Seeking a voice in the dark, I flick on the radio and walk straight into an argument. An impassioned affair, already well underway, echoes off the walls, forcing me to dash back and turn it down. That is not what our research suggests … growls an irate government minister before the interviewer cuts in: But it is what the evidence says and isn’t that the problem? The science is clear. This cull will not have any significant impact. It may even make things worse …
I rub my eyes and open the cupboard. The oven clock glows 6:51 a.m. Between that and the radio’s display there is enough light that I don’t need to switch on the main bulb. Black presses against the kitchen windows, invading the corners in the cold sweat of condensation. Arms folded, leaning against the sink, I listen to the debate as the kettle bubbles up to boiling, but it feels too early for such barking, especially when it’s going nowhere. The minister refuses to concede ground and the more it escalates, the more he begins to sounds like a school debating champion entrenched for the sake of it, bloody-minded and priggishly fighting a line he’s been handed. I start to wonder whether even he believes what he’s saying. As he begins yet another sentence with Let me be absolutely clear, I hit the ‘off’ button. Enough with the professional politicking. It’s been the same for weeks now and the only thing the government is not being is clear. Clear as in unobstructed; clear as in transparent or without impurity; clear as in evident to the mind, free from guilt.
Sipping coffee, I stare through the window into the shapeless gloom outside, scanning the pre-dawn dark behind our house for sunrise in the east. It’s taking its sweet time but then again, that’s October for you. All hush, no rush. The slow-start days. Murky, misted mornings. The steady unpicking of the trees. The clocks going back. And in keeping with the rhythm of the month, our baby is now nine days overdue. It’s a strange feeling that comes with the waiting, like we’ve momentarily fallen off life’s merry-go-round into our own excited space. We’re on permanent standby and entirely freed-up. Appointments are cancelled. Meetings re-scheduled. I work when Rosie sleeps – in these early hours, an hour or two in the afternoon and later on at night. The rest of the time is given over to enjoying our suddenly spontaneous days. It’s like going back to when we first met at university, the impulsive, hour-by-hour existence of students newly let off the leash. Let’s tramp the moors; let’s go get ice creams; let’s get the train to the coast! There is a freedom and intensity that comes with knowing that things won’t stay as they are for long. A strange simplicity; a clarity of sorts.
It was a snap decision yesterday to head out for a walk through the edge-land, coming in from the west and cutting up through the meadows to the old railway, following the cables threaded from pylon to pylon. It was getting on for late afternoon but the sky was still warm and huge, the sun a luminous disc ringed by a circle of pale blue. We ate the last of the blackberries and sat for a while sky watching, eyes shifting from rubbly clouds with gilded edges to great chrome-coloured sweeps. Rosie suggested we walked a loop, down the holloway to the river, along the gorge and back past the sewage works. Messing around where the track sinks into the trees from the field level, I scaled the slope and kept pace with her as she descended along the woody tunnel. The soil beneath my boots was like cocoa powder, recently milled to a fine tilth. It stretched out to the straggly hedges to the west and south and, where the earth curved, it took a red tint, like dried blood. The prints were obvious in the surface; a series of darker, round dots, but the soil was too soft to retain their details. I called Rosie to join me and, as she cut through the trees, she found the others – a whole channel of them pressed into damper ground at the edge of the wood. Hind and fore paw prints overlaid each other – rough ovals, like soap dishes, with traces of five-clawed toes. ‘A badger?’ she asked and I nodded. More than one, in fact. Prints of different sizes. Possibly a family group. I snapped a photo of the clearest, then fit my hand in its depression, scrunching it up so that my palm sat in the pad and I could push a couple of my fingertips into the holes left by its toes. It suddenly mattered to me, the act of touching those traces. It mattered because I’d seen neither hide nor hair of a badger since January and now, here, was the irrefutable proof they were still around. It mattered because the way they wove between the borders of the ‘wild’ wood and the neatly ploughed field reminded me of the edge-land itself – unseen, evasive and surprising. And it mattered too because those muddy prints traipsed an unexpected darkness into our expectant world; they were a breath of wind down the neck. They made real the madness of what was happening in the outside world, giving a shape and a form to a shy creature currently being dragged into the spotlight and fought over in every corner of the national press.
The badger (Meles meles) seems, on the surface, an unlikely candidate to wind up at the heart of any media frenzy. Nocturnal, redoubtable, clean-living, enigmatic, rarely seen at all other than as a dead black and white bundle by the side of the road, it has only been thrust centre stage at all because of our reliance on, and increasing exploitation of, another animal – the cow. Britain’s ever-squeezed and long-suffering cattle-farming industry is stuck in a dirty war with an intractable disease. Bovine tuberculosis is a ruthless and, according to recent government data, resurgent disease that causes tens of thousands of beef and dairy cattle to be slaughtered every year in England and Wales, striking with particular virulence in the south-west counties of Gloucestershire and Somerset. ‘The White Death’, as it’s known, devastates wherever it hits, exacting a heavy emotional and financial price from farmers as it jumps through their herds and across neighbouring lands, wiping out prized bloodlines, forcing the sudden shut-down of livelihoods, restricting movement and heralding the precautionary killing of huge numbers of beasts, many of which turn out to be disease-free in post-mortem. It’s a crushing process for families to have to bear and a terrible psychological burden to live with that constant fear. Testing has become more rigorous and regular but even half an eye on the news will tell you that bovine TB continues to be a thorn in the side of the ‘rural economy’, stacking up a costly bill for the British taxpayer as a result. Those thousands upon thousands of prematurely killed cattle have incurred a half a billion pound bill paid to farmers in the ten years between 2001 and 2011, mostly in compensation. With the government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) estimating that amount will double over the next decade, the pressure to win the war on TB has become intense from all sides.
