Earthed E-Book

Rebecca Schiller

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 441

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

___________'A beautiful memoir of one small plot of land and one complex human mind.' Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun'So many readers will find themselves in these pages.' Katherine May, author of Wintering'A timely reflection on what it means to be human, and the redemptive power of nature.' Charlotte Philby___________When we find ourselves lost, we all need something to hold on to – to hope for…After moving to a countryside smallholding, Rebecca Schiller finds her family's new life is far from simple. Overwhelmed by what she has taken on and reeling from the turmoil in the wider world, her mind begins to unravel. And so she turns to her two acres, and to the women of this land's past, searching for answers and hope.Here, she stumbles on a wild space where she begins to uncover the hidden layers of her plot's history – and of herself. As a new year arrives, offering a life-changing diagnosis and then a global crisis, the smallholding has become her anchor and her family's shelter – a way to keep herself earthed.***'When you think about ADHD . . . do you picture a woman in the bucolic English countryside, raising her children along with an assortment of animals and vegetables? Why not?' Salon.com'So good – tender and penetrating and beautiful – that I just want to tell everyone.' Lucy Mangan'A stunner. Full of wisdom about the world we are all looking at with new eyes.' Emma Freud'A powerfully confessional memoir that excavates important truths about our lives, our selves and our dreams – and what happens when we have to let go.' Clover Stroud, author of My Wild and Sleepless Nights'Incredibly bold, brave, poetic and absolutely beautiful. The "how I moved to a field and had a breakdown book" that desperately needed to be written.' Sophie Heawood, author of The Hungover Games'A book that will reshape how you view the world.' Kerri ni Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places'A much-needed story of resilience drawing on the histories of the people who have gone before and to whom this land once belonged.' Dr Pragya Agarwal, author of Sway'A deeply moving, gritty memoir of hope, disenchantment and unravelling that reads like a song.' Laetitia Maklouf, author of The Five-Minute Garden'Earthed speaks to the struggles of holding on during dark days and the power of hope in hard times.' Rob Cowen, author of Common GroundPublisher's Note: A different version of this book has been published under the title A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention in North America

Leseprobe

‘A beautiful memoir of a scattered mind and how it can find peace in the soil. Rebecca Schiller’s gaze is unflinching and full of truth. So many readers will find themselves in these pages.’

Katherine May, author of Wintering

‘A much-needed story of resilience drawing on the histories of the people who have gone before and to whom this land once belonged.’

Dr Pragya Agarwal, author of Sway

‘So good – tender and penetrating and beautiful – that I just want to tell everyone.’

Lucy Mangan

‘A deeply moving, gritty memoir of hope, disenchantment and unravelling that reads like a song. I loved it.’

Laetitia Maklouf, author of The Five Minute Garden

‘An incredible, candid memoir: full of flowers, truth and the reality of growth.’

Cariad Lloyd, creator of the Griefcast podcast

‘Incredibly bold, brave, poetic and absolutely beautiful. The “how I moved to a field and had a breakdown book” that desperately needed to be written.’

Sophie Heawood, author of The Hungover Games

‘Interwoven with many difficult and beautiful things: breakdown and worry alongside women and interconnectedness; poppies and eggs beside struggle and confusion . . . This is a book that will reshape how you view the world.’

Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places

‘Earthed is Rebecca Schiller’s powerful, poetic meditation on the process of falling apart, and her love letter to the land that rooted and rebuilt her. A deeply affecting read.’

Leah Hazard, author of Hard Pushed

‘A disarmingly honest book that tells of vulnerability and striving as well as resilience and reward. The freshness of Schiller’s writing leaps off the page.’

Dr Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well-Gardened Mind

‘A moving, intriguing and beautifully conceived exploration of place, person and planet through time, Earthed speaks to the struggles of holding on during dark days and the power of hope in hard times.’

Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground

‘I’m in awe of this extraordinary book. Artfully crafted yet full of raw honesty, Earthed is unlike anything I’ve read before.’

Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden

‘A stirring, powerful and honest examination of mental health, motherhood and the pressures we put on one another.

A vital book.’ Alice Vincent, author of Rootbound

‘A hard and beautiful read. The tough truth about the simple life.’

Eva Wiseman

‘So powerful, so human and so compelling. This is a beautifully written story of land and life and people. How we need them all yet all struggle with that need. I couldn’t put it down. Connecting past to present and future, this frank and vulnerable memoir is filled with hope, strength and resilience. A must read.’

Frances Tophill, Gardeners’ World

‘A lyrical journey through nature and the human heart.’

Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence

‘Earthed broke me open. Painful, visceral and amazing writing that I loved from start to finish. This is a book that I will read again and again.’

Grace Timothy, author of Lost in Motherhood

‘An intimate story of fragility and losing control . . . I loved the evocation of women from history, their reminder that trees and terrain are part of what we all traverse and part of what we need to look after ourselves.’

Jessica Moxham, author of The Cracks That Let the Light In

‘We can never really know the inner landscapes of another person’s mind. In Rebecca Schiller’s Earthed, we see the compelling portrait of a woman who struggles and pivots, persists and adapts to a mental health diagnosis in honest and insightful prose.’

Kathryn Aalto, author of Writing Wild

‘Profoundly observed and beautifully rendered, this is a timely reflection on what it means to be human, and the redemptive power of nature. It is both exquisitely personal and painfully universal, I was underlining whole paragraphs as I read. A remarkable book.’

Charlotte Philby, author of A Double Life

‘Earthed is the most beautiful, poetic book about what it means to be a woman raising kids in this high-pressured modern world while attempting to connect with the natural world in order to feel more grounded.’

