ABOUT THE BOOK
Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of 15-year-old Dara
McAnulty’s world. From spring and through a year in his home patch in
Northern Ireland, Dara spent the seasons writing. These vivid, evocative
and moving diary entries about his connection to wildlife and the way he
sees the world are raw in their telling.
Diary of a Young Naturalist portrays Dara’s intense connection to the
natural world, and his perspective as a teenager juggling exams and
friendships alongside a life of campaigning. ‘In writing this book,’ Dara
explains, ‘I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy,
wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that
people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but
also appreciate a child’s eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.’
For my family
Prologue
This diary chronicles the turning of my world, from spring to winter, at
home, in the wild, in my head. It travels from the west of Northern Ireland
in County Fermanagh to the east in County Down. It records the uprooting
of a home, a change of county and landscape, and at times the de-rooting of
my senses and my mind. I’m Dara, a boy, an acorn. Mum used to call me
lon dubh (which is Irish for blackbird) when I was a baby, and sometimes
she still does. I have the heart of a naturalist, the head of a would-be
scientist, and bones of someone who is already wearied by the apathy and
destruction wielded against the natural world. The outpourings on these
pages express my connection to wildlife, try to explain the way I see the
world, and describe how we weather the storms as a family.
I started to write in a very plain bungalow surrounded by families who
kept their children behind closed doors, and empty-nesters who manicured
their gardens and lawns with scissors – yes, I actually witnessed this. This is
where sentences first began to form, where wonder grappled with
frustration on the page, and where our garden (unlike any other in the cul-
de-sac) became a meadow during the spring and summer months, with
wildflowers and insects and a sign that read ‘Bee and Bee’ staked in the
long grasses, and where our family spent hours and hours observing the
abundance that other gardens lacked, all of us gloriously indifferent to the
raised eyebrows of neighbours that appeared from behind curtains from
time to time.
We’ve moved on since then, crossed the country to make another home,
and not for the first time. We’ve lived in many places during my short life,
in a kind of nomadic existence. But wherever we settle, our home is
crammed with books, skulls, feathers, politics, unbridled debates, tears,
laughter and joy. Some people believe that roots grow from bricks and
mortar, but ours spread like mycelium networks, connected to a well of life
lived together, so that wherever we go we stay rooted.
My parents, both from working-class backgrounds, were the first
generation of university-goers and graduates in their families, and they are
still fresh with ideals for making the world a better place. This means that
we’re not rich materially, but as Mum says ‘we are rich in many other
ways’. Dad is – and always has been – a scientist (marine and now
conservation). He’s brought alive the secrets and knowledge that wild
places hold and explained the mysteries of nature to us all. Mum’s career
path resembles the way she crosses a stream: never in a straight line. Music
journalist, voluntary sector, academic – she still does a little of all these
things as well as teaching my nine-year-old sister, Bláthnaid, at home.
Bláthnaid’s name means ‘blossoming one’, and at the moment she’s a fairy
expert who can give you a multitude of insect facts, keeps pet snails and
also fixes all the electrical equipment in the house (which Mum boggles
over). I also have a brother called Lorcan – ‘fierce one’ – who is thirteen.
Lorcan is a self-taught musician and never fails to rouse in us sheer wonder
and confusion all at once. He’s also an adrenaline junkie – think running
down mountains, jumping off cliffs into the sea, and generally going
through life with the energy of a neutron star. Then there’s Rosie, a rescue
greyhound with severe flatulence and a brindle coat, whom we adopted in
2014. She’s our tiger-dog. We call her the living cushion, and she’s a
wonderful companion and stress reliever. Me, well, I’m the pensive one,
always with dirty hands and pockets stuffed with dead things and
(sometimes) animal scat.
Before I sat down to write this diary, I had also been writing an online
blog. A good few people enjoyed it and said more than once I should write
a book. Which is quite amazing really, as a teacher once told my parents
‘Your son will never be able to complete a comprehension, never mind
string a paragraph together.’ Yet here we are. My voice is bubbling up,
volcano-like, and all my frustrations and passions may just explode into the
world as I write.
Not only is our family bound together by blood, we are all autistic, all
except Dad – he’s the odd one out, and he’s also the one we rely on to
deconstruct the mysteries of not just the natural world but the human one
too. Together, we make for an eccentric and chaotic bunch. We’re pretty
formidable, apparently. We’re as close as otters, and huddled together, we
make our way in the world.
In the darkness my dreams are interrupted. I’m somewhere between
swimming to the surface and coming up for air when the flute catches my
consciousness. The bedroom walls disappear. The space between my bed
and the garden narrows, becomes one. I rise without moving, pinned by the
heaviness of sleep. The notes keep falling on my chest. Now I can see the
blackbird in my mind, its testosterone arrows flying as the territorial
sonatas spread across the dawn. Engrossed in this symphony, awake and
thinking, the whirring of my brain begins.
Spring varies from space to space, but for me it’s the sights and sounds
swirling around my everyday, from sky to roots, that hold the most magic.
Spring is the frog that crossed our path at the beginning of our time in this
house – our first encounter was a splodge of spawn left quickly on the road,
its invisible pathway intruded upon by modernity. Upset, we dug out a
watery sanctuary with hope: a small bucket of water buried and filled with
broken clay pots, pebbles, plants and some sticks for the entrance and exit.
We didn’t really know if it would work. (Anything deeper would’ve needed a
digger to break through the boulder clay that we’re blessed with in our
suburban Enniskillen garden.) But there was another meeting, the following
year, when our amphibian friend danced a jig on the grass and was joined
by another, leaving us a gift of frogspawn in the bucket-refuge. We were
exultant, and our whoops of excitement could be heard from the bottom of
the hill, drowning out for a moment the sound of cars travelling to Sligo or
Dublin, and even rallying against the background noise of the concrete
factory nearby.
The ebb and flow of time punctuated by the familiar brings a cycle of
wonder and discovery every year, just as if it’s the first time. That rippling
excitement never fades. The newness is always tender.
Dog violets push through first, just as the sparrows dig the moss from the
guttering and the air is as puffed out as the robin’s chest. Dandelions and
buttercups emerge like sunbeams, signalling to bees that it’s safe to come
out now, finally. Spring is all about watching each resurgence. Bláthnaid
celebrates by counting daisies every day, and when there’s enough to make
a crown she becomes the ‘Queen of Spring’ – if there’s some left over, she
makes a bracelet and matching ring to complete the trinity. At some point,
like magic, there are enough daisies for a whole week’s worth of trinkets
and charms, so she leaves us all daisy gifts around the house.
I’ve been told more than once that I was an aurora baby, always awake
at dawn. I was born in spring, and my first mornings were accompanied by
the sonata of the male blackbird, nourishing a growing body and mind.
Maybe its song was the first lure to the wild. My calling. I often think of St
Kevin, CaoimhÃn, picture him standing with his outstretched hand, cradling
a blackbird nest until the single chick has fledged. CaoimhÃn of
Glendalough was a hermit who sought solace in nature. Gradually, as more
people came to see the holy man, seeking out his advice and teaching, a
monastic community grew.
I love the stories of CaoimhÃn, perhaps because CaoimhÃn is also the
saint’s name I took at my confirmation. Although I now feel that this
experience was more a ‘coming of age’, his name is still important to me,
even more so now because his story shows that we just can’t help intruding
on wild places, and altering the balance between people and nature.
Perhaps that’s how CaoimhÃn felt, too, as more followers arrived.
The richness of the notes. I can pick them out, even from the most
crowded air space. They are the start of it all, the awakening of so much.
The song carries me further back: I’m three, and living either inside my
head or amongst the creeping, crawling, fluttering, wild things. They all
make sense to me, people just don’t. I’m waiting for the dawn light to come
into my parents’ room. Lorcan is nestled between Mum and Dad. I’m
listening for the notes, and they come just as the first slice of light reaches
the curtain. Golden shadows unveil the shape I’ve been waiting for: the
blackbird harking from the kitchen extension, a glorious messenger on the
rooftop of the sleeping and waking.
When the blackbird came, I could breathe a sigh of relief. It meant the
day had started like every other. There was a symmetry. Clockwork. And
each morning I’d listen and touch the shadows, not wanting to open the
curtains and wake everyone up. I never ever wanted to destroy the moment.
I couldn’t invite the rest of the world in, with its hustle and bustle, its noise,
its confusion. So I listened and watched – the tiny movements of beak and
body, the straight lines of the telephone wires, the thirty-second interval
between verses.
I knew that ‘my bird’ was the male because once I’d crept downstairs,
just once, to look out and up from the patio doors. It was stark and grey but
he was there, and so he was always. I counted and remembered each beat,
then crept upstairs again to watch the shadowplay on the curtain. The
blackbird was the conductor of my day, every day, for what seemed like a
long time. Then it stopped and I thought my world would fall apart. I had to
find a new way of awakening, and that’s when I learnt to read. Books about
birds first, and then all wildlife. The books had to have accurate
illustrations and lots of information. The books helped bridge my blackbird
dream. They connected me to the bird, physically. I learnt that only male
blackbirds sing with such intensity, and that birds sing when they have a
reason to, like defending territory or attracting a mate. They didn’t sing for
me, or anyone else. The loss of that song in autumn and winter was
traumatic, but reading taught me that the blackbird would come back.
Spring does something to the inside of you. All things levitate. There’s no
choice but to move up and forwards. There’s more light too, more time,
more doing. Every past spring merges into a collage and it’s so full of
matter, all that matters. And that first memorable spring, so etched and
vivid: it was the start of a fascination with the world outside of walls and
windows. Everything in it pushed with a gentle force, it begged me to listen
and to understand. The world became multidimensional, and for the first
time I understood it. I began to feel every particle and could grow into it
until there was no distinction between me and the space around me. If only
it wasn’t punctured by aeroplanes, cars, voices, orders, questions, changes
of expression, fast chatter that I couldn’t keep up with. I closed myself away
from this noise and the world of people that made it; I opened up among
trees, birds and small secluded spaces that my mum instinctively and
regularly found for me in parks, forests, on beaches. It was in these places,
apparently, that I would uncoil: face tilted with concentration, wearing a
very serious expression, I absorbed the sights, the sounds.
I suddenly fade out and in, realising that it’s light outside and the dawn
chorus has stopped. The spell is broken. It’s time for school. These days, it
feels like things are changing. I’m here, on the cusp of my fourteenth year,
and the blackbird, that conductor of my day, is just as important as it was
when I was three. I still crave symmetry. Clockwork neediness. The only
change is another kind of awakening: the need to write about my days, what
I see, how I feel. Amongst this onslaught of life, exams, expectations (the
highest of which are my own) come these outpourings, and they are
becoming a cog in the cycle between waking and sleeping and the turning
world.
Saturday, 21 March
The arrival of March is a time of emerging colour and warmth, but standing
in my garden today is like being encased in a snow globe. The icy flakes
bite and snatch away the brightness of yesterday. This cold snap brings with
it a tough time for our garden birds. They’re our extended family, so I rush
out to buy more mealworms from the garden centre just down the road, to
top up our feeders outside the kitchen window; the feeders are a good
twelve feet away to draw a line between neighbourly privacy and invasion.
Just a few days ago our blue tits were prospecting the nest boxes and the
birdsong in the garden was a concerto of anticipation. And now this. Birds
are resilient, but this dip in temperature has us all worried.
It’s hard to believe that we felt the whispering of warmer days – only last
week – while we were in the branches of an ancient oak at Castle Archdale
Country Park, where Dad’s office is based. Many people attribute my love
of nature to him. He’s definitely contributed deeply to my knowledge and
appreciation, but I also feel the connection was forged while I was in
Mum’s womb, the umbilical still nourishing. Nature and nurture – it’s got to
be a mix of both. It may be innate, something I was born with, but without
encouragement from parents and teachers and access to the wilder places, it
can’t bind to everyday life.
Dara, my name, means ‘oak’ in Irish, and sitting up in the branches of
that majestic tree, feeling the pulse of a life that has been growing in Castle
Archdale soil for nearly five hundred years, I was clinging to my childhood
by a twig.
I watch a chaffinch in the garden with confetti flecks on his silver crown.
He rests on a branch of our cypress tree, an evergreen now turned powdery-
white with snow. The chaffinch’s peach-blushed chest puffs out as he’s
joined by a pair of siskins – one citrus-yellow and black, the other
delicately flecked with pewter, a daintier yellow. The robin, as ever, is
lording it about, pompously strutting to ward off any usurpers. Earlier, there
was a four-males-and-one-female tussle of feathers and pecking heads –
robins are so aggressive they’re said to sever the neck of any opponent, but
I wonder if they do that in gardens so full of seeds, nuts and fancy buggy
nibbles. Plenty for all.
A song thrush plays hopscotch in the snow, scrabbling around for the
seed we’ve scattered. The bright red of half-eaten apples is spotted: the
thrush pecks, releases juice, I smile. The thrush comes at odd points in the
seasons, which is the sort of unpredictability that would’ve caused me
frustration and pain in the past. But now I’ve learnt to rationalise the
unreliable thrush, and to appreciate all the encounters without ties or
expectation. Well, sort of.
In the evening we celebrate Dad’s birthday as though it’s a winter
Wassail: we all sing and dance and play our tin whistles (badly), shrieking
notes and demanding the end of darker days, calling out for light. Mum has
baked him a cake – Victoria sponge, his favourite.
Wednesday, 25 March
I find the tail end of winter frustrating, and all this waiting to travel through
a portal into colour and warmth brings out my worst characteristic:
impatience! Today, though, the heat of the air and the hum and buzz all
around allay my restlessness. At last, spring seems to be escaping the
retreating shadows of winter.
This morning we’re all off to one of our favourite places: Big Dog Forest,
a sitka plantation close to the Irish border, about thirty minutes from home,
high in the hills, with pockets of willow, alder, larch and bushes of bilberry
in midsummer. Its two sandstone mounds – Little Dog and Big Dog – are
said to be the result of a spell cast on Bran and Sceolan, the giant hounds of
the legendary Fionn Mac Cumhaill, the hunter-warrior and last leader of the
mythical Fianna people. While out hunting, so the story goes, Fionn’s two
dogs picked up the scent of the evil witch Mallacht, and gave chase. The
witch fled and changed herself into a deer to stay ahead, but the hounds still
snapped closer, so Mallacht cast a powerful spell that turned the dogs, little
dog and big dog, into the two hills we see here today.
I love how these names tell stories about the land, and how telling these
stories keeps the past alive. Equally, I’m fascinated by the scientific
explanations that geologists blast this myth with: the sandstone of the hills
is more robust than the surrounding limestone, and as this wore away
through glacial erosion, it was the sandstone that remained, towering above
the fallen rubble of the Ice Age.
I spy coltsfoot, bursts of sunshine from the disturbed ground. White-
tailed bumblebees drink and collect hungrily. Dandelions and their allies in
the daisy (or Asteraceae) family are often the first pollinating plants to
flower in spring, and are incredibly important for biodiversity. I implore
everyone I meet to leave a wild patch in their garden for these plants – it
doesn’t cost much and anybody can do it. As nature is pushed to the fringes
of our built-up world, it’s the small pockets of wild resistance that can help.
Sometimes, ideas and words feel trapped in my chest – even if they are
heard and read, will anything change? This thought hurts me, and joins the
other thoughts that are always skirmishing in my brain, battling away at the
enjoyment of a moment.
The click-clacking of a stonechat brings me back to where I should be, in
the forest, and I watch as the bird seems to drop tiny gravel fragments onto
the path. I gaze down as the light passes over the path and realise nothing is
motionless. Even a stone pathway can move and change with the light and
the silhouettes of birds in flight. Each moment is a picture that will never be
identically repeated. I watch, captivated, not worried by what onlookers
might think, as we usually have this place to ourselves. I can be myself
here. I can lie down and stare at the ground, if I choose to. And while I’m
staring, inevitably, a creature passes by the tip of my nose: a woodlouse this
time, ambling from nowhere to somewhere. I offer it my fingertip and it
tickles my skin. I love the feeling of holding a creature in my hand. It’s not
even the connection I feel, but the curiosity it quenches. As you look
closely, the moment sucks you in – again and again it’s a perfect moment.
All other noise disappears from the space around you. I move to the grass
and gently lower my finger to the blades: the woodlouse disappears in the
undergrowth.
Bláthnaid and Lorcan rush ahead to the brow of the hill which drops
down to Lough Nabrickboy, while Dad, Mum and I amble, chatting about
replacing sitka with native trees in this special place. Last year, at almost
this exact time, we reached the top of the hill and saw the magnificent sight
of four whooper swans – the only true wild swans. These gentle,
melancholic figures bobbed gracefully on the pool, necks held high. They
could have been The Children of Lir: Aodh, Fionnuala, Fiachra and Conn,
cursed by their cruel stepmother Aoife to spend three hundred years on
Lough Derravaragh, three hundred years on the Sea of Moyle and three
hundred years on the Isle of Inishglora.
Slowly and quietly we approached the willow-shaded picnic table beside
the lake, and they stayed with us as we sat in silent reverence and awe. We
felt so privileged. My heart beat faster, my breath felt trapped in my chest.
The birds sailed along nonchalantly, until suddenly the honking and
trumpeting began. I moved to take a closer look, shielded by the bare
branches of a willow tree. I sat as still as the air, watching the widening
ripples made by the birds’ readying for flight: wings extended, heads
dipped, their legs rotating ferociously as they rose up, ungainly webbed
paddles giving them forward thrust and lift-off. Away they went, bugling,
like a royal convoy. They disappeared to the north-west, perhaps towards
Iceland.
To even hope for a repeat of this encounter would be unheard of, and
looking down across the lake, I can see there are no whoopers today. It’s
empty.
I feel a little melancholy as we make our way down to the picnic table. I
find a spot and wait for the hen harriers, transfixed until the light fades.
When it’s time to go my parents exchange knowing looks – and of course
they’re right, because I’m morose for the rest of the day, and when we get
home I slink off into my room, to write, to mope. No whooper swans today.
No hen harriers.
Saturday, 31 March
In late-afternoon light, with wind rising from the sea, we sail on the ferry
the few miles from Ballycastle on the north-east coast to Rathlin Island.
Guillemots and gulls scrabble the air with screeching and cackling. My
excitement is intense.
Today is my birthday, and this morning I lay awake in bed for hours
before the actual birth time (11.20 am) listening to a screeching fox in the
distance. All week I’ve been like this, intensely excited, nervous, for
reasons I may never truly understand. Perhaps it’s because I love new
places and hate new places all at once. The smells, the sounds. Things that
nobody else notices. The people, too. And the right and wrong of things.
Small things, like how we’d line up for the ferry, or what was expected of
me on Rathlin when we arrived. Though I always do the usual mop-up
operation in my mind after any journey, look back and usually think how
ludicrous it all was, still the anxiety floods in. Mum assures me that our
time on Rathlin will be spent either outside or alone with the family. ‘It’ll
all be okay,’ she says.
Eider ducks congregate at the harbour on our arrival, and as we head out
to the cottage that we’ll be staying in for a few days, my usual dislike of
new surroundings softens. This place has something special. It feels so calm
here. The air is fresh, the landscape extra-worldly in its abundance.
Lapwing circle to our right, a buzzard to our left. The windows are rolled
down and the sound circulates through our limbs, stiff from the three-hour
drive and ferry ride. We relax and radiate as hares abound and geese honk
above. The car climbs above sea level towards the west of the island.
When we reach our roosting place, it looks perfect in the distance:
traditional stone with no other dwellings around for miles, and on arrival I
jump out to walk and explore. I soon discover a lake with tufted duck and
greylag geese. As I walk, hares seem to keep popping up everywhere and
my eyes struggle to keep up with all the movement, my brain whirring with
all the senses.
I can hear the cries of seabirds in the distance. Gannets fly on the
horizon, the squeak of kittiwakes becomes louder. I stand and look out to
sea and watch the waves gently swirling, and in the dusk sky a skein of
white-fronted geese fly in dagger formation. Although we’ve just arrived
and have a few days here, I start wondering how empty I’ll feel when it’s
time to leave. I feel panic.
My childhood, although wonderful, is still confined. I’m not free. Daily
life is all busy roads and lots of people. Schedules, expectations, stress. Yes,
there is unfettered joy, too, but right now, standing in an extraordinary and
beautiful place, so full of life, there is this terrible angst rising in my chest. I
walk back to the cottage in a trance, watching shadows moving in golden
fields.
After dinner, song bursts from every corner of the sky and we stop to
listen in the twilight. Isolating each and every melody, I feel suddenly
rooted. Skylark spirals. Blackbird harmonies. Bubbling meadow pipits. The
winnowing wings of snipe. And always the sound of seabirds. We are in the
other world. No cars. No people. Just wildlife and the magnificence of
nature.
It’s the best birthday.
A full moon beams from behind clouds as we watch Venus above the
distant houses, and I stand there with numb hands and a numb nose but a
bursting heart. This is the kind of place I can be happy in. I wrap my coat
tightly around my chest, inhaling it all in, not wanting to go to bed, storing
the moment up with all the other memories I keep cached. When I’m
ambushed by the anxiety army, when it comes stomping back, I’ll be ready
to fight, armed with the wild cries of Rathlin Island.
Sunday, 1 April
After a night of good food and music and with birdsong still swirling in my
head, I wake to promising weather, bursts of blue emerging from the cloud.
The morning sea is calm and dazzling. It’s Easter Sunday, and we’re
heading to the RSPB West Light Seabird Centre, home to the largest seabird
colony in Northern Ireland – and not too far from the cottage.
I run around with Bláthnaid and Lorcan before breakfast, searching for
the chocolate eggs Mum and Dad have hidden in the cracks and crevices of
a drystone wall, under rocks and behind clumps of grasses. This is so
different to our small suburban garden, where the eggs are found too
quickly! We squeal and run, full of unbridled excitement. We don’t have to
control ourselves here: there isn’t anyone around for miles!
Skylarks are our Sunday choir as we walk out west, the landscape our
place of worship, as it always is. It’s breezy but bright. I spy a pair of
greylag geese nibbling grass by the distant edge of the lake, and by the time
we reach them I count eight in total, waddling close to us. They show no
fear.
When we arrive at the seabird centre we realise we’re half an hour early,
such was our urgency to get here. We’re met by Hazel and Ric – they’ve
been living on the island for a year and are incredibly knowledgeable and
passionate about the wildlife, and so very warm and welcoming. I don’t say
much, but that’s not unusual for me. I always smile and nod, except when
talking about birds. But even then, although I might look comfortable from
the outside, I’m not. I feel squeezed in the middle. I’m trying to process
conversations, always looking for nuances, facial expressions, intonation. It
often gets far too much, so I just zone out. My heart beats too fast.
Sometimes, I walk away from people without realising. It can all be a bit
awkward.
Hazel and Ric walk with us towards the stone steps down to the seabird
colony. Mum and Dad are still indulging Hazel and Ric in the usual adult
pleasantries – all unnecessary conversation if you ask me! I stride out
ahead, to start on the ninety-four winding steps that slowly reveal a rugged
cliff face alive with kittiwakes and wheeling fulmars, twisting and throwing
and dancing in the air. The sight of it makes my insides wiggle. In a sudden
fit of excitement I rush down the rest of the steps and across the viewing
platform. I can see the guillemot stacks! The cries of excited birds explode
inside my chest. Hands trembling, I borrow a tripod from Ric, set up my
scope and peer out to sea.
After only moments of scanning, the monochrome suit of a razorbill
comes into focus. It bobs in the water and amazingly, despite the churning
waves, stays in line with the group. They’re such smart-looking birds, even
while swaying at sea. I spot a streamlined northern gannet (our largest
seabird) in the sky, nonchalantly swerving – it can reach an astonishing 62
mph when diving to feed, but this is a spectacle I’ve yet to see. They’re
beautiful birds with stunning eyes, Art Deco lines and a six-foot wingspan.
I manage to catch one in my scope, just about. Everywhere, there is the
sound of fulmars cackling and creaking like hags hexing the cliffs and all
who rest on them. They’re quite amusing birds, vomiting a rancid bright-
yellow oil to repel nest intruders. I find them strangely delicate and enjoy
watching them sailing to land. The whole scene is mesmerising and
hypnotic. The screeching soundtrack is perfection. There are no puffins, but
I didn’t really expect them yet.
It’s incredibly warm today, and I feel so content, at peace. Bláthnaid and
Lorcan are getting a little restless though – not everyone has the patience
for watching birds. I’m given the option to stay, but head off with the rest of
the family for some lunch. It’s so difficult to leave, but we make a family
deal to return before we leave the island.
In the afternoon, we hike to the beautiful Kebble Cliff. Hare prints cast in
mud show its light- and deep-footed antics. They’re everywhere again.
They mystically emerge from tufts of grass and rest for a while, as if
sussing us out, then disappear. Buzzards and ravens intermittently delve and
wheel throughout our day and a peregrine passes, swiftly downwards, out of
sight. We flush out snipe and woodcock as we walk, their frightened flight
taking us by surprise and delight. Skylarks and meadow pipits continue to
spiral and ascend, their song reaching into every part of my being, lifting,
coiling. All that’s missing now is the flutter of butterflies, the whizz of
dragonflies. The hum of full spring. I stand still and can imagine how it
might sound. I vow to come back for real, in May. Such a day.
All tired from walking and exploring, we drive to the pub to have dinner
and play pool. I start filing away each moment in my head so that next
week or next month, at some unknown point in the future, when I really
need to feel happy, I can recall the details. This almost-mermaid-tail-shaped
island has me in its siren spell. I’m completely smitten. It’s only six miles
long and one mile wide but holds so much – and we’ve only seen a fraction
of it.
Mum and I walk the last mile or so from the pub back to the cottage in
search of the rare pyramidal bugle, to no avail. Looking at our cottage and
how perfect it looks, my heart aches. Tomorrow is our last full day.
Monday, 2 April
A restful night’s sleep is not something I’m familiar with. I find it hard to
process and phase out so much of our overwhelming world. The colours on
Rathlin are mostly natural and muted in this early spring light, tones that are
tolerable to me. Bright colours cause a kind of pain, a physical assault of
the senses. Noise can be unbearable. Natural sounds are easier to process,
and that’s all we hear on Rathlin. Here, my body and mind are in a kind of
balance. I don’t feel like this very often. It means I can reconnect with
myself and my family, which is usually difficult because life can get busy
and intense. I amble here. I get to watch birds for hours on my own. I’m
free to walk where I want. Free to explore. There’s no litter either, no
unsavoury anything – unless you don’t like animal poo! My curiosity draws
me to places like this, where I can pick up guillemot and razorbill eggshells
(last year’s loot stolen by the ravens), mermaid’s purses, shells, bones. At
home, we have a thing called ‘Fermanagh Time’, which means life seems
slower compared to most other places. But Fermanagh Time has nothing on
Rathlin Time, which is even kinder and more free-flowing.
