Meadowland (22 page)

The horsefly is a silent and murderous biter. It comes not in ones or twos but whole battalions, drawn from afar by the smell of sweat. I become twitchy, like the horses do, expecting their attack, and begin slapping paranoically at any sensation on my skin. When the horseflies infiltrate past my defences and inject their probosces I smack them dead.
Haematopota pluvialis
means ‘blood-drinker of the rain’. Half an inch long, slate grey, horseflies also have the nickname ‘gadfly’, a reference to either the fly’s roving habits or the Middle English
gad
for pointed tool or iron (the same root as goad).

After crushing the biting flies, I wipe the blood off on my shirt. I look like the lead in
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
.

For good measure I am also bitten by
Tabanus bovinus
(the horsefly with the hairy thorax) despite its supposed preference for cows.

In the evening I look upon my work. Eternity would not be enough to contain all the summer eves
one could enjoy if they were like this, despite the horseflies. I chew on a stem of foxtail that escaped the hook.

Another blissful, rosy summer’s eve, in Herefordshire, the unknown county.

The buzzard young are on the wing, making the meadow their nursery hunting ground. A wood pigeon coos drowsily in the oaks. Grasshoppers are chirping . . . For a second I think I hear a nightjar.

There was a nightjar here once, on a similarly warm and windless night. In the near dark, its churring seemed to emerge from the very landscape, as if the earth was vibrating. Then, for a second, the bird flew up against the sinking sun and performed a silhouetted cartwheel along the mountain top. Or so it appeared in a glorious moment of trompe l’oeil. Then it flew away. For the nightjar, the field was just a stopover on the way to Ewyas Harold Common or on to the mountain. It was not home.

I have seen them on the common in daylight, reposing like lizards in the trees. The nightjar is not an attractive bird, what with its drab plumage and gaping mouth; it was said to steal the milk from goats, hence the local name of goatsucker. But the nightjar is entirely an insect eater, catching its prey on the wing
like the martins, only at night, using the bristle to the sides of its mouth to funnel insects into the chasm of no return.

I have decided to sleep under the stars.

They say that if you can remember the sixties you weren’t really there. By the same token, if your night under the stars was free of insect bites and rustling you didn’t really do it. But better to lie out in a sleeping bag in the open than in a tent, which is only another form of house. Tonight heaven is my roof, the hedges my walls. A procession of late night birds and early night bats fly over me, and a hedgehog snuffles along to give me a fright with a human-sounding snort.

The jackdaws do not seem to sleep, but jackdaw young have no sense of danger, so need great and loud teaching. Lots of it, apparently.

Then the field folds me in soft wings.

One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow.

Haying, of course, used to be a communal activity, although the raciness of traditional English folk songs about mowing suggests that the day’s activity extended to rolls in the stuff:

’Twas in the merry month of May in the Springtime of the year
,

All down in yonder meadows there runs a river clear
,

And to see those little fishes how they do sport and play
,

In comes three jolly scythesmen to cut those meadows down
,

With a good leathern bottle and the ale that is so brown;

For there’s many a smart young labouring man comes here his skill to try
,

Then in come both Will and Tom with pitchfork and with rake
,

And likewise black-eyed Susan the hay all for to make;

For the sun did shine most glorious and the small birds they did sing
,

Then just as bright Phoebus the sun was a-going down
,

Along comes two merry piping men approaching from the town.

They pulled out the tabor and pipes, which made the hay-making girls to sing
,

They called for a dance and they jigged it along,

They all lay on the haycocks till the rising of the sun.

With ‘jug! jug! jug! and sweet jug!’ how the nightingale did sing!

Another song, ‘As I Was a-Walking’, recalled:

A brisk young sailor walked the field

To see all the pleasures Flora would yield

He saw a maid dressed in a smock

Busy a-raking, all round the hay-cock.

When it is really hot I, to the children’s ire, put on a terrible Wild West voice and say, ‘It’s hotter’n hell.’

I have to get up at dawn to beat the heat, but even so, by ten it is warmer than Hades. This fierce morning
light shows every detail of the mountain: each sheep, each scattered hawthorn tree, the tumbled careworn rock face of Red Darren.