Annie Ridout, author of Shy

‘An extraordinary, life-changing read. Honest, vulnerable and deeply moving.’

Sara Venn, founder of Incredible Edible, horticulturist and food activist

‘A brave and honest memoir.’

Alice O’Keeffe, author of On the Up

‘Invoking the power of the land and the women who worked and walked it before, Earthed is a spellbinding account of an urgent search for wholeness, acceptance and belonging.’

Andrew O’Brien, ‘Gardens, Weeds and Words’

‘Earthed beautifully captures the unravelling of a woman and mother in all its untidy, unyielding and brutal reality. The honesty and rawness in the way Rebecca writes about her rage spoke to me so much. A powerful and poetic look at our connection to country, to those women who came before us and the understanding our own minds.’

Penny Wincer, author of Tender

‘Elegant and emotional. . . Truly beautiful. Unlike anything else I’ve ever read.’

Clemmie Telford, creator of Mother of All Lists

‘Beautifully written and devastating in its honesty.’

Ben Hoare, BBC Countryfile

‘Entwining strands of memoir, fiction, history and gardening, Earthed is outwardly a journey through a year of a Kentish plot, but it’s also an inward journey through an unravelling mind. . . Eloquent. . . finely observed. . . tender.’

Gail Simmons, Resurgence and Ecologist

For Jared, with love and faithThis is my letter – you’ll open it when it suits you best.

For Clare, with gratitudeYou are pure carbon. Never doubt it.

CONTENTS

Prologue: February 2020

Part One: Spring 2019

January: I Fall

February: Beginnings

March: Frag ment ation

April: A Candle in the Dark

Part Two: Summer 2019

May: Mismatch

June: I Dissolve

July: Offerings

August: Djendjenkumaka

Part Three: Autumn–Winter 2019

September: Map-making

October: Missing Pieces

November: I Am Revealed

December: The Mind Scrambler

Part Four: The New Year

Spring 2020: Zoom In

Summer 2020: Zoom Out

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PROLOGUE

FEBRUARY 2020

TEST START

Blue square, red square, red circle, blue circle, red square, red square: CLICK.

This feels like a race that I have lost from the start. My body is alive with potential movements but I try not to give in to them. I’m aware of everything all at once, which is too much and makes it hard to concentrate on the – blue square, red circle, red circle: CLICK. My thoughts bounce off the red circle and into the future when I tell Jared about the test: this result, that result, which result do I want it to be? Blue circle, blue circle: CLICK. I need to speed my brain up or make the shapes slow down – blue circle, red square: NO CLICK – but how? If I could just rewind ten minutes and listen to the instructions again, perhaps it would be easier? That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go just the tiniest half-step back and try harder to pin it all down.

The grey, ping-pong-sized ball is attached to the middle of my forehead with a black sweatband. I’m wearing the child’s size, and at first it holds my head in its grip comfortingly. As the minutes pass the band constricts until my temples bisect the circle of my skull with a line of future headache. I keep it on though: the adult size doesn’t have a single-use cover and, according to the news, this sort of thing is becoming important. As we get ready for the test to start, adjusting the equipment squeezed close together in the corner of the consulting room, the psychiatrist’s assistant and I dance around this awkward issue of hygiene, unsure whether we are being overly cautious or not cautious enough.

I am sitting where I have been told to sit: facing a camera, at a laminate desk, in front of a laptop. There is no window and the room is small and impersonal: an examining couch behind me, clinical waste bins and a sink to my left. It has not yet got to the stage where we think to wash our hands.

The slickness in the well of my right palm as I take the black plastic button-clicker makes me realise how nervous I am. The assistant’s instructions are simple. All I have to do is stay in this chair for twenty minutes pushing the button with my thumb every time the screen in front of me shows a matching shape sequence. Red square, red square: CLICK. Blue circle, red circle: NO CLICK. Blue circle, blue circle: CLICK. Blue square, blue circle: NO CLICK. Together the camera and ping-pong ball will record how much I move around, while the computer program keeps tabs on my accuracy and reaction times.

During the test the psychiatrist’s assistant will sit behind me, just out of sight, making notes.

I have done much harder things than sitting in a too-warm room clicking, or not clicking, a button. Yet I’m breathing fast and my lungs are stretched taut – the soon-to-split skin of an over-watered tomato after a drought. I no longer know how to be in this kind of electric-lit absence of a room. None of the versions of myself that I usually wear to camouflage this seem to fit. My fingers shake slightly with this disorientation: the ruffle of grass in a June breeze, the tiny bounce of a birch branch as a goldfinch lands. To cover my discomfort I make three stupid jokes, which fall like stones on to the rubberised floor.

An example test starts. I yank my mind back to the laptop and find red and blue shapes sliding past my eyes very, very quickly. I struggle to catch them before they disappear. They shimmer and blend with each other and I am instantly jumbled and on the back foot.

Oh.

An hour ago, as my husband Jared drove me here, I watched the fields and forests of Kent turn into shopping centres and wondered whether my subconscious could skew the test’s result one way or the other. Now that the shapes are in front of me, refusing to cooperate with my brain, I am realising that, as a patient, I don’t have that kind of power. But once a try-hard, always a try-hard, and so I lean forwards, deepening my crow’s feet, and squint with concentration. I ready myself by pushing my hair out of my eyes and shaking my tilted head sightly as if hoping to tip the fog out of my ears. There’s a blond hair caught on the purple sapphire of my engagement ring: mine. A mane of two years of neglect now: elbow-length, with split ends and better-than-salon lightened by the sun.