We wake to wind and grey skies but it doesn’t stop Lorcan, Bláthnaid and
me running out. The wind chops at our exposed faces, our eyes and mouths
fill with salt and freshness. Even in shades of grey and black, the sky here
holds such light and space and colour. It doesn’t have the heaviness of a
suburban sky, perhaps because there’s just so much expanse. We scope out
the lake again, where we spotted the greylags yesterday. We run and run.
There are no hares this morning. They’re probably undercover, hunkering in
the gale. The lake is writhing with wind but empty of birds.
Out of breath and battered, we return to the cottage to be told by Mum
that the ferry is cancelled. Joy! I hope the weather never improves and start
dreaming of being stranded on Rathlin. During breakfast, I remind everyone
of our deal to return to the seabird centre before leaving the island, but
instead of walking through sheets of rain we agree to drive the short
distance.
There are fewer birds today: a small pod of razorbills undulating on the
turbulence, a couple of greater black-backed gulls. Despite the weather, I
raise my head to the sky and breathe the tiny details in. A solitary gannet
scythes the sky and its cantering cries synchronise with my heartbeat –
Orcadians (the people who live on the Orkney islands) call them Solan
Goose, or Sun Goose, and as the rain falls I feel the warmth of its lamenting
calls. All too soon I feel Mum’s hand on my shoulder – I haven’t realised
how much time has passed.
We head up to the seabird centre for mugs of hot chocolate, my skin
flushed and prickling with the heat of the indoors. My thoughts flit in and
out of time as Mum and Dad talk to Hazel and Ric. Gradually, my fingers
relax and I feel less numb, so I tune in to hear that we’re going out into the
wind and rain again, apparently to look for seals.
The drive to the harbour takes much longer than we all thought. The rain
has slowed by the time we arrive, scratching rather than scraping, but I’m
grateful for the waterproofs as we make our way to the small beach in front
of McCuaig’s Bar. The seals are not difficult to find: there are six in the
turning waves. We watch eider ducks too, drifting. The males’ striking
plumage seems outlandish against the moderately adorned female.
Oystercatchers, redshank and a single sanderling peck through the seaweed,
while more heads are bobbing further out, long, spindly legs dancing
through the washed-up kelp. There’s a seal with a strange red protrusion in
its body: a wound made by plastic, healed over but with whatever the object
is still lodged in place. The sight fills me with a solar flare of anger. How
can we treat wildlife like this?
To try and cheer us all up, Mum and Dad take us to a cosy coffee shop
where we demolish crêpes, and they remind us that we are soon heading to
the McFaul farm, where we’ve been invited to feed the lambs later that
afternoon. As well as being a farmer, Liam McFaul is the RSPB warden on
Rathlin Island, and is working hard to return the corncrake, a critically
endangered bird everywhere in Ireland. Last year, a male called but wasn’t
answered. Liam’s nettlebeds might help this year, I hope. Talk of the
corncrake and sight of the injured seal remind me that even here, in such a
wild place, nowhere escapes human intervention. There is loss everywhere.
Loss of habitat, loss of species and ways of life. Though it’s being
reclaimed here and in many places, it’s such a complicated matter. I don’t
feel qualified to understand it or pass judgement. I know it unsettles me,
though. The balance is just never quite right.
These thoughts occupy me into the evening, as we feed the lambs at the
McFaul farm. It feels good feeding them. We’re not farmers but we all love
animals, and now Bláthnaid is talking about being a vet one day!
Back at the cottage, we read by candlelight. Dad starts aloud with Dara Ó
Conaola’s Night Ructions, Mum follows with some poetry, until one by one
we all drift away to sleep, protected against the crashing waves and din
outside.
Wednesday, 4 April
The morning dawns quietly. The wind has gone, which means we’re
leaving. The business of tidying and packing keeps my mind busy, but a
feeling inside is tumbling in jagged circles. We rush for the ferry, late. With
a heavy heart we’re out to sea. There is no giggling, no pointing out beyond
the waves. Subdued silence. In Irish this feeling is called uaigneas. It is a
deep, deep feeling, a condition of being lonely.
We had found and lost something, so quickly. Maybe I’m also losing part
of my childhood. There’s a Rathlin space inside me, mermaid-shaped, and it
needs to be filled again.
Saturday, 7 April
There’s an oppression this morning and all day, weighted, surrounding me.
Even though there are so many good things happening outside in a garden
full of song and activity, my mind has settled between melancholy and
heart-racing anxiety. I feel trapped in suburbia. The wind and rush of air, of
a wild place, swirls through my daydreams and night stirrings. The anxiety
army is marching but my defences have failed me. I scrabble around the fog
in my brain, trying desperately to find a memory, an image to ease the tears
and confusion and frustration. I pull the quilt over my head to stifle it all,
and fall again into another fitful sleep.
Sunday, 8 April
I haul myself back into the world, grudgingly. Even the enticement of
Claddagh Nature Reserve doesn’t quieten my inner angst. And I feel right
to have been brooding because when we arrive, on the forest floor, where
the anemones usually flourish, is a huge gouge of dumped mud and stones
blotting the ground between the river and a carpet of wild garlic. I rage
inside. A tell-tale digger, parked in an empty building nearby, is the last
piece in the jigsaw.
We walk on in anger, and although I spy buds on the trees and golden-
leaved saxifrage covering the high banks, all of it is cold comfort. The
chiffchaffs are warbling too, but I brush their chirpings aside.
As the day grows warmer we decide to head to Gortmaconnell Rock, a
wilder place, part of Marble Arch Caves Global Geopark. It’s one of those
places where no one ever seems to go, at least not while we’re there. We
claim a few places in Fermanagh as our ‘playground’, and this is one of
them. I spot my first butterfly of the year, a very worn peacock. A flutter
clamours around my chest, teasing apart the knot of tension. I can inhale
and exhale a little easier. I run from the bottom to the top of the
Gortmaconnell summit and feel the wind breaking apart the turmoil. It
surges out into the landscape and I lie flat and look at the clouds. I close my
eyes, put a hand on my chest and feel a steadier beat. I sleep for a while;
everyone leaves me alone. Those fifteen minutes are more restful than all
the interrupted hours of sleep I’ve had this week.
Wednesday, 18 April
The fourth ‘report card’ of the year has kept my feet from touching soil and
grass, and locked me in a cycle of exams where freedom seems nonexistent.
The classrooms at school are claustrophobic. Through the stale air I’m
bombarded with fidgets, sighs, shifts, rustles as loud as rumbles. The rooms
are bright, so bright that the reds and yellows pierce my retinas.
Fluorescents drowning natural light. I can’t see outside. I feel boxed in, a
wild thing caged.
Though I really enjoy Spanish classes, the room is hideous and makes
concentrating absolutely impossible. During almost every lesson I have to
remove myself and sit outside the classroom. Sitting still, breathing in and
out, vanishing in a maelstrom. Thank goodness for the school ‘safe space’ –
it’s a room reserved for kids on the spectrum, or others with needs for a
quiet space. Some people think I’m isolated in there, but no. I’m safe. My
brain can expand and spill out the burdens.
I like school, I really want to learn. But the learning is so flat and
uninspiring. The apathy of the surroundings is intolerable. The things we’re
learning are as captivating as a dripping tap, while outside the world is so
much easier to condense, to understand. You can focus in on one thing: a
flower, a bird, a sound, an insect. School is the opposite. I can never think
straight. My brain becomes engulfed by colour and noise and remembering
to be organised. Ticking things off brain-lists. Always trying to hold in the
nervous anxiety. To keep myself together.
Friday, 20 April
This morning I was out of school because I’d been asked to talk at a
conference of teachers, an ‘eco schools’ event. I do love doing this type of
work. It’s part of my mission, for want of a better word. I must shout from
the rafters about how we can all be doing more for our living world, our
wildlife, how we can make a difference. I often feel like I’m banging my
head on a brick wall.
Today, everyone is friendly, encouraging and genuinely excited to be
there, to celebrate what many schools are doing with such little funding.
But walking through the cultivated gardens, towards the building where the
event is taking place, there’s a stench of slurry. I’m here talking about
biodiversity but there’s a lack of it; neither the smell nor tidy gardens sit
comfortably.
My heart starts pounding when I’m asked to stand and speak. I realise I
can’t see the back of the room – making eye contact with an empty wall far
away is an important tool for me when I talk in public. Here, though, the
podium is too high. I feel small and try to rise up. The room begins to swell.
I feel submerged in water. As I read aloud the string holding me up begins
to twinge. I’m about to crash. I keep reading. Smile. Stand for photographs.
Talk as much as possible among unfamiliar faces. I then realise I’m still
wearing my fleece, which explains the sweat dripping down my neck. I’ve
no idea how long I’ve been feeling like this. And when I do finally remove
the layer, I get cross with myself because I’m wearing my favourite
Undertones T-shirt. Why didn’t I do this sooner? My inability to organise
myself, to do basic things – like take my fleece off in a hot room – really
gets on my nerves. I can’t plan for it. I just can’t seem to manage without
someone prompting (usually Mum or Dad). But then the prompting itself is
even more annoying.
I travel home with Dad and we play my favourite music. The Clash, The
Buzzcocks, and the rest. We talk a little, but all I really want to do is doze,
to try and shut the day away. The music flicks the sensory switch, and the
sound travels into me and releases the pressure inside.
Music always makes me feel better, and when we arrive home to Mum’s
questions and smiles, my obligatory rundown of the day is more upbeat.
Afterwards, I escape into the garden with my camera. I don’t take any
pictures. I doze again instead. No wonder I can’t sleep at night.
Thursday, 26 April
As I sit finishing homework in my room, I feel a tingle. I pull open the
curtain and push aside my doors. I live on the edge, on the edge of the
house, away from everyone else in the converted garage. Mum and Dad
always worry that I’m not near them at night, but I’m not a baby, and
mostly like it. I stand outside and cock my head to the sky and there it is. A
screech. A swift! The first of their hundred-day residency. They’re here! All
the way from Africa. The most exuberant and spirited of our summer
visitors, screaming over my house.
One of the most important single moments in a swift’s life is finding a
nesting place. But people like my neighbours sterilise their gardens and put
plastic or metal spears down the middle of their eaves. This attitude prevails
everywhere. It’s the norm to stop wildlife thriving in the gaps of our homes
and office buildings. And the whole poo thing is ridiculous! It’s the
standard complaint, how dirty birds are, and justifies the loss of habitat,
right on our own doorstep.
For now, the lone swift jubilantly churns – a scout, perhaps feeding, not
yet paired and searching for a partner, waiting on the screaming parties to
tussle and jostle for territory. It’s so hard to believe that many of the babies
just fly out of the nest and set off on their massive journey alone.
Astonishing. I muse on how much we humans depend on each other for
survival, and how wild species are at our mercy for survival. I shudder in
the evening coolness. The swift has moved on, leaving behind an empty sky
as darkness falls.
Before I go to bed, I eye a modest green stalk, shy against the brash
dandelions. A tiny pink bud, the first cuckoo flower, lady’s smock. Fields
were once covered in this delicate, unassuming spring flower, which is still
the chosen resting place for the eggs of the orange-tip butterfly. Tiny orange
microdots. I’ll check all our green stems later in the year, but I haven’t
found one despite years of looking. Maybe it has something to do with the
field and neon-slurry-greens visible from our kitchen window.
Thursday, 10 May
I take my camera into the garden to photograph a dandelion with its blooms
inside out, like a windswept umbrella. It caught my eye because I love
dandelions. They make me feel like sunshine itself, and you will always see
some creature resting on an open bloom, if you have a little patience to
wait. This vital life source for all emerging pollinators is a blast of uplifting
yellow to brighten even the greyest of days. It stands tall and proud, unlike
all the others opening and swaying in the breeze. The odd one out.
The cuckoo flowers are now plentiful, too, and the first common orchid
has burst above ground. I wonder if we’ll have more than last year: thirteen
magnificent orchids. All of a sudden, raindrops fall from the few clouds
above and plonk on all the other open-topped dandelions. The only one to
escape unscathed is the one that caught my eye.
Dandelions remind me of the way I close myself off from so much of the
world, either because it’s too painful to see or feel, or because when I am
open to people the ridicule comes. The bullying. The foul-mouthed insults
directed at the intense joy I feel, directed at my excitement, at my passion.
For years I kept it to myself, but now these words are leaking into the
world.
I lift my face to the rain and let cloud particles fall on my tongue.
Friday, 11 May
I am buoyed by the life springing out everywhere, in the garden, in the
school grounds, even on the streets around the house. My heart crashes less
against my chest. I feel in rhythm with nature, and I start becoming
immersed in every moment again, letting each wave hit me and seep in.
We decide to take a late-evening walk after Scouts, to a little park in
Lisnaskea, a small town not 15 miles outside Enniskillen. It’s a balmy
evening and the light is hazy with midges, revelling all around, irritatingly
to us. Suddenly, punching above the weight of every other song among the
reeds and trees, a sedge warbler. It permeates the airspace. I stop to listen. A
moment later, a conversation begins between a sedge warbler perched on
barbed wire and another on the willow branch. One in shade, the other
choosing light, their chirps put into song all the giddy amazement I am
feeling. I wonder, sometimes, how other people respond to these
encounters. Do they have the same sense of privilege on hearing a bird like
the sedge warbler? After one continuous flight from the Sahara, it lands
right here to embellish our summer with crackling excitement.
Edward Thomas, who fitted a lifetime of poetry into two years before
being killed in the trenches of the First World War, captures it perfectly:
Their song that lacks all words, all melody.
All sweetness almost, was dearer to me
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.
This was the best of May – the small brown birds.
Wisely reiterating endlessly
What no man learnt in or out of school.
Above the bulrushes, a cloud of hoverflies. The light is dappled and
sepia. I’m dazzled by the delicacy of the moment. My insides explode,
words ricochet outside-in. I hold them close, because capturing this on a
page allows me to feel it all over again.
Saturday, 12 May
Today, on a leisurely stroll around one of our local parks – Forthill Park, a
remnant of Victorian Enniskillen – I spot something that I haven’t noticed
before. The rhododendron we love playing in has been dismembered, along
with the cold, dark world it once covered. But this spring, amazingly, there
are primroses bursting from below the stumps, visible for the first time in –
I don’t know how many years. Then, in with primroses, I spy a wood
anemone, exposed to the air like a forgotten spell.
The heavy rhododendron canopy has smothered the primrose and
anemone alike, cast them in dormancy. Yet suddenly, here the anemone is,
the blood of Adonis, the blood of the forest that once thrived here before. A
relic. A clue to an ancient murder. Evidence of the loss of the forest and bog
that covered all of Ireland. The wood anemone grows a mere six-foot
spread every one hundred years. I hope this patch is left alone in the light so
it can spread once more. A wood anemone in a park, in a town, where
children play. An anemone with so much mythology, so many stories, can
now reach out again, open minds, touch lives in this century.
Years ago, Mum went to the primary school that borders the park – she
went for nature walks, right here. St Theresa’s Girls School. Grey pinafore,
red rose badge. She’s told me how much she loved it – because RóisÃn, her
name, means ‘little rose’ in Irish. She remembers collecting oak and
sycamore leaves, pine cones, conkers. All the children would lay their finds
on a nature table – I wonder how many schools have a nature table these
days. I know mine doesn’t.
The swallows are exultant here, etching the short grass. I lie down and
look up at ‘The Happy Prince’ – it’s really called Cole’s Monument,
dedicated to General G. Lowry Cole, a soldier and politician in the
nineteenth century. But in our house it’s called The Happy Prince, after the
Oscar Wilde story. When he boarded at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen,
Wilde must have looked out at the grey tower and dreamed up his precious
story of the boy-statue who befriended a lone swallow, left behind in winter.
In the story, the prince witnesses the horrors of the world below him, and
asks the swallow to pick away at the gold leaf and jewels that adorn the
surface of the statue, to tear them away and give them to the poor. When he
is stripped of all his beauty, the Happy Prince is taken down and melted in a
furnace. All that remain are his broken heart and the dead swallow. These
are lifted, swallow and heart, into heaven by angels and declared the most
beautiful things in the city.
The story always makes me cry. It makes all of us cry. I sink deeper into
the grass and watch the shadows of swallows and listen to their bubblings.
Wilde despised Portora, and I too spent a soul-destroying eighteen
months there. I can’t imagine why I wanted to go. Perhaps it was because
one of Ireland’s most famous writers also went there: Samuel Beckett, who
loved it apparently, maybe because he loved sports. For me, every day was
agony. I hid it well. The bullies were powerful boys, popular, sporty, and
lies tripped off their tongues like diamonds. Dark diamonds. Bloody
diamonds. I sit up suddenly, heart thrashing and pounding. It’s too painful
to even think about, still, even over a year later. I’m glad to be gone from
there.
I return to the single wood anemone, so alone, but all the more beautiful
for it.
Sunday, 13 May
When you visit a familiar place, it’s never stagnant. There’s always change,
and every new day brings a tilt, another view, something that previously
escaped you. That something can be as innocuous as a stone wall. Of
course, stone walls could hardly be called that – so much life emerges from
the cracks and crevices. Wait and watch a stone wall and I promise you,
what emerges is a performance, reserved only for those who stop and look.
Today, though, it wasn’t what was on the wall or inside it, but what was
over it.
We’d been walking for quite some time in Killykeeghan Nature Reserve,
a small and secret place not far from home. It’s another of the places we
always seem to be alone in. Today, we were searching for orchids, listening
for the cuckoo call, running over limestone pavements to see if we could
spot some mammal scat.
Bláthnaid loves peering over walls, and is drawn to these moments. She
has a sixth sense. We both feel it. And she stopped at the most perfect
peering spot, because behind the stone wall of an ancient cashel was a
hidden pond, reflecting the sky and squiggling with shadows galore, darting
in and out of the light. A convulsing mass of tadpoles, and with them the
epic cycle of life, anticipation and fascination. We clambered over and
surrounded the muddy edge, peering in delight.
The water is bubbling with methane, which makes me think of folklore,
of will-o’-the-wisps and banshees, dancing flashes of red light emanating
from the decomposition of organic matter. My dad remembers seeing them
in Tamnaharry on his great-uncle’s farm, dancing in the dark. These days
they are rare because drainage and farmland ‘improvement’ have claimed
most of our swamps, bog and marshlands. Whether it’s bioluminescence or
the combustion of methane, it’s wonderful to let the mind wander off with
banshees and will-o’-the-wisps. Folklore and stories are so often inspired by
the strange and the beautiful in the natural world, and all these stories bring
nature, deeply, into our imagination. Plus I just love staring into ponds, so it
must be good for the mind. My head is pretty hectic most of the time, and
watching daphnia, beetles, pond skaters and dragonfly nymphs is a
medicine for this overactive brain.
Ripples appear on the surface tension, from no obvious source. I feel the
light sprinkling on my head turn into larger raindrops, breaking my trance
as they drip from my brow down my face. Bláthnaid and I wander off to
find shelter by a hedge, but when the rain stops she goes back to Mum and
Dad while I carry on in a different direction, alone.
As the globe turns, there are things we reach for at certain times. Today, I
wanted so much to hear the cuckoo – a need for seasonal ‘firsts’ is strong in
me. The first of everything is very special. In my fervour to hear it today, I
realise I’ve wandered quite far away from everyone and find myself in a
secret spinney of hazel and bluebell. You know when you forget a place and
remember it all at once? Being in the spinney takes me straight back to
being a toddler, trampling the lilac blooms before Mum whisks me up. Then
fast forward a couple of years and I’m fidgeting through a cow pat for dung
beetles, and climbing mossy banks searching for unknown things. It almost
brings tears to me. Being alone, it’s peaceful enough to feel the past, and to
feel it overlapping with the here and now of musky scent, trickles of light
passing through the canopy.
The verdant-lapis light illuminates a path through the bluebells and hazel,
a secret way. Sometimes it’s good to have a path, for fear of the wrath of
faeries, who are said to live inside the bells of these wildflowers – some say
that the ominous ring of the bluebell, if heard, will spell death to whoever
bares those unfortunate ears.
I tread softly on the wood path. The bulldozing of early childhood is
gone. In its place, there is reverence. A bluebell wood takes much longer
than our time on earth to get to this carpet of bloom. It is precious and
ancient and magical. And it arrives like clockwork, if left alone, casting a
charm on so many open hearts. Here since the Ice Age, the bluebell takes
five whole years to grow, from seed to bulb. A labour of slow and perfect
growth.
A mantle of bluebells, the cycle of spring, and amongst it all, quite
suddenly, making me jump out of my skin, the cuckoo sings loud and close.
I decide not to chase it, though. I listen. I smile with relief, knowing all is
well in this place.
Friday, 18 May
I’m flicking restlessly on our garden swing. It’s full sun and the small
enclosed space is brimming with birdsong and hiving activity. I hop off and
peer into our wee bucket. I remember the day we filled it with stones and
old bits of clay pot and impatiently let it fill with rainwater. We added a
cupful of murkiness from the pond at Dad’s work, some native oxygenators,
and the magic brew grew life. Water fleas first. Within a week, snails. Water
beetles followed. Then dragonfly nymph and the holy grail: tadpoles. Birds
drink and bathe in our magic cauldron, while under the surface
metamorphosis is alive and well with five whole tadpoles! Squiggly,
squirming teardrops, eating algae from the side of our potion pot. If you
brew your own cauldron, magic will surely happen.
A spring evening spent watching life in a bucket on your doorstep is pure
enchantment. Yes, it absolutely is!
I go in for dinner but soon enough I’m back out, making a beeline for the
bucket. It constantly surprises us with its offerings. I especially love
watching how different species interact. The springtail goes on a little jolly
reconnaissance using the water’s surface tension, a thick skin to the insect,
which is so small and blissfully unaware of what is patrolling the underside
of the tension: in the gloom, the water boatman is propelled by hunger on
its two oar-like legs, swimming upside down, with its piercing mouthparts,
or stylet, ready to attack. The action between the water boatman and the
springtail is magnificent. The springtail is so fast, driven forward by the
abdominal, tail-like appendage called the furcula. The water boatman is so
gracefully crazed. It is great to wile away an hour following their antics.
I look again before bedtime, and the springtail is alive and well. But for
how long? My mind skips because, well, I’m too old for my body to be seen
skipping into the house. I go to bed happy. We’re told that childishness is
wrong, bad almost. I mourn a world without such feelings. A joyless world,
a disconnected one. I push the feelings aside. As I close my eyes, all I can
see is scuttling tadpoles, springingtails and a lurking water boatman.
Saturday, 19 May
Before breakfast, I check on the cauldron again. The water boatman is still
lingering but the springtail has gone. I don’t question it or wonder, it’s just
gone. I count and breathe with a sigh of relief: the same number of tadpoles
swim around the clay-pot fragments, and one is resting on a piece of wood
which fits diagonally across the pond. I have to tear myself away as we’re
making a two-hour journey to Downpatrick to run some errands with Dad,
and then on to Inch Abbey together, where one of my favourite corvids is
nesting in plain sight.
It feels like a summer evening except for the buzzing and hum, and the
distant screech of terns skimming over the Quoile River to the south-west.
Butterflies are everywhere. A clattering of jackdaws rises from the ruins of
the Cistercian abbey. This is something special. As they swoop silently
around us, we hear other noises, not quite caws. I explore the crevices of the
stone walls and find chicks guarded by twigs. Then, the sounds seem to
come from everywhere. I step back and watch the parents tirelessly dart in
and out of hidden chambers to feed their young.
The black shapes of jackdaws on the feeder at home always take me by
surprise. They look so out of place, teetering shakily on the edge. They eat
the fat balls delicately, unlike corvid cousins (especially rooks), who snatch
and grab and fly away. They’re such highly intelligent, sentient birds. They
look into the human eye and search it for intention. They can also learn
tricks. What amazing creatures, with wonderful shiny, charcoal and night
plumage.
In Celtic mythology, there’s a story about a flock of jackdaws who
pleaded with the king to let them enter the town to escape the bullying
rooks and ravens. The king refused, but the jackdaws persisted and found a
lost, enchanted ring which had previously kept the province of Munster safe
from Fomorian attack. The king changed his mind and the jackdaws were
let into the town as avian citizens.
I do love these stories. They enrich my life as a young naturalist. Science,
yes, always science. But we need these lost connections, they feed our
imagination, bring wild characters to life, and remind us that we’re not
separate from nature but part of it. Avian citizens! Why not?
Saturday, 26 May
It feels so good to be back on Rathlin Island again, for the late spring bank
holiday. We’re staying in the same stone cottage and head straight out to the
seabird centre for the afternoon. There are a lot more people compared to
last time, so before we head down to the viewing platform, Mum takes me
aside. We exchange code words and hand squeezes. I build an imaginary
suit of armour around myself and move forwards into the throng, senses
popping like corn kernels.
When you first encounter the cliffs here during the breeding season,
between May and July, everything gloriously slams into you at once. The
not-quite pungent smell. The kaleidoscope of sounds. There are thousands
of birds: guillemots, kittiwakes, razorbills, fulmars and puffins, all wheeling
or diving, patrolling and protecting, sauntering over the shoulder of the
stack. Mind-blowing. Magnificent. This is a place vibrating with survival
and endurance. I feel tickled and almost hysterical, but must take it all in.
I try to focus on each species, starting with a fulmar, dozing and waiting,
a queen on her throne, alone yet protected by the shadow of wings
constantly flying past. She’s like the Buddha in a trance, conserving energy,
settling on the spot. Then the congregation of guillemots catches my eye,
one heaving mass – safety in numbers – that completely cover the stack (the
birds and the guano). The razorbills are cajoling each other, craning their
necks and clacking their beaks, snuggling into gorgeous sleek plumage just
as a monochrome mutiny breaks out amongst them, a fight for territory. The
kittiwake pair stick together on the cliffside and in the air. These ocean-
faring nomads seem like the softest of gulls, but must be so hardy and tough
to endure half a year far out at sea – the young birds only return to land
when they are two years old or more. And here come the little waddlers,
puffins! Slits for eyes make them look like sleepwalkers, hefty on their
small bodies as they make their way across the green grass. It all seems like
such an effort for them, but they’re determined and charismatic – I imagine
them alongside the Wizard in Oz as they bumble from burrow to burrow,
diminutive inspectors. In flight, amazingly, they can reach 55 mph by
manically flapping four hundred times a minute.