The problem for the badger is that, just as the virus jumps from cow to cow, it is also passed on to other species through breathing and exposure to cattle faeces and urine. Sheep, pigs, cats and deer can all be infected, all could theoretically bring the disease back into a herd, but the badger has long been suspected by farmers as the most problematic of these carriers because of its home and habits. It lives in the woods at the edges of fields, often sharing the same ground and foraging at night among drowsing stock, industriously toeing over cowpats and digging earth for worms. In 1971, when a dead badger tested positive for the bacteria in an area of Gloucestershire badly hit by bovine TB, the Ministry of Agriculture made no secret of its results and almost overnight the animal became a national scapegoat, despite there being no hard scientific evidence that badgers were even capable of transmitting the disease back to cows. A villain had been caught red-handed and long-held suspicions about the ‘wildlife reservoir’ being at the root of the re-infection of cattle appeared vindicated. A causality link existed, no matter how tenuous, complex and multi-faceted. It was enough to herald a new front in the war on TB: the first official culls of badgers in Britain; the mass gassing of setts near hot-spots. Hydrogen cyanide was supposed to kill gently by putting the animals to sleep, but when the gas was shown to cause lingering, excruciating deaths, it was replaced with the swifter and ‘cleaner’ process of trapping the badgers live and shooting them in the back of the head. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s the link between badgers and bovine TB levels in cows was tested and retested through mostly unscientific field studies and culls. Trapping and shooting were licensed in a reactionary move wherever outbreaks struck, provoking little fanfare or public controversy because the numbers of cattle and badgers killed in each incident was relatively small. Figures collated since the 1980s showed that both bovine TB and badger numbers appeared to be on the rise, but actual evidence of the animal’s contribution to the disease remained, at best, inconclusive. After forty years of policy failure in tackling the virus, there was a large-scale independent review of bovine TB management policy in 1996, chaired by Professor (and later Lord) John Krebs. This recommended that the government undertake a scientific trial to establish once and for all whether badgers were responsible for a resurgence of bovine TB in cattle and, importantly, whether killing them would help reduce the incidence of the disease in stock.
The Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) was conducted over nine years between 1998 and 2007. It involved the deaths of 10,979 badgers at a staggering cost of nearly fifty million pounds but, despite opposition from animal rights activists, it was widely held as money and time well invested. This was the longest and most in-depth experimental study of the effects of badger culling on TB in cattle in the world. It was what Defra itself called ‘the best scientific evidence available from which to predict the effects of a future culling policy’. The RCBT found that, at the most, culling would reduce incidences of cattle TB by 12–16 per cent over nine years and subsequently, in the words of John Bourne, the scientist who led the trial: badger culling cannot meaningfully contribute to the control of cattle TB in Britain. Indeed, some policies under consideration are likely to make matters worse rather than better. The Labour government followed his recommendations, but it was clear even before publication that not everyone wanted to listen. During 2004 the (then) shadow environment minister, Owen Paterson, was busy tabling a record number of Parliamentary questions (almost 600) on bovine TB.1 He was keen to bolster his image both as a ‘true blue countryman’ dedicated to eradicating the disease and – prudently, in political terms – as a willing mouthpiece for the powerful farming lobby, the National Farmers Union, making it clear he shared its belief that badger culling was a necessity, regardless of what the trial found. So when the coalition government took power in 2010 it came as no surprise when it made good on its promises, revisiting the RCBT trial data and, inexplicably, drawing a different conclusion to the scientists: that killing badgers in substantial numbers is essential to stemming the rise of tuberculosis in British cattle. Suddenly culling was back on the cards.
In recent weeks, and with Paterson freshly appointed as environment minister, it has been rampantly pushed up Defra’s priority list. The pilot shooting schemes are due to begin any day now in west Gloucestershire and west Somerset. But this is only the start of it. If ‘successful’, the government is committed to rolling out the cull nationally, which could mean many tens of thousands of badgers being killed, regardless of whether they are diseased or healthy. This despite the fact that the cull goes against all rigorous scientific evidence and economic logic and, if you believe the experts, will have no meaningful impact on reducing bovine TB in cattle.
The government must surely have expected a backlash – this is, after all, highly contentious policy – but even so I doubt many in power could have predicted that the plight of the badger would become the inflammatory issue it has among British voters. The opposition is growing daily. No wonder the minister sounded so indignant on the radio this morning. A public e-petition calling for the abandonment of the cull and a Commons debate on the issue has amassed over 150,000 signatures; rock stars, famous naturalists and spokesmen from wildlife charities are appearing on TV shows imploring the Prime Minister to intervene; police are warning Defra over spiralling costs as activists pledge to disrupt gunmen and frighten off targets with a chorus of vuvuzelas left over from the World Cup. Images of badgers are appearing on every front page; they are colonising the streets and newsstands. But amid this tragicomic cycle of events remains the sobering weight of informed opinion stacking up against it. Opposition voices are pointing out that the cull is a distraction from the real war against TB and that the money could and should be spent on the host of other more effective strategies – biosecurity and further developing and employing TB vaccinations for badgers and cows. In a body blow to the new environment minister, thirty eminent British scientists who work in animal disease treatment and control have sent an open letter to the Observer insisting that the government rethinks its strategy immediately, writing that the evidence shows the planned cull may actually risk increasing TB in British cattle.2 This is because the proposed free-shooting approach (i.e. culling without trapping the badgers first) could encourage the ‘perturbation effect’ with badgers roaming from setts into wider areas, potentially spreading the disease into other herds. Under this intense scrutiny, the cull’s flaws are revealed. Free-shooting badgers is a cheap option compared with trapping and killing, but it is distinctly unscientific and without control areas, testing or the possibility of statistical analysis. As such, there can be no way of measuring its effectiveness or even determining what percentage of badgers killed has bovine TB. Campaigners claim this is because the data would corroborate the findings of the RCBT and show a low incidence of the disease in badger populations. Most troublesome for Defra, however, seems to be the challenge of meeting the cull’s own objectives – namely to kill the requisite minimum of 70 per cent of badgers in the pilot areas. That would require knowledge of how many animals existed before you began and it turns out that nobody has that exact information. Lord Krebs, architect of the RCBT, describes the whole plan as ‘mindless’, accusing the government of cherry-picking data to justify an agenda. Lord May, a former chief scientist, agrees, saying: ‘They are transmuting evidence-based policy into policy-based evidence.’ The public is rightly suspicious of this all too frequently employed political inversion; it smacks of the tactics the previous Labour government used in the trumped-up case for war in Iraq. And yet the more farcical it all sounds, the more ministers are becoming badger-like, backed into a corner, digging their heels in, bearing their teeth. There must be a reckoning, they insist. And soon.
