an old oak, looking down the embankment of a disused railway; each willing the other to crack first, call it a night, and then we could head home for hot chocolate.
This wasn’t quite the image in my copy of Gerald and Lee Durrell’s Amateur Naturalist, the simple line drawing of a boy in dark clothes, back to a tree with badgers foraging a few metres from his feet. It didn’t quite tally: for a start, it couldn’t convey the agony of blood pooling in buttock cheeks, the creeping cold working its way along his bones to his core, and it certainly didn’t illustrate the clouds of bloodthirsty insects that would have been cavorting around his head.
Then we both heard it: a scratching sound. Impossible to describe, but if you rapidly scrape the hairs on the back of your neck with your fingernails, you get a pretty good simile of the noise emanating from the tangled darkness. Then again, six, seven times in each burst. I strained into the darkness, suddenly piqued. My heart was racing, my mouth dry as I desperately tried to decipher shapes in the dingy understorey light. Then there it was; I saw the white stripes of a humbug head, bobbing in and out of sight before slinking away backwards, dissolving, absorbed into the inky night. We never saw any more badgers that night and it really didn’t matter. It was the most exciting thing I had ever done.
I was about eight and from then on badgers were my everything, they were my portal into the wilds of the woods. They were my interface through which to relate to the world. While I was watching badgers or, more often, waiting for them, I became a part of the woods. I saw and heard everything, like they did. They were my teachers, my stripey, emblazoned tutors of the wild. I learned through them, not just about birds and their song, but I got to know their rhythms, their other lesser-known calls and vocalisations; mice ate peanuts from my hand, rabbits got closer than ever, fox cubs played just feet from my feet, a mole even ran across my legs.
When I was in their presence in the hushed solitude of a wood at dusk, I was whoever I wanted to be, I was a tracker, I was Grey Owl, Grizzly Adams, Gerald Durrell, Alfred Russel Wallace, I was a time traveller. They seemed as ancient as the hills themselves. A raw end to a continuous unbroken link to the ancient wild woods, I imagined them here, in this same precise spot, sharing their world with other larger mammals long since passed.
It was a real adventure, one I could have any day and one that made me me. I would try and get out to see them at every opportunity. These mammals and my almost daily moments with them gave me the same joy and anticipation as seeing my friends at the school bus stop; they were part of the very fabric of my younger life.
At first I tried sitting on a stool, the creaky aluminium one, then on the ground, where I felt too vulnerable and where the cold crept at me from all directions, then, after having my cover blown by changing wind direction, I decided I would wedge myself in the crotch of a tree bough, which was fine to climb up into an hour before sunset, but was a dreaded leap into the dark once it was night and I needed to get home. Eventually, I constructed a high seat out of an old wooden ladder and a chair seat and back; I then had a comfortable and portable option – if the badgers decided to move their activities to somewhere else I could follow. The intimacy I described in an earlier chapter came later; once I had gathered experiences, learned to work the wind direction and gained in confidence, I came down to the ground again when I wanted – only falling back on the high seat when getting to know a new clan, if I had been absent, or if I wanted to make observations without my own presence being a distraction.
Over the years, I got to know the clan pretty well, I gave them names, watched the cubs grow up, fed them peanuts, even became an honorary badger. When a badger wipes its yellowed bottom on your jeans, it might not be apparent, but the pungent, greasy stain left behind is the biggest compliment a badger can give you; it was like being given the key to their world, an olfactory badge, that said I was trusted, I was one of them, I was a brock of their clan.
Looking back, I now realize these moments were my time to process thoughts, get away from the claustrophobic stifling indoors, away from parents and school work, away from judgements and difficulties. These animals and their environment had become a kind of back-up surrogate family, their fields, woods and ditches my second home. I really did know the landscape in the way others might know their house, the furniture layout or the planting in their herbaceous border.
