The Easternmost House, page 6
We passed the timber, person to person, hand to hand, almost as a meditation.
April
Food in season and local ‘sea state’ update
Veg
Spring cabbage, carrots, end of root veg and sprouts
Fruit
Height of rhubarb season, strictly a vegetable
Game
Pigeon, rabbit, hare, muntjac
Meat
Lamb
Fish
Crabs, lobster, shrimp, salmon, trout
Eggs
1st April - 15th May, gulls’ eggs, strictly regulated and by licence only
Distance from cliff
22 metres
Change since last month
No change, but jagged edge and small losses along cliff path to beach
1st April - 31st August
Hedge-cutting off-season, not allowed again until September
Fur, Feather, Fin, Fire and Food
The generations of living things pass in a short time, and, like runners, hand on the torch of life. What is food to one man is bitter poison to others.
De Rerum Natura
Lucretius (99-55 BC)
5
MAY
It is interesting to see how differently wild animals respond to humans when we are on a horse. We become more primitively animal on a horse. I have ridden on the beach and around the landscape of this part of Suffolk, on and off, all my life, from the cherished joys of Pony Club Camp in Henham Park, now famous for pink sheep and the Latitude Festival, to pragmatically being paid to exercise other people’s horses to get them fit. In Wadi Rum, on horses, the wild camels and wild oryx were unafraid of us. In Suffolk, I have occasionally seen the magical, mythical sight of a white hart, and always the horse was the catalyst, my cover, my camouflage and my ally. Our ancestors must have seen the white hart’s ancestors too and celebrated by naming the pub in Blythburgh after it.
The Suffolk safari around our clifftop is not confined to land, river and sea. The sky is a rewarding hunting ground for watching the wild. There was much local dissent a few years ago when there was a proposal to release sea eagles along this coast. There were fears that the sea eagles would take piglets and lambs. There may be a sinister long-forgotten reason why so many pubs are called The Eagle and Child. A sparrowhawk once swooped down on our garden and killed a pigeon and there are alleged to be wild goshawks about the place, although I’m not sure I would recognise one without Helen MacDonald’s menacing H is for Hawk book cover picture as a field guide.
The Hen Reedbeds are a haven for secretive creatures. The hovering marsh harrier casts a shadow over the unsuspecting frogs and mice in the long grass at the edge of the crops and I remain convinced that I once saw a bird of prey flying alongside the track dangling a cat from his talons. People always say it must have been a rabbit, but if it had been a rabbit, surely, I would have just thought, oh dear, poor bunny, rather than being startled and fascinated by the fact of it being a cat? Cats, oddly the pet of choice among some vegan animal rights activists, allegedly kill about 275 million wild animals and birds a year in the UK, according to a report by the Mammal Society. Clearly it is not the cats’ fault, hunting and play-killing being in their nature, but to inflict so many non-native predators on our own native wildlife seems an unnecessary carnage, a paradox full of pathos. Whichever bird of prey swooped down on that ill-fated cat would have saved many more lives than it took that day.
The local territory of the Easternmost House is possibly the only place on earth where you can be served smoked eel in a public place, for pudding, without a murmur. Some time ago, when we went out to dinner, as opposed to just eating it outside, we chose as a first course ‘smoked local eel with beetroot and horseradish’, which turned out to be an artistic creation including crème fraiche and shards of colour alongside the eel. One of us liked this combination so much that after the long-forgotten middle course, he asked for some more ‘smoked local eel with beetroot and horseradish’, for pudding. Yes, sir. Of course, sir. People eat smoked eel for pudding here all the time, sir. Quite normal. Quality service from The Swan in Southwold, and not a giggle.