‘Maybe you are being too sensitive,’ a friend said to me the other day as we talked it over. ‘You’ve grown soft. It’s understandable; you’re having a baby any minute.’ He was being flippant, teasing, but his words stung me. ‘Sad sentimentality’ is an argument that the cull lobby has been quick to smear the opposition with, citing the traditional borders between the removed, sanitised mentality of the town and the harsh but necessary realities of those who deal in country life. But I’ve known both these worlds, and I’ve killed animals before, shooting, butchering and eating rabbits and woodpigeon that threatened to overrun a farmer’s crop fields. I’ve felt hearts slow and stop under my fingers and seen eyes set and staring because I chose to pull a trigger. I’ve watched emaciated red deer stags, ribs poking horribly through fur on a Scottish mountain, starving to death from overpopulation and the human-wrought absence of predators, and I’m certain I would have shot them there and then too, had I been carrying a rifle. I’ve broken the necks of rabbits squatting swollen and hopeless on footpaths to end the unholy misery of myxomatosis. No, I don’t think I’m squeamish; it’s true that I’ve never managed to stop my heart hammering in my chest or shake the repulsion at my own hands for hastening the end of another creature, but that innate displeasure has proved an ethical compass too: I’ve never killed anything for the sake of it. There’s always been a reason. That’s what I can’t shake about all this mess, that there is such a lack of logic in the sanctioned mass killing of one of Britain’s most intriguing wild animals. It’s proving damaging for the coalition too. Dragging the badger into the line of fire has had the unintentional outcome of hauling the workings of the government and politicians into the crosshairs. I know I’m not alone in wondering, If the government is refusing to listen to science and reason, who or what is it listening to? And why?3
‘Let me be absolutely clear …’ the minister had said on the radio. Well, you should be careful what you wish for.
It’s still dark through the kitchen window as I pour another coffee and cradle the cup’s warmth in both hands. The coughs of starting, stirring traffic sound faintly from the front of the house. I think of Rosie sleeping upstairs and a baby, like the dawn, on the edge of arriving in this world. But what world are we bringing you into? It’s a thought that has bitten into me many times recently and I feel it sharply again now. There is a consciousness gleaned from time immersed in the edge-land, from being outside the confines; a perspective that comes from being where the historical collisions between human and nature are evident and inescapable, like a movie permanently projected along the borders. Playing on a loop, it whirrs back and forth, showing us what we are and how we came to be thus. The kitchen radio is switched off, but the minister’s barking rhetoric still echoes in my ears, jarring and unsettling. His talk of growing ‘rural economies’ and making them evermore profitable smacks of a wider addiction to endless growth that doesn’t square with the finite resources of this biosphere. There is a debt accumulating that no one wants to address. In its current state our economy already consumes 50 per cent more resources and churns out more waste than ecosystems can restore or absorb. So what will happen if and when that does increase? I think of the phrase I heard a different minister say on the radio many months ago – anything that cannot justify itself financially has to go. The second, unspoken part of that being: anything that can justify itself financially is fair game. Now, after these many months, I can hear in those words the same cries for ‘improvement’ that justified the acts of enclosure in the eighteenth century and, later, monoculture and the intensification of farming. I sense the residual influence of a wealthy minority that has governed this land in various guises since the Normans and whose motivation still appears to be self-interest, self-preservation and power. I feel sorry for farmers at the sharp end with ever-increasing overheads and pressure to produce more, and who are already choked by a consumer society that demands cheaper food yet throws away 30 per cent of what it buys. I feel sorry that they’re being driven out of business, ignored, lied to and manipulated, that we all are. And I feel sorry for the other species caught up in it all: the cows bred by artificial insemination for fifty years to yield more milk but that are now weakened against disease; the golden eagles killed to protect industrially farmed pheasant for sport; the pollinators being poisoned by pesticides; the badgers about to be shot for nothing more than political purpose. These things may only be local and small-scale but they form part of a bigger global picture where extinctions, habitat loss and climate destruction are raging unchecked, and where almost half the planet’s population of invertebrates has been lost in the last four decades. Maybe I have grown sensitive, but only if sensitivity is waking up to the state of things and having a more acute understanding of, and empathy for, the intrinsically valuable and miraculous world we exist in. A world that science and rational thought tell us we’re pushing to the edge and well past the point of no return.
