I’ve just got back from interviewing Isabella Tree for the book I’m serialising here: Wilderness: In Search of Belonging. Isabella is the author of Wilding and The Book of Wilding; of course, we talked rewilding, her 20-year plus project at Knepp and our mini, fledging one at Wild Pinebeck.
We also talked of belonging - what it means, where we belong, how we ensure people of the global majority feel that they belong in the countryside. And we spoke of how, in her words, it all ‘turns on a six pence’: where we are born and the circumstances in which we are raised, will profoundly affect our sense of self, and yet may be solely due to luck.
It is election day in the UK. All week the radio has been reporting on Britain’s chief concerns: tax and immigration. A Radio 4 reporter visits Tamworth, the birthplace of the Conservatives. Martin, a fish monger, stops selling cod cheeks long enough to tell the reporter how disappointed he is with the Tories, whom he’s always voted for.
‘Immigration is a massive problem in this country,’ he says, speaking of being over-run with migrants as if they were fish lice.
France is on the brink of an election and the far right are in the lead. The BBC speaks to a man who came to France from Iran when he was five. Now fifty years later, he believes that if Marine Le Pen's National Rally party seize power, he and his children will be deported.
He is sobbing so hard, he can barely speak: ‘I am French,’ he says, over and over again.
In the night I have a dream.
We are in a municipal building after hours, a school, maybe. The corridors are long and linoleum-lined; the windows faceless.
Someone has done something wrong. A minor misdemeanour. The culprit is caught.
She stands in front of us - a slight young woman, alabaster-skinned, raven-haired, blue-eyed. A tall white man, leans over her, remonstrating. Deciding on her punishment.
I look at her out of the corner of my eyes as I pace, my shoes squeaking on the linoleum. She is outwardly calm and compliant. But I can feel her rage. It is building.
Suddenly, I walk over and step between her and the man.
‘May I touch you?’ I ask.
She nods.
I stretch out my hand and place it on her chest, beneath her collar bone.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘You are beautiful.’
She nods again. She is surprised.
I sounded surprised, but I am not. What I am, is filled with wonder.
Because what I feel is the dragon within her, the sand-coloured skin of its underbelly, smooth and cool, and the rough-chocolate dark that flares across its rib cage.
I hear the girl’s voice in my mind and I speak to her without words.
But what everyone else sees is a glow, a golden-light that burns through my palm from her heart and illuminates me.
What everyone else hears is my voice, so loud it booms down the corridors, rasping and grating, as I speak an ancient language I have never heard before.
I can feel the dragon shape-shifting within her, twisting and opening its arms, flesh and bone fusing with her flesh and bone.
‘Is it hard to be so different?’ I say. ‘Do you enjoy the power?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
It is growing within her and I am now almost incandescent with light.
‘Stand back,’ I say, in English, but in my dragon’s voice that reverberates throughout the building and our bones. ‘Open the doors. Set her free.’
And I take my hand away as she bursts into flames and turns, beautiful and terrible, stretches her wings and flies into the night.
I know, even as I am in the midst of my dream, that I am steeped in centuries of literature relating to dragons: Beowulf, William Blake and Lord Tennyson, King Arthur and Lord of the Rings, George RR Martin and Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse.
I know what it means.
The young woman represents me, and those like me, monstrous to those who only see the otherness.
An otherness that appears so different, men will call you names as you pass, men will spit at you and boys will throw bottles.
An otherness so different that men will tell you how you should look and how you should speak and how you should behave and who you really are and where you really came from.
And yet.
And yet there us a power in being the other, in being the outsider, in being the monster.
The dragon may be the outward personification of this otherness, but it is also rage and pain and it is melded to her, skin to skull and scale to sinew.
And in the dream, I am me, now.
I can see who she truly is. I can see her beauty. I can feel that rage, that pain.
And only I can set her free.
The others fling open the doors and we all watch her, burning so very brightly, as she blazes across a barren sky.