Meadowland (10 page)

My guess is that the dog fox has taken a gift to his vixen, who is now suckling her cubs. I see him that evening trotting into Bank Field, then redoubling his
trotting tracks, working his way into the wind, into the dusk. (I do not think I have ever seen a fox walk except when stalking; like Labradors under the age of ten, they run everywhere.)

I barely recognized him. Gone is the gorgeous coat of winter; his moulting fur is threadbare and tatty.

In the newt ditch the water has again frozen. A solitary silver backswimmer (
Notonecta galuca
) is preserved in a crystal sarcophagus. A temporary tomb, yet dead forever. The topmost frogspawn is also encased in the killing ice.

29 M
ARCH
The tadpoles are not finished with trouble. When the ice melts the heron comes plunging his lightning beak into them. But he must find the oozy bottom of the ditch shiftily uncomfortable or the tadpoles unsatisfyingly titchy because he gives up after only a minute or two to flap off on tired wings.

There is something primeval about herons; they trail ancientness behind them. As it sluggishly flies towards the Grove it calls once; a screech from dinosaur times which terrifies an already melancholic sky.

The surviving tadpoles in the newt ditch stick together, safety in numbers, salvation in a heaving unsaintly black mass, save for a handful of brave explorers.

This is a trick lambs are less able to pull off.

Penny and Tris arrived home to say they saw a red kite sitting on a molehill in the top field. Except they then realized it was no molehill; it was a black lamb, and the kite was pulling it apart. The lamb had been running around happily thirty minutes before.

When I stomp up through the bone-cold mist, the kite is still there, tearing with its beak. Only when I get to within thirty feet does the kite launch up; it makes a half-hearted attempt to carry the lamb off but only succeeds in dragging it for a foot or two, before insolently making its way towards the mountain wall.

The black lamb in its curly astrakhan coat has had its guts slit open, pink and exposed. White heat rises from the body in gasps.

I carry away the dead lamb by its gangly back legs. The eyeless head, heavy with skull, swings and contorts in grotesque stringless puppetry.

Beyond the mountain is the fastness of the red kite. Once upon a medieval time the red kite was about as common in London as the sparrow, and more welcome because of its habit of cleaning the capital’s streets with its scavenging. Years and years of persecution by keepers on shooting estates beat back the bird to mid-Wales. By the 1950s the red kite population was down to about a hundred pairs. Through protection it has risen in numbers, and expanded its range.

Today I wish the dam wall of the mountain had held the bird back.

30 M
ARCH
The month ends in a blaze of clear-skied glory.

There is one perfect, silver-toned night, when the moon provides lighting, when the Escley has settled down to an expectant hush, and there enters from stage right a white ghost which drifts silently across the field.

A barn owl.
Tyto alba
. Its pale flat face gives me an unconcerned glance. Barn owls have peerlessly acute hearing, and the owl is listening for the squeaks of rodents rather than watching for their movement. When the owl reaches the thicket it banks right and makes a return pass over the field. The barn owl is the owl of meadowland: detecting noise with its asymmetric arrangement of ears is easier above grass than woodland, with its rustling interferences. On this night nothing catches the owl’s ear, and it veers off to the Grove. Lower Meadow is not the barn owl’s usual hunting ground for it prefers the still more open aspect at the top of the farm. This protractedly chilled March is making for desperate hunting measures.

Indisputably, there is something spooky about barn owls. They are the demon owls and death owls of
country lore. Shakespeare frequently employed them to dramatic effect, and nowhere better than
King Henry VI
, Part III, Act V, Scene 6, when, at the hour of his murder in the Tower, King Henry tells the villainous Richard of Gloucester, ‘The owl shriek’d at thy birth.’

The moon disappears behind a monstrous cloud. On cue, the barn owl emits its territorial cry from somewhere in the darkness of the Grove. Barn owls do not hoot. They screech, they scream. With the anguish of a dying child.

Across the Escley in the wood of the old quarry the tawny owl, the wood owl, the ivy owl, the brown owl, emits its comforting ‘tu-whit’.

Cuckoo pint

MORDANT CLOUDS FLOOD
over the mountain, and the field is wreathed in the dark that comes before the storm.