And standing here alone looking into the blackness, I’m struggling with even blacker thoughts. There is that niggling, inconvenient question refusing to budge: If the government is refusing to listen to science and reason, who or what is it listening to? The news of the appointment of Owen Paterson as Secretary of State for the Environment is not merely a death sentence for thousands of badgers, but a cruel and cynical twist from a government that once pledged to be ‘the greenest ever’. Paterson is an avowed supporter of fracking to extract shale gas and an opponent of renewable energy subsidies but, most incomprehensibly of all, he is an open climate-change denier. In the name of ‘global trade’ he is making promises to tear down any environmental red tape around big business, burn more fossil fuels and support the expansion of the UK’s airport capacity. Yet the government knows the physics is unanswerable: climate scientists agree that carbon emissions are dangerously heating up the planet. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that most of the global temperature rise since 1950 is due to greenhouse gases and deforestation, and that a further increase of 2°C would be catastrophic for humanity. There is no debate; eminent scientist after eminent scientist agrees that it is our consumption causing the unprecedented ice melt and global temperatures and sea levels to rise. The proof is everywhere that we are beckoning catastrophe and yet he, the environment minister, is refusing to meet with the chief scientific adviser at the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It is like watching a car crash in slow motion. It just makes me think, Why? Is there something inherently wrong with us? Is there something immoral at the core of our species? These are dark days when those elected to run our world pour scorn on scientific consensus for short-term gain and to protect the interests of mining, oil and gas corporations. Dark days when the ultra-rich beneficiaries of endlessly increasing global growth know the consequences of continuing to produce carbon emissions, yet invest hundreds of millions of dollars to clandestinely influence political agendas, lobby government and finance ‘think-tanks’ to rubbish climate-change data. Dark days when you realise you are bringing a life into a world that you’re not even sure you can trust any more.
When the first liquid grey light steals through the yard, it takes me by surprise. I blink and peer out at the familiar shapes forming in the silver-black – the log shed, the little flowerbed, the back gate, the trellis coiled with a climbing rose gone wild. Eastwards a hairline crack in the black has opened above the rooftops. It is fascinating thing, vanishing to a tiny point like a bronze road into another dimension. Then, from above, a muffled cry breaks the silence. It comes again, clearer now. Rosie is calling my name in a voice I’ve never heard before. I drop the mug in the sink and run, taking the stairs two at a time, but before I even reach her, I know what it means.
For the past nine days we have had a hold-all packed and ready, stashed in the corner of the bedroom by a Moses basket, similarly primed: cleaned, blanketed and waiting for occupancy. In our ‘hospital bag’ is an array of oddities to ease the journey ahead – flannels, drinking straws, an iPod filled with relaxation music and affirmations. And, sitting on top, my tatty notebook. After a few hours the contractions have quickened in frequency but our house isn’t very far from the hospital and two phone calls later, we’re still at home. Still waiting. By ten o’clock all that remains for me to do is to make sandwiches. Mum will need her strength we’re told in the NHS leaflet, also tucked into the bag, like an invite to a party. Even so, it seems an absurdly mundane task when every six minutes, counted out carefully on the oven clock, Rosie is doubling over, gripping my arm and riding a sea-swell of internal pressure for sixty seconds, sighing, breathing, humming. I hold her, support her body and rub her back as she crests each surge, then dash back to peeling the boiled eggs and mashing them up with mayonnaise. ‘What about the smell?’ she asks, leaning on the sofa recovering her breath. ‘Won’t egg mayonnaise stink out the place?’ I point out there’ll probably be worse smells to contend with in a maternity ward and then admonish her for always worrying about others, even now, while secretly thinking how wonderful that is. But we are out of bread anyway. We both laugh. Amateurs; so excited and so frightened. After another contraction passes I dash to Sainsbury’s around the corner. The world outside the door is superficially the same – cars and traffic lights; a clear October day, born cold and growing colder – but it feels like I’m on a different frequency, a different rhythm, and numb to everything else. It’s like being caught in a tractor beam radiating from somewhere beyond, a warm, nervous energy that is pulling me steadily and unstoppably towards a place where nothing will ever be the same again. It’s only when I run to the checkout clutching a loaf that I discover I’ve left my wallet at home. ‘My wife’s about to have a baby,’ I mumble, ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m halfway out of the door when the girl on the till calls me back. Her eyes search my face for something. Honesty, perhaps. She curls stray bright-red hairs behind her ear as she checks the aisle behind me. Her purple shirt moulds around a distinct bump of her own. Five or six months, I’d guess. ‘Here,’ she says, handing me the bread. ‘Take it. Bring the money another time.’
It’s a kind act, one that could get her into bother, and I’m touched. I read the name badge pinned to her fleece and smile. ‘Thank you, Lauren.’
An hour later our bags are by the door, coats on top and I’m pacing the hall itching to do something. Rosie is back on the phone to the maternity ward. The contractions are getting stronger and the midwife is asking when she last definitely felt the baby. When Rosie explains it was sometime during the night I hear the voice at the other end click into a different gear: ‘OK, right. Well, you need to come in now. We’ll have to check the baby’s heartbeat.’
There are things I remember from coming here for Rosie’s scans: the surprising hugeness of the hospital, its coraltoned brickwork and blue railings, the buddleia now gone to seed in beds by the steps, the warmth of the corridors and the smell of disinfectant. What I missed on previous visits were the two photographic portraits of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh staring down benevolently from the walls. Opposite them, so it appears like the Duke is struggling to make sense of it, a map explodes the hospital’s many floors and wings into details. It’s like a disassembled diagram from a car manual, too much to take in. I just see random words: Radiology, Cardiology, Chapel, Restaurant, X-ray. ‘It’s down here,’ says Rosie and off we squeak down the corridor, her arm on mine, pausing each time she begins to feel the pressure within to adopt our practised positions: interlocking arms and hands the way ballroom dancers do just before the music starts.
