Common Ground (30 page)

That night a vivid dream comes as I sleep. What my conscious mind has failed to recall all week, my unconscious grabs and bundles into my brain. I see a boy in a bracken field. Fair-haired. Bob-cut. Nine or ten. Wearing shorts, T-shirt and sandals. He is pushing his knees up a rise after his brother who runs ahead on faster legs. It's a hot day and they've already been swimming in the beck higher on the moor. Up where the curlews call out
cour-leeee
in the huge, thick, flustered air. Now, in the late-afternoon sun, the bracken smells earthy, damp, woody, and grows tall as a cornfield. They push through it, cracking stems, sweaty and red-faced with the sun, knowing they're supposed to be home soon, but neither wanting to leave. Approaching their den, they crawl and wriggle through its branched entrance and down into its hole. From here they can see the houses in the valley below. Their house. The edge of a shining town. Then the younger boy shifts on his belly. He looks down at his feet because something is moving past his shoe. He grabs his brother's arm and they both watch in silence as the snake noses up the bank, its little head with piercing black and gold eye, its thick olive-green body and yellow collar.
Grass snake.
I watch them run home screaming for their mother. But I remember it well. Our screams were from excitement, not from fear.

I wake in the morning feeling foolish. And selfish. My memory has revealed some unavoidable truths: the only reason I ever came to know the edge-land in the first place was because that world had been opened up for me. When I came to find this margin I didn't have to learn how to be in it, how to navigate its desire-paths, how to open it up and see its layers, listen to its histories and draw closer to its wildlife; I didn't have to because I already knew how to do all that. Thanks to my mother and father, the fringe had always been a mysterious and wild adventure playground, a refuge, frontier and a portal since childhood. Could I really be against others having the same opportunities? We live in a different world, a changing world. I can't remember how many people I've encountered in the edge-land in all the days I've spent there, but it's not many. And apart from that snowy morning in March when they came to play in the meadow, I don't recollect seeing any children. My concerns over the controlled experience of landscape may be valid, but it's a battle to be had down the line. There's a more pressing crisis. Society is so disconnected from something
real
that perhaps a tarmac cycleway and signposts are required to reach such spaces. At the very least, I suppose, it is a beginning. A way
in
. And maybe as people cut through the meadows or cross the viaduct on their bikes, the pollen, seeds and grasses will lure them deeper; the woods and river will grow in their imaginations. Entranced, they'll wander off the track, cut their own paths and slowly become transformed. It happens to us all.

I look over at Rosie in our bed. She only sleeps on her side now, two pillows under her head and one between her legs to support her hips. She is full-term and suits it, carrying the baby ‘neatly' – as the books describe it – at her front, so that you could scarcely tell that she's pregnant if you were standing behind her. Aside from these precise sleeping positions, she is more comfortable than she has been for months. As we get up and fuss around in the kitchen making breakfast, I notice how the bump has recalibrated her spatial awareness. The way she shifts her body back to the exact distance now needed when opening drawers and squeezes past things inch-perfectly, it's as if this shape has always been waiting within her. Inside the safety of its womb wall, our little traveller has come an infinitely greater physiological distance, blooming from a cluster of dividing cells to its final, recognisable form. I try to picture what it must look like now: a tiny assemblage of limbs and fingers and toes, thundering heart, eyes tight shut. Alive but not yet
alive
, cradled safely between Rosie's bones, it is almost ready to emerge.

Through the skylight in my office, an early September day. Beautiful blue skies, long shadows and the air chilled and sharp. Best of all is a vast cloud in the shape of a hare hunkered and hiding in its scrape. I reckon it must be slap-bang above the edge-land. I'll take that as a sign. I open my laptop and search for a word I overheard the tree cutters mention: ‘SUSTRANS' – the organisation behind the cycleway. I know the name. It is a sustainable transport charity responsible for the conversion of great lengths of disused railways into foot- and cycle-paths around and about Britain's towns and cities. It is an agency of the edge-land, part of its goal being to promote open access, reduce traffic and increase activity among the unused, unloved areas that fringe our lives. You'd have to be mad to be against that. And as its website resolves on the screen, I'm immediately reassured. There is a photograph of a cyclist, her back to the camera, with sundogs haloing around her. She's cycling away down an old railway. To her right rises the edge of a town; a wall of semi-detacheds sits on a lip of messy, tangled greenery. Beside the track there's bindweed in flower and rosebay willowherb. It looks to be late August or early September, judging by the light. Around now, in fact. The physical resemblance to
my
edge-land is uncanny; it could be Bilton's old railway. Heck, it
will
be Bilton's old railway soon enough. It feels premonition-like –
Here you are, see? Nothing to worry about. Just more people.
And it's true. The ground in the photograph is still wild edge-land; it still possesses the same untamed DNA, it has just undergone a necessary metamorphic shift. An alteration from a solitary to a social existence. A progression essential for all perpetuation and survival.