Why didn’t I tie it back? Why am I making myself do this? Why didn’t I just stay at home?

This year I decided not to make resolutions. Not to wake every morning and tie each day to them and not to spend the evening crying because, once again, the wind had blown those twelve hours loose. 2019 was difficult, but so was the year before. And the one before that – 2017 – when we moved to the plot and more than my edges started to fray. So I wanted to find a new way to open myself to the future without expectation and unfold the promise of 2020 slowly and carefully.

Yet in my cold new-year garden, I couldn’t help letting one hope in. As I went out to feed the hens, I spotted something in the mud. I told myself that the grey-green shoots were only grass but the buds revealed themselves anyway: tiny, tightly closed, spear tips that loosened into white bells. The snowdrops opened with an invitation to believe that, whatever this year would bring, it would be better than the one before.

And it will be.

And it won’t.

TEST START

Blue square, red square, red circle, blue circle, red square, red square: CLICK.

This feels like a race that I have lost from the start. My body is alive with potential movements but I try not to give in to them. I’m aware of everything all at once, which is too much and makes it hard to concentrate on the – blue square, red circle, red circle: CLICK. My thoughts bounce off the red circle and into the future when I tell Jared about the test: this result, that result, which do I want it to be? Blue circle, blue circle: CLICK. There is a clock on the metal-and-glass shelf to my left. Its hands read 10:46 and I already wonder what time the test started and how many minutes have gone by. Blue circle, red square, blue circle, blue circle: CLICK. I hear the noise of biro on paper over my right shoulder: the assistant is writing something down. Anxiety prickles up my arms and into my throat as I wonder what notes she could possibly be taking already: I haven’t done anything yet. I am sitting so still, clicking this button (as I have been told) in total silence – though of course the silence exists only outside my head. Blue circle, blue circle: CLICK.

My legs are very restless but I try to keep them fixed in one position. Red square, red square: CLICK. My mind is a kaleidoscope of blurry thoughts and questions: the task in hand, its interpretation, trying to read the woman sitting invisibly behind me, keeping all these tabs open, active and interlinked. Underneath this first avalanche of thought are many bigger-picture wonderings: about my family, my life, our way of life and, as these things pop up, they obscure parts of the red circle, blue circle, red square: NO CLICK.

I hear the receptionist leading someone into the room next door. Babble, footsteps, door open, door close. A muffled discussion makes it through the plasterboard between us and a single reassurance is audible: ‘No one is trying to trip you up.’ The receptionist speaks in a voice that I remember from the two sentences we exchanged earlier. Has this reassurance made the woman on the other side of the wall feel more nervous or less?

Blue square, blue square? CLICK? CLICK.

As I depress the button with my thumb again I realise that – ridiculously, embarrassingly – I am going to cry and there is probably nothing I can do about it. With as little movement as possible (red square, blue circle, blue circle: CLICK) I put my left hand on my right arm and discreetly dig my fingernails into the freckles there. I feel naked: underneath-my-skin-level naked. As if my fat and bones and partially digested food are suddenly visible and the world can see all the bloody parts of my body: the ones I usually dress up in skin and shove out into the world as if they were a person.

I am confused and ashamed, none of my sleights of hand work here and now a tear has escaped and is making its way down my right cheek. I decide to risk wiping it, disguising the movement as a nose scratch and treating myself to uncrossing and recrossing my legs at the same time. I need to stop this crying before the assistant notices, so, just for a second, I pretend there is night sky above me instead of ceiling tiles; a sliver of new moon in the west replacing the ugly brown water stain.

But the squares and circles block out the stars and I am sinking with the effort of separating them: NO CLICK. I’ve stopped wiping tears, so there’s a regular beat of tiny, almost non-sounds as they hit my skirt.

Red circle, red square, blue square, red circle, blue, red, blue, red, square, circle, squircle, circed, squed, blircle.

Bled. Rue.

CLICK?

NO CLICK?

I am screwing this up and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. No performance I can roll out and no illusion of competence. There’s no one to hide behind here, no last-minute miracle push I can pull out of the bag, no way to fake it, no brilliant distraction, no covering humour, no meticulous preparation, no costume, no series of reminders and lists, no lie or excuse, no way to cancel at the last minute, no opt-out, no get-out, no convincing apology, no way to go back in time.

I have finally been caught out.

I take deliberate, slow breaths and try to overcome this realisation – blue square, blue square: CLICK – and become one with the – red, blue, blue, red, red – computer. I tell myself that I exist only for this button and these shapes. That nothing else matters. Except it does. It all matters. It is all connected. It is all important. Square, square, square, circle, square, circle, square. My house is square and our field is made of two rectangles. I guess the pond is a wonky circle? And inside the trees’ trunks there are hundreds of them: concentric circles, red circles. A red circle? CLICK.

I am trying to stay in this room but I want to go home to the place where all my hopes and hurts are held safely by a boundary of trees and hedges, two acres of dirt and a swatch of red sky in the morning, blue sky at lunchtime and red sky at night. Red: shepherd’s warning, shepherd’s delight. Red sky, red circle, blue circle, blue circle: CLICK? Red, blue, red, blue, rose, delphinium, dahlia, anemone, bluebell, tulip, forget-me-not.

But I have forgotten.

