Villager, page 10
August: the most spiritually dark month that doesn’t happen in winter. Everything is scruffy and angry and moist, waiting for September and October to come in to crisp it up and prettify it again. Chunks of crumbling wood in the lanes. A tree has come down on my route home from work so I’m having to go the long way around for now, which isn’t such a great hardship as it gives me a better view of the tor, or at least it would, if it wasn’t still raining for 70 per cent of each day. It feels like all this rain and wind is coppicing the countryside, knocking the excess wood off it. I detect a pinch of autumn in the air already and it is not too warm for a night-time fire. I gather kindling from up the lane. There’s plenty. I avoid the stuff on the ground, favouring the bits caught high up in fences and branches, which is always drier. Today, in the middle of all the sogginess, we had three hours of brilliant sunshine, and I took advantage by doing some tidying in the garden and digging out a new bed. At least I have no trouble getting a spade in now. As I go down through the earth I feel like I am burrowing through tiers of history. Rabbit skulls, shards of pottery and thin old hand-forged nails turn up, and some bigger stuff, which I do my best to upcycle, such as a baffling rusty bracket, about two feet in length, with another baffling chain attached to it. I jammed this into one of the endless crevices in the wall and hung a bird feeder on it. Some primal instinct kicks in as I dig further and get more dirty and scratched up, some innate understanding of compost, something there in me from birth, always just waiting to be unleashed. Time stops being conventionally measured. Through the open window I heard Reka talking on speakerphone to one of her sisters in Budapest, which – possibly in part because of all the extra letters in the Hungarian alphabet – always sounds more like seven people having a conversation than two. Later, I hear her singing. Folk songs from her home country. I have loaned her the old acoustic guitar I inherited from Mum. I called it a loan, but she can keep it, as I doubt it will be any use to me ever again.
More rain. The damp in Reka’s room is worse. Some of the wall seems to be coming away. I offered to sleep downstairs in the living room and let her have my bed for a while. She waved the suggestion away, explaining that until she was sixteen she, her dad and her two sisters all slept in one room, in a tiny flat with no central heating. ‘Summer is warm in Hungary but our winters, pffff, they make yours look like a beach holiday,’ she said. She showed me a Dansette record player she found yesterday in a pile of electrical equipment at the tip. Remarkably, it works, albeit at a slightly slower speed than intended, and means she can play the nine 45s she brought with her from Hungary. These all formerly belonged to her dad, and were recorded by Hungarian acts in the late sixties and early seventies, with the exception of one by a British artist I’d never heard of called RJ McKendree: a distorted, fuzzy rock version of a folk song I’ve heard played in a couple of pubs here in Devon, quite a haunting tune. Reka tells me that, bizarrely, the record only came out in Hungary, and is worth over £400 now. She put it on and, despite the reduced power of the Dansette, bopped around the room to its nagging, oddly sexual beat. ‘I don’t know how they allowed this during communism!’ she said, hurling herself onto the bed, and, for the first time, I was very aware that I wished to kiss her.
SEPTEMBER
What would we do without weather? Where would we be without the sideways rain of this morning and the sun that burned it off then made the remaining clouds curl above the tor like smoke from seven symmetrical bonfires, all smouldering at the same rate? How bland would the planet be? The fallen tree on the lane has still not been removed. I am enjoying driving the other route, along the ridge, and seeing the changes in the sky above the tor: the varying colours from day to day, and sometimes hour to hour, above those rocks at the summit that always remind me of piled pony poo. I pulled into a gate gap this morning on the opposite side of the valley and lingered a while to take it in and made myself ten minutes late for work. A queue of first years were already lined up at the desk, waiting for me to sign off their new library cards. Awkward, shy kids, vague about their own futures, who, when typing into their phones and laptops, find their bold and opinionated superhero alter egos. I am half-invisible to them, even the ones in their twenties and thirties. The young will always to some extent view ageing as a matter of taste, as if the fact you do not appear to be young any more is a decision you’ve made, like selecting a certain type of carpet or paint for your house. I remember back in spring, listening to a youth who was chatting with his friend about his discovery of old-school rap music, near reception while waiting for an appointment with the college counsellor. He mentioned Public Enemy. Not looking up from my screen, I offered the opinion that It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, from 1988, was their strongest album. Both boys went silent and turned in my direction with a look on their faces that suggested they’d just seen a goat driving a bus. But I feel for them, and their problems, and would not want to be young today, with all the added pressures of our new digital age. Reka is eight or nine years older than most of these kids but she seems at least a decade further from them than that, and from some less materialistic era. There is something generally, permeatingly vintage about her. Even her teddy bear – a rare reminder of how recent her childhood was – is ancient and tattered.
