Living outside a village at the top of a rural lane, I feel more in touch with the seasons than I have for many years. This autumn feels like an adventure, and lovely with it. Although the summer keeps fighting back, giving us one, two or even a week’s worth of bright, dry days, autumn has taken hold and has been a severe one this year.
There are bare trees, thinning trees and trees whose leaves are turning, like the one in this picture, to display a palette of change, rich and beautiful. The wetness of the autumn, so disastrous for the farmers, adds to the sense of abundance for those of us who don’t depend upon good weather for our living. I wear my wellies to walk Hazel, and the smells of dampness and earth and grass and horse poo fill me with an awareness of the life around me, even though I seldom meet anyone on my walks.
I no longer live with Amanda and Hazel, but they visit three or four times a week, and I walk Hazel then. On the days when we have a carer in and I go over to East Cowes, I still take her on the local, suburban walk I’ve used for years,1 so familiar that certain turns trigger memories of audiobooks I have listened to as I passed that same point.2
Today, I made soup and rolls, and Amanda came over after finishing work at lunchtime. It is the wettest of days, the rain pummelling from leaden skies in ten minute bursts before becoming lighter, but not stopping. My mother finds the weather gloomy and needs cheering up, but I love the power of the dark clouds and the rhythm of the rain on the pond and the patterns of raindrops on the windows.
After lunch, we had a quick cup of tea with some of my mother’s birthday biscuits, then I went out to do some shopping while Amanda sat with my mother. Aldi and Morrisons were busy and damp, and I rushed through the shopping, which is always fatal for the household economy, but I wanted to be away from the eddies of people, milling around with our mouths opening and closing in resentful avarice, like the fish in our pond.
When I got back, I changed into my wellies and my big raincoat, and took Hazel out. Our walk is now well-established and Hazel trots ahead, seeking out smells in the verges and horse poo on the lane. At the bottom of the lane there is the farm which gives this place its name, a site that goes back at least a thousand years. Although the current building is mostly nineteenth century, there is, apparently, a cockpit in the building that dates back many hundreds of years. We turn at its gate and get on to the track that is in the picture at the top of this page, a rough path, often flooded, that goes between horse paddocks where angry women struggle with the the gulf between their dreams of horse ownership and the reality. Today, fortunately, the horses were unmolested, the chronically weird women not braving the weather.
The path winds downhill in two dramatic drops. On one side, the marginal land given over to horse paddocks banks up in small, bramble hedged parcels. On the other, new woodland, planted within the last couple of decades, many of the trees still wearing their plastic sleeves around their lower trunks, creates a barrier for the privacy of the two landowners in this isolated spot. From maps,3 I know there are two houses, each surrounded by a large amount of land, but you’d hardly know it. It is like an area of secret installations, where nefarious goings on are hidden by strategic planting: havens against planning restrictions. I often here the crack of shooting from this end of the path. That is the perversion they hide.
A steep slope from here leads through some thin woods to the lowest point of the path, that is raised only half a metre or so from wetland where the trees grow out of almost permanent puddles. A very light rise gets us to the cycle path; the Red Squirrel Trail4.
Some days, we turn back here. It is enough of a walk for Hazel, and the cycle path is a bit boring, being open and tarmacked and often quite busy. If I am in a full daydream, I don’t want to acknowledge my fellow walkers. However, today I was happy to wander further. I had a full poo bag to get rid of and there is a bin at the end of the section of path, where it crosses the road at the bottom of the village.
So, we hiked on, Hazel trotting ahead until she was distracted by some particularly interesting scent, when she would stop to investigate and I would get ahead of her. After a time, she’d come flying past me, having run to catch me up, and then turn around to get my approval of her return. The hedges on the side of the path are full at this time of year, but there are gaps enough to see into the fields beyond, and then into the industrial estate on the hill going out of the village, where the brewery has its distribution centre and the excellent garage has a large yard and workshop5. For a while, there are streams on both sides of the path, until a channel burrows under the path to unite them, with a strange anti-climbing device on the outside of the safety barrier making it look like a fortress below the path.
We passed the cyclists’ cafe6, and got to the road. Hazel is very good at sit and wait commands, and I leave her while I go to the bin then treat her when I get back. Then, we retrace our steps, along the cycle path, which always seems much longer on the return, and then up the lane, through mud and puddles, rain soaking her fur and pattering on the top of my raincoat’s hood.
Today was not a bad day at home. Being a carer, mood dictates everything, my mother’s and mine. Seeing Amanda, walking with Hazel, enjoying the drama of the weather, all helped to break the monotony of being stuck in a home that is not my home, with a mother who is no longer my mother.
Despite it not being home, this is a rural place, where beauty is closer and more constant than in our suburban home. Today, although we are in the middle of October, there was still a huge amount of colour in the banks and the hedgerows. I have swapped a life of hobbies and activity for the consolations of natural beauty and a sense of virtue. I hope I have made the right decision, but there is no backing out now.