It turns my heart over to remember my house in Devon. It stood with its cob-walled back to a kink in the lane, with just one small window, on the landing, looking out on that side. Coming down the hill on blue and moonlit nights, its yellow eye would suddenly wink out warmly as you rounded the sharp bend. The lines of hedgerow, the fallow fields and the folded hills held it tenderly and the seasons washed around it, as they had done for the three hundred years since it was built, marked with a sequence of leafing and blossoming, like the numbers on a clock face.
Winters twenty years ago in Devon could be snowy, but mostly they were raw and wet. By Valentine’s day you looked out for the slightest sign that spring was really coming, with a kind of desperation. The blackthorn blossom could frost the hedges by mid-February but it was an unreliable witness; the so called ‘Blackthorn Spring,’ a counterfeit of the real season, that could simply be the harbinger of yet more rain, cold, and even blizzards.
More certain, was the appearance of a plant so small that if you didn’t know to look, you wouldn’t find it. Moschatel it’s called, but its country name is town hall clock, because its tiny, greenish flowers grow in fours, at right angles to each other. It blooms early, but only when spring has her foot very firmly in the door. Once it’s bloomed, the cascade of wildflowers—bluebells, stitchwort, Queen Anne’s lace, early purple orchid, meadow sweet and bush vetch, is inevitable.
It grew in the damp hedge bottom along the cart track that ran beside the house, where the stream made a huge muddy pool that held endless fascination for my two small children. While they splashed, took voyages on floating sticks and explored the limits of their wellington boots, I showed them moschatel, its four tiny lime green faces like a secret sign of the season’s turning. The next year they knew to look for it and it became part of the small, deep magic of that place.
The idyllic childhood that I wanted for my kids did not go on for long. Their father left and we were all quite broken by it. Their play was no longer the pure, clear flame of life it had been, no longer harmonious. Our three souls were fractured; we were strangers to ourselves and sometimes to each other. Struggling to survive, I didn’t have time to cook on bonfires in the garden, plant seeds and pull potatoes or give them the names of plants and birds that is the language of my own soul and that I hoped would be their life long delight and solace. The countryside that had been their kingdom, was the prison of their adolescence and I was just the jailor.
When they grew up they went to the city and they left the country side behind, relief streaming from them as they ran.
That muddy lane and town hall clock, became the shorthand in my heart for all my failings. The symbol of what should and could have been, and then was not. Part of the hair shirt that drew blood from my back every single day.
I believed my children, those little people, bright and dear, playing in the mud were lost to me, and were no part of the adults they’d become. That all we’d learned together in those days had been swept away by the storm and trauma of the years that followed.
And then, late one night my son phoned me. He was in a bar somewhere in London, a little drunk.
“What was that plant mum? That tiny thing with green flowers?”
We hadn’t spoken in a while, and never spoke of the past. Never reminisced, because what was there to reminisce about but pain and conflict? My little boy who’d looked into my face with such delight when I showed him the secret messenger of spring, was gone. Yet, suddenly he wasn’t, he was here speaking with a grown man’s voice
“Are you still there? Mum?”
I kept my voice steady. I didn’t show that I was crying
“Moschatel. Adoxa moschcatellina, is the Latin name but I think I taught you town hall clock.”
“That’s it! “ he said “I remember.”
And in his voice, I could hear him remembering, the muddy pool and sharp spring light slicing through the ash tree, and me showing him a small, exquisite detail of the lovely world.
That same year my daughter wrote from Patagonia where she was trekking in the wilds.
“I was washing pots in a stream and I remembered that cooking fat and ashes make a soap. It got the pots so clean! You must have taught me that.”
Sometimes I still feel that I messed up the most important job of my life, being a mother. And then I’ll get a photo message from my daughter of her hands, dark with garden soil or I’ll remember that my son has a town hall clock tattooed into his skin.
This spring, working on a dry stone wall on a Welsh hillside with my husband of less than a year, I found moshcatel again, growing on the hedge bank with the songs of newly arrived migrant birds, chiff chaffs and willow warblers raining down around it. It had been a long while since I’d seen it.
I crouched down and greeted it like a friend. I took a picture and, later, when we were back where phones have signals, sent it to my son. He didn’t say much in reply. He didn’t call me back. But immediately he sent a message, clear as town hall clock announcing spring’s arrival: a single heart pinged into my phone.
Nicola Davies
trained as a field zoologist and became a children's author when her own children were in school. She has written more than 60 books for children, fiction, non fiction and poetry, many of which have been published in more than 10 different languages. Her work focuses on the natural world and our relationship to it, and has won awards around the world including twice being one of the New York Times picture books of the year, the Green Earth Book Award and the Subaru SB and F award from the American Association for the Advancement Of Science.
2 Responses
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing this.
I am eagerly hoping my own children will grow up with the love of the outdoors I am trying to pass on. Thank you for the encouragement!