Bilberry jam was the biggest treat, to be stirred into steaming hot porridge on a winter’s morning. Bilberries thrive where the heather grows deep and tall, and most of the hills here were far too heavily grazed for heather. If I found bilberry plants at all on my hill, they would be stunted and cropped to an inch high, and would seldom fruit at all. But there was one hillside that had been protected from heavy grazing, where the heather blazed purple as summer ended, and I would head here every year for a basket of berries. It was a longish walk upriver, through a tiny village with no shops at all where the swifts screamed all summer long. The hillside, waist-high in heather, was fringed by beautiful hanging oak woods and had a character all its own; more like a dry heath than the wet, boggy moorland I was used to. Cuckoos called constantly here in season, and I once found the egg case of a grass snake, the only sign I ever saw of one. The land here was too cold and damp for reptiles; I would occasionally see a common lizard or a slow-worm sunning itself on a rock, but even these were a novelty.
If there was a shortfall on my target figure of thirty jars, I would make up the difference with crab jelly. My top field had a scattering of crab apples on it; they didn’t fruit every year but seemed to take turns, so that every year one single tree would be laden with hard little apples. The jelly was quite plain so I would flavour the jars variously; with sloes from the blackthorns by my gate, with elderberries from the hedgerows, or with rowanberries from the mountain ashes in the hills.
I experimented with making alcohol, using an old recipe I had found for elderflower champagne. It bubbled away for a month on the stone shelf in my pantry until it was time for bottling. I took a sip; it was foul, so in my disappointment I just shoved the bottles to the back of my shelves and forgot about them. A year later, I needed the bottles, so I took them out to tip the experiment away. Almost as an afterthought I decided to give it another try, and it was absolutely delicious. Some sort of alchemy had taken place over the year they had been left undisturbed. So that too became a part of my annual routine; elders were everywhere so I could make as much as I wanted.
By the time the first frosts came in November, my shelves would be laden with jars of jam and pickled mushrooms, bottles of ketchup and wine, and whatever else I had preserved that year. What vegetables could not be left out to overwinter would be harvested and stored. I would be like a squirrel with my cache of nuts to keep me through the hard times to come. The hatches would be battened down; I was ready for the worst. Happiness is a full larder.
This was the pattern of my days, a simple life led by natural rhythms rather than the requirements and expectations of others. Imagine being given the opportunity to take time out of your life, for five whole years. Free of social obligations, free of work commitments. Think how well you would get to know yourself, all that time to consider your past and the choices you had made, to focus on your personal development, to know yourself through and through, to work out your goals in life, your true ambitions.
None of this happened, not to me. Perhaps for someone else it would have been different. Any insight I have gained has been the result of later reflection. Solitude did not breed introspection, quite the reverse. My days were spent outside, immersed in nature, watching. I saw as much as I did because of two things: the first, quite simply, was time, the long hours spent out in the field; the second was alertness, a state of heightened attentiveness. My attention was constantly focused away from myself and on to the natural world around me. And my nights were spent sitting in front of the log fire, aimlessly turning a log from time to time and staring at the flickering flames. I would not be thinking of the day just gone; the day was done. And I would not be planning tomorrow; tomorrow would take care of itself. The silence outside was reflected by a growing silence within. Any interior monologue quietened to a whisper, then faded away entirely. I have never practised meditation, but there is a goal in Buddhist practice of achieving a condition of no-mind, a state of being free of thought, and I seemed to have found my way there by accident. I certainly learned to be at ease with myself in the years I spent at Penlan, but it was not by knowing myself better — it was by forgetting I was there. I had become a part of the landscape, a stone.
3. The Sheep in the Trees
I was sitting in my wicker chair in front of the log fire, still wearing my boots and overcoat. The candle flame guttered in the draught. The house was always draughty; it had to be to feed the fire. When the wind blew from the north, it swept down the hill and forced the smoke straight back down the chimney, and there was nothing for it but to open the front door to clear the smoke, no matter how cold it was. The floor was bare, the original clay tiles had been fired in a kiln down in the valley, along with all the bricks that were used for the estate cottages. The chequerboard of black and red was cracked and sunken now, but it was easy to mop clean of the mud that I dragged in on my heels.
When I moved in there were a handful of old paraffin lamps here, but their thin glass chimneys shattered easily and were almost impossible to replace. No one had used them in earnest in fifty years and if they are available at all it is purely for decorative purposes. So I had candles stuck in bottles, and a couple of storm lamps for when I needed to move around the house or go outside, to save spilling hot wax on my hands. Eventually, I worried that I would get eye strain from reading by candlelight, and I got hold of a hissing Sid, an old tilley lamp with original brass fittings that last saw service in the power cuts of the 1970s, and renovated that. It was a fiddle having to light the mantle with methylated spirits and keep priming it to keep the pressure up, but when I hung it from one of the ham hooks in the ceiling it would give off as much light as a 40-watt bulb, and gave a constant reassuring hiss that I learned to love.
Winters here were hard. It was not so much the cold as the long nights, and I tended to sleep early and wake with first light to minimize the hours spent sitting in darkness in forced immobility, idly tending the fire. My life revolved around that fire. My mainstay was ash, which burns well even when green. Oak is dense and heavy and needs to be well seasoned; a log of it will last for hours once the fire is hot enough to get it started. There was a stand of dead elms in the top field, long since killed off by Dutch elm disease even though down the track were a few full-grown ones that seemed to have escaped. They were still standing, barkless white skeletons, and I worked my way through them one at a time. There were a few crab apple trees in the fields, a treat that would fill the room with a scented, fruity smoke. I would use poor-quality wood too, a little at a time: birch that would spit and crackle and burn away fast, and alder that would smoulder and ooze. Everything went in the fire save for softwoods, which would coat the inside of the chimney with black sticky resin and ruin it, though I would collect basketfuls of pine cones to use as firelighters. Tending the fire became as automatic as breathing, it was my lifeline. Once I fell suddenly ill. I could feel my temperature rising fast and knew I didn’t have much time. As quick as I could I brought in water and a pile of logs from the woodshed, then made up a bed by the fire and climbed in fully clothed and shivering uncontrollably. When I woke to a sunny morning on the third day, my fever had broken. I felt weak and shaken but knew that the worst was over. I had no memory at all of the whole time I had lain sick, the days were a complete blank. But the fire was still burning.