Meadowland (18 page)

A black wolf spider creeps from a crack in the ground of the hedge bottom. And starts off into the grass with deliberation. A male
Pardosa amentata
, I think. Wolf spiders do not spin webs; they hunt. On its head there are eight eyes arranged in three rows, all the better to see with; the first row comprises four small eyes, the second contains two larger eyes and the third row has two medium-sized eyes. (The four small anterior eyes are difficult to spot without a magnifying glass.) His peepers are better than mine. He sees her before I do. He stops and taps the ground with his front feet; she stills. Over the next minute, he cautiously scuttles, stops, scuttles until he is facing her. Then he begins waving the palps to the side of his face as though he was a sailor particularly weak at semaphoring. So begins the courtship in the fetid, closed-in world of the sward bottom.

His wariness is wise. Among spiders, the female of the species really is more deadly than the male. Lady arachnids have a well-deserved reputation for polishing off their suitors,
post copula
. But it has never been clear why this happens. Some biologists believe it is simply a mixture of female hunger and the availability of a meal that is in no position to run away. Others suspect that the male is actually sacrificing his life for the good of his genes. In other words, in becoming a meal for his paramour he somehow helps the offspring of their union.

He taps with his feet. Although she stares malevolently, the vibrations he sends must be good. This shadow foreplay can take hours. Sometimes, like today, it takes minutes. She accepts him. He rushes off. Wisely. And, ridiculously, I breathe a sympathetic sigh of relief for him.

Others have already mated. There are females basking in sun spots, where the grass has been parted by wind or animal activity, warming up their eggs which are attached to a hideous pod on their rear. A crusted molehill is much sought after for this pre-natal sunbathing.

I decide to go on a spider hunt, armed with a magnifying glass Sherlock Holmes would admire. And find: in the newt ditch the walk-on-water wolf spider,
Pirata piraticus
; in the grass and hedge there is also
Pisaura mirabilis
, a comparatively large wolf spider, the
male of which woos his mate by offering her a dead fly or other insect, wrapped up in a silk parcel.
Pachygnatha degeeri
(large-jawed spider);
Clubiona reclusa
(silk cell spider);
Clubiona lutescens
(silk cell spider);
Lepthyphantes ericaeus
(money spider);
Lepthyphantes tenuis
(money spider);
Dismodicus bifrons
(money spider), which is a particularly common denizen of grasslands, found between the upper strata of field layer vegetation and litter at ground level;
Gongylidiellum vivum
(money spider);
Meioneta rurestris
(money spider). The money spider, in its various sub-species, is one of the commonest spiders living in grasslands. By my estimate I am sharing the meadow with over two million of these incy wincy spiders, few of which are more than 5mm long. They in turn are consuming over 230kg of invertebrates. For all the industry of the money spider in the meadow habitat, it delivers an elegant murder, tying up its victim in silken threads before dispatching it with a poisoned bite.

The spiders travel on the self-same silk threads, a personal flying carpet.

28 J
UNE
Under a chattering swallow-sky I run down the bank. Two of the Gloucester Old Spots have done a bunk from the orchard. Like the truant cow they
have headed for the luxury grass of Lower Meadow, where they have snouted the entrance gate off its hinges, and are now energetically eating, their mouths an epileptic, frothy green. They are pigs in clover.

When Freda was younger, I think about eight, we mislaid her. Forty acres is at its vastest when you cannot find your child, and there is a river all along the eastern boundary and a lane all along the western one. A lane with cars.

Freda went missing just before noon, on a day when the sun seemed locked above our heads and the land was holding its breath. Penny – who is less prone to panic – started a methodical search of the house and garden, while I speed-walked down the fields to the river. Soon I was running. And calling. At every alien shape in the water – a snagged plastic feed bag, a broken galvanized bucket washed down from God knows where – I imagined the worst.

Nothing. Sheening with sweat, I began running uphill in wellingtons – a feat usually beyond me – and decided to cut through the pig paddock to get to the fields leading to the lane. As I scrambled down the metal gate into the bare earth of the pigs’ enclosure I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Freda’s clothes entangled with a row of pink pigs, lying like sausages in the packet.