The tawny owl has flown from the walls of the Antenatal Clinic along with the rest of the menagerie of animals. Other signs have replaced it: more tinselly adverts for baby photographers and a poster-paint globe cupped in a human hand. Heal the World, it instructs in rainbow letters tacked above. In a small room off to the side, Rosie sits up on a bed as a cardiotocograph asserts the vivacity of our baby’s life via twitching needle and a jagged mountain range drawn along a roll of graph paper. Half an hour later and satisfied with the topography, the midwife beams at us: ‘All good. You can probably go home now, to be honest.’ She lifts up the half-watch clipped to her pocket. ‘Baby could be hours away yet.’ But we don’t go home. Instead, we’re moved up a flight of stairs to an empty observation bay. It is a peachy room in every sense, filled with clean beds, each with a pay-for-TV monitor suspended on an arm above it. The screensavers flick in sync between live news and adverts. After another contraction passes, we take the bed by the window. A horse chestnut folds its rusty leaves up against the glass. Beyond it, over a security fence, a few dog walkers and runners are crossing a thick, flat swathe of green edged with trees. It’s a view and a half. You can see a long way from here, a long way back.
The maternity wing overlooks the Stray, the 200-acre horseshoe of common ground created in a famous gesture during the land enclosures in 1778. This wasn’t to be ‘common’ in the sense understood before the acts were passed; it wasn’t to sustain the landless or dispossessed poor. The Stray’s limited grazing rights or ‘Cattlegates’ were strictly for those copyholders recognised as previously holding tenancy over the ground, and of the fifty cattlegates allocated, the devisees of baronet Sir Thomas Ingilby received twelve. Rather, the Stray was a gesture to appease the new and emerging class of landowners concerned that the privatisation of the mineral springs here would damage the wider area’s reputation as a burgeoning English Spa. Responding to their petitions, the King (through his title ‘Duchy of Lancaster’) bequeathed them the land with the promise it would remain open common where all and sundry could enjoy free and unfettered access to the medicinal waters for ever, without being subject to the payment of any acknowledgment whatsoever for the same, or liable to any action of trespass, or other suit, molestation, or disturbance whatsoever, in respect thereof. Protected by law, this gift set in stone the future of the rural hamlets of High and Low Harrogate as well as the older township they fell under: Bilton-with-Harrogate. It created the environment whereby a grand resort could rise and flourish, attracting visitors to its wide avenues and tree-lined parks, its hostelries and assembly rooms. And, importantly, the unique concentration of springs set amid this rolling curve of public green. Those were different times. With the spa industry drying up for good in the 1930s, the Stray now finds itself tussling with the legacy – Harrogate is a tourist hotspot, residential jewel and conference venue that requires space more than it does springs. Zoom out and you see these 200 acres surrounded. Hemmed and threaded with roads, the Stray is now encroached from every direction, squeezed by the fine, imposing architecture of the ‘old’ town on one side and, on the other, the density of streets, houses, churches and schools that form its southerly suburbs.
I open the window as far as it will go. About three inches. With no one here to be offended, we eat our egg mayonnaise sandwiches and then conduct laps of the room, arm in arm, returning after each to rest and take in the vista of grass and trees. Dutifully, Rosie plugs in her iPod and closes her eyes. Through her earphones I can hear the faint sound of hypnobirthing affirmations. An American woman with a voice like silk: The colour violet causes the mind to vibrate; all of nature is in tune with violet. Go deeper. You are a vehicle of nature. In tune with nature. Go even deeper. Now envisage yourself in a soft, green mist. Just as the earth springs forth life so too will your body …
Sitting beside her on the bed, looking through the window, I can just about make out a small, hexagonal stone building, an elegant pump room constructed in the nineteenth century over one of the Stray’s famous iron or chalybeate wells. It is shut up now like an abandoned lighthouse in a sea of grass, an oddly ornate distraction for those idling in traffic. A toppled turret. Nothing more. A dead king’s wishes about free water carry little weight these days. Every spring in Harrogate is under lock and key. I’m not sure what that implies – perhaps they need to be for their own protection – but walking here sometimes after heavy rain I’ve found patches where those ancient iron and sulphur waters have leached back up through the boggy grass, pooling and puddling again in the Stray’s dips and muddy corners. Birds flock to these mineral lagoons just as they have for millennia, before every stone, brick and human story was laid down here. To see that scene enduring among the queues of cars restores me in some small way.
Rosie’s waters break at 3:30 p.m., halfway through another loop of the room. A different midwife, Jean – a short, kind-faced woman with glasses and grey hair dyed to blond – arrives with paper towels, checks her watch and makes a note. I’d no idea it was so late. Time has become an elastic concept outside the precise clockwork of the contractions, arriving now every four minutes, and for forty intense seconds. ‘You’re three centimetres dilated, too,’ Jean says, peeling off a rubber glove. ‘So I think we should move you to the labour ward.’ She smiles at me. ‘Let’s call it a free upgrade.’
Jean fetches a wheelchair as I pack up our stuff. I have that same punched-gut tension as you feel the moments before stepping on a stage – that edginess. And it won’t go. Rosie is pushed down the corridor past idle equipment and boxy incubation chambers, but I don’t think she’s taking any of it in. Her eyes are becoming more focused after each wave, as though she is staring inwards at something I can neither see nor hear. Past rows of drawers and a bright reception desk, we’re shown into a room with a single, high, mechanical bed in its centre and a bathroom to one side. Jean and a nurse move automatically through the space, opening drawers and preparing equipment as they ask questions and strap a blood pressure monitor on Rosie’s arm: Do you want some water? Would you like to try a bath? Polite as ever, Rosie answers each – No, thank you and Yes, please – then succumbs again, folding over the bed, interlocking hands with mine and releasing a long humming breath deep into the hospital sheet.
I’ve never heard of it before, but midwives rely on a kind of data record designed to draw order from the process of birth. It has a name – Partogram. It makes the details of labour, such as dilation, the baby’s heart rate and the mother’s vital signs visible and measurable so that any variations can be identified and investigated. Jean explains that she is starting one and then wires Rosie up accordingly. After handing her a little paper cup with pills in, I watch her write: Paracetamol (1gm) and codeine phosphate (60mg) taken – declines further analgesia.