The homepage photograph fades into another: people walking and cycling to work along an old canal; then another: kids on a bridge surrounded by scrub and high security fencing. It's a close-up and I can see something in their faces: a sense of belonging. This is edge-land as true common ground – reclaimed, re-purposed, nourishing, loved again. And now I feel even more foolish about my resistance to the old railway's new incarnation. The margins
should
be made part of people's daily experience. Of course they should. The wild collision and coexistence of human and nature, the complex interlocking of infrastructure and land, the bizarre and beguiling interchange of the layers of history and modern life – this is what tomorrow's decision-makers must know, experience and understand. This is the reality of our species' interaction with our environment. The edge-land is a visceral reminder that we are all part of a process. It teaches us more about the way things were, are and will be than any grand, aspic-preserved landscape or sterile park. It shows us what we truly are: authors of our own transformations and the transformations happening throughout our world.

The acrid smell of burning drifts across the edge-land again, just like 1979. Not from burning cars this time, but Dense Bitumen Macadam brewed to 200°C off-site and brought, broiling, to the bottom of Bilton Lane. A man flicks a lever on a truck and empties a fresh torrent into a wheelbarrow before steering it along a plank to the rest of his team.
Slush.
Return. They are working fast, taking advantage of this high, warm spell of afternoon sun to sweep this steaming treacle lacquer over the old railway. Another skin, the brown-black track, dries behind them. It is 2.5 metres wide and 60 millimetres deep, rollered into flawless billiard-table flatness, banded on either side by the orange sawdust and turned earth. Just on the edge of this cleared zone, a nettle was caught by a strimmer two weeks previously. Or rather, it was half caught. One side of its thick stem was flayed into shreds, causing the plant to lurch sideways and carry the chrysalis hidden amid its lower leaves from the path of the strimmer's return.

Slush.
Sweep.
Slush.
Sweep. The bitumen is spread closer. The smoking tar sets quickly over the ants' nest and the raked soil where the willow tree stood. A trundling roller grumbles past, vibrating the ground. After seventeen days of disassembling and reassembling, something moves inside the chrysalis. The smooth plates of the exterior crack and part. A hunched, black, caped creature pushes itself through the rift. First its left antenna springs up from its stored position beneath its body, then its right. Then front legs flicker out; long legs that give it the grip to drag free its changed body. Resistance falls away. The female red admiral scurries from its now transparent pupa and climbs, carrying its still-wet wings on its flanks, like sodden leather saddlebags.

Slush.
Sweep. One of the workmen manoeuvres to get a better angle to brush the macadam and stamps on the nettle, crushing the empty chrysalis. The butterfly holds firm to its leaf until the trembling stops, then continues scrambling up, moving from stem to stem and crossing over into the branches of a blackthorn, warmed and edged by the sun. Underwings folded up, it waits, drying, unrolling its tongue to caress its furry chest, like a dog licking its coat. Then it opens those wings. Pulsing. Pulsing.

Another red admiral flits over to join it. A male butterfly from further north is migrating south, corkscrewing from ivy flower to ivy flower seeking nectar for strength. For a while they flash around each other and bob upwards, as if blown in great breaths from the ground, the last flakes of a vanishing summer. Then the male is up and away again, climbing higher, tumbling towards the invisible lure of heat on the horizon. The female doesn't follow; it remains basking on the edge-land's blackthorn. And it will stay until March, hibernating through the cold months deep in the pile of cut buddleia stacked beside the cycleway, waiting to be lit by the fiery light of the first warm days of spring. Butterfly, metaphor, indicator species: its presence here testament to the restored health of this patch of earth; its survival through the winter warning of a warming planet.