More and more often I rest by the river. Spit bubbles come towards me in flotillas. Leaves roll along. The kingfisher flies past. ‘Zeet. Zeet’. The mallard mother softly calls to her four remaining chicks, now as camouflaged brown as she, and they paddle away in a safety routine now familiar to all. Walking back into the meadow I alarm a sunning gatekeeper which flutters up and off; the golden butterfly takes its name exactly from this habit of rising up, which reminded people in past centuries of the men employed to mind tolls, who would sit up when customers appeared.

It is late July, and this is the first gatekeeper I have noted this year.

The adults lay their eggs singly on grasses beneath bramble, blackthorn and hawthorn bushes where the grass stems are not grazed by animals. At night I take a torch to a corner of Marsh Field protected by a barbed wire fence. Gatekeeper caterpillars, which are nocturnal, are a nondescript brown, and feed on grasses, with a preference for fine species such as the fescues, bents and meadow grasses. Despite an hour-long search I find no gatekeeper caterpillars.

But the devil’s bit scabious in the meadow is hanging with the mace-spiked black caterpillars of the marsh fritillary.

And meadowsweet now trips lightly out of the hedge and into the damp ground by the newt ditch. A common sight in the old British countryside,
Filipendula ulmaria
has disappeared along with the water meadows that were its main abode. The creamy summer flowers are sweet to smell when rubbed under my nose, though an oenologist would note the hints of almond. In Tudor Britain meadowsweet was one of the principal ‘strewing herbs’, scattered on floors as an air-freshener, and the great herbalist Gerard went so far as to say that meadowsweet

farre excelle all other strowing herbs for to decke up houses, to strowe in chambers, halls and banqueting-houses in the summer-time, for the smell thereof makes the heart merrie and joyful and delighteth the senses. Neither doth it cause headache, or loathsomeness to meet, as some other sweete smelling herbs do.

It was meadowsweet, ‘and willows, willow-herb, and grass’ that caught Edward Thomas’s eye on that baking day of June 1914 when his steam train drew up unwontedly at Adlestrop station, and he made a
photograph in poetry of pastoral England on the eve of war.

Some say the flowers of meadowsweet fizz, others say the blossom is spun as finely as vanilla candyfloss. All I know is that the feminine delicacy of the meadowsweet’s flowers, which are in bloom from June to September, is hinted at by the names lady of the meadow, maids of the meadow and queen of the meadow. In the Welsh mythical tales collected in the
Mabinogion
, the magicians Math and Gwydion take flowers of oak, of broom and of meadowsweet to create ‘the fairest and most beautiful maiden anyone had ever seen’, Blodeuwedd, or ‘Flower Face’. So womanishly graceful is meadowsweet that in Irish mythology, Cú Chulainn, the testosteroned hero of the Ulster Cycle, used meadowsweet baths to calm his rages.

Like the fair Blodeuwedd, who would turn out to be a homicidal adulteress, meadowsweet has a secret. The dark leaves whiff of childhood TCP. So the plant’s contradictory nature is also caught in such oxymoronic local names as bittersweet and courtship-and-matrimony. Even meadowsweet is misleading, because the plant is not named for its liking for meadows but for the role its leaves played in embittering and aromatizing medieval mead. Hence its appearance as Middle English
medewurte
in Chaucer’s
The Knight’s Tale
. Meadowsweet, it might be said, is a
plant with a history as well as literature. Evidence of meadowsweet has been found in Bronze Age burial sites, and the Druids are said to have ranked it as one of their most sacred herbs. When Gerard noted the plant’s characteristic of not causing headaches he was more right than he possibly knew; the flower head contains salicylic acid, from which, in 1897, Felix Hoffmann created a synthetically altered version of salicin. The new drug was named aspirin by Hoffmann’s employer, Bayer AG, after the old botanical name for meadowsweet,
Spiraea ulmaria
. This gave rise to the class of drugs known as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).

On this furnace-hot afternoon, when no bird can be bothered to sing, and I am unsure whether the metre-tall meadowsweet looks more like debutantes gathered for a ball or a cresting white wave, I have picked twenty full sprays of meadowsweet for cottage country wine. So deadly intoxicating is the nectar that hosts of hoverflies will hardly let go their sucking tongues even as I put the flower heads in the carrier. Meadowsweet is beloved of insects; the gall midge
Dasineura pustulans
has already burrowed into the leaves and left unseemly yellow blisters; and the plant is the larval food for all manner of butterflies and moths.