There is a single bright spot. Today on this 2 April the first cuckoo flower in the field blossomed, to nod its pale pink bloom in the gathering wind.

Any flower that comes with a host of local names is likely to be of human use, either as food or as medicine. The cuckoo flower has at least thirty local names, among them lady’s smock, milkmaids, lady’s mantle, lady’s glove, cuckoo’s shoes, which usually point to its habit of flowering to meet the arrival of the cuckoo, or innuendo-ishly, to its passing resemblance to women’s undergarments hanging on a washing line. The vernacular meadow bittercress is the most useful of names, since the needle-thin leaves of
Cardamine pratensis
make a peppery edible that used to be sold on medieval market stalls. Left uneaten by humans, cuckoo flower is the foodstuff of the caterpillars of the orange-tip butterfly.

Cardamine pratensis
shares one country name, ‘cuckoo pint’, with the wholly different lords and ladies (
Arum maculatum
). All the folky nomenclatures
of lords and ladies are of eye-winking,
Carry On
standard. Cuckoo pint here is derived from cuckold and ‘pintle’, meaning penis. Geoffrey Grigson lists as many as ninety nudge-nudge alternative names for
Arum maculatum
in his book
An Englishman’s Flora
. So: cuckoo cock, dog cocks, kings and queens, parson’s billycock, stallions and mares, and wake robin (Robin being the medieval equivalent of ‘Dick’). Such names are saucy souvenirs of British rural humour.

The plant’s shiny halberd leaves (with disfiguring black poxy spots) have been visible for a month in the hedges, but now the brown phallic spadix is . . . tumescent. It is a flasher in the hedge. On the warm days soon to come, midges, enticed by the meaty smell of the spadix, become trapped in the outer suggestive sheath from which it peeps. The midges will fertilize the hidden flowers, which in turn will become the beguilingly orange berries of autumn. At night the sheath will loosen, allowing the midges to escape.

The tubers used to be made into a love potion; in John Lyly’s play
Love’s Metamorphosis
of 1601, he had a character say, ‘They have eaten so much wake robin, that they cannot sleep for love.’ Whatever their efficacy as medieval viagra, the plant’s roots, properly prepared and baked, made a kind of arrowroot once sold as Portland Sago, and were the main ingredient in ‘saloop’ (salep), a working-class drink popular before the introduction of coffee and tea.

Gilbert White recorded thrushes eating the roots in severe snowy seasons, and the berries are devoured by several kinds of birds, particularly by pheasants. No animal will touch the leaves. They emit prussic acid when bruised.

Drops of rain linger, glisten, cling to the sword-blades of grass. They do better than a bronze beetle that climbs a grass stalk, falls, climbs, falls, never achieving escape.

A peacock butterfly is on the wing in the floating spring air, and nectars on the cuckoo flower. The butterfly spreads its wings as it feeds, advertising its garish eye-spots. They watch over the field, but really they are devices to deter predators. They are passable imitations of the eyes of a giant bird, of an avian monster. The pansy-coloured peacock is happily unmolested by birds, even when it provocatively warms itself on a flat stone.

Birds are in and out of the hedges in a constant traffic of nest building. Chaffinch. Great tit. Blue tit. Robin. They still seek the innermost sanctums because the hedges are still not in leaf. A favoured material, I note, is dried stems of grass from the meadow. The nest building of the birds invisibly binds the field with the hedge. Passing sunlight rebounds off the smooth woman’s skin of the hazel.

I am not the only farmer in the field. Away in the rough grass beside the Grove ditch are three tumps of yellow meadow ants. Estimating the age of anthills is approximate, yet not so vague as to be useless.
Lasius flavus
digs down into the earth and brings up its spoil at the rate of a litre or so a year; it is the spoil which makes the hill. The colonies beside the ditch are about five years of age; the home mounds in Bank Field from which the winged agates (in non-science speak, flying ants) flew on their drifty summer’s voyage of colonization are twenty. The steepest part of Bank Field burgeons with so many mounds it appears the earth has boils.

There is no finer soil than the soil of the meadow ants’ nest, for each individual particle is dug out and then hauled by the worker ants to take its place on the mound top, all stones and debris left behind. A few select blades of grass grow from the bald earth dome, like hairs on the head of a venerable curate.