A week: that’s how long it took the cabbage whites to decimate my kale. I leave them to it and don’t begrudge them their meals. I grew far too much anyway and was beginning to tire of kale curries. After the caterpillars finished their business, they moved towards the house and appear to have earmarked it as an excellent place to pupate. I counted more than eighty chrysalises on the back wall and at least a dozen more have made it indoors. Today, I found an earwig in my lentil and tomato soup. Yesterday I watched an enormous spider stealthily lowering itself from the lampshade onto my pillow on a gossamer homemade rope. ‘Hey! What are you doing?’ I shouted, and it stopped, as if in embarrassment. The mason bees are turning up in the house more and more often, dopey or deceased. It’s an insect’s world here; Reka and I just live in it. I wonder if the introduction of sheep and cattle into the field across the lane is also contributing to the ever-larger number of flies in the house. Or perhaps a pigeon has got into the loft and died. I cannot check because the landlady, who lives in the Maldives, padlocked the hatch and did not leave a key.
When I arrived home today I noticed someone has cut the hedges quite brutally, without clearing up, and, as a result, one of the sheep had got a bit of blackthorn caught up its bottom. I climbed over the fence and tried to get close enough to the sheep to dislodge the blackthorn but it was too fast for me. After about five minutes of this, Reka arrived home and joined me, but being chased by two people caused even greater panic in the sheep and its companions, and several sheep all bumped into each other as we chased them. In the melee, the blackthorn branch was thankfully dislodged from the unfortunate sheep’s bottom.
Flood in the kitchen this morning, after many days of suspicious smells. Water pouring through the ceiling from the bathroom. I put a bucket under it, switched the stopcock off and left a phone message for the landlady but after seven hours had received nothing back other than an email saying she would ‘send my guy over’, so I called an emergency drain company. Immediately, they identified the problem as backed-up water from a blocked septic tank, but I had been told by the landlady that there was no septic tank at the house. I managed to finally get her on the phone – the first time I’d actually heard her voice. She’s very well spoken, called Flora, and I don’t think I’m paranoid in thinking that as soon as she heard my accent, she identified me – in that way many privileged people do – as someone she could push around. She remained adamant that the drainage at the house had always ‘worked solely on a soakaway’ and, when I questioned this and pointed out that a soakaway always has to work in tandem with either a septic tank or reed bed and waste does not just ‘vanish’, she got very defensive and began to tell me how loved the house – which her parents once lived in – was and how many people had ‘had a very wonderful time there’. She also said I had been rash in calling out the drain company and would have to pay the bill myself. ‘So you reckon I’d have been more sensible to wait for however many days until your guy came out, sitting in a house without a working toilet or running water?’ I asked, getting a bit pissed off now, and she put the phone down on me, but not before she’d announced, ‘Nice speaking to you!’ What followed, after the drain men’s discovery of a totally blocked pipe, was a treasure hunt, with the significant catch that unlike most treasure hunts the reward at the end of it would not be treasure, but shit. Finally, the drain experts uncovered a rusty grate deeply submerged amongst many years of foliage. The chamber was full. Had been for who knows how many aeons. That, combined with tree roots growing into the waste pipe leading from the house, had been the cause of the kitchen flood. The drain guys were bloody brilliant. Not many people make it their life’s ambition to work with drains but what you find is that those who do end up in that area often take a lot of pride in their work. They are rarely of an apathetic or indifferent demeanour. The work of the drain men was more like surgery than repair or maintenance, their camera tunnelling deep into the house’s stomach and telling them what was amiss. I wasn’t here afterwards, when the septic tank man came to empty it, but the note he left, detailing the ‘dangerous condition’ of the tank, is a small, dark, poetic masterpiece of some bygone English I never knew existed. After reading it, it is hard not to picture a man of ancient years and hawkish appearance who upon putting an ear close to the ground can actually hear sludge speak to him. One of the last of his breed. Perhaps the last. What had he seen, in his time? I suspect this house, empty and in a state of disrepair for a few years before my occupancy, and backed up with waste of olden times, was child’s play to him. Anyway, the overall result, many hours later, is that the situation is fixed, temporarily, and I am more than £700 out of pocket. Reka and I played Scrabble later. She is getting better, very quickly, and I am sure will be beating me within a month or two.
Over at Underhill churchyard today, whose kissing gate Jim Boyland and I volunteered to rebuild a little while back. The church is in an exposed spot and we were soaked and dried and soaked again numerous times during the course of our work. It was a very satisfying day, although Jim brought his dog with him, who is extremely boring. As the dog – a smallish one, of I don’t know what breed, which never makes a noise and puts me in mind of a bereaved aunt from a drabber Britain – watched us with its sad eyes, Jim showed me how to hammer iron wedges into the grooves we’d made in the granite. As I hit the rock with the hammer, I noticed the sound it made change as I moved down the line. It made me think of the stories stone has to tell us, all the voices inside it. How many voices are inside the wall that surrounds my garden, and what could they tell me? I feel privileged to live within its shelter, like the humans and cats and dogs and horses who have gone before me, and am glad to be able to add a tiny new chapter to its story. I look into its crevices and grooves and clefts and observe its changing hues and I know where I am, who I am, and what I am doing: I am just passing through. Reka was cleaning the house when I got home. I told her she really didn’t need to do that. She told me it is almost her time of the month and she feels very hyper and cleaning always helps. ‘I was very lazy when I was young,’ she explained. ‘My grandma used to say to me, “If laziness hurt, you would be screaming.”’ As I write this I can hear the little stream across the lane raging, and rain tumbling off the roof, and I am a bit worried about the weather forecast for next week, and what it might do to this place, but maybe I am painting the devil on the wall here.
