n e w   s p e c i e s   o f   l e s s o n 

 

Holding a length of terracotta pipe in his hand he speaks to us for the first time: ’I found this down in the bottom field. It’s probably really old.’. We nod in agreement and his face opens into a smile with several teeth missing, though something else very present. You could be forgiven for thinking that he was also found down in the bottom field, after a journey through something dark, thick and story-like, having forgotten the reason for its beginning.

Rats are moving about the place. Rats that don’t care about being seen. Some may be deaf or blind. Chickens beget rats and the chicken farm next door has moved to another location taking its chickens with it, so the rats have crossed the fence. I stare at one for at least a minute as it dabs at some broken guttering and nettles. It could be offering me some thoughts about a length of Victorian pipe, about old roads that lay buried in the woods, or stones by the stream that were worn down by people who have turned into worn-out lumps themselves. Wringing out their clothes. Singing out through the blackthorn and bluebells. 

 

The rats are a part of the culture, you can’t just evict them, but they can be killed. That said, even the enormous cat — patched with old and new wounds from bouts with foxes — cannot be persuaded to give them more than a cautionary pat on the head.  Seems they don’t taste good enough for it to be worth engaging with their relentless fortitude. We spend an evening trying to imagine what the rats are giving back to the system — some kind of trophic magic? — only to conclude that they’re probably more human than creature.

Here’s a new species of lesson, asking you to think about complexity, about how, for example, something might be helping you and that you may never know that it exists. Not a spirit, but a thing so immeshed in the chaos of everything living and dying that you don’t have the nouse to brush the dirt from its buried sheen, or you manage to find the sheen only to realise it was actually the dirt all along. I’d always imagined chaos to be messy, but it’s starting to feel very different. Brambles sheltering saplings from grazing teeth for no other reason than their twisted form; and yet every thorn a reason for something it seems. Something as faint as the trigger being squeezed on a bottle of soapy water — cooling the stem, killing the aphid, infuriating the ant, growing the bean. 

Rules are everywhere, but the joy is that they cannot be separated; they shelter, break or devour one other; all we ask is that life runs in accordance with the ones we think most important. Starting another story, surrounded by piles of tools, he mentions something about the fuselage of a plane that a group of anarchic welders were thinking of stealing, but, after foraging through his memory for the end, remembers that he’s supposed to be showing us where the rope is kept. ‘Actually, that’s a long story…’ he says, fading away. We take the rope and string it between a horse chestnut and a black elder. From it we hang fragments of pressure-washed garden chairs, pegged like laundry on little bits of wire. The line, held up in the middle by a forked stick, swings backwards and forwards in the heatwave, clunking a different rhythm to the gardens of Japan. 

 

There’s chaos in the arc of a polytunnel. Trapped insects maddened by heat you can feel the weight of on your skin. Cannabis plants practising hypnosis with their crooked fingers. Tomatoes slumping onto dehydrated vines. Clearing nettles by the entrance we discover a bird that has long since died in a water butt. It’s large: crow-size. I roll it over with a twig and its head turns revealing a hooked beak and a large eye bleached by drowning. A young tawny owl floating in tawny leaves and tawny water. Later on that evening, I ask if I can take the head to clean and keep because owl skulls are an intricate, odd technology. She says I should ask first, in case he’s got any plans for it. Seems silly to push this any further.

Rules lap onto the banks of rules, treading other rules into sludge. She broke her leg slipping on the plastic mulch that makes the paths. Over the weeks we spend there, her leg mends well enough for her to stop walking with a crutch, as much a testament to strength than to healing. The paths have been made with this plastic webbing, enclosing cul-de-sacs of herb, flower, weed and legume. Fennel explodes elegantly above an applauding crowd of horseradishes; borage slips into soft focus; nettles rasp and linger in the gaps. ‘Always thought dock leaves had something to do with doctors…’ he says threading something metal together in his hands, ‘…I’ve since realised it’s because you can probably moor a fucking boat to them.’. The plastic paths are one of the few causes of debate. Other volunteers have expressed their disgust at them, perhaps for symbolism more than anything. The plastic mulch — a seemingly impenetrable barrier against weediness — soon becomes mulched into the earth, streams of it buried like old cassette tape. Mulch is a good measurement of time.

She drinks wine and he smokes dope. She guides him and he inspires her. She says that the best time to plant a tree is yesterday, as she takes us around the site on our first day. She says its nice to have mature trees as well as planting your own — this way you get to enjoy some, too. She says a weed is only a plant that’s lost. He’s sat by the door of the kitchen one morning, blowing the end of a spliff into the air and finishing off a sentence that links coronavirus with something co-ordinated and conspiratorial. ‘What’s going on here?' she enquires, stepping inside on her way to work. ‘O.. just something I’m probably not allowed to talk about,’ he replies blushing a darker shade of dirt. She laughs, drawing up a list of activities for the day, leading us as surely as the wind.

Nettle stings become a pleasure, tingling in your hands for days. Fat hen gives up its roots to the gardener like a chicken ready for the pot. You can burst cabbage white caterpillars until your fingers grow tacky with sweet brassica juice. The horror of killing a butterfly begins to shelter the more controversial crime of killing their babies. Digging into an enormous pile of well-rotten manure releases pockets of mammal scent and a collection of Fruit Shoot bottles. 

 

Hammer a wooden stake into the earth: feel how it forgives any injury the very moment it’s made: there is no violence in these actions, only action; every thin root tip breaks easily into air. As the sun sets, the cat moughs three times to signal it has dug a little life out of the raspberry beds. On closer inspection, a vole cowers under its paw. It chows the animal down in a series of light crunches and squelches; then, having careful cleaned the rodent from its whiskers, falls asleep beneath the canopy of a passion flower vine, the fruit of which has begun to ripen into yellow lanterns. 

 

Branches interlock without fault into branches. Somewhere the thud of a fruit, or a turd dropping onto sawdust. Teetering through the door of the barn: cello singing slightly out-of-tune; broken guitar sketching something underneath. Within orbit of this music, a dog who cannot see beyond its fringe, and has long gone deaf, sitting somewhat attentive all the same, barking for hours at howls and screeches it imagines to have come from the woods beyond. They bought him as a puppy from a gypsy camp: a fire eating terrier. If the fire throws up a spark the dog will chase it, lift it gently in its teeth, cool it with breath then eat it — many unattended caravans have been saved this way.  

 

Each night we sit outside, watching the slowing world turn into slower night. Bits of light jolt occasionally above their heads; the odd satellite peels into view. Some nights, clouds breathe over the mirror, but once, in a long moment, through a gap between them, I notice a star almost certainly staring back, shifting a little on its axis as if attempting to get a better view. ‘You can dissolve concrete with milk,’ he says, after a lengthy pause. ‘I once saw a yogurt factory destroy a concrete yard’. Hard not to believe anything with a fire close-by, spitting sparks for the dog to feast on.