fiction

The running man and the pony

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At New Year, I took on the care of two ponies. Both had been living on the common by my house for some months, owned by Mike, a local man who became too unwell to care for them. They are just two years old and the boy, who I call Little Bob, has one black ear and one white, curved like a yin-yang symbol. My neighbour called the filly Scrufty, a blending of scruffy and tufty, as her coat was a little matted at first. Now she is a girl of brushed flowing locks, as fluffy as a My Little Pony.

Mike had already rescued Scrufty once, as a foal, from conditions that sounded pretty grim. It explains her reticence with humans – Little Bob walks confidently over to anyone, searches their pockets for treats, leans into any hand for a scratch. Scrufty is wary, eyeing people up from behind her exuberant fringe and often walking away with an air of equine indifference. Whatever has happened in her short life has left her hesitant and I am still uncertain how much she enjoys my company. For four months now, the ponies have bookended my days on the common – they get their buckets of breakfast after the hens, but before my own; I check them again at dusk, when the song thrush sings behind my garden and the tawny owls call in the wood. Visiting the ponies has become a focal point for my night time rambles too, and often now I stand with the black and white horses a while in the moonlight and shadow.

One evening last week I spotted the Running Man crossing the common. I don’t know his name, only that he lives in a residential home for adults a mile or so away and has run or walked past my house every day for more than two decades. Over the years, I’ve watched his dark beard become speckled with grey, but we have never spoken. He will raise a hand whilst looking straight ahead, clearly uncomfortable with eye contact or speaking. This time he waved at me, a full-armed and enthusiastic gesture, and walked towards where I was standing with the ponies. I waved back, surprised at his exuberance, telling myself to be calm, to let him take the lead in our contact. ‘I have seen the horses’ he said, ‘I have seen the horses, can I touch one?’

I pointed towards Scrufty, who was nearest to him and muttered something about approaching her quietly. The tall man walked towards her, an arm held stiffly out in front, towering over the little pony. I was worried she would back off, freaked out by this sudden human in Hi-Viz and thinking I’d go over and help if I was needed. Instead, she wandered over to him slowly, sniffed the proffered hand and reached her head up to nuzzle his shoulder. A huge grin spread over the Running Man’s face and he ran his fingers through the softness beneath her long mane. I let them be, alone with whatever communication was flowing between them. Then the man turned to me, held up his hand, and said ‘thanks’. I told him he was welcome to chat to them anytime, but he had picked up speed and was gone into the dusk.

I’ve spent a lot of my life with horses – dun-coloured Zodiac, who I sat on as a child, behind the glasshouse of a market garden, Dougal, who I rode bareback in the fields by a coal yard in Scotland and Perkins, the white and gold pony I drove in a cart down Norfolk lanes for fifteen years. I used to call him my grass-powered pickup truck – one less four-by-four I would say to my friends as we bowled along the lanes to the pub. Each of them, like all horses, lived in the present moment, easily scared, but sensitive to human behaviour. Building trust with them can take time, but once won it feels like the warm depth of falling in love, my heart turning over as they follow me across a field or run their soft lips gently across my palms. I don’t know if the Running Man will visit Scrufty again, but I hope he does – both of them seemed to benefit from that moment of contact and I’d been waiting weeks for little signs that her confidence is growing.

Sleepy ponies. Helen

A Common Land Year, March

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At Swaddy Well

I thought about Swaddy Well all the way from Norfolk to the Northamptonshire village of Helpston. Driving across the Fens, wondered if I could find it, if it would be more than a name on a map and the memory of a place. Beneath the wide, grey skies beyond my windscreen, the reeds in the drainage ditches stood bleached by the winter. March was ending like a pacing lion, the north wind carrying a hesitant drizzle.

In Helpston, I met friends in the café attached to the museum that was once the home of the poet John Clare, who was born in the village in 1793. When we walked through the gift shop to the white-washed cottage, I was struck by the cold. No fire, just the kitchen laid out as if someone had come in from a summer garden and placed apples on the table beside slices of bread and hard, cheap cheese. A small bowl held convincing glass raspberries.

I wondered what rights Clare’s family had claimed on the commons at the edges of his parish, on Emmonsale Heath, the Mores and Swaddy Well. Maybe grazing for a pony, geese or cattle, entitlements to wood for the fire or for whittling into spoons, perhaps a right to catch fish or cut turf – all of them supplementing the living of a poor family. Common rights, like my own at Wood Green, are still often linked to the hearth of a house and are what has defined common land for centuries; no matter who owns the ground, the right holders’ access to the grass and timber should prevail.

