‘Who’s Harry Styles’ girlfriend?’ I ask.
‘Cheryl Cole,’ says Mum, ‘and she’s a good fifteen years older than him.’
Emma googles this and can’t find any information to confirm or deny this ‘fact’. It’s something no one else in the room had ever thought about.
‘And how do you know this?’ I ask.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ says Mum.
It’s been six years since her haemorrhage, a Grade 4 subarachnoid bleed on the brain, after which she spent two months in hospital. (‘N-n-n-n-n-o I d-d-d-d-d-didn’t!’ she says, ‘I would have remembered!’)
She bled into the front-left part of her brain, the bit where all the language and speech is. A tragedy for someone who taught literature in secondary schools for 40 years and who knows the Latin stem of everything. Who has an annoying habit of quoting Shakespeare and other random pieces of literature she thinks we should all, too, have engraved on our brains. We thought this habit had been washed away with the blood but it returned, one day, when she sprang a test on us, just like she always has.
‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ she crowed, rubbing her thighs. ‘Who wrote it who wrote it?’
‘Tennyson,’ I replied. It’s an easy one, for me. It’s the one everyone rolls out on Twitter whenever a woodpecker eats a blue tit or something similarly unsavoury. ‘Oh it’s all so brutal, isn’t it? Nature red in tooth and claw!’, they post. ‘Yes indeed, yes it is, yes.’ come the replies.
‘Marvellous,’ said Mum. ‘Excellent daughter.’
‘I haven’t actually read it,’ I sighed, ‘it’s just quite a well-worn phrase, isn’t it?’
‘A well-worn phrase? You haven’t read Tennyson?’
We all googled the poem and realised quickly why none of us other than Mum had read it. It has several parts and was written in different years and, ‘Has anyone actually got to the tooth and claw bit yet?’
‘Heathens,’ Mum remarked, and we laughed.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t read any Tennyson,’ I lied, and reminded her that I read her favourite poems to her – T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland and Philip Larkin’s Aubade – when she was unconscious in hospital.
‘You did WHAT?’ Mum spat out her tea. ‘Christ, no wonder I nearly died.’
She lost her speech entirely for a few weeks and then slowly got it back, but she still forgets words sometimes. There is often such beauty in her quest to find them, like when in hospital she described the woman who ‘lived on the wall opposite,’ or when she got really into the wheelchair tennis but forgot both the words ‘wheelchair’ and ‘tennis’. ‘They drive around in little boats,’ she said, and we all chimed, ‘Golf! The rowing! Tour de France?’ and she said, ‘No!’ and became frustrated. ‘Little boats,’ she said, ‘little boats.’ Two days later, out of nowhere, she said ‘I’m really enjoying the wheelchair tennis,’ and we all said ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh,’ and laughed for days.
She can’t read books anymore, she has no concentration. I buy her poetry compilations; she can just about keep up with a poem, although she forgets about it soon afterwards. ‘I’m happy sitting with Pete and doing my brain games,’ she says. She makes me play Words with Friends, an online version of Scrabble but with coloured tiles and themed headdresses when you reach a certain goal (I’ve currently got one with frogs on it). Sometimes she beats me. Sometimes.
According to the doctors, she made a complete recovery; only we know the bits of her that have come since her injury. The part of the brain where the language is also dictates behaviour, and we were warned that she might become more volatile and impulsive. There’s a switch, and if it’s flicked she’ll fly into a rage and there’s no getting through to her. We’re getting used to it and we are learning, gradually, how not to stoke the fire. There have been a few slip-ups, usually when I haven’t realised that this is ‘brain haemorrhage rage’ rather than her just being her usual stubborn self. I spend less time with her than the others and I forget, sometimes, that these days they can read her better than I can.
She also has ‘funny turns’, where she goes quiet suddenly and has to hold on to something to steady herself, even if sitting down. We don’t really know what that is but it comes and goes; she used to have several a day and can now go months without having one at all, but then will have one, suddenly, that takes us by surprise. It’s as if there’s scar tissue around the injury and sometimes messages in the brain hit the wrong bit, come to a sort of dead end and the whole brain short circuits and needs resetting. It’s scary when it happens but, again, we’re all used to it. Five minutes later and she’s fine again, although always a bit shaken.
The sun is shining, and we sit on the front lawn together, taking in the last of the day. I notice the first red mason and tawny mining bees of the year and have to remind myself to focus on my family and not spend the entire time staring at the trunk of the tree where the insects bask. Mum asks Alex, who is very handy, to fix her water butt and downpipe, which are clogged up with moss and silt. (Poor Alex, he always gets given jobs when he visits.) Emma and Gareth keep sneaking off for ‘chats’.
‘Can I go to Liverpool with Gareth tomorrow to watch the football?’ asks Emma.
‘No you may not,’ I reply.
It’s been so long since I’ve been home I had forgotten they are under the flight path of Birmingham Airport. That being woken at 6.10 a.m. as the first plane flies overhead is quite intrusive, that conversations are interrupted, as we pause to let the noise fade, that the others barely notice it, Ellie even finds it comforting. But I struggle, as I struggle with lots of things these days, as each plane is a reminder of empty promises to reduce emissions, of the mountain of work yet to be done. I haven’t quit flying completely but I do so very infrequently (although I was never a very frequent flyer). I suppose that makes me a hypocrite – taking part in one of the very things that needs to be curtailed if we are to meet our emissions targets. I drive too, but again, very little. I’m not perfect. I think it’s OK to live in today’s world while striving for tomorrow’s. I’m practically vegan, I buy very few clothes, I drive and fly very little and walk or take public transport nearly always. You can be part of a world that needs changing and still push for that change. You can be a car driver but still campaign for cleaner roads for asthmatic children. You can eat meat while campaigning for an end to factory farming. I don’t like flying and I don’t want to fly but sometimes it’s easier and cheaper to fly and, as with all partnerships, the decision to fly or not isn’t always mine alone to make. But now, with a plane drowning conversation every two minutes, I’m faced with the enormity of what needs fixing. And it’s overwhelming.
