Sometimes They Blow Trumpets

I walk this path again. I know it well. My dog by my side. She pads gently at the side-seam of trouser leg, knowing intimately as I do, the surface we walk on, of flint and chalk, rubble, earth.

The tractor-ridges in the broad track draw us along in their directional flow. The big open fields to either side, asleep in winter, not empty, but drowsy, await a spring reawakening. It is cold. Just before Christmas, a dry, grey, still day. Crisp however, with the memory of frost, quiet, no wind. My thoughts, browsing memories and lazy unfettered words, catch upon nothing, leave my mind open, receptive. Everything is waiting: the soil awaits the warmth, weeds keep their underground counsel, buds wrap up against the present chill, I anticipate a home fire and a glass of something to defrost the nip in my fingertips. The nag of errands to run and a million tiny seasonal things to complete before the festive day, hum, if I allow them to, in my ear, but mostly they are altogether absent.

    Our rhythm of footfall is barely audible, it is unobtrusive, just enough to accompany our heartbeats. I drift between this groundedness, this belonging in a landscape, and a floating within the sense of the place, in the cold air that hangs imperceptibly. The hint of ice, the crunch and even the tinkle of it, is a mantle wrapped around everything.

    I feel the warmth of my dog’s flank rub through to my leg, a slight pull on her lead and then it slackens again. I see the toes of my boots swing forward one then the other, I lift my head to silent birds as they draw across the sky above us. As I look ahead at the thick, dark smudge of a line of tall fir trees, it is then that I see him. Walking, no, he is loping, effortlessly through the field margin of teasels, sorrel seed-heads, tall grasses; against the trees he too is dark green. His long strides bring him down the gentle slope of the hill. I see him for only a second and I also know he is only in my mind’s eye. He is taller than a man, a man of this world, he is whip-thin-willowy; his holly-dark coat, buttoned down the front and tied in with a belt at his middle, flaps around his legs, falling to low shin, just atop his boots. His face is serious, concentrating on something; do I hear him muttering? Is he whispering to himself, does he converse with the field mice scurrying when they should be sleeping? Is he cursing the raucous pheasants that give away his presence and the cacophony of ridiculous pigeons shaking their wings out like cotton tablecloths from amongst snappy twigs? My perception assures me he lifts a hand to his face and quickly rubs his chin, animating straggly whisps of off-white beard, or perhaps this is vapour from his out-breath. His strides continue, his shoulders are drooped forwards in his trajectory.

    By now my conscious thoughts appraise him and with this alert, he disappears. Now he is of my imagination only and I question whether he was ever there at all. The trees are closer, I am adjacent to the verge of uncut wilderness. My dog and I cross his path, were he to have continued on his journey, crossing ours.

    I smile with the memory and hold the encounter close, knowing it to be magic. I am lucky to have seen him. I seem to know him; he is the pagan Father Christmas, or perhaps he is Odin, fallen from his horse, or maybe old Jack o’ the green roused early, woken from his wintry hibernation. There was consternation on his face and a serious inward-looking concentration. Weary, worldly, purposeful. If I had stopped, turned my gaze away, would he none the less have vanished, still? Or might he have faltered only, evaluated my presence and my dog beside me, balanced up the situation, measured the threat, got a measure of me? Would he have waited for me to pass? Might he have continued on if I had averted my gaze bashfully, respectfully, if I had faced the other way towards the big field and the silver earth barely turned, to the birds dotted along the telegraph lines, to the misty distance, to the winter fields and the frozen air, the stillness, the hovering weightlessness?

    My boots scuff the ground and my dog’s feet patter. We turn into the woods the other side of the line of evergreens and the wooded world closes in around us benevolently. I find I can focus on the green man if I look at that split-second memory askance. It is there he remains, in the peripheral vision, in the shadows and in the corners, behind the branches, beneath the farrow. I know now, only moments after the encounter, that this is where he’ll remain, augmented by imagination, embellished by excitement and longing and want. Until the next time.

    Over there I saw a group of people, perhaps there were three of them, more likely it was four, no more than five. A little gaggle of lively country folk talking amongst themselves as they walked along the hedge-line, far across the field from me as I ambled under the trees of the avenue, their direction against mine, their shoulders brushing against one another, a close ensemble. I looked up involuntarily from my day-dreaming, my perception clocked their presence and drew me back from miles away afloat and loose. In the time it took me to smile at their easy familiarity with one another, their merry way, they had gone. Blended into the wintry distance.

