Wilderness: Chapter 10

The Haw Lantern: In which the new hedge arrives and we dream of waxwings and May blossom

This is the tenth chapter in Wilderness: In Search of Belonging, my nature memoir, which traces my journey growing up as a dual heritage child in a white family in predominantly white, rural Britain—a place where I never quite fit in, and my sense of belonging always felt out of reach.

Now, as an adult, with my husband and daughter, I have moved to a remote part of Somerset to begin a mini conservation project. This is my story of our rewilding adventure, an exploration of how nature can help us heal, and a deepening understanding of what it means to truly belong.

Somerset - Winter

I’ve taken up a meditation practice. It’s based on the ‘6 phase meditation’ created by MindValley founder and author of The Buddha and the Badass, Vishen Lakhani. Step two, for instance, is to think of three things that you are grateful for that have happened in the past day, week or month and to conjure the emotion you felt during that moment. Phase four is to imagine the future in around three years’ time because, as he says, we over-estimate what we can achieve in a year and under-estimate what we achieve in three.

I think of my novel-writing career - effectively stalled as my agent has gone out of business, and because the world, depressed by Covid, has moved away from dwelling on the darkness at the heart of family life, which is what I write about. So every day, I sit at the window in my office overlooking our rewilding project and think of two things: a stack of my books, freshly published: fat hardcovers glittering with gilt, and agents and publishers waiting for me with champagne and flowers. And then I think of a hedge running along the raw edge of the fence, thick with a froth of cream and pale pink flowers, flickering with butterflies and bustling with small birds.

The reason I dream, again and again, of a hedge is because I know how valuable they are for wildlife. They provide shelter, food and nesting sites for mammals, birds, insects and plants. Species such as hedgehogs, dormice and birds like yellowhammer, nightingales and whitethroat nest within them. Bats like greater horseshoe bats, and barn owls, run nocturnal patrols along their lengths in search of midnight snacks. Insects, including bees and butterflies, benefit from the shrubs’ nectar-rich flowers and they’re also a refuge for amphibians and reptiles, helping them to move between different habitats safely.

Altogether, 130 Biodiversity Action Plan species (the British species most urgently in need of our protection) are closely associated with hedgerows, They are effectively corridors that connect pristine habitats with sparse wildlife to areas that are more diverse. In our case, I imagine the hedge as a living link between Lilac and Bluebell Wood, yoking them to one another and the wider wood beyond.

Unfortunately, the UK has seen a significant decline in hedgerows over the last century. Since the Second World War, it’s estimated that the country has lost more than 50% of its hedgerows due to urbanisation, intensive farming and land clearance. Even today we’re still losing 2,000 miles of hedgerow a year.

I have successfully applied for a grant from The Woodland Trust for a ‘wildlife-friendly hedge’. We have been promised a mixture of dog rose, dogwood, guelder rose, hazel, field maple; half of it will be hawthorn. That so much of it will be hawthorn is, I imagine, because hawthorn, tough and thorny, is likely to survive in our rocky, yet damp valley.

Hawthorn is also known as Maythorn (which gave rise to the English, May Day) because it flowers in May, producing abundant blossom that dormice and pollinators love. The tree supports over 300 insect species. In autumn, hawthorn is laden with berries - haws, which taste sour to us, but are packed with vitamin B and C and keep birds, from bullfinches to fieldfares to thrushes, fed throughout the colder months. In Orchard: A Year in England’s Eden Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates describe how hawthorn helps ‘bullfinches, one of our hardiest resident birds, make it through the winter, without leaving the tiny territories where they were born, raised and die.’

Its name, haw (for both tree and fruit) comes from the Old English haga, shortened from hagu-berige, meaning hedge berry. The haws themselves are technically known as ‘pomes’; the tree belongs to the rose family, which also includes rowan, blackthorn, apple, pear, plum, damson, cherry and, of course, rose. I remember one of my books of poetry is called The Haw Lantern by Seamus Heaney and I re-read it in preparation for - or perhaps homage to - the coming hedge.

