Writing Home
After a recent house move, Méadbh Bruce reflects on a writer’s relationship with place.
I always thought I was good at moving house. As a child, my family moved around a lot, a habit I took into adulthood, picking up my life and transplanting it to another place more than 50 times in my 52 years.
Three months ago, I did it again, and this time it wasn’t so easy.
We lived at Ash Tree Cottage for nine years, six months and eight days, the longest I have ever stayed anywhere. The house stood in an acre of woodland garden down a rough track in a small Oxfordshire valley, surrounded by a patchwork of open fields stitched together by ancient hedgerows and drystone walls. The track ran on across the quilted land for another half a mile, past Pintle Woods and Grimm’s Ditch to the Salt Way; the old traders’ route from Droitwich to Princes Risborough, where downy woundwort still flowers on the way to Stonesfield and Woodstock.
For a writer whose work is concerned with the natural world, Ash Tree Cottage couldn’t have been more perfect. The house was situated in the edgelands, somewhere on the threshold between village life and rural obscurity, wrapped in the Cotswolds countryside like a gift. It was big enough for me to claim a room of my own in which to write. I lined the walls with books and placed my desk beneath the window, looking out over the valley towards Chadlington Downs and Sarsgrove Woods in the distance. While I worked, I watched the squirrels steal the fruit from the wild cherry tree, the blue tits nest in the crumbling garden wall, the roe deer browse the tangled shrubbery. I woke at first light to the dawn chorus, and at night, drifted into sleep with the owls calling and the foxes barking. On warm clear days, the familiar cry of the buzzard marked my hours.
On the grassy slope behind the cottage stood the magnificent ash tree that gave the house its name. Everything about the tree seemed to be reaching for the heavens. Even the tips of the twigs at the end of the branches tilted up towards to the sun, belying the inevitable tragedy of the ash tree’s future. In the spring, the flowers emerged delicate and violet from coal black ash buds. In the autumn, the yellowing leaves were among the first in the garden to fall, leaving golden brown single-winged samarae hanging in clusters for hungry bullfinches. Sometime last century, somebody had built a low wall around the tree, creating a circular seat beneath its spreading branches. There, I would take a moment at dawn and later, watch the sunset over the valley at the end of the day.
But the cottage was not ours. We paid an eye-watering rent to a banker who made his millions in London managing a New York investment fund that bet against subprime mortgages and counted Donald Trump among its clients. With his millions, the banker bought a large country house in ten acres of Cotswold land, and with it, Ash Tree Cottage. Like all renters, we knew the day would come when we had to move on. When the banker decided overnight to double the rent, we knew our time was up.
We found a house in the centre of town - another stone cottage with period features, an inglenook fireplace. It is half the size of Ash Tree Cottage and therefore, crucially, commands only half the rent. It’s been 12 weeks now since we moved into Magdalen Cottage - enough time to arrange the furniture and unpack most of the boxes. However, it is taking much longer to work out exactly where I fit into this new place.
As I write this, I am sitting on the sofa, legs curled under me, laptop on my knee. There is no room of my own here; no space, even for a desk. I sold my old oak one and gave away most of my books. Without the trappings of my profession, I worry what kind of writer I will now be.
In time, of course, I will adapt to this new environment. I will probably buy one of those lap trays for my laptop, use the library, learn to be among people again. I know it isn’t the desk or the books or the solitude that makes me a writer. It’s the words, but I must learn a whole new lexicon of place.
Friends ask about practical concerns, comment on how convenient it must be, living in the middle of this market town. It must be so easy for the shop! Have we finished unpacking? Found a place for all our possessions? People seem only to weigh their relocations in terms of the concrete. Nobody mentions the trauma of dislocation, the bewilderment of displacement, the sense of being uprooted, unattached, lost. These things are not articulated. Nobody thinks to ask how I might feel about the end of my relationship with the ash tree.
I still inhabit the small hours but it is no longer the dawn chorus that wakes me. Instead it is the early bus that rattles along the main road outside our door or the beer delivery to the inn across the street. During the day, there is a constant stream of traffic past the front window, and the narrow pavement is busy with people visiting the grocery shop. At night, there are no owls or foxes to call me to sleep, but the sound of the neighbours putting the bins out and well-oiled revellers leaving the pub.
There is no ash tree standing sentinel over the house, no acre of green to hold me. Instead, I find myself in the early morning, in the tiny walled courtyard at the back of the house, looking upwards to the skies and lamenting the absence of birds. I don’t know if I can write without them.
Méadbh Bruce has written about place and belonging for publications including The Wychwood, Scottish Islands Explorer, The Pilgrim, Creative Countryside, Nowhere magazine and the anthology Out There, published by Bath Spa University, which she also co-edited. Her poetry has been published in The Dawntreader, Dodging the Rain, and the anthology Spirit of People and Place. She lives in Oxfordshire on the edge of the ancient Wychwood Forest.
You can find her at meadbhbruce.com