My grin is stretching outwards, from me to the cliffs, as if connecting to
each and every wing and beak. I even decide to start my new challenge of
talking to other people, interacting. Here, surrounded by this, it’s easier. I’m
in my natural habitat, and sharing it all with others feels so good.
Sunday, 27 May
I wake with a dry mouth and dry eyes from lack of sleep. I need to find the
excitement, the rush. I need to find the ability to move through the day,
without grumpiness and self-entitlement. Find the joy in the unknown.
Because maybe all of life is unknown and we are grappling in the dark, and
at least I have the comforts that so many have not. I have family. I have
warmth. I have so much love. It will be okay.
What a day it was yesterday – I cantered up the steps of the viewing
platform, the heat and the air mixing with the wind and birdsong in my
chest. We went to the pub afterwards for dinner, and watched the crimson
sky and the sun slink into the sea. We talked and raised our glasses, and
then I felt the tide going out and coming in and going out again when Mum
and Dad started talking, chose this moment to tell us we’d be moving.
Moving house. Moving county, landscape, people. Moving.
Mum said she feels we need to have a new start, a new school for Lorcan
and me. Dad wants to be closer to Belfast, for work opportunities, and to be
closer to Granny, his mum, who lives on her own now that Grandad has
passed. I nodded. I understood what they were saying. I understood but my
throat was burning as I breathed in the salty air. I pushed it all as far away
as it could go. Denial. Confusion. Mum’s and Dad’s eyes darted between us
and each other. Afterwards, they knew to leave me alone. But as we walked,
Mum stopped and hugged us all, and without speaking we made our way
towards the cottage and the eeriness of the unknown.
The electricity in my head is only just starting to fizzle out. I get out of
bed to a day of scorching sun. After breakfast, as we walk towards Rue
Point, there is an overwhelming stench of decomposing kelp and two dead
goats. It’s intense but doesn’t dull the glimmering ocean-island expanse.
I rest on a bank full of sea thistle and watch pipits flutter among the
rocks, scanning for more life with my binoculars. The sun is so strong I
have to squint to make out the shapes up ahead: grey seals sprawled over
rocks. Basking, a little scratching, hardly fidgeting. I feel envious. Not only
do they lie on rocks from dawn to dusk, but all it takes is one big heave to
plunge themselves into the murky depths to feed. From stillness to full
motion, no preparation, no in-between. I pick out individuals, compare
behaviour. They have such distinct personalities. In a few months they’ll
begin their breeding activity. For now, they’re resting while they can.
In 1914, grey seals became the first animal to be protected by
government legislation. But the Grey Seals Protection Act didn’t end the
conflict with the fishing industry, and killing continued.Thankfully, public
outcry in the late 1970s stopped further culls. But as the biologist Lizzie
Daly reported in her short film, Silent Slaughter, dead seals were found shot
on beaches near Scotland’s salmon farms in 2018, so it is still a
controversial issue.
I feel sick to think of blood running over these rocks. I shake out the
thoughts, turn my gaze outwards. I keep a fair distance from the seals and
find great satisfaction in watching the soap opera of flippers as they haul
up, protecting space, wriggling and nudging. A fantastic silent movie. I
relate to their need for personal space, and their antisocial behaviour. The
wind changes and the smell overwhelms me. Enough. Even this most
enthusiastic naturalist has to move on. I rise and walk towards some other
sparkly thing of interest.
The day passes among the cackling ravens and the beginnings of late-
spring wildflowers: clover, buttercup and sea campion. I lie on the grass and
watch the cumulus, bulbous against the blue. This weekend break in Rathlin
is so short, too short. My life seems to come in bursts, close together,
crowding in, diminishing freedom. I relish these moments of quiet and
solitude.
When dusk comes it is a bruised blackberry sky. The air is cool and
fragrant with hay, and before it gets too dark we start driving around the
island looking for the spot that Liam McFaul has told us about, all of us
listening intently for a sound that was once so common that it could be
heard in inner-city Dublin and every field and farm across the British and
Irish isles. We stop at the side of the road and wait. There is a stillness in
this place, and the silence is deafening. I hear my heartbeat and feel it
exploding out through my ears. The anticipation leaves a metallic taste in
my mouth. Dad is about to hit the start button on the engine when the
craking begins, clear and quaking as a ratchet. A corncrake. It sizzles
against the bleating of lambs and moaning of cows, another wild song
sacrificed to the agricultural soundscape.
The crops were once cut late, allowing the corncrake pair to breed and
raise young. This way of farming has been replaced with more intensive
silage-making through spring and summer. This different seasonal rhythm
conflicts with the birds – and the unthinkable happens, a life is cut short by
the blades. Imagine it. Every egg cracked. The future of the species in this
place, in any place, is broken. Gone. A human in the driving seat, of course.
These days, just the male calls out to the infinite skies. He crakes and
keens with no mate to return the sound. We sit in silence and listen, and
everyone inside the car is smiling.
I love my family, but in that moment their smiles make me want to
scream. How can they? I don’t share in the joy. A tear moves down my
cheek. I creep out of the car, close the door as quietly as I can and walk
towards the sound. Such a tiny patch of earth, and yet here it is, padding
among dry reeds.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper.
The bird ignores me, it keeps crexing, and it will keep crexing until the
season is over. Night after night. Relentless. I feel such loneliness and
despair watching it, listening in. A surge moves through me. I have to do
something. I have to speak out. Rise up.
The sky falls dark, I return to the car. The corncrake is still crexing at the
night.
Friday, 1 June
The school week is over and I’m still haunted. I sit on the swing watching
the adult garden birds to and fro at the feeders, to eat and dig around in the
earth before flying off to feed their young.
I have a weight on my tongue, and I’ve had it most the week. I haven’t
been able to speak. School is gearing up for exam time, yet again.
Apparently these are the ‘more important’ exams because they’ll have an
impact on which GCSEs I can choose. The exams are no problem to me; I
actually like sitting tests. I like the challenge, sort of, but they just seem to
roll around so quickly and we don’t learn enough new things in between.
It’s so frustrating and tiring. If I didn’t write, if I didn’t have a way to sort
through and filter the fluffiness, the haziness, the overwhelming noise that
constantly surrounds me, I think I would implode. All the pressures would
crush me. Yet, I’m here and it’s a Friday evening, and we’re going pond
dipping tomorrow.
I lean out of the bedroom window and watch intently as the harrying
shapes flit at two-minute intervals. Back and forth. Diligent parents. No
rest. It’s a joyful time. The fledglings will be out soon, and the garden will
be all action. A male bullfinch lands on the wall (we had one this morning
too). Its rotund, coral breast is flamboyant against the grey of the stone. It’s
an ungainly form, plopping down to pluck the seeds of the dandelion heads.
He repeats this a few more times and is joined by the dusky-pink-chested
female. They converse in bubble and squeak. The male’s silver back-
plumage comes so close, I could reach out and touch it. The tail flicks
closer still. I hold my breath, prepare myself, and at that exact moment a
lawnmower drones, our encounter sucked away.
Saturday, 2 June
I run through the long meadow, the heady scent catching on my clothes. I
stop at the great oak at Castle Archdale and rest my cheek on the bark. I feel
the aged, rough skin, the protective layer. I hear it breathing, our rhythms
intertwine. I close my eyes.
Three hundred years to grow, three hundred years living in fullness and
three hundred years to die. The thought of it makes me feel as small as the
ants scuttling up the skin of this mighty creature.
It has been supporting ants and hundreds of other species for nearly five
centuries. I sit on the grass with my back resting on the trunk and look up
into the canopy. The leaves shimmer in the breeze and my body lights up. A
chaffinch’s two-note beat starts the rest of its kin singing, and they all play
together in the branches. A private performance. I give it a moment and
leave before it is disturbed by some unwelcome racket in the distance. I feel
smug. I left when the timing was perfect, and skip back to the others at the
pond.
The sky looks daunting from here, a flourish of burgeoning clouds. They
seem to canon down from the sky without us noticing, rolling in from some
part of the blue we didn’t see before. The heavens open and close in about
two minutes, and then the flickers of light dart before our eyes: dragonflies,
their silken wings etched with the maps of the Carboniferous (their wings
spanned six feet when their ancestors flew with dinosaurs). They zoom still,
like turbo-boosted flecks of light, wings catching the light and showing us
glimpses of eons past.
I spy a common hawker engaged in aerial dogfights, striking out after
flies, catching them in a spindly cage of legs. Two red damselflies land on a
leaf and they contort in courtship to form a heart: the male clasps the female
behind her head, depositing. They fly off together, still attached as another
tries to interlope.
The rain stays away, so we fill the dipping tray and catch caddis-fly
larvae, pond skaters, ramshorn snails, whirligig beetles and a leech. They
squiggle, squirm and dart out and away from each other, squeezed together
in a pond-dipping pinball tray. Our five pairs of eyes, child and adult alike,
shine with delight. In this moment, each of us is connected with the
creatures on the little tray, and every other living thing that moves around
us in the late-evening sun.
Tuesday, 5 June
The garden has blossomed in the warmth of these late spring days. So much
light and sunshine, compensating for the heaving tiredness and exasperation
that comes, for me, at the end of the school year. Friendship has always
eluded me – what is it anyway? A collection of actions and words between
two people or more, people who grow and change anyway. It’s a good
thing, apparently. That’s what some people say. I don’t have any
experience, though. I mean, I play board games with a group at my school.
We play, we deconstruct the game. We don’t ‘talk’. What is there to say?
Sometimes, I feel that if I start, I might not shut up. That has happened, lots
of times. It doesn’t end well. Kids in my class, they walk around town
together, they might play football together or whatever other sport takes
their fancy. They don’t talk, though. They smirk and snigger at anyone who
is different. Unfortunately, for me, I’m different. Different from everyone in
my class. Different from most people in my school. But at breaktime today
I watched the pied wagtails fly in and out of the nest. How could I feel
lonely when there are such things? Wildlife is my refuge. When I’m sitting
and watching, grown-ups usually ask if I’m okay. Like it’s not okay just to
sit and process the world, to figure things out and watch other species go
about their day. Wildlife never disappoints like people can. Nature has a
purity to me, unaffected. I watch the wagtail fly out and in again, then step a
little closer. Peering in, I see that last week’s eggs are now chicks. Tiny
bright-yellow beaks, mouths opening and closing silently. This is the magic.
This bird, which dances and hops at everyone’s feet in the playground,
unnoticed by most. Its liveliness and clockwork tail, ticking constantly,
never touching the ground. It appears again, and the squawking starts in
earnest. I giggle inside, in case someone sees. I have to hold so much in,
phase so much out. It’s exhausting.
At home, I mooch around the garden and notice the first herb robert
flowers, pink wild bloom amongst the verdant. I note it down on my list of
firsts in the garden and feel good. I hear Dad come back from work, and
with him an injured bat. She’s the first of the year and we tend to it –
females only have one pup a year, such precious cargo. We feed it
mealworms and put water in a milk-bottle lid. The bat’s mouth is so small I
use one of Bláthnaid’s paintbrushes to put droplets on its tongue, hoping it
will be something like lapping dewdrops from a leaf or puddle. Dehydration
is the main killer of an injured bat, so it’s important to get it to drink. But as
they’re getting better they’ll chew up a mealworm like a piece of spaghetti.
They’re such innocuous and timid creatures, not worthy of the silly hype
that surrounds the movies and Hallowe’en. They’re insect-controllers: a
single pipistrelle eats 3,000 midges a night. Can you imagine the swarms
really ruining your camping holiday if we didn’t have healthy numbers of
bat populations? It’s unimaginable.
The bat sleeps in my room. They always do because it’s quiet away from
the hustle and bustle of the rest of the McAnulty family. I always sleep so
soundly when I have a bat staying in my room. I hear it scratching about in
the night and am never afraid, I am comforted.
Friday, 8 June
I trudge to school with a leaden heart: the bat didn’t make it through the
night, and we didn’t lose just one bat, we’ve lost every generation that
could have followed. Her injuries, caused by a cat, were too much and she
died, Dad thinks, from infection. I feel so heartbroken. I’ve finished all my
exams but that isn’t enough to lighten my spirits.
After school, Lorcan and I arrive home to squeals of delight from Mum
and Bláthnaid. ‘The fledglings are out! The fledglings are out!’ Mum roars
with all the childish delight that many of the kids I know have lost before
they’re eight or nine. The excitement is intoxicating, and it spreads into me
and I feel a little airy. We watch through the window as a just-emerged coal
tit, blue tit and sparrow rest on the branches of the pine trees, open-
mouthed, noisy and boisterous and splendiferous. Watching the discordant
gang, I realise that I won’t see them when they’re fully grown. Not if we
move house.
I’ve been in complete denial about moving house. Tomorrow, though,
we’re going house-hunting in County Down, in Castlewellan – a small town
six miles from our new school in Newcastle (which Mum and Dad say is
too expensive for us to live in). I’m not sure if I feel really annoyed about
the whole thing, or whether that tickle I sometimes get thinking about it is a
sign of the excitement there might be in starting over again. The
opportunity to reinvent myself.
Mum notices my mood shifting. I give her my best broad grin and a hug.
It’s not easy for any of us, but she and Dad will do most of the work – and
the worrying.
Every day, ever since I can remember, Mum has sat me down, sat us all
down, and explained every situation we’ve ever had to deal with. Whether
it was going to the park, to the cinema, to someone’s house, to a café. Every
time, all manner of things were delicately instructed. Social cues, meanings
of gestures, some handy answers if we didn’t know what to say. Pictures,
social stories, diagrams, cartoons. Many people accuse me of ‘not looking
autistic’. I have no idea what that means. I know lots of ‘autistics’ and we
all look different. We’re not some recognisable breed. We are human
beings. If we’re not out of the ordinary, it’s because we’re fighting to mask
our real selves. We’re holding back and holding in. It’s a lot of effort.
What’s a lot more effort, though, is the work Mum did and does still, so
light-heartedly. She tells us it’s because she knows. She knows the
excruciating pain and confusion of her own childhood. She wants our
experiences to be better than her own. That’s why she and Dad will be
doing the worrying about moving, and why Mum will be doing all the
planning and mind-mapping, and will somehow know how everything fits
together. I’m lucky, very lucky.
Saturday, 9 June
The day is glorious. It’s summer weather, I have a new Undertones T-shirt
(the ‘My Perfect Cousin’ one) and I feel good wearing it. I don’t know why
I love T-shirts with some part of me brandished on them. Maybe it’s
because it will either scare people away or start a conversation without me
having to do anything. Well, either way, that hasn’t happened yet!
We arrive at the first house for viewing and Mum hates it, I can tell. I
don’t like it either. Everything about it is squashed, though we can see the
Mourne Mountains from upstairs. The second house is much better but
needs a lot of work – the views are extraordinary. Neither of them lights a
fire in anyone’s belly, though, so that’s it for today, thankfully. And because
it’s still morning we’re going to explore the Castlewellan Forest Park, a
government-owned forest with native woods, conifer plantation and red
kites. It even has a lake and a mountain path. Lorcan and Bláthnaid have
already been but it’s a first for me. It’s so beautiful. I feel a swell of
anticipation – if we move here we could live beside a forest. We could be
near trees! We might not be crammed in by suburbia anymore. I could ride
my bike without worrying about cars.
You see, this is a big deal for us kids. We can’t access nature the way my
parents’ generation could. Our exposure to wildlife and wild places has
been robbed by modernity and ‘progress’. Our pathways for exploration
have been severed by development and roads and pollution. Seriously, you
take your life into your own hands if you choose to cycle anywhere in
Enniskillen. The roads are congested, busy and unfriendly, especially if,
like me, you want to stop and stare. We always have to travel to forest parks
or nature reserves for our dose, returning to the starkness of concrete and
manicured lawns. To think we could live beside a forest!
The thought keeps echoing and I feel euphoric, almost delirious. We all
feel it in the glow of the sun with swallows, house martins and swifts above
us, dancing everywhere. So many. I’ve never seen so many all at once. Not
all three together. It’s heady and intense.We’re all springing, bouncing off
one another with sideway glances and controlled smiles. Hoping and
holding it all in.
We find a Peace Maze in the park, created after the Good Friday
Agreement in 1998. It has 6,000 yew trees and was planted by 5,000 school
children and others from the nearby community. We race through it until we
come to a rope bridge. I stop and get out my binoculars: red kites, three of
them, wheeling and soaring, ascending, dropping right over our heads. It’s
staggering. We gawp at the sky and you can feel our family agreement
travelling through us, silently: this might be a good place to live.
Exhausted after the long drive and the day’s events, we head back to
Granny’s house in Warrenpoint, where we’re staying tonight. My Granny
Elsie has amazing views from her back garden. We can see Carlingford
Lough and the Mournes and the Cooley Mountains. Every day looks
different there, with subtle changes of colour or the way the clouds sit then
disperse on the mountains. Today, the sparrows are chattering and the sun is
still high. We decide we need another walk along the beach before we get
dinner.
We do a beach clean as we go, but not too much today, which gives us
plenty of time for exploring. Lorcan has the best find of the day: a cuttlefish
bone smoothed by the sea, silk-soft. The bones, which are not really bones
at all but a shell, are usually from the females who die a few weeks after
breeding, and the dead cephalopods’ skeletons are later washed up on the
beach. Lorcan’s find has the kind of piddock holes that we normally see in
soft rocks and clays, and there still seems to be life inside them so we carry
it back to the sea before it dries out. We find another, bone-dry, which we
bring back to Granny Elsie’s.
Later that night, in the darkness, sharing a room with Lorcan, we talk
about the move in hushed tones and excitement, until we both sink like
stones into sleep.
Saturday, 16 June
These glorious days have been rolling into one another until they are
indistinguishable. The heat is unbearable at times, and the garden is already
suffering. The grass is parched and I’m in my last week of school before the
summer holidays.
I’ve just found out that I’ve been invited to Scotland next week. Mum got
a text from Dr Eimear Rooney, who works for the Northern Ireland Raptor
Study Group. I’ve met Eimear a couple of times before, once during Hen
Harrier Day and again after a fundraising walk, so she knows how
passionate I am, especially about birds of prey. And now she’s invited Mum
and me on a mission with another hero of mine, the amazing Dave (he does
have a surname, but his work is sensitive so I don’t want to give it away)
who will be leading a satellite-tagging trip for goshawks.
Goshawks! After hearing the news, I sit myself down and flick through
the pages of a raptor field guide, stopping on Accipiter gentilis, the gentle
hawk. I’ve heard them before, cackling from the depth of conifers in Big
Dog Forest, shattering the silence, but I’ve never actually seen one before.
Soon I might be able to hold one! I can scarcely imagine it, never mind
believe it. I’m going to learn so much.
I reel myself back and remember that we’re making a pilgrimage to Big
Dog Forest today. It will be our last visit before we move in four weeks’
time. It’s all happened so fast but we’ve found a house. It seems nice. It has
rowan trees in the garden, and it’s right across the road from the forest park
that we explored last week. Although we’re all full of exhilaration this
morning, I can see the drawn expression of tiredness on Mum’s and Dad’s
faces. Mum has been sorting out our school, our educational statements,
GCSE choices, furniture removals, and all the while she’s still been
teaching Bláthnaid at home.
We head out happy but aren’t prepared for the emotional connection at
Big Dog. It’s here I saw my first hen harrier rise out of the trees, and where
we heard the goshawk’s call. It’s here that we’ve had picnics, conversations,
accidents, mishaps. This place has formed me. Soon we won’t have many
opportunities to come back and meander like we do, wandering lazily
through the forest for hours. The new forest park might one day cradle
memories too, but I feel treacherous for even thinking it.
Dad, Lorcan and Bláthnaid climb Little Dog while Mum and I sit beside
the lake in our spot to watch for the hen harriers. I get distracted by two red
admiral butterflies, circling each other in a ray of sun, chasing light,
dazzling us. I intuitively look up as a large bird – what can only be a raptor
– flies over our heads and into the sitka trees. It couldn’t be. It’s impossible!
Was it? I manage to shakily zoom in on the black-and-white wingspan, like
a pair of barn doors flapping in the wind. Mum and I shriek in disbelief. An
osprey! Mum quickly texts a picture to Eimear, and she confirms what we
already knew: this bird is too late to be a passage migrant, and its
mysterious appearance might be a sign. Could ospreys breed in Ireland once
more? We jump in the air but quickly gather ourselves as we wait a little
longer for the harriers. As minutes pass I start grappling. It’s not just that
the hen harriers don’t show, it’s more than that. We won’t be back here
anymore, monitoring this spot for hen harriers. I feel grief. A deep grief.
I’m lying on the ground looking up at the branches of an oak tree. Dappled
light is shining through the canopy, the leaves whisper ancient incantations.
This tree, in its living stage, rooted in sights and sounds that I’ll never
know, has witnessed extinctions and wars, loves and losses. I wish we could
translate the language of trees – hear their voices, know their stories. They
host such an astonishing amount of life – there are thousands of species
harbouring in and on and under this mighty giant. And I believe trees are
like us, or they inspire the better parts of human nature. If only we could be
connected in the way this oak tree is connected with its ecosystem.
I often imagine a canopy of leaves above my head, protecting me from the
world. More often than not, though, it doesn’t work. The humiliation builds
into despair. I get completely exhausted by the amount of energy spent
taking deep breaths, ignoring remarks, weathering punches. By solstice in
June I end up feeling like Scarecrow on the way to Oz, his straw-insides
hollowed out. The feeling of complete emptiness is eclipsed by confusion:
how can people be so cruel? People my age. My generation. How can they
hit, punch, hurl abuse? Who teaches kids to be cruel? Why mock and taunt?
Where does all this hate come from?
The pain has dulled though. They cannot hurt me. They don’t have power
over me, not anymore. I see only beauty in the world, at least I very much
try to. The life that surrounds us is so bewitching, so fascinating. Autism
makes me feel everything more intensely: I don’t have a joy filter. When you
are different, when you are joyful and exuberant, when you are riding the
crest of the wave of the everyday, a lot of people just don’t like it. They don’t
like me. But I don’t want to tone down my excitement. Why should I?
Everything is burgeoning below the oak tree, and Castle Archdale Forest
is full of life as I try to fight the emptiness. I’m looking forward to the end of
June when school ends and I’m safe again, at home with my family. Grades
are always near perfect but that’s the easy part; while everyone swaps
numbers and arranges to meet during the holiday, I’m the one standing
there gaping, bewildered, awkward. I want to belong, yet I hate the notion
of belonging. Instead, I spend the summer at home, with every good day
spent outside. There are always projects to do, on pollination, the Middle
Ages, Beowulf, poetry, music: Mum is determined to give us what she never
had when she was a girl. And we love it, especially the road trips. The
travelling. The movement. We’re never stagnant, unlike at school.
We weren’t always so mobile. When I was younger it was just easier if
there was nobody else around. I used to have major tantrums, which peaked
when I was about seven, and if we spent any time with other families –
other parents, other kids – it was hell.
The light is dazzling the ground below the oak tree. I watch it sparkle on
the grass as a memory surfaces, emerging in the warmth. It must have been
ten years ago now, in Belfast. It was a warm summer day like this one, and
we’ve just left the library on Ormeau Road with some friends. I see a
jackdaw feather on the ground, so I pick it up and give it to a girl standing
next to me, ‘my friend’. I had frequently confused her by my actions, and
this day was no exception: she looks at the feather with disgust, then her
mum grabs it and throws it away. ‘Horrible’, she says. ‘Dirty’.
I can still feel the heat rising inside me, like particle soup, exploding,
crashing. I couldn’t control the roar. I roared so loudly and for so long that
my brother Lorcan started to cry. Mum, I know, could see the hurt and
confusion in my eyes. But what could she do?
I still wonder what that moment must have been like for her, a mother
and a friend and a person on a street in Belfast. I remember how it felt
when she picked me up, so gently, without blame.
It wasn’t the first wild offering I’d tried to give someone but it was the
last. Unless they were family, I decided that nobody deserved anything as
beautiful as a feather. People just seemed to enjoy nature from a distance;
cherry blossom or autumn leaves were beautiful on trees, where they
belonged, but not so great when they fell all damp and leathery to the
ground, onto lawns or school playgrounds. Snails were an abomination.
Foxes were vermin, badgers dangerous. All these strange ideas spun round
me like a spider’s web until I was entombed. I was the pesky fly and they
were in control. Controlling wildlife, controlling me. But there is joy in the
things you love, a power that I’m starting to fight back with, to take back
control, fiercely and righteously. Lying below the oak, I can feel it surging
below the ground, the roots curling around me, a restless energy feeding me
strength.
Thursday, 21 June
The summer solstice starts at 3am. The night is heavy, the air clear and
silent as we pack the car and drive towards the ferry port in Belfast.
Teenagers are still revelling in their exam results, staggering, helping each
other home in the darkness. Mum and I are travelling with Dr Eimear
Rooney and Dr Kendrew Colhoun, two of the ornithological experts joining
us on our trip to Callender in Scotland. An expedition. An adventure.
Proper fieldwork, with goshawks! In the car, I have to suppress a giggle
because it all feels a bit like Michael Rosen’s We’re Going On A Bear Hunt.
We arrive at the ferry port in good time, with no hassles. When we travel
by plane there is always hassle: delayed flights, squashed seats. Such close
proximity to people is all very annoying to me. This is different. I settle
down in one of the comfy reclining chairs for a sleep as the grown-ups head
off for coffee. I know Mum won’t rest, and when I stir, there she is, reading,
while Eimear and Kendrew snooze alongside. She smiles at me. ‘I’m
enjoying the quiet,’ she says. ‘I never know quiet like this.’
I doze again and when Mum wakes me we’re close to shore. We go to
one of the viewing points to look at the gulls and see if we can spot
anything else. The clouds are lifting, blue is pushing through. I feel so good,
full of anticipation. But I can feel my excitement tipping into panic. I
wonder what the day will bring. Will I make a fool of myself? Will I be
useful? I hope I don’t drone on, mechanically reciting goshawk facts. And
what if I’m not physically able enough for any of the work? Mum senses
my quickening heart. She leans her shoulder towards mine and says she’s
worried too, but that it will all be okay, ‘We’re among kindreds.’ Bird
lovers. Compassionate people. She’s right, it will be just grand.
