The Banker's Niece 42: Six weeks later

Jane manoeuvres Clio round a tight corner and into the carpark. Retrieving her backpack and locking the car, she sets off.

    It’s a brilliant April morning. The air has that clear just-washed look she never noticed before she came to Devon. Perhaps it’s particular to this part of the country, something to do with the amount of rain that falls on it. The sun sparkles on a stream that ripples down a brick channel parallel with the High Street. In neat front gardens, swathes of bold daffodils sway in the breeze, yellow trumpets proclaiming spring.

    Jane walks briskly swinging her arms. Young women pushing buggies glance at her and Jane smiles politely. When she reaches the square, the older people, well wrapped in anoraks and scarves and clustered round the door of the mini-market catching up on gossip, give her more searching looks, but Jane doesn’t linger. Even though she’s visited the village before many years ago, she doesn’t recognise it, and she hopes no one recognises her although she fears they might. She knows now how deep run the Devon memories, and how far-reaching are the connections.

    Take Maisie for instance, with whom she’s had several glorious Exmoor walks since retrieving Clio and whom she hasn’t been able to stop thanking for rescuing her.

    ‘I just can’t believe that someone would be so kind to a complete stranger,’ she said.

    ‘Ah, but you weren’t a complete stranger,’ said Maisie. ‘I was almost certain I knew who you were.’

    She stopped there as if waiting for Jane to say something but Jane didn’t. She knew the obvious reply. What did Maisie know about her? Did she mean she knew about Jane now or about Jane both now and thirty-something years ago? She didn’t want to know the answer to that because she suspected from the way Maisie spoke that it was the latter. It made her queasy to think that people might be privy to events in her life that she herself had banished to the back of the least-used cupboards of her mind.

    Had.

Six roads and a footpath lead off the square, only two of them signposted. With the help of Google and Chris however she’s done her homework and, without drawing attention to herself by hesitating or pulling out a map, is able to turn on to one of the unmarked roads.

    She strides away from the village, splashing through muddy puddles. Already her mind is clearing and the knot in her stomach dissolving. That's the magic of walking she's discovered, not only during her excursions with Maisie, but also during recent solitary explorations around Muddicombe. However bad you feel before you start, and however dire the weather, you always feel better afterwards. Her once-pristine Ordnance Survey map is tearing along its folds, and the ridges on her wellie soles are worn flat. She's wearing the wellies now and hopes they don't start to leak. That would really put her off.

    The hedgerows are liberally sprinkled with wildflowers. She recognises some of them, like bluebell and buttercup, but there are others, pink ones and white ones, that she doesn’t yet know the names of. She really must take photographs and check them against her old wildflower book. The flora of Devon differs from that of Kent and it’s time – ‘high time’ as her father would have said – she got to grips with it. After all, if she stays in Devon she’s likely to be out walking, now that she’s discovered how therapeutic walking is, and if she’s out walking she’s going to want to know what she’s looking at.

    If she stays in Devon, that is, and doesn’t take an extended holiday the other side of the globe. She’s still looking at pictures of Oz on the internet and plotting itineraries. She hasn’t yet ruled it out.

    Busy-ness is all around. Little birds flit across the road in front of her and vanish into bushes. Bigger birds, holding twigs in their beaks, fly self-importantly from tree to tree. A frantic chorus of birdsong comes at her from all directions.

    Spring is something else she’s noticing for the first time. She never realised before she came to Devon how mad spring is and how catching that madness is. She can feel her own blood stirring, and thanks providence that she decided to walk from the village – in spite of its danger - instead of driving all the way. Walking is giving her time to think, time to make sure that it’s not only spring fever that propelled her out of bed and into her car this morning.

    She may be better than she was, but she’s not there yet, and she's still not certain about what she's doing today.

The road winds on and on. With its high hedges that hide the surroundings, it looks like every other Devon lane and she knows she has to pay attention so as not to get lost. Many a time in Clio she’s emerged from a reverie to find she hasn’t the faintest idea where she is or even where she’s going. It’s scary, like waking in a strange bed. She’s pretty certain however from the map Chris drew for her that there are no turnings until the relevant one, and she doesn’t think she’s reached that yet. She hopes not anyway. She's not ready.

