native denizens

Who are the fellows who cut the hay, nowadays. George Ewart Evans, writing about a Suffolk village more than a hundred years ago, knew who cut the hay, what their tools were called. 

James at the gravel pit up the road showed us boulders, and chatted a little. Eighty per cent of the ornamental gravel they sold was imported, he said. The local boulders we chose would be prized in Galway. The gravel of my childhood on the east coast of England, was exotic in Cork. Very yellow, very clean and fresh. That's how you know this is a rich country, I said, when people prize stones from another town, another country, more than their own. I hadn't thought about that, said James. Varieties of gravel around the cornus contraversa variegata in the visitor carpark confused the shrub so it became invisible. This is very mediated landscape. Earth and stones unearthed, displayed. Meanwhile out in the boulder zone goat willow showed through, some bird's foot trefoil. The mud was caked and cracked like Africa. 

Why were we choosing boulders, you might ask. Who cuts the hay around here. The zero grazing machine, that's who. That's why we were choosing boulders.

George Bourne — another George — in his 1912 book Change in the Village, said:

.... how attached he must have grown — I mean how closely linked — to his own countryside. He did not merely 'reside' in it; he was part of it, and it was part of him. He fitted into it as one of its native denizens, like the hedgehogs and the thrushes. All that happened to it mattered to him. I feel a forlornness in country places, as if all their best significance were gone.

People cannot talk about themselves in their place any more. The ground is too unstable. You can't stop progress, as the energetic lying husband says in the film Muriel's Wedding.

In the School chapter of Ask the Fellows Who cut the Hay I lingered on this, coming full circle on where I lost track of arithmetic:

How many furlongs, rods, yards, feet and inches and Barleycorns will reach round the earth, supposing it according to the best calculation to be 25,020 miles? The boy, in a page of working, threw a girdle of 4,755 million Barleycorns round the earth.

Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay

Up at the reservoir on a warm morning it's easy to move from rural Suffolk a hundred years ago to the Brooklyn Public Library last week where a philosopher chews over some big questions with a group of third-graders.

This is reading as flexing, during which certain things fall away and others stand in soft relief, like an old tree stump in the water, down to its lineaments. Reading as part of the landscape.

George Ewart Evans published Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay in 1956. He's a plain reporting shy kind of writer, not at ease but keen to convey. There are chapters on bread, sheep, cheese, pigs and stonepicking, the dialect, the tales, the names of fields, the social structure: how far you had to go 'to go away foreign' (not very far).

...people rarely went out to buy things in the town, the village was almost entirely self supporting, most families living on what they grew or reared on their yards or allotments

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn Public Library, the big questions involve foxes, mushrooms, chewing gum and the soul and where it is. Third-graders have a great sense of reality.

What if we're not really here? What if we're in someone else's dream?

What if it's an object, and it's gum—but it's not, because those are just words we use for things?

The coconut scent of gorse runs through an inadvertent garden by the reservoir, sheltered from the light northerly air: ladies smock, foxglove, ragweed, hypericum, dandelion, willow herb, self-heal, eyebright.

I walked back along the lake very slowly, looking at air bubbles on underwater stones, negotiating gorse bushes—the water is high in the reservoir—noting plants and rescuing insects from shallow water.

One tree stump from 1951 when the reservoir was created, stood at the water's edge. I sat on it, but  I didn't sit on it, it's an object but it's not, because those are just words we use for things.