A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (28 page)

On such things I mused, as I walked over the moor towards the beech grove and the drovers’ road to Triscombe, and as I walked I noticed that each low wind-battered bush of thorn or oak or holly was crowned with a small bird. The birds were not all of one species, but there they perched, in the
afternoon heat, not singing, but chatting to one another, in a gentle, low, unexcited, friendly murmur of conversation.

As I descended into the wood, the notes of the birds changed, for it was turning towards evening, and they were now singing up in the canopy, just out of sight. I paused from time to time to listen, and during one of these halts I heard a louder rustling above me, where bracken grew beneath the trees. A deer with calf, I hoped, and I froze, half hidden – but then into sight came not a deer but a person, emerging sure-footed from the trackless hillside. She carried a canvas bag, and just before she reached the path she stopped, put down her bag, took something from it, and began to peer intently at the bark of the tree. Then she got out a little booklet and began to make notes. Then she moved on to another tree, and repeated the process. What messages did she read in the trees, what poems from them did she transcribe?

She was about my age, with thick streaked black and grey hair, and a handsome, ruddy, veined, wind-weathered face. She was wearing baggy dark red cotton trousers, and an earth-pink floppy shirt. As she moved from tree to tree, I followed her with my eyes, then took a step forward. Her hearing was acute. She turned at once. And she smiled as I approached.

‘Afternoon,’ she said, ‘or is it evening?’

‘Betwixt and between,’ I said.

‘Lovely day,’ she said.

I wasn’t going to let her get away with that.

‘I’ve been watching you,’ I said. ‘Inspecting those trees. Do tell me, what
is
it that you do?’

Now you won’t believe this but it’s true. She laughed, a strange friendly hooting owl-like laugh, and said, ‘You mean, how is it that I live and what is it that I do?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That is exactly what I mean.’

‘
Well
,’ she said, emphatically, ‘I hope you’ll pay proper attention if I tell you, instead of drifting off and daydreaming, like that other fellow. What was it that distracted him – “cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills”?’

‘I’ve done that bit,’ I said. ‘I’m ready to listen now.’

And we sat down together on a patch of green moss where the sun broke through the boughs, and she explained.

‘I read,’ she said, ‘the messages of the forest. I decode the text of the trees. I read the lichen through my little lens.’ And she passed me a small round hand lens.

‘And what do the lichens tell you?’ I asked.

‘They tell us of the health of the woodland. They speak to us of acid rain from South Wales. Through the lichens we can monitor pollution year by year. Occasionally we use PH meters, but we can read much through the lens. Here, look, what do you see?’

I looked through her lens at the twigs she had collected, at the bark of the trees around us, and I saw revealed an extraordinary miniature world, of grey-green grottos and caverns, or armies of cactus spears, of seaweed fantasies, of orange spots, of starred and matted patternings, of black calligraphy on silver bark. ‘Such a diversity!’ I said. ‘And in so small a space.’

But she shook her head. ‘There’s far less diversity than there used to be. We are losing species. Some cannot survive the changing climate. Some, which have grown for millions of years in the same places, are now threatened.’

‘So lichen is a good indicator?’

‘Oh yes, the more the better.’ She laughed, entranced by her subject. ‘I’m afraid Wordsworth got that wrong, when he said the thorn was being
dragged down
by the moss and lichens, or whatever it was he said. What did he say, exactly?’

I produced the poem, and we read it together, in perfect
happiness. And then we made our way down the hill together, talking of Wordsworth and of Coleridge – or rather she talked and I listened, to a dazzling flow of art and science mixed, and it was, for that space of time, as though the two cultures had never divided, as though they had flowed on together through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, regardless of the National Curriculum. She spoke of Horner Wood and the Barle Valley, of Dowsborough Camp and Mounsey Castle, of Nettlecombe Park and of Kellynch Hall, of the lepers who lived below Culbone church, of the mineral railway and Tom Poole’s tannery and the charcoal burners and the lime kilns. She was impressed that I had discovered Shurton Bars, where they used to land the coal from Wales. Not many people know about that, she said. And dear God, she even knew the poem, for it prompted her to an aria on the green radiance of the vanished glow-worm, and the electric flame of the marigold. You remember the lines, perhaps –

’Tis said, in summer’s evening hour

Flashes the golden-coloured flower

A fair electric flame:

And so shall flash my love-charged eye

When all the heart’s big ecstasy

Shoots rapid through the frame!