    Support over the last six weeks has come from the most unlikely sources – and she’s sure Sharon would have something to say about that. She remembers her talking one day about ‘quests’ and the helpers you meet on the road and how important it is to recognise and respect them.

    On the very day that everything happened – the day she lost her job, and Chris arrived, and Rick had his crash – Mrs Henry rang and asked her over. It was a measure of how desperate she was that she went.

    ‘Call me Rose,’ said Mrs Henry the next morning, greeting Jane with a kiss on both cheeks. ‘We’ll go to my office. It’s the warmest place.’

    Jane trailed after her, too intent on holding herself upright to notice much even though it was her first visit to the Manor. She had a vague impression of wooden floors and Turkish rugs, blue and white porcelain, the scent of woodsmoke, fresh flowers.

    The office was a small sunlit room. A desk covered with papers sat sideways to the window. Opposite was a faded sofa, heated by a free-standing electric fire.
    ‘Do sit down,’ said Mrs Henry – Rose, placing herself on the sofa and patting the cushion next to her.

    Jane huddled into the far end.

    ‘Can I tell you something?’ said Rose. ‘I think it might help.’

    Jane gave a small nod but kept her eyes down. She was afraid she might cry if she looked Rose in the face.

    ‘Four years ago’, said Rose, ‘our youngest son, Archie, was expelled from Eton for selling drugs and disappeared. A year later, thank God, he turned up again but we hardly recognised him. He was covered in dirt and looked like a skeleton, but at least he was alive. Since then we’ve realised that bad things can happen to anyone and that one must do what one can for others. I volunteered for the Samaritans and now I’m training to be a counsellor.’

    She put her hand on Jane’s arm. Jane tried not to pull away.

    ‘Henry’s told me something of what’s been happening and it’s obvious to me that you’re going through a trauma of some kind. So what I wanted to say was, if you ever need the name of someone who could help you, someone good, I can recommend someone.’

    Rose stood up and poured some coffee from a vacuum flask on the desk. She pressed the mug into Jane’s hand.

    ‘Do think about it,’ she said. ‘It's no loss if it doesn't work out, and it might be a comfort to you.’

Then of course there’s Chris, who phoned her every day to start with and visits often.

    One evening she came over with an envelope.

    ‘I found this at Rick’s place,’ she said, handing it to Jane.

    On the front was written ‘For Jane’. Inside was a memory stick with a sticky label on which was written ‘Listen!’ and the date 22 February - the day she drove into a snowdrift, the day before Rick’s crash. She recognised Rick's tiny scrawl on both envelope and label.

    It was nearly a week before she found the courage to plug the stick into her computer.

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The Banker's Niece 41: Unsuitable

January 1978

‘I spent all Christmas looking through the University List for you,’ said Rick.

    ‘Whatever for?’ asked Jane.

    ‘I wanted to send you a Christmas card,’ said Rick.

    ‘But I didn’t get one from you,’ she exclaimed.

    ‘I couldn’t find you,’ said Rick mournfully. ‘I only know your first name.’

    Jane thought of her own Christmas holiday. In spite of its confusion, Rick had never entered her head.

    They were lying on cushions in the bay window of the sitting-room of Jane’s house. Bernard, her tutor, had gone home, and Mike and Heather up to bed - both of them giving Jane and Rick funny looks before departing. It was one o’clock in the morning.

    She didn’t dare touch Rick. She thought she might explode if she did. And he didn’t touch her either. There was so much tension around, the air crackled.

    A thick mist, light blue and sparkling, filtered into the room from the corner by the door. It formed itself into a cloud and floated across to hover over the pair of them.

    ‘What is it?’ whispered Jane.

    She wasn’t frightened – there were so many other supernormal things going on – but she wasn’t altogether sure either. There was something slightly malevolent about the sparkling cloud.

    Rick shook his head. ‘Buggered if I know.’

    So he saw it too.

    ‘I must go home,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve a cat to feed.’

    ‘OK,’ said Jane.

    ‘I’ll come over tomorrow,’ he said.

She spent the next day, Sunday, pacing the house. He hadn’t said when he was coming. She couldn’t rest until he arrived.

