I encountered my first nightingale on heathland near Compiègne, north of Paris and I’d never heard anything like it; it felt like its song spoke for and from my soul. I was birding with my then boyfriend and his friends, following mad twitching weekends and the ‘Where to Watch Birds in Britain’ guide, with a hectic road trip to France and ‘Where to Watch Birds in Europe’. A crazy whirlwind of a holiday, getting in as many birding spots as possible; daft company, random camping, fine weather (despite the Mistral blowing hot and relentless as we headed south) and good, basic French food and wine. In the years after, I saw and heard many more nightingales throughout southern Europe, though never sadly on British soil, their rich and fruity notes penetrating deep into the heart of me, taking me back to that time and that place and it always felt like they were singing my story.

The day the towers fell, I was back in England, working far from home for a small company making and hanging huge and extraordinary hand painted, ultra-violet décor for festivals, corporate events, parties and the like. We worked to tight budgets and tighter deadlines – the paint was often still drying as we began a rig. Frequently working through the night, I’d turn my hand to anything; I’d done my share of hard hats and high ladders as well as the paintbrush, but my main job would find me chained to the sewing machine, stitching together acres of cloth to be cut to shape and painted, or hemming the finished pieces with webbing and eyelets. 

I did little work that day. We were glued to the screen – watching in horror and disbelief as the scale and reality of it unfolded minute by minute, compulsive and beyond our small-town comprehension.

We must have been watching a news channel on the computer in the workshop – or was there a TV in there? I really can’t remember, but one of the team had burst in with the story, after hearing the first newsflashes on the car radio. Crowding round, we watched as the second tower was hit and it became clear that this was no accident… further reports came in by the hour of other planes, other damage, other deaths and we spent a numb day, a minute tremor in the seismic shock that rocked the world.

Back at the house that evening it continued – rolling and repeating film of the moments of impact, the explosions, the implosions, the collapses, the avalanches of dust and rubble and death, the running crowds, the falling man… We ate supper in a daze, unable to tear ourselves away from images that would sear themselves into our eyeballs – and into history.

Mid-evening, escaping what was beginning to feel uncomfortably like rubbernecking and on complete trauma overload, I headed to my borrowed bed, longing for the comfort of home, longing for solitude, longing to pull the covers over my exhausted eyes and shut out the sheer, deadly craziness of it all.

I was startled awake by the voice of my ex. I had left the radio on and the good old BBC in moments of national or global crisis, abandons its pre-ordained Radio 4 running order and plays benign, apolitical programmes to avoid charges of unwitting insensitivity, as well as to soothe and distract the troubled listener. I was long broken up from that birding boyfriend but here he was, in a change to the schedule, talking about Compiègne in a programme about The Nightingale. Something deep in my sleeping brain, some atavistic muscle memory, must have recognised and been woken by his tones. And he talked movingly about one of the friends with us back then, a friend who had died pointlessly young in a tragic swimming accident; he captured the spirit of place perfectly – the summer heat, the French landscape, his youth, male friendships bonded by shared passions – and how hearing the nightingale now reminds him of that time, that scrubby countryside and that lost friend who’d shared its voice.

I was erased.

At first I was pissed off, angry even – I wanted to ring him right there and then to challenge his version, correct his vision. But it was late and there were bigger things going off in the world at that moment, no doubt leading to heightened emotions all round, so I decided to sleep on it.

And I’m glad I didn’t rage at him that night, because with time and a correcting of my own vision, I found myself given a freedom that I didn’t expect. We all make choices about how we tell our stories. We can push to the back what no longer matters, emphasise what does; that night gave me back the nightingale, I can claim it as my own and choose who I share it with and how. It also helped cut the last binds of that relationship – if he could sideline me to tell a good story, I could do the same.

When I think of 9/11 now, despite the horrors of the towers and the global chaos and carnage that have tumbled down the years after it, on a personal level something shifted – I sloughed a skin leaving me temporarily raw and vulnerable but l also learnt a great lesson in the vagaries of truth, in storytelling and in letting go. 

So here’s to the nightingale… have you heard it? Does its liquid song run through you to your core like it does with me? Writing this, I find myself needing to hear it again, but given that it’s midwinter and I’m high on a Welsh hillside, for now I’ll have to make do with a recording, close my eyes and picture myself back in the hot and dusky half-light, in that parched Compiègne scrub; just me… and the nightingale.

One of my most powerful childhood memories is of picking spring flowers in the ‘primrose wood’. Later in the season it became the ‘bluebell wood’ and there are photographs of us as we staggered home with armfuls. It was an abandoned chestnut plantation on a south facing hill overlooking the Weald and as well as the primroses and bluebells, tucked into the tree boles were violets, anemones, wood sorrel and further on, a patch of dog’s mercury which our dog loved but which made her sick. We picked primroses there for our bridesmaids’ posies for my aunt’s April wedding and down the years, when it came to my sister’s wedding, because she was a spring baby, mum crystallised the violets and primroses for her cake.

