After her father died in 2002, she and Ken separated, and he went to live in
Ludlow; Swift took him vegetables from the garden, made up window boxes for
his new flat and still regularly fixes his computer. He read each chapter of
her book as she wrote it. “We are still very close; I do love him. He didn’t
garden but he always understood the point of it; why I was always exhausted,
why I never wanted to go on holiday. We did go away once, to Paris in
winter. At Sacré-Coeur I wanted to light a candle and we wandered round
looking at all the plaster saints with their votive offerings. There was one
with very few candles: ‘That one,’ Ken said. It was St Joseph,
the patron saint of understanding husbands.”
For five years now she has lived with her partner, Sandy, an old friend from
university days. He is upstairs watching football, making occasional forays
into the library to bring us fresh tea and stoke the fire. Without him, she
says, the book might not have taken so long, “but life would not have been
so much fun”.
Still, she often sent him away so she could write undisturbed, hanging
blackout curtains at her study windows to avoid distraction, eventually
taking herself off to a borrowed one-room cottage on a remote mountainside
to finish it, spurred by an increasingly urgent publisher’s deadline. “It
was so high, there were no birds except for the occasional raven and
buzzard. I looked out from my desk into thin air and felt sublimely
unselfconscious.”
She is thinking about her next book: “Something about mitochondrial DNA
– passed in plants only through the female line; about mothers and
daughters, looking at questions of place and belonging. Of things being
uprooted.” It is all much on her mind – her 20-year lease on the Dower
House is up in August this year, and she doesn’t know whether she will be
offered a renewal or, if she is, whether she will be able to afford it. “I
never knew what the future would be here,” she says. “It was like falling in
love: you know it will end in tears, but you do it anyway.”
Extract from The Morville Hours
As my days spent alone in the garden turned into weeks and the weeks into
months, I got into the habit of leaving the front door of the house open –
not just unlocked, but standing open to the garden – from spring to autumn,
all day long. I would open it first thing in the morning to smell the air
and close it only at midnight as I went to bed. House and garden became
extensions of each other. The kitchen filled with plant pots and tools and
string, the hall with boots and jackets and gloves, the bathroom with tender
seedlings. Plants spent part of their year in the house and part outside in
the garden; I could tell the time of year from the tide of greenery in the
house. And gradually I came to know the creatures who shared the house and
garden with me: the jackdaws who roosted in the roof space; the black newts
in the cellar, dining on woodlice; the harvest spiders and the tortoiseshell
butterflies who found a winter home in the dim recesses of the ceiling; the
swallows who reconnoitred the bookshelves in the hall for nesting places in
spring. Outside, there were other creatures and other worlds to discover: the
citadels of bees and ants, the papier-mâché galleries of the wasps, the
subterranean refuges of badgers and moles. Then there were the wanderers –
the animals who came and went unseen: the night owls and the foxes, the
birds who left their arrowed footprints in the snow. The cats were louche
go-betweens, at home in both worlds, belonging to neither.
I found companionship too in the other people who inhabited the same landscape
– the tramp, the hedge-layer, the stockman, the gravedigger; the
sheep-shearer, the farm labourer, my neighbour who tended the vines, the lad
who brought the logs, the butcher who delivered the meat – present-day
inheritors of those figures in the calendars of the Books of Hours. Country
people seem to have all the time in the world. Not really, of course.
Concerns are as pressing here as elsewhere. But there seemed to be a country
courtesy which required that conversations over the field gate or in the
lane or down in the Church Meadow be unhurried – a mutual satisfying of
curiosities, an exchange of information, a bond formed: Welsh voices,
Shropshire voices, Black Country voices, telling stories of the land and the
village and its people.
Gardens are about people first and plants second. Like our multilayered
language, gardening is made up of different elements, bits and pieces from
far and near, now and long ago, taken and incorporated into the vocabulary
of plant and tree, the grammar of path and hedge. I divided the garden up,
hid each part from the nine others behind high yew hedges, played a game of
multidimensional chess with myself. In my 21st-century garden, bits of the
17th century are still here – and the 19th and 16th and 18th – poking
through the gauzy surface of the present like Marley’s pigtail. And there is
China and America and Africa, as well as Shropshire. And stories – many
stories, of this house and the people who lived here, and of the people who
live here still – handed on from person to person, told and retold, a skein
of stories. Like the lavender my father took as he moved from house to
house, from one job to the next, and I from him, taking cuttings of the
lavender, and cuttings of the cuttings, and cuttings of the cuttings of the
cuttings, rooting it each time in a new garden.
And me? What is my story? My father carving my name in the speckled green side
of a vegetable marrow so that I could watch the letters stretch and grow as
wide as my own four-year-old smile. Violet-blue Michaelmas daises and
basking tortoiseshell butterflies. Fossils in wrappings of cotton wool.
Books on leaning metal shelves. The smell of pipe smoke in a cold room. A
typewriter. Blue hyacinths. Iron Age forts and the worn steps of church
towers. A dozen clocks chiming the hour for dinner. A black-and-white marble
floor. A yellow climbing rose. Clouds passing over the hillside. Each a
fragment of memory, a lost moment, a shining and irreducible “now”.
You can smell the spring even before it arrives, like a seafarer becalmed for
months on the wide expanse of ocean, scenting land before he sees it. Caught
unaware, stooping perhaps to collect milk from the step; one morning it is
suddenly there, on the breeze, unmistakeable after the long months of
winter: a smell compounded of greenness and rain showers and damp earth; a
hint of balsam, a rumour of hyacinths – pregnant with the ghosts of
flowers-to-be, like Flora’s breath. The clock strikes, the sound
reverberating across the Church Meadow like ripples of water in the Mor
Brook. Nine o’clock on a spring morning. How can you resist? The village is
quiet; husbands, wives, children all dispatched to office or school; hum of
early-morning traffic silenced; scrunch of postman’s foot on gravel
been and gone. Leave the mail unopened, the milk where it stands on the
step. Follow your nose into the garden.
Even the rain smells different. April is the month of sunshine and showers,
rainbows and reflections, of small, puffy, white, fair-weather cumuli which
bubble up into cauliflower-headed cumuli congesti behind your back and take
you by surprise. Intent upon some late pruning, I hear the rain before I see
it, rattling on the leaves in a rising wind. “Only a shower,” we say,
sniffing the air. And it is: gone as quickly as it came, with ragged
fragments of sky left in the puddles of the drive and a glaze of silver on
the rose leaves.
© Katherine Swift 2008. Extracted from The Morville Hours,
published by Bloomsbury on May 5. To order The Morville Hours by
Katherine Swift for £16.20, free p&p (RRP £17.99), call BooksFirst on
0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst.
The garden at the Dower House, Morville Hall, Bridgnorth, Shropshire (01746
714407), is open on Sundays, Wednesdays and Bank Holidays, from 2pm to 6pm,
until the end of September; groups may visit, by appointment only, at other
times.