More rain. Coffee with James Boyland’s wife, Edith, at the abbey tea rooms. She entered the building alone, without the dog, and as she did I noticed a relief in myself. Water pouring down the lanes. Hart’s-tongue fern lapping at it from the verges. The last remnants of summer’s ambition are fading. Someone has yet to take down the sign advertising the tug of war in Marybridge, which has caused much local amusement, due to the extra ‘f’ the sign’s writer mistakenly added to ‘of’. I took the car in for its MOT at Phil Spring’s and was surprised that, with a couple of small improvements, it passed. I suppose it looks worse than it is. Typical Devon car: not bad on the right-hand side, dented and scratched to buggery on the left, with the wing mirror held on with tape. These lanes on the edge of the moor were not dug out with any cars in mind, and particularly not the huge fortified people-carriers of today. Curiously it’s the individuals negotiating them in more modestly sized vehicles who often drive more apologetically. The countryside looks on, bemused at the way it’s been outgrown, bludgeoned, smoothed over, suppressed, raped, waiting for the revenge it will surely enjoy when we are gone. I reverse into my drive in my smaller than medium car, only just squeezing through the small gap in the wall, imagining the Morris Minor or Triumph Dolemite it once more practically housed and the people who probably never conceived that anybody could possibly need anything grander. You can let yourself go into a gentle, cuckoo-soundtracked fantasy about life here in the unclaustrophobic 1950s but it’s worth bearing in mind, as you do, that that’s when we really started getting on the bad road we are on, environmentally speaking, and when some of the most irreversible damage was already being done.
Finishing touches to the kissing gate today. Jim – whose family have been associated with the church for centuries – and I posed next to our work, and Clive, Underhill’s new vicar, snapped a couple of photos of us. Clive speaks very softly and has long slender fingers, which he often uses to gently tickle the palms of his own hands as he listens to you speak. I have heard that some in the village have not taken to him, finding his gentle and sensitive nature suspicious, but I like him. He does seem a little bored, though, and apparently the job leaves him a lot of time to work on his macrame skills. He offered to do some for me and I accepted, as I need a place for my spider plant to live. He and Jim also showed me what they call ‘The Bird Lady’: a very mysterious carving in the church that I suspect will linger in my mind for a long time. I took a long route back, just to glory in the beginning of the changing colours on the hillside, but my goal proved futile as the journey coincided with the fifth or sixth cloudburst of the day. As I came cautiously down Riddlefoot Lane, which is barely wider than an average car, a hooded figure in a red anorak pressed itself up against the foliage to let me pass, and as I pulled level, I recognised the figure as Reka. I opened the door and she got in. She could not have been wetter. ‘Rain has been a big fuck today!’ she said. When we arrived home I rushed into the living room to light a fire and Reka, having dispensed of most of her wet clothing, went straight upstairs to run a bath. Seconds later, I heard a shout of ‘Jézus Krisztus!’, dropped the log I was holding and ran in her direction, to find her standing in her room amidst a pile of stone and plaster, with water puddling all around her. She’d been so wet, it took me a couple of seconds to realise the water had mostly come from the wall and not her. I went to the airing cupboard and grabbed as many towels as I could carry, gave one to Reka to wrap around herself, and began spreading them on the floor, then left a voice message for Flora Prissypants. When I returned to the bedroom, Reka had found the dustpan and brush and was attempting to sweep some of the rubble into the corner. I told her to leave it, and that I would be sleeping downstairs this evening, she could have my room, and I would not hear any protests to the contrary. She finally went for her bath and while she did I put more towels down and, as I did, I froze. What appeared to be a tiny, dusty foot was sticking up out of the rubble. Tentatively I poked it, and was relieved to find it was merely an empty shoe: a very old one, designed for a tiny child. On further investigation, just to the left of it I discovered an arm sticking up from the mess, pulled it, and found myself holding a small doll: not a hard, plastic doll, of the type common over the last three quarters of a century, but one made out of fabric and stuffing, and missing an eye. ‘Jézus Krisztus,’ I muttered to myself, letting it fall from my hand, as you might an object you’d picked up and not realised was molten hot.
‘It happens in Hungary, too,’ said Reka. We were sitting in front of the fire, with Rafael Perera stretched out on the rug in front of us. Reka’s face was the colour of a good pomegranate. She had chosen to dry her hair naturally and I could see that five or six drips still remained on her neck. ‘My grandmother lives in the countryside near a place called Kaposhomok. You would not have heard of it. People haven’t. She took down a wall in her cottage and found, how do you say it, when a shoe is harder?’