The eponymous poem, The Haw Lantern, is about Diogenes, a disgraced Greek philosopher whose theories and teachings later gave rise to stoicism. It’s said that he used to wander the streets with a lantern, holding it up to seek out a ‘man’, a man who is rational and honest. In the poem, Heaney imagines the haw as a phantasmagorical lantern, ‘burning out of season’, with Diogenes, fashioned from frozen breath, holding his haw lantern

‘up at eye-level on its twig, 
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone...
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.'

For weeks Jaimie has been preparing the ground - where it is most barren and rocky, he’s been wheelbarrowing top soil from a heap of earth on our drive, up the West Mendip Way, and then, balancing on a scaffolding plank, manoeuvring his load from the path to the verge a metre above him. He finally finished at the start of the holidays.

The hedging plants arrive just before Christmas. There are a thousand of them. Each sapling is between 20 and 60 cm tall and looks like a thin stick; they’re grouped into bundles, tied with twine and packed into plastic bags, their roots damp and gnarled. These fledgling trees are known as ‘bare root’; they’ve been dug up from a nursery in Yorkshire whilst dormant. They’ll need to be planted soon, before they dry out and before the weather warms and their sap starts to flow. There are also bundles of bamboo canes and plastic spiral tree guards to protect them from deer and rodents. Each tree will need to be planted individually, a bamboo stake knocked in next to it, and a plastic guard wrapped around both it and the cane.

The entire woodshed is now full of canes and guards. In addition, The Woodland Trust, would like us to plant trees within the hedge and have given us a shortlist to choose from. I pick rowan. Rowans are delicate-looking trees with burnished bronze trunks when young, plates of creamy-white flowers in spring and bunches of scarlet-orange berries in autumn. They are, of course, good for wildlife. The Woodland Trust says the gloriously named Welsh wave and autumn green carpet moth love the leaves; the apple fruit moth feeds on the berries (or rather, like hawthorn, bunches of pomes). The fruit also attracts birds, particularly blackbirds, mistle thrush, song thrush, redstart, redwing, fieldfare and waxwing.

But the real reason I chose this species is because of rowan’s roots in mythology. Having grown up with an Irish family, partly in Ireland, I knew these were sacred and maybe slightly dangerous trees. Its Celtic name, 'fid na ndruad', means wizards' tree and it was once widely planted near houses and graveyards as protection against malevolent spirits. In Ireland, the little people, or fairies, were meant to dance around the trees; even as a child, I knew you must never fall asleep beneath one.

There is a Celtic tale of little Brigit, who did exactly that, and was spirited away by the little people, never to return for seven long years. It became the inspiration for WB Yeats' poem, The Stolen Child, first published in 1889. The pome, in turn, became part of the inspiration for my second thriller, also called The Stolen Child, about a child who is adopted. When she turns seven, her father appears, claiming she’s been stolen from him and he wants her back.

‘Come away, O human child! 
To the waters and the wild 
With a faery, hand in hand, 
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.' 

WB Yeats

In Celtic mythology, the rowan is called the Traveller’s Tree because it allegedly prevents those on a journey from getting lost. If we have to plant one every six metres in the hedge, which will run along the edge of the West Mendip Way, a little wayfaring help might be no bad thing.

But when the trees arrive, The Woodland Trust has sent 50 silver birch trees instead. I phone to let them know; they’re apologetic and arrange for the rowans to be couriered to us in the next couple of days. So now we have 100 trees to plant in addition to 1000 hedge saplings. I had been looking forward to this: I had imagined a great post-Christmas work party of family and friends. We’d get the hedge planted in a day, stopping for bowls of hearty soup, coffee in flasks, our breath steaming in the chill air, eating chocolate brownies that melted on our fingertips; warming ourselves with mulled wine in the afternoon. After so long in lockdown, I craved companionship and camaraderie.