The drive is spectacular and strange: majestic seascapes on one side,
bland and luminous fields on the other, one after the other bereft of life, just
monoculture. It’s more industrial than it is at home, and the sight of it
makes me mournful. I wonder what life those green fields deny.
The adults all sound very chipper, chatting away, but I’m more pensive,
still contemplating what will lie ahead. I try to envision all the possibilities:
the habitat, the craft of looking for goshawks, how to walk or bog-hop the
forest floors. We’re with experts (and meeting more) who know everything,
but it doesn’t stop me joining imaginary dots and thinking methodically
about how I should talk to people. I rehearse the things I’ll say, how to be
polite, how to look engaged. My head whizzes – it’s hard work picking
through the details of the day before it happens. But I desperately want to
make a good impression.
My early fascination for raptors has grown into a passion to help protect
them. A few months ago, Mum and I bog-trotted and hiked our way through
the Cuilcagh Mountains, thirty miles of spectacular landscape, to raise
money for a satellite-tagging programme, the first of its kind in Northern
Ireland. The work is delicate, secretive, and involves raptors being tracked
and monitored so ecologists can learn about how the birds travel, where
they nest, their flight patterns and behaviour. Our trip to Scotland is all
about training for this, learning from the scientists in Callender. It is also
about seeing conservation in action, taking part.
Hunted to the brink of extinction by gamekeepers and egg collectors in
the 1800s, the few hundred goshawks now breeding in the UK are
descendants of bred falconry birds released into the wild. I imagine what
they’ll be like up close, what they’ll smell like, what they will feel like. I
can’t stop thinking about them. Goshawks and ospreys are still being
mercilessly killed by people. Shot. Poisoned. Trapped. That a human being
thinks and feels it’s okay to persecute such beautiful creatures is
implausible to me. I feel enraged.
As we drive, I watch gannets dive into the sea and a solitary buzzard
hunched on a fence post. Swallows are swooping, and I rejoice in them, as I
do every year. Although the car windows are closed, a warmth sweeps
through me because I can still hear their bubbling song in my head.
The clouds have all but disappeared. Wispy cirrus decorates the light
blue. At the half-way point we stop for coffee – I have a mocha, and when I
look down at the empty cup I realise it was a bad idea, it has nearly blown
my head off. I gulp down water from my bottle to compensate. Mum drinks
two coffees – years of night-owl studying have left her immune to caffeine.
We joke that she’d change from angel to demon without her morning
coffee, though I reckon she’d be just the same.
By the time we arrive at Dave’s house at around eleven, I’m all at once
full of nerves. I know we’ll get on because we both love birds of prey, but
I’ve only seen him on television, satellite-tagging golden eagles, and always
feel like this meeting new people. It doesn’t help that we’ve been travelling
for six hours and are running late. I breathe deeply. Mum pulls me back for
a few seconds, squeezes my hand before I go on.
Dave is larger than life, and his family are there, along with his teammate
Simon, who has smiling eyes and a very sharp wit. Dave talks about what
we’re going to do, and why we’re doing it. It’s such brave, important work,
and I feel incredibly privileged to be joining them. When Dave hands me a
satellite-tagging device, I’m amazed at how light it is, and that such a small
piece of technology can monitor the bird’s movements anywhere with a
network connection, until the solar batteries break down a few years from
now. Ideally, none of this would be necessary. The technology, the
conservation teams. The constant vigilance. The responsibility. The
heartbreak. But so long as raptors like goshawks, golden eagles, hen
harriers, buzzards and red kites are persecuted, this sort of human
intervention is necessary. Satellite tags can help build a picture of where the
birds travel, and where they disappear.
We continue on our way in Dave’s truck along with his dogs, Simon and
another member of the conservation team whom we pick up before reaching
the spruce and sitka plantation. It’s still late morning when we arrive. We
can’t drive any deeper into the plantation, so we get out and trek with the
equipment. The sun warms my skin. My ears pick out a robin, then
chaffinches.
It doesn’t take us long to find the first nest: guano marks the ground
below it and white feathers are stuck to fallen branches. Reverent whispers
travel between us as Simon and Dave delicately lay the tools out. A harness
is clipped on, arms and legs go rocketing expertly up the tree at an
astounding speed. I stand below and can make out the mewing sound of the
chicks above. There, in the distance, the mother starts calling. Her sounds
aren’t repetitive for now, nor is she swooping at us. The signs are all good,
but I hope she doesn’t get distressed.
I stare up to the nest, transfixed, stroking one of Dave’s dogs to calm my
nerves. I can see a bundle being carefully lowered in an orange bag, full of
promise. I inhale every scent and sound in the forest. Pine-dry earth. The
creaking branches. There are crossbills somewhere; I can hear them
chattering. Although I’ve never seen crossbills, I hold in my excitement
because the goshawk has arrived at ground level. I feel something turning
inside me. We catch hold of the rope at the bottom, unclip the bag from the
harness and lay the bundle onto the ground. The chick inside looks like an
autumn forest rolled in the first snows of winter. The plumage is still
downy, feathery constellations shine out all over it. Breathtaking. We are all
in awe. It stares at me, deeply. The searching blue eyes and powerful beak
are offset, almost amusingly, by its tufty crown of brown studded with stars.
Dave gives me the job of writing in the log book. It feels good being
useful, and I take great care to get all the information correct as the chick is
tenderly weighed, measured, ringed, tagged. It’s a technological ballet, not
surgical or invasive, and afterwards the chick sits on the ground as if it were
still in its nest, quite unfazed, its head bobbing. Then the process starts over
again: two more chicks are lowered in the orange bag. Weighed. Measured.
Ringed. Tagged. I find the whole operation mesmerising, this delicate
interaction between birds and people. The closeness of one species to
another doesn’t seem quite right somehow, and yet completely enchanting.
Perhaps I’m just not used to it.
Without realising, I start talking to the people around me – Simon, Dave,
Eimear and Kendrew. I feel at ease. This is so rare. They aren’t teasing or
confusing me. I ask questions which are given detailed, intelligent answers,
and it feels as if I’ve been dipped in a golden light. This is what I want to
do. This is what I want to be, surrounded by kindred spirits, doing useful
things with care, knowledge and clarity. Surely this is enough to quench my
overactive brain. Surely this would mean I’d be happy. My endless need for
facts and hunger for information don’t necessarily fill me with ease. This is
different, though. For here and now I am working and seeing and feeling,
and it is more than enough.
When we’re finished at the first nest, we are led to another site, first
through a field of willowherb buzzing and humming with life. I get
momentarily distracted by red admiral butterflies and carder bees. I inhale
the delicious scent of late afternoon. Moving onwards, we enter another
dense plantation, where the terrain is tougher, with higher and thinner trees.
It becomes clear that climbing up to the second nest is going to be much
trickier. Dave suggests we spread out around the base of the trunk, in case
the birds ‘jump’. I look up: the trees are like spindly witch’s fingers,
swaying as if casting spells. Suddenly, four birds jump and one of them is
heading right at me. My heart jumps. We scatter as they land, and I step
back as Eimear and Kendrew catch them and bring them safely to the
ringing station so it can begin again. Wing-measuring with a ruler.
Weighing a bird in a bag attached to a scale. Leg banding with a colour
band and a British Trust for Ornithology ring. Attaching the satellite tag
with ribbon, delicately on the back of the goshawk. It might sound robotic
and innocuous, but to me it’s miraculous and exciting.
I start to shiver while I’m watching the chicks. I realise I’ve not eaten
since morning, and we hadn’t had the time or foresight to remember a
packed lunch. Without food to burn, my body feels the cold seeping in. I
keep watching, listening, recording. It helps keep the hunger at bay. Dave
asks me to hold one of the birds, and as I bring it close to my chest its body
heat illuminates me. I start to fill with something visceral. This is who I am.
This is who we all could be. I am not like these birds but neither am I
separate from them. Perhaps it’s a feeling of love, or a longing. I don’t
know for certain. It is a rare feeling, a sensation that most of my life (full of
school and homework) doesn’t have the space for. The goshawk wriggles. I
settle it down and stare into its eyes again – as it grows older the baby-blue
will change, become a bright and deep amber. I start to imagine it as an
adult sailing through the trees, cutting through the air, wings tucked tight,
swerving at breakneck speed, building a nest for its young. Will I come
back to see it again? I hope this chick will survive.
Once the three birds are hoisted back into the tree and carefully returned
to the nest, we trek back to the truck and drive out of the plantation. On the
way to the hotel, we stop for supper: half-deranged and delirious from lack
of food, we are all so red-cheeked and merry that the people at other tables
in the restaurant probably think our group (all but me, of course) are drunk.
It’s the first time in a long time, probably ever, that my head doesn’t stay
awake to dissect the day. I just hit the pillow and sleep. Deep.
Friday, 22 June
I wake in the tiny hotel room, light slicing through the thin curtains. There
are rooks on the roof clattering above me, and the screeching song of swifts.
A good soundtrack to wake up to in a strange place. I feel refreshed and
ready for the excitement of what’s to come. More goshawk tagging.
Mum and I are staying in a different hotel from the others, so after a
shower and breakfast we meet up with Kendrew and Eimear to stock up
with lunch and snacks (there’s no way we’re making the same mistake
twice) and then to drive to Dave’s house. After a quick chat and a raucous
play in the garden with Dave’s dog, we set off for another adventure.
The day is so much hotter. Dragonflies are whizzing, grasshoppers are
trembling in the grass, and swallows are everywhere. We’re in a field
bordering another plantation, where the trees meet farmland, and Dave is
unpacking a mysterious black box – we’re all intrigued. It’s a drone, he
explains, which if used properly can become an amazing investigatory tool.
He sets the machine whirring, it ascends quietly, surges towards a stand of
trees, flying nimbly then hovering absolutely still: somewhere among
distant branches, a female osprey is sitting on her eggs. Mum and I are
captivated as much by the technology as the images of the bird that begin
flickering on a screen in front of us, a statuesque goshawk piercing us with
her eyes. I wonder what she makes of the drone, so quiet and seemingly
unobtrusive, only staying above the nest for a moment. The osprey lifts,
rearranging her body, revealing a clutch of three eggs. Just like that, a
revelation under feathers.
The drone has done its job, in and out in five minutes, astoundingly
effective. All too soon for me, the equipment is packed away and the osprey
is left in the leaves. It’s time for us to walk through the wall of sitka spruce
in search of more goshawks. Dave warns us that the forest is a quagmire,
and suggests that we kit up with our waterproofs and wellies. I feel the rush
of adrenaline pulsing in my legs as we navigate the terrain, bog-trot over
pools, branches and the bright-green sphagnum. Dave’s height means he
takes one step to our three, and in an effort to keep up, Mum hurries
forwards, ahead of the rest of us. I worry, because even though she can
stroll up mountains with ease, this is very different. Treacherous really.
These plantations, built on bog which ripples beneath your feet – only a
frequenter can understand its nooks and crannies.
I watch Dave stride over a particularly large bog pool, Mum behind,
readying herself to leap. I see the gap and know her legs won’t make it as
she steps in and disappears, hip first. Squelch. I feel embarrassed for her
and worried, too. Amazingly, she heaves herself out with one leg on the
bank, refusing Dave’s hand. I know she’s probably mortified as she
emerges, welly still attached, covered in moss and debris, but she just
smiles, empties the boot of bog water and keeps going.
Arriving at a clearing, we can see a female goshawk in the middle
distance, circling, calling out. I feel uncomfortable and start worrying that
our presence is upsetting her. She lands back at her nest, but rises again and
keeps circling, calling out. Dave and Simon conclude that it’s best we
retreat, respectfully. I take a moment to mentally photograph everything
before we go, knowing it’s probably the last goshawk we’ll see today – and
perhaps the last one we’ll see on this trip. I drink it all in. The logs on the
ground where we sat. The weird patch of nasturtium-bright orange against
the lush mossy branches. The way the light is pulsing through the trees.
Even that faint smell of slurry from a nearby field.
On the way back we check in on another nest site but find it empty, either
abandoned, fledged, or worse. We stand waiting and watching for a while
longer, but still nothing. We give up and walk out into the field to eat our
lunch in the heat of the day. We settle ourselves on the grass and Dave
suggests we go higher into the mountains to see some much rarer birds.
‘Would you like that?’ he asks.
I cannot contain my eagerness, but it means saying goodbye to Simon,
who drives off in his own truck. I shake his hand before he goes and feel
such gratitude – I’ve learnt so much from him in the field, and all this doing
is so different from being in a classroom.
As we drive off with Dave, I stare out at the splendid Trossachs, so
rugged and wooded – the sight of them reminds me of the Mourne
Mountains back home, and my thoughts quickly drift to our plans to move
house. Anxiety starts its growl. Unusually, though, I manage to blank it all
out. I concentrate hard instead on the beautiful valleys, on the hills rising,
the bordering forests filled with pools and streams. I wish my life was full
of days like this one. Perhaps it can be.
There are several gates to open and close as we pass through farmland,
twisting and turning onto higher ground, before we arrive at another secret
location. It’s early evening and we’re greeted by a swarm of midges as we
get out of the truck. I spy what might be some heath orchids, then some
common spotted ones, all flourishing alongside knapweed and covered with
hoverflies and bees. The sound of water rushes everywhere. The valley
sings, heaves and rests. All the expanse, after we’ve been closed in by
plantation forest, is like drawing in a tremendous breath before diving off a
waterfall. Freefalling headiness.
It’s a relief to follow a path – solid ground. We set up a scope and point
up to a steep hill, where there is a vein of solid rock that leads to an alcove.
Our excitement is crackling. Dave takes the drone out of his backpack and
sets it off again, towards the alcove. We watch, expectantly. The video
monitor moves towards the eyrie as the drone sweeps above the rocky face,
then hovers. There it is! The camera beams back a golden eagle chick in the
nest. What a sight! My laugh ricochets, and then we’re all smiling and
watching, enchanted. At this age, the parents will feed it every few days, so
the chances of seeing them were slim. But there it is: the next generation
sitting on the precipice of life and death. We sit below breathing in the
moment and feeling the enormity of it. I watch the sun dip behind the
valley, happiness flutters in my chest.
Saturday, 23 June
It was Granda who told me about the sounds of the scréachóg. He used to
hear them in the countryside as a young man, especially on the way back
from the pub at night. These days, the screeching of barn owls is rare in
Northern Ireland, as it is elsewhere in these Isles, which means I won’t
experience the sounds that Granda heard as a young lad. Modern farming
and housing developments have depleted roosting owl habitats, while the
use of rodenticides has poisoned populations – because barn owls feed on
rats, mice and voles. Unless rodenticide is banned completely, the future for
them will be bleak.
On our last day in the field, when we spied the female barn owl through
binoculars, alone and very underweight, we knew it was possible, in
desperate hunger, that she might have eaten her own chicks and was still
struggling for food. She was ringed, so Dave and the team will continue to
monitor her – we’re all hopeful she’ll breed successfully next year.
It was a sad, unsettling way to end these enchanting few days of our field
trip. But this is the reality. Many birds don’t make it. I’m so in awe of Dave
and all those that do this important work. They are my heroes, and I’m so
lucky to have had a tiny glimpse of what they do. The monitoring is the
exciting part, but there is also the burden of waiting for birds to nest and
breed, then the fallout and grief when the worst happens. This work must be
like riding a pendulum, moving quickly between joy, adrenalin, anguish,
anger.
I count buzzards and watch plummeting gannets as we drive to the ferry
port. When I sleep against the car window, I dream of blue goshawk eyes,
bright-yellow talons and the feel of downy feathers. I hold each memory
close. These are the things that will lighten the bad days to come. In three
weeks, we’ll be moving house – I must hang on to these moments, keep
them locked away but always living.
Wednesday, 27 June
The dry spell has continued, the temperatures are still rising. I try to
remember when it last rained – was it last month? One hot day melts into
another. Apparently it’s been the hottest June since 1940. The last days of
school are dragging. Other people seem to enjoy free time but it’s hell to
me. I enjoy daydreaming and thinking, letting my mind wander so it can
process things that need to be filed away or understood more. This is part of
how I function. But the chatting and the banter that seem to go hand in
hand, unless it’s about something I’m interested in, make me feel anxious. I
just don’t know how to play my part. Schools can be extremely bad places
to learn if you’re autistic. Filtering out noise can be impossible. Focusing
and concentrating require so much energy. I’m exhausted by 3 pm. Yet, I
must come home and do homework then set my alarm, and do it all again
the next day. I have to work so much harder than most other ‘typical’
students. But it has to be done because I want to be a scientist. I want to go
to university. The hoops must be jumped through. Apparently, it makes us
stronger. Better citizens. I’m not so sure. I think of all the technical
advances humankind has made over the last hundred years, yet the way
we’re educated has stayed more or less the same. With rows of bodies sat
rigidly behind desks. Sitting still. Putting up our hand to talk, unless it’s a
teacher-directed debate (quite rare in my experience). Yet, we accept it.
Why? Conformity. Obedience. Duty. And now that our house is starting to
fill up with boxes, the uneasiness that is usually left behind the moment I
step outside the school gates continues when I open my front door. The
mess. It’s chaos in here.
I escape to watch birds in the garden: there are fledglings everywhere,
alongside the exhausted, bedraggled adults. A rook hops along the hot roof,
then cleans its silver beak on the apex slates. One hop, two hop, three, stop.
Clean beak, repeat. One hop, two hop, three. In the distance, the wood
pigeon is calling out again. It sounds like the song in my head today: ‘I
don’t want to move, I don’t want to move.’ I can’t stop hearing the words
going over and over on repeat. ‘I don’t want to move.’
I flick the imaginary switch in my head so the wood pigeon sounds like a
wood pigeon, not me. And I keep those thoughts away by standing up and
walking around, pacing, then walking on to watch the tadpoles, which are
now froglets. They’re basking on the brick and twig bridges we made for
them (so they and other creatures can move in and out at will). I hope they
leave the rocky cauldron as frogs before we move away to County Down. I
lean closer, cast my shadow across the water by accident; the froglets
disappear in a blink.
It’s unbearably hot, so I take my book to the swing and pull the cover
across my face to hide the sun. It’s still too hot. I get up, walk around again,
sit again. So restless. Mum’s watering the raspberries at the side of the
house and loudly declares that they’re ready to eat. What a relief, something
to do! We all plunder in (Lorcan gets there first) and leave with stained
hands and lips, my restlessness broken for a few minutes.
When Lorcan and Bláthnaid drift back inside the house, I end up back on
the swing pushing myself gently. I start to wonder why life throws me such
curve balls, such as this moving-house-shaped curve ball. Is it to help me
grow into a ‘normal’ person? Perhaps, if life shakes things up enough, I’ll
get used to the mishaps and not worry about them so much. Really, deep
down, I know this is never going to happen. I might deal with things in a
more visibly ‘able’ way, but the inner torment will be the same.
After dinner, in the cool of the evening, we decide to head out as a family
for an evening walk. Dad drives us to Bellanaleck, a small village about
five miles outside Enniskillen, on our side of town. There are still traces of
heat in the late evening sun as it sets behind the trees. I watch swallows
skim the lake, picking midges off as they go.
I will miss the lakes here in Fermanagh – there is water in every
direction. You can’t travel anywhere without having water beside you.
Lorcan, Bláthnaid and Dad walk on, leaving Mum and me sitting quietly on
the jetty, dangling our legs as we watch the swallows part the water with
open beaks. After a while, she gets up and heads off to see if she can find
the others. I stay, lying down on my back to watch the sky. Dragonflies are
dark circlings above my head, darting like visible fragments of the evening
breeze. I turn on my belly and look at the ripples made by whirligig beetles
and wonder what bodies of water there are near our new home in County
Down. What ponds and lakes will I stare into there?
Sunday, 1 July
We have grasshoppers in the garden for the first time, springing up from the
grass onto the arms of the swing chair, crackling in the heat. I watch one
resting on the green metal and think about how amazing it is to have ears on
your abdomen, tucked under wings – it’s the tympanal membrane that
vibrates in response to sound waves, enabling them to hear other
grasshoppers singing. Each species sings in a different rhythm, so the
female can mate with the correct species. I love how evolution finds these
perfect systems and niches. I’ve never seen a grasshopper sit so still for this
long. I give it my undivided attention. It starts stridulating, rubbing its hind
legs against its wings, and the sound is loud so close up. I smile from ear to
ear at this magic, and try to follow as it catapults into the air.
The grass in our garden is crunchy and straw-brown, the flowers blazing
like a rainbow. The thought of leaving it all behind has been shadowing me
for weeks. All morning I’ve been struggling to keep the anxiety beast at
bay, and now I just can’t stop the liquid panic rising. My heartbeats are
manic. I can hardly breathe. This heat doesn’t help. I reach for the sides of
the seat and cling on, knuckles tightening. To stop it swinging, I plant my
feet abruptly on the ground and feel a crunch on my sole. I know straight
away it’s the sound of a grasshopper dying. I am disgusted. I don’t hear
myself scream as a red mist falls, but can see Mum and Dad and Lorcan
running outside towards me, almost in slow-motion, and I feel their arms
around me, grappling, while the boom boom boom in my head says
‘Whenever you try to do good things, bad stuff happens.’ I have to fight
back against the sweeping darkness. I know I must breathe. I know I can
squeeze the nearest hand. I can sense sunlight but can’t work out when I
shut my eyes or how long they’ve been closed. The voices around me are
meant to soothe, I know that. I know. But I’m submerged right now,
completely under, and still babbling about digging up all the plants in the
garden, ‘I want to take them with us.’ Someone answers, ‘We’ll try our
best’, which just isn’t good enough. I open my eyes and feel drained and
cold despite the heat of the day.
I stand and shuffle to the house where it suddenly hits me, there and then:
there’s no school tomorrow. There’s no school tomorrow or the next day, or
the one after that, and now I can see all the evenings and days ahead stretch
out without fear, without worry.
A wave hits me, and when I next exhale all the murkiness leaves and I
can breathe again. I’m at home now. I feel giddy but can almost see the new
feeling in the distance like the horizon, and when I think about the new
home it is a much lighter thought because it also means there will be new
places to explore, different landscapes, habitats, and all the new animals and
plants in these places mean there will be no need to dig up the garden.
What was I thinking?
I sit down on the step by the back door and notice the birdsong is less
robust and gutsy. It lacks urgency. The work of spring and early summer is
coming to an end. It happens, every year. I know this. The blackbird and all
the other birds will sing again just as loudly next year. I’ve known it since I
was a toddler, watching shadows from my parents bed. The singing stops
but always comes back. This realisation is close but still out of reach, too
far away to be real. At least the swifts are still screaming, and they will be
here for a good while yet. I breathe in the fragrances of dusk and notice
flitting shapes moving in the new darkness – the bats are starting to come
out to scoop up the midges. I close my eyes as a trickle of contentment
passes through me. I’m pleased with myself for holding on today, for not
letting the day end sour. I didn’t let it swallow me completely. So here I am,
enjoying the day into night, warm and still, bats replacing swifts in the
cooling air.
Monday, 2 July
I lie in way past the sunrise and early morning. The slant of the light
coming through the window suggests it’s past nine o’clock, at least. I sit up
to read a book for a while, savouring the luxury of being able to do so on a
Monday morning. But it’s not long before I hear the clatter of breakfast
dishes and the smell of warming bread and coffee. I rise to find Mum in the
kitchen, simultaneously reading and looking at a map spread out on the
table, a large cup of coffee in hand. She asks if we should go somewhere
new today, unexplored, ‘You know, because we’ll be leaving soon. It might
be a good idea to find another secret place.’ I look at her with daggers in my
eyes. Explore somewhere new? So we can regret leaving yet another place?
I feel the anger bubbling back but check myself, push these morning
thoughts in a different direction. I want to find new places, I remind myself.
With new smells, new trees to climb, with creatures I’ve yet to encounter.
The effort to shift my thoughts to a more positive place, the unpicking
needed, all the arguing with myself, must have taken a while because when
I finally snap back into the kitchen, Lorcan and Bláthnaid are at the table.
Bláthnaid is eating croissants while making something with string. Lorcan
is tapping a beat on the table and asking Mum to turn off Radio 4 because
all the talking is giving him a headache. But Mum wants to keep listening,
she insists. ‘Just five more minutes, then I’ll turn it off.’ If he stops beating
for five minutes, she tells him, half-jokingly, she won’t need to scream after
she turns the radio off. Lorcan stops, the radio babbles on, we start talking
about the day ahead.
It’s the first proper day of summer, but should we do nothing because
we’re all too tired? Or should we get a full day planned because it’s the
beginning of the holidays and there’s loads of time ahead to rest and recover
from school? (I’m so glad I live in Northern Ireland because we get July
and August off school.) I want to go out adventuring and be busy, so I’m
delighted with the consensus building. Then comes the inevitable debate
about where to go, which is also when Dad appears in the kitchen to a storm
of pleas and ‘I wants’ which ricochet off cereal packets and packing boxes,
crashing back into the centre of the table.
Deep down, I don’t really mind. I just feel unusually listless and want to
get out, wherever we go. Apparently, Lorcan chose last time and it’s my
choice, so I suggest Big Dog. Even though I always choose it, we haven’t
seen any hen harriers there this season. I sit back and wait for the protest,
and it comes like a hurricane from Lorcan, who wants to go wild
swimming. And then Bláthnaid agrees, wild swimming is the thing to do,
and I wait for the majority ruling to win. Strangely, though, it doesn’t.
Instead, Mum stands to grab a sheet of paper and starts writing a list of all
the places and all the things everyone wants to do before we move house.
‘Lorcan: wild swimming, Killykeeghan, kayaking, jetty jumping; Dara: Big
Dog, hen harriers, Cuilcagh Mountain; Bláthnaid: pond dipping,
Rossnowlagh Beach in Donegal, playing with friends at the park by the
leisure centre.’ Mum then assigns each of these activities a different day, so
everybody feels like they’ve been heard and can say goodbye to their
special places, and says that Dad and she can do the rest of the packing in
the evenings, so there’s time for full days. She makes it all sound so
reasonable, and although there is a little more rambunctious conversation,
we all agree that this is a great plan. Afterwards, things return to how we
were: Lorcan is beating again, Bláthnaid’s string is unravelling all over the
table, Mum has completely missed Woman’s Hour on the radio and breathes
deeply as she walks off with Dad to get things ready for Big Dog.