    ‘What’s going on?’ asked Heather. ‘You’re very . . . something.’

    ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Jane.

    She didn’t and even if she had she wouldn’t have wanted to tell Heather.

    Heather sniffed and went upstairs.

    Jane made a cake – a fruit cake from another recipe of her mother’s. Rick had liked her banana and lemon cake. She hoped he would like this one too. She left the cake cooling on a wire rack in the kitchen and every time her peregrinations took her to the kitchen she cut and ate a small slice.

    At three in the afternoon she discovered that there was no cake left.

Rick burst through the front door at six-thirty in the evening.

    ‘I think we ought to get married,’ he blurted out.

    ‘I agree,’ wailed Jane, clutching her head, ‘but you’re so unsuitable.’

    It wasn’t a ‘no’. She understood that, and she knew Rick understood it too, but she wasn’t sure she could manage to be married to Rick.

    Marrying Rick would mean being a real person, not a cipher or a daughter or a wife. Rick wouldn't want anything less; he wanted an equal. But did she have it in her to be a real person? Nothing in her upbringing had prepared her for it. She had no skills for achieving it.

    She was one self with her parents and another with Rick and, though she had no doubt that the self she was with Rick was bigger and more honest than the self she was with her parents, she was terrified of revealing that self to her parents. She feared that they would trample all over it, that they might destroy it. She’d always feared that. That was why she’d always kept it secret.

    ‘I thought I might take you to my local,’ he said.

    He had a blue wood-trimmed Mini parked outside the house. Folded clothes filled the back seat.

    ‘Clean washing,’ said Rick, without explaining what it was doing in the car.

    He drove at 60 miles an hour through narrow hedged lanes, crouched in his seat so as not to bang his head on the roof, talking all the while. Jane hung on to the door-handle as Rick told her the story of his life. He was twenty-three, a year older than her. He came from Devon. He lived in a farm cottage that had once contained four other people – Stick, Big John, Ratty and Helen – but they’d all gone now and he rented it on his own. Helen had been his girlfriend since he was nineteen, but last September she’d gone off with Ratty. (That explained a lot.)

    He skidded to a halt in front of a long stone building. They climbed wide steps to a heavy door. The interior smelt of polish. Dim wall lights revealed shiny wooden surfaces and gleaming brass.
    'Alex,' said Rick, pushing her forward. 'This is Jane.'

    ‘And what do you do?’ said the man behind the bar. He had a neat moustache and clear blue eyes.

    Jane faltered. For a moment she didn’t know what he meant. Everything was happening so fast. Nothing was the same as it had been. Her mind swirled like an agitated snow globe.

    ‘Er, I’m a student,’ she stammered.

    ‘I know that,’ said the man. ‘I mean, what subjects?’

    It took her a second or two to remember.

    ‘Er, French and Spanish,’ she said.

    He nodded and moved to the other end of the bar to serve someone else.
    'He likes you,' said Rick.

    

They climbed into the car again and set off down a lane that became narrower and narrower and more and more bumpy. When Jane got out of the car her feet sank into mud.

    She followed Rick into a hallway lit by one bare bulb. Underfoot was a patch of lino, frayed at the edges. Through a door to the right, she saw a dark room piled like a junk shop with furniture and clothes. A cooker and fridge sat under the stairs ahead. On shelves sat quantities of jam-jars labelled ‘Mushroom ketchup 1976’.

    ‘Helen,’ said Rick. ‘It was a good year for mushrooms.’

    Upstairs she shuffled after him along a passage strewn with more clothes. Whose were they? What were they doing there? It was so cold she could see her breath. The floor undulated like the lanes they’d been travelling.

    He led her into a room at the end of the passage. A paraffin heater rose like a lighthouse from a sea of clutter. A tortoiseshell cat, its fur tousled as if it had just woken, glared at Jane from the centre of a mattress pushed against one wall.

    ‘That’s Cat,’ said Rick. ‘She likes marzipan.’

    Cat jumped off the bed and stalked out.

    Jane sat on the edge of the mattress. Rick reached into a wall-rack crammed with records, selected one and put it on a player on the floor. A man’s voice rang out, pure and strong.

