We continued towards Snape, making the most of a bright almost warm day with a breeze made of small needles, the dusty-coloured countryside fervidly evolving to mustard and green all around us. Near the church we stopped to say hi to some sheep. Blaxhall has a good strong sheep history, and these ewes seemed aware of it, upholding their heritage by wandering over to gently headbutt our fists. The name of the inn in the village, the Ship, comes not from a vessel on the sea or the nearby Alde estuary but from the old Suffolk word for sheep. In the nineteenth century the man responsible for dipping the sheep in the village proudly displayed the sign CHARLES SMITH: SHEEP DRESSER outside his house. The shearers here drank lots of ale, sang songs and slept outdoors. In the off season they found what other work they could. Poaching, smuggling. One, legendarily, cut the villagers’ hair, using his shears to ‘take off the rough’ then trimming the rest up with scissors. I told Annabel about this and took a second to admire her fringe. She’d cut it herself again and it was looking particularly smart and sharp. In my bag was my phone, which still displayed an unreturned text from my hairdresser in Norwich, a hairdresser about whom I’d initially felt quite positive before having the cold realisation that she was just like all the other hairdressers I had met in the past and only pretended to listen to me when I told her about the stuff that was important to me. I resolved to return the text later in the evening, explaining assertively that I had moved on and since our parting had found out a lot about who I was and what I truly wanted in life.
After a false alarm – two old wellies on sticks on the ditchy margin of a mini-valley of oilseed rape – we turned south-west and hit pay dirt: a good solid mawkin a quarter-mile down the road towards Tunstall Forest. Paint-pot head, wax coat, 1982 power ballad stance. Nothing special, but getting the job done without an undue quantity of fuss. The scarecrow wore cords, like my own garden scarecrow, Warren, but his, unlike Warren’s, were more the workwear kind. Unflared. Practical. He looked healthier than Warren too, who – with arms still outstretched – had recently almost keeled over into some ivy in a pose that brought to mind the phrase ‘death by disco’. Even when he’d been healthier, before his false beard began to rot and his parka became stained with mud and rain, Warren’s life had been checkered by failure and insult. ‘Why have you got a corpse in the corner of your garden?’ my neighbour David had asked, completely within his earshot, only days after my friend Jo and I had filled Warren with straw and erected him. Even before he’d begun to ail, he’d done little to protect from birds the grass seed I’d put down. I suppose he’d just never seemed like an assertive figure. Right from the start he’d failed to command the necessary terror or awe of his kind. I am thinking particularly here of the day I collected his frame – part of an old tree my dad had found down in the field behind his garden – then headed off to meet Hannah for a walk on the moors west of Sheffield. It was my debut date with Hannah, and my forward planning, as it so often does, left something to be desired. I am a man with a scarecrow in the back of his car, driving to meet a woman who hardly knows me for a walk on remote moorland, was the realisation that hit me as I reached the outskirts of Sheffield, on the way to collect her from the train station. ‘What is that?’ Hannah asked, pointing to Warren’s frame half an hour later, as we headed in the direction of Froggatt Edge and Grindleford. ‘It’s the structural base of my new scarecrow,’ I replied. ‘Oh, cool,’ said Hannah casually and continued to talk about a Dusty Springfield record she had recently purchased.
Upon my return home to