We have a simple system to stop us arguing about music in the car: we all
get a song each. And the cycle goes like this from youngest to oldest:
Bláthnaid (‘My Little Pony’) to Lorcan (either Kygo or Motorhead) to me
(punk), onto Mum (punk) and Dad (even more punk), which is great
because, in a way, I get three choices!
Our journeys around Fermanagh usually take half an hour, which means
two music cycles each – though Bláthnaid sometimes gets three, depending
on traffic. Today is one of those days, so when ‘My Little Pony’ comes
back on again Lorcan and I roll our eyes and try not to moan at the high-
pitched rubbish about everyone being winners and other saccharine
impossibilities. What a relief to arrive at Big Dog! We tumble out of the car
with such enthusiasm that we offer to carry something to the lake.
It’s around a fifteen-minute walk, through a sitka plantation then into a
piece of clear-felled forestry land with some newly planted trees. There are
a few dead trees still, tall wooden spikes, which provide raptors with
perching places. Although there are meadow pipits and stonechats flitting
about, spiralling and clacking, I sometimes dislike it here. Maybe it’s the
barren feel of it all. If there weren’t any hen harriers, I don’t know if I
would like it at all. In a few years, when the young saplings have grown
into monotonous forestry once again, it won’t be a suitable habitat for them
anymore – hen harriers prefer willow and hazel copses. Still, it’s gorgeous
when you reach the top of the hill and the two shining lakes beckon in the
distance – you just have to run to them, and we always do.
This time, about half-way down and mid-stretch, I stop because there are
four alarming shapes at the edge of the lake – people! I know this sounds
ludicrous, but here in Fermanagh we rarely see others, not in ‘our’ places –
and having to deal with other people always makes me panic.
I calm myself and walk slowly towards the picnic bench. The rest of my
family are still behind the hill so I sit behind a willow tree, hiding, catching
my breath. I don’t want to stare at the strangers; I distract myself by staring
into the lake. Dragonflies whizz and skim the water’s surface, their wings
propelling them like bejewelled helicopters.
When the rest of my family arrive, Lorcan declares that he wants to go
wild swimming here, right now, because he sees other people doing it. Mum
and Dad discuss what to do. I notice the four shapes are now getting out,
drying themselves and dressing, getting ready to leave. Maybe they feel the
same way as me. Or maybe there’s actually a relay of visitors like us,
seeking isolation and a dose of wilderness, but we just usually miss each
other and always assume we’re all alone, all the time. We nod to greet the
other family cordially, but as they disappear over the brow of the hill, wide
grins pass between us all – we’re by ourselves. Just how we like it.
The heat is like a furnace at the water’s edge. While Dad heads back to
the car to gather up towels and wetsuits (I’ve outgrown mine again, so I’ll
have to wear trunks), we make our way along the narrow grassy patch
around the lake and lay out our things before dipping our feet in the cool
water and eating our snacks. I lie back on the bank and look towards lines
of sitka trees. It was two years ago when a pair of male hen harriers shot out
of the trees like arrows, shouldering and sparkling against the purple
heather. Glinting, rising, dancing, tumbling. I wonder if I’ll ever see them
here again. They’ve been absent most of the season and the place seems
lifeless without them. I feel a dark, cold shadow creeping inside until a red
damselfly distracts me.
Dad reappears with the swimming gear. I take my time, but Lorcan and
Bláthnaid quickly change and rush in splashing. Perhaps they have freer
souls. They’re definitely more adventurous than me, reckless maybe. Or it
could be my age: I’m more self-conscious now I’m older, more aware of
myself. I still have vivid memories of being uninhibited like them, always
talking, explaining, feeling intense, bubbling excitement. This early teenage
phase in my life is quieter, more inward-looking, reticent, scarred by the
hurt of others.
Watching Lorcan and Bláthnaid in the water, I suddenly feel emboldened:
I want to join in. I undress quickly and plunge into the depths. The cold hits
me like an icy punch, I gasp, my skin tingles. I try and play with Bláthnaid
and Lorcan but it just isn’t working. I lie on my back instead and warm my
front, squinting in the sunlight. I feel changed. I’m still changing. I
submerge my head, turn around, take a deep breath and go under with my
eyes wide open. I’m struck by the darkness, my chest contracts. The lake
could be bottomless.
Doubt hounds me so much in life. If there’s even the minutest chance that
something might go wrong, that is still a number to me, a possibility. The
desire to enjoy immersion comes with the fear of being underwater. Maybe
others feel the same, I’ve just never asked them.
I come up for air, scramble to the edge, pull myself out. I lie back on the
warm grass and feel the light and brightness all around me.
The horse flies (we call them ‘cleggs’) are out in force, the commandos
of the fly kingdom. Silent strikers. They plague me, go for Mum and Dad
too. It’s a shame because they’re such beautiful creatures. Beautiful but
lethal. Eventually, we can’t take it anymore. We decide to head to a local
pub for dinner, so we can properly celebrate the first day of the summer
holidays together.
There haven’t been any hen harriers again today, but on our way back
down the hill at least the ravens fly with us, and a grey wagtail too, bobbing
among the rocks, almost invisible except for the flash of its lemon breast.
I’m in good spirits, feeling easy. I skip, forgetting I’m a teenager. I run and
laugh and shout, and we all run together and there it is, childhood, still
hanging on.
Friday, 6 July
Walking is becoming my absolute favourite thing to do. I once loved to lie
on the ground and wait for creatures to appear in front of me, but recently
I’ve been far too brooding to sit still. I need to move.
Out on a stroll, our family are always a motley bunch. We can never
control our excitement. We are gloriously uninhibited, and our progress is
constantly interrupted by a leaf rustle, a flash of feather or a trundling dor
beetle. It’s wonderful to be together but I can’t always phase out the chatter
and flailing arms, the sound of running feet and shrieking laughter. The
walks are lovely and maddening.
It’s stop and start at Florencecourt this morning, as always. Lorcan and
Bláthnaid are bounding but I’m finding it difficult to tune in. I slow down
and lower my head, concentrate energy into looking. It always amazes me
how Dad can talk, look and find all at once – I just can’t do that. It’s too
much for me. I’d miss everything if I did. Lorcan falls behind with me,
talking about his latest obsessions: video games (particularly the Skyrim
soundtrack) and Soviet Communism. Today I welcome the talking and the
distraction; it’s a relief not to be so intent on looking and noticing. I still
can’t ignore the gleaming things when they appear, but to drift along like
this also feels good.
Shaded by beech, birch and sycamore, we find it beautifully cool in the
woods. The diffused light casts a glow all around us. Lorcan moves on and I
settle into my stride, feeling the rhythm of my arms and legs start. I can
sense the beginnings of a little musical, building with every step, until
everything is part of the orchestra. The robins and blackbirds are strings.
Great, coal and blue tits are wind, the corvids brass. The shrill cry of a
buzzard is percussion. And they are all held together in time by the beat of
my feet as I feel myself rising up and filling out and then… A shriek of
discovery, not mine. It’s Bláthnaid. I turn to see the widest smile on her face
and a jay feather in her hand. Her whole being is shining. She’s the queen of
all feathery things and has been waiting for this moment for so long. She
puts it in her hair and skips with elation. Mum takes some pictures: the girl
and the jay feather in the late-afternoon light. We herd ourselves forwards
again, carrying the warmth of the skies and Bláthnaid’s find – when one of
us finds something special, it replenishes us all. The same can be said about
the way we share anguish, as we rediscover just a few moments later when
a scream knifes the air. ‘My feather!’
Bláthnaid’s eyes are wide and filled with tears. It’s gone. In her joy, the
feather has fallen away.
We start to retrace our steps, dropping onto hands and knees occasionally
to search the forest path. But the jewel is lost to us forever. I try to console
Bláthnaid – the pain is real and all-consuming. She cries. She begins her
meltdown – I know how it feels. I offer a piggyback home, scooping her up
before she’s had the chance to reply. The light bleeds from the sky as I sing
her songs of nonsense. I feel her head on my shoulder, body relaxing. We
keep going, keep pacing it out for ages judging by the twinge in my back,
keep walking on until the need to skip takes over Bláthnaid again.
She slides off towards Mum, who puts an arm around her. ‘You can have
my jay feather,’ Mum offers. ‘The one from Scotland. We can write a story
about what has happened with the photo I took.’ Bláthnaid nods up to Mum
and reaches for a hand.
Though we know the feather won’t be rediscovered, we keep searching
as we walk on the path, off the path, through the undergrowth, hoping for
some other jewel to replace what we’ve all lost. And suddenly, there it is, a
loud whirring crashing into the silence: a field cricket singing in the fading
light. We all stop to listen. From a distance, we must look like a strange
bunch, leaning towards a bramble bush. For us, though, the moment is holy.
A tiny, solitary creature has the power to lift our spirits. A human
catastrophe is transformed by a singing insect.
Saturday, 7 July
The bookshelves are empty. There are no photos or paintings on walls
anymore. Our voices echo in the kitchen – there is emptiness everywhere,
even at the height of the day’s bustle.
My bedroom in the old garage is filled with packing boxes so we don’t
have to confront them in the house. It’s not my room anymore. My posters
and certificates have been taken off the walls, the periodic table is rolled up
and my fossils, shells and skulls are all packed away with wings and
feathers and sea glass. The space is there, but I’m gone from it. I don’t want
to be there anymore. And I’ll have to get used to sharing a room with
Lorcan now, because it will continue when we move to the new house.
I’m trying not to think about how hellish this will be. Sharing space. I
will have to make allowances, we both will. We’ll have to work out ways
for us to compromise and have the peace and calm that we both need. It’s
not too bad at the moment, though. I enjoy the way the rooks gather on the
roof above the room, their patter waking me up with a different dance each
morning. There’s also a robin that sings right outside the window – new
palettes of sound.
We’re gathered in the kitchen for breakfast, playing a constellation
memory game, when Mum shouts ‘Red squirrel!’ Our chairs scrape the
kitchen floor simultaneously as we push ourselves up and rush to the
window. We don’t see anything, save a lone blue tit at the bird feeder. Then
an unfamiliar face breaks from the shadow of the trees, its small shape jerks
forwards on the grass, stopping watching leaping, stopping watching
leaping. There it is: a red squirrel. I stare in disbelief. To see it stray from
the woods into this suburban place. I reach for my camera because no one
will believe us. It’s there in plain sight, bounding through our wildflower
patch, scrambling up the trees and across the branches. An effortless
acrobatic display, its russet body and exuberant balancing tail, swinging
from tree to tree until it’s out of sight. When everyone else is gone, I am
still rooted to the floor.
Joy gives way to melancholy as I return to the echoes of the kitchen, the
emptiness. In less than two weeks this will no longer be my home. New
people will move in and they will not love it like we do. They just won’t.
I go out and immediately feel how much cooler the air is this morning. I
sit among the chattering fledglings and watch the hoverflies and bees
feeding on catmint, ox-eye daisy, cow parsley. I breathe in all the memories
and feel swollen with emotion. The greenfinches have just returned,
alongside a charm of goldfinches. Flames of our mini forest, flames in our
hearts. I feel an ache and lie down on the grass to watch the screeching
swifts. My body sinks. I want nothing more than to sink underground.
Tuesday, 10 July
None of us can bear to be in the house anymore – its spaces are roaring out
our intentions to belong elsewhere. It hurts, and it bangs against us as we
move around. The urgency to visit all our special places becomes more
intense. We have the list, we’re working through it, we’re running out of
days. This morning we’re off to Castle Caldwell Forest, carrying with us the
bundle of memories from our different trips there, of wild swimming and
caddis-fly larvae, chasing the call of a cuckoo, the newly emerged ringlet
butterfly with its wings still coiled as it warms in the sun then flies away
vibrating through the taller grasses.
It’s turning into a blistering day, but we’re cooled by a canopy of beech
as we walk. Not native to Ireland, these Castle Caldwell beeches were
introduced with other ‘exotic’ trees from the 1600s, during the Plantation of
Ulster. Back then, County Fermanagh had many ‘castles’ strategically
placed around Lough Erne – the Irish gentry were frightened of an invasion
by the increasingly Puritan English Parliament and Scottish Covenanters,
despite signs that everyone was starting to integrate. So these castles were
in fact fortifications, and this one at Caldwell, built by Francis
Blennerhassett of Norfolk, was originally known as Hassett’s Fort.
Although it was spared during the Irish Rebellion of 1641, while many
other fortifications were burnt and their residents murdered, it has since
decayed into the ruin we see here today.
Without going into history too much, let’s just say that the events of the
seventeenth century, between the native Irish and the new Scottish and
English settlers, set off a chain reaction of ethnic violence that spilled out
across the Irish Sea, sparking the English Civil War, prompting the
execution of King Charles I, and leading to the rise of Oliver Cromwell –
when Cromwell came to reconquer Ireland in 1648, the Irish nobles were
dispossessed and one-third of the population perished. The fault lines of this
devastation are still felt near the surface of our shifting, uncertain world. We
know all too well what little it takes to set us spiralling.
I try to imagine these ruins full of laughter and the sound of it being
wiped away by war. Now, it has fallen into the hands of nature: resident
cave spiders living in the cellar depths, roots growing and branches twisting
and cradling birds’ nests, red-squirrel dreys and bat roosts. I look up into
the canopy, squinting, and back down to the spreading pools of light on the
forest floor. From the castle walls comes the thrumming of bees, zipping
out like an electrical charge as they busy themselves between stone crevices
and the ivy flowers growing from the ruins.
We move on towards the wildflower meadow for our picnic. The
meadowsweet here is glistening and abundant. There are cowslips and
buttercups, too, glimpsed between the grasses like twinkling lights. I sit and
inhale the honeyed scent. In Fermanagh, the boulder clay is so hard to drain
and farm (thank goodness), which is why the meadowsweet thrives. In
Dad’s County Down – soon to be my County Down, too – the soil is so well
drained that next summer we’ll probably have to travel further to see
meadowsweet. For now, it’s right here in front of us, charging the heat of
the air with sweetness.
When a ringlet butterfly lands on my shirt, I close my eyes to feel the
flutter of its wings on my chest. My ears pick up more music: grasshopper
stridulations, rook caws, invertebrate murmurings, the quaking grass and
willowherb. A single song strikes out above the sound of everything else,
three notes that rise gustily. I sit up and open my eyes, start scanning the
trees with my binoculars. A lone chiffchaff is calling out at the top of a
beech tree, its chest swelling and feathers rustling with the effort.
I look down at my top, but the ringlet isn’t there anymore. It must have
flown away with my sudden movement. I close my eyes and lie down
again, wanting to feel the vibrations of all the creatures around me. I start to
imagine myself covered with grasshoppers, butterflies, beetles, damselflies
and hoverflies – they’re resting everywhere on my arms, chest, face, hair,
and because of their imaginary tickles on my skin, I laugh out loud until my
eyes open and my body lurches upright, shaking itself suddenly and
purposefully out of such a childish notion. And here it is again, my inner
war rumbling on.
I’m still a kid really, but there’s this piece of me that wants to be treated
like an adult, and to behave like an adult. It’s this ‘maturing’ self that for
some reason starts worrying about what others think, and likes to pop
bubbles and question the purity of these moments. But I’m in no mood for it
today. Instead, I resist and lie back down to my reveries. No one can see, so
who cares. No one can hear, no one can put me down or kick me in the face.
I’m safe down here with the buttercups and meadowsweet.
I hear Mum call out. Over an hour has passed since I was last with them,
apparently, so I make my way over to join the family. Passing the sentinel
willowherb standing around the edges of the field, I stop to look for
elephant hawkmoth caterpillars in the leaves, and watch the countless
meadow brown butterflies feed, criss-crossing the luminous pink flowers.
There’s no tension in my body at all today. I am fluid and free. I hold my
hand out and almost immediately a meadow brown lands. I am suspended
in the moment, feeling hot sun on my back and the smell of meadowsweet
filling my nostrils. I want this to be etched in me forever.
Friday, 13 July
Suburbia can feel claustrophobic. I don’t know whether it is the place itself,
the houses and roads and the people, or the views from the house. In
Fermanagh, we’re actually lucky because agriculture is still not as intense
as it is in the east, but beyond the mown verges and roundabouts, the far
away farmland we can see is all bright-green grass, square after square of it,
with wire fences (where the hedgerows used to be), white fertiliser tanks,
high-yield cattle, and some of it paid for by the state. All legal. All normal.
Totally acceptable. The views are good, yet when you think about what’s
inside the view, all the wildlife it squeezes out, what we can see from the
house begins to feel more grim and starts closing in. Which is why we seek
out wilder places – places that aren’t really wild, but feel like wilderness to
us.
Today is cloudy but more refreshing, and we’re leaving the farmland and
monotonous greens behind by heading south-west from Sligo Road, up
towards Marlbank Road where the limestone pavement rises from the
grassland, with orchids and ox-eye daisy along the verges. As we near the
entrance of Killykeeghan Nature Reserve, a ghostly shape glides past the
car window and every McAnulty head turns to the left. There’s a split-
second silence before the joyous whoops of realisation that a male hen
harrier just flew past, an unexpected messenger. I haven’t seen one all
summer yet there he goes, a talisman of delight, giver of silvery inner light.
The car fills with joy. We’re all smiling right up to our eyebrows, and still
glowing as we tumble out and run to follow its shape dip down into the
willow trees. We stop and spontaneously hug each other – that’s what we
McAnultys do. We can’t help it. We want to share our love and the joy we
feel in a moment like this, share it with each other, with the place we’re in.
Mum squeezes us a little tighter and I almost feel like it will all burst out,
all the grief I’ve been holding in, the darkness that keeps trying to pull me
under. This is why Killykeeghan is also known to us as ‘McAnulty chapel’.
It’s our place of peace and absolute joy.
Though we move off in different directions in search of more treasure,
the skeins that invisibly bind us are spider-silk strong. Straight away, I see a
dusty green-gold shape in the quaking grasses. Silently, stealthily, I move
towards it and rest on a nearby stone. I watch as it opens and closes its
veined wings, revealing ochre and night black. It’s a dark green fritillary
basking in the hazy sunshine. I watch it lift and glide effortlessly over the
grasses. I touch the spot it has just left behind, to glean its warmth. I wonder
if there are marsh fritillary butterflies here too, so I sit and wait for a little
while, until the restlessness arrives again. I have to stand and keep walking.
In the brightening day I spy ragwort covered in cinnabar moth
caterpillars – ragwort is a wildflower much reviled by farmers for its
toxicity and danger to cattle and horses, but it’s so beneficial for all
pollinating insects. If you look closely at ragwort during the summer
months you’re sure to see the flowers vibrating with life, especially with the
striped yellow-and-black caterpillars of the cinnabar moth, moving like
slow-motion accordions up the stems.
Above me, a lone buzzard is keening and I turn to watch its wingspan
fanning out and hovering over the field nearby. At my feet, the limestone
pavement is cut with grooves and runnels, smoothed by water and time. In
the gaps, alongside orchids and knapweed, devil’s bit scabious is growing.
The buzzard wheels over one of the luminous fields, that tedious green sea,
searching, searching – and then suddenly drops, mantling its prey. That
field just gave the buzzard food! I bow my head and smile: there is life in
these fields, too. Nature is constantly surprising. Only by looking can we
challenge our own prejudices, clearing them out and making way for
possibilities. The sun breaks from the clouds and a single beam spotlights
the buzzard with a halo. My skin flushes and tingles, I spontaneously jump
in the air.
Wednesday, 25 July
We have moved. It’s happened. We have moved county and house. I now
live in Castlewellan, County Down, in a small, modern housing estate. We
have native trees in the garden: rowan, ash, cherry and sycamore. Ivy
covers the trunks and the forest park is right across the road. The last few
days have been a whirlwind and now the darkness is so all-consuming, I
haven’t had the impetus to write. I hear the word ‘depression’ a lot but
don’t know if that’s what I’m feeling right now, or if this is a normal
reaction to the changes in my life. The effort of the everyday is like wading
through treacle. Anxiety has been spiralling, and the energy spent on the
battles is towering like the Mourne Mountains that now surround our home.
Last week, in between moving house, I did some filming with Chris
Packham for his nationwide BioBlitz, which was assessing and recording
the wildlife of fifty nature reserves across the UK. I filmed at Murlough
Beach, just a ten-minute car drive from our new house, and I was so excited
to explore a place that will become familiar. It was also the first time I’d
worked on a group project. I usually work alone, but instead I was one of
many young people presenting, which was easy really, because I was
talking about what I love, what I feel passionately about. The problems
started afterwards, when the comparisons and the comments started
flooding in on social media. That’s when my body started seething.
I really wasn’t expecting such intense feelings of doubt. The words they
used to congratulate or criticise me seemed to grow larger and larger on the
screen, until it suddenly dawned on me that I sought attention and
validation. This is something I hadn’t experienced before. For so many
years I’ve just done things that appeal to me, without thinking too much
about them, and usually when I do them I’m on my own or with my family,
isolated more or less from the eyes of the world – it isn’t that I’ve been in
my own bubble, just that not many people have looked in or cared about the
things I’m up to. But with this, because I was with other young people,
other activists and conservationists, I suddenly found myself obsessively
comparing my words, my actions, even my face, with others. It greatly
disturbed me.
If I’m doing this, then others must be, too. And where must all this
comparing end? Surely the purpose gets lost along the way, as do we. The
urgency of supporting collapsing ecosystems and protecting wildlife gets
overtaken by human narcissism and insecurity. All this obsessing on Twitter
last week has exacerbated my palpitations. There was nothing else to do
except pull the plug, switch off. And I’m still switched off. But my
enthusiasm and excitement are sullied. The words have hurt me, and I just
want to hurt myself because of the shame and guilt and confusion of it.
I’m nobody: I’ve often heard other people say that to me, usually through
clasped ears as I crouch on the ground. These words have been resonating
for years, and for the first time I’m the one saying them. You’re a nobody.
I do what I always do. What I must do. I went back to the dunes of
Murlough Bay, with Mum, Lorcan and Bláthnaid, to be with the waves and
the seals and the butterflies. I wandered along well-trodden paths listening
to a linnet call, the skylark songs and the crying gulls. With every footstep,
I tried to restore balance in my head, with my surroundings. This landscape
– mountains, coast, sea, sand, forest – will shape the rest of my teenage
years, and I must pay attention to it now, let my body be part of it.
Being autistic, I am a perfectionist and always looking for ways to prove
that I’m actually an imposter, a failure. There are plenty of other people out
there who fit the bill better than me, with large social-media followings, and
who say the right things and look the right way, who stand up for wildlife
and rage against climate change. I always believed I was standing up for
something, and was beginning to feel that my voice was being heard. In my
own way, I thought I was helping to fight for nature, by doing things
locally, at my school, and contributing to science by recording data and
taking part in protests. It isn’t in my personality to go around regurgitating
statistics about the horrors inflicted on the natural world, because they are
outside of my experience. It fills me with despair and all I want to do is
bury my head. Does that mean I’m weak? Am I too insipid? Does this mean
I don’t care? If it makes me switch off, why should others listen? I just
don’t fit in. I am not that sort of person, my body and mind just won’t let
me. I have to accept my limitations, or maybe my strengths. I’m hoping to
help find solutions, but right now I feel like part of the problem.
I’m so glad we got out of the house, escaped the unopened boxes. I
spotted a six-spot burnet moth on the devil’s bit scabious, its red-and-black
wings resting on purple, a clash of the Gothic with the royal. These tiny
wild things lit up the overcast day at Murlough Bay, and as I lay on the
sand, listening to the waves, I promised not to lose myself again. I must
stop thinking about taking my own life. I don’t want to imagine the world
without me. I vow never to let it go this far, to talk to my family if I start
holding on to the sadness.
The whole filming thing, the comparing, the validating, perhaps it’s
because there are deeper wounds. Maybe I use it all as an excuse. It’s
difficult to explain the weight the bullies have left over the years. I’m
marked by them. I don’t want to be. Without realising when it’s happening,
I am consumed, drawn under. It eats away my joy.
How can I overpower it?
How do I know they won’t hurt me again?
To play my part in fighting for the natural world, I must start by
smashing stereotypes. Every day I puff out an invisible black smoke,
cooling and purifying my heart, trying profoundly hard to become me
again. It will take time. I will have to be patient.
Wednesday, 1 August
I keep dreaming of Killykeeghan, the McAnulty ‘chapel’, back in County
Fermanagh. My hands are touching limestone pavement, my feet pounding
the earth. I wake up smelling the scent of Fermanagh but am not there.
I’m in my new room instead, and Lorcan is making music on his laptop,
drowning the sound of traffic rushing in the distance. I fight back the tears
that always arrive as I wake up these days. My brother notices that I’m
awake and runs over. ‘Pinch, punch, first day of the month,’ he says. I
growl back at him and hit out. He moves away muttering curses, confused
by my reaction. I lie there, my insides popping, as a black mist rolls in.
A silky sound breezes through the window, and with every note it blows
softly at the mist, puffing it away, until I can hear it clearly, almost hoarse,
familiar yet strange. I rise and pull back the curtains to see a male blackbird
hopping and pecking at the damp grass, extracting something delicious
before bouncing over to the hedge. The young bird pops out from the
undergrowth and the adult feeds it. I shift my body to watch more
comfortably – the youngster follows its parent in a dance with three parts.
Hop, peck the earth, feed, repeat. The young bird is incessant, vocalising its
hunger with notes that already have a similar rhythm to the adult’s.
We haven’t put up our bird feeders yet – I remember the floods of tears as
we took them down at our old house. The rain hadn’t quite started yet, but I
could smell it coming on the air. I was sitting in the garden because the
removal guys were in the house and I couldn’t bear being near them. I
tucked myself into the swing seat behind a low wall, where I pulled at the
grass and let woodlice trickle up my hands. I watched a garden spider spin a
thread of silk before scuttling behind a stone. I stood up slowly, looked at
the back door. I saw the handle pushing down, Mum appeared. She came
towards me and I can still feel her arms around me. I had been crying, and
let a little more out with her. But I couldn’t let it all out, there was just too
much. I controlled it instead. Then it was time to leave, although the house
wasn’t empty. The removal company had brought the wrong van so there
was still stuff everywhere. I could hear talk of what was going to happen
next, but really it was just babble.
I can’t really remember much else, and now we’re here in County Down
and Fermanagh feels so far away. I have to get on with my day, take each
one as it comes. I’m so glad it’s the school holidays. Imagine doing this and
moving schools. Think of all those new people I’d have to process.
