Common Ground (14 page)

Oh, I knew the game was up but who has the willpower to walk away from that? Certainly not me. At least, not then. It was like one long scene from
Caligula
. The epiphany came when driving home with a girl around dawn from a party in Weybridge. Sally or Sandy, I think her name was. No, it was Sandy. Mortimer. Nice girl. Married an MP in the end, I read later in the papers. We were both wired on Courvoisier and cocaine and I was gunning my beloved Lotus Esprit around the back roads somewhere near Meadowlands on the A317. The headlights picked out a shape frozen in the road. It was just there for a second – then thump. We skidded to a halt and after a moment Sandy started screaming. I remember the thick grey mist as I threw open the door and staggered back. I remember the smell of the exhaust. Lennon's ‘(Just Like) Starting Over' blaring out from the stereo. And there he was, lying in the road.

‘What is it?' Sandy yelled. ‘What is it?'

‘A hare.'

‘Oh, thank God,' she said.

Thank God?
How could she say that? I could feel tears coming; my chest was tightening. I sank to my knees and tried to stop shaking. You see, I saw myself lying there in that road. It was
me
. It was my flank heaving like the clappers; it was my legs all broken. Blood was bubbling from its nose, over its lip. And that eye. I saw the whole world in that eye, like a mirror. I understood everything in an instant. I saw what I'd become but even worse than that, I saw what we'd become. I was ashamed. I picked up the hare and walked off into the fields, carrying it in front of me like a sacrifice. Sandy was going crazy at me –
What the hell are you doing?
I shouted to her to drive herself home. Told her to keep the car. Keep everything. I had no need for it any more. I think it was somewhere near Staines when I realised the hare had stopped wheezing and I buried it in the soil of a rapeseed field and waited for sunrise. In the glow of a new morning I headed north, subsisting on the little cash left in my wallet until I threw it into the River Meden just north of Markham Moor.

I'm not ashamed to say that I cried frequently on my slow pilgrimage through this country; I cried for the way-wardness of humankind and the part I had played in it. Huddled beneath an old canal bridge I watched links of multicoloured traffic splashing endlessly over the rain-washed asphalt. I slept under the murky concrete of flyovers and crossed septic streams that reeked of disgorged chemicals. At dusk, I saw how the houses and tower blocks shimmered with wasted energy. I passed power stations and factories whose spewing funnels arrogantly hazed the sky with carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons. Rummaging for sustenance among field edges, I found the dock, plantain and bindweed dusted white and dying with pesticide residue. The corpses of harvest mice, titmice and sparrows lay limed in mass graves under hedges. Mixed in among them were crushed Coca-Cola cans, the sodden and torn bare-breasted pages of the
News of the World
and the flayed black skins of burst tyres. I was walking through a grey, choking world of the infantile and facile whose caretakers had become sick with greed and lust. I saw a paved-over land populated by people whose minds had forgotten the very ground they came from, who took the gift of life for granted. Humankind was atomised, enslaved, forced to compete with one another for jobs, for housing, for education. Numbed by alcohol, drugs, golf club memberships and shiny falsities, there was no thought for our place as part of the greater organism. Mother Earth had reached breaking point. Even she could no longer stand idly by and watch her spoilt son tearing apart the biosphere. I saw her rage manifested in the eyes of a poisoned sparrow-hawk flapping out its death throes on the verge of Common Lane, a mile to the east of Tickhill.
My love is not unequivocal
, I heard her scream in the clap of thunder that broke overhead. With each footstep my vision and understanding became clearer until, around Doncaster, sleeping rough in a belt of larch by the A1, I woke with everything straightened out in my mind. That was Saturday 21 March 1987.

