Only a small percentage of the time I’ve spent with Ru and Claire has been spent talking about death, but in that small percentage an extra awareness has been created for me of what people have snatched away from them and what people are finding the strength to deal with, everywhere, all the time. Ru lost both of his parents when he was young and started the Green Funeral Company in the years directly following his mum’s death, having seen the impersonal way the traditional ceremony was conducted and wanting to provide something different for others in the same situation. He remembers the feeling of being excluded by undertakers he describes as ‘a cross between removal men and bouncers’. He and Claire – who quit her job in the London music industry to join him as a business partner, and subsequently a romantic one – do not wear suits when conducting their ceremonies. They transport coffins not in a hearse but in an old Volvo estate which doubles as the family car. Their conviction is that grieving people fall back, very understandably, on tired rituals and ceremonies that don’t reflect their beliefs because they don’t have the energy to look for an alternative. What they try to provide is something based not on quasi-Victoriana and fake solemnity but on honesty and participation and appropriateness and a respect for the earth. The opening ceremony of a new music festival in the area was performed by them recently: an incantation conducted above a rotating skull, evoking the swirling nature of time and genetics, which was probably something of a surprise to outsiders who’d come purely for the indie rock and limited-edition vinyl. But what Ru and Claire do should not be lumped in with some of south-west Devon’s more preposterous hippy excesses. There is no room for air quotes during their rituals; the importance of the subject matter will wash them away like violent weather.
Ru and Claire’s natural burial ground is on a very high point above the Dart, over a chicane in the river shortly after it becomes tidal, and its curvy, oaky sweep to the sea – and that favourite bit of coastline of mine – begins. I saw my first wild Devonian barn owl not far from the burial ground, a daytime ghost vanishing as if embarrassed into a blue sky over the reed beds. Steep, shale-banked sunken lanes overrun with rubbly rocks and hart’s tongue fern race down from here towards Totnes and fill up with fast water in the winter so the line between footpath and stream blurs. Dartmouth sits on its rocky perch at the end of the estuary as imperiously as an old naval captain assured that his family has owned the spot since time immemorial, but despite being seven miles inland, Totnes was once the bigger port of the two. The river stays wide enough to support a small ferry up all the way to the town weir, which seals and gulls tend to mark as the northern point of their territory. You can’t see the sea here but you can smell a hint of it on the wind. This proximity is a continuing marvel to a person like me, a product of Britain’s interior, and at my first sight of blue on the horizon beneath the skyline I always do a little cheer, either internally or – to the bemusement of any complacent South West Peninsula natives who happen to be with me – out loud. I have used this proximity as one of several landscape-based arguments in favour of my continuing residence here, in the face of counter-pressure, both intentional and unintentional, from friends and family to move back in the direction from which I came. In this way I am like Elizabeth Prettejohn, standing firm at my beloved wild outpost on the edge of the world, resisting a more convenient life, more densely packed with other humans. Except I’m nowhere near as tough as Elizabeth Prettejohn. I have BBC iPlayer, don’t live in a ruined village and don’t have chickens, just cats, who cannot give me eggs and probably wouldn’t even if they could. But in these tussles with myself about what I want, landscape is the deciding factor. Good people I’ve met here – Ru and Claire included – win, but landscape wins too.
Some days I feel the tussle more than others, though. In early November 2015 I’d just returned from a cross-country car trip, over the course of which I’d seen my