Although, a strange thing has happened since we’ve arrived. There’s a boy
next door, a little younger than me, but he’s interested in all things and likes
to play board games. We’ve been sitting outside together, because it’s been
fine weather, and played cards and talked. I even showed him a colony of
ants traversing the patio slabs, a marching line carrying crumbs and
(amazingly) a small ground beetle. In that moment, I let my real self slip
out. I was so excited that my mask fell. But he didn’t laugh or look down at
me in a weird way. Instead, he hunkered low and we shared the moment.
The experience of looking with another person, somebody I don’t know that
well, was different. It was a little more shallow, if I’m honest. But the
strangest thing was having company. This sort of encounter hardly ever
happens to me. Afterwards, we carried on playing cards and chatting and I
felt a spark of easiness that still feels good.
Later in the evening, we take Rosie into the Castlewellan Forest Park for
a walk, which, amazingly, is fewer than three hundred steps away from our
front door – even fewer if you hop over the back fence. Rosie is our
constant companion on walks. A strong and silent guardian. She’s pretty
docile now, and obedient – a trait left over from her racing days, long
forgotten except when there’s a sudden noise like a gun crack or roaring car
engine. We call her the ‘autistic dog’ because she always wants to walk the
same route. If we’re not all together, or if Mum isn’t with us, Rosie stops
suddenly, digs her heels in and absolutely refuses to walk. I remember once
Dad phoning Mum while out on a lone walk, pleading for help because
Rosie wouldn’t budge. Mum had to go out with us in tow and physically
move her. Since then, it’s a standing joke that Mum is top dog. She-wolf.
The traffic is a little heavy on the road, but we escape it easily to enjoy
the late-evening air. We couldn’t do this at our old house, that’s for sure.
The busy road went on for miles before it reached Enniskillen and more
busyness.
The walk inside Castlewellan is easy and I’m chatting with Mum because
I’ve promised myself, and her, that I won’t hold things in to fester anymore.
First I tell her how much I’m missing our Fermanagh places, and that
everything here is so strange and different. ‘It smells different,’ I explain.
‘Not in a bad way, it just does. It sounds different, too, in a good way. There
are definitely more birds here, more insects.’
I then go on to tell her about Jude next door, my new friend. This makes
her smile and the dimples in her cheeks become more pronounced – this
happens when she’s tired. There are also shadows under her eyes, and
seeing them I want to find the beauty in everything and promise not to let
the bullies weigh me down. I have so much love around me. I want to do it
for her. I want to do it for myself. It’s all around me, beauty, so why should
it be hard?
Darkness comes in quick and it’s time to head for home. We turn around
at the lake and go back the way we came, the circular lake walk. Mum feels
uneasy walking in the dark, in a new place, so we pick up pace and walk
fast, breaking into a sprint across the road.
Nearing home, Mum grabs my arm and we stop in the falling darkness to
watch shadows fly from one side of the road to the other. Bats. I see their
flickers all around us more clearly than usual because the streetlight outside
the back of our house isn’t working. Mum and I laugh, and the excitement
bubbles up. We rush back to the house: I find the bat detector and pummel
through the kitchen and out the back door. In the garden more shapes
mobilise from the trees – the bat detector is forgotten as I watch this
origami take flight, just one shade brighter than the night, the bats’ nimble
wings making strange angles as they take to the air to feed. Each night we
are blessed with these flying mammals, eating for us, too.
I stay out when Mum heads back inside the house, watching the night
sky. I notice a new feeling, a buzzing in the air, a pulsation that makes me
look over to the buddleia growing in the garden. Something strange is
stirring. It’s whizzing with life and movement is palpitating in and around
it. When the light goes on in the kitchen and I’m joined by everyone –
Lorcan and Bláthnaid first, followed by Mum and Dad – I realise I must
have shouted but don’t remember doing it.
We watch in collective wonder as countless silver Y moths feast on the
purple blooms. Some rest, drunk with nectar, before refilling, whirling and
dancing in constant motion; even at rest their wings are quivering like
leaves in a storm. The feather-like scales, brown flecked with silver, are
shimmering with starry dust, protecting them from being eaten by our other
nocturnal neighbours. I find it fascinating that silver Y fur can confuse the
sonar readings of bats, and even when they are predated they can escape,
leaving the bat with a mouthful of undressed scales. And here we all are,
the McAnultys congregated in worship of these tiny migrants, perhaps the
second generation. Soon they, too, will make the journey to their birthplace,
silver stars crossing land and sea to North Africa.
The night crackles as the storm of flitting moves off, and even though the
moths didn’t make a sound, the night seems to have less noise without
them. We jump up and down and hug each other, a stream of tension
collectively leaking out and away and spreading. Let it go, let it all get
caught in the night and taken far away. We chat and look at the sky, now
empty of mammals, but still sparkling with Orion, Seven Sisters and The
Plough. This is us, standing here. All the best part of us, and another
moment etched in our memories, to be invited back and re-lived in
conversations for years to come. Remember that night, when fluttering stars
calmed a storm in all of us.
As I walk into the warmth of the house, for the first time I notice that
there are no boxes. Everything has a place. The shelves are filled with
books and paintings now cover the walls. This is our home, and like our
house in Fermanagh, it will always be our home, even if we move on,
because even if we flit again and again, this feeling will travel everywhere
with us.
I give one of my little excited jumps and move my hands and fingers
around with a happy yelp. Lorcan shouts out that I haven’t done that in
months.
‘Are you happy again?’ he asks.
‘Yes!’ I shout. I think I am. Am I?
Saturday, 4 August
No, as it turns out. A sense of being trapped returns as I wake up the next
morning, and it stays there all day through playing cards with Jude and
games of Gubs and Trivial Pursuit with the family, then on through eating
pizza when even swallowing it down feels painful.
I tell Mum, as promised, about the stifling fabric on top of me. The
invisible straightjacket. I just can’t break free. Trains of thought are hurtling
without meaning or direction. I’m stumbling from moment to moment, out
of balance, out of sync, aimless and haphazard. Battling. Always battling.
Mum thinks that a new place to explore might bring in the cavalry to
fight off these feelings. She also tells me that I need to hang on to grace and
gratitude. ‘Hold them close,’ she says. ‘And remember by writing down all
the good things in life.’ She’s right of course, but it takes every single
muscle to agree.
At last it’s announced that we’re all going out, despite protestations from
Bláthnaid who has quickly made a lot of new friends on our street and
wants to play out. Extra guilt for me, because the point of getting out is to
help Dara. Yet the frustration keeps building in the car. It’s all so incredibly
different from Fermanagh, and every car park in County Down is full.
There are people everywhere. We drive from place to place without success
and decide to go home again, but on the way back there’s a space at Bloody
Bridge – the name pays gruesome homage to the Protestants executed here
during the 1641 rebellion, driven on to the rocks when an exchange with
Catholic prisoners went horribly wrong.
Despite its grim history, or possibly because of it, the landscape here
takes on a strange beauty. I can feel a breeze lift from the sea and cool the
inshore heat, and with it the pummelling in my chest subsides as I listen for
the rhythm of the waves crashing against the rocks.
We walk down over the steep stile and along the narrow path, rocks and
sea on one side, dry heath on the other. We pause at a wider section and take
in the view. Three men are fishing on the rocks – I can’t help thinking what
an idiotic thing to do, but perhaps it’s just because more adrenaline is the
last thing I need right now.
I sit down on the Silurian hornfels – the roughness of these rocks is
softened by lichen and the thought that they’re over 400 million years old,
the result of colliding continents and marine life recovering from extinction.
I stare at the granite veins, tracing them with my fingers. The coolness of
the rock brings me comfort. Several wren chicks come skipping over the
rocks, drowning each other out with attention-grabbing chirps. They pause,
mouths open, their cries answered by diligent parents. I smile. I giggle.
They come even closer, uninhibited by my hunched stillness, such a loud
sound for a small bird. This is the music of our ancestors too, waves in one
ear, wren siblings in the other. A two-track stereo. The sound of natural
things that influence every other thing, whether we know it or not.
I go down towards the rockpools, where Bláthnaid and Lorcan have
already taken their shoes off and are hopping like the wrens between the
smooth Silurian crevices, stopping occasionally to crouch and look. I take
my shoes off to join them, feeling the chill of granite. We stare into pools
brimming with life. Hermit crabs scuttle between our submerged feet. I feel
the tickle of a goby and blenny as beadlet anemones wave their antennae,
scarlet with beads of blue around the inner edge. I touch one and a
stickiness grips my skin – they do have sting cells, called nematocysts, but
these can’t penetrate human skin. The antennae retract, and so do I. But I’m
firmly back inside the life I like to live, exploring, watching, learning. I start
opening up too, tentacles of my chatter reaching out to Dad, sharing facts
about the life we’re witnessing. It just feels so good.
As the light fades and the day starts cooling, we put our shoes and socks
back on. We turn back so that Bláthnaid still has time to play with her
friends when we get home. Excited about seeing them, she runs out ahead
but we all catch up when she stops and whoops. Her beady eyes have
caught something again, this time the emerald sheen of a green tiger beetle.
We pop it into a pot to watch it move for a little while, a glittering jewel,
ferocious predator of ants and caterpillars. After ogling, we release it and
watch as it javelins forwards, living up to its reputation of being one of the
world’s fastest insects. I bound up the steps, enjoying the weightlessness I
feel. Will tomorrow be the same?
Tuesday, 7 August
When we began, our feet trod lightly
Bare upon the earth, we were weightless
Travellers, allowing resurgence and
Regrowth, leaving enough.
Reverence.
Forging through millennia, we kept on
Adding endless weight, a leadening
Heaviness, leaving deep and lasting
Indentations, sending shockwaves.
Eliminating.
Cruelty, cavernous greed, no impediment,
Hands and feet became Industrial.
Monsters, spewing toxicity, sickening,
Deafening, echoing arrows.
Piercing.
Now thundering, trampling boundlessly.
Decimating pathways once bountiful.
We watch helplessly, numb and aching,
Our hollow, haunting cries in empty spaces.
Waiting.
Stop. I hear hope, purposely striding.
Footsteps pleading necessary action.
Great minds whirring, channelling change,
Demanding, respectfully our weight to
Lessen.
I want birdsong, abundant fluttering,
Humming, no more poison or destruction.
Growing for growth, it has to end.
Will my generation see the rightful
Rising?
Wednesday, 8 August
Every day we are exploring more of the forest park across the road from us,
relishing it in small sections, getting to know it like a friend. We have found
secret paths among the jays and rooks. We have climbed banks of leaf litter,
strayed far off pathways. I can feel my energy returning, and my appetite
too. I’ve not felt very hungry for days, but as the emptiness in my head is
filled with fresh sights and sounds, the emptiness in my belly needs filling
with food again.
The days are developing a pattern that we’ve probably all been craving.
The topsy-turvy of moving and acclimatising is passing. We’re settling into
the house and into picnics in the forest. On one of the days, the day before
yesterday, a hooded crow settled at my feet. It was a juvenile male, and I
could hear the scratchiness of his movements as he hopped over my leg. It
made me think of a line from The Secret Garden: ‘Much more surprising
things can happen to anyone, who, when a disagreeable or discouraged
thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and
push it out by putting in an agreeable, determinedly courageous one. Two
things cannot be in one place.’
Saturday, 11 August
We’re driving to Dungonnell Reservoir, Glenariff, in the Glens of Antrim
for an annual gathering of people from all over who care about hen harriers.
It’s a chance for us to express a shared outrage at the persecution of all birds
of prey, and to share our own experiences of seeing hen harriers.
I haven’t been around more than a small group of people for a while, and
I can feel huge knots tying up my insides. I start to fudge through it all with
a fake smile, mumbling a few words here and there, until I find Dr Rooney
(goshawk Eimear, as I like to call her). We talk about ospreys, red kites,
drones, birds in general, and all of it flows so easily that it lifts my mood.
Unfortunately, I can’t talk with her all day and we’re separated by others
who want to say hello.
At all these gatherings, you see, well-meaning people tell me how
inspirational I am. How my Tweets lift their day. How my blogs,
campaigning, talks are ‘just amazing’ or ‘fabulous’, and some even say how
I’m a ‘fantastic role model to young people’. I hate it all. Honestly, I feel
like an imposter. I don’t deserve any praise. It makes me feel really
uncomfortable because, well, why don’t they just help their children,
grandchildren, nieces or nephews to join in? To do the same. To take the
spotlight off me.
I smile, shake hands. The usual.
I feel terrible not being appreciative of their compliments, and just have
to walk away from everyone, down the grassy bank, towards the reservoir
where the ground is scorched – wildflowers hang on by a raggedy thread.
Dragonflies – hawkers – are hovering and darting over the boggy pools,
snatching prey from the air. Peacock butterflies are in abundance – I count
at least twelve that pepper the brown-green grass with fluttering colour and
multiple eyes.
Back at the gathering, things are winding down. There aren’t any talks
this year, for which I am grateful – my normal enthusiasm for speaking to
groups of people has completely vanished. Maybe it will return in time,
maybe not. The rest of the afternoon passes with no big catastrophes, and
we spot five buzzards on the way home. There were no hen harriers at the
reservoir, though. Nor any on the way home, and I wonder if I’ll ever see
one again this year.
Arriving home to a welcome committee of Bláthnaid’s friends is now a
normality. I loiter outside for a bit, then all of a sudden feel the urge to go
looking for some nature finds with the younger ones. There’s a communal
shrubbery across from our house, so I walk around it looking for a feather
or some herb robert to show them. I don’t want to bring out my own
specimens, just in case they slip from smaller fingers or wander off. I notice
a bloody feathered mass on the ground on the other side of the shrubbery.
Perfect!
I run to get some gloves and take apart the prize: a goldfinch wing. I
clean it off a little, quickly smooth down the feathers. I show the kids and
they look at me and the wing with a mixture of repulsion and curiosity. I put
it down for them to inspect, glorious and golden and black with silvery
flecks of fluff. I tell them to stroke it, to feel how soft it is. They don’t balk.
Their eyes shine. I impart a few facts, and as some of the kids know Irish I
tell them that goldfinches are called lasair choille, flame of the forest, and
ask if they know that a gathering of goldfinches is described as a ‘charm’.
They ask more questions, I get my book and show them some pictures of
garden birds. Who would’ve thought that looking under a shrubbery in a
housing estate could have brought such a moment? I glow in the dusk. The
streetlight is flickering, and a robin sings to it. I sit on the step, as the paths
and streets are now empty. I wonder if there is a glow around me still, or if
anyone can see it.
Monday, 13 August
The patio doors in the kitchen are wide open in the heat. I’m sat on the step
playing card games with Jude as the sound of birdsong rises above the
white noise of rushing traffic. We chat aimlessly about mythology and
animals and – just stuff. I’ve never been good at conversation. It’s an art I
don’t know the rules of. Either I just ramble on, spouting facts, not listening
to the other person, or else I silently gawp, muddled by how to take part.
It’s how it has always been. With Jude, though, it feels easy. There’s no
third person, no chiding, no group, no bullies. I’m cautious, though. It’s like
I’m waiting for the contempt to slip out, even accidentally. It doesn’t help
that Mum is in the kitchen making plans to visit our new school for next
week, which fills me with dread and anticipation all at once. The chance of
a new start comes with the thought that I won’t know anyone and haven’t
really met anyone outside of where our house is, except for Jude. I haven’t
really wanted to meet anyone else.
When he heads back to his house for lunch, a soft breeze picks up and
blows eyed wings to my feet: a floundering peacock butterfly. I rush to get
some sugar water, but it doesn’t respond. I hold it up to the sky on my
finger and it gives a little flutter. I pop it onto a buddleia flower, and it
drinks a little. I wait and watch but it falls onto the ground. The end of a
life.
I remember back to last August when Bláthnaid found a paper-thin, dusty
peacock on the road, its wings still beating. She carried it home on her chest
like a living brooch, and it stayed there all day as she spoke in gentle
whispers and made offerings of food and water. When the end came, she
placed it in her ‘box of things’, a memorial box of the once living. Although
everything in the box is dead, they are alive in Bláthnaid’s memory. She
loves them all.
Sitting on the patio step, thinking about Bláthnaid’s box, I feel a tear
slither down my cheek. There’s no living hierarchy in Bláthnaid’s eyes, and
therefore there is no living hierarchy in the world, not really. The smallest
creatures carry the same importance and demand as much attention and awe
as the ones that roam the savannah, fly through the skies or swing from
trees. To Bláthnaid, to me, they are all equal.
Tuesday, 14 August
The shrieks of playing children swivel from house to house. Through the
back window comes the intermittent rush of cars and lorries – it’s not
horrendous, though, because the trees in our garden shield us from the road.
It’s the first time I’ve lived in a house with mature native trees. The ivy-
coated trunks vibrate with life.
Before breakfast, I usually leave the sound of Lorcan tinkling on his
keyboard in our bedroom to see what’s happening at the bottom of the
garden, bursting with all sorts of wonderful things. And now that Dad has
slung a hammock between the cherry and rowan, it’s become part of my
morning routine to swing on it before the rush-hour traffic gets too much.
From it, I can watch a great tit feeding its young, flying off intermittently to
forage for caterpillars and spiders. The young are fluffed up at the moment,
and as dull as their exhausted parents. The feathers have a herringbone
pattern to them, delicate and wispy, a barely-there green. Their calls (four
shrill beeps) are answered quickly. It feels late for the baby season. It’s
typical for great tits to raise two broods, but having left our fledglings in
Fermanagh some time ago, I’m not sure whether these County Down birds
are on the first or second round of chicks. I need to tune in. It’ll take time,
but soon enough the seasons will tell me what I need to know. The turning
of the year will reveal its secrets.
I close my eyes and listen closer to the four-beat food call until it’s
drowned out by a robin, cascading more elaborately in the humid air. A
rustling of leaves alerts me to a young robin, so unlike its adult self – no red
breast, a tweed body with ten shades of brown and a speckled crown. It
hops to the right of me, in and out of the shrubs. On closer inspection, I can
see it has actually lost the baby-white at the edge of its mouth and its
feathers are sleeker, just starting to show hints of red. It hops with purpose
and flies up onto our bird feeder. Our first visitor! We’ve had the feeders up
for a week, but nothing until now. An adult swoops in with authority, the
young robin scampers away to the cypress hedge and is gone. The adult
puffs out its chest, poses and calls out beautifully, performing its act of
defiance.
We all have a place in this world, our small corner. And we must notice
it, tend to it with grace and compassion. Maybe this could be mine, this
little corner of County Down, where I can think thoughts, watch birds, and
swing gently on a hammock. But is this enough? Is noticing an act of
resistance, a rebellion? I don’t know but smile anyway because with each
passing day I am feeling lighter.
Thursday, 16 August
Our garden is thrumming with birds today: coal, blue and great tits,
blackbird, thrush, magpie, jackdaw, rook, all of them revelling on the grass,
pecking at the feeders. I could happily watch them all day but rain is
coming from the east, so we decide to go west to the coast at Murlough to
stay in the sunshine. I usually despise being in the sun. I find its light too
bright, its heat too hot, and it can make me feel as if there’s nowhere to
hide. But with this rain coming, I feel like being on the dunes at Murlough,
pressed by warmth and sea breezes.
The ancient dune system here is six thousand years old, fragile and
spectacular. The unusually high dunes were formed in the late thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries by massive storms, and were used by people in the
Middle Ages as rabbit warrens to provide them with meat and pelts.
Grazing rabbits encouraged the grassy heathland here, but when
myxomatosis first broke out in the 1950s, as it did in other parts of Ireland
and Britain, the population was almost wiped out. With fewer rabbits, sea
buckthorn and sycamore could grow, turning heath to scrubland. Now the
National Trust have intervened at Murlough, managing the landscape so it
reverts back to heath – and judging from the copious droppings, it looks
like the rabbits are thriving again, too.
The day is sparkling, the wind is shaking and shaping the clouds. Lorcan
and Bláthnaid want to swim, so I stroll along the beach with my binoculars.
Shapes out at sea stop me: a trinity of torpedoing gannets. They swoop,
wheel and suddenly drop, spiralling until the last second when they
transform into arrows before hitting the water. Swallows are overhead – I
can see their small bodies so clearly, weightless and constantly moving. I
feel myself rising with them.
My dark, knotted thoughts seem to be staying away at the moment. I feel
as free as the gannets and swallows. If they can live their lives, shouldn’t I
do the same? Can I breathe and live and also fight? The natural world –
which includes us – is facing such enormous challenges that it’s easy to
become overwhelmed and depressed. But we must fix them, and if I’m no
longer here, alive, I can’t be part of the solution. What is it that’s holding
me back? Anxiety? Depression? Autism? These are the shackles. Surely, I
can break free. Or at least I can accept these things as part of me. I have no
answers, but the lightness of these thoughts and these days weave my body
and mind with everything around me. The only thing that I am really bound
to is nature – as we all are.
Lorcan and Bláthnaid are running towards me, and I run to them and then
we run together, exultant. We slow down in unison, all feeling the same pull
of the large peculiar shells dotted around the beach. We each pick one up
and hold them outstretched, delicate porcelain in our hands. They look like
pale planets, pockmarked with symmetrical lines. I rattle mine, listening to
the whisper of sand and the past. These are sea potatoes – a type of sand-
burrowing sea urchin – with pocks that once held spines and a bleached
calcium carbonate shell that could so easily shatter on land or at sea. Each
one is a miracle. So many miracles washed up at once.
We start to collect them and Lorcan decides to name three of the best
specimens: ‘Sandy, Sam and Sandra’. He holds a conversation with them,
three sea potatoes, which makes us laugh so hard that tears well up and
almost flow, and we’re still laughing as a warm rain starts to fall on us.
Under dark skies, I feel completely unburdened of any doubts in my own
abilities to help our planet. Instead, I feel energised and ready. Sopping wet
and cold and with chattering teeth, still giggling madly, I feel hope pouring
in the rain. Being myself is enough.
Sunday, 19 August
The air today is sweet on the tongue. For days, I have been seeing
everything like Dorothy in Oz. I’m not quite sure what has happened.
Maybe the serotonin levels in my brain have miraculously reached a point
of equilibrium. Maybe talking to Mum and writing everything down have
helped. I just don’t know. The mist has gone and I can see all the fine
details.
This morning Dad is driving us all to Tollymore Forest, one of the first
public parks in Northern Ireland, opened in 1955. The rain has stopped, the
intense heat of previous weeks has gone. Before I get into the car, a funny
sensation prickles over me: there’s a small creature on my shoulder. It takes
me a few seconds to realise it’s a water boatman, unrecognisable and naked
out of water. I ask Dad for a positive identification and we all marvel at this
sumptuous creature. The oar-shaped hind legs are still outstretched, resting
on my bright-blue fleece as if it were the surface of a pond. If I hadn’t felt
it, we might have been deprived of a magical moment – and it is these,
tiniest of noticings, that bind all of us together. Nature’s miracles. The water
boatman starts warming its wings and flies off, disappears from sight, but
leaves us all with the gift of a conversation that lasts until we reach
Tollymore Forest.
There’s an overwhelming amount of people and noise in the car park
when we arrive, which reminds us why we’ve not visited here yet. This
onslaught on my senses fills me with dread. I try to push the thoughts aside,
distracting myself with the large route maps. We decide to walk the second-
longest ‘red’ trail, not too strenuous but hopefully less busy. As we enter the
forest, the crowds do begin to thin and birdsong overtakes the human
chatter.
Usually, our family walks are very slow but today we yomp purposefully
along the Shimna River, crossing Parnell Bridge, to leave the throng behind
us. A patch of gold catches my eye: a stagshorn fungus, tendrils of
basidiocarps snaking from the ground. It’s spongy to touch, slightly
squidgy. Beautiful in its radiance, a sun lamp on the forest floor. I rummage
around and find the piece of wood it’s growing from, covered by leaf litter
and surrounded by luminous moss. Its Latin genus, Calocera viscosa,
means ‘beautiful and waxy’ (Calocera) and ‘viscous/sticky’ (viscosa),
though it doesn’t feel that sticky right now because the rain the other day
was short-lived and it’s been dry ever since.
Tollymore began to be planted as an arboretum in 1752, with a mixture of
native trees and exotics like eucalyptus and monkey puzzle. The oak from
Tollymore was used to fit the interiors of White Star Liners, including
Titanic. We speed through it all, trekking up onto higher ground where I
stop to listen to a buzzard and catch a glimpse as it dips behind the trees.
Further on, I bend down to tie my bootlace and see in front of me
something discarded but utterly beautiful: a nest. I gently pick it up and turn
it around in my hands, enjoying how intricately woven it is, with twigs,
roots and moss, while the inside is still layered with hair and feathers. My
mind wanders through the possibilities of why the nest was on the ground:
had it been raided? Did the wind blow it down? Was it tossed from the tree
after the broods had fledged?
I carry the nest with me as we walk, in awe of the complexity, the craft.
A scuttling shape emerges: a spider, a garden cross, with the cross shape
and spots of white on its abdomen. I love spiders, especially the garden
cross and orb-weaver. They’re such a beguiling sight – it hurts me to think
how people so carelessly kill them or just remark on how disgusting they
are. When the garden cross scampers back into hiding, I put the nest back
onto the forest floor, even though I really want to keep it. It may no longer
be used by birds, but it has become a shelter for the spider, and possibly a
source of food. A pocket-sized habitat that I don’t want to disturb.
I’m quite a long way behind the others, so I rush on to catch up, and even
skip a little because I feel so lucky to be a part of my family. By the time we
reach Hoare’s Bridge and the trickling of the Spinkwee River, we’ve
walked quite high and can overlook the jackdaws and rooks congregating in
the trees below, a parliamentary meeting that probably has more interesting
ideas than our human governments seem to have.
The more I read or hear about politics, the stronger my reaction is to
focus on nature and wildlife. Just thinking about our situation here in
Northern Ireland gives way to intense anger and frustration – the two main
parties sticking either side of an old divide. Do I have to be inside Stormont
to make a difference? Is it all about Westminster or the United Nations? Can
I fight for change from the outside?
I listen to the crows again, and allow their sounds to go deep, to that
place where memories are stored. I can hear the buzzard mewing too, but
can’t see it. I close my eyes instead, to rest a little, and so I can listen to the
gentle rush of the river. A blackbird sings – maybe its last song of summer.