Clare’s poem, ‘The Lament of Swaddy Well’, recounts the enclosure of a common into cropped, farmed fields and a quarry. By the time of the Norman Conquest, ‘open field’ farming existed in much of the English Midlands, with villagers having rights on common grazing land and hayfields and ‘owning’ a number of strips marked with posts in the parish’s arable fields – the origin of the term ‘stakeholder’. In 1760, a new legal process speeded up the gathering of the strips into individual farms that could be rented out or farmed for profit more than subsistence. Common rights were dissolved by this process and the pastures ploughed up, whether or not the rightholders agreed. These ‘parliamentary enclosures’ were frequently led by an individual who had acquired most of the strips in a parish and it could be carried out even if the majority of those ‘owning’ land in the village opposed the idea. The deciding factor was not the number of stakeholders who consented, but the agreement of those who owned the largest share of the land. Owning land of significant value was then the backbone of power in Britain and the required route for becoming a Justice of the Peace or a Member of Parliament – the very people who would rule on private enclosure acts laid before them by other landowners. Between 1760 and 1870, nearly seven million acres of common land in Britain were enclosed and commoners, deprived of their rights, were left with only their waged labour to live on[i]. ‘Where profit gets his clutches in’, writes Clare, ‘there’s little he will leave’.

The Lament of Swaddy Well is written from the point of view of the land as it says farewell to the Gypsies who camped among its bushes, to commoners and the wild creatures of its ‘old, green hills’. It is one of the most eloquent texts on habitat destruction in English, voicing sorrow at the obliteration of beetles ‘hiding ‘neath a stone’, flowers ‘that bloomed nowhere beside’ and the butterflies that ‘whirr and come’. I feel my voice wavering if I try to read it aloud, recognising in the words my own landscapes of loss – the chalk hill that was once Twyford Down, with its wild flowers, skylarks and bees, or the old oak trees at Skinner’s Green, on the route of the Newbury bypass. I am not surprised that Clare’s sanity collapsed as the places he knew were destroyed. Many of my road protest friends suffered breakdowns and struggled for years to find their place in the world, yet we had known those woods and valleys and rivers only briefly, whereas Clare was grappling with the destruction of the ‘mossy hills’ and ‘silver springs’ he had walked among all his life.

Despite the enclosures of commons that Clare saw in his lifetime, over a million hectares of common land remain in England and Wales today[ii]. More than a third of this area is designated as nationally important for nature conservation, a testimony to its history. The long use by right holders means that commons are not truly ‘wild’, but they have had a long time to develop peat soils, or the plants of ancient grasslands and heaths, and to be a familiar haven for generations of migrant birds. These old lands are, however, still places of conflict. My journey through Britain’s commons, currently being shaped into a book, have taken me to the burnt squares of heather on grouse moors, the enclosure of a common for military training, the industrial scale digging of peat in northern England, and the sheep-cropped turf of Welsh commons. Each of these has a story of carbon capture and climate change, flood control and the continual dwindling of nature; like the Fens that I crossed on my trip to Clare’s cottage, they are stories for another day, or for the longer pages of my book.

In Helpston, the small group of us who had met in the café braved the keen March wind and the drizzle to visit Swaddy Well. A red kite drifted over thorn scrub as we arrived and a flock of black sheep eyed us warily from a distance. The limestone cliffs of the abandoned quarry were still exposed, facing a shallow lake fringed with reeds, young birch trees and the spiky skeletons of last summer’s thistles. Wading into a pond, I found a few great crested newt eggs, tucked neatly under the leaves of a plant. In the shelter of a hut, we took turns at reading out the verses of Clare’s Lament. Tears pricked a little at my eyes and yet, there was a hopefulness in the battered land around us and in the kite, a species returning to Britain after years of persecution and near extinction. Swaddy Well, I found out, is more than a place on a map or the ghost of a common, it’s a reminder of how, with benevolent care, even the most mistreated places can find their way back to the wild.

Dyke looking towards Engine Farm in The Fens; a steam pump bought at the Great Exhibition in 1851 was installed here to drain one of the last shallow lakes of the landscape. H Baczkowska

[i] A Short History of Enclosure, Simon Fairlie, The Land, https://thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain

[ii] Foundation for Common Land, https://foundationforcommonland.org.uk/