Today you’ll make me say that I somehow have changed

Today you’ll look into my eyes, I’m just not the same

To be any more than all I am would be a lie

I’m so full of love I could burst apart and start to cry

Today, everything you want I swear it all will come true

Today, I realize how much I’m in love with you*

She was going mad. The singer was communicating directly with her through the ether. The song had been written especially for her and Rick.

    The tidal wave that had been rising inside her ever since yesterday was about to crash. She too was about to burst apart.

*From 'Today' by Jefferson Airplane

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The Banker's Niece 40: Decision-time

SPOILER ALERT

Don't read this chapter if you've not read earlier ones and are intending to do so

Jane puts the sheaf of papers back on the kitchen table and rests her head in her hands.

    It’s a shock to come back to the present, to hear the radiators creaking and feel the sun warming her through the French windows. She still has the taste of coffee in her mouth, and in her nose is her own scent of soap and clean clothes.

    Ever since she left her safe London life – no, ever since her father died – something inside her has been crumbling. The Berlin Wall she erected between her past and her present has been falling into disrepair and memories have flooded through the gaps. Up until now however she’s managed to keep them in her head. She’s heard them and seen them but she hasn’t done anything with them.

    At the same time she’s felt propelled. Decisions have made themselves. Surprises have ambushed her at every juncture, and nothing has turned out as she planned. 

    But all that has changed with Chris’s letter.

    She’s back with the same stark choice she faced nearly forty years ago when she first met Rick. What a joke. It’s almost cruel.

She stands up and goes over to the French windows, flinging them open and stepping outside.

    There’s still a chill to the air but the slush has vanished and all she can see in her garden is brown-ness: the plants are either dead or leafless and the grass is a bog. Even the birds having a noisy argument in the hedge at the bottom of the garden are brown. Even her view is brown.

    She’s angry with Rick, of course she is.

    Not only is the ruse disgusting, an insult to both her and Chris, but it’s stupid. It could so easily have gone so very wrong. It could have destroyed her. It would almost certainly have driven her away. After all, isn’t that what Rick’s affair with Chris did to her, all that time ago?

    One part of her wants to throw plates at the wall, to march round the room swearing and kicking chairs. It would be a relief. But another part of her can’t be bothered. It wouldn’t achieve anything. It would make her feel like a spoilt child. More importantly, it would be a waste of everything Chris has done.

    According to the tabloids (which she doesn’t read any more) and soaps (which she doesn’t watch), she and Chris should by now be slinging insults at each other, if not grappling on the ground. That’s how these stories run, according to them. But in Jane’s experience that’s never the case. If anything, women gang up against men. They support each other. After all, who else do they have?

    She’ll be forever grateful to Chris for coming to see her and including her in Rick’s machinations. It was a brave, selfless thing to do. It was the action of a responsible adult. It’s an example to her.

    What choice, however, does a responsible adult make in the situation in which Jane now finds herself?

She plonks herself into one of the wooden garden armchairs left behind on the terrace by the previous owner and which Jane should have put in the shed for the winter, but never got round to. Damp seeps through her trousers but she tries to ignore it. It’s not important at the moment.

    She could ring Sharon. After all, Sharon is privy to the secrets of the higher world, or so she would have Jane believe. She would know which action is best suited to the unfolding of Jane’s life-plan. Somehow though, she doesn’t want to do that, and that’s because she knows already what Sharon would say: ‘Ah, the Prince of Wands. I’ve been expecting him to reappear. Didn’t I always say that the two of you had unfinished business? Of course you must go and see him.’

    She wouldn’t listen to Jane’s objections: that it would reopen the most painful part of her life; that it could all go horribly wrong and Jane would lose even the good memories of her time with Rick; that there would be no love left between the two of them and so nothing for Jane to believe in any more; that he would be fat and ugly; that she would still be the same inadequate person and that everything would fall apart like it did before.

    Sharon would tap her finger on the table and exhort Jane to bypass the objections and use her in-tu-ition.

    But how do you recognise your intuition? How do you decide which of the voices in your head is the right one? In spite of Sharon’s exercises, she still doesn’t know.

