Hedging our bets
John Lewis-stempel and Snoopy the terrier sample the sights and smells of a hedgerow walk
ON the windowsill, a wasp stings itself to death in the sunlight. Through the glass, the Mediterranean sky makes promises—promises it will sever this English autumn morning. We all have our rituals and responsibilities and one of mine—shared with my wife—is the 9.30am dog walk of our elderly blind Jack Russell, Snoopy. (No, I didn’t name him—the entire credit goes to our daughter Freda.)
My grandfather had the care of estate workers: at Cradley, there were two men whose sole job was to chop logs for the hearth six months of the year. My duty this day is to take a small sightless terrier for a 100-yard walk along the lane. However, Snoopy is a faithful retainer. Noblesse oblige, you see?
The outside world is chill and the dog’s first pee steams. Bizarrely, it remains a source of pride to him, and to us, that he can cock a back leg on a nettle. The old dog toddles along and I’m grateful to him, to be reminded, Christianly, of life in the slow lane. He stops every two yards, prickeared to sniff a brown skeletal hogweed stem, a blackthorn sucker, a white trumpet of bindweed.
It’s a special thing, an October hedge. I’ve just returned from exile: four weeks studying agriculture in France. I missed the usual expatriate things—bacon and beamy village pubs—but what I missed most of all, I think, was a good, thick English hedge. One you can tootle along, poke a stick into. A hedge you can’t see through. A hedge with hinterland, troll holes, antique places and lost and dark continents.
The laneside hedge is 900 years old, or thereabouts, according to Dr Max Hooper’s famous formula, as patented in his Hedges (1974). Essentially, the number of woody species in 100ft of hedge equals the centuries the hedge has existed. The Norman hedge along the lane has oak, elm, ash, hawthorn, rose, hazel, sallow and blackthorn. Over the years, we’ve allowed it to grow in height, so it’s tall (8ft) for a farm hedge,
although not as tall as the hopyard hedges I grew up with and will shortly return to.
Loss of sight has done zero to lessen Snoopy’s desire for the daily hedge news. He sticks his snout into a rat hole, corktight, and sniffs. The rats quit their summer
dacha last week—he wants to check they haven’t, rodent-cunningly, returned.
The hedge here sprawls with Rupert Brooke’s ‘unofficial English rose’, along with wanton red haws and the Tic-tac lime and orange of bryony berries. A few blackberries hang on, Rococo ripe. The gold leaves of the hazels flicker, flame, in pseudo fire. The wind last night, when comets and fieldfares flew the sky, has stripped the sallow to shredded pennants on cavalry lances.
Ash leaves die pale and yellow, like sickly Victorian heroines. The cold snaps off the leaves. An abscission layer forms on the leaf stalk, weakening and finally severing its attachment to the twigs from which, in spring, it grew. The dropped leaves are future humus—a hedge eats itself. The antimonies of Nature are most keenly revealed in October. Life: Death. Comfort: Barbarism. Blackberry: Barb.
Small wonder, I think, that autumn has entranced the soul poets, most famously, of course, John Keats. A pity, I think, that Karl Marx didn’t understand the mental stimulation of a harvest-time hedge, then he may have moved beyond the idiocy of his own remark on ‘the idiocy of rural life’.
An electric jolt: a fly-agaric mushroom in the verge, its top seductive, luxury scarlet, thick like icing or sugar glaze. Everything about a fly agaric says ‘eat me’. Viking warriors did: the mushroom contains a mescaline compound, which affects the nervous system in the manner of LSD, causing a loss of fear born of delusion. The Vikings took half of England because they were berserk drug-takers.
At the dark tunnel where the fox slides through, Snoopy sprays his scent contemptuously on the glistening emerald moss that coats the hawthorn trunks. The true October morning scent, itchy-fruity, is drowned in the rank, stale beer stink of dog musk.
There is a single brown chicken feather lying, as if displayed by a curator, at the entrance to the fox tunnel—the fox has raided my neighbour’s clueless Warrens again. For me, the feather is a warning to ramp the security on the geese, because, on some darkening afternoon, the fox makes the calculation ‘better to be hung for a big fat free-range goose than a scrawny egg layer’. Always.
It’s the nature of the fox to thieve and it’s the nature of the farmer to protect his flock. With electric fencing and two smoking steel barrels of a Lincoln Premiere—agricultural artillery.
Somewhere in the unsighted wood, the fieldfares cluck, knocking nails in the last of summer. A beating of wings overhead—the pigeons are flying from oak to oak, covering them like lice, in the squabble for acorns.
Snoopy and I have done 100 yards. We cross the tarmac for the return, he wagging his tail. The return lap, he does not yet know, is even more interesting. I’ve already spotted a fresh rabbit burrow in the bank under the opposite hedge, English nature’s wall.
However, we will have to hurry. From the bend in the lane, there’s a view clear across to the peregrine-stooped hills of Mid Wales, where the rains of the world are born.
Twice crowned victor of the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, for ‘Where Poppies Blow’ (2017) and ‘Meadowland’ (2015), John Lewis-stempel is the 2016 British Society of Magazine Editors Columnist of the Year
‘Loss of sight has done zero to lessen Snoopy’s desire for the daily hedge news’