The story of these local eels, who were treated with such double-reverence at the table, is one of nature’s marvels, a great ritual of migration and survival. The elvers, which are the size of bootlaces, apparently make the journey from the Sargasso Sea in the north Atlantic to the rivers of East Anglia, including our river. They then stay in these rivers for fifteen years until they are mature, by which time they are about three or four feet long. Then suddenly, out of the blue, by some magic of nature, they wake up one morning knowing, knowing by instinct, that they must now set off on the journey back to the Sargasso Sea to lay eggs. How, how, can that be? Inevitably, human life threatens this extraordinary wonderment of migration. Changes in habitat, water quality, climate change, global warming, diversion of the gulf stream and so on, threaten the eels in their already mighty quest.
On your imaginary pocket-cottage visits to the Easternmost House, you will find yourself surrounded by good food of all sorts, much of it produced within a five-mile radius, for this is a region especially celebrated for the quality and variety of its food and drink. We still have plenty of roadside honesty boxes selling eggs, asparagus, honey or jam, because people are honest and pay. We still have independent butchers’ shops, because people will still buy the old-fashioned, slow-cooking, nose-to-tail, cheap cuts of meat, as well as the more obvious offerings favoured by supermarkets. We still have fishermen and a working harbour because we buy fish from our fishermen’s huts. Local and seasonal is the thing, rather than organic or over-hyped or over-priced. Ordinary fresh fruit and veg, not billed as ‘plant-based’ when they are just plants. Things chopped up, not spiralised. Normal fresh greenery, not clean eating. Timeless, obvious, unfashionable food.
Our immediate territory is also as fine a place as any to essay and foray in search of wild food, in fur, feather, fin and field. There is an abundance of animals surrounding us within a one-mile radius of our clifftop, some seen, some secretive. One of the tragedies of the world today is the separation of so many people from physical contact with other animals, seeing them only in a picture on a screen. Whether in the wild, or in our fields, or in our houses, animals are our allies. Animals are an example to us, with their ability to live in the present moment and their blessed lack of anxiety about the past or the future. Animals have a calm amorality about them, which means they cannot actively and intentionally be evil or cruel. Animals do whatever they do because they need to, or just because they do. Animals decorate the landscape with their presence. They animate the silence with their odd sounds. They amuse us with their odd habits. Animals have the capacity to show emotions of joyfulness and misery, and they can certainly feel pain. We have a duty to treat animals well, but as at least 97% of us are also happy to eat them, or food derived from them, animals also lead into temptation, and into some awkward corners of moral philosophy.
Animals have individual characters, or if they don’t, they seem to. It is slightly disturbing to observe the behaviour of domestic chickens closely. Knowing your own chickens can lead to a stale dark place: seeing clearly the potential for cruelty inherent in intensive poultry farming. Among the various chickens we have kept as companionable domestic egg-layers over the years, all of them have displayed what one could call a personality, an individual character: Pud was a motherly fat hen, Sab always seemed rather angry, Shy Baby was perpetually anxious, Moderate and Good were ordinary-looking Skyline hens who laid beautiful blue eggs and Cockle, the cock, was like a perfectly-mannered avuncular old gent pottering about at the Garrick Club.
Clucky and Debo (named after the late, great chicken-loving Dowager Duchess of Devonshire) were a little bantam husband and wife team, who jumped into my arms in the morning and sat on the table while we ate. Clucky and Debo taught us the secret of a happy marriage: just wanting to be together. When distracted by their scratching perambulations, one or other would suddenly notice that their beloved was too far away and run over, just to be nearer, to be together. Clucky and Debo were pets, tragically killed by the farm black Labrador, whose breeding and instincts had been honed over centuries to retrieve feathered game, but who lacked the reputed ‘soft mouth’ that is supposed to be characteristic of good gundogs. If eight domestic chickens can display these diverse qualities, each a distinct and memorable chicken-character, almost a little chicken-soul, so, logically, can the farmed and factory-farmed chickens who are their closest relations. It is disquieting.