Time has stopped flowing and become a pool of superglue. I am lost in it: held fast by primary colours. Beyond this screen I know there is a world where red circles are ladybird poppies I sowed in autumn and blue squares the sharp-edged cornflowers. In that place it is shadows and whispers that compel me to stare at the curves and corners of red and blue as they sway gently in the wind. There I watch a dronefly settle to take a little nectar and wait for the understanding to land in me, as it always does, in the tiniest fragments: pollen caught in bristles and then flown away across the many miles.

The plot is out of my reach though. Red square? Red square? I don’t remember what a square is but I am sure I never want to see one again. I can’t think why I have to click this button but I’m certain that I must. I click. I don’t click. I click. CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.

I disappear.

I have become earth now. Crumbled to a fine tilth and blown into the cracks of the keyboard: lost between the ‘A’ and the ‘S’ and the ‘D’. I am so fine and so light that I could plant carrots in myself and they would grow straight and true in my insubstantial being. Nothing exists but the squares and circles that keep coming at me relentlessly, an endlessness of commas, here in the place where I am stuck:red, blue, red, blue, , , ,

The world as I know it has ended. The plot has died off, died back.

A felled forest: white noise and then silence.

And even the swirl of the wind is stopped.

The Hummingbirds

In this book

there are many hummingbirds—

the blue-throated, the bumblebee, the calliope

the cinnamon, the lucifer, and of course

the ruby-throated.

Imagine!

Well, that’s all you can do.

For they’re swift as the wind

and they fly, not across the pages but,

like many shy and otherworldly things,

between them.

I know you’ll keep looking now that I’ve told you.

I’m hungry to see them too, but I can’t

hold them back even for a moment, they’re

busy, as all things are, with their own lives.

So all I can do is let you know

they’re here somewhere.

All I can do is tell you

by putting my own hunger on the page.

Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses

PART ONE

SPRING 2019

JANUARY

I FALL

It is dark on this moonless night, the ground uneven, and the half-bottle of wine makes me forget to place each foot deliberately as I have trained myself to do. I am upright and laughing one moment and the next, side-lit by the pub window, I’m knees down on the wet pavement trying not to cry. Down here I spot mud and grass smeared on the side of my good shoes – a gift from my field no doubt. My palms are skinned and there’s a pain somewhere else too, but I pay more attention to the two men in front of me turning their heads in interest and amusement.

‘I’m fine. So like me. What a klutz,’ I say to the friend I’m out with for the night, rolling my eyes faux-affectionately at myself and performing my best version of a capable, calm and unhurt woman with an unfortunate but cute habit of tipping herself on to the floor. It’s a routine I do well. ‘I’m okay, really, don’t worry. Let’s go on somewhere, have another drink,’ I say to her, smiling, as I jack-in-a-box up. My friend has had a tough time of late and I know she needs me for an uncomplicated night out. As I walk through the narrow streets of the old town with her, I let myself feel the pain in my knee for a moment, and I can tell that I’m probably not so okay after all.

This fall is a thing to be carefully managed by my internal PR agency. I play a tactical game of deflection, telling my friend lightly about the four-year-old me who went to school and swiftly got given the ‘girl with two left feet’ tag. I paint a funny picture of my scruffy little self emerging from the prefab classroom dragging a manky teddy behind me; sweetly stuccoed with plasters, ripped clothes and undone plaits. I compress the story into three minutes, ending with four weeks ago when, attempting to show my children that I could leap, gazelle-like, from one wooden stepping stone to the other, like an idiot I fell in the adventure playground and bruised both knees so badly that I couldn’t drive for a week. I draw a line under all this with minimising laughter and then return to celebrating her brave new life, which, with as much of my heart as I can muster, is what I am here for.

In the background, as I pay attention to her, I also think of the part of me that’s still constantly bruising my hips and shins on the edges of furniture, ripping waistbands off jeans and destroying my dungarees by catching the straps on door handles. This me is still a four-year-old, unsure where the edges of her body are, where the floor and walls begin but not having any idea why.

I can’t bear that I fell in front of strangers and an image of the men swivelling in amusement keeps popping up in my thoughts as we walk. A little vignette of embarrassment and self-loathing that will stay on a loop for much longer than it should, taking turns with the playback of my stepping-stone fall. That time no one noticed me hit the ground. Not the children, racing joyfully away from me, the backs of their fleeces covered in leaf mould, nor my husband sitting on the nearby bench looking at his muddy boots. I stayed down there for a while, my nose against the bark chippings for long enough to spot a woodlouse creeping between two logs and to realise how like a tiny armadillo it looked. As it worried its way into the woody darkness, my shock and embarrassment coalesced into anger but, as ever, I wasn’t clear who it was I was angry with.

Later tonight, in a wine-bar bathroom, I sit on the cold toilet seat and try to pull down my tights. They are stuck fast to my skin: glued with blood from the four-inch gash that runs from the bottom of my knee on a diagonal that splits my shin. I instantly hate this cut and the little limp it is making me do.

So I cover it up. I go back out into the bar, glad of my long skirt; I refuse to limp and am extra witty, extra clever and extra outgoing. Later, lying on my friend’s spare bed with the ceiling spinning gently above me, I will think that while most people are made of 60 per cent water, I am composed of smoke and mirrors largely held together with shame.

The next morning I scrape the ice from my car before driving back across the flat, reclaimed land that lies between my rare night away and a two-acre patch of frozen mud, the smallholding that Jared, our two children and I moved to in 2017. The light is low and clouds hang heavily over the reeds that border the water along the roadside. It’s stark and beautiful with occasional glimpses of swan and a liberal sprinkling of Romney sheep. In summer we’ll all walk lazily along here in the most English of sunshine: spotting wildflowers, butterflies and bees and arguing about whether 10 a.m. is too early for our picnic lunch.

