That spring I took over the tenancy of the cottage, paying a peppercorn rent of just a hundred pounds a year. A house that is lived in falls apart much more slowly than one that is abandoned. My friends had decided it was not for them, even as a holiday let. They had been offered the use of another cottage on the estate with better facilities. There was a big house over the river where the lord and lady lived, but much of the estate had been shared out among their children, so my landlords were actually the eldest son and his wife, whom I had known for years. I moved in at the beginning of April, having burned what few bridges I had left. I unlocked the doors of the cottage and hung up the keys on a handy hook just inside. And I don’t believe I have ever touched them since.
The first thing I needed to do was to make the place habitable, by my standards if not by those of others. I mended the gates and the fence to keep the sheep out of the little garden so it would be usable. A lot of roof tiles had slipped, so I fixed them back in place using the little strips of lead that undoubtedly have a name but which remains unknown to me. The ceiling of the main bedroom had collapsed, so I nailed up squares of plasterboard and roughly filled the gaps. I am no handyman; it looked a complete mess. But it worked, and still works now. The downpipe that led from the gutter to one of the water-butts had snapped off at the top. I filled the gap with a plastic funnel, a short length of hosepipe, and some gaffer tape. And that did the job for the next five years. The narrow gap behind the back wall of the house and the quarry wall was inclined to flood from the overflow from the water-butts and the rain that ran down the rock face, so I dug a trench and filled it with gravel and a length of cast-off land drain that I found in the corner of a field. Rain would run down the chimney into the fire, so I climbed the stack and cemented a couple of spare slate roof tiles over it in an upside-down V. I fashioned a cowling for the chimney-place out of a sheet of aluminium I found in the woodshed, to stop so much smoke backing into the room. And so the house was ready for me.
A hundred years ago, when the cottage was a family home, the place would have been better equipped for living. In the kitchen at the back of the house was an old copper for heating water, but it was rusted beyond repair now, and the fireplace beneath it had been bricked in, as had the bread ovens beside it. Even the chimney had been blocked off. I say kitchen, but perhaps scullery is a better description for a room with no water and no cooking facilities. But it was where I stored my jugs of water for the day’s use, and my pots and pans, and there was a stone sink and a walk-in pantry that here at the north of the house never saw a ray of sun and so kept things reasonably cool throughout the year. There was another copper in the woodshed where once laundry would have been washed, but this too was no longer usable.
It was spring and there was life all around me as I worked. A pair of starlings nested in the corner of the gable, and all day long they perched at the very top of the ash immediately in front of the house and mimicked everything they heard, so I would keep rushing out to look for things that weren’t there. They did a particularly fine curlew. The jackdaws had steered clear of the smoking chimney, and built their nest in a hollow in the ash at the back of the house. This ash tree grew straight out of the rock of my quarry wall; it never seemed to have enough leaves and looked as though it might come crashing down at any time. But it never did. Pied wagtails had tucked themselves away in the drystone wall that separated my garden from the track. This is a bird whose nest is notoriously hard to find; the feeding birds would land on a rock some distance away, their beaks stuffed with insects, their tails bobbing, then scurry along the track in the lee of the wall to throw predators off the scent. It took several days of watching closely to locate the exact spot, in a little niche in the rocks not a foot above the ground. The parent birds were never out of sight, they found enough food in the field within fifty yards of the nest. I felt protective of these birds; they were the welcoming committee to my new home, and in the Gypsy tradition they are a bird of good omen. Two of the chicks left the nest long before they were ready, when they were just nine days old, two tiny bundles of innocence huddled together on a nearby rock, cheeping for their parents. Lots of young birds leave the nest days before they can fly, and it seems like a risky survival strategy; they are just so vulnerable to predators. But I suppose that when the young are competing against one another for a limited supply of food, it is the birds that leave the nest first that get fed first. When I heard the alarm calls of the parent birds and saw them fluttering in distress, I went out and chased away the squirrel that had come too close and was sniffing around with interest, and took the two little feather-balls back to their nest. They stayed there all day but by nightfall they were out again. I was relieved to find them alive in the morning, and in fact the whole brood fledged successfully. It doesn’t pay to get too attached to the fate of individual birds though; it’s a brutal life out there in the fields and forests. Small birds like blue tits will lay a clutch of thirteen or fourteen eggs, and if things go well will try for a second clutch, which gives some idea of their life chances; if mortality was not so high they would be everywhere, swarming like locusts.
On an unexpectedly warm spring day I threw open the doors to air the place. A swallow flew in through the open front door, circled me three times where I stood in the centre of the living room, then exited through the back door as suddenly as it had arrived. For a moment inside became outside, my cottage became a part of the landscape, not a self-contained unit that separated me from the natural world beyond its windows.
In the loft was a small breeding colony of bats, and it was a pleasure on a mild evening to sit out in the garden at dusk and count them out. They would dart out from invisible crevices under the eaves and head straight for the trees; these were long-eared bats that specialize in picking insects off leaves, rather than concentrating on flying insects. There were sometimes one or two Natterer’s bats too, slightly larger and rarer, that zoomed off into the distance. It is not easy to identify bat species, even in the hand, let alone as they dart around at frantic speed in the half-light. Only a decade ago experts finally realized that the pipistrelle, our most numerous and familiar bat, was actually two distinct species. Usually their manner of flight was my best clue that most of my residents were long-eareds, but sometimes I would catch the silhouette of ears that looked half the animal’s body length and made them look like tiny flying rabbits. I stayed away from the loft in season; these colonies are so vulnerable that you need a licence to visit them. I generally counted about twenty or thirty bats emerging from my loft; come the summer the numbers would rise as the year’s young began independent flight. Bats may look to us like winged mice, but their life cycles are very different: mice have just a year to breed a new generation, while bats can live for thirty years and occupy the same summer and winter roosts for the whole of their lives. That is why it is so important to protect their chosen sites; long-eareds in particular don’t take kindly to new homes. They didn’t leave the cottage only at dusk and return at dawn, but came and went all night, and when I stepped outside in the dark they would often be chasing each other in circles around and around the house. They would fly incredibly close, so that I could feel the breath of their wings on my skin, but they would never touch me, their reflexes were so fast. Sometimes at night I could hear the faint rustle of them moving around in the roof-space, and it felt like a privilege to know they were there, living out their unfathomable lives just above me.