24 November 1987
When I was a teenager, several years after I had really discovered and got to know my badgers, I experienced an emotional trauma that turned my world on its head. I remember that harrowing evening like it was yesterday. The evening of 24 November 1987 was a cold and wet one. Ready for bed, pyjamas and dressing gown on, I was watching TV in the house on my own. Dad was at a cycling club AGM and my mum had gone out a while back to pick my brother up from his weekly football practice. I remember thinking that they should have been back ages ago; it was past my bedtime, past my brother’s bedtime. Where were they? What was taking them so long? Of course I took advantage of the opportunity to watch even more TV than I was usually allowed. Guiltily, I would keep taking quick peeks through a crack in the curtains to check for car headlamps while keeping half an ear open for car noises on the drive. It eventually came but the engine tone was different, the headlamp pattern wasn’t that of my mum’s car. Cautiously, I went to the door to look out; I’d been warned about strangers but instead of the familiar white panelling of the family Mini there was orange and blue, the unmistakable livery of a police car, reflective strips, loud and silver, reflecting the outside security lamp light back at me.
There was an apologetic and solemn look in the officer’s eye that told me all I needed to know. Something terrible had happened and because they had asked me to phone my dad, I knew that the something had happened to my mum or brother or both. We waited, I boiled a kettle, enough for three distracting, awkward time-filling brews. That was the longest cup of tea I had never drunk. Dad finally arrived home with a heavy sense of dread and distress in his eyes and in the handful of minutes that followed before we were off to the hospital I learned that half of my family were more than half dead – my mum was in a critical condition and on life-support and my brother, who had sustained serious head injuries, was in a coma.
What followed was a lonely period, weeks dangling over a chasm of misery, a time of not knowing: not knowing if I would ever have a complete family again, not knowing if my brother would wake up, and if he did, whether he was going to be the ‘talking head’ the neurologist had warned us was likely. My dad was always away at the hospitals, the house was always cold and empty when I got back from school; there were food parcels from caring neighbours, next to neglected milk bottles on the doorstep. I heard my dad, who always struggled with emotion, crying in the night, and caught him red-eyed on more than one occasion; that former pillar of my life was unable to convincingly tell me that everything was going to be all right. The only thing I was sure of was that I was, completely and utterly, on my own.
My happy, middle-class, perfect little family idyll had, in a split second of inattentiveness by another driver late that wet autumn night, been turned totally upside down. It was so painful that I remember wishing it all to be over; I wanted them to die and release me and Dad from the pain of it all.
I tell you this because even though I lived in a caring community, had family close by and had very supportive teachers at school, what I learned in that cruel life lesson was that nobody can really make things better, they can hug you and bring you food, and talk, which, of course, undoubtedly is a big part of dealing with emotional trauma and is essential to the development of coping processes, but when it comes down to it, you’ve got to do the healing and the surviving yourself. Face-to-face contact with anyone was always a little awkward, everyone tiptoed around the issue, never quite knowing what to say; there was always a huge elephant in the room.
I share all this because, retrospectively, this period of intense emotional upheaval and pain taught me something about our human spiritual connection with nature that in my experience is completely undervalued by our Western society. Nature heals, it has restorative powers. The woods and fields and all they contained, especially my badgers, were the constant unmoving point of reference through it all. It was the clan of monochromatic friends in the night that gave me focus, gave me the space to process the enormously complex emotional baggage that life had just rudely dumped onto me. Thinking back to those days now, I’ve realised those badgers saved me hours of therapy, maybe my life? They were my reconcilers, my non-judgmental council and silent stalwarts. They, and the woods and hedgerows, the fields and ditches that contained them, were a constant, an immutable part of my life. When I would slam the kitchen door and ‘run away’ from it all, I was doing the exact opposite. I was running to the one thing that made sense to me, the one thing that didn’t tire of me, didn’t mind if I shouted at it, or cried with it.
In short, nature was good for my mental health. I still rely on my nature time in the same way. Whether it’s a row with my wife, an unpayable credit-card bill, death or stress of any kind, I take to the hills, woods, fields, hedgerows, parks – wherever I can find nature I find my salvation.
I often ponder this particular value. I wonder about how many hours of therapy I’ve saved myself, how much time and money. If I hadn’t found the wild, where would I be? How would I have coped? Could I have coped?
I’ve since met others who have found, by accident, the same sort of comfort in the non-judgemental natural world. I’ve also become aware of many who are helping people make this connection for just this purpose.