By the time I tramped back here to Harrogate I was physically exhausted but my mind was gripped with righteous energy. I set about explaining the need for a new global ecological consciousness to the bored commuters parking their Rovers and Volvos at the railway station. Climbing onto the footbridge's handrail, I hailed them from high over the tracks: ‘Brothers and sisters,' I said, ‘stop what you are doing before it's too late. Everything in our sick civilisation is either made by or moved by fossil fuels. Fertilisers, pesticides, building materials, medicines; your fine suits and clothes, your power, your heat, your light, these transportation infrastructures, all are made of carbon. This will be the world's death. It will be your death … '

I didn't get much further before the station staff hauled me down, restrained me and issued a platform ban for life. I tried more subtle approaches after that: knocking on residents' doors or shadowing shoppers as I weaved through the crowds of the high street. I begged and pleaded that people looked at themselves and the world and recognise what was happening. Some laughed; some shouted; some pushed change into my hands; others punched, kicked or urinated on me as I curled up to sleep among the flat-pack boxes behind Woolworths. There were spells in hospitals and police cells. Once, when I was stricken with flu, an elderly lady kindly let me sleep for a week in her spare room until her son, a local estate agent, found out and threw me into the road. I took to handwriting pamphlets and petitioning the local council. Surely they'd see sense? But when reception staff began to routinely call the police upon my arrival, I adopted more guerrilla tactics, hiding out in the elegant gardens of local Conservative MPs' houses on the Duchy Estate and flyering their cars each morning. I was threatened with arrest on charges of vagrancy. Then trumped-up charges of sexual deviancy. In my absence, steps were taken through the county court to detain me permanently at High Royds mental institution on grounds of lunacy.

My name then, if I had one at all, was ‘madman', ‘tramp', ‘good-for-nothing', ‘blight'. I was chased and spat at, but that was nothing compared to the savage beating inflicted by a group of drunk football fans enraged at England's semi-final exit from Euro '96. Disoriented and half-dead, I crawled with my meagre belongings to the only place I knew no one would follow, where I could shelter and recover unmolested: the woods and meadows beyond the new urban limits of Bilton. Here, in the remnants of the realm that had once been my playground, I fell back on the deep-rooted knowledge accrued through my father's botanical obsession and my own historical studies, tending my injuries with the herbal remedies of the Romans. I used sphagnum moss to clean the wounds and then stuffed them with foul-smelling hedge woundwort –
Stachys sylvatica
– a legionnaire's cure-all I discovered to be incomparable in its efficacy. The bleeding stopped and my skin healed without infection. The fever that followed subsided quickly and a tea brewed from its purple flowers restored me to level spirits. It's true that I'll always carry a limp but at least I was able to walk again. Then, as my strength returned, I haunted the same spots I had as a boy, surviving on food I could forage, steal from supermarkets (on point of principle) and blag from the North Outfall allotmenters who tilled the soil between my old school and the sewage works. Each evening I lit a cooking fire on the bank above the old weir and watched the flickering shadows of Daubenton's bats hunting insects over the Nidd.

Readmitted to the societies of the wood and field, I fell into the rituals of earlier times. I prayed to the gods of Celt, Saxon, Angle and Jute and communed with the insects, animals and plants seeking to learn the secrets of their microbial, cellular majesty. I dabbled with mind-altering concoctions of liberty cap –
Psilocybe semilanceata
– and pine needles, stripping away my pain and loneliness. All those hours of research at UCL proved invaluable in this homecoming and I dredged my memory for ancient practices to enact among the trees. The ebb and flow of birdsong, the rise and fall of the sun, such things became my world. The slow spinning of the earth, the circadian rhythms of the solar day, the life and death of the flowers and the fruits, these whirred the mechanisms of my mended biological clock. I moved barefoot with the wax and wane of the moon, synchronising with the lunar month, realigning my entirety to the rotation of the planet in the universe.

In the middle of the wood is a small clearing that becomes a crucible of sunlight in summer. It is a celestial spot but hidden to all that don't know it, so it was a shock one day to find a man standing there as I returned from washing. Wearing a cardigan and tie, he was picking about my sleeping bag with a stick, oblivious to the glorious light and occasionally looking about himself like he'd lost something. It took a while before I realised it was my eldest brother, George.