I can tell you what the end of the world looks like. In a circle around you everything dissolves and melts
so that you know that life is an illusion, a pretty screen over the eternal expanding chaos of the universe. For one terrifying second I thought that the pigs had eaten Freda.

As I stumbled forward I could see that Freda was still inside the clothes. I could see that she was intact. As I reached her and touched her beautiful, rosy-cheeked face I could see that she was breathing. Colour burst into the world. Time sped up to its proper dimension. I’m probably imagining this, but I’m sure birds started singing too. Freda was fast asleep between two pigs. Feeling my fingers on her face, she opened her eyes. ‘Hi, Daddy,’ she said, before turning over on her side, the better to cuddle the pig next to her. The pig grunted its minor annoyance, before shifting its weight to accommodate her, setting off a porcine ripple as every pig adjusted its place in the sun.

I have another memory of pigs. A memory from my own childhood. I’m about six, standing on a wooden Davies Brooke’s lemonade box, arms leaning on the concrete wall of the pigsty at my grandparents’ house. The pigs are milling around, squealing in excitement because they can smell the buckets of warm mash, boiled up from kitchen leftovers, that Poppop, as we call my grandfather, is about to tip into their metal troughs. As the food arcs down from the buckets I slyly look at my grandfather’s thin arms, leather-brown below his rolled-up shirt sleeves; his
arms always fascinate me, because the tendons – after fifty years of farming – are taut steel-wire hausers.

The pigs jostle and barge, so that the herd order – for pigs are strictly hierarchical – is maintained and the top pigs have what they presume to be the biggest and best portions. ‘Always remember this about pigs, Jahn,’ he says, and suddenly jabs one pig on the ear with a spade. There is a grunt from the recesses of time, from the primordial swamp, as the pig bites at the shovel. Poppop retracts the shovel, bends down and points to the blade, swivelling it slightly so it catches the morning light. The pig has left gashing teeth marks in the steel. My grandfather is a man of few words but actions speak louder. Any animal that can leave bite marks in steel can bite off a human limb.

The problem with pigs is that one is never quite sure how they will react, dozily pacific or violently aggressive. The bristly Gloucester Old Spots do not like being shoved off the grass, and one whips around and tries to bite me. A shark’s mouth is tender, quaint in comparison.

By the time I have got them back into their paddock, they have been out in the Aztec sun for too long and their pale ears are reddening with sunburn. They snort satisfiedly when I rub sun lotion into their ears.

The Gloucester Old Spots and the truant cow are not alone in their liking for my grass. In the greyscale
evening a snuffling family party of badgers dines on the stuff too.

Young jackdaws fledged from the ruined barn at the Grove skirr in the sky. A kestrel fans the meadow; sunlight strikes through the goat willow, making the predator invisible. Below are field voles running through tunnels in the grass, dribbling urine as they go. The hawk, it is thought, can see the ultraviolet light reflected off the urine. The trees send shadows downhill on to the sighing grass. Hoverflies zip to the sudsy heads of cow parsley. Cabbage whites flock on the thistle heads. Grasshoppers and bees chant to the breeze, and the birds chorus back. The entire landscape is in motion.

Except for the grass snake – lying peacefully on a rock slab by the gate, and looking strangely unreal. This is the only time I see the snake in this entire year. When I look back to see if the hawk is still hovering I cannot make it out against the shadow play of the sun in the willows. Then when I look again to the snake it is no more.

29 J
UNE
Clouds race their shadows down the
mountain, across the valley, across the meadow, and up the criss-cross of fields on Merlin’s Hill. Something else is stirring, moving. There are so many little shiny frogs in the newt ditch that they make the sedge grass in and around it tremulous.

30 J
UNE
The time for mowing is nigh. The hay-cut is when farmers wheel out their vintage tractors from dusty barn corners, and I am no exception. I spend the day servicing our 1978 International 474. And the finger bar mower, which looks for all the world like a horizontal garden hedge-cutter, which attaches to the tractor’s rear. And the bailer too. A long day of grease and spanners. The baby blue tits which live in the crack in the breeze blocks of the stables are companionable, though. They have not yet learned fear, and cheer me on.

Devil’s bit scabious