21st-Century Yokel

in a cupboard . . . the half an hour it takes to strip off the spare bed’s duvet cover and carefully scrape all the chunky dried puke off it . . . the six hours twenty minutes you will devote to cleansing your house of an unnameable evil. It was almost 6 p.m. and I had wasted an entire working day. I knew I should make up for it by writing into the night, but Ru and Claire had asked me along to their natural burial ground for their All Souls Day ritual. It had been too long since I’d seen them, and the potential nostril transfusion the evening promised was too tempting: hilly night air and woodsmoke replacing the writhing shitfires of hell. There aren’t many times you find yourself heading to a burial ground to escape the taint of death, but this was one of them. I parked and followed two strangers – or rather the light of the sensible headtorches of two strangers – through a wicker arch and over the brow of a hill to a large fire surrounded by sixty or seventy people. In the distance the lights of the busy seaside towns of Paignton and Brixham twinkled. If you estimated the distance to the sea in hills, which was the tendency here, it somehow seemed closer. ‘The sea? That’s six hills away.’ ‘Oh, cool. Thanks. No distance at all!’ The blackness of the night added to the sense of its proximity. There is a magic in the air at this darkening time of year, but people in the United Kingdom tend to over-egg it nowadays with show-off pyrotechnics and the fancy dress of pretend Americans. What this gathering proved was that all you really needed to tease it out was a strong orange glow and the magic of naked nocturnal hills, with hot spiced apple juice as an optional extra. As I defrosted my hands beside the Sharpham bonfire I felt another kind of warmth that I had never quite felt before at any traditional ceremony dealing with death: a powerful breaking down of barriers, a removing of a certain ugliness. Not the ugliness that’s intrinsic to last rites but an unnecessary one often imposed on top of it.

All Souls Day, also known as the Day of the Dead, is now best known as a Christian ceremony, but its roots go back to European folklore and ancient customs of ancestor veneration. Ru and Claire also see it as an acknowledgement of the fading of the light, the ripeness around us turning into rot and the way the veil seems to thin at this time of year. In a way that felt universal, passionate and not a bit formulaic, Ru talked of the souls we were honouring and autumn’s reminder of nature’s ability to die over and over again. He also asked everyone gathered around the fire to spare a thought for the refugees who would not make it across the Mediterranean this winter, and whose bodies would never be honoured. Claire and the youngest member of the Green Funeral Company staff, Jennifer, spoke the names of everyone buried on the hillside, and among them I heard a familiar surname that made my chest stop: that of one of my favourite folk musicians. His son. Dead before him, far, far too young.

People were asked to come forward if they wished and speak the name of someone they had lost then throw a pine cone into the fire in their memory. Naturally I had begun by this point to think of my nan. It was only now that I realised that it was once again the sort of anniversary of her death. I became aware that the moisture pouring out of my eyes was not solely the result of smoke and the unfortunate wind direction. I wanted to step forward and pick a cone from the box on the ground and add it to the fire and say something about her amazing kindness, how I’d admired her more every day since I’d lost her, about how she’d lived through war and extreme poverty, then, just as her life was improving, had the love of her life snatched away from her, but something stopped me. Most people were speaking the names of relatives and friends buried on this hillside or nearby. Some had died half a century ago, others, such as a twenty-one-year-old German man someone’s son had tried and failed to save from drowning in the sea, only last week. Perhaps it was the strength of these stories combined with a sense of geographical separation – my nan being from so far away and me only being a recent import – that made me hold back. As the ceremony wound down, I began to rue my reticence and found myself oddly reluctant to go home, although not just because of that or the prospect of deceased-rabbit afterstench. Others seemed the same, as if pinned and mesmerised by the flames. Here was the antithesis of LED light: a healthy, primal hypnosis. During a lull in the conversation I noticed two pine cones, one considerably larger than the other. I picked both up and placed them in the embers. Then, pre-emptively clutching my keys, I left.

7

FULL JACKDAW

What you think will stay with you about a house you live in and love for a long time is often not what does stay with you about a house you live in and love for a long time; it is other feelings about the place, unique to it, which set in gradually over a period of several years, whose true uniqueness you will only notice long after you have left. When I think about the house in Norfolk where I lived between 2004 and 2013, which is the house I’ve got to know more intimately than any other in my adult life, I often think about parties