Today, as I return to our plot, I notice the mess first, as always: the weeds and grass that encroach on the gravel driveway, piles of leaves we have found time to rake but not collect, a heap of broken bricks we plan to use as hardcore when we finally get round to filling in the flood-waiting-to-happen car-inspection pit dug by the previous owners. The paddock gate reveals a motley collection of field shelters, sheds and henhouses that contain an even motlier crew of geese, goats, chickens and ducks. Their comforting cacophony starts as I exit the car – desperate to let me know that they haven’t yet been fed.

Even though I’m in my good clothes and nice shoes I walk straight through my garden towards the animal sheds. My borders offer the first glimpse of primroses telling winter to move along now. Hellebores and the spidery leaves of Anemone coronaria give welcome respite from the endless brown and my boots inadvertently trample a host of particularly keen daffodil shoots that ring the fruit trees in our little orchard. The season’s early adopters are out in force this morning, but still it takes the faith I’ve been cultivating to believe in spring’s coming in the sharp cold of this January day.

I pass the almost empty vegetable garden and tuck behind our beech hedge to let the animals into the field. The gang cheer me as they always do: a chuckle at the way the ducks chase our cats – beaks down, sheer gumption making them the unlikely winners in every encounter; the goats’ distinct preferences for being stroked and scratched (Amber on her ear, Belle on the sides of her golden face) and their daily attempts to escape and nibble my rose cuttings – the hairy little gits. The white hen who streaks straight to the end of the field every morning to get into the hollow tree where she insists on laying.

Limping a little, I crouch down by the chicken shed to check if anyone remembered to collect the eggs last night and, as my knee bends, the new scab breaks, letting blood through. It barely hurts but I wince anyway with the thought of the night before. Out in today’s morning quiet, I put my ungloved hands on the ground and try to be here now instead of there then. The earth feels cold: grass crispy with a light coating of frost, a present-moment shimmer camouflaging something more permanent below.

I brush a few of the frost crystals aside with my fingers and put more pressure on the field’s surface. Today the frozen crust gives way easily, revealing only the wet clagginess beneath. My ground. My mud. It is why I am here: this clay, this land. To return to it, get back to it, to raise my children in it, to try naively to live the good life, the simple life, a life where this ground supports us.

Today, and every day this week, our plot is hard with the cold. The pond is a solid brown lump of ice, much to the surprise of the ducks, who waddle over to it every hour or so on a Groundhog Day loop of bewilderment. I find myself humming ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ as I do my morning rounds with the animals and discover that the hose, water butt and all the buckets and drinkers have turned to solid ice. I replace the frozen drinkers with makeshift troughs and bowls (which will themselves freeze over in an hour) and take the others inside to start a constant cycle of thawing that leaves chicken-poo-infused puddles on the living-room floor.

As I finish my morning jobs I spot a blackbird with a distinctive necklace of featherless skin around his throat. There is something about the framing of this view, and the very same blackbird in it, that opens up a memory. The air is the same as it was then too: two years back on the day we moved here. The kind of deep cold that refuses to let the sun bring its usual warmth.

We were stuffed into the car: two adults, two children and two cats. Sparks of stress and excitement pinged off the sunroof, the windows and the box in the boot containing a kettle, cups and a corkscrew. We’d done this house-moving thing before and knew there would be an urgent need for hot caffeine on arrival, followed later by wine. The stench hit us about ten minutes into the journey. I’d daydreamed about this trip from our former home in a seaside town to the new house, just over an hour away on the edge of the Weald of Kent. I’d imagined the salty seaside air slowly mingling with countryside smells before disappearing entirely, every inhalation filling our noses with the iron tang of earth or perhaps an unseasonal breath of new-mown hay. An olfactory metaphor for the big adventure ahead. But before we’d even made it to the motorway, the smell in the car made me want to be sick.

We stopped in a lay-by, sniffed three-year-old Arthur warily and then opened the boot. The horror was definitely in there somewhere. We found him – the culprit – in his blue carrier, miaowing desperately. Perhaps we’d scooped him up and stuffed him into the car on his way to the litter tray. Maybe the stress of moving day had worked a kind of unholy magic on his feline bowels, but for whatever reason Bruce had smeared himself and the carrier with pungent catshit. It was all we could do not to leave him by the side of the road. Instead we cracked the windows, turned the heating up and I carried on driving, feeling a little chastened.

Then we were here, turning the car into the driveway. Jared got out before any of us, then the children and finally me. ‘I can’t believe that we live here, that this is all ours!’ I said, though the words, once out in the freezing air, didn’t sound quite right. But I moved on quickly, taking it all in: the plot, the work, the plans, the ideas already piling up and spreading out in my head. We walked along the path, past the log store, under the wooden arch that would soon fall down, and took out unfamiliar keys to open the porch for the first time. The stress of mortgages, solicitors, of packing and the journey dulled instantly. There’s nothing like watching your children run in circles, shrieking with excitement and arguing about who gets which bedroom, to make you forget that ten minutes ago you were shouting and that your near future involves washing an angry cat. As we walked through the door now, this place that we had spent only minutes in before became our shelter and, though the kitchen was falling apart and the central heating didn’t exist, every corner was transformed by the hopes we were piling in them. We were home.

