Oh, How Little I Know

There is a bird.

Far off, in the distance. Way beyond the blackberries promised to sweet, sharp crumbles.

It is not a kite. Nor a buzzard. And it doesn’t quite match the right shape for a raven. No black cross. No diamond-wedged tail.

I squint my already tired eyes at it, watch as it rises and lifts above the allotments, past the neatly drawn rows of houses. The flat light rendering it featureless. A conundrum creature; obscured by mist and distance. And there is no wrapping my head around its strange spluttering flight, like a cold old car engine that can’t quite start. I let it go. Leave it to the horizon, to disperse into an afterthought. An ever-nagging, yet never-answered question.

Hidden in the wayward wild beyond the fence, a robin summons rain with its song; unseen alchemy cast well within the thicket. A familiar, sweet sound, its notes as well-known as a worn-in pair of shoes, or a well-thumbed book. It is tempting to linger on it, in a comforting place, but that unidentified figure of a bird, now well out of sight beyond the horizon, pulls me to sit with the unknowing instead. As the mist sinks into the vale, masking roads and hedgerows, footpaths and villages, the scratchy woollen-jumper feeling of uncertainty wraps around me.

Jackdaws jink along roofs of houses containing whole families of lives that will live out unknown to all but their own web. I may, by chance, meet the friend of a friend of a cousin, of a neighbour of someone who once brushed shoulders with me in a crowded supermarket isle. But the intricacy of our lives will go unnoticed by the next. Same for the people passing in the steady stream of cars that make up the bee-drone of traffic lingering beneath the robin song. And, that’s just in this hilltop town. Zooming out and up in my minds eye, soaring above it all with a buzzard’s eye view, thermal riding, my mind spins with the enormity of it all.

The odd drop of rain centres me for a second. My toes, open to the elements in sandals because I didn’t know what shoes to wear on this not-quite-autumnal September day, wriggle like expectant earthworms. I’m momentarily grounded by the promise of precipitation, but the relief doesn’t last long.

This time it is the breeze that sends me whirring. It catches in the thin silver hoops that hug my ear lobes giving voice to this unseen being. In hollow moans and soft whispers, it spills its secrets to me. Secrets I am unable to decipher. A knowing, not for human consumption. The crow that crowns the rising ash knows them though, with wild ears she hears of lifts and shifts, rises and falls. She cocks her head, ruffles her feathers, tentatively tests the air with a wing. Not yet, it tells her, rest a while longer.

Below us all, past the houses and the traffic, there will be more secrets. Desire lines carved by badgers, run through by deer and foxes, all driven by an animal desire we can never truly understand. Lives lived based on scent, slight sound, and the stirring of muscles controlled as if by sixth senses. How does the owl map the woods? What does the snail feel as its scrapes across gravel? Can the kestrel feel each breath of breeze bend its feathers as it masters the wind?

There are whole worlds happening around us, whole lives lived without our knowing.

I’m certain there was a time when I would be frustrated by that idea. That I would have strained after that black shape of a bird for as long as possible. It would have played on my mind as I trawled through bird guides and online forums for some kind of answer. And I do want to know. I want to know all these things, all the names, all the lives of these creatures. I want to know them better, their struggles, their hardships, as well as the solutions they need. I aim to strive for as much knowledge as possible.

But, stood here in my sandals staring at a mist that won’t lift, I settle into the idea that not all things are for us. There is a certain kind of magic in not knowing. As crow lifts from her perch and aims for the space beyond the horizon, something shifts in me. A reassurance, perhaps. A definite feeling: oh, how little I know, and how much I love it.

New Forest Footsteps

Three fallow deer stand framed by fox gloves; evening light illuminating the hot pinks and green of fresh leaves in a stained-glass scene. All peace and reverence. But the soundtrack doesn’t quite match. Instead of birdsong the evening chorus consists of shouts, cracking cans, bellowing laughter. Human equivalents of territory marking, highlighting food sources, and attempted ‘wooing’s’ in the summer evening’s hazy heat. Longbeech Campsite is full to the brim, but the deer continue browsing, unbothered. As is the New Forest way: humans and wildlife side-by-side.

Longbeech is no stranger to human presence, even before the campers arrived. From 1942-1946 its tree cover harboured the buildings belonging to the airfield that stretched over the gorse-speckled Stoney Cross. The runway remnants today are traversed by ponies and cattle instead of aircraft. When the war was over, and the airfield redundant, the left over Nissen huts took on a new role: accommodation for those awaiting council houses. Families made their homes here, painted the stern grey stone and curved roofs of ex-military outcrop with cartoon characters. They fenced off plots with discarded barbed wire to make small gardens and to keep ponies from pestering. There was even a village hall, which doubled as a cinema on the weekends. An entire community created from the in between, from the waiting. My own Grandma one of them.