The wood had been planted and coppiced for fencing, though I never knew it harvested and we never checked it for autumn nuts – it was a spring place and my recollections are of cold, bright, family days with the promise of summer.

Later I learnt about the fencing it was planted for – chestnut paling – those lovely, rustic, wired rolls of split wood. I learnt its etymology – mediaeval English from the old French, pales were the wooden uprights and to pale meant to encircle, hem, fence in. There was even a paler, a park officer charged with keeping the fences in good repair. Presumably Dublin’s Pale and thus ‘beyond the pale’ came from the same root.

When I began blacksmithing, determined to avoid fossil fuels I experimented with different local, sustainable charcoals. Until the industrial revolution and the discovery of coal, all iron had been forged on charcoal and in the way that different woods have different burning properties, so do charcoals. Alder, for example, makes lousy firewood as it’s so wet, but charcoaled, with all the moisture driven out, it’s porous and burns hot and fast making it ideal for fire welding. Hardwood charcoals are best, burning hotter and longer than softwoods, whose residual resins can make it spit, unpredictable and dangerous. Both oak and sweet chestnut are recommended for smithing and I found a good and reliable source of chestnut charcoal which is a great all-rounder, coppiced in Herefordshire by someone who was diversifying; it kept both me and the forge happy.

Once my kids were grown and I could travel, I would discover the chestnut blanketed hillsides of the Cevennes in southern France and the sharp, tangy scent of them would take me straight back to the familiarity of my Kentish childhood. Hundreds of years ago monks arrived in Lozere, bringing with them not the better-known marron or Spanish chestnut, but the smaller chataigne, also known as the bread-tree for its utility and versatility. Ideally suited to the terrain, it became the staple of the region, dried in the schist cledes or drying houses which you still see everywhere. Used sweet or savoury in the form of dried whole chestnuts, milled flour, puree, jam, alcohol and even these days, ice cream, the Cevennes never knew famine. Autumn still sees every village and hamlet celebrate their Fete de la Chataigne with feasting and revelry and the rich smell of roasting chestnuts hangs over the valleys. The local trick is to roast them, wrap them in a cloth and then sit on this knobbly cushion – the weight helps separate the nut from its skin and children vie for the privilege!

I lived there amongst these trees for a while in my caravan with my forge, harvesting the nuts, (which I discovered went exceptionally well with bacon), heating my small space with the fallen dead wood and dreaming of making my own charcoal. As they ripened, the nuts would explode out of their spiky husks and there were times at night when I’d be startled awake by what I thought was someone at the door, but was in fact nuts thwacking the trailer roof or walls at speed. The fallen dried, brittle and spiny husks were hazardous though – a thistly carpet that you couldn’t walk barefoot on and a fall one day left me with a rash of tiny, poisonous splinters in my wrists; it took many painful months for them to work themselves out.

And now I’m moving into a small cottage in Radnorshire whose south facing garden slopes steeply down to the river, the bottom part of which is overgrown ash and hazel coppice, but the ash will have to go as disease has hit and is slowly killing them from the tips of their branches back. The land needs careful and sympathetic management and even though it may be too far north for them, I’m nostalgically tempted to replant with sweet chestnut with a view to coppicing and charcoal. I’ll give it a go and whether I succeed or fail, one thing’s for certain; whatever fencing I’ll need, it will be that lovely, rustic, wired chestnut paling.

The final gift from my home on the hill and it opened the floodgates. I finally wept as the blood red, wolf moon appeared from behind the clouds before dawn on a cold January morning – not that there were wolves howling here; it was completely still, completely silent. No wind, no sound. It was only when a sliver of white light started its peel across the lunar landscape that a hunting tawny kee-wicked from the wood and the land began to wake again. A farm dog barked across the valley and the trees rustled overhead.

Within a week I will have moved from here and how I’ll miss it. The silence, the wildlife, the isolation, the memories of the fine times we’ve had. I’m bottling up my grief to get through it, but this morning it spilt and overwhelmed me.

I’ve seen lunar eclipses before. The most memorable was in high summer, a bright then darkening midnight walk across the Welsh hillside with a friend and his terrier; the dog got more and more fretful as the moonlight dimmed and he finally had to be carried. Then there was the friend who went into labour with the full moon, whose contractions stopped as the moon went into shadow and started again as its light returned. A hundred miles away and in the days before mobiles and social media made communication instant, I knew in my gut her babe was coming and wandered out into the night to watch the fiery moon and send love their way.

