reserved trades, weekend coarse fishermen, allotment gardeners, rosette-winning attenders of dog shows. My dad left school at 16, became an engineer’s apprentice, and set out to prove his own dad wrong. My mum met him at school, left at the same age, became a comptometer operator (look it up), then a school classroom assistant, a housewife, our mum, the still point in a not-often-still home.
Me? I’m an Oxford University graduate who writes books for a living. Look! I’ve worked in the jungles of Borneo and the villages of Mexico. I’ve done book tours of Australia and the USA. I don’t have any money, but I have—no, I had—my father’s ambition and I know how to look like I’m one of them. You know: one of the kinds of people who also have all these things but who somehow, unlike me, feel they have them by right. Who grew into them, or who always had them, or who grew up surrounded by people who did. At Oxford I would see these 19-year-old boys in tweed jackets, who wandered about full of louche, angular confidence, and they didn’t seem any smarter than me but they seemed a lot more sure of themselves. I knew nothing about the world, or myself, or how to behave, and I didn’t know what I was doing there, or anywhere else. But they did. They were all confident, while I was not. At least I thought they were. Now that I write this, I realize I’m not so sure. Maybe they were looking at me the same way. Where did this chip on my shoulder fall from? I think my dad must have dropped it as he was passing. It’s not attractive. I wonder if I will pass it on to my children. I am trying not to.
This is me: a wanderer through words and through the world. A wanderer who is often sick of wandering, who is not a natural at this, who wants to put down roots, or feels he would be a better and more whole and more productive member of society if he did, and who was brought up that way. At the same time I am someone whose soul drifts like a cloudbank, someone who feels sick at the very notion of being productive, someone who wants to be anything but a member of society, thinks society stinks and has nothing to do with him. There is the battle, maybe within us all. The West battles the East, the old battles the new, modernity battles tradition, inside all of us, all of the time. It’s exhausting, don’t you find?
This is the battle I have used my words to document for so many years. Now, suddenly, something is happening that I never expected or prepared for. All the words are dropping away.
9.
Three years ago, I arrived here, in my new green stillness, in a land that had been stripped bare for centuries by people from my land, and I started to fragment. I felt like I was falling apart. After the first few weeks, the initial anxiety dissipated, but I still felt the scales dropping off my skin one by one. All of my comfortable certainties looked less comfortable. Surrounded now by people of different origins, classes, ages, backgrounds, I saw more clearly than ever that for most of my adult life I had been hanging about with people like myself: middle-class graduates, liberal-leftish, urban, left-brained, intellectual, floating, disconnected. That stuff wouldn’t wash here. Suddenly it all seemed painfully self-conscious and individualist, and so did I. In the city, in the town even, there was no real need to talk to your neighbors if you didn’t want to. I had never really learned how to do it properly; I was not good at talking to people at the best of times, which was probably another reason I had become a writer. But out here, everybody knew your business, especially if you were a blow-in like me. You had to talk to your neighbors, and they felt like neighbors, not just people who happened to be living in the next house along for now, before they moved on to something and somewhere better.
The position I had painfully staked out in the world began to fragment. I began to fragment. I am still fragmenting, I think. Sometimes it scares me, sometimes it excites me. You have to come apart to be put back together in a different shape. You have to be reformed, or you rust up, and all your parts stop moving.
Soon enough, my writing began to fragment too, because the kind of words you create to speak to the urban crowds of the alienated West don’t come from places like this. This old land out in the west, this ground will not give you what you need in that regard. It has no intention of helping. I mean that. I think, more and more, that words come from places, that they seep up into you and that places like this will not give words to people like me that speak to the things I used to be and used to believe. The words that come from this place, that bubble up from it, don’t even always make sense to me. I don’t know what they are trying to say or what they want. But they want something, and it is not what I once thought I came here to do. All I know right now is that my words don’t work the way they used to. I used to think words were my tools. Now I think it might be the other way around.
I wonder what they want me to make.
What does a writer do when his words stop working? I don’t know. All I know is that I am churning inside and everything I knew is windskipping like brown willow leaves in a winter gale. I am afraid and sometimes I am excited. I feel like something is waiting for me, and I don’t know what, but I fear that I do know. I fear that I am being called, and I am taking too long to answer. But who is to say how long it should take?
I don’t know. I don’t know much at the moment. It feels like all the things I was so sure about have dissolved away from me. I don’t even know who I am now. When I came here, I thought I would at least know where I am, but that, too, the longer I look at it, turns out not to be quite true either. The more I look at anything, the more questions I seem to have about it. All the stories I had are dissolving away. None of the scaffolding holds.
All the words I used to have: once they would have closed these paragraphs comfortably on the page. Almost without me thinking about it, they would have offered up a well-wrought conclusion, a rallying cry. They would have rounded-off, tied up, concluded. Words used to hold up my world, to construct it, to protect me from it. Now they are transparent and suddenly fragile. Now, they offer me no comfort at all. Now, they say: giving comfort is not what we do. Not anymore. Now we do something else.
And I ask: what?
And they say: find out.
10.
It’s a Sunday in April and I am at home. I have a whole day to spend outside. We have herbs to plant, and onion sets, and heather. We have beds to dig and grass to cut. Spring is roaring out. Time is pressing.
My nine-year-old daughter, Leela, appears by my side. ‘Hello, Daddy,’ she says. ‘Would you like to come to my stone-carving workshop?’
‘Er,’ I say. ‘Yes, that would be great.’ She leads me to an upturned box in the porch on which lie a selection of scratched stones she has found in the garden. She hands me an awl and a lump of sandstone.
‘How long will it take?’ I ask.
‘About 20 minutes,’ she says.
‘I’ve only got 10,’ I say, instinctively.
‘Oh, that’s OK,’ she says. ‘You can still do something good. You have to decide what you want to carve. Maybe a lady’s face, or maybe Quincy.’
Quincy is our dog. I sit on a stool and begin to carve the dog’s face on the stone. Shit, I think to myself, for the eight-hundredth time. I am a terrible father. The thing that has haunted me throughout my children’s lives has been the remembered moments. We all have them: standout images from our childhood, times, pictures, events, things which sank in, good or bad. But there’s no rhyme or reason to them. You never know what they will take with them into adulthood. Will Leela always remember the time we camped together in the woods by Lough Gill, just yards from Yeats’ Isle of Innisfree, and cooked dinner over a fire? Will she remember us playing vets together in a garden beneath a volcano in Chilean Patagonia? Will she remember us sheltering from the rain in a Cumbrian wood? Or will she remember the time I couldn’t spare 10 minutes because I had to do something which I had told myself was more important than being with her, because it was ‘work,’ and ‘work’ is always more important than living?
Part of my plan, when we came here, was that my newfound rootedness would spread like a slow mist into every other area of my life. My restless energy would be channeled into planting trees, clearing brambles, building treehouses, hacking down long grass, hefting stones and all the other heavy, ongoing work of running a working smallholding.