A small portion of her life was lived out here. She raised children, cooked meals, loved, laughed, and hurt where revellers now come for their holidays; where I now sit in my own campervan, watching deer in a dappled glade. I can’t help wondering if she stopped in this very same spot I’m sat in now, if she too peered into the space between the trees.

As the darkness takes hold and the foxglove’s colours mute, it strikes me that it’s not just the wildlife and humans brushing against each other here. Each era rubs up against the last. There is nothing new about this forest. Its air is thick with lives lived before, their now presence covered in leaf litter and moss, yet still as tangible as the bark on the trees that watched them come and go. Much like the deer that have now disappeared into their woodland realm, I can no longer see them, but I know they’re there.

Words and Image Jeni Bell

The May King

I think it was the rain that kept us concealed from each other for so long. Thick drops that bounced off leaf and bark and stone. They fell so heavily, in a wall of early-summer sound, that it must have covered the crunch of my boots on the track and stole the swish of my once-waterproof jacket. No, I don’t think you heard me coming. If you had I am certain you would have slipped off into the woods long before you did. And if I had seen you sooner, I’m certain I would have stopped; held in awe at your form as you emerged like a Will-o’-the-Wisp from the cow parsley and campion flanking the old road’s edges. But, as it happened, on that day drenched in rain and low-lying clouds, I didn’t stumble upon you until the very last moment. When we both drew in a breath, locked gazes, and you, adorned in your summer crown, stared back at the human unearthing you from the hedgerow.

I have seen plenty of roe bucks before, especially along this stretch of the drove, where they skirt the field edges ready to disappear into the treeline like they were never there; or heads poking out from crop cover, eyes wide and antlers gnarled as though carved from oak. But I have not been this close. Close enough to see the individual clumps of old winter coat falling doggedly as a new one, the colour of fresh rust, emerges. Close enough to see the rise and fall of a chest, and the tinge of lithe muscle in the back legs. Close enough to witness the breath before a body springs into action; the hair-trigger pull of a split-second decision played out less than an arm’s length in front me.

A young buck, not quite yet three points on your crown, but a true May King none the less dissolving back into a wild realm where I could not follow.

You left me there up on the old drove road, the rain a little lighter, but its drumming just as steady. I had spooked you from an afternoon’s rest, couched up amongst the cow parsley. The tangled cleavers and red-dead nettle now bent by your body; the only sign you’d ever been here at all. I suppose I could pick that apart, peel back the fronds of soon to be faded greenery in search of meaning. I could harp on about the fleetingness of things: how the hawthorn blossom will pass and leave the sweet sickly scent of decay, or the sun will soon replace the rain and leave dry brittle heat in its wake, and the green will turn to gold. I could dwell on how we should live solely in the moment because all too soon it will be gone. But I won’t. There’s no need. We all know that already. Even the May King knows he can’t outrun the turning of the wheel.

I placed my hand where you had been and felt the warmth press against my palm. A faint animal scent, mixing in with the unseasonably chilled air and the flourishing greenery. I wanted to sit in it, to curl up and take your place, just for a minute soaking in a deer’s eye view of the landscape. But I didn’t. A walker was approaching with a waddling Labrador following closely to heel and I wasn’t really in the mood to answer any awkward questions about why I was led out covered in cleavers. And, selfishly, in that moment I didn’t really want to share my experience: to tell this unknown person that I had held court, for just a few seconds, with the May King. Instead I carried on walking, offering a brief nod to the man and his dog. All the way onwards one eye on the track, the other watching the woods for another fleeting glimpse of you.

Ghosts

This morning started with a ghost.

A spectral flickering, caught beneath pooling reflections of the kitchen lights in the window above my desk. Outside, a blue morning crept across the sky, nothing more than a stealthy exchange, a swapping of shades of blue.

The ghost in question caught me off guard.

A breath-stealer, throat-squeezer, spine-shiver of a presence beyond. A hint at something otherworldly, whose figure pulled me out from the pages of my email inbox; overgrown like an abandoned garden. I had finally felt up to dealing with the weeds, but they would have to wait for a moment longer, whilst the spectre quartered back and forth. Although, I could no longer see it, I knew it was still there. Lingering in the lightening of the morning. Caught in the moment between darkness and dawn.

I have felt like a ghost recently. Of all the things I’ve been before, and all the things I could be. Half a self; scratching at the floorboards and tapping at the windowpane. Sounds a tad dramatic doesn’t it, but then find me a haunting that isn’t.

