Wilderness: Chapter 2
The Way Through the Woods: In which we run out of money, the builders leave and we share the house with four species of bat
This is the second extract from the non-fiction nature memoir I’m writing. Wilderness: In Search of Belonging 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 - July
It’s July a year after we bought our place in the country and Jaimie, Jasmine and I finally leave inner city Bristol and move into our beautiful, newly renovated house. It’s a relief to escape the cramped double-parked streets, the roar of the motorway, the everyday micro aggressions of too many people living too closely together.
At first we share the house with between three and twelve builders on a daily basis, which is stressful and annoying - but Jasmine and I secretly miss them when they all leave in September and the house no longer reverberates to Shotgun by George Ezra being belted out in baritone.
We’ve completely opened up the house allowing light to flood in by fitting floor to ceiling windows on two sides, removing all the internal walls downstairs and taking out over eleven doors. We’ve got rid of several design fiascos, such as having to access our bedroom via another bedroom.
We were going to take out the ceilings upstairs and open the space up to the roof beams until I remembered that we really needed to do a bat survey. Bats are protected species and as well as not harming them, I didn’t want us to incur a hefty fine and possible prison sentence by destroying their habitat.
The building work was put on hold while our bat expert, Dr Ele Nash, discovered that we had not one, but four species of bat sharing the house with us. Soprano pipistrelles foraged in the garden, serotines roosted above our bedroom, lesser horseshoe bats dosed in the wood shed during the day, and brown long-eared bats lived in the main roof space. I was delighted - until Ele told us that there was no way we’d get permission to move the bats and we’d have to scrap our plans to open up the roof.
Once we moved in, Jaimie and I were kept up at night by the noise our satisfyingly rare bats, the serotines, mating noisily. We lay awake in the semi-darkness (we’d run out of money and couldn’t afford curtains), staring at the ceiling, Jaimie grumbling about the party happening overhead.
Autumn
In the early morning chill, in the first days of autumn, mist lies in thick swathes over the stream, draped across the lower branches of hazel, and every blade of grass sparkles as if encrusted in diamonds. I’m breathing hard, a small white cloud forming around my face. Everywhere here is uphill. I’m searching for