    She bites her fingers and stares at the ground.

    A breeze ruffles the bare branches of her apple tree and a couple of dead apples thud to the ground. She discovered the tree laden with fruit when she moved in last September. She managed to pick some of it but the rest she had to leave for the birds. Maybe this year she’ll be more organised.

    If she's still here in the autumn.

    And with a flash of something like inspiration she realises that not all her choices have to relate to Rick. As Sharon says, no situation is black and white. There’s always a third option.

    So why shouldn’t she listen to the loud voice that has this minute joined the others and is telling her to get the hell out, to travel to the other side of the world – Australia perhaps - and make a true fresh start, not this bastard one in Devon. After all, she’s never had a gap year – they didn’t exist in her day – so why shouldn’t she have gap rest-of-life? She’s worked for it. She can afford it.

    She jumps to her feet. She'll race to the computer this very minute, before she starts to doubt, and do some research – into the cost of flights, estate and letting agents who might deal with her house, internet banking, insurance and the million and one other things involved in an extended trip, not to say move, to another country.

She charges up the stairs, buzzing like she does after a double espresso, but as she sits at her desk the phone rings.

    She doesn’t want to answer it. She’s already spoken to all the important people in her life this morning. The call can only be rubbish, or bad news.

    ‘Hello,’ she says cautiously into the mouthpiece.

    ‘Jane?’ says a trembling voice.

    ‘Yes,’ she says, her tone warmer. She thinks she knows who it is.

    ‘Jane, it’s Chris.’ She sounds as if she’s trying not to cry.

    ‘Yes?’ says Jane, her voice rising in pitch.

    ‘It’s Rick,’ quavers Chris. ‘He’s had a crash. In the back roads. You know what he’s like. Met a tractor head on . . . Air ambulance . . . Just this minute rung me . . . On my way now . . . Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital . . . May have to be transferred to Bristol . . .

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The Banker's Niece 39: The revelation

January 1978

Jane sat at an empty table in the Dart House coffee bar, nursing a cappuccino in its Pyrex glass cup and saucer.

    She didn’t normally frequent Dart House any more than she could help as it was infested with wellies. She could hear them now, behaving as usual as if they were the only people who mattered, talking about Christmas in loud voices and urging their friends to jump the queue for food and drink.

    She kept her eyes fixed on her coffee as she knew that if she looked up she might catch the eye of one of them and they might come over. She’d made the mistake when she first arrived at university and attended the rash of fresher parties of allowing wellies to latch on to her because they thought she was one of them. Now she spent her time on campus dodging those first acquaintances, which was difficult as they tended to study arts subjects like she did. (She was as bad as Heather in her own way, she sometimes thought.)

    Dart House was near the arts buildings, which was one of the reasons she was there now risking wellie contact, instead of good old Exe House with its mixed clientele, her usual haunt.

    The other reason was that she didn’t want to go back to the house.

She’d returned to Kent for Christmas and discovered that her mother had arranged for Jane a selection of parties where she could mix with the offspring of Jane’s mother’s friends, as she’d been doing since Jane was about fourteen. Jane wasn’t sure whether her mother was still doing this because she hadn’t realised that Jane was grown up and could organise her own social life or because she thought that Jane at twenty-two was on the shelf. Probably the latter.

    After all, her mother had ‘come out’ at seventeen, joining all the other ‘debutantes’ in being ‘presented’ to the monarch before plunging into a series of cocktail parties, balls and weekends at grand country houses. You were supposed to find a husband pretty smartly because you only got one shot at a ‘season’. This was partly because they were expensive to fund, what with the clothes you needed, living in London, the travel and hosting your share of the various events, and partly because you were used goods afterwards.

    Jane’s mother had avoided this shame by going on to study at Oxford University, which was hard to remember sometimes, but perhaps it was because of this that she hadn’t tried to put Jane through something similar. Or at least not so structured and overt.

    Jane could have refused to attend the Christmas parties, she supposed, but she lived in hope. Somewhere, some day, she might find a kindred spirit. She simply had to keep looking.