Emma, Alex, Anna and I go for a walk with Mum. ‘Pete doesn’t like walking,’ she tells us, so it’s nice that we can join her. We cross a meadow into agricultural fields and I don’t know where I am. There are nearby villages I’d never heard of. There’s not much in the sky; a baby buzzard mews for its parents and we stop at a big log and take photos of each other. They’ve had so much more rain here than we’ve had in Brighton; I can’t believe how different the landscape is.
We pass the garden centre that closed down and was left abandoned with all the plants left on the shelves with no one to love or water them. ‘I’ve rescued a few,’ says Mum, who explains that she has been sneaking in for months and helping herself to plants that ‘don’t belong to anyone anymore’. Anna puts her face in her hands and we try not to laugh while reminding her she is stealing.
‘It’s not stealing if you’re rescuing things left for dead,’ she explains. ‘I have given them new life.’
‘What plants did you take?’ I ask.
‘Ah,’ she says. ‘I’ll need your help to identify some of them, darling. But they’re really coming along, the garden is looking splendid.’ We are hereby complicit in her crime.
This dry spring has me anxious about the lives of wild things who live beyond my garden. I post pleas on local Facebook groups for people to leave out water but it doesn’t seem enough. I have a hedgehog making a dandelion-leaf nest in my garden, but how are those in other gardens faring? And how are the foxes and the tadpoles and the birds and the worms? What is everyone doing for their wild neighbours?
How does a wildlife gardener connect with the community and help to create networks and corridors that link gardens together and to the wider landscape? How do we spread the word about species decline and habitat loss, about the amazing role gardens can have in the fight against biodiversity loss and climate change? How can we change public perceptions of what constitutes a well-maintained garden and what is considered mess? How can we help species through a drought?
Hedgehogs.
Everyone loves hedgehogs. Everyone says ‘Wow’ and ‘Cor’ and all the things you would expect from people being truly delighted by another species. Hedgehogs have a lot going for them: they’re nocturnal so have an element of mystery and surprise; they have spikes, which makes them unusual; they can roll into a ball, which is basically a superpower, and they tend not to run away when they come across a human or predator, which means you can have a good look at them. They have suffered staggering declines (estimated to be around 95 per cent since the 1950s), which makes them precious. And they suffer enormously in a drought, which means we can actively help them now. To garden for hedgehogs is to garden for everyone else: they need access to the space itself as well as water and invertebrate food, and somewhere to nest or hibernate. We therefore need to open our gardens up to them, leave dishes of water or dig ponds they can enter and exit easily, grow food plants for the caterpillars and beetles that hedgehogs eat and leave wild areas where they can take shelter. If you garden specifically for hedgehogs you’ll have a pretty good garden for lots of other species, too.
My garden alone is not enough for a neighbourhood’s-worth of hedgehogs, and so the only way I can meaningfully help those living in my area is to reach out to the community, to engage with more people to do more for wildlife. Connecting with those who already are helping wildlife is also useful – it’s good to know my allies. So I decide to set up a hedgehog group.
I email Mike, who helps run the local park group, and ask if I can borrow the park’s name to create a Facebook group for the hogs of the park and surrounding streets. He says yes but why don’t you launch it with a talk? I laugh and say of course I can launch my hedgehog group with a talk. ‘I’ll let you know when I’ve written it.’
I set up the Facebook group first. It doesn’t have much, just a what/why/where of hedgehogs in the neighbourhood, a link to the Hedgehog Street website (a joint collaboration between the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and the People’s Trust for Endangered Species that has seen neighbourhoods get together to create more hedgehog-friendly gardens) and bits of information on what to do if you find a hog out during the day. I invite a few people to join but not many will know about the group until I’ve done my talk. Mike was right.
I spend two days finding screenshots of hedgehogs feeding, foraging and courting in my garden, and put them together to make a PowerPoint presentation. I write a script and practise it in my head as I walk to the gym and the shops, take Tos out. I worry about the audience: will they be gardeners or not? Young or old? What if it’s full of kids? I remove slides of hogs stuck in netting or with bonfire and strimming injuries, just in case, and replace them with cute pics of hedgehogs with hoglets. The aim: cheerful and easy ways to help a declining species. Not too much about habitat loss or the climate crisis. No big lectures on plastic grass and paving (although I will mention them). Just nice things about hogs and easy ways to make their lives easier, especially in a drought. I hope it will cover all bases and not put anyone off, but also that it will be the start of a wildlife-loving community that will do more for the hedgehogs and other species living in these streets.
I tell Mike it’s ready and we arrange for the talk to be held in the scout hut on a chilly Wednesday evening. Someone from the park group makes a flyer and I print it out and leaflet-drop 250 houses in the surrounding streets. Mike makes a Facebook event page and invites people from local groups. In the end it’s all very last minute and I worry we’ve left it too late for people to know about it and come. Mike, too, thinks people won’t make it. I arrive to the scout hut to find he’s put out 10 chairs.
‘Are you not expecting many people to come?’ I ask, laughing to hide my anxiety.