I carry on, running downhill until Altavaddy Bridge, where the Spinkwee
converges with the Shimna. The water gushes over rocks. The banks are
sprouting with damp tree roots that almost touch the river. Lorcan and
Bláthnaid have taken their shoes and socks off already and wade through
the water. I sit on the edge where a dor beetle ambles onto my trouser leg –
I notice the bluish sheen of its legs and the gleam of its coal-black elytra. I
lift it up and turn it over with my thumb on the palm of my hand. These
luminous and exquisite creatures are the true cleaners of our countryside,
consuming their own weight in dung every day. They also have amazing
mating habits: after sunset, the pair find a suitable cowpat where the female
burrows to create chambers; the male works behind her, clearing and
depositing another parcel of dung in every chamber before the female lays
an egg in each – when the egg hatches, there’s a ready meal waiting for
them. Life cycles like this make me so happy! The beauty and logic of it all.
I’m still lost in dor-beetle mating rituals when I hear shouts from
Bláthnaid, who has managed to slip on a rock and get herself soaking wet.
Lorcan is sopping too – he obviously favoured a dip with his clothes on.
Unprepared, Mum gives them her jumper and the two of them squelch
together back to the car park.
Wednesday, 29 August
You know it’s blackberry time when Seamus Heaney’s words start to echo
around our house:
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking
We’ve spent the morning gathering from the roadsides and in the forest.
Tasting my first blackberry always sends a little spark deep inside. A
glowing sweet fire. As the juice dribbles down my chin, I feel that freedom
again and ride the electrically charged thought that all things, good or bad,
have an ending. And by the time I’ve had a handful, I even feel a bit better
about the way I completely blanked the principal when we visited my new
school yesterday.
He had started talking about being a punk in the 1970s because he saw I
was wearing an Undertones T-shirt. I should’ve been overjoyed to have
something in common with him. Instead, my brain didn’t play along. My
head throbbed. My eyes and ears couldn’t process anything. My stomach
was churning and there was a foul taste in my mouth. But thankfully it
started to fade as we walked around the school. I probably relaxed because
the vice principal seemed to have a sixth sense – she gave Lorcan and I
plenty of time to take in our surroundings. But the stress of starting again
was visceral. Maybe it was made stranger because the school is a mirror
image of my old school: they were built in the 1990s with what must have
been identical architectural plans. There’s no logic I can apply to overcome
these waves of feeling. My senses, my body, my system, just won’t let me.
Returning home from the forest, I take to my favourite place: the
hammock. The air is cooler now, the garden quieter (well, besides the
traffic). The shadows are lengthening over the mountains where we’ve seen
red kites wheeling high on thermals. The wings of our bird neighbours are
still beating, and the swallows are still here, growing in number by day,
feeding together, bubbling with the imminence of longhaul flight. Some
swallow pairs may have had a third brood late in the summer, and even
these fledglings are ready to join the adults in making the treacherous
journey to southern Africa, via France, eastern Spain, Morocco, and either
over the Sahara, around the west coast of Africa, or east down the Nile
valley. This incredible migration will never cease to amaze and inspire me –
that these small powerhouses can fly 200 miles every day for six weeks, in
a race against starvation and exhaustion. When I start to worry about school
and all of the newness – of people, of classrooms – I think about the
resilience and determination of swallows.
There is nothing quite like the gradual slanting of light, the fiery beauty of
the landscape. Although life is in astate of slow withering and soft lullaby,
there is a bursting from the ground, connecting under our feet, mycelium
strands interweaving and bearing fruit from darkness. Fungi. Fruits of the
forest. Everyday we walk over these invisible formings, unaware of their
necessity for life on earth. A hidden wonder web of connection.
The smell of the earth in autumn is so different, intoxicating. A massive
exhaling of compounds that swings my senses. And while the land breathes
out, I breathe in deeply, covering the incoming dread of the newness to
come. New school, new people, new navigations. Grief, although not as
raw, still pulses.
These past months have been tumultuous, and I must not think about the
waste, the days lost. Instead, I focus on the rising. I am rising from the
darkness too, and feel the light and the warmth of the soil as I lie on the
forest floor below a massive birch tree.
I’m surrounded by five or six fly agaric mushrooms. Like them, I have
burst open. I feel more resilient, more powerful. The years of cruel taunts,
beatings, exclusion, isolation, helplessness: all the potential for hurt has
been eclipsed by meaning and purpose. My life now is all about that. I can’t
just love the natural world. I have to raise my voice even louder to help it.
It’s my duty, the duty of all of us, to support and protect nature. Our life
support system, our interconnectedness, our interdependence.
But is writing enough? It doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Not nearly enough.
I need to think of other ways of rising.
The leaves of the birch tree diffuse the light. The fly agarics are red
jewels spotted with white flakes, flaming bright and triggering in me
flashes, evocations: I’m four years old again, hunkered down, facing a man
with long white hair and glasses – I have just started wearing glasses, too.
He has a wooden box filled with fruits of the forest; each different fungus is
fascinating, alluring, utterly mesmerising. I feel it, you see, the connection.
Even back then, so I listened intently and relentlessly asked the man
questions. His kindness isn’t all remembered, but an impression of kindness
was imprinted in me, and the spark was lit. A need for learning was
burning.
I don’t remember more of that day, if only I did. What did it smell like,
what sounds did I hear? What did I really say? Mum and Dad have photos
of me: tiny and serious and spectacled, and obviously interested enough to
shake out my money box and go accompanied to Waterstones, where I laid
out the coins on the counter for my first field guide, Roger Phillips’
Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Britain and Europe. Mum bought me
picture books, too – my favourite was The Mushroom Hunt by Simon
Frazer, with its glorious illustrations and wise words. Both guide and
picture book are now worn, dog-eared, still loved.
My body feels light as I roll over onto my stomach and stare at the
agarics until they blur. Regarded by shamans as holy mushrooms, they were
given as gifts on the winter solstice, perhaps because they are
hallucinogenic (although deaths from this particular Amanita are rare, I
wouldn’t chance it). They are so beautiful, though. The quintessential
fairytale toadstool. Some are rounded and small, just starting to blush.
Others are more like gnome platters, bright and peeling. I touch the spongy
surface, slightly damp and sticky. I smell it: only a faint odour of sweetness.
I swivel around again and think of the season ahead. New beginnings in
school – a school protected by mountains to the back and side, facing the
sea on the other side. A new horizon. I vow to stand proud. I have a
mission. I have a journey to make, doubtless with obstacles, but they won’t
stop me, just as you can’t stop fruits bursting from tree and soil. I can battle
quietly or loudly, with humility. I can be rooted, to ideas, plans, hope. I can
grow. Sapling stage is ending, it is time to grow thicker branches and
mature.
Sunday, 2 September
I’ve taken to walking to the forest park most mornings. There’s a spot I’ve
found just behind the Peace Maze, on a patch of grass off the main path,
where I can perch unseen facing the frothing willowherb, its feathered seeds
blowing away in the breeze. From here I gaze at the mountains on the
horizon, or watch the rabbits run in and out of the warrens – sometimes they
come right up to my stillness, about twenty of them, all twitching noses and
scampering shapes.
The horizon at my old house at County Fermanagh was Cuilcagh
Mountain, as flat and inviting as an outstretched palm. A plateau of
protection. Now we share space with the Mourne Mountains, rearing up
with textured undulations, valleys and peaks, our Narnia. I long to run into
the crevices and along the jagged edges. As time goes on, the Mournes and
I will inhabit each other.
Here, the traffic doesn’t purr as loudly as it does in our garden. I lie back
and watch the jackdaws as the heat of the day starts to rise. The birds cavort
playfully, their space-invader sound effects reverberating against the forest
floor. I feel the ground move, as I often do. I feel all the movement down
below, all that life. And it’s in me, too. As I head back to the house, pausing
by a huge patch of willowherb, I can hear the grasshoppers still singing.
The house is busy. School starts next Tuesday and uniforms for Lorcan
and me hang on the kitchen door, like a taunt. The emptiness of the
garments, hanging loosely, waiting for me to fill them; I wonder if they will
get torn by others. I move stiffly towards the throng in the kitchen, making
sure not to brush any nearer before I need to. The map is on the table, and
there is a strong smell of coffee. Bláthnaid is pressing dandelions into a
notebook, Lorcan is reading an Usborne history encyclopaedia. He’s still
fascinated with communism and the Cold War – hammer and sickles drawn
on paper surround him.
When we (by ‘we’ I mean autistics) get interested in something, most
people would call it an ‘obsession’. It really is not an obsession, though. It’s
not dangerous, quite the opposite. It’s liberating and essential to the
workings of my brain. It calms and soothes: gathering information, finding
patterns, sequencing and sorting out is a muscle I must flex. I prefer the
word passion. Yes! And it’s absolutely essential that we get to follow our
passions.
Our feet are itchy, the desire to head out into the day is constant. The
warmth beckons, so we head to Crocknafeola wood for a good walk – not a
mountain walk because we’ve things to do later, and mountains are for the
stopping of time; you need hours. The peaked guardians are everywhere,
though, and I can feel Slieve Muck on my back as I look towards the path
ahead, like a lonely giant that somehow seems apart from the other peaks.
We pause in the car park to hoard blackberries, stuffing ourselves among
the coconut-scented gorse. We follow a dirt path and the call of a stonechat
uphill, keeping to the edge of the forest. It’s mostly plantation here, but
there are patches of willow and hazel breaking through.
As we move away from the gaze of Slieve Muck, I can feel my feet
treading more lightly and my heart rate start to slow – my anxiety about
school flowing into the earth. Then I feel the sizzling anticipation that
something is waiting for me, and as I glance down there’s an orange
fluttering, a gauzy light sprinkled over amber wings: small copper
butterflies, about ten of them, communing. Some are ragged, others pristine.
They flit and rest on each other, those with worn wings and those with still
velvety and bright wings, journeys beginning and ending, all as one.
I reluctantly leave the glow of the butterflies behind as we hike up and
onwards around the forest, where clouds of midges compete for sunlight in
the cool breath of the trees. The walk becomes monotonous but the light
remains extraordinary, turning the pathways golden either side of plantation
darkness. Dragonflies zoom overhead. The rattle of jays casts a spell. I
continue to feel light-footed until we reach a section of pathway which is
flooded – either we’ll have to make our way round it by walking up a bank
tangled in brambles and gorse, or go straight through, wading. Lorcan and
Bláthnaid are already taking off their socks and shoes, laughing, almost
hysterically excited. Dad realises he’ll have to do the same. Rosie can’t
manage it – greyhounds, especially if they’ve had a tough beginning in the
racing trade, can age very quickly. She daintily and distastefully shakes her
paws if they get wet – maybe we’ve pampered her for the last five years,
but she’s not an adventurous dog. Mum asks if we need help and receives
shoes and socks gracefully then turns down the opportunity to wade herself,
and sets off through the dense growth of the verge. The sensory feeling of
mud should be wonderful for a young naturalist, but it’s something I’m still
learning to enjoy – I don’t know why the squelching is so excruciating. I
choose the hard-earth option, even though scratches and cuts are inevitable.
I’m distracted easily and find a bilberry bush with five seven-spot
ladybirds basking in the sun: one opens its cloak and, with humming wings,
flies the short distance to my outstretched finger. It rests there for some
seconds before ambling down onto my wrist, where I feel the tickle of its
legs. It flies away when a beam of sunlight lands on its body. I stay still,
watching the remaining beetles, the way the shadows rise and fall, the
brightness of the red changing with the clouds.
The path is flooded for some distance on and off – there’s been a lot of
tree felling recently, which leaves me wondering if that’s the reason. The
pools are peaty, some have rainbow slicks. Bláthnaid is leading the way
with water up to her calves, clutching her puffin teddy from Rathlin Island
to her chest. Dad and Lorcan follow with the ever-reluctant Rosie. Lorcan is
the official Rosie whisperer. Their bond is the strongest. You can see it in
the way he usually coaxes her through the puddles. But today, at the end of
the pathway, although the humans are in good spirits, poor Rosie is shaking
out her paws in disgust, looking very put out by it all. Dad’s knees are wet
too, because he decided to lean right down to look at a whizzing great
diving beetle. I remember the time one flew into our bird bath in
Fermanagh, and how we marvelled at this opportunist with an air bubble on
its back, carrying its own oxygen supply wherever it went, a predator on the
prowl, eating everything and anything. We turn the corner and emerge out
of the forest, facing Slieve Muck, back where we started. We wipe our feet
as much as possible before making the short descent back down to the car
park. It’s so hot, now the sun is at its highest, and there’s still so much of
the day left.
On the way home from Crocknafeola we stop on the bridge over
Whitewater, just outside Kilkeel, which is a particularly lovely stretch, fast-
flowing with a rocky weir and the highest rocks covered in moss and
dripping with river spray. The salmon here wiggle and jump over the weir
before resting in the pools above and travelling on and up. Hawthorn and
alder overhang the river, lime-green leaves almost touching the water.
Our family is well used to finding itself at destinations chosen for their
proximity to freshwater. Since moving to County Down, Dad has been
photographing all the rivers of the Mourne area in the south – he did this in
Fermanagh too, finding the sources, their stories, and how they overlap with
the language and culture of the places they run through. I’m staring into the
weir when a bobbing movement shows itself: a white-throated dipper –
current-swimmer, rock-clinger, water ouzel and the holy grail of stream-
watching. It hops from rock to rock before disappearing, all in the space of
Dad’s camera click.
Saturday, 15 September
The first fallen leaves are pirouetting at my feet, rising, tumbling, skittering,
falling again. The breeze feels colder with the emerging autumn. I’m
standing on the foothills of Slieve Donard, mother of the Mournes, towering
above the other peaks that clamour around like children at her heels,
desperate to learn how she grew so tall. The Glen River is gushing and
drowns out the sound of Lorcan and Bláthnaid climbing trees. I sit and
watch the white water swells, tinged with earthy brown. I feel like a speck
of dust among this expanse of forest shadowed by mountain. Deep clumps
of knotted oak roots spread out, a staircase up and up to an unseen pinnacle
chafed by walkers, so many walkers. I nestle out of sight under an alder
tree, seeking out a pinch of twilight against the brightness and noise of the
day. The sound of this gushing mountain river is not dissimilar to the
clamour that has been in my brain all week.
What a week it’s been. I woke up in a pool of sweat in the early hours of
Monday morning. My heart was racing and my chest was so tight I thought
I’d choke. When it was time to leave the house, taking those first steps
away from the front door, my whole body was rigid. Then in the car park,
after we had said our goodbyes, I issued computed responses to Dad so he
wouldn’t worry. ‘Thank you. Yes. It’ll be great. I’m okay.’
Fear constricted all and everything as I walked from the car with Lorcan
to the school gates, with the teenage shrieks and chatter taking on an arena-
sized volume in my head. I stopped as we walked, paused to look across the
football field at the twenty or so oystercatchers waddling in peace, probing
the earth for worms. I felt old wounds opening. Lorcan tugged at my blazer
for me to move on but I shrugged him off for just a moment more. I needed
to take in the black-and-white plumage, the beaks like orange spears
stabbing the ground. The oystercatchers started piping, whistling and
trilling – nobody took any notice, which also meant no stones were thrown
and the birds were left alone. The noise grew and grew, and without
encouragement or disturbance they lifted and flew up and over the trees and
houses towards Newcastle beach. I looked up after them, to the blue sky,
twisting my head to see the high peak of Slieve Donard, and found it
miraculous to think that my school would be at the foot of the tallest
mountain in Northern Ireland, one of the twelve chieftain mountains on the
island of Ireland. I felt embraced by it. Slieve Donard would be with me
everyday. A warmth flooded my body, untying lots of little knots.
Lorcan and I were met by Karen, the vice principal, who guided us
towards the sports hall. Some of the students wore hoodies and sports tops
with the school crest on it, others were in blazers like us. There was a
bubble of anticipation around everything but neither of us knew what to
expect, what rules and regulations to follow.
Lorcan was met by his ‘buddy’, and I was introduced to mine: Felix.
Although it was weird and uncomfortable to start with, when we started
talking there was lots we had in common, like our love of science and
maths. I could already feel the tiniest spark of friendliness as the day sped
past with new faces flashing by. There were students from Canada and the
Isle of Man, which meant Lorcan and I weren’t the only new kids. But
there’s nothing like finding somebody similar to yourself, who enjoys the
challenge of having their intellect stretched.
In my last school we had a board- and card-game club and although we
didn’t talk much (we were all on the autistic spectrum), there was a
camaraderie that was a lifeline in such a challenging environment. Many of
us wouldn’t dare go outside. When we did, we were immediately the
bullseye on the target. It was as if we wore bright-neon beacons that
basically said yeah, come and beat me up for being different.
Would it be the same here?
Having a sounding board (and a human map) in Felix helped me navigate
the rest of the week, as I flowed easily from class to class, enjoying the
lessons and spending my breaks and lunch walking around the school
grounds debating with him. I had never talked so much at school, ever. I
must’ve spoken many thousands of words more in this single week than
I’ve uttered in my entire school life so far. Discussing science, Star Wars,
nature, maths, philosophy, history. Everything. I even started to wonder if
this was what being normal actually felt like, but had to stop myself
because normal is definitely not something I want to be. It felt strange,
alien. But such a relief.
Above the sound of the rushing River Glen, I hear my name being called.
I’ve been hidden below this alder, out of sight, and the torrent of worried
voices from Mum and Lorcan tells me I’ve been there a while. I get up to
join them, stepping into a pool of sunlight where some serious tree climbing
is going on. I stare back to the river as a grey wagtail bows to the rocks,
disappearing into the undergrowth like a river nymph.
Wednesday, 19 September
This morning, as Lorcan and I walked to the bus stop, we saw the damage
of last night’s raging winds: trees toppled over, branches brutally snapped.
Some had escaped their prison of decorative concrete or clay pots. One tree,
an oak, growing below the pavement had fallen to expose its root ball, so
tight and tangled that there couldn’t possibly have been any more space for
life. It wasn’t the wind that toppled the oak, not really. Being confined in
asphalt and under slabs, that’s what did it. When we strolled past on the
way to school there were traffic cones all around it, but I stepped inside the
space anyway and wondered if anyone saw me touch the bark. ‘Sorry,’ I
said.
The ripped-up human surfaces, all broken and jagged, spoke of people
first, nature last. I knelt beside the trunk and stroked the bark, no longer
caring if all the people passing were watching or not. I pulled some still-
green leaves from its branches: they were still perfect. I collected a handful
of acorns from the branches and put each one into my pocket, like small
pieces of hope. I walked on with heaviness, but knew my blazer carried
something good.
In the afternoon, when we got home from school, we planted out each
one. They may or may not make it, but fifty-fifty is enough and we should
always take the chance. As I write at the end of the day, I press the
oakleaves into my diary in good company with feathers and celandine,
gentian and speedwell.
An unfamiliar rhythm is beating, gentle yet raging. I have gone two
weeks without being bullied. Two weeks. This is the longest period I’ve
experienced without taunts and jibes or fists landing. It feels strange, almost
eerie. I had prepared myself for the worst, because that’s what I’ve come to
expect. I had my list of affirmations and vault of memories from Rathlin
Island or my garden back in Fermanagh. I had strategies worked out in my
head, of what to do when things got bad. I had even written conversation
openers to hand to my mum, if things got cloudy. Instead, every morning I
walk and sit with rabbits and rooks, go to school, work hard, talk
animatedly with my friend Felix as we watch the gulls and oystercatchers
quarrelling, rising and resting. Then I come home, with energy to spare
because I’ve not used it all up battling anxiety. I do my homework. Write
my diary more and more. Watch birds. Play my computer games. It’s weird,
feeling ordinary. Usually, every breath of wind is a storm. At the moment,
the wind is gentle and I find myself laughing when it swirls around me. I
am happy, yes, but with it I also feel more cynical and hardened.
Over the years, a wall of stone and beautiful ivy has grown up around
me, and only family and wildlife are allowed in. Although shafts of light are
starting to get through all this, I am still wary and catch myself wondering
how long it will last. This doubt creeps when the wall and the ivy are in
shadow. But I’m starting to realise that I probably need both the light and
the shadow. They are part of me, and I can’t change that.
Friday, 21 September
My social media has been a hive of activity these last few weeks: the
naturalist and TV presenter Chris Packham is organising a People’s Walk
For Wildlife in London, and has asked me to recite ‘Anthropocene’. I call it
a poem but I’m not sure it is. I feel it would be good to say aloud, to a
crowd. I’ve only written a few ‘poems’ in the past, none of which was
memorable, but with this one the words spilled out and I kind of
‘performed’ them, recorded and shared them on Twitter. Bare upon the
earth, we were weightless… Will my generation see the rightful, rising?
Lots of people liked it, including Chris. It’s always a surprise to me, that
people appreciate what I say and how I share it.
These past weeks I’ve been helping raise awareness for the walk in
London by doing videos and Tweeting lots. It’s an exciting prospect:
hundreds, if not thousands of people marching on behalf of wildlife. I’m not
worried about speaking. I actually find it easier if there are lots of people,
because I don’t have to make eye contact and it’s much easier to blur them
into a mass. Speaking to smaller groups, that’s a killer: you feel the heat of
their gaze, every twitch, each sigh. No, talking to lots of people is not
something to be afraid of: all that space swallows me up.
So I have an early flight to London with Mum in the morning. I feel bad
for flying, we both do, knowing the damage emissions do to our world. But
we’re not guzzlers. We’re not jet-setters and never have been. We’ve only
had one European holiday, to Italy, which was six years ago now. I still
remember searching the shrubs outside our caravan and kneeling down on
the dusty earth with the lizards, the heat unlike anything I’d ever
experienced as I put a stick on the path and watched ants crawl up one by
one. Though I don’t mind going to other places, I prefer familiar things
really. My parents have never flown much either, so I suppose we don’t
have lots of carbon in our past. Ideally, we should be taking a boat and
driving to London, or taking the train, but it’s beyond us financially right
now, and I can’t get more time off school so soon without getting into
trouble. The walk feels like important work, something we should do.
I’ve already got the poem locked in my head now, When we began, our
feet trod lightly. I know it off by heart. We want birdsong, abundant
fluttering, humming, no more poison or destruction. I feel excited. Perhaps
it is the right time for me. Tomorrow will be epic.
Saturday, 22 September
I’m sitting with Mum in our London hotel room, drying out our clothes and
the contents of our rucksacks. My bones are getting cold now that the
adrenaline and charge of the day are fading. And what a day. It’s going to
take a while to process it all. My body and brain are exhausted.
We arrived very early in this morning at Hyde Park, straight from the
airport. Thousands of people had already turned up, and below darkening
clouds thousands more arrived on a day that blazed with human empathy
and camaraderie. I saw the young campaigners and many others I’ve only
‘met’ on Twitter, and all the meetings and shaking of hands is still blurring
my brain. Circuit boards are snapping.
I was soaked to the skin, hair dripping wet, like everybody else standing
in the pouring rain. Anxiety started swirling. A silence seemed to descend
on the crowd when I stood in front of them, an expectancy. But I felt strong
on the stage as I spoke. My words were purposeful, filled with fire – I hope
I’ve managed to ignite others.
I ad-libbed a lot at the end, and can’t remember exactly what I said. All
those frustrations that so often leave me feeling helpless started pouring out.
All the times I’ve spoken to people who didn’t listen or didn’t care. For all
those brick walls and slammed doors. I poured out my feelings, passed
them on. Who knows if my words will help.
The speeches after were all magnificent. Intergenerational. Important and
inspiring. Afterwards, as we walked from Hyde Park towards Whitehall, we
played native birdsong from our mobile phones, in a procession of grief and
hope, over 20,000 feet pounding the pavement for wildlife, for what we
have lost, for what we must do. When we reached Whitehall there were
more speeches from conservationists, and more photos. The crowd was
immense, stretching as far as the eye could see.
Outside Number 10, water pouring from our coats and hair, we handed
over ‘A People’s Manifesto For Wildlife’, written by Chris and many
others, full of ideas for a wilder future. It was another leg of a journey that
started when I was a young child. Conservation has always been a topic
discussed around our dinner table, on our walks, at bedtime. All the time. It
is part of the fabric of my being.
At some point there was another shift of location, and I found myself
sitting somewhere in Whitehall inside a large and bustling space, with just
five other young campaigners, Chris and the Prime Minister’s special
adviser on the environment. We’d already waited an age for access to the
meeting room we’d been assigned, but even after being rushed through
security, we were told the room was no longer available. So we sat around
tables in an open, public atrium. The noise was as clamorous as the outdoor
din, which made me feel really out of sync with myself. I had to focus
intently. This was my chance to speak out, to be heard by a government
official. So I had to physically pull my body and brain into shape, pocket
the anxiety, suppress myself until I could release it all later. I had to do it, I
was determined. Otherwise sitting there in wet clothes would’ve all been
for nothing.
The advisor seemed nice enough, but as we talked it became apparent
that politically, even though we both loved birds and nature, we came from
very different places. But I wasn’t deterred and seized my chance, pouring
my words out on the lack of ecological education, the need for urgency in
Government, the need for a complete shift in society, the need for radical
change, for bravery and boldness. They weren’t just my words. They are the
feelings of so many of us, young and old. Those of us that care. We feel it,
every hour of every day. It’s heart-wrenching and exhausting, but it’s vital
to keep pushing on, doing heartfelt things.
As I write, the warmth is starting to seep in through my damp skin. We
were part of something big. The whole day was a bit like moving on the
Underground, too fast to really comprehend. But I know that I can help. We
all can. Taking part is important. I feel that now. Whether or not our ideas
and pleas are thrown to the wind, we still have to keep asking for change.
I take a hagstone out of the rucksack and feel relief that it’s still there –
the writer Robert Macfarlane gave it to me, along with a book by John
Steinback, damp from the downpours. A gift from one generation to
another. An established writer to a novice. I turn over the stone in my hand
and feel the weight of its smooth weathering against my skin – when I hold
it a certain way, I can see straight through it, a tunnel gouged by time.
Watching me in the hotel, Mum tells me they are also called ‘Odin
stones’ and that they have protective powers. She says that if I look through
the hole I might see a fairy or two. I laugh and put the stone on the bedside
table, a companion as I write.
Wednesday, 26 September
Even though socially I’m doing much better in my new school, the
educational and institutional blueprint seems the same. Sometimes, sitting
in class, I feel so lethargic. I’m almost comatose. The rooms are always so
stuffy, the heady perfume of teenagers. It feels like Miss Trelawney’s room
in Harry Potter, sucking the life out of me. I don’t want to pay attention. I
mean I do, I do want to pay attention, but my body is fighting with my
brain. My eyelids get heavy, my body slips in the chair. Tedium. The
teachers sound like they’re sometimes whispering underwater, and I’m
drowning in boredom. I’m shutting down, wandering through a trance until
I come to and feel lost. What am I supposed to be learning? Thank
goodness for textbooks and handouts.