Pud, Sab, Shy Baby, Moderate, Good, Cockle, Clucky and Debo all seemed to experience the following sensations quite markedly: warmth and cold, and comfort or discomfort resulting from either, something like cheerfulness, or at least being pleased to see the hand that brings the food, general background fear, and real immediate terror, relief when terror ends, independent decision-making of sorts, contentment and something similar to boredom. I know that these individual chickens would be denied a part of their natural behaviour if they were never to see the daylight or sun, living for only a few weeks in a large predator-proof shed. They would surely suffer if they were not stunned properly in the robotic killing-plucking-and-oven-readying factory process.
In addition to the most basic reflex sensations, chickens show every inclination towards enjoying human and other company. Pud the black rock hen was, for six years, improbably great friends with Speedy the Big Black Greyhound. Together, these two would sleep for hours at a time in Speedy’s bed. When outside together, both hen and greyhound seemed to display something very like humour, although that might be going too far down the anthropomorphic route for the scientists and zoologists among you, but I once had a horse called Dotty who definitely had a sense of humour, and Chuffy seems to find it funny to run away, loping off just out of the comfortable radius, just for fun. A kind of humour seems to be among the observable range of animal emotions.
There is a commercial chicken shed nearby in which the ventilation broke down overnight. The following day, 20,000 chicken-bodies, each arguably a little chicken-soul like Pud, were scraped out and disposed of by bulldozer, since these chickens were now ‘not fit for human consumption’. But perhaps they never were ‘fit for human consumption’, morally. On the other hand, the chickens were never in danger of being eaten by a fox and factory farming since the war has provided cheap protein to a population who have never been so well nourished before. Some people are against other people shooting pheasants, which on our cliff, around our so-called garden and in the woods at Benacre live a relatively natural life, as well as being highly valued as food available from the butchers in all our local market towns. Yet we collectively (if not individually) are also happy to tuck into a chicken korma or a family bucket of finger-lickin’ chicken from who knows where, one of 945 million chickens eaten every year in the UK. Food is our modern moral minefield, a labyrinth, a rabbit hole from which you can never escape, even if you go vegan.
At the far end of the clifftop where there is an area marked on OS maps as ‘The Warren’, there live many extended families of rabbits, with their cousins and second-cousins flopsy-bunnying about among the black cliff-sheep heading off towards the marshes, confounding reports of a rabbit crisis. Rabbit numbers are apparently down elsewhere, which is worrying. The cliff-sheep on have their own little beach hut surrounded by gorse and they sometimes escape their large enclosure to roam the cliffs. One-Horn, a ram, was tragically mauled by a summer-visiting lurcher, one of hundreds of cases of fatal ‘sheep worrying’ by loose dogs which go largely unreported in the press, and a euphemistic misnomer if ever there was one. It was in this general vicinity that I once watched a remarkable spring rabbit-and-lamb scene unfold before me.
A very young lamb was gambolling about in the spring sunshine (as only lambs ever seem to do) when a small baby rabbit hopped into the orbit of its activity. The baby rabbit was just snuffling about, twitching its nose, when the lamb skipped up to have a sniff of its twitchy nose. The baby rabbit hopped away and suddenly started racing round the lamb, who stood in the middle of the circle and jumped straight up in the air from a standing start on all fours, as lambs will at such moments. The baby rabbit raced round and round and then the lamb joined in. The lamb and the baby rabbit continued racing round and round and round, chasing each other for a sustained period of several minutes. They seemed to be doing this for the sheer fun of each other’s company, and joy in the act of running, the whole scene like an extreme ‘aaaah’ moment set up by a school of sentimental film-making. Yet these adorable fluffy free-running happy creatures are also food. People shoot pigeons and rabbits as an agricultural pest and they also eat them. The thinking meat-eater and moral philosopher should logically prefer to eat the wild pigeon, or the lamb or the rabbit that has skipped in the sunshine, than the chickens from the stale dark shed, yet it is not so. We are a contrary and hypocritical species.
Rabbits don’t like swimming, but hares have an extra layer of fur, so can occasionally be seen swimming across ditches and dykes. Possibly no other animal is so steeped in rural folklore as the brown hare. Hares are connected with the Goddess Eostre, and have all sorts of associations with the moon, fertility symbolism and the Easter Bunny. In East Anglian dialect, hares are known as sallies or stubble stags. The three-hare roundel is often found in church architecture. The brown hare is considered as native as the mountain hare now but was originally introduced by the Romans as a source of food and sport. Hares are unavoidably bound up with the history of the chase, with packs of harriers traditionally more common than foxhounds in East Anglia, their breeding still thriving albeit adapted to the hunting of an artificial trail, in line with modern sensibilities and law.
The noble history of the greyhound is also closely linked with that of the hare, coursing being an ancient sport. The greyhound appears in the Bible (Proverbs 30:31), Chaucer (the Monk and his greyhounds), Shakespeare (Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1, just before ‘Cry ‘‘God’’ for Harry, England and Saint George!’) and in our heraldry, art and architecture. Very often in these artistic depictions of greyhounds, there is a hare or a deer not far away, for the greyhound to pursue. Huntingfield church in Suffolk has painted greyhounds as hatchments on the wall, carved greyhounds on pews and stone greyhound gargoyles on a mausoleum attached to the church, all relating to the Vanneck family, formerly of nearby Heveningham Hall, whose emblem is a greyhound. Coincidentally, and dating from well before the greyhounds, there are stone harrier hound heads carved into the church window surrounds outside. The hare and the hunting of it, is deeply embedded in this part of Suffolk, even in the very name of the village: Huntingfield. The village sign shows a hare. This hunting field was never about the pursuit of the fox.
The agricultural monocultures of the 1970s are blamed for drastically reduced hare numbers, although large estates in East Anglia still hold annual hare shoots where the hares are sold into the human food chain as wild game. It is certainly true that in the golden summers of our childhood, we rode around the countryside on ponies amid scenes of unfathomable destruction, hedges uprooted and ponds filled in, the landscape ablaze with dangerous stubble-burnings. But the cultural tide has turned and hare populations are healthy in Suffolk.
I have often seen what at first appeared to be a huge hare, which turned out to be a muntjac skipping lightly across the growing crops, covering the ground with astonishing grace and then vanishing into thin air, as wild animals do. Country people are inclined to remark on all sorts of undesirable features and habits of this peculiar little species of deer, all allegedly descended from some escapees from Woburn Abbey. People say muntjacs damage trees, eat bluebells, gore dogs with their tusks, damage crops and many other sins. But I once saw one of these beautiful animals, so perfect and skittish and lithe, suddenly jump out of the dark to be hit by a car some distance ahead, then run away into the night, probably injured. It seemed a tragedy of the highest order. There is, or should be, a sting to the human soul at the sight of a perfect animal damaged or killed. This is especially so if the animal is under our care, or if it is damaged by an accident of modern life from which even its sharpest natural instincts cannot possibly protect it.
There was an episode of Countryfile, the gentle Sunday-evening telly slot with an audience of about 8 million people, which featured a short piece about the overpopulation of deer in the UK and the need to cull them, followed by a lesson in butchering the resultant venison. It showed a normal piece of meat being cut up. Not the whole beast, no fur, no blood, no guts. There is a movement to introduce lynxes to cull the deer population near here, in a planned programme of rewilding. Similar ideas have been mooted for the Scottish Highlands, but with the addition of wolves. The lynxes are supposed to know that they must only eat the deer, not the ponies, foals, calves, piglets, lambs etc. Deer are shot as pests by professional stalkers, to avoid unbalanced overpopulation, so it seems odd to want to feed good quality venison to wolves and lynxes, with a chase to the death, when humans could eat it cleanly shot, but there you are. About 1% of the UK population is truly vegan, yet a small but significant minority of the meat-eating Countryfile audience took to Twitter on the night of the venison lesson, to be unusually offended and appalled at the butchering of meat that had lived a free and natural life as a deer. The offended section of the Countryfile audience would have been even more appalled if they had witnessed my own muntjac venison experience.