Perhaps they’ve dimmed the lights or it’s growing darker through the window but the monitor recording the baby’s heart rate glows a bright orange and for a while I can’t take my eyes off it. I stare at those digits, thinking of what’s behind them: the life nosing its way out of its dark world, a fluid-lunged thing beginning to haul itself ashore through the breakers. The bath next door fills, cools and is run out again. We mean to reach it but after an hour of trying Rosie is back on the bed contorting with the tides inside. Together we wrestle the pull and the pain, locking our fingers, gripping, straining, stretching, and it dawns on me that I’m holding on to her as much as she is to me. Our heads pressed together, I’m whispering words of encouragement, knowing she’s only hearing tones. And in between the crests of the contractions, Jean is talking her down, a trainer in our corner – calm, calm, you’re doing great – as Rosie drags deep from the gas and air. And then it surges again and she cries against the inevitability of it, before channelling, breathing and bracing. Jean lifts her voice, coaxing the animal in her: ‘OK, NOW PUSH THIS TIME. PUSH NOW. SHOUT IF YOU WANT TO. BUT PUSH. That’s brilliant.’ Except I’m seeing something else: each time Rosie pushes those orange digits on the monitor plummet. Jean glances at them too and makes hurried notes. Decelerations, they call these; the baby’s heart rate is swooping low with every uterine contraction before swinging back up again as it subsides. It’s difficult to watch; a necessity to bestowing life that seems to come close to ending it every time. Come on. Come on – I’m willing it – come on, little thing. Another hour or more with Rosie, head-down, rolling into the waves every two minutes and for a minute, but no further progress. It seems a futile torture and I can see she’s tiring with every exertion; her face is red, exhausted and soaking with sweat. But baby has to come now – that’s what Jean is saying. Baby has to come. By 6 p.m. it is concerning enough that she asks another midwife to send for the duty doctor.
A tall man in smart trousers, blue shirt and a white coat breezes in, smiles and introduces himself with a warm Nigerian lilt. He checks the Partogram and quietly confers with Jean. I hear words passed between them – vertex, presenting, crowning. Then he nods and asks in a sudden calm, loud tone, like a headmaster: ‘Why don’t we have this baby now, Rosemary? You know you can, don’t you? You know you will do it. You just have to push now, Rosemary. When it comes … NOW.’ Suddenly there are three of us willing her – Yes! Yes! That’s it – as the current drags her down again. She pushes back against the pillows, eyes shut, biting her lips. And the noise she’s making now is a soul-noise, an animal noise. I press my head into hers again, my arm around her shoulder, and I’m rocking and whispering all the reassuring words I can think of. Any spell to conjure this life from her and end the pain. I feel the sinews of her straining neck and her iron strength and hear the juddering, bellowing of deep, desperate lungs. She calls out again, a long howl, which resolves into a sharp series of exhalations, each a moan or a ‘hooo’. A commotion as Jean and the doctor cheer and lean forwards and suddenly something else is with us: a slick, bruise-coloured, blood-cowled form that Jean attends to quickly but gently. She wipes it, clears its face and then lays it shivering and unfolding on Rosie’s chest. ‘It’s a boy. A little boy,’ says Rosie and then, ‘Thomas. Thomas.’ And I’m face to face with a life that has fought its way to this beginning, all the way from nothing, from eternity. Thomas who, had things been different, might never have been, but now squeaks in his mother’s arms as some hitherto unrealised part of my brain counts each of his strengthening breaths. And with every one I’m becoming more lightheaded. My heart is thumping in my chest. This brew of emotions is strong; old waters are bubbling up through the grass. Instincts. There are words they use in the books, words like ‘wonder’, but all are insufficient to relay the hugeness of the shift, the acute brightness and sensitivity like your head’s been thrust through a door into a different room, as if it’s you that’s just been born. And your mouth is asking ‘Is he OK?’ once, twice, because you feel useless and you can’t hear properly and because you’re too scared to do anything but ask that dumb question and look. In fact, that’s what the books should tell you: that you can’t stop looking and that, from here on, there will be no end to your fascination. How you are seeing in the present tense and differently, more like the way a hawk sees: every lash, pore, patch of skin and every shaking, stretching limb, every fingernail and toe; the small exactness of the lips and those welded-shut eyes scowling open and rolling towards the light. But you’re not seeing with the fury of a predator identifying weakness; it’s the attentiveness of adoration. You’re thinking, Careful! Be careful, as though he is made of thin glass. The books should explain that this brings as much terror as euphoria and how you might not realise you have tears looping down to your jaw until the doctor tells you; how even the soft hospital blanket they place around his innocent little form can seem like a desecration of perfection.
Then, at some point while I’m distracted and staring, a different animal steals into the room. Jean has not ceased in her attendance of Rosie, her care necessary because the placenta didn’t birth properly. The cord came away in her hand (1820 hrs Valementous insertion – the Partogram records), but I presume this must be a fairly common occurrence. No one seems too concerned. There are a couple of injections before the doctor is called back to perform another summoning and deftly removes the placenta. Right, I think, that must be that. ‘You’ll be fine now,’ Jean confirms as she pops out of the door, ‘so I’ll leave you alone for a bit.’ And then it’s just the three of us wrapped up in each other, lulled into a beautiful calm until, weirdly, Rosie stops speaking to Thomas. Then altogether. Even making those soft, low mammal sounds has become too taxing for her. ‘Are you OK?’ She smiles, and then blinks wearily down at the boy. I kiss her forehead and notice how pale it has become. Fatigue. The lights. Must be. The garish strips have been flicked on above us. She closes her eyes and shuffles position, as if going to sleep. Her long, brown hair falls in twists across her face and arms; peat streams coursing through snowy moor. She’s too pale. I frown. Then I hear the splash of water on stone. I take a step back and see blood spreading across the linoleum.