(Not perhaps his best lines; but his footnote on electricity is superb.)

We had a beer together in the Castle of Comfort, and we exchanged names and addresses. Her name was Anne Elliot, and she was of an old Somerset family that had owned Kellynch in grander days, though now she lived mainly in Shropshire – ‘In fact, I live all over the place,’ she said, ‘and wherever I find lichens I set up my camp.’ She invited me to supper with
her at the Kellynch Field Study Centre, but I declined. I did not wish to impose.

The next day, after a quiet night with a silent, disapproving, well-bred landlady, I decided to skip a projected visit to ‘wicked Watchet’ and move on to Porlock Weir, to walk the coast path, in pursuit of the forests ancient as the hills and deep romantic chasms which Anne had assured me were still there. A gold-spotted lichen had been growing in those woods for seventy million years, she said. Could I have remembered that right? Seventy
million
years? The weather held and my heart sang.

I parked in the car park at the Weir, and bought myself a bottle of water in the little shop. I would take my knapsack and some money and a toothbrush, for it occurred to me that if I wanted I could walk on to Lynton and the haunted Valley of the Rocks, and spend the night there, to return by bus in the morning. I mentioned this plan to the person in the shop, who was clearly the guardian of the neighbourhood, and she said it would be quite safe to leave the car in the car park, but I must beware of landslides. ‘You look like a sensible person,’ she said, in a somewhat admonitory tone, ‘and I’m sure you know what you are doing.’

And off I set, up behind the pink Anchor Hotel, through fields of Jacobs sheep, past a little folly of a tollhouse, past the ruins of Ashley Combe, under the red deeps of a tunnel, and up the steep path to Culbone. I visited the little grey church, with its many tombstones of the Red family – there is one, believe it or not, to an Ethel Red – and noted (would I have noted this quite so keenly the day before?) the extraordinarily brilliant orange of the lichens that grew upon them, and then I went on up the path behind, steeply up to Silcombe. It was hot, and the air hummed. I emerged from woodland on a high-banked, open track, knowing and feeling that I was
within half a mile of the fount of Kubla Khan. There were white cattle standing in a spring of red water, and farther on a field of large lambs. Most of them scampered off, but one stood its ground to speak to me, and thrust its nose through the fence at me. I reached out a hand and it nudged me with its little hard hot woollen flat head. It was bored, and it was pleased to speak to me. Do not mock the pathetic fallacy. I know a bored lamb when I see one.

And on I went, until the path rejoined the coastal woodland. I could see what my friend at the Weir had meant by landslides, for since Coleridge’s day much of the path had slipped into the sea. Even my recent Pathfinder map was out of date. Below me were fallen tree trunks, some gallantly sprouting in their ruins, some dead as matchsticks. And far below them, the sea.

It was on this stretch that I embarked on my own folly. A gate informed me ‘Danger: Road Closed: No Through Way: New Route’, but I could see beyond this gate a particularly enticing Coleridgean jungle. The track looked good enough, and I am very sorry to say that I left the prescribed route and
deliberately
took the wrong turning. I told myself I would go only a little way – I thought I could hear the sound of a waterfall which called out to be inspected – but I should have known myself better, for each twist of the track revealed some new and wondrous prospect, of birch trees, of hart’s tongue ferns, of great slabs of wet rock, of mossy caverns, of dappled glades. On I went, recklessly. And all was well until I came to a place where a little dry watercourse crossed the path. It was no kind of a jump – only a couple of feet, and certainly not a brook too broad for leaping – but I landed heavily on my right heel, and at once felt a shooting pain up the back of my calf.

I stood there on one leg like a heron in astonishment. I had
never felt anything like this before. Gingerly, I tried to put my foot down again. The pain was intense.