A little later, despite chattering teeth, the children and I did our tenth excited loop around the plot, trying and failing to stay out of the way of Jared and the movers. We’d already clocked potential sites for chicken coops and dens by the time I spotted a row of leeks waiting to be harvested in the neat, otherwise bare, vegetable patch that sat (and still sits, somewhat less neatly) directly behind the south-facing house. A few hours later, our possessions stacked in each room and the removal lorry finally gone, I knew exactly what I wanted to do to mark the beginning of our lives in this squat bungalow with its wrap-around garden and tree-lined field – and it involved leeks.

I strolled over to the vegetable patch, my first real encounter with its soil squares, and felt consumed by the romance of harvesting produce sown nearly a year ago by the garden’s previous caretaker. She had lived here for over thirty years and raised her family in this place where I would now raise mine. Our first meal in our new life would be a ritual dinner, a gift from the past. So I took hold of a leek by its peeling casing and pulled gently, savouring the poignant moment. Nothing happened. I tried again. This time I snapped off an inch or so of the inedible top, but was no closer to actually harvesting a leek.

Undeterred, I tried a new technique: grabbing it at the bottom where its thick white stem met the soil. I yanked really hard this time, but it didn’t budge a millimetre. Was it a trick leek? I was flailing about by now, using every ounce of strength to get the damn thing out of the ground and feeling increasingly ridiculous. It would not yield to me. Fuck that fucking leek.

Twenty minutes later, having worked out where the movers had left the gardening tools, finding only three impossibly heavy spades – and something pointy and unfathomable – I improvised with a dessert spoon and set about digging. The soil was much harder than I’d expected so I was chipping away at it like just-out-of-the-freezer ice cream. Every now and then I gave the damn thing an experimental wiggle and shouted to my increasingly impatient family that everything was great, I wouldn’t be long. What felt like hours later, I could finally see its gnarly base and the first signs of white worm-like roots clinging fast to the clods of clay. This was it; I would conquer this leek. Ha!

Red in the face and sweating profusely despite the January cold, I grabbed it once again and it seemed to give a little. I wiggled it and – yes – it yielded some more. I took it in both hands and, grunting with effort, pulled upwards from the depths of my being, from my soul. Finally, I felt the exquisite freedom of release as it gave up and came to me. And then snap. I was thrown backwards on to the hard ground. Only the tasteless green part was clutched in my red-raw hands and the white prize of its leeky, savoury goodness was still firmly one with the clay. Double fuck that fucking leek and the realisation that this was all going to be much harder than I’d thought.

At lunchtime today I am wearing my third-best dungarees over leggings, thick gloves and a ridiculous bobble hat. The cold air is a slap in the face as I go outside, but it distracts from the pain in my leg as I start digging close to where this year’s leeks wait for a more successful harvest. That’s for another week though, as right now there’s a huge pile of woodchip that needs loading on to wheelbarrows, dumping on my paths and spreading evenly with a rake. It’s a satisfying thing to cut through; parting easily enough with a whooshing sound of man-made meeting nature, and then a shhhunk as I lift the mulch and tip it into the barrow bed. One spade, two spade, three spade, four. It takes about twenty spadefuls to fill it and then, reckless, I usually gamble on another couple on the top. Back and forth, back and forth, I pass bare branches and juicy, duplicitous holly berries as I take out the crappy week I’m having on this mound of bark. I struggle not to break into a jog but I am trying to remember to walk rather than run between tasks. This overwhelming urge to keep moving so as to travel almost instantly from job to job, radically limiting any gaps in productivity, has been with me for as long as I can remember. No task is too big – it’s just a matter of perspective and determination. I didn’t learn to walk as a baby; I learned to sprint – swift but off balance.

Soon after we moved here – around the time that the full extent of the work ahead on this smallholding dawned on me – I tripled my pace rather than dial down on ambition or schedule. Within weeks my default speed became ‘pretend I am being chased by a rabid dog and then go a bit faster’. And it did get things done, for a while at least. But there turned out to be consequences to keeping up a hysterical pace for too long: an abrupt stop. So now, even though my every instinct is to rush, I try to grit my teeth and take my time, telling myself that easing up means I can keep going for longer.

Finally, I finish covering this patch with a fresh layer of chippings and feel better. Daily pressures and nagging voices have receded. This task – the smoothing-over and hiding of imperfections – appeals to me. The quick pay-off, the miniature Grand Designs reveal, suits my natural impatience. I feel bad, I come outside, I see the sky, I dig a hole, I stroke a hen and I feel calmer. Every single time. This was a good idea.

Then I look to my right and see days-I-don’t-haves’-worth of paths that also needing weeding and chipping. They actually look worse now that they have a tidy neighbour. And then there’s the literal tonne of compost I’ve got to finish covering my veg and flower beds with. Not to mention the leaves smothering the crocuses and the grass growing in between every paving stone. Now the run is right there, ready to spring my ligaments, bones and muscles into action like a pent-up shout. I think about the seed trays I need to fill with compost to allow seedlings to push their way to the surface. Seeds still to buy. Poultry houses to disinfect. Worlds yet to conquer. Then thoughts of my children, Jared, the house, my work, the political mess, the world’s slide towards climate disaster and everything else start jumping up and down and waving at me.

My hips, thighs and knees start to move. My breathing quickens.

I am running again.

Forty-eight miles away from me a civil servant is sitting at her desk worrying discreetly at a small bead bracelet held between finger and thumb. She is nervous, excited and the rhythm of her breath is more quavers than crotchets, though she tries to hide it, to calm herself – to fit in. She reads the pages on her screen with a face arranged into the perfect show of interested concentration. This is her first day in a new job and her first task – one that will take some months – is to produce the government’s sixty-seventh annual report into smallholding. The sensory assault of the morning in a new office has left her tired and muddled. Head full of names that don’t yet connect to faces, new rules – spoken and unspoken – the whirl of the journey, the need to be early, the moulding of her contours to fit the shape her predecessor left. She pauses to yawn behind her hand; thankful that the sound is disappeared by the judder-click of a printer and the slam of a taxi horn on the Westminster street below.