My ideal classroom would have no bright colours and lots of natural
light. It would have a single line of symmetrical windows, six feet off the
ground, looking out to sky and birds. The space itself would be cosy, and
the desks would be arranged in a horseshoe, not a circle. I’d sit in the
middle, at the bottom of the curve, so I could place everyone but not have to
look straight at them. There would be nobody behind me – I need to know
what’s happening all around. On the walls, there should be lots of
inspirational quotes or cool facts. My history classroom is actually pretty
close to this kind of perfect, and I learn so brilliantly in this space. I come
alive. I interact. I’m fizzing with excitement. It also helps that the teacher is
one of my favourites.
Science labs should be havens of curiosity and excitement. Imagine that
you’ve wanted to be a scientist all of your young life, and you find out that
when you’re in secondary school you’ll be taught science in a laboratory.
Even the word holds such promise. You imagine a room with walls of
chemicals, neatly labelled and displayed. Specimen jars. Interesting pieces
of equipment all within easy sight and availability. A room of possibility,
invention and wonder. But no, I’ve been let down by science labs. All the
chemicals are in a separate store, under lock and key. All the equipment is
in cluttered unnamed cupboards, and there are no curiosities, except for our
physics lab where all manner of interesting objects are strewn around the
benches. This is clutter I can deal with, organised chaos.
Friday, 28 September
This afternoon we were going through old photos – there are countless ones
of me holding slugs before I wore glasses, all cross-eyed, well before the
failed operation that was supposed to fix the severe squint I had in both
eyes. It did work on one eye, which I suppose is better than nothing. My
glasses cover up the remaining squint, at least I think they do, because no
one has ever teased me specifically about that – there were so many ‘faults’
to choose from.
I’ve gone a whole month of school term without being bullied. The new
reality is still sinking in. It probably sounds ridiculous to keep mentioning
it, but this really is huge. To not carry around the fear. Usually, the
desolation becomes a physical presence, a bulk.
In the forest, the greens are still the dominant colour but are starting to
fade. The leaves of the beech trees are more golden every day, brittle on the
branches. The gulls, rooks and jackdaws are becoming louder as the world
around them recedes. The week has been a busy one outside of school. I
sent the ‘Peoples’ Manifesto for Wildlife’ to my MP and organised a
meeting with him to discuss how we can do things on a local level. Then a
couple of nights ago, we went to the Ulster Museum in Belfast for the
Dippy on Tour exhibition – dinosaurs were one of my first passions. The
exhibition was full of natural history exhibits too, the journey from the
Mesozoic onwards. Weirdly, there was a photograph of me in one of the
displays. Apparently, I was an ‘expert explorer’. I had completely forgotten
the words I had written for the museum a few months ago, now featured
beside two actual experts: the prolific naturalist Roy Anderson and Donna
Rainey, a wildflower and pollinator hero of mine (we met on Twitter).
I love how worlds collide like this: social media is many bad things, a
source of anxiety, stress and hate. But it still does bring people together and
merge things that we hold dear. For me, it has been a blessing. Because I’ve
not been able to hold conversations dexterously in the ‘real’ world,
platforms like Twitter have enabled me to be myself, allowed my heart and
brain to speak with a clarity that would otherwise be impossible. For that
I’m grateful. And so here we all are in the museum: Roy with his moth net,
Donna with a magnifying glass, Dara with his binoculars.
Sunday, 30 September
Silver-streaked clouds, intense cold sunlight. The beach is invigorating
today. I haven’t stretched my legs properly in a few days, and the comfort
of walking unloads a little more weight. With every passing day, a little
more joy sneaks in – is there a peak, a maximum amount of joy that we’re
allowed to feel? In the past, noticings or moments like this have been
overshadowed, if not immediately, then not long afterwards.
Unburdened, I breathe in the salty air. The common terns are still here,
readying for the journey to the southern hemisphere – Africa, Asia and
South America, a round journey of over 20,000 miles. Truly epic. I watch
them hover and dive. Cackling. Silver feathers glittering and dazzling, red
bill piercing the surface. One tern catches a small fish that I can’t identify
with my rubbish binoculars, then flies off my radar as four others repeat the
motion.
I lie back on the bottom of a dune bank and feel the light and the wind
and the cold on my face. I feel something in the space around me change. I
sit up and turn. Not ten feet away, a kestrel bursts over the top of the sand
dunes. I hold it in my gaze where it stays for at least a minute, hovering. I
send it a wave of admiration and it replies by holding for a few moments
longer, before sweeping elegantly behind the marram grass. I bound
upwards with bent body and silent footsteps, but it’s gone. I fall back onto
the sand, breathless and giddy. A good day. A very good day.
Saturday, 6 October
‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.’ Every year, my
mum shares the same quote from Anne of Green Gables, and of course it’s
true. Outside, the world is a thousand shades of gold, glistening. Anne of
the book wants to take in the maple leaves and decorate her bedroom with
them, but Marilla Cuthbert (who has adopted Anne) calls them ‘messy
things’. There it is: these attitudes to nature aren’t new. I wonder when it all
started and why. Was it when we brought the wild indoors? I think we’re all
better off bringing nature inside and taking ourselves out, and why
shouldn’t we wrap fallen leaves around ourselves, bring them close, cover
our beds when we sleep and dream.
Multiple vases of gathered-up leaves adorn our house, every autumn. The
ivy in our back garden is flowering profusely and bees are still gathering to
feed, even though the temperature is dropping. I sit on the hammock most
days after school now, wrapped in a blanket and watching all the ivy-life
before homework starts. So many people think that because it grows around
trees, ivy somehow strangles them, inhibits their growth. Time after time, I
see trees stripped of these leafy garlands, which are such a good food
source and place of insulation for birds and insects, especially at this time
of year.
I’ve noticed a few small holes appearing in the ivy from the comings and
goings of our bird neighbours, now established (hopefully) in our garden.
I’ve also counted at least five different species of hoverfly so far, the most
abundant being the Eristalis: the marmalade and sun fly variety. Hoverflies
are fascinating to watch, though notoriously difficult to identify, and I
always need help, with the exception of a few species.
I really am floating through the days at the moment, inside a glorious
haze. Every day I wake up with energy and excitement. I have the most
formidable and amazing maths teacher for a change, and for the first time I
feel properly challenged. The workload is increasing, though, as I’ve got
my physics exams for Double Award Science next month.
Friday, 12 October
A young boy of about six is playing in the forest, enjoying the fallen russet
leaves crunch beneath his feet. A breeze is blowing gently, and while he
rummages he finds a conker.
The boy pushes it from its spiked casing, holds it up, and the conker
shines. A tiny globe of red-tinted light. The boy’s mum notices, glances up
from her phone, and now she’s charging in and snatching the conker.
‘Dirty,’ she proclaims and hurls it away.
The boy is crestfallen, a light goes out.
As I watch, anger surges inside. I think about all these tiny wrongdoings,
everywhere in every season, the tiniest crimes. The things grown-ups do
without thinking. The messages they send angrily into the world. The
consequences ricochet through time, morph, grow, shapeshift. What’s so
wrong with a conker?
I breathe and rise from the bench where I was watching the thrushes in
the trees. I go into the pile of leaves myself to start searching, and it doesn’t
take long to find one, round, swollen, so perfect. The mum is back on her
phone, engrossed by the glow of a milk-white screen. When I hold up the
conker to the light, the little boy comes over and his eyes dare to shine a
little. I pass it to him.
‘Put it into your pocket,’ I say. ‘It’s called a conker. It’s the seed of that
horse chestnut tree.’
In the nick of time, the boy puts the conker in his coat pocket as his mum
calls over that it’s time to go. I hope it gets to stay with him, if not in his
pocket then in his memory. I honestly cannot comprehend where this comes
from, this fear, this disconnect. Such a beautiful world, of which we are a
part, is so disregarded. I think back to the meetings I’ve had with local
politicians, their empty words and praise. I don’t want praise anymore, I
want action.
There’s a girl on Twitter called Greta Thunberg (we’ve been following
each other for a while now), who’s been leaving school to sit in front of the
Swedish parliament to strike for action on climate. She’s a bit older than me
but has been getting huge amounts of media attention and coverage. It’s
amazing, energising and exciting. It feels brilliant but frightening. I’ve
always thought my education was my only hope of making a concerted
difference to the future, my future and the planet’s. My parents are not
connected or rich or clued-up, and I feel so disconnected from other ways in
which I can make changes, beyond what I’m doing already. Perhaps this is
not enough. Maybe there’s another way. A different way.
Saturday, 13 October
The sky darkens slightly and shimmers as black shadows speed towards
treetop homes, a cackling of jackdaws and rooks, a coven swirling and
rising and resting. Almost playfully, they are chattering on the branches one
moment then surging skywards the next. I can see a new black cloud
arriving, and the trees are quivering with wingbeat wind. More jackdaws
mostly, with a few starlings on the fringe. The noise is blissful and
deafening. Such abundance. Such life. But is this what abundance looks
like? When everything was in better balance than it is today? Imagine
seeing curlew or corncrake everyday, bitterns booming from the callows.
Just think of cranes on Irish soil – they were a popular pet here on the island
of Ireland in the Middle Ages, before they became extinct in the 1500s.
Bitterns went later, in the mid-1800s when the wetlands were drained for
agriculture, and then the curlew and corncrake followed. Will I ever get to
experience abundance? Are we wrong to assume that our ancestors had a
stronger connection to nature? They were more reliant on the fields, that’s
for sure. There were no supermarkets. But if we were so connected in the
past, what went wrong? Why did our ancestors let this happen? Was it the
supermarkets? The massive corporations? The vested interests and hidden
agendas? I feel the need to be brave but am unsure how I can be. The world
is so confusing most of the time. The noise, the images, the instructions.
Orders, demands. All clamouring, always clamouring. Shouting above it all
seems impossible. Should we all be content with changing a little corner of
our world? Showing one kid a conker isn’t going to change economics or
the fossil-fuel industry or the other abuses of the planet’s resources. This
churning in me, it’s got to go somewhere.
Saturday, 20 October
The leaves are falling. The days are getting much cooler, but the light is
amber all day long. Mum and Dad have been trying to find new areas for us
to explore, and today we headed to the forest beside Dundrum Castle. The
castle remnants are still impressive, even after seven hundred years. It
became a fortress and lookout for John de Courcy in the thirteenth century,
after he invaded Ulster and dethroned the family that I’m apparently
descended from. The views out over Dundrum Bay are spectacular this
afternoon, with woods surrounding both sides – beech, sycamore, ash, a few
oak and wych elm.
We walk down a series of steep steps, covered in autumn colours. Other
than the quick shower this morning, there hasn’t been much rain lately – the
leaves crackle underfoot and forewarn the surrounding creatures that
humans are on the way. The smell is intoxicating. The fragmenting, the
mouldering. There are some leaves still green on the beech and oak, holding
on. Red valerian and comfrey bells carry droplets of moisture from the
morning. I remember brewing our own comfrey for fertiliser once: I stuffed
the leaves into an old pot in the garden while Bláthnaid made her own
potion of young nettles and anything else she could find. And there they
stayed for two years, hidden under the weight of a cypress tree. Mum, who
rediscovered our brews, wretched and gagged. Bláthnaid still has jars lined
up along the wall beside our back door, filled with her potions, some with
white scum forming on top. Mum and Dad just let her be, knowing that
there’s a deeper force working up these spells. They’re not experts but they
were kids too, and we all know what it’s like to have our feelings squashed
by parents or teachers or other kids.
A quick flurry of wind unlatches leaves from a beech tree. The leaves fall
and gather at our feet, as if they want us to notice this last breath of beauty
and loss. We open our hands to catch some, so we can make wishes and
collect enough memories to keep us warm through the winter. We sit for a
while, amongst the arboreal spires, in speckled light and in silence. The
sudden keening of a buzzard has us all jumping up and swaying to see
where it’s going. When it disappears behind the trees, instead of the usual
searching, I just close my eyes and listen to the sounds, from sky to tree to
ear to heart, and feel the cold in my hands.
When I open my eyes the others are climbing a bank, exploring through
the bramble. I don’t follow. Instead, I stray with my own thoughts and spot
some bracket fungus growing on the old stump of a beech tree, a shelf
fruiting outwards. I go over for a closer look at the conks, the wavy lines of
colour, so symmetrical, going from brown to red to green towards the
stump. Envoys of decay, polypores, nutrient oscillators of the forest. I look
to the other side of me and discover a ladybird, shining brightly against
Xanthoria lichen, like sun bursting from a branch. Its stillness begs not to
be touched and I marvel from a short distance at the contrasting colours, the
bright yellowy orange frills of lichen and the tiny red sleeping spot in the
middle. I look up and squint to see a roughly made shape of what could be a
buzzard nest up in the trees – perhaps the lichen has grown here because of
bird spray.
The bird has stopped its squalling now and the forest is mostly silent
again, save for a lone robin still singing. Always singing. I can see that Dad
has found some cep mushrooms: supper for later. I take some photos of the
bracket fungus and we head off, back to the castle grounds where we play at
being knights and kings and queens, because I’m still a kid and need a
battle to get my energy out. The biggest battle is loving and protecting the
natural world. For now, I pour out my battle cries and mock fight with
Lorcan.
Saturday, 27 October
Most places in the Mournes seem to be crowded on the weekend, but there
were only a few people walking today. It was unusually warm, with almost
crystal-clear skies. A single cumulus funnelled from the peak of Ott
Mountain right down to the valley below. I felt cradled up there because the
surrounding mountains were so close together. The walk up was easy
enough but we needed a thrust to get to the top, and now that I’m back
home writing the day down, I can still sense particles passing through me,
waves of sound and mountain light. My hand touches moss, leaves my
imprint. It’s as if I am back there still, with the small mass of the experience
on my skin.
At the Shimna River, which flows out of the Ott, we spotted what could
only have been an otter, bounding across the field. The air was so clear and
hushed that I had to lie back, close my eyes and feel the warmth of the sun.
Ravens, three of them circling. Three goddesses. I feel transformed as I
write myself back to the mountain, and every time I feel the vitality and
beauty of nature. There is a strength growing in me, steady and knowing. I
opened my eyes just in time to pick out a bird in my binoculars as it
funnelled then blurred over towards Meelbeg Mountain: a peregrine, surely,
its wings tucked as it dived down and out of sight. The camera clicks in my
memory and there it will stay, like all these moments. Catalogued. Picture
perfect. Loved with everything that is not precise or relatable, just the
feeling left over every time.
Wednesday, 31 October
It’s mid-term break. I’ve survived the first part of the academic year.
Actually, I’m thriving. Perhaps that’s why my feet land purposefully on the
path. We’re all out for a walk across the road to the forest. We’ve decided to
do the Slievenaslat walk, the highest path there is in the park (885 feet
above sea level) and it promises to be rousing and a little strenuous. Just
what we need.
It’s Samhain for us today, not Hallowe’en. The day when we celebrate
the Celtic New Year – we celebrate Lorcan’s birthday on the ‘other’ New
Year’s Eve. The early afternoon light, although not sparkling, isn’t grey
either. Rosie is staying indoors, just in case there are fireworks later. She
doesn’t react to them much when she’s safely inside, but outside her body
tenses, jaw starts shaking, and she roots herself even more than usual. So
she’s tucked up in her purple dog bed, with the curtains closed, while we
stride.
In previous years, we’ve celebrated Samhain by camping outdoors under
constellations that were usually hidden by wind and rain. There were also
crazy parties with our neighbours, especially one we had a few years ago,
the year before we moved to Fermanagh, which went particularly haywire
and ended up with a visit to casualty for me. (I still have a scar on my gum.)
I’ve never understood how to play games with the other kids. The rules of
play are a mystery to me. And they certainly don’t understand my rules,
which are usually convoluted and complicated. Either I’ll underreact or
overreact; I’ll stand vacuously staring or get madly excitable. There is no
middle ground.
The Slievenaslat route begins in a mixed wood of broadleaves and
plantation conifers, but a monoculture of sitka quickly crowds in, and there
are small absences in the understorey because of the lack of light. One
particular beech has thrived, though, and has a girth of three hugs (I don’t
know if beech hugs are measured like oak hugs, so it could be one hundred
and fifty years old, or younger, as beech do grow much faster). Moss is
growing up from the base of the trunk and the bark has been stripped in
places. Up ahead, I see strange oak leaves on the path, more serrated and
narrower than native sessile oaks. These are from the Turkey oak, an
ornamental tree introduced to the gardens and parklands of Ireland from the
eighteenth century.
Jays are cackling all around us. Do they plant Turkey oak as well as the
thousands of sessile acorns they plant every autumn? There are Turkey oak
saplings growing everywhere! Their acorns have more tannin in them than
sessile oaks, which means that insects and herbivores don’t like eating
them; this might explain why there are more Turkey oak saplings than
sessile. There are lots of deer around here, and usually they nibble at the
saplings, which can be a real problem for natural regeneration of woods. I
wonder if deer like eating the Turkey oak saplings?
The gravel path ahead is covered in leathery beech leaves, and they
squelch or crunch depending on where the water is running off the sitka
bank. The leaf litter suddenly changes to sweet chestnut. I touch the
furrowed bark of one tree, my fingers settling in the grooves. We pause by a
pond, still as glass until gentle ripples are set off by fish below the surface.
The water is earth-brown and surrounded by widely spaced conifers and
some goat willows with low-lying, outstretched branches almost touching
the water. Suddenly, there are cones raining down. We stop to look up,
spotting an auburn shape tousling the branches of a sitka tree. We crane our
heads until the cold seeps in. The movement stops and the red squirrel just
seems to vanish into thin air.
We move on, delighted and smiling. The gravel path stops as we cross
onto more earthy and rocky terrain, over roots and rock. It’s a little wilder
too, with willow and hazel gorse, and bilberry showing its samphire stems
(we must come back in late summer to harvest the fruits). The light
becomes dazzling as we move to higher ground, ascending quickly to
magnificent views of the Mournes and Dundrum bay. We can still see an
ocean of fertilised fields, the luminous greens contrasting with the rugged
mountain, forest and the patchwork of birch leaves in Dutch and orpiment
orange. (I’ve been reading Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours by P. Syme,
and these two oranges were used to describe the seed pod of a spindle tree
and the belly of a warty newt. These descriptions make my heart soar!)
We sit at the top of Slievenaslat, a family alone with a waning sun. Alone
but for the hazel, showing us who it really is – I think it’s my favourite
thing about late autumn, the way it reveals the structure of trees. Angled
maps, splayed vulnerability. This is what they really look like, leafless,
down to bare branches.
Starlings are congregating in the distance, and their presence seems to
pull us spiralling back down the other side of the mountain, appreciating
each other and everything around us. I find some chewed-up pine cones as
we reach the bottom of the path, red-squirrel leftovers. All at once the
conifers disappear and a startling copse of birch trees emerges, a thick
carpet of copper underfoot. We explore around the trunks for a little bit,
touching smooth chocolate bark. Kicking up the leaves.
As usual, we’ve spent so long outside that we need to rush to the local
pub for a late dinner, then home where we relax in the sitting room
surrounded by flickering candles lit for those who have left this world. The
Celtic New Year is an opening up to the dark, lit by fires, warmed by the
awakening of senses, and hopefully some space to think with the stark
branches of winter. Dad plays guitar. We sing and tell stories. We celebrate
in our own way before Bláthnaid goes out trick-or-treating, and the glowing
pumpkins tell others to knock at our door.
Tuesday, 13 November
The morning starts in a hotel by the river, with cormorants sitting on
blackened trees and herons stalking with coots and moorhens. Marauding
black-headed gulls make everything come alive. The day then blurs, fast-
forwards to Kew Gardens, London, where I’m inside a beautiful
conservatory, feeling excited but also miffed because I want to explore the
plant collections and discover the birds (anything but the ring-necked
parakeets). Instead, I have to fulfil my duties as an ambassador. I have to
shake hands. Nod, smile. Be polite. I’m handed an award, signed by the
Prime Minister, and astonishingly I’m actually enjoying it because I feel
stronger and start thinking how my activism is becoming something. I pose
for photos, smile. Click. Click click again. I’m about to make the speech.
My body becomes rigid from the effort. I suddenly find humans really hard
to interpret. I can hear their voices and know what they’re saying, but so
much of my energy is spent translating the noises into meaning. I start
wondering if I’m traumatised by bullying. Is this why I always feel that
something is about to go terribly wrong?
Today, like other days, the doubts are all unfounded, and everything
passes without mishap into something glorious, pulsing with happiness. It’s
all exhausting of course, it always is. And now I’m finally on the plane
home, I can feel the oncoming wave and there’s no choice but to accept it,
succumb with glazed eyes and a hurtling heart. But before I crash out, I
need to write it all down.
Back to the beginning… Mum and I arrived last night; I’d been invited to
London with lots of other young people to become an ambassador for an
organisation that supports young people and their passions, and encourages
them into social action, particularly in their local community. From what I’d
read, it all sounded like a good idea, which is why Mum and I agreed to be
part of the ‘Year of Green Action’ launch at Kew.
This year I’ve received countless emails with requests like this, to
promote campaigns, highlight an issue or write an article on this or that or
my experiences that relate to another project or campaign. It’s becoming a
full-time job for Mum. She’s had to deal with it all for me – and I know that
she keeps some of it from my eyes and ears, because she knows I’ll get
upset. I might be a kid but I’m not gullible, and while I do want to support
some amazing campaigns and people, I sometimes feel like people are
using me, or the idea of who I am. Borrowing Dara to suit some endgame.
I’m not a pawn, though. I prefer to think of myself as a rook: an outlier, on
the margins, looking in.
My need to be independent, to keep away from people and crowds, has
held me back. But it might have saved me too. I’m a young punk at heart,
so the idea of getting too attached to any organisation runs against who I
am. Lately, the urge to shout louder for wildlife has been growing inside
me, starting to eclipse the feeling that I’m too young or too ineffectual. I’ve
begun to feel like it could be the right time. Still, being so engrossed and
passionate and saying I want to ‘save nature’ is too hazy, and I still need to
figure out what I, Dara McAnulty, can do to effectively make a difference.
This campaign launching at Kew sounds different. Their pledge focuses
on helping young people, rather than the other way around. When we
arrived at the hotel to have pizza with the other ambassadors, I was
terrified. I wanted to run, which made the panic set in. And when this
happens I overcompensate. Words just tumble out. I say too much, too fast.
My chest tightens, palpitates, then words rattle at the same rate as my heart
beat. From the outside, I might sound a little overeager or eloquent because
facts, stories, anecdotes keep pouring out. But so does the sweat, dripping
from my head into my shoes as I melt into a puddle of chaos.
I said the wrong things, I ate too much. My inner-editor couldn’t work
fast enough to correct the thoughts, could not steer me away from the car
crash at the restaurant. Mum could see my clenched fists on the table, my
shifting feet; she knows what it means when my jaw starts to jar and my
breathing quickens. She knows to intervene in these silent wars –
sometimes, all it takes is a glance or a look or a squeeze of the hand.
Unbeknownst to everyone else at the table, chatting, enjoying pizza, the
raging suddenly stopped.
Escaping back to our hotel room was a massive relief. With an aching
head and heart, I locked myself into the bathroom and sat, head between my
legs, trying to release the pressure. I adopted a sort of prayer-squat, which is
comfortable and helps me breathe. I discovered this technique at school
once, accidentally, after someone had pushed me around in the playground.
They couldn’t help but take it to another level when I wouldn’t ‘play ball’,
and their insults came right up and into my face, louder and louder because
I ignored them and turned and walked, knowing they wouldn’t come after
me, as our teacher was coming out of the mobile classroom. Safely away, I
found an empty store cupboard and squatted out of sight. I started to
breathe, deeply, and the images and words seemed to slip away a little,
allowing my body to relax, the pain to fade a little. It wasn’t a cure, not
then, and it isn’t a cure now. But it does allow me time to gather the pieces
and go back onto the battlefield and try again.
Crouched in the hotel bathroom, as I was starting to feel better, that’s
when the words started to form in my head. Glowing pathway, beckons … I
walk amongst it and the radiance travels in and around … The growing up
and growing apart … Suddenly, a blackbird’s furrowed song. I was
supposed to be making a speech at Kew, about young people, about nature,
and although I had written something already, these new words were
starting to make sense. Pathways. Ancestors. Aching. Me in the midst of it
all. Healing. I felt better. Getting these words out calmed my brain. I wasn’t
sure if they were the words anybody wanted, but they were my words, so
they would have to do.
Wednesday, 17 November
We meet outside Dublin’s Dead Zoo. There are rows and cases of dead and
extinct animals, trophies shot for game. Collected. Amassed. Hoarded.
Glassy-eyed. Lifeless. Museums of natural history normally fascinate me,
but here I feel sick and bitter. There are lots of people, a sea of faces with
placards and banners and drums. There are cheers, chants, waves of
solidarity pulsing. Many speak before me: politicians, lawyers, academics, a
fellow young activist called Flossie (she’s really cool). This surge of
humanity, this coming together, is an Extinction Rebellion. I might love
punk music and hate conformity and being boxed in, but I never saw myself
as a rebel. But maybe I am, and as I stand on a wooden box, the organiser,
called Caroline, holds a microphone so I can read my speech. I feel
emboldened, outspoken. I feel like it’s the first time I’ve actually said out
loud all the many things I’m angry about. It feels energised and raw as I
look above the people, raising my voice, declaring out loud, my anger
rising.
These are the threats we are facing. These are the crises that the most
vulnerable in the global south are already facing. Yet those in power do
nothing. Those in big business just carry on making obscene amounts of
money. We are governed by materialism. Flocks of curlew and lapwing
were commonplace when the destroyers were children, like me. But unlike
me, they do not see the world as I do now. Depleted. They couldn’t possibly
know. Now, however, they are in denial. If they weren’t, how could they
carry on? The fields are falling silent and empty and although I love
corvids, I want to see diversity. A healthy and balanced ecosystem. Even
my beloved whooper swans are not as bountiful. I try to imagine the noise,
the music, the orchestrational clamour of the song. I can’t because it’s not
there. I ache for it. The world is still hurtling too fast. My generation will
experience the worst of it: rising sea levels, oceans with more plastic and
starved of oxygen because the phytoplankