Undertow

What do you do when your feet won't reach the bottom?

It’s been so long since I picked up a pen that I had to remind the ink how to flow, to shake it awake. I’ve been like a child hiding in a cupboard, watching shapes move across the light through a crack in the door.

Breathe in

Breathe out

Let your shoulders drop

In the last weeks the undertow has pulled me down, finding out all the cracks. I don’t want to retrace any of its movement, but I know that at times its velocity has made me afraid. Covid’s viciousness has made my breath catch in my throat, my body freeze, my mind restless for a place neither alien or acidic.

The eddy pulled in Hicks, our ridiculous cat - the one who reappeared after years of wandering to make a challenge of love. A link to another lifetime, family, landscape and sense of belonging, after fifteen years, she’s gone.

She’s still inhabiting the house. I see her shape on my bed several times a day, her black shadow curling around a door, hear her scratching the mat, feel the deep pile of her fur under my fingers. But at night, as I settle, she no longer appears in my room, rubbing noses with the dog, jumping onto the bed as the dog wraps himself into a tight circle on the chair. She no longer runs the underside of her jaw along the edge of my book, knocking it until I put it aside to scratch between her ears.

The last time I returned from a trip away she greeted me on the landing like a shy toddler, leading me down the corridor to our room, running to hide behind the bed, coming out eventually to climb into my case and demand affection. In recent years, like the old woman who in the 1970s lived in this room - occupying the bed like one of Charlie Bucket’s grandparents - she’d retreated from the world.

Now, when I wake in the night, Hicks’s weight is missing, the silence unbroken by her purr. I am alone in the little back bedroom with its ancient woodchip and bulging lining paper, except for the centuries’ of other sleeping souls.

Hicks leaving has made me think about us leaving too. As if one of the invisible threads that tie us to this house, this life, has snapped. Neither would make sense without the dog, the cat, the hens. It wouldn’t make sense without Glen, or without Calum’s visits.

A portal has opened up to a new imagining.

Goodbyes are hard. Feeling finity is frightening; like realising that your feet can’t reach the bottom. I know that something better is coming, that all is well, and all will be well, but it’s taking me a minute to unpeel my fingers from the side. My trip to India is on my mind, an adventure and a challenge, a source of excitement and fear. How will it be on my own, far from home and comfort? How will I keep afloat when my feet won’t reach the bottom?

Finding home in the familiar

Yesterday the sun shone and I went up to spend time with the hens. There’s a housing order in force after a case of HPAI at a poultry farm in nearby Crediton. Our little flock is used to a free range life, so I’m working to make their newly enclosed one as comfortable and interesting as possible. I’ve dragged stones and pieces of wood into their run to recreate their favourite perches and places.

“You’ve made them a kids’ camp!” says Glen.

I spread straw onto the floor, scattering it with seed for them to ferret through, cutting turves for them to turn and scratch out grubs. Little Blue, a pretty blue maran who does everything on her own terms, picks at the grass delicately once the others allow her a turn.

I sit in the run with them and they gravitate towards me, chattering in their low musical-throated way. It makes me so happy to be with them, to see them being hens in their new world.

In another part of the garden the sparrows mob and busy at the feeders of sunflowers and mealworms in perpetual vibration. Against the cold blue sky the robin sways the bare branches of the wildlife hedge, his scarlet chest the colour of the rose hips. There’s a flash of yellow in the hazel, a little goldcrest, an orb, a ping pong ball of tiny shine.

It’s a time of hibernation and breaking down, of composting all that’s gone before, waiting for the light to return and reveal the shape of new life.

I buy tulip bulbs and watch the forecast for a dry day to begin again.

Making plans

As regular readers will know, I’ve been awarded funding to help me develop my first longform creative nonfiction book. It’ll blend memoir, cultural history, and ecological reflection, and centre on my great-grandfather’s migration from South India to England - exploring themes of belonging, colonial legacy, and our relationship to land and place. (If you don’t already know the story you can read this essay, ‘Shifting Sands’ in The Clearing for context.)

As part of my research I’m travelling to India. It’s only six weeks now until I go, and my plan is coming together slowly. I’m trying to balance structure with looseness, to build in time for reflection and immersion, as well as detailed research. I’m starting in Kochi, site of the first European settlement in India, before travelling by train to Tamil Nadu. There, I’ll spend time in Idaiyangudi, the village where Sandosham - my great grandfather - was born, and Sawyerpuram, a missionary outpost carved from the jungle by Mr Sawyer, an East India Company employee. G.U Pope, an Anglican missionary, educator and Tamil scholar established a Christian community and a school there, which Sandosham attended.

A letter from Sandosham’s nephew to my grandfather, written on Sandsoham’s death in 1953, reads: ‘He was reading in the I form in the local school founded by Dr G.U Pope, who had adopted for his school the triple motto:- Good teaching; good feeding; and good caning.’

I’ve been feeling the weight of the legacy of colonialism - on people and place - so I know it will be an emotional journey, in more ways than one.

Travel tips

Do you have travel tips to share? Recommendations for South India? Contacts I could connect with? I’d love to hear from you - you can comment below or reply to this email. Alternatively, you can find me (sporadically) on Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Thanks!

What I’m listening to

• The Reith Lectures: ‘Moral Revolution’. The Reith Lectures are back for their annual run and couldn’t be more timely. This year Dutch Historian and writer Rutger Bregman explores the moral decay and un-seriousness of today’s elites, arguing for the power of small, committed groups to spark moral revolutions.

• Take Four Books: If you haven’t already discovered it, this is a gem of a podcast. Authors talks about three books that have influenced their latest work. In this episode Alexander McCall Smith talks movingly about the nature of friendship.

• What’s Up Doc: Does what we believe about our health affect it? Doctors Chris and Xand van Tulleken talk to Professor of Psychology, Ryan McKay about our incredible ‘prediction machine’ of a brain, and how our beliefs can shape our experience of the world and our bodies.