So far she has been reading last year’s report slowly and carefully, preparing notes and questions to discuss with the team. But now she just lets the words about these council-owned parcels of land – 75, 150, 200, 300, 400 acres – wash around her brain. She thinks back to the weekend when, to celebrate this new job, she bought herself a copy of The Smallholder magazine. Over coffee, toast and the new silence of her Sundays, she looked at pictures of tinpot, piglet-strewn junkyards and genteel duck-egg-blue-painted cottages strung with bunting and decorated with jugs of home-grown flowers. She felt the pull of that life, as she often had before, and a crackle of excitement to be getting closer to it – at least in working hours. But the report she’s reading now, and the one she’ll soon have to write, don’t quite seem to fit with the world she found in the magazine, nor the one always turning over in her imagination.

These slick set-ups are the real deal, of course, and they are more professional than what the clunky word – ‘smallholding’ – has always conjured for her. Even the mud seems shinier when six zeros of local-authority profit are lined up in the next column. Good, the civil servant tells herself. It is good to find something significant, when you were expecting three acres and an elderly cow. The case study she reads next is impressive. Four hundred and forty acres of wild flowers grown for seeds. Over the hum of the road she can almost hear the buzzing of the insects enjoying these vast new meadows. What a thing to be part of: this report that captures far more than her own hazy fantasy of hearing nothing in the early morning but soft breaths, starlings and rain on the roof.

She should feel happy and excited by this day-one change in perspective, and the bits of her not already dulled by strip lights and induction manuals do register the shift. Yet she’s rolling the beads faster and faster, squeezing them harder against her fingerprints. And when she makes herself put the bracelet in her pocket, she pulls her scarf comfortingly around her shoulders like a shawl. Her hands drop to her belly; fingers fanning out over the rollercoaster loops of her fallopian tubes, the thin end of the wedge of her uterus and the slack of her cervix. She knows what it’s like when something is missing and can’t shake the feeling that the pixels in front of her now are incomplete. That the scale in this report is wrong. She’s kidding herself with this reverence for largeness. It’s the small things sometimes (often); the tiniest things – their presence, their absence – that have a world-smashing, big-bang-ing, universal impact. Boom!

Four hundred and forty acres. A union. A once-divided cell. A hope. The smallest of smallholdings.

Smallholding

Small. Holding.

This thing I have that is not much

and all too much for me.

‘Small’:

a pale yellow flower of a word on the stalk of the Old English ‘smæl’.

A thin meaning:

slender,

fine.

Under the soil a tangled root ball:

the proto-Germanic ‘smal’, the Gothic ‘smalista’, old Norse ‘smali’,

church Slavonic ‘malu’.

The original meaning of ‘narrow’ almost lost to us unless

we turn our tongues to waists or (worse)

intestines.

Sm–all.

Five letters, two sounds – all in, in ‘small’.

Thirteenth-century diagraphs that pushed

out of an embryonic base to become:

not big, not large but

compact.

With decades’ padding this little thing

got diminished:

a small person of small means and small import.

Small change, small talk, small fry,

small potatoes

– but when I dig them up, surprisingly heavy in my hand.

‘Holding’:

from the Middle English ‘holden’ to the Old English ‘halden’.

Meanings peel away like layers

of the onions I pull from the earth:

sharper than you’d think with

a side-effect of tears.

To hold: containing something that would otherwise

escape: water, petrol, grain.

A gift, a load, a ritual

gathering.

A firm hold, on my arm:

ruling, controlling, imprisoning.

Or (on the other hand)

a cherishing touch

that watches while I rest.

Seven letters of: finding,

tending, keeping, owning.

Hard and soft sounds

that won’t be put down.

Hold on! Hold me!

And [in a whisper]:

never let me go.

(Let me go!)

Last of all –

‘a hold’:

the void in a ship’s

belly where the cargo is stored.

Empty and echoing.

Stuffed full of

flowers,

treasures,

breaths.

A little breath.

A small holding.

Holding.

Beholden.

Held.

In the short-changed light of the January afternoon – after finally washing my cut leg in the bath – I pull on a fresh set of work clothes and watch the birds going about their end-ofthe-day business from my bedroom window. A dunnock (I think) on the hawthorn; blue tits having relay races from guttering to rose branch; a collared dove getting a head start on nest-building and my unimaginative favourite, the robin, hopping across the grass. I know this chap from all the others. He’s charmingly pot-bellied with a tilt of his head that makes me think of a 1920s dancer with a top hat and cane: ‘Robbo the Robin’. ‘He’s so fat, Mummy!’ says Sofya, who’s come into the room in her school uniform to hunt me down. Good old Robbo defuses my irritation at the feeling she’s pursuing me and the swift guilt that follows. I don’t want to be this person who reacts to my daughter as if she were an intruder in a rare five minutes of rest.