And here on this hill I’ve had a decade of living close to these dark skies and being in tune with their shifts and shapes. There have been other eclipses, although all too often obliterated by cloud cover; we have lain out in the field on summer nights watching for shooting stars, there have been full moon parties… 

This faithful moon has marked my time here and now, in eclipse, marks my leaving.

I’m feeling grumpy and uncharitable. I’m having to move house and I’m finding leaving here really hard – it’s been my home for more than ten years and I’m not going through choice. I rent and my landlord decided that he wants to sell – except now he doesn’t, but I can’t live with the precariousness of his whim. For the last three years he’s been making noises about it, then just over a year ago he knocked on my door at eight in the morning to tell me that he’d made his mind up – he’s a farmer and has had a bad back, so he’s giving up farming and cashing in his assets. He wasn’t giving me notice as such, just letting me know, in no uncertain terms, that I’d better start looking elsewhere.             

I live with this knot of fear in my belly; single and now in my sixties I suddenly find both my job and my home at risk, both as a result of capitalist policies that favour the haves and punish the have-nots. Most of my peers are secure in their home-ownership, but I missed the boat on that one – a single parent of three at thirty, I chose poorly paid self-employment to be home for my children as they grew, so was never in a position to buy a house, to afford a mortgage. And be clear, I have nothing against renting – we’ve lived in some wonderful, magical places through the years, but it’s the unsettledness that gets you, the lack of security – and the absence of choice.

This is the third time I’ve been forced out of a home I was happy in. On the first occasion, I was in a lovely, old, unmodernised farmhouse back in those halcyon days of security of tenure – but my farmer landlord’s son was getting married, the house was part of the farm and they wanted it back for him and his bride; it was the one way you could retrieve your property – if a family member needed it. Off we had to go. Then the relationship broke down, the marriage was off and the owners re-rented the house under Thatcher’s new shorthold tenancy rules where the landlord has all the power and the tenant loses out big time. I don’t know what’s happened to that house now – I pass it occasionally and wonder, but I do know that the son never did live there. Why would he want a crumbling, draughty old place when a new-build bungalow was his for the asking?

The second time was from the house we lived in next, the home my children have most childhood memories of. We’d been there years, juggled the indoor and outdoor spaces to make it ours, to make it fit; we were happy and settled. We’d filled it with friends and fine times, the children’s growth measured on door-jambs. Then a bolt from the blue in the form of a letter from the landlord, whose daughter was coming back from her world travels – and despite owning several other properties that he rented out as holiday lets, he’d promised her this house and me and my young family would have to go.

I went to see him to plead my case, to see if we couldn’t come up with a solution together. It turned out his daughter was temporarily renting a flat in a large, old, cooperatively owned country house, but he wasn’t happy about it because it was ‘very damp’. We talked on, batting ideas back and forth, then he said, “I don’t suppose there’s room for you in the cooperative house?” I was tempted to snap that I’d heard it was very damp, but the power dynamic didn’t allow for that. Not good enough for his adult daughter but fine for me and my children? I found my own solution and moved on.

And now I have to leave here. I have somewhere equally, if not more beautiful to move to, but it means uprooting everything, leaving behind more fabulous memories of happy times and starting again. I shall miss this high moorland, the isolation and the vast open vistas. I’ll miss the wildlife, flora as well as fauna. I’ll miss the turning of the seasons marked by the returning curlew, cuckoos, winter thrushes, the extremes of weather. I’ll miss the deep privilege of sharing a habitat with nesting barn owls, kites, kestrels, crossbills, the occasional hen harrier or roe deer and the hares that regularly pass through. I’ll miss standing on the doorstep and hearing skylarks, watching for the summer redstarts and flycatchers. I’ll miss the little wood in front of the house; the scots pines with my hammock-hanging points, the elders, the tall and stately lime and the sycamore I’ve hated. I shall miss having space to throw wild and wonderful parties, filling the place with family, friends, music and laughter. What times we’ve had.

But it’s time to move on – and I’ll grieve but be grateful. I know that in time I shall remember without this belly knot of pain and anxiety and loss; I’ll be thankful that I was gifted custodianship here for more than a decade. I shall leave to create another wonderful home and fill it with more splendid memories. After a lifetime in the hills, I’m headed to the valley, beside the river, nestled in woodland… a whole new and unknown environment to explore and make mine. 

Life changes and goes on.

It was a dull Saturday afternoon in early June as I glanced out of my dining room window towards the moor and saw what I first assumed to be a kestrel sitting on the gatepost. But no, I’d made a mistake in identification… despite being mobbed by a meadow pipit, the beak was wrong, the body not quite right and it was then that I recognised it as a cuckoo.  We have them here each spring, the male frequenting the trees around the house on first arrival and for several years there was one that made me laugh with his vocal tic; cuck-squeak, cuck-squeak rather than the more familiar cuckoo call.

