Out in the Woods Rosalind Brady
I was brought up in contradicting landscapes, inner cities and English gardens and wildernesses, each with their own natures. The smell of old apricots rotting on the branch in the deserted orchard farm in the outback; wild cats and Coca-Cola crates in the alley back of the milk bar; tarantulas hanging on my bedroom wall and then later, Sussex; hours spent in the woods near our a small village estate; grey Weald clay on my boots and fingers, smell of the oaks, the downy fields. With Richard Mabey's "Food for Free" tucked in our rucksack, my mother and I would make off across the landscape gathering sorrel, fat hen, leaves and flowers. Later, my first oak leaf fag rolled up in brown paper. 5 years on, Brixton, in London, wild parties, home at dawn-out with the foxes.
I started writing when I was very young, immediately affected by beauty, by rain and wind, as children are. School, ambition, restlessness and disquiet wrenched me from the countryside-it has been more than fifteen years, but I have made it back.
The Greeks call it Artemis: the feeling of sanctity in that place you love, deep in the woods. Find a place where its spirit and yours are in tune, and you will be abundantly creative. You will have reached your homeland.
I had been ill for months and in a lot of physical pain. I returned to the woods when I was too unwell to be anywhere else. I threw myself into the countryside and meditation, and this journey brought me into an entirely new field of writing and singing.
I longed to find a field, to stretch out under the trees, to rest and dream. I had craved this for many years. And when I finally found myself there I had a vision; flocks of skylarks zooming around like they used to. I only learnt this recently but there used to be flocks of skylarks! Flocks! I had rarely seen one in all my walking. Shortly after this discovery we saw one, my partner and I. She sang so sweetly, so high, my eyes stung trying to catch sight of her,my neck strained upwards to hear. My heart really aches thinking of her now: this intense love. But a few weeks later her weedy field was ploughed over, her nest on the earth destroyed, her voice gone. Where did she go? It is concerns such as these that began to affect my life and work.
"In the empty blue a lark is calling
...in her lonely flight." (1)
I am a singer but before that a writer. I also loved acting when I lived in London, the fun, the escape. But I did not like the words, the lines, the sentences: I wanted to write my own sentences, I wanted to make sense of beauty and of the lack of beauty, of joy and the lack of joy. I find joy in the country, peace and hope. It is a keener closer joy than the worldly stage. Sometimes I long to return to the stage. Out in the fields writing, singing, there is a lonely joy. When I perform one of the things I want to do is to sing about nature, her struggles and joys. Surely if we bond with her we shall want to protect her, as we protect our own friends and families and neighbours?
So it was that simple. I spent a lot of time outside and I grew very fond of a particular place in the countryside- Dartington Hall estate. I read Rumi and Kabir and Edward Thomas- that was all I read for a long time. I fell in love with Rumi. When we fall in love the layers of outward meaning are torn away. One's being melts and merges with the Other- so it is with love of God, Nature, Allah, Great Spirit, the Beloved, call it what you want. "My home was at Cold Mountain from the start Rambling among the hills, far from trouble"(2) My Cold Mountain and place of sanctity is a special wood under the leafless ash trees staring up at the white branches in the blue sky. Many ideas have been seeded here under these trees.
"The grazing kine, I learnt from them of time
From cold thistle I learnt to cry
The bluebells spoke of splendour,
The celandine
Has steeped within her petals
A heady wine"(3)
This year I discovered the books of John Muir, the Scottish naturalist, founder of the environmental movement, explorer, poet and writer, who emigrated to America in 1849. He is revered in the US and remarkably little known in the UK.
I love his descriptions of bounding down mountain sides at dusk, back towards camp after days spent in Yosemite, California. He lost his sight after an industrial accident and when he could see again all he wanted to do was spend his whole life in the mountains gazing at their beauty, taking notes on their ecology, in a sort of spiritual ecstasy. Unfashionably, at the time, he went on to fight to preserve the wild spaces where the forests were being ripped down to fuel growth in the soaring US economy. He sat in the woods with Teddy Roosevelt, convinced him of the importance of protecting the wilderness, and the first US national parks were created. Muir wrote about the feeling of homecoming he found in the mountains and which he wanted everyone to experience. Forced into a more contemplative life than I had ever known before, I sat in the peaceful woods of Devon and began to recover and as I started to sing and write again I felt restored; I sensed I was returning home. Walking through the landscape, as I did every day I became fascinated by the interweaving of mankind with the natural world.
We were born in the world as Edward O. Wilson so clearly points out; not on Mars or on some desert planet.(5) He states we belong here, where we grew up. Tear us away, orchestrate our reality and we begin to suffer. Beyond sport and anything else the most popular American pursuit is visiting the wilderness areas of the national parks that Muir preserved; Muir believed we need beauty as well as bread.
" Searching for wilderness I found none
Until I stumbled through the wind-lorn gate
Into the small wood
Into this laurelled place
I had been waiting, we knew then
For honesty and grace."(6)
Last year I discovered that the Soil Association is encouraging people to come back onto the farms and into the countryside. "Over the last 50 years we have increasingly lost our link with the land and our knowledge of how food is grown", they say. So I visited Bwllchwernen Organic Farm in west Wales, where in the 1970s, a group of young idealists dreaming and farming the land ploughed new life into the Soil Association. Two of that original group, Patrick Holden (who went on to become Director of the Soil Association) and Nick Rebbeck(education officer for the SA), still live and work on the same dairy farm.
Nick, who organises and takes school outings to Bwllchwernen showed me the route around the farm on which he takes the visiting school children. We pause in the snow by some birch scrub he has recently grown on the edge of a field. "This is the secret place I have created for them," Nick tells me. "We crouch here and I say "can you smell that? It is the smell of the musk of a fox." Wow! they go. We come up this path but their favourite bit is here.
We approach a broad bank by the meeting of two streams. "This is where we sit and have a barbecue, and the children can play in the stream. We watch the sun go down across the fields beyond the beech trees. They love just playing in the stream."
"Children even in the countryside," he explains later, "live urban lifestyles." The Soil Association believe that if people connect with the land and the farms, they will start to care not only about the quality of the food they eat but also about the methods and ethics surrounding its production. The seed of Patrick's wish to start an organic farm was itself sown when he was very young on a trip to a farm. Over the last year we have begun writing songs inspired by the work of the Soil Association, interviewing workers, farmers and food producers and we look forward to participating in the Soil Associations annual conference in 2006. Where else will this work lead? I have a dream of singing in fields and woods and returning songs to the country side where they used to belong, before they went to the city,to the urban rooms and halls and arts centres. Of course music belongs everywhere but it also belongs to the countryside. I love to sing in the summertime by some darkly glinting woods near my home. This year we have been invited to sing in the woods of Bedfordshire at a concert to support the replanting of the Forest of Marston Vale.
"The door to the field lay open
Hope was propping up the lintel
So she planted fruit trees
Blackcurrant, elder and apple."(7)
Perhaps we could take President Bush and Tony Blair to the Community Forest of Marston Vale and see the urban teenagers' delight in planting trees. Then take them to see the children crouching by the shrubs, entranced by the wildlife, flowers and butterflies on Nick and Patrick's organic farm, then sit with them on the green desert of a Wiltshire Plain in that deadly silence where no bird sings, no butterfly plays. After these visits, perhaps concern for the environment and the degenerating web of nature would be higher on their agendas. In the Observer's Book of Wild Flowers given to me by my mother when I was young (first published in 1937) it reads: "Corn cockle- a common plant. Wandering through our cornfields any time during summer, one is sure to find this beautiful flower" and, "Rock Rose- common throughout the country." These are plants I have never seen wild! They have been stolen from us. To see a field of wild pale flax and pink centaury as I have just once, is a rare delight. We flock to the countryside on Sundays to see beauty, to wander awkwardly for a while with a vague tugging on the heart of love and loss and recognition. This is the tenderness about which I want to sing.
'In the cold wind left behind
The smell of sweet red apple rind' (8)
Last year we almost sold up and moved out of Dartington. Luckily we didn't. But when we were on the verge of leaving I suddenly saw the beauty again, the orchards; the smell of crushed apples by the roadside in the cold; the views of the windswept moors; the boney ash boughs in Chacegrove: the silent redwoods on Northwood hill: the watery, Ragwort field between the forest side and the river Dart, The Dart! I have seen kingfishers, egrets, a great black angular bird I could not name, heaving out of the black blood of the river. So I began to write about my particular landscape, her nature and her people.
I feel great excitement walking through the courtyard past medieval Dartington Hall and into the old gardens. The ideas, the innovation, poets, artists, potters, the creativity; it buzzes out of the stones, in the past and in this moment as the college of arts continues to thrive! Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst renovated the estate from the 1920s onwards and they loved the history: the chiselled marks on the archway door where Anglo-Saxons knights had sharpened their arrows: the stamp of the White hart above the doors, the romance of its dilapidation.
"through the archway came the cattle and the crows" 9
I wanted to write a song where past and present collide because to me the veil between the two at Dartington is very thin indeed. And so I wrote "Appletown". That winter, instead of moving I settled by the wood stove and wrote and talked to older locals in my village and researched their voices, their lives. By the following summer I was also writing about the gardens, Dorothy Elmhirst and John Holland who built the Hall in the 12th century. I met the Hill family who for hundreds of years have been tending the orchards around Dartington and Staverton and in the warmth of their kitchen and their enthusiasm they told me a family story that runs back through time.
"Totnes and the Newton Apple
Great Britain, Slap me Girdle
Butterbox are tiny gold
For Gwen's new apple child to hold" 10
Once a few years ago I suddenly saw my past life spread like a river valley behind me -the cut of the silvered river, zig zagging- scooping away. The Dart River valley now surrounds me and zooms off into the distance. The more I dig into the earth here to uncover the stories and voices the more I find I belong to this place.
There is so much to write. There is the song about the sheep farmer Jack Connabeer whom I interviewed last year. He lived under the wooded hill Hood Ball- my 'mountain' he says, just outside the estate and was forced out from his sheep farm by changing farm practices -forced in great sadness from his land. There is so much sadness amidst the gratitude (most locals speak of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst in very fond terms and are evidently highly pleased that as they say "they put Dartington on the map") sadness at the loss of peace, the noise, the traffic, the loss of working farms, the orchard skills and practices, the inhibitive house prices, inhibitive that is for local children to get a grip here and get a hold, loss of the smallness of the village.
'She heard softly the clack of the pail
the trains ring of the wheel on the rail
the lowing of cattle and the chant of the boy
all before the noise came' 11
Gone are the days when as Eddie Guy explained to me, the local children queued at the grocer's shop door at Shinners Bridge for their Christmas treats or boxes of victuals were gifted to every newlywed couple in the village or in the quiet of a summer evening, every window open, the voice of the mower was heard singing in the meadow. The loss of trust is felt- doors locked now- and the end of village shows and dances in the Hall. The loss of darkness is replaced now with with the blare of the sodium lamp. All this is felt and has been expressed to me. I am led to wonder who will really belong to our village when the old folk are gone, if the village is developed to twice?
"Who will belong who owns this place when John and Jan have all left us?
Who will plant the new ones in graft them on, gather them in?
Who will bind the orchard root
And bring the tree to bare a fruit?'12
I hope I can give back in some small way through my songs a recognition to the locals, past and present, of the work and industry with which they have chiselled the form and mould of this beautiful landscape of Dartington.
But will Dartington ever be my true homeland? No matter how much I dig and dream to find images that bind me here to this village in this landscape won't I always be restlessly longing for elsewhere? Will I ever return home? But this searching is my work now. I am made to see again and again what really matters- a feeling of belonging to a particular landscape, a feeling of belonging to the natural world.
"the arbour arch under which I pass
Brief flowers lost among the grass
They were here before the garden
They leave us last
We were beaten by their beauty
And made to yield our grasp" 13
1 "Skyline" Barron&Brady 2003
2 Han-Shan Zen master, hermit and poet. See Riprap and Cold Mountain poems, by Gary Snyder, Four Seasons,1965, and Cold Mountain translated by Burton Watson, Columbia University Press 1970
3" Morning of the Tide" Barron&Brady 2004
4 John Muir The Wilderness Journeys Canongate Classics 1996
5 "Humanity evolved with the rest of life in this particular planet: other worlds are not in our genes" The Diversity of Life. E. O. Wilson- Biologist and Ecologist
6 "The Way for Billy and Me" Barron&Brady 2003
7 "The Rosehip Farmer " Barron & Brady 2004
8 "Appletown" Barron&Brady 2004
9 "Historic Hall" Barron&Brady 2004
10 "The Lowland Dart" Barron & Brady 2004 Names mentioned here are varieties of Devon apples- some are now rare.
11 "Appletown" Barron & Brady 2004
12 "Appletown" Barron&Brady 2004