How long does a nettle live?
The thought bursts in. It'll do. He grabs and holds it. Unpicks it.
How long does a nettle live? A year? Ten years? A hundred? More? Think. Think.
Standing at the edge of the wood, half-in, half-out, he breathes hard from running as he stares at a clump of
Urtica dioica
, turning the question over in his mind, forming it into a wall to keep all other thoughts at bay. It has been the same all the way back – Albert, Boulogne. Then Folkestone, London, York, Harrogate. Two days of travelling through the Dear Homeland (a world he can hardly bear to see exists), his attention shifting and fixing on a succession of little distractions. The note of the ship's horn; the rattle of a train window in its casing; the yellow teeth of a woman on the omnibus who, noticing his stare, smiled at him and touched his knee (‘we're so proud of you, of all of you'). Her husband's quick, apologetic face and admonishing hiss –
Louise, please
. It is a mental game, a concentration game, an attempt to drill the mind back into proper order by exhausting it in the chase of some innocuous puzzlement. A hope that, if pursued into a fatigued rest, it might sleep and wake restored. Memories gone. Arthur gone. And now the focus is this: a nettle, one of a fresh crop that has sprung forth with the autumn. And all around it the brambles and the pines, 100-foot pines, and clear air, the smell of the river and the creaking of crows.
How long does a nettle live? A year? Ten years? A hundred? More?

How long will any of us live?

He'd meant to go home. He wanted to try to find that small part of his old self, the small, shrivelled husk of Thomas Watson he'd folded away after 1 July and sent home wrapped in a letter to Elizabeth. He'd convinced himself that if he could just get back to Bilton Hall he might become that man again, at least for long enough to have a bath and dinner. He could only stay a night at any rate. Five days' (enforced) leave meant two to get home, two back, leaving a solitary twenty-four hours in the middle. He'd walked quickly from Starbeck station to the gates of the drive, intending to march right in with a bright call out, like his mother and Evans would have expected him to. Like he used to when returning from Ampleforth for the summer. But there'd been an incident. The little muffled voice outside the butcher's.
Mother! Mother! Look, an officer!
Running feet. Catching up.
Just back, are you, sir?
And blow me, if he wasn't dressed like a Tommy. Khaki, puttees and peaked hat.
We had a Zepp, sir, we did. Over Bilton Lane. Have you seen much?
The boy's face horrified him, morphing as it did into Wilson's, Brayshaw's, Daley's, any of the underage in his platoon who went into the mud. He'd needed to hurry away.
Concentrate
.
The game.
The sparrows in the hedge. The oak's outline. The surface of the long road that led him home. The orange sun above the larches. Anything would do. He'd paused to smoke at the end of the drive. The black twisted foliage of the wrought-iron gates had only just been brushed down and there was still the strong scent of soap. Water steamed in puddles beneath. And a handmade sign in black Gothic:
Welcome Home Our Brave Son
, tied with yellow ribbon. The hall was there, just visible. Redoubtable. Unchanged. Dappled by the early-afternoon light and shade. People assembling. His mother would be drifting from room to room, ordering, organising, enacting her role splendidly: Evelyn Watson – the heiress. Insisting hot water was brought up for his bath. Checking the flowers in the drawing room. French doors opened over the lawns to make the most of the views over Spring Wood.
He so loves Spring Wood, you know
. Tablecloths pressed by the maids. The slow
tick-tock
of unbearable time in the drawing room. Cards with Bible readings and sentiments –
Remember
,
Honour
– propped up against polished silver. The vicar hovering, hands clasped. His sisters. And, of course, later on, Elizabeth and her parents. Sweet, amiable Lizzie who hadn't received a letter from him since August, but had kept up her loyal and loving correspondence all the same.
My dearest darling …
Perhaps Mr and Mrs Hutton would appear at the party's end, shuffling gravely into the room in their mourning dress. Living ghosts, stiff faces trembling, waiting for their moment to ask, their voices trailing away.
We wanted to thank you for your letter. It was a great comfort. Is there anything more you might …? My wife … we'd like to know …