    But in the event, she’d spent several dire evenings hiding in bathrooms or shrinking against walls wanting to be invisible. She did try to play the game, at least at the start of the holidays, but she discovered that she couldn’t any more. She would utter something she thought perfectly normal and interesting, and there would be an awkward silence and people would start to edge away.

    For the first time she began to wonder if she was indeed past it.

   

It was strange therefore that yesterday, her first day back at university after the holidays, she’d known as soon as she walked through the front door of the house that she had to finish whatever it was between her and Gordon.

    It wasn’t that she minded the meaningless sex. The opposite in fact. The more meaningless the better as far as she was concerned as she was done with those sorts of feelings. It was simply that she feared Gordon was taking their relationship too seriously. She was leading him on. She wasn’t being honest with him. And, given that he was her second-best friend at university, that wasn’t fair.

    Of course she couldn’t explain much of that to him, particularly the sex bit, and so he hadn’t understood her sudden change of heart. He’d gone very quiet and she’d hadn’t seen him since. She missed him but she felt bad about what she'd done and so all in all not seeing him was the best option. 

    Thus her exile in the Dart coffee bar.

   

The swing doors behind her swished open and banged shut. A figure zoomed past, twirled one hundred and eighty degrees and dropped into a squat in front of her.

    ‘Neep,’ it said.

    She hardly recognised him.

    The cloak had gone. The beard had gone.

    He wore black boots, black jeans, a black polo-necked jumper and a brown corduroy jacket. Where the beard had been was stubble, a generous mouth and a dimpled chin. He looked almost . . . almost handsome.   

    ‘You, er, you look different,’ she stammered, trying not to blush.

    His eyes twinkled. They were the only part of him she recognised. But the expression in them had changed.

    ‘I went to see my parents at Christmas,’ he said. ‘My mother re-equipped my wardrobe.’

    ‘Oh, I see,’ said Jane, swallowing.

    She didn’t know what else to say. They seemed to have gone beyond small talk – if they ever had in fact been at that stage. Her ears buzzed, blocking all the other sounds around. They were in a bubble of their own.

    Hey,’ said Rick, as if taking pity on her. ‘The Albion Band are playing at the Great Hall on Saturday. D’you want to come?’

    ‘Oh no,’ said Jane. ‘I couldn’t possibly. I’ve got far too much work to do.’

    Well she had. Her finals were only a few months away, and it was vital she passed them. Her only purpose in coming to university was to acquire a degree, and hence rewarding work. For that she had to be disciplined and calm, so social life always came second. She never wanted to go back to the amoral work she’d done in London, or the frantic social life, or to be stirred up like she had been there.

    And something told her that Rick could stir her up.

    A lot.

Jane and Heather sat at their usual table in the Exe bar, not too near the wall so that they couldn’t see people coming and going, and not too near the front so that they were conspicuous themselves and had to mingle with all the show-offs lounging on the steps down to the Heffalump Trap. It was Thursday, a week and a half into term and as both had been studying hard they’d decided they deserved a night out.

    ‘Look,’ said Heather, pointing to the other side of the room. ‘Isn’t that Rick?’

    She’d softened towards him slightly after their party in November when she’d seen him cloak-less.

    He had his trousers tucked into his boots like a Cossack. He was speeding towards some woman. Small and round, dark curly hair, big smile. Pretty.

    Jane leapt to her feet, scrambled over the bodies in the middle of the room, and placed herself in Rick’s way.

    ‘Would you like to come to supper?’ she panted. ‘Saturday. At the house.’

  

‘You what?’ exclaimed Heather in horror, when Jane returned.

    ‘I’ve invited him to supper,’ repeated Jane. ‘And I’m hoping you’ll come too and give me some moral support.’

    She also invited one of her Spanish tutors to whom she owed a meal as he’d had the tutorial group over to his house the term before. Then Mike from the house, with whom she’d hardly exchanged a word as she only saw him when he was in the kitchen eating and he did that with headphones on while reading a newspaper, happened to be hanging around looking hungry when she and Heather were cooking for the party so they took pity on him and invited him too.

    Gordon, thank goodness, was still not in evidence.

    Heather cooked the usual something with mince and tinned tomatoes and Jane made a banana and lemon cake from a recipe of her mother’s. She put too much lemon juice in the icing and it slid off the cake to rest in untidy folds on the plate, but she hoped no one would mind. She decided to wear her usual jeans and jumper so as not to appear to be trying too hard.

    Rick on the other hand arrived in his magenta trousers and a sage-green shirt that looked new. Jane wondered if it was another item that had come to him courtesy of his mother. At supper he had two helpings of Jane’s cake and afterwards he sat on the sitting-room floor against a wall while Mike played his collection of Electric Light Orchestra albums. Jane perched on the arm of the sofa next to him.
    Rick didn’t say anything – in fact he’d hardly said anything all evening – but Jane could tell he wasn’t impressed with the choice of music. Even cloak-less he fitted in even less than she did, but to her he was cooler than anyone else in the room. He was different. He was exotic. He was real. He had something inside that was distinctive, particular to him, and that echoed something inside herself.

    Her mind went clear, as if clouds had rolled back, and a voice spoke in her head.

    ‘This man will interest me for the rest of my life. We are going to marry.’

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Look no fences: A visit to Knepp wildland

At the weekend Frog and I (sans Dog) visit my brother D and his family in West Sussex only a couple of miles from Knepp, the site of the first (I think) large-scale rewilding project in the UK and the subject of that fabulous book Wilding which I’ve mentioned several times before in this blog.

On Saturday we head to the estate for a walk. Because visitors are exhorted – extremely nicely – to stick to designated routes so as not to disturb wildlife, my well-organised brother has acquired a leaflet and chosen ours: Castle Walk. It's the longest – 8.8km.

As soon as we drive up the track to the carpark I start crying. I think it’s as much that somebody is doing something so extraordinarily brave and positive for the environment as it is the sight of the scrub and scruffy woods on either side (which as you will know if you are a diligent reader of this blog are exactly my sort of thing and increasingly hard to find).

We take a quick look at the safari office . . .

In the safari office - a blackboard for listing species spotted

. . . before entering the estate through this arch of deer antlers. It’s like entering Jurassic Park.

The entrance to Knepp's wildland

We twirl round the glamping/camping site and the yurts where yoga and other courses are held (for some of which my dear niece M does the cooking). The yoga yurt is surprisingly warm and spacious, and flooded with light from the transparent centre to its dome.

The yoga yurt (left)

We study the adjacent wild-swimming pool. It’s a bit murky and I can see slimy leg-grabbing things growing up from the bottom, but I’m almost tempted.

The wild-swimming pool

Then we head out to the bush.

It’s not long before we emerge into this. 

Our first sight of Knepp wildland. (My picture does not do it justice.)

I start crying again. I’ve never seen anything like it in this country before. There are no fences, and all I can see is scrub and trees. I feel as if I’m in a dream or a long-lost memory.

As explained in Wilding, scrub – long considered worthless - is in fact the richest wildlife habitat. Ecologists are beginning to think that our land’s natural state is not woodland but a mixture of woods, scrub, wetland and grassland. Knepp is testing this idea by leaving the land and its inhabitants to do their own thing.

Then a flock of storks appear. I'm not expecting them. I didn’t know there were storks at Knepp. They wheel over us for many minutes and I imagine that they’re performing just for us. I cry some more.

Storks. (Again, apologies for the picture. Not only did the birds keep moving but it was one of those sunny days when all I could see on the camera-screen  was myself.) 

Now we understand better some tall posts near the entrance.

Tall posts topped with untidy piles of twigs. We think they must be stork nests (or attempts to encourage the storks to nest).

Later D points me towards an article Isabella Tree (the author of Wilding) has written recently for the Guardian. It relates how storks last nested successfully in England in 1416 and are now in decline everywhere because of loss of wetlands and meadows and fatalities from power-lines and roads. The Knepp birds come from Poland and were released at Knepp only this year.

For several hours we wander the paths, looking at birds and wildflowers and fungi and a slow-worm, and eating blackberries that taste better than any I’ve eaten this year.

As well as cooking, M does postgraduate studies into the interaction between humans and their environment. We talk about our nomadic ancestors and how as humans we're meant to walk most of the time.

We take a wrong turning and stumble across a lake. Wilding tells how they ‘untamed’ the river which runs through the estate, and I've read somewhere that they aim when they can to reintroduce beavers – the best agents of waterway wilding. But this lake according to D is the result of ironworkings. We think we see a great crested grebe on it.

Back on the path, one of us points out some deer in a distant clearing, but I can’t see them. Then however on an expanse of grass next a wood we encounter an unmissable herd of cattle . . .

Wild cattle (aurochs) are extinct but these - English longhorns - are a near equivalent

. . . which look fearsome and have young with them, but ignore us.

A safari group - the first people we have encountered - is also looking at the cattle. Frog is more interested in their strange vehicle than in the animals.

We see a platform in a tree . . .

Tree platform

. . . and climb up to it. To one side is another lake (or an untamed river) . . .

View from the tree platform

 . . . and to the other, tree canopy which makes me feel like a child again and climbing trees.

The view the other way

Further on, deep in the woods, we nearly collide with a pig the exact colour of the dead bracken . . .

A Tamworth pig, a substitute for the wild boar for which Knepp does not have a licence

The walks leaflet exhorts us not to get close to the animals but we have no choice. It takes no notice of us however.

Another pig lumbers in our direction snorting. We think she’s going to attack us but at the last minute she puts her nose down and starts rooting for food. Perhaps she was simply saying hello, we think, or excited at the thought of eating.

The pig which lumbered towards us

Some piglets squeal in the undergrowth but I only catch glimpses of them and it’s too dark to take a photograph. I worry that they’re frightened. ‘No,’ say the others. ‘They’re annoyed because their mother’s gone.’ I move off anyway.

We cross a road and enter another wood and, even though it doesn’t look that different from the one we’ve just been in, we all speed up.

    ‘This isn’t part of the estate,’ says my brother D. ‘It’s not rewilded.’

    ‘It’s as if we sensed that before we knew it,’ I say to Frog.

    ‘Yes,’ he agrees. ‘There’s no “dawdle factor” here.’

We arrive at the deer park in front of Knepp Castle where Isabella Tree and her husband live. On the edge of a wood in dappled shade we see red deer.

Red deer

For the first time in my life I hear a red-deer stag make his autumn, rutting-season cry – a loud throaty moo designed I presume to scare off rivals. It’s impressive. He then scampers off after a couple of hinds who have run away. I feel sorry for them.

Red deer stag, pausing his mating behaviour briefly so as to stare at us (and pose for his picture)

In the distance, way out on the grassland, we spot wild (Exmoor) ponies.

We’ve now seen each of the four species of animal Knepp has introduced in order to ‘imitate the mix of herbivores that would have grazed this land thousands of years ago’ (as the wildland leaflet says). Each I realise favours a slightly different habitat, none of them anything like the uniform fields in which we plonk their domesticated versions. They all look healthy and none has fled from or attacked us as farm animals do. It’s as if they see us as equals. We’ve been happy wandering – as our nomadic ancestors did - and the animals seem happy about us being there.

We find a bird hide over a third lake and sit down to rest and chat about water-birds.

Four hours have gone and we’ve missed lunch but there’s one more thing to see – the remains of the original Knepp Castle which was destroyed by the Roundheads in 1648.

    They haven’t left much.

The remains of the first Knepp Castle

Around the ruin, fences have gone, the grass is rough and yellow not bright green and cultivated, and the river is crammed with reeds. I hope this is because the area is a new addition to the rewilding project.

We’ve been exploring the southern section of the estate, now 15 or so years into rewilding, but the northern section is not part of the project. I hope too that this will be one day be included.

For me there can never be enough wilderness. In a previous post I wrote about my vision of a future in which the current situation is reversed: in which wild countryside is the norm and reserves are where we grow our food. Now I wonder whether that goes far enough.

There are many good scientific reasons for rewilding (and Isabella Tree explains them with her usual aplomb in Wilding) but for me it’s a spiritual thing. It’s about releasing control. It’s about remembering that we are small and nature is big. It’s about relearning how to be simple.

I know that the visit to Knepp is one of the key events of my life.


If you want to know more about rewilding in general as well as other rewilding projects, have a look at the website of the four-year-old charity Rewilding Britain.