I hobbled over to a tree trunk, sat down and tested my toes.
They
were fine. Everything was fine, except for the fact that I could not stand on my right leg.

I sat there, and philosophically ate a sandwich, and wondered how far I was from any human being and from my poor red car.

I had damaged a tendon, or torn a blood vessel. Such things happen. I ate another sandwich.

I felt quite calm. It was a pleasant spot. All the same, I admitted I had been a fool, and a fool whose best hope was to be caught out in her folly. Otherwise I should have to limp on, or back. I wondered which was wiser? The map showed a farmhouse not much further on, but then I knew I could not trust the map. The farmhouse might have fallen into the sea.

I decided to hobble back. It was not easy. I had to pick my way with great care, and I had travelled about a hundred yards when I heard, as I had heard the day before, a rustling in the woodland. I hoped and cried out.

‘Anne!’ I yelled. ‘Anne!’

And it was indeed she, for who else could it have been? She emerged from the undergrowth, as she had before, her lens and her little booklet in her hand, and exclaimed in delight which quickly turned to dismay.

‘Oh Mary,’ she said, as though she had known me all her life. ‘Oh Mary, Mary Mogg! What
have
you done? What a mercy I dropped by!’

She produced at once a plan of campaign. I was to hobble not back but on, towards the farm called Tasketts, which was, she assured me, still there. She would scramble back up the hill to her car, which was parked higher up on the drive, and
meet me there, and drive me back to safety. ‘Not to worry, Mary,’ she said, ‘the track’s quite safe as far as Tasketts, it only gets dodgy after that.’

So off she scampered, and off I stumbled, and we met at this lost place perched in a deep combe halfway between sea and sky.

‘Let’s go in,’ she said, ‘and make ourselves a cup of tea. We deserve one. Don’t look so alarmed, I know the people. They’re old friends, but they’re away.’

And she took the key from the soot drop by the door and let herself in. Indoors smelt of damp and moss and wood smoke. She put the kettle on and opened a carton of long-life milk and made us a pot of tea. She wrote a note to our unknown hosts, saying, ‘Dear Bears, guess who’s been drinking
your
tea?’

‘
What
an adventure,’ she said. ‘Now you’ll have to come back and spend the night at Kellynch with me.’ And she laughed her hooting woodland laugh.

I gave in. What could I do?

The next twenty-four hours were like an opium dream, induced by nothing stronger than a few glasses, over supper, of Bulgarian red. I had stumbled into an enchanted realm. We reported at Porlock Weir, where my friend of the shop tut-tutted over my accident and said, ‘Well, at least you had the sense to tell me where you were going,’ and Anne drove me to Kellynch, twenty miles away. It was an old house, eighteenth century on a sixteenth-century foundation, once the Elliot family seat, but now filled with aspiring botanists on weekend courses. Anne was staying in the stable courtyard, in what had been the old estate offices. She had an entourage of fellow lichenologists – a young man from the Natural History Museum, a professor from a Scottish university, a part-time poet from Iceland and a gold panner from Guiana.

I have never spent such an evening. In that long, high room, surrounded by old Elliot trophies – birds in glass cases, a coal scuttle with a coat of arms, a chemical retort, an old printing press – we sat and talked and shared our mysteries. From time to time Anne would leap up to consult a book from the heaped shelves, for this room was also a library, and such a library – a librarian’s dream, a librarian’s nightmare. Here were sixteenth-century herbals, and first editions of old topographical poems, and hand-tinted tomes on lichens and butterflies. We spoke of Humphry Davy and Sir Walter Raleigh and the albatross. I even told them of the brilliant Shakira Jagan and my high hopes for her, whereupon the Guyanese gold panner told us that his mother had always claimed to be descended from Toussaint L’Ouverture himself. He spoke of his journeys up the Demerara and the Orinoco, he spoke of the wonders of the jungle, and the Icelandic poet told us of the secret places in Iceland where no harm comes, where the air is pure as in the Garden of Eden. The log fire crumbled to red ash, and still we talked.

At last I was put to bed, in a walled and panelled closet in the corner of the room. Anne shut its doors on me and I slept as I have not slept in years.