Since October last year, when a chest infection settled itself in my airways and wormed its way through my body, I have felt like I’ve barely been here. Tired. Worn out. Unable to focus on words on the page, actually, there haven’t been any words to focus on because putting words on a page has been too much of a task. There were moments I tried to convince myself I was mended, I walked, carried on working, but come the week before Christmas I burnt out completely and retreated inwards. No more work, no more walking. I disappeared, for a moment, into winter in the name of healing.

But I am no longer a ghost.

And neither is the thing I saw through the window this morning.

The thing trapped beyond the glass, sparking in my peripheral, was not a spectre or a phantom, or an otherworldly apparition. Despite its stark white appearance and its ability to be there one minute and vanish the next, this creature was entirely real and entirely present. Confirmed, in the way it floated over the sparsely leaved beech hedge and flew directly towards me as I peered out from the dimly lit room.

It's eyes, elderberry black, set deep in the disc of its face were focused, not on me, but on its next movements. As it past the window, whipped up on a stirring breeze, I could make out the small round shape of a field vole hung limply from its beak: a body bound for sustenance, an apparition left to haunt the hedgerows.

The barn owl was making the most of the half-light. Stocking up on small mammals in the spaces between the squalls that, over the past few days, have raged through the fields like scowling toddlers. I only caught her by chance. A flicker of a passing shadow, gentle as a guttering candle flame. Patience did the rest.

Both of us ghosts for the briefest of breathes, before returning back to the living.

Prayer to Sea

Earlier this year I entered the Nature Writing Prize for Working Class Writers, founded by Natasha Carthew and I am thrilled to announce my ‘Prayer to Sea’ was chosen as the winning piece.

Prayer to Sea

Yes, it will be cold. Bitingly so.

She will strip the sensation from your fingertips and the soles of your feet, until you can no longer feel the sand’s roughness. The tide-worn smoothness of the mussel shell, discarded by a bivalve-hunting beach bird, will go unnoticed under your toes.

It’s okay. It is necessary.

She’s asking you to meet her in a different place. A quiet place. Outside of your head. Defenceless.

It will not work without discomfort.

You must leave your earth-bound body: the one that slips and trips across seaweed-slathered rocks, stumbling gracelessly over the sand. This must be swapped for seal skin. For weightlessness. Once the exchange has been made, then you should sink beneath the surface, and in your new form dive under the waves so that your belly scrapes the seabed. Here you can stare through jade opaqueness, towards deeper waters.

When you rise again, rise in trust.

Sit with her awhile. Feel strength in her embrace. Trust her enough to hold you aloft, star-shaped and salt-soaked, like an offering to the seabirds above you: the white wraiths of kittiwakes that speak their names in endless loops, arrow-necked cormorants, and gannets with eyes made of open oceans. They will inspect you, size you up like a sprat in a shoal. But ultimately it is she who decides.

When you have offered yourself numbly to the water and she has offered you to the birds, you can ask for the thing you came for. Not a confession as such, more of a cleansing, a shedding even.

In this moment you may request permission to leave parts of yourself for the tide to take.

The bitter parts. The dark parts. The loud, relentless questioning. The voice that sounds strangely like you but speaks words that are not yours. The thoughts that cloud your judgement like the sheen of sewage on a clear pond.

It’s okay. These are her favourite things. She clings to them the way sailors cling to siren song. She devours them; pries them out of their storm-grey shells and chokes back the innards like a herring gull does the beak-slashed carcass of a fish.

She will take them all from you. They are hers now. And you are cleaner, freer, quieter for a short time. At least until the waves call you back again to greet her and ask for her blessing once more.

Leaving is hard but go back to your body smiling. Let the breeze kiss your shoulders and the sun suck the salt from your skin. And if you do return, which of course you will, know she will always welcome you back. For the price of a small ritual: chilled hands, goose-bumped flesh, and an offering of your darkest, bitterest parts. A willingness to surrender to the stillness of gentle tides and seabird cries. That is all. Your prayers in sea.

Yes, it will be cold. But it will be worth it.

The Pied Wagtail and the Rabbit

This piece was written in the summer, inspired by a writing workshop run by Nicola Chester. I’ve only just got round to posting it here.

Summer has finally arrived in the Chalke Valley, bringing its bottom-of-the-biscuit tin scent. A heat haze trails across High Lane’s sun-scorched verges; all brittle yellow and brown. Yet, the brightness of oxeye daisies mixed with trailing strands of common vetch, are refreshing glugs of a cool drink on a hot day. My eye is pulled from the rippling air by another movement.