I must be shouting because Jean and a nurse run in exactly as another splatter spills sickeningly onto the floor. They both cry out ‘Oh!’ at the bright, scarlet pool. It is the movie blood of veins, arteries and haemorrhages. Panic hits me like a slap and I stroke Rosie’s head: ‘What is it, sweetheart? What’s wrong?’ But she won’t – or can’t – respond. Her arm goes limp and slides from Thomas, leaving him washed up on her breast. As the nurse slams the red alarm button over the bed, Jean scoops the baby up in a single movement and hands him to me. Then the doctor bursts in and suddenly I feel like I’m falling backwards or that the bed and its attendants are drifting away, the way a loosened boat slips from harbour. And now I see it and feel it, that wild animal that crept into the corner while my guard was down. I sense its size and shape; nature’s other side, the chaotic antithesis of the hypno-birthing affirmations; this vicious twin of glorious creation and I’m thinking, You cruel fucking thing, to give and take in the same gesture, to open the heart and sharpen the senses, then do this. Leaning over her, the doctor is asking firmly and loudly: ‘Rosemary? Rosemary?’ And I want to yell at him – Stop talking and DO something – but they are trying, and I see that too. Drips are wheeled to the head of the bed; saline and bloods quickly plumbed into the back of her hands. There are more injections. Her blood pressure flashes on a monitor (88/50). Jean lays paper towels on the floor so nobody will slip. But I’m still slipping, further back to the window and to the darkness outside, struggling with the unfathomable weight of this baby staring up at me with its deep dark-blue eyes. ‘It’s OK,’ I whisper with my lips touching his forehead. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’ But I’m not talking to Thomas; I’m haggling with that presence staring indifferently at me from the bed. Please. Not this. Not this. Of course, there’s no arrangement you can make, no matter how hard you beg. It just glares back asking if I remember what being animal really means. And as Rosie lies there passed out, her blood darkening the paper towels, I realise I do. I’m afraid like I’ve never been before. The animal terror. ‘Learn to fear,’ advises J. A. Baker in his dark, apocalyptic book The Peregrine: ‘To share fear is the greatest bond of all.’ And I feel it now more deeply than I thought possible. Fear, the spark that ignites the flight of deer; that freezes the hare in its form; that fuels the owl’s defence of its nest; that makes the fox caught in wire tear off its claws trying to escape. Enough, I say into Thomas’s soft skin. I’ve seen enough. Please stop.
Gradually, and I mean painfully gradually, the injections start to work. The bleeding slows and then ceases altogether. After an hour Rosie stirs and starts to come around. Two more and her colour returns. Another and she’s sitting up for the toast and sugary hot chocolate Jean has brought in on a tray. When I hand Thomas back to her, she’s the one asking, ‘Are you OK?’ I’m the pale thing now, my arms cramped and trembling from holding the baby in the same position for the last four hours. Rosie, on the other hand, remembers nothing and is confused at where the time has gone. ‘I think Dad might need a hug,’ explains Jean and she comes over and puts her arms around me. After a moment I relent and sink into her hold. Wrapped in that human warmth, watching Rosie and Thomas burbling happily to each other again, I feel the fear withdrawing. Over Jean’s shoulder, the animal has slipped from the room. There are other wards and beds to prowl; other hearts to bless and brutalise.
It’s not far off two o’clock in the morning when I leave. Thomas and Rosie have been whisked off to a ward with the promise of more hot chocolate and buttered toast. But I’m not allowed to go with them. And they won’t let me stay overnight, not even in a chair in reception. ‘Go home,’ the midwives say, laughing, ‘we’ll be watching them. Get some sleep.’ But who are they trying to kid? There’s too much stuff running round my head; too many revelations. I know where I’m going. I thank them all and ask them to pass on my heartfelt gratitude to the doctor busy bestowing calmness further down the corridor.
Outside it has turned deeply cold and the streets are deserted. Not another vehicle as I drive through the oily night, passing under the misted orbs of streetlamps along Skipton Road then right, down Bilton Lane. At the crossing point I stop, pull on my jacket from the boot and walk to the same fence I hunkered by on New Year’s Eve. Wiping away the drop-in-temperature-tears with a sleeve, my eyes adjust. The silence thickens. Aside from a pylon showing as a deeper geometric darkness against the sky, the edge-land is an indistinct mass of blurry, coffee-black, all looming presence, distance and intimacy, exaggerated by Bilton’s orange-washed roads and the few houselights still blazing over the fences. It is almost exactly like I found it those many months ago, only it doesn’t feel strange any more.
When I first came to this spot I was seeking somewhere I might belong. I felt the urge to align myself with a place that, like me, seemed caught between states. Mapping this patch of ground has made it part of my life; we have blurred and planed together. It has altered my internal landscape even as I’ve watched it change. Perhaps this is a process that we all go through at some point, a kind of internal stock-take that occurs when confronted with the tectonic shifts in our existence, like moving away or impending fatherhood. There are times when we need to lose illusions and work out who we are, how we got here and where we’re going. And now I realise how the outside world can inform our inside world. The common ground and edge-lands that surround our homes may not provide our food or fuel any more, but once unlocked, they can still sustain us, revealing the complex intermeshing between human and nature – showing us what we are, what we are not and how these two things are inseparable.
