It’s possibly my least favourite writing group exercise, the one where we go from field edge to field edge. Up the lane, onto another field. Only rarely do we get to cross the field, mostly we're constrained to its edges. Maybe I just resent that constraint.
It’s a bit tricky, because it is our group leader’s favourite exercise.
I love to see him so excited by it, but the busy-ness of it gets in the way for me. We don’t have long enough in one place for me to find whatever it is that’s waiting for me – or if I do, not long enough to grab hold of it, swallow it, digest it.
So instead I just make notes. Random words. Basic compost. Chuck everything on the heap and hope it will alchemize into something later.
I write down everything I overhear. Flower names. Snippets of story.
I write down questions: why is it a pill box, and what do hats have to do with anything? Is it a common blue? Who was the old woman of the lane? Are we in the middle of this field or between two separate ones? Was there once a field boundary here, a hedge, a track?
I write… words. I don’t write poems or even sentences. Just words and phrases.
Stop by the sluice, listen to the water, trickling. Am moved on before I can investigate the gauge and water levels. The water in the cut is black and seed-head strewn. Why black?
Why are gates five-barred? Is that the minimum number of cross-rails for stability? Is it even true? How often do I bother to count them? I will from now on. Maybe. More likely I will forget to do so.
Someone says: that’s a froglet, that one’s a toad, you can tell by… I don’t catch how to make the distinction. I’m too busy looking at reeds…and paths…and gates…
I write words: fat hen, pill box (collapsing), old man’s beard, travellers’ joy, grass, thistledown, oxeye daisy, scarlet pimpernel, speedwell. Field. Ghost tree. Stop talking. Let me think.
I bring my camera to my hand and my body to my knees. Tiny things that matter to me are pimpernels and speedwells. Red and blue and small and trampled over.
A common blue butterfly takes our eyes away from pages and we watch it scattering its fairy dust until it settles on a grass stem. It rests improbably long with so many people milling about. Long enough, breathing deeply, probably, for JW to fetch his phone and the relevant app to confirm our
identification. I wonder if the small, delicate, winged creature has her own name for herself. I’m sure she couldn’t give a pollen grain for what we think: more important things to attend to. Mates to attract and such like.
We talk about meadow flowers but arable weeds, and that somehow seems wrong. JW corrects himself when he catches himself. I love his confluence term of ‘arable-weed-flowers’.
Whenever my helpmeet talks about the weeds in my space, I remind him that there are no weeds in my garden, only wild flowers. To be fair, I have to remind myself as well. I thought I read somewhere that grass would outgrow just about anything else. I got that wrong. Or they did. I keep over-seeding. And the wild flowers keep over-weeding.
Meanwhile back up by the saltmarsh, the barley escapes the field, into the hedgerow, up onto the pill box roof.
I write: waiting for settling, but will forget what I meant by it.
People keep talking to me. I’ve been told that I am good at listening. Maybe so, maybe not, but for sure I cannot listen and think at the same time. I cannot write while people talk.
Every comment steals a fraction of my attention and scatters it out onto these fields, into these hedges, up into the sky.
Smudgy sky.
I learn that the ghost tree that has scooped me into its story is an elm…and I listen to Adam’s lesson on the dying of elms and their recovery…I have a ghosts project somewhere in one of my writing files. I love spectral trees. And ruined buildings. And faded adverts painted onto brickwork. And paths that are no longer, quite, there. And old railway lines, now just track bed and ballast and
still-blue-painted bridges.
I think about unravelling. I think about the old spider woman who spun the world into being and whether anyone would have the patience to unspin a web, rewind the silk for re-use. I wonder if spiders have thought of that.
We stumble on litter and read the words on packaging. I wonder who Thanos is or was.
I wonder about wooden poles with signs warning of the danger of death.
I wonder why a path across a field exists.
But I keep coming back to spiders. I dreamt of spiders and in my dream they were on my leg, one black and orange like the bird spider we had in the art department in The Avenue Comprehensive school, the other was black and white striped like the tiny jumping spiders on my garden table, but the size of my hand, and I was freaking out just as I would in my waking world. I am not good with spiders. It is two days later that I read about Old Spider Woman who, in the Diné / Navajo tradition spun the world into being. The world now unravelling.
It is a week later that I am woken in the early hours by something crawling over my legs – and get up and switch on lights and only slightly, which is to say massively, lose my composure at the actual spider in my actual bed. I evict it. I leave lights on for an hour or so. I drink unnecessary wine and read Robert Macfarlane’sThe Gifts of Reading to calm my breath and heart-beat.
The reason I hate August is because it is the month the big hairy spiders come indoors. Today there was one on the wall in my living room. It hid before I steeled myself to approach.
Did I say, I don’t do spiders?
Back in the fields, I notice how heavy the heads of wheat are after the storms. Later I will think that I have coined the word “brackled” only to discover it already exists and means precisely this, the broken-stemmed corn after heavy rain.
Half-way down the path, I find a plastic letter G. It is pink. And I wonder why it mattered enough to be held into the field, and not enough to be missed when it was dropped. I wonder if it has magnets in the back, because in the moment I remember a magnetic white-board I got for Christmas when I was small. It was a dual-easel. Magnetic whiteboard on one side, blackboard for coloured chalks on the other. It was not a good Christmas day. We were naughty, or Mam was tired, or someone did or said something to make her mad. We were made to put all our presents away – but Dad intervened and said we could choose one, only one, to keep out. I kept that easel. I remember chalk-drawing a Christmas tree, with baubles, and candles. I remember the smell of the chalk. I remember feeling sorry for whatever it was I had said or done to make Mam so angry.
I don’t know if it was me. But I can’t imagine who else it could have been.
Not every Christmas day was perfect. I remember the one much later, when my brother phoned to say that he was going to be divorced…news he might well have saved for another day. I remember holding Mam, letting her be sad and angry, and trying to tell her not to be, and not knowing what to do, especially when my Dad’s only comment was “I’m not surprised.”
Perhaps he would be surprised that the divorce never happened. Perhaps not then either.
I remember that day, because my brother was alone (or not alone) and a long way away. And my parents were home, and I was with them, when I would rather have been in my own bedsit with Clive within reach. I remember it as a no-one-talking day. It was a hard-edged silence. Sharp, like flint, designed to be cutting. We ate a Christmas dinner. For what it was worth. There may have been candles – Mam did that for me – but again, there might not have been that year - all rituals were ruined. Mostly I just remember Mam on the sofa, breaking her heart for her son. In a way that I know she would never have done for her daughter.
I forget about the pink plastic letter and look at the powerlines. I listen to a vehicle way down in the village, its reversing warning echoing up the hill. I look at St Nicholas’ church in the distance and start to wonder about why footpaths are where they are. In other words, I start to step away from what really matters. I start to breathe again.
