Meadowland (6 page)

13 F
EBRUARY
Flurries of snow in the morning.

A raven flies over, emitting its basso profundo croak. The wingspan of a raven is four feet, and the bird always chills the land with its Gothic shadow. When I walk past the copse a jay screams at me from
within. (I jump, confirming Chaucer’s observation in
The Man of Law’s Tale
, ‘Thou janglest as a Jay’.) A wren starts up with its staccato alarm calls, the ‘tecks’ rattling off the hard, bare branches.

I watch it fly off into the sheltering mass of holly in the hedge. Another grateful wren joins it. And another. They are clubbing together their body warmth in a bid for life.

14 F
EBRUARY
St Valentine’s Day, the day that Geoffrey Chaucer was convinced that the birds became betrothed. In his
Parlement of Foules
, written
c.
1381, he visioned that on this day of love the birds met and Nature:

This noble emperesse, ful of grace

Bad[e] every foul to take his owne place,

As they were woned alwey fro yer to yeere,

Of foules every kynde

That in this world han fetheres and stature

Men myghten in that place assembled fynde

Byfore the noble goddesse Nature,

And ech of hem dide his besy cure

Benygnely to chese or for to take,

Over the field two wood pigeons, as if on cue, fly up high with clappering wings, then glide down in school-time paper darts. This is their courtship flight. They repeat this four times, their white wing-bars electrifying the running black clouds.

A lawn, when you come to think of it, is nothing but a meadow in captivity. When the British moved off the land in the nineteenth century to work in factories and towns, they could not quite bear to leave their rural roots and so created a patch of familiar green behind the house.

Alas, modern lawns have little wildlife value. Most are green deserts, marinated in chemicals, comprised of only a couple of grass species, and shorn stupid once a week in summer. But in the Middle Ages, a lawn was more like a meadow; it was a ‘flowery mead’, bursting with perfumed wildflowers and herbs and grasses.

These gorgeous, semi-wild acres were an integral part of medieval life, used to their full for walking in, dancing on, sitting in. And in houses and castles where privacy was hard to find, they were the perfect places for lovers to share secluded passion:

He had made very beautifully a soft bed out of
the flowers. Anybody who comes by there knowingly may smile to himself for by the upset roses he may see tandaradei! where my head lay.

If anyone were to know how he lay with me (may God forbid it), I’d feel such shame. What we did together may no one ever know except us two one small bird excepted tandaradei! and it can keep a secret.

Walther von der Vogelweide (
c
.1170–1230)

In a flowery mead flowers had symbolism, as well as beauty. Cowslip was Our Lady’s keys; daisy was the emblem of purity; forget-me-not was Our Lady’s eyes; foxglove stood for Our Lady’s gloves.

This I have to confess: there is nothing beautiful about Lower Meadow at the moment. The first flowers have not yet appeared, and the grass is thin and vapid, except for some rank wheaten tussocks where the horses dunged in the autumn. Even sheep will turn their noses up at the grass around a horse latrine. The field is a minor, lower-scale note of green. If that. And stubbly-short, and corrupted by the mud from the sheep’s cloven hooves, and by molehills and piles of horse shit which the weather has inexplicably failed to break and level down. The sunlight is spotlight cruel on the grass. Each blade is clearly discernible in its earth surround; a hair in the follicle of the planet. Few blades are longer than 3.25cm, and they are identical.
In this season the grass species cannot really be told the one from the other. But why do a peculiar few blades catch the microscopic breezes and tremble – and others do not?

It takes a moment of effort to see the tiny doily-carte leaves of incipient buttercups, the miniature clubs of clover, the mini shields of docks and nettles. Across the valley are fields that are already fluorescent green and table-top smooth. These are the fields doused in nitrogen. Say what you like about artificial fertilizer: you do get a nice shade of green.

I spend the morning, in the euphemism beloved of horse-owners, ‘poo-picking’, shovelling the excess of horse excrement into the link box on the back of the tractor to dump on the manure heap.

A scattering of jackdaws plays a game of its own devising in the turquoise sky. Small spears of lords and ladies have pushed through the earth into daylight.

15 F
EBRUARY
Dawn chorus at 6.45am. Thrushes going full steam; in the background at Little Trelandon, jackdaws.

Then it rains with high wind. A sweet fierce rain song. The field is desolation, not a beast or a bird to be seen. The Escley roars in the night.

17 F
EBRUARY
The Escley is quieter now; on the bank under the thicket the tunnels of the water voles have been cruelly exposed by the lately rampaging water. The river bottom, in long stretches, has been wire-brushed of all the silt, algae and detritus down to shining pink-and-green bedrock. Breathing in, I can almost smell pure, exhilarating oxygen coursing above the water.

Beside the copse an oblivious male blackbird tosses aside leathery hazel leaves looking for morsels.

A solitary male pheasant crows in the alders of Quarry Wood. The high dome of the evening sky is wiped free of cloud; a rose glow settles on the spreading girth of Merlin’s Hill.

19 F
EBRUARY
On the lane at night driving home from Freda’s parents’ evening, the headlights of the car pick out scatterings of pale leaves. Except they are not leaves; they are the white throats of hundreds of silent gazing frogs. The track down to the farm is similarly littered with befuddled amphibians. Penny picks a cautious way around the potholes and the frogs; the four-hundred-yard track takes five minutes for the car to descend. Even so, it is impossible not to crush some of the
Rana temporaria
.

The frogs that reach the house still have three hundred yards to go to the ditch-cum-pond in Lower Meadow where they habitually breed.

22 F
EBRUARY
The ditch in Lower Meadow sounds like a steelworks in the evening, so loud is the noise of mating frogs.

23 F
EBRUARY
The toads are also on the move to their ancestral spawning grounds.

In ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ George Orwell posited the emergence of
Bufo bufo
, frog’s cousin the toad, from its winter hibernation, after some awakening shudder in the earth or rise in temperature, as the most appealing sign of the coming of spring. The toad, he noted, unlike the skylark and the primrose, ‘has never had much of a boost from poets’ and added that fasting gave the toad ‘a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent’. Whether it’s high-mindedness or light-headedness, toads, as they crawl to their spawning grounds, are more maddeningly careless of their lives than frogs.

In the morning, there is the squashed body of a warty toad every yard on the lane. But away from cars
toads have a good chance of life; they emit a poison, bufotoxin, from their skin to deter predators.

A share of the toad survivors heads with unstoppable, will-not-be-diverted fervour for the shallow flood ponds at the bottom of Bank Field. Haughtily, they do not share the ditch in Lower Meadow with the frogs and newts.

With some squeamish caution I go down at night to the grassy watery depressions. I turn on the torch; there are roaming gangs of toads everywhere. There is nothing pleasant about toad sex: the males are wantonly copulating with each other, five or more fighting for one female in a so-called ‘mating-ball’, and a dozen are straddling a stone. I push a stick into the water; one toad lurches at it, embraces it and does not let go when I raise the stick in the air.

Next morning the bodies of two female toads are lifeless in the water. They have been drowned in the mating frenzy.