Despite the darkness, I know what lies beyond the fence. And, as I breathe, I pull this region close to me, drawing it into my lungs, conjuring visions of the precise shape of far hills, the lane and the woods, the hanging, grey silence of viaduct and gorge, the shuffling mice in the meadow, the dormant vetch seed in the soil, the starling shifting its hold on an electricity cable, the silent imprinting of a badger paw beside the holloway. I think of how beautifully telling it is that for all my time spent recording this edge-land’s manifestation, of witnessing its histories and inhabitants coming to life, it still required that most human experience, a child being born, to feel the true sense and shape of being animal. And how, conversely, I feel all the more human for it.
Nearly twenty-four hours have elapsed since I stood in my kitchen waiting for the light to come, wrestling with the overbearing bleakness in this world. Sometimes it is impossible to come to terms with the things our species has done, and what it is capable of doing, but it can be easy to forget to hope too. And this is what I’m left with here and now. I write and circle a word in my notebook. HOPE. Even after everything there is hope because deep down people do care. People are good. They take jobs that mean staying awake all night watching a ward of sleeping mothers and their newborn children, or they travel halfway around the world far away from their own families to care for the sick and dying on another continent. If someone stumbles on an escalator or falls in the street, the first instinct is not to steal their bag but to help them. I’ve witnessed that countless times and never before appreciated it for what it really is. To touch and reassure, to hasten over and bear-hug an emotional father in a maternity ward, kindness, compassion, the selflessness, the care, the heeding – these are natural states too. We need to fight to keep them alive and foremost, not surrender them to the other impulses our species carries within: selfishness, self-interest and one-upmanship.
As I was leaving the hospital I saw a face I recognised. A man in his thirties leaning with his back against the wall in a lower corridor, his eyes staring, brows jumping, as though he was running through a very serious conversation with himself. It was Danny, one of the dads-to-be who’d attended the same series of baby-care classes as us a few weeks back. After a long and difficult labour his wife had just birthed a boy. We talked for a few minutes and he looked a little shaky, frightened and tired, so I put my arm round his shoulder. He smiled and then, suddenly and forcibly, sobbed. ‘Sorry,’ he said immediately, ‘I’m sorry.’ There are times when the distance between us becomes noticeably less, when you recognise the humanity in others and feel the common thread that knots and ties us all together. In the same way the zoomed-out eyes of those first astronauts were gifted a unique perspective of this planet – the preciousness and precariousness of a small pale-blue dot in cold, sparse space – I feel the cogs that turn unstoppably under the surface; the connection we all share from living out our days together and, at the same time, the beauty and viciousness those days entail. I think of how we owe it to ourselves to make the best of it all during our short-lived stay. And I wonder whether, if we could hold on to such truths, the answer to that question – what kind of world are we bringing you into? – might yet be different.
Exhaustion and crashing emotions are catching up with me. I start back for the car, looking up at the sleeping town as I walk. The lights shivering and twinkling against the black remind me of those images you see of distant galaxies forming. I think of Thomas asleep in a crib with Rosie curled next to him, then of the endless potentiality within our grasp. And for a moment the world seems right.
‘Oh and by the way, did you hear?’ Rosie asks. An intense, excited, delirious week has already passed since we brought Thomas home. For the umpteenth time, changing his nappy is a two-person job, requiring fresh Babygro, blanket, cardigan, hat, even a sponging-down of our bedroom wall.
‘Hear what?’
‘It was on the news at lunchtime. They’re calling off the badger cull.’
It’s a funny feeling that follows, like just after you yawn or sneeze: a little rush, then a stolen second of stunned reflection.
Later, while Rosie feeds Thomas upstairs, I flick on the kitchen radio and listen to the Commons announcement being replayed in full. Turns out it is less an abandonment, more a stay of execution. At the dispatch box Owen Paterson sounds as defiant as ever, emphasising it is a ‘postponement’ until next summer, resolutely insisting that there is no shift in government policy. But there is a shift, and I can feel it. I suspect he can too. Common sense, public conscience and scientific reason have prevailed and prevented – for now, at least. Who would have thought it? Forcing a change through scrutiny, assessment of evidence, resilience, determination and action; a national show of compassion towards the non-human world – sometimes even a little victory can go a long way to restoring your faith. It lightens the horizon, even as the days draw in and darken.
I am dreaming of the edge-land again, down in the midst of Scots pines and the cold, scrub-scattered banks. I’m walking by the river upstream, towards the viaduct, following something. But what, I can’t quite tell. A faint shift in the silence is all. The wood is grey and black. The river slips by. And I’m still going. Footstep after footstep. And it’s still going. Another slight fizz ahead, like a rustle, a soft tread on leaves or a leg shifting under a blanket. I roll my head on the pillow and, still dreaming, quicken my pace to reach the trees that lean and stretch from the bank like fingers pointing lazily northwards, over the Nidd. Another movement, this one a snuffle, like a fox cub, and I realise that I’m no longer looking through the trees but down into a dark den or sett. And that whatever is in there is working up to a scream. A pause and my mind reacts like a pilot flame firing in a boiler, yanking me from sleep. My legs kick out from under the duvet; my feet touch carpet and I push and pivot my body, covering the few feet to the Moses basket stationed at the end of our bed. I rub my eyes but there’s nothing to attend to. Thomas has settled himself. No scream erupts. It was probably just wind. He is perfectly happy, snug and swaddled with the fingers of his left hand poking out of the top in a nonchalant wave. I smile and put my finger in his palm, letting him grip it. ‘I’m here,’ I whisper. ‘Daddy’s here’. A rookie move. He clamps down hard and I’m caught. I try to work my hand free but each time I do he stirs, whimpers and makes like he’s about to shriek. I glance over at Rosie who is lost in the duvet and exhausted slumber, her arm tucked under the pillow. Anxious not to disturb her, I give up and stand in the dark watching Thomas sleep, wondering at the indescribable strength of the thing that’s grasped hold of me. It takes a moment to straighten it out, but it’s love, of course. It fills my head, my heart and this whole messy house.