I kiss her on the top of her dark, tangled head and take a moment to breathe her in. Over the past couple of years my capacity for almost everything in life has shrunk dramatically. The generous, patient and unboundaried energy required to meet my children in the loud, needy, giving-of-myself places they often ask me to be is just not there any more. I cheat by taking them in like this: smelling them and letting that connect with the ancient bit of my brain that isn’t so depleted, but which is very hard to find. I spend time stroking their cheeks, kissing their foreheads and saying loving things to them as they sleep, knowing that here in the dark they won’t argue, talk incessantly or drop a fork on the floor – the clatter plucking every one of my nerves. I find a Canadian soap opera about a horse whisperer for us to watch together in almost silence, snuggled close, and I make it into an exclusive mother–child club. I give them what I can and hope it makes up for how little I have left.

Sofya and I also find a way to be together in our roles as Director and Deputy Director of Animal Husbandry. And now we are rushing to put on our boots, hats, gloves and coats and head out into the dimness that has abruptly claimed the afternoon. She mucks out the goats using a red dustpan and brush. I refill their hayrack and put hard feed in buckets; sprinkling it with supplement and listening to my daughter spill the contents of her mind into the little animal shelter we inherited. Always wanting to want to hear more of her sideways take on the world; always longing for a stretch of quiet.

As we walk back to the house I am already deep in the week ahead, but Sofya’s voice breaks through: ‘Look, Mummy!’ I turn and find her behind me, absorbed by the sky. I was rushing again and nearly missed this January sunset laid out above the trees. But my eight-year-old moves at a slower pace; eyes open, ready to receive these kinds of gifts and this feels like a small victory. I walk back towards her smiling and put my arm around her shoulders. We stare at the red on the horizon and see it fade up to orange and then yellow. There’s a band of green above, spreading like watercolour into the blue. Higher up the clouds are shocking pink and – behind witchy, black branches – the dusk is crushed berries. We say nothing – there is nothing that needs to be said as the animals’ jaws work at their dinners, the birds sing their goodnights and our quiet breathing slowly synchronises.

The last day of the month and I walk across the garden’s snowy ground as night gives into morning. Despite the smoothing of white over them, the unkempt hedges, flower beds and lawns are enormous today through eyes sharpened by overwhelm. This smallholding is, in reality, on the smallest of sides at a touch under two acres, but it has a way of expanding and contracting depending on how I am feeling and who is looking at it with me. The space we inhabit is vast through the eyes of our city friends yet poky when I come up with a new plan that won’t fit. On my very worst days it is a universe whose edges I can never hope to touch – let alone weed. When our farmer neighbour Victor pushes a barrow between our yards, bringing over bales of hay, it all shrinks again to fit neatly in his pocket. A toy holding, not even a hectare and ineligible for the basic payments that even the tiniest of real farms receive from the government. With him I don’t use the word ‘smallholding’. I’m embarrassed to have called the place where we live and work anything but a garden with a few pets.

Now I let them out – my livestock, my pets – and watch them from the gate next to what, in summer, will be a grassy hollow but in winter months is an accidental pond. Today, this dip is hidden by snow and Honk the goose is walking slowly across it, hoping for a drink. As the water has turned to ice in the past fourteen hours her orange feet slap down comedically on a newly hard surface.

I’ve woken feeling tired and flimsy and need something more than the bite in the air to enliven me. A connection to something – a goose will do – might help me shake off this creeping feeling that something inside me has started to come loose. A cobblestone, agitated by generations of boot soles, working its way up to become a trip hazard.

There is nothing uneven about Honk though as she stretches; long and balanced, opening her wings in parallel to the ground, standing straight on her left foot and stretching her right out behind her: a perfect arabesque. I force myself to leave my head for a moment, eased down into my body by the view of her elegant form. I am an infrequent visitor here and it is uncomfortable to concentrate on the reality under my skin. Tight in the chest, a little dehydrated, achy in the lower back and the sticky constriction of a wound dressing on my leg.

I ended up at the GP surgery within a week of my pavement dive outside the pub. As the doctor peered professionally at the gross pus-y mess of my shin I was embarrassed by what, under his gaze, looked like lack of self-care: black hairs poking out of the weeping yellow and – how had I missed it? – a line of mud along my ankle bone.

There is not much I can do about the mud – a little of this earth is always on me now: a smear of boot edge catching the skin over my fibula, a grain of brown down the side of my nail that no amount of brushing can reach. I take the plot with me on the train to smart London meetings, on the school run, to my desk. There’s dirt on my knees at the end of the day and it’s there when I turn to Jared in the morning wanting to be touched.

And there is more of it, no doubt, making its way onto me now as I look back at Honk lumbering to the centre of the ice and hear a crack. Liquid appears from below the thin surface as her weight, and the heat from her feet, fractures the hardness below. I flinch, but she doesn’t plummet; sinking slowly, gracefully instead – as if even an abrupt change in the very state of the matter under her toes doesn’t ruffle her. She raises her head on a pipe-cleaner neck and plunges it into the new pool; grooming herself with a twist of her beak; splashing her back and in between her feathers in the way, I have learned, geese love to do.

I envy Honk’s determination to start the morning with what she needs and her ability to roll with the changes. I stay here a little longer trying to harvest something from the sight of my white goose under the lightening sky. Though I’m trying to ignore and fight it in turns, part of me knows that – unlike her – I am plunging. This could go one way or the other.

It is there in every moment: concentration, pressure – from within – to: stop falling. Hold steady as the sun tracks east to west like this beautiful bird with her ridiculous name. And to stretch out and up too despite the fear. These instructions run through my head as the minutes pull a little further from the dark. I am coaching myself for what feels like it might be coming. I’m apprehensive, yes, but there’s also a strange desire for the strength that might be released when everything starts to melt. Muddy water of oscillating atoms, ice bonds loosened by radiation, and kinetic energy splashed on to my wind-reddened cheeks like a tonic.