I’d seen the Beacon scowling at me so many times, dominating the landscape and the A38 between South Brent and Ivybridge, but I’d never imagined it could be this otherworldly and ominous on top, like that one planet people talk about in a sci-fi film which nobody actually goes to because it’s nearly devoid of life. The path began to go downhill, a sign that I would be out of here soon. I was surprised to feel a marginal tickle of relief. Earlier I’d had the passing, accepting thought that it wouldn’t be such a bad place to die, Ugborough Beacon. But in this lower-altitude spot the mist cleared and the turf around me widened out into what looked oddly like a golf fairway. This was because what I was on was a golf fairway. I knew the golf course. I planned to play it in a couple of months, in another bout of self-punishment. I was almost back. I still had not seen another human.
I drove home, opened my front door, instantly peeled off most of my sodden clothes. Other clothes – clean, warm – hung on radiators, still unvandalised. The phone rang. It was Dermot. Roscoe had woken up from her anaesthetic. He’d done his best for her and she seemed reasonably bright, but there was a long way to go and only the coming days, again, would reveal if the operation had truly been a success. I had been on walks of at least four miles every day since her accident. I remembered the toothache and backache I’d been suffering from for the last fortnight – mysteriously absent for just a few hours but now back with interest. I ran a hot bath, thinking that it was time to rest for a day or two, and also of all the work I had been postponing.
Early the next morning though I set off again, through long narrow crevices in the hills a few miles from my house: red earth paths and water lanes where you could be quiet and alone. Places where silence has a different kind of depth. I knew where I was going, which was to the village of Stoke Gabriel, but it was only when I got to the churchyard in the centre of the village that I realised why I had truly gone there.
Beside the lychgate at the entrance to the churchyard stands a yew tree estimated to be a thousand years old. Its gnarly limbs, some of them held up by wooden struts, twist down around and on top of gravestones, attempting to re-root, as yews tend to, given enough time. In the places where the exterior bark has flaked off, the underlayer is the colour of dried blood. It’s a tree of glorious, wise chaos, associated, like all yews, in folklore with everlasting life or at least longevity. I had a couple of much much younger yews in my garden beneath which my oldest cat, The Bear, loved to sleep. The Bear was approaching twenty-one now and almost entirely deaf. I’d become properly aware of the severity of his impaired hearing the previous August when I was sorting myself some cheese on toast and set my kitchen smoke alarm off, causing the other three cats to scatter but The Bear to merely sit at my feet, looking up at me in a way that seemed to say, ‘Hello! Erm, did someone call?’ I’d felt he was slowing down before my move to Devon, becoming more of an indoor cat, but since being here he’d loved to be outdoors again, and our two years here so far had seemed like a miraculous extension of his long life, during which rain, clear air and sun appeared to be performing a natural spa treatment on his brittle old body. Beneath the yew, he fell into inordinately deep sleeps and woke from them wide-eyed, as if freshly amazed at the grass and trees and hilltop air. I sometimes told myself the yews had a hand in the fact that he was still with me. They’d been associated with all sorts of magic in the past after all, some of it unexplained, some of it debunked. Until the 1800s their branches were laid in coffins and graves for good luck. In the churchyard at Painswick in Gloucestershire during the first half of the twentieth century nobody could understand why there were always ninety-nine small, clipped yews, and any time a hundredth was planted, it would die, until in the 1960s it was revealed that a local scientist was sneaking into the graveyard and repeatedly poisioning the hundredth yew after it was planted. Fanciful non-pragmatic people like me like to think that the reasons yews are often found in churchyards might relate to some kind of earlier pagan, Druidic activity, but there is no historical evidence to substantiate this. Of course the contradiction of yews is that their sap is extremely poisonous; they are killers who double as dark green saints of life.
Local legend states that if you walk backwards around the yew in Stoke Gabriel churchyard seven times without stumbling ‘one true wish will come to thee’. It’s the kind of thing I might not have done alone when I was younger,