‘What the hell are you doing down here?' he asked. ‘We're all worried. Joy says she saw you shoplifting in Asda last week. For Christ's sake, John, look at the bloody state of you.'

I told him everything, hoping he'd understand. I laid out my thoughts on carbon societies and greenhouse gases, and why the myth of unending growth could only result in destruction. I explained the danger of indifferent, short-term political economies and revealed my insight into the micro-ecosystems of the hedges and woods. I thought he'd been listening, but evidently he'd been growing angrier. Spittle flew from his mouth as he told me he was a prospective councillor for the Harrogate Bilton and Nidd Gorge division in coming local elections. He said my living there could ruin his chances if word got out.

‘You better not eff this up for me,' he yelled. ‘I've worked too hard for it. I sweated blood in the office while you were gallivanting around London high as a kite.'

The
coup de grâce
was his assertion that my presence there was illegal, that, by law, I could be,
should
be, removed. We argued for a while and I accused him of colluding in the widespread exploitation and destruction of this world. He said I had sustained a serious head injury and that I needed proper care. Round-the-clock care. The sort of care where they lock you away. ‘You're ill, John,' he said. ‘Time to stop with these daft ideas and speak to someone.' At these words, I asked him to leave, which he did after throwing a crumpled twenty-pound note on the ground and calling me a damn fool. Off he stamped through the trees, swearing. I watched him go and realised that I was speaking those passages from Luke out loud, just as I had on Harvest Festival all those decades before.

The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.' Then he said, ‘This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I'll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”' But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?' Do not worry about your life, what you will eat; or about your body, what you will wear. Life is more than food; the body more than clothes.

The winter that year was a particularly long and bitter one with deathly nights and short sunless days of rain, frost and sleet. It showed no sign of letting up, and by the last days of March I was ready to go further and consign my form entirely to the divinity of the radiant dawn, Eostre, if only her up-springing light would come again to warm us beleaguered survivors. Pledging to do her will and become a living spectacle of her joy and blessing, I built a bonfire at sunrise on Easter Sunday, 2007. As the smoke filled the canopy of the wood, I heard St John's Church ringing out the good news of the resurrection over the town, over my parents' greening bones. I thought of my father sitting in his garden and smiled. It had been a long time since anyone called me Sir Hare, but I felt myself again. I knew who I was.
What
I was.

That evening hares flocked in the fields. A drove of them, maybe thirty or forty, were gathering in the gloaming. I rushed from the trees to join them, tearing over the soil in giant leaps. We ran together east of here along the edge of dense hazel thickets, up sloping fields and through hedges until I could run no more and collapsed panting on my back. It was there that I chanced upon a strange relic lurking in the undergrowth, a dome of gritstone buried by brambles, wood anemone and bluebell leaves. I only noticed it at all because of the marshy ground and stench of rotten eggs. Brushing aside the foliage I revealed a capstone covering a spring, potent with the smell of sulphur. On the stone were carved the initials ‘JW' and the numerals ‘1778', a date that had been chiselled just as deeply into my memory by Mr Wallbank back at Bilton Endowed School. It was the year the Enclosure Acts were passed in Harrogate. The enormity of that discovery dawned on me, sending me reeling backwards into a carpet of greater stitchwort. As I stared at it, the simple stone testament of ownership became the embodiment of dispossession. With such markers they had broken up, divided and enclosed our beautiful world, turning fields, springs, trees and beasts into commodities for mankind to claim, buy, sell and kill for. Global enclosure, exploitation, industrialisation, climate change, I saw all of it radiating out from that capstone, leaching out its poisonous darkness over the land. Eostre had clearly led me there for a purpose and I wasn't about to disappoint her.

Sending up a prayer of strength to
Tiw
, god of war, I set upon the stone, heaving and hauling away until I wrestled it sideways into the foliage. From beneath, water bubbled and gushed through black mud. I bent down and scooped a hollow, then drank thirstily, handful after handful, raising my wet face to the moon and shouting my joy and thanks.