We allow ourselves Christmas and Boxing Day off, and then Jaimie and I go out to look at the trees, stacked in their bags against the dilapidated former stables; the mountains of plastic tree guards and bundles and bundles of bamboo. We are still in lockdown. We are still unable to socialise. There will be no friends or family, no hot soup or tree planting. We will have to do the entire hedge - all 500 metres and 1100 trees - by ourselves.

We go and look at the section of the verge where Jaimie has spread the soil. It’s covered with a thin skin of frost. When we tentatively try and slide a spade between the stones, we discover that the ground is frozen solid.

I’m seven years old. After a few months in Royal Leamington Spa, where my sister was born and I was given a giant teddy and accused of stealing next-door’s tomatoes, we have moved again. We’re now in a small coastal town in Northern Ireland called Whitehead. I hold myself tight and tense. I tell my mum and the doctor that I have a pain all the time. It’s in my stomach and it feels like a ball of nails, all aligned with the points sticking out. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with me and there is no further investigation.

I don’t have any friends at school, but that’s to be expected. Since I was born, I’ve moved every few months—changing countries, continents and even fathers. At age six, when we arrived, Whitehead Primary was my fifth educational establishment. I have made other friends though: a middle-aged American couple called Bob and Tess Houston who live next door but one and who teach me how to make wine and grow pot plants; Simon, their teenage son when he condescends to let me hang out with him in his wooden tank. We blow things up with his chemistry set. Then there’s an elderly teacher who lives up the road and shows me how to polish stones in his velvet-curtain-lined study. I’m transfixed: a rough pebble can be buffed until it becomes a work of art, dark sea-green with orange ripples, like a dragon’s iris or a mermaid’s egg.

But, for the first time, I feel a sense of belonging. The people here sound like my mum, who’s originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland’s capital city.

For the first time, I have family around me: my beloved grandparents, Nanny and Pappa; two aunts and two cousins in Donaghadee. I develop a Northern Irish accent.

As well as a new baby sister, Sheila, I also have a puppy! Bunty is adorable, with a soft black coat, large brown eyes, a small, taut tummy and curly ears. She’s a cross between a springer and a Labrador.

I don’t look as if I belong. My family - my mother, stepfather, my baby sister and all my relatives - are white. My skin is the colour of coffee with a dribble of milk in it. My eyes are almost black and my dark hair is now down to my waist and brushed into two plaits. No one I’ve encountered in the rural places we’ve lived so far has met anyone else who looks like me. There is no one, in my entire school, who is not white. In spite of this, there is no abuse or racism as there was in the English suburbs.

I start to relax a little. I feel myself slowly uncurling. In the summer afternoons, my mother gardens, and I play beneath the broccoli plants she’s growing. She’s created borders of African marigolds and the sunshine-orange petals and sweet, peppery scent transports me back to Nigeria. The garden is built into a hillside and from the slope, we can look into Sheila’s bedroom and see when she wakes up. Sheila will stand up , holding on to the bars of her cot, and we wave and then Mum brings her out to the garden.

Mum attaches a long line from Sheila’s harness to a clothesline, so she can crawl around safely (and not fall down the steep steps up the garden). Mum starts an art club in the garage for the local children. I fall in love with the sea. I’m allowed to walk Bunty down the road from our house to the beach and along the coast path. People often laugh and comment that my puppy is taking me for a walk, as she drags me enthusiastically down the road.

I start to believe I am safe, that I have finally come home. But of course, it is not safe. This is Ireland in the seventies, and although we are in a quiet backwater, once a feted Victorian seaside destination, swiftly reached by steam train from Belfast, we are living in the midst of The Troubles: sectarian terrorism waged by paramilitary Protestants and Catholics.

Somehow, aged seven, I’ve landed in my third war zone.

Thank you so much for reading. Do let me know what you think.

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