Marsh Vapours

Waiting for snow today out of the sort of lapis lazuli sky that only a severely wind chilled February day can produce. The yellow crocuses are appearing on the Swathe. Last year the white ones showed first. I wonder if there is a reason , why only one colour tests the air first; too much rain, too dry, temperature too warm, too cold, a race to the surface below in the crocus corm world, perhaps. Visions of Persephone with a starter's air horn, on your marks, get set, 'mmmeearrwaugh' .Maybe they have a sort of crocus marathon, where some entrants are the serious competitors and others dress up like emus and flop and bounce, trip and flounce their way to the finish line. Whatever, team saffron have won this year, leaving the white and the purple and the parti-coloured stripy hybrids behind in the underworld.

The wind festoons the branches of the majestic horse chestnut trees far above with plastic bags and street litter until they look less like they are lining a sedate avenue and more like they are dancing in a Mardi Gras parade. It batters the early crocuses into egg yolk lily stars on standing pools.

The news says that the north of England is blizzarded and white outed. Not here of course, maybe later. Snow never happens much here in the sheltered huddle of the town. It was raining with the odd soggy dollop of sleet mixed in as I walked against the wind to the Post Office, pushing my vintage bicycle to which I had strapped the parcels because today's load was too big and awkward to fit in my backpack. Pedaling back, still, it seemed, against the wind, my face was numbed by a hundred acupuncture needles, my mouth frozen into a stretched teeth grin.

Every year in one form or another I write this crocus-on-the Stray shit. It is predictable. It is always the same. In that sameness there is irritation and comfort and the knowledge of another year starting, another season turning, my life plodding on with the odd flashes of colour to use as bookmarks in time.

In the course of my ancestral research Project I have found a line of agricultural labourers stretching back certainly from 1900 to the Domesday Book and probably back to the first time a bloke dragged an auroch antler through the earth and dropped barleycorns into the furrow or kept a beast for meat or milk in the corner of his hovel. Dependency and certainty that the sun would rise in the morning at the designated degree for the length of days, that Spring would come after winter, that winter would fallow the land year in year out ; predictable and necessary as breathing out follows breathing in follows breathing out.

Natural orders were part of my ancestors' lives, until the Great War of 1914-1918 changed the world irrevocably, or at least was the watershed by which we can bookmark those changes. My Great- Great- Grandmother Moore bore 14 children who survived past infancy, nine of whom died alongside her and her husband of some epidemic during the 1870s, one of the many diseases that perennially stalked the marsh which bore them, supported them and took the marsh dwellers back to its squelchy bosom when they died. Other babies died before they were named. As the nature of the naturalness and the nature of the orders changed over the centuries, the resilience and the resignation of the folk closest to the earth appeared to remain much the same. They worshiped at many different shrines over the millennia, but in reality it was the same shrine. They were owned by overlords with different titles over the years, yet fundamentally they were independent of human beings, owned ultimately by the earth.

Her son George survived to marry Elizabeth, who bore 11 children in 13 years. She did not lose one of them until they answered the call to arms and went to smell the earth a short hop from the fields of Kent to the fields of Flanders. Then some of her sons stayed there in the mud , others returned mutilated in mind or body, one or two ploughed a deep and strong furrow into the future but none went back to the Marsh, to the farms. One who survived was Frank, my grandfather. The randomness of fate and survival , who is born and who dies jolts my complacency and ennui.

These are the folk whose names never made it onto carved stone memorials in churches, they are those who are buried in unmarked graves, or graves marked with crude wooden crosses, with Lee Enfield rifles and tin hats, with wildflowers and widow's weeds, a mother's tears ,a sweetheart's despair, or a child's love. They are expendable people, fodder for the cannon, fodder for the Earth.

The same Goddess Earth who ordains which colour crocuses break surface first each year.