It’s below freezing once again outside the cottage. I had an extra blanket, a hot water bottle and socks on in bed last night. The heads of the hydrangea outside the front door are brown and sagging while underneath them the heads of snowdrops bow in unison offering some hope of new life amongst the decay.
Fog is thick in the meadows, the trees and hedgerows smothering everything and confusing the mind but exciting it too with the way it changes everything. We are hidden.
I’m walking to see Jane in the top field up Holden’s Way.
The sun endeavours to make an appearance but is a pale sphere behind the scenes seemingly drained of its strength. Everything is very still. There isn’t even birdsong. What do they do in this cold? Puff out their chests and hope for the best. I make a note to buy bird feeders. I know many of the smaller ones die if the cold lasts for days on end. Droplets of water tiptap onto leaves. The world seems frozen.
Outside Wiltown House is one of the biggest cobwebs I’ve ever seen dropping from a branch. For a second I wonder if it’s man made – a bit of nylon abandoned on a tree. It could be a scene from a hammer horror. Is there a figure in that window part of me wonders.
With the world shrouded sounds become more acute. A woodpecker’s knocking echoes somewhere across a field, reverberating sharply through the fog. I hear the brief hoot and shhhh of the Penzance to London train as it rushes across Sedgemoor. It fades to nothingness after a few seconds.
At the back of Jane’s house everything is blanketed.
Jane looks great. She is 92 and has lived at Windmill Cottage for 33 years. We sit in her conservatory looking over the field I must have walked around hundreds of times.
The base of the windmill is just beside us, the stones still rising in a great ring overgrown with weeds some three or four feet above the ground. Much of the local grain would be brought here to be ground into flour back in the day.
Jane looks away from me and casts her mind back to the past. We talk about my grandfather’s famous birthday parties where there was a lot of drinking and the men would stand around the piano and sing. I remember it, trying to go to sleep in the little bed with a floral pattern eiderdown and the creaky headboard wide awake smelling the richness of cigarette smoke and hearing the deep voices of farmers and land agents bellowing out rugby songs.
Her and Anthony were much younger than most of the other couples in Wiltown, the little Hamlet on the outskirts of Curry Rivel. They would play tennis with the Furnesses at Wiltown House. ‘They were a strange couple.’ I never found out why. She says how all the men wore long trousers when playing tennis.
When Mrs Furness died she didn’t want a funeral. Instead they processed her coffin around the garden at Wiltown House while her husband gave a long eulogy pointing out her favourite tree and other things that she was fond of.
At Windmill Cottage daffodils are appearing along the drive. Two hours have past and the fog is still heavy on the land; the low roar of the train comes and goes again this time going west down to Penzance.
The sun is still white and pale but half of the sky is now a milky blue and forms start to become more distinct appearing like ghostly apparitions.
Jane tells me how these two fields are two of the worst in terms of its soil. Her late husband’s fields, her son’s fields and now her grandson’s fields. They have poor soil and many stones. Jane’s son has always left wide margins on those fields which allows for the growing of wildflowers. She says how she used to use it to ride her Welsh cobbs that she once kept at Windmill Cottage.
As I turn northwards towards the monument at Burton Pynsent, my shadow appears miraculously below me and the field is unveiled and the sky too – great masses of cloud like continents on the ocean – moving slowly west.
The vapour starts to shift. Houses, trees, hedges that didn’t exist a minute ago are now back in their usual places.
Crows caw. The droplets on blades of grass shiver. And a great stillness presides over everything.
The Slow Walker 