Love and Death

Love and Death

A greater spotted woodpecker flew into my window and killed himself on Friday. I opened the door to find the vivid black, red and white corpse lying at my feet. There are windows floor to ceiling in my house wherever I could fit them. I want to feel like I am outside, even when the weather drives us in, which in these isles of rain is far too often. So I have slowly taken out sections of wall and replaced them in glass. That way, I may see nature carrying on the process of creation and destruction and recreation of complexity throughout the day.

Early on we had a few deaths, several chaffinches and some lovely long tailed tits, flew heavenward, convinced they had a new flight path into one and out of another window. I duly stuck falcon-shaped stickers on the glass, which prevented further loss of life. For a long time there have been no casualties, but last week, this lovely, long-beaked creature, dashing and in-command on the bird feeder, hammering out his heart on the wood of ages, died an unfitting death on the stone slabs of my courtyard. 

That same day, in mid-February, after a hoarfrost which lasted till elevenses, I cautiously peeped inside my hive to be attacked and stung in the thigh by one of a very busy group of bees. My friend, a gardener who was with me at the time, commented that I had killed twice that day.

I am not unfamiliar with death. All four of my grandparents have died, and my father. I loved them all. The unremitting nature of death, the no-going backness of it is so unlike most of life. You can usually apologise for a misdeed after the event, fix something you've broken, make good on your errors. Death doesn't work like that. Living creatures have no reboot button. When we say our phone has died, when the battery has run out, we are profoundly wrong. Our phone is very much alive. It just needs charging up. There is no charging up a corpse. 

Until you have experienced this finality, it can be hard to really fathom and comprehend. This is one of the reasons younger adults tend to be more reckless at the invisible edge between life and death, speeding in cars, taking poisonous substances for fun and even fighting each other. Older people for whom death has been more present, are more cautious, not just because their hormones have settled down.

An ex-officer in the army once described to me how occasionally he sent men home, with a madness which had struck them following the death of their comrades. He said, they see it like a video game, and then suddenly, its real.  Death is bizarre especially in the face of love. For a mother, facing the death of her son in a war its particularly incongruous. To spend day after day, hour after hour, nurturing and nourishing a child, only to have them wiped away at the moment they reach their potential. In this way, death and love do truly belong on different planets. It is unfair of evolution to make creatures which care so deeply when death takes so decisively.

Donne said 'Death be not proud', but death I am afraid, is mighty. I will find a way to do almost anything I put my mind to, but I could not blow life back in among the feathers of that lovely bird no matter how much I wanted to. I could not make his heart to beat again, his wings, to fly. The children and I pulled the beautiful scarlet feathers from his belly and head, and the spotted pied feathers from his wings and laid them, reverentially in a fan shaped display in our little family 'natural history museum'.  Now we watch to see who takes his place eating the peanuts. For the moment there are only blue tits. But soon, I am sure, the flashing orange red, the tropical swagger of this species will reappear out there in front of our window to delight and awe us again. For sure enough, the gap will fill and life will give where it has taken away.

Sasha x

Love and Mud

Love and Mud

I didn't always live like this, in the mud, with trees as my main companions.  I grew up in a Victorian terrace on a back road somewhere between Tottenham and Muswell Hill. I was  suspended between two worlds, at  a private school but returning home in a beaten up fiat which seemed to break down at every junction. Some days I walked back down Highgate Hill, over the pavements mosaiced with sycamore leaves to a latch key existence as my mum made ends meet, a teacher in an Islington school. There her kids, their shiny faces unaware of anything out of the ordinary, would write in their 'news', 'my dad came round and stabbed my mum last night, we went to the hospital in an ambulance, My aunty Doreen is looking after me. Dad is at the police station.'

I remember the filthy smatterings that would coat my lower legs on rainy days in Camden, helped by buses too close to the kerb. Now in Herefordshire I have a kind of pasty pink, iron rich mud which besmears itself over me at this time of the year. From this soil come the best of Britain's agricultural fruits, the apples, and potatoes and hops and beefsides, the honey and the milk. It is almost a shame to steal it from nature by collecting it on my clothes. Its job is so vital, and life-giving.  London's version was a personification of pollution, a congealed pate of a city's strange ecological processes, the fume and fag butts and human urine, creating a substance with dark powers.

 Not that I hated London. In fact, I love it still, yearn for its diversity, its population captive, but somehow free. They are  'repressed but remarkably dressed' to quote Morrissey, whose flower touting Wildean antics I emulated, whose lyrics I knew by heart and would sing out loud in Highgate Cemetery or on the 134 from Leicester Square. The squash and the squeeze of London, the desperate bids to be seen among the millions, create the colourful blue quiffs, the platinum spikes and bewildering costume of Kensington Market and Carnaby Street. I love London's colour engendered by its people. a kind of rebellion against the grey. The whirling leaves of London Plane trees, the wolves who used to howl for the sheer paradox of their home in Regent's Park. My mum fled the county of her birth for a slice of this freedom, for Whirligig, free-form dance, and street theatre,   and something more important, for free thought, away from the provincial snobbery which is still palpable in the Midlands. She fled the petty judgements of her childhood, the fake posh accents, amateur dramatics  and subtle racism of her youth. 

I went back. Not for any of that of course, but for the mud, the hills, the air that doesn't drive asthma into children's lungs, the psychological and the actual landscape. I lived for a time in the Home counties, Oxfordshire and then Berkshire.  The woody dells and byways there are beautiful  and I explored many in my job as countryside reporter. Somehow, though, wherever I went, there was always the faint sound of traffic and the sense that in front and behind you, to your left and right, just around the next corner there would be an A road, a Tile Warehouse, a B and Q or a Macdonald's. I came to Herefordshire, because here the landscape opens itself out into the raw, green, unadulterated waterfalls and valleys and dragon country of the Black Hills and the Brecon Beacons. There is no motorway here, no restless, roaring, snaking monster tearing the land in two,  There is just a single lane road to the seaside, where pipefish nest in rockpools and starlings roost under the pier. Beyond too are the rained-on peaks of Snowdonia, and further still, with big-mouthed basking sharks in its belly, there is the wide Atlantic Ocean.

There was another reason I came. It was here that I saw love manifest itself along a timeline of sixty years, in the patience with which my grandparents, cared for each other in old age. Here in a little detached house in suburban Hereford, I watched love play itself out in domestic conclusion. Ordinary everyday acts of love, tea at a certain o clock, offering of the larger slice chocolate cake, my grandfather, teaching my granny how to pay the bills just in case he went first.  Here I experienced an intact 'nuclear' family. The day, in day out, old-fashioned roles of a man and woman, dividing into their household duties, in harmony, no arguments. He had his tool shed, and his car, she had her kitchen and her sewing machine. I make no sociological assertions, how can I? Women's Lib gave me my education, which  gift I cherish above all. The experience for me as a child, though, was that I felt utterly relaxed, safe to be a child knowing life was taken care of. So that is why i took myself out of the hub bub, the excitement, the cultural richness of Oxford, London and the energy of the South east, heading west, for love, for wide open spaces, and for mud. 

Sasha  x