An ageing civil servant out for a walk with his Corgi in Kent, 1950s or earlier. He strolls his Kentish lanes, his Corgi coursing around, he says, quartering the lane, chasing rabbits. Hedgerows, cornfields, hop-gardens and apple orchards on either side of the quiet road. He is recalled from his meditations by a yelp of pain and fear from a field away. The Corgi needed help. Kentish hedges were high and dense.
Finally I took off my coat, and pushed it before me through the hedge. ... Bramble and eglantine parted before me, and the cruel spines of the hawthorn. The coat saved my face, but from one or two back-lashings of briar sprays I caught some feline scratches on hands and wrists. And an ankle suffered too.
He finds his dog four or five feet through a thicket, beside a stream, caught in rusty wire in front of the rabbit burrow, whimpering. The only way to get to his dog was to lie down on his belly and make his way, slug-like, muddy and wet through the open space between the ground and the bottom growth of the thicket.
There we lay together, a muddy pair. Now I had to get him out. ... it was not so easy ... I looked about me, to realise that for once I was looking at the world from below, from Corgi height ... the smallest weed, the speck of dust, magnified, or conversely the whole world dwarfed to the compass of this patch of woodland and meadow-fall ... I was looking at the universe from below.
I read several of the pieces in Small Moments, by Richard Church, to see why I'd bought the book whenever I did — some drift towards small, towards moments, the ivory paper with wood-engravings, all this would have seduced me, if to be seduced is to understand only this much — then the story of the Corgi chasing rabbits and the civil servant/poet pushing through a hedge and a thicket, confirmed that this was an other person's rendering of what I know, what William Blake, Henry David Thoreau and so many ruralists and poets, know also. Then it's just a question of how you like your eggs.