As I watched, this bird patrolled the fence posts between my garden and the moorland, flying back and forth with the distressed pipit harassing desperately and I realised I was watching a female scouting for somewhere to lay. After hopping up and down the fence posts a few times, she flew down into the hummocky grass, then straight back up to the gate post. The pipit was going mad. After another couple of runs up and down the fence, still chased by the pipit she dived down into the grassland a second time, disappeared for a few seconds, reappeared and flew straight off into the distance across the moor – she was gone.

You could spend years waiting to see a cuckoo lay her egg, even if you knew where to look. This view from my window has been a constant delight in the time I’ve lived here – I’ve sat and watched barn owls hunting low over the fields at dusk, green woodpeckers anting, crossbills silhouetted on the topmost branches of the pines, red kites catching thermals, hen harriers quartering the moorland, gangs of curlew circling the house with their plaintive cries, skylarks filling the air with their fluting song as well as more familiar garden birds on the nut and seed feeders. There has been the occasional deafening clatter of a starling murmuration, hares have been constant neighbours and there was one memorable occasion when a roe deer came close then bounced off across the fields, its white rump bobbing; but nothing, nothing compares to the extraordinary privilege – and sheer chance – of witnessing a female cuckoo in full, single-minded, egg-laying action.

Thirty-seven years ago I had a miscarriage. I was at about fourteen weeks (standard gestation is forty weeks) and it was one of three I’ve knowingly had and the furthest along. I have no idea why my body rejected that foetus or why that foetus rejected me, but I remember discussing it with a catholic priest and asking why, if life is sacred from the moment of conception, was there no church ritual, no sacrament for that lost life? And if the spontaneous abortion of a wanted embryo wasn’t considered worth the sacrament (presumably to be cast into eternal limbo) what the hell was the fuss about with those damaged or unwanted pregnancies that were deliberately ended? He had no acceptable answer.

Since then the years have uncovered untold institutional catholic horrors in Ireland – the enslavement of women, considered insane or depraved, in the laundries (as if pregnancy happened by parthenogenesis), dead babies disposed of in septic tanks or buried nameless in mass graves, children sold to childless Americans, the physical, sexual and emotional abuse of boys, girls, young men and women by priests and nuns – and the cover-ups and denials which still go on… and on. Just how sacred were… are… those lives?

A No vote in Ireland’s referendum tomorrow is not about the sanctity of life; it’s about misogyny, patriarchy, hypocrisy, a desperate clinging to power and to the old order where laws were driven by a church which held a vice-like grip on all aspects of politics and society and still considers women second class citizens.

Despite my Irish passport I have no vote tomorrow, but from this side of the water I for one – and I hope for the masses – am holding out in solidarity for Yes. 

 Trust Women 

It’s often difficult to decide how to write about something that’s happened – in prose or poetry, a factual narrative or a distillation of essences. In this event I’ve opted for both, partly because when introducing the poem at a reading, I tell the story and partly because it’s a good story in its own right. It still makes me smile as it’s not the only time I’ve had to give a man a lesson on towing a vehicle out of trouble, only this time it was with a little Berlingo and not the usual Landrover. 

It was Sunday morning and I was on the mountain road on my way back from a gig the night before in north Wales; Zion Train if I remember rightly and I’d slept in the car. I was flagged down by a middle-aged born-again biker who had stopped to take a photo, had pulled up on a soft verge and had let his heavy, borrowed Harley slide off the edge and get caught in the sheep wire. He looked aghast when I got out of my car: small, female, hung over, clearly older than him and still in my glad rags after a night on the razz. 

“My bike slid into the fence – is there any way you can help pull it out?”

Hmmmm… I had a look and it was well stuck in a rut with the handlebars caught in the wires. 

“I’ll see what I’ve got.”

Unfortunately I didn’t have a tow rope with me, but did find a small, tatty ratchet strap under a seat that I thought would do. I went to attach it to the back of his bike.

“No, not that way. I want to go out forwards, not backwards.”

Oh god, another one of those!

“Look, the only way you’re coming out is the way you went in. Your front wheel is jammed against the fence sideways in a ditch and the handlebars are tangled in the wire. Trust me on this; you need to come out backwards, not forwards which will only dig you deeper in, so if you deal with the bike I’ll tow you slowly with the car.”

He wouldn’t believe me and tried to argue the toss but I wouldn’t give in and he realised that, given no other vehicle had passed us, I was his only option. I hooked him on, started the car and towed the bike out backwards onto the road in a single, fluid movement. 

He did have the grace to look pretty sheepish and thanked me profusely before going on his way – forwards. 

I learned later that Harleys usually have a reverse gear, so he may not even have needed me at all. Hey ho!