A small movement, from a small bird.

Ahead, on treacle tarmac that cracks and oozes like a flapjack fresh from the oven, a pied wagtail scurries in Morse code dots-and-dashes to the road’s edge. Here lies a less summery sight. Slumped against the bank is the body of a rabbit, a strange contradiction of velvet-soft rigidness. Its once clean cottontail now changed to the colour of stale cream, with smears of rotten-strawberry red clinging to it.

In its solemn suit of shadow black, daisy-white, and all the grey in between, the wagtail felt like a suitable attendee. Conducting last rites for the poor creature as the grasses bowed their heads in respect, and a whispering breeze gave voice to their mourning.

Why else would a pied wagtail be in attendance? They don’t eat carrion. They are not like the magpies who will come later; or the red kites that circle above with keen eyes, picking out breaks in the road’s uniform shade.

As the bird leapt no more than a ruler’s length into the air, fanning its tail and fizzing its wings, I realised it wasn’t here for funerary rites, or carrion-craving tendencies. It was hawking for flies. Flies that droned drunkenly in crooked circles above the rabbit’s lifeless limbs. The pied wagtail deftly plucked them from the air, with the ease of a shopper lifting tins from supermarket shelves.

Even in nature’s darkest moments, in its grimmest forms and all the glistening redness of tooth and claw, there is life. And surrounding it are the creatures ready to seize opportunity. Like this pied wagtail, who is much more than just a small, delicate, pretty bird. It’s a clever one as well.

Bath Spa MA Writing Award 2021

Writing is so often over-wrought with worry. Words are woven with the threads of anxieties trailing through them: deadlines, briefs, wordcounts, is it dreamed or dreamt, was that colon the right choice? Behind each sentence, each carefully chosen adjective and metaphor is a writer asking is that right, is it good enough? Am I good enough? Inescapable quandaries that follow us each time we sit down to corral ideas into articles, blogs, books, and screenplays. And there are other worries as well. More practical ones that hover around finding the time to write, getting commissions, getting work out into the world.

Last year, as well as the worries mentioned above, my main concern came in the form of my laptop. It was temperamental to say the least. Choosing to freeze in the middle of an essay, deciding to only charge in certain positions (usually not conducive for writing), it had a habit of crashing at random and refusing to save whatever I had been working on at the time. My hopes to write regular blogs, articles, and begin research for my own book idea became like a buffering screen; unclear, uncertain, and frustrating.

I was not in a position to be able to go out and buy a new one, instead my little laptop was coerced into working through offerings of duct tape and tears. As a freelancer that piece of silver machinery was my office; as a low-residency student it was my only access to education; as a writer, it was my biggest worry.

After the first year on the Nature and Travel Writing MA at Bath Spa University, something had clicked with my writing. I knew that this is what I wanted to do full time, spending my days surrounded by words and using my own to create connections with other people. I also discovered that I am at my happiest when I am learning, which made me worry about the state of my laptop even more.

I had applied for the Bath Spa MA Writing Award, generously sponsored by Jack and Audrey Ladeveze with no expectations, so when the email came in late November to say I had been successful in my application, I was shocked to say the least. Here was an opportunity to move forward with one less worry. The academic year ahead suddenly became less daunting, my own personal projects were refreshed and now accessible.

With a new laptop in my life, one that runs smoothly and doesn’t require begging, pleading or duct tape to do its job, I can spend my days immersed in words. In my application for the award, I explained I had wanted to create connections with my work, not in a business-sense, but in a real human sense, which I hope to achieve in the following ways:

·       Honing my existing writing skills, whilst developing new ones on the Nature and Travel Writing MA, as well as expanding on my understanding of the nature writing genre.

·       Restarting my Seeking Wild Sights blog with regular posts in the hope that readers will be inspired to find their own ways to connect with the wild world.

·       Starting to research and develop my idea for a book – a memoir that explores how it feels to be unsettled in a settled home.

These things, of course, require more than just a laptop. There is time and commitment to be considered, but the release of one pressure has made a dramatic difference to me and I am so thankful to have been the recipient of the 2021 Bath Spa MA writing award. I am not just grateful for the ability to buy a new laptop, but that people believed enough in my work and words. That is armour against anxiety.

As a writer I will always be followed by worries, whether it is writing a tweet, a 3000-word essay, an application or a blog post. And I hope they do stay, I hope I always worry about my choice of words, about the way my syntax sounds, or whether that metaphor fits. I am only glad I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’ve got enough duct tape and tears to meet the demands of the technology gods.