Village Life

Photo by Sven Fischer on Unsplash

The twilight before the birds decided to grace our feeder, a blackbird on high alert had caused us to rush to a large window in the bedroom we used for storage. Some sort of avian brouhaha was occurring in the thick tangle of ivy which had overwhelmed the drystone wall that framed the lawn behind the farmhouse beyond our garden. We watched the smudges of two or three blackbirds dart in and out of a gap in the greenery and speculated as to the source of the commotion: a rat; a sparrowhawk intent on a late supper? An alien call turned our attention to the farmhouse roof where the silhouette of a little owl – short, squat and roundish – had been cut out of the dark, but clear sky. Rapt by the raptor, we clutched hands and celebrated our luck in whispers until the owl took flight and headed for a tree beyond the reach of our eyes.

The following morning, birds began to appear at the feeder which had been ignored, save one or two skittish jackdaws, during the two and a half months we had lived in the village. In the space of ten spellbinding minutes we were visited by a robin, two chaffinches, a dunnock and a coal tit which spent the next hour evacuating sunflower seeds one by one. None of this activity would have been much to write home about in the other places we had lived, but there, in that odd little village in the middle of the Dales, this was a significant victory in a year of diminishing returns.

We had no idea what the locals had made of the youngish (everything is relative) couple that had travelled up country to view the house for ten minutes in early June, had returned one month later to collect the keys (and spend the night on an airbed in the empty house) and had moved in over the space of the final weekend of July. Our wedding anniversary weekend, as it happens, but this was not a time for celebrations. Our immediate neighbours – we had landed in a cul-de-sac of four dwellings – had offered brief introductions from the requisite two metres, and made all the right and usual noises about how if we needed anything we only had to ask; but they had retreated indoors before the opportunity had arisen to strike up meaningful conversations. The warmth of community, so abundant in the early weeks of the virus, had morphed over that long but short summer into circumspection, suspicion and fear of any other than one’s family and friends. Perhaps this is why were obsessed with our lack of garden visitors.

The village lacked a public house or anywhere else where in normal times we would have rubbed shoulders with fellow residents. In any case, this was the year the pubs were empty or shut, but we mourned the lack nonetheless. We did not own a dog, so that avenue was also closed to us, and the queues outside the nearest supermarket were not conducive to the kind of exchanges that lead to friendship, not least because the blitz spirit, as mentioned, had long since evaporated. So we were shut in, but not shut in; alone, but not alone because we had each other with whom to endure the isolation. We took to the hills, lanes, paths and trails where we encountered and spoke with more livestock than people. A particular favourite was a smallholding at the side of a road we often wandered, where we would stop to chat with a feisty piglet and his grunting parents. The smallholding was also home to dozens of chickens and geese and an extended family of ducks that liked to disappear, single file, around corners, into barns and through impossible gaps in walls. The ducks’ quiet chatter never failed to raise a smile, even though our joy was often tinged by the fate that awaited these animals at Christmastime.

Some weekends we elected to escape the village, venturing out in the car and stopping to walk in more remote locations. We hiked for hours on end, gulping bucketfuls of damp air, slipping on greasy rocks and trudging through wet grass and bogs. The day before the birds came, hours before the incident in the ivy, we had arrived, mid-walk, at what passes for a chocolate box village in this part of the world. Descending from the ridge of a magnificent valley, we crossed the river via a narrow, but picturesque footbridge and climbed a long, grassy lane into the village of Starbotton. At least half of the houses bore the mark of the holiday let – key safes next to front doors are a dead giveaway – while the rest must have been second homes, judging from the shiny Porsches, Mercedes and Land Rovers that languished in driveways and in front of picture postcard cottages and converted barns. Where, we might have asked, did the real villagers live? Where had everyone gone, we did ask, since we happened upon so few people. This village was lucky enough to have a hostelry – the primary reason, no doubt, for the second homes and holiday lets – but all signs of fellowship and hospitality had been rubbed out by a complex one-way system, check-in points and hand sanitising stations. We skipped the opportunity to sink a pint under a gazebo in the car park and returned to the bridge, crossed the river and walked back to the car along the valley floor. A riparian treat, that return leg, since the trail was flat and mud-free; and I forgot for all of twenty minutes about the virus and how our lives had changed forever. We were brought to our senses by a sign on a gate that reminded walkers to keep their distance from others. Why? We had encountered ten others at most and could not have been more distanced unless we had taken to opposite bank of the river. Still, that was a rare good day, topped off by the owl on the roof; and the advent of the birds the following morning had sparked optimism – a precious commodity that year – that a second good day lay before us. Honestly, our leaders were treating us to daily demonstrations of hubris and yet we failed to recognise it in ourselves. Is this what it is to be human?