    So, when I returned and sat this time, on an old fallen tree-trunk, its bark long shed and its colour bleached, I looked across the expanse of winter-sown barley, and patiently awaited their reappearance. Like an incantation the woodlarks sang with flute-like voices calling and responding; the chaffinches trilled and sneezed and the robin put its love-song on repeat. Luring, summoning, but my view was too direct, I wouldn’t catch them again. Ghosts only appear when you see without looking.

    But I wondered about this group; it seemed to me in that pinprick of a moment in which I spied them, that they had been here, a part of the land, for ever. Using the hedge, deep and impenetrable, as their guide, they followed an old way between the villages, linking lives and livelihoods, an umbilical cord between farmyards and farm cottages. Did they pronounce their passage in song? A band of troubadours, notes issuing, like drops of water surfacing from a spring, from within the folds of their clothes, from the sparkle and glints in their eyes, escaping with their smiles through lips formed for tune-making. Perhaps they trumpeted their music in response to the cry of the solitary peewit I once saw here, rollicking earthwards in the sky, tilting this way and that, a jagged flight-path, darting ground-ward, hidden for a moment within the crease of the land and then rising again, calling. A male showing off to an unseen female above the same spot in that field; a magnetism in the soil attracting a spirit of some kind, capturing a call and a song.

    At home, an upstairs window looks out over the garden to the paddock and the strip of ancient woodland that marks the near horizon, from the room that was my son’s bedroom and now houses my crammed bookshelves and my desk, at right-angles to the view. Trees fill the lower half of the frame. Close to the house is a youthful ornamental fir tree, a few paces further and a thirty-year-old walnut stretches across the width of the garden, further still and a wizened and mistletoe-bedecked apple tree shrinks with age, and lastly a copper beech that I brought here twenty-five years ago from a self-seeded sapling from my childhood home, reaches for the sky, and then beyond the garden are the ash trees and the oaks, the centenarian, veteran cedar of Lebanon, and in winter, through all the bare branches, the evergreen forest a mile away.

    From this window come many sounds. A swoosh of a vehicle emerging, arriving, passing, on the tarmac road out the front of the house; a dog yapping from the close, up the way; the back door closing; a boom from 25 miles away on the firing ranges of Salisbury Plain, that rattles the window in its crittle frame, feeling like its coming from the next-door neighbour attached to us and causing a rush to look out of all the windows to check; was that a collision? Has there been an accident on the farm, a Manitou perhaps losing its grip on its cargo? The roof falling in, for god’s sake? The ground shakes with the sound as the air is displaced and rearranges itself.

    At dusk it can be foxes barking and tawny owls conversing that pull me to peer through the reflecting glass. An audible musical pulse in the air calls me outside. A reverberation that wobbles and warps and makes all things solid become fluid. I follow the sound only to find it moves and is elusive.

    This night I feel my way in the dark, through my feet, through memory, making out the worn route in the meadow-grass cast in varying shades of shadow. I move beside the form of woodland on my left, squeeze through the kissing gate, slip across the puckered mud and keep the trees to my side and then my back. Here the sound is clear. One tawny owl pulses its call from the south. I like to imagine it has found a perch within the brick clocktower of The Hall. The note rides in waves towards me and washes over me. Silence for a moment. And then a response in the same warble, from the woodlands in the east beyond the barn conversions rudely throwing out light into this dark night sky. It is delightful, this fluting duet. Then behind me and close by, a third joins in from the top of a nearby oak, westwards from the others, it is thrilling and I can’t help but smile, looking upwards blindly in the blackness – blocking out the light pollution as best I can – the better to hear. I am surrounded by this ebbing and flowing as it comes and goes in unpredictable surges, swaying my centre of gravity, making a nonsense of balance, gently, kindly, dissolving matter. Everything becomes this pulse of varying single notes from over there, then here, then from another direction, until there are four voices calling in this way from all points of the compass. Complete surround-sound and I melt at the centre.

    Back in the daylight and I walk in the company of shadows. Glancing up and re-focusing my gaze from the near at hand to the middle distance, I see a figure shift between a couple of tree-trunks amongst the multitude. It could just be the transference of the static as my perspective waives on my approach, or it is a twig caught in a dervish whirl, and so the figure jumps to hide and won’t be revealed again. But there was a cottage here. I can see it in the mortared-together clumps of brick, in the chunks of stone lintel, in concrete, rusted pails, the glass bottles that litter the leaf-litter, emerging from their burial places in the banks, mocking with their continued presence when attempts to suppress them have failed. There are deep quarry-pits, derelict pheasant pens and abandoned beehives in these woods. There is also a pond with a broken drainage sluice, badger setts, both those in-use and deserted, carpets of snowdrops and later, bluebells, denoting the deep age of this habitat. A home, once and forever; the occupants can be heard in a whisper, but sometimes a tantara proclaims their existence.