The bank became virtually impassable beyond this point, so I would cross a field on to the route once taken by the railway. I started in a deep cutting, overarched by trees, dark and boggy and filled with nettles. There was the ancient, rusted wreck of a car here that must have been rolled down the bank well over fifty years ago; I couldn’t tell the make but it had running boards. It felt as though I was walking through a tunnel. There was a tangible sense of history here, but soon the trees gave way and the sun came in. Here in the cutting walls I once saw a pair of weasels popping their heads in and out of a niche in the rocks. I always looked out for them every time I passed this way, but I never saw them here again. The ground fell away and I was on a bridge, not a tunnel, with the fields twenty feet below me to either side. But the real bridge over the river was long gone. The river here turned sharply, and tumbling over rocks it had gouged out a sheer bank perhaps forty feet high. I crossed one last stream, on a bridge of two logs, and the last part of my journey was through dense woodland high over the river. First mixed woodland, then stands of old conifers where the sparrowhawks nested. I would watch out for them here, and sometimes I would even see them over the village. Finally I would emerge from the woods and, after crossing one field of head-high corn, come to the road-bridge that led to the village.
Just past the bridge was a fine beach with a swimming hole, and I would often pause here for a while if the weather was good. In spite of its proximity to the village there was almost never anyone else here. As I stepped into the water thousands of tiny fish would dart away from the shallows, and before long there would be a loud chikeee and a lightning bolt in neon blue would flash past. The kingfishers nested in the bank here every year without fail, even though the village boys would sometimes stopper their holes with stones as a game. It was a good place to bring guests; even people with no real interest in birds like to see a kingfisher — they are just so glamorous and unexpectedly tiny, and the sighting was almost guaranteed.
After loading up with supplies, I would need to make a decision; whether to retrace my steps along the riverbank or walk back along the lanes. Almost anyone who lived along these lanes and who passed by would stop and give me a lift, but there were not many of them, and I could easily find myself walking the whole way back without a car passing. And it was a lot further. About a quarter of the way home from the village was my local telephone box, but I wouldn’t stop. This would be a separate trip, on a Sunday when people would not be at work, but of course then the shop would not be open either.
I remember once walking to the village shop, collecting up my few basic requirements and taking them up to the counter, and as I spoke to the shopkeeper my voice cracked. It was only then that I realized I hadn’t spoken a word in at least two weeks. It also made me aware that I never talked to myself, never sang to myself, not ever.
Going down to cross the river one day after I had already been at the cottage a year or two, I came upon a team of men renovating the old footbridge. It was probably not before time; I was used to it, but my visitors would sometimes be alarmed by how it swayed and rocked. If you walked fast, it would roll like a wave under your feet, and the suspension would creak and groan. And it was a long way down to the rocky waters below. I got chatting to the foreman of the gang, and found that his family was the last to live at Penlan. He had lived there until he was seven, when the family had decanted to town. He asked me if I snared many rabbits up there, and I said none at all, as I was vegetarian. Then he asked the route I followed into the village, and was delighted to discover that my chosen path was almost identical to his daily walk to the village school. The railway bridge was still standing then, which would have cut out that final dog-leg, and reduced the journey time a little, but even so it was an astonishing distance for a five-year-old to cover twice a day. And he had to be there at seven o’clock sharp, or face the consequences. I asked him if he could conceive of living that life now, and he said absolutely, he loved it, except … except for one thing. He could not imagine life without a television.
Less often I travelled into town, which had a health-food shop where I could stock up on dried pulses for my one-pot stews and fine-ground flour for the unleavened bread I made on a griddle over the fire. There was a hardware store for paraffin for my lamps and seeds for the garden, and a library. Occasionally I would take the daily postbus, but usually I hitchhiked. These were not busy roads, but I got lifts from regulars. The Travellers from a nearby site would stop for me without fail, as did a retired man who lived up-valley opposite the quarry. He would always tell me when the peregrines had returned to their eyrie. He’d spent his entire working life researching foxes for the Ministry of Agriculture, and was now spending his entire retirement travelling to and from the nearest golf course. In view of his wealth of experience, I asked him his opinion on whether or not foxes are pests. After some consideration he said: No, foxes are not pests, the foxes were here first. People are pests.
It was not a large garden. I say garden, but perhaps I should say the area around the cottage enclosed by a fence, for it had few attributes to distinguish it from the fields across that fence, although in February there would be a drift of snowdrops under my fruit tree, soon to be followed first by crocuses and then by huge numbers of daffodils. Long ago, someone had planted a scattering of bulbs, and over the years they had divided and divided so that each bulb became a cluster, and now in March the cottage would be surrounded by hundreds of nodding golden heads. Without the sheep coming in to trim it, the grass grew in rank tussocks that I had to hack back with a sickle. Besides the fruit tree, the jackdaw ash and the cotoneaster next to the porch, there was one small rhododendron and a clump of blackthorn by the gate. Once, before my time, a solitary pine had stood guard over the house from above the quarry wall, but it had been unlucky. The landlords, fearing that the ash balanced on the rocks would come crashing down on the cottage roof, had sent up a man to fell it, and he had mistakenly taken out the pine instead. The ash lived on to teeter another day, and teeters still, twenty years later. All that remains of the pine is its stump, a favoured perch for the green woodpeckers when they visit. I planted out a larch to stand in for the lonesome pine, and in the south-west corner of the garden a beech, which will one day afford the cottage a little shelter from the prevailing wind. Then a couple of rowans, for berries for the birds, and a buddleia for the butterflies. Apart from a row of poppies and wild flowers along the fence, I didn’t trouble with flowers. I needed the land for food.
Although I planted a patch of herbs — coriander, dill and parsley, which were unavailable locally — my priority was the heavy vegetables. I didn’t want to be hauling sackfuls of potatoes up the mountainside when I could be growing them myself. Preparing the land was hard work; the roots of the grass grew deep and tangled. Then I had to pick out all the rocks, carefully lift any daffodil bulbs for transplant-ation elsewhere, and lime the soil. Each year I would dig an extra patch, and prepare another for the next year by pegging down a sheet of tarpaulin with bricks to kill off the grass. I didn’t want to use any pesticides, and besides the lime I bought no fertilizer. Each winter, when the bats were long gone to their hibernation roost, I would clamber up into the loft and shovel up bagfuls of guano. It was dry and powdery and odourless, and it seemed somehow appropriate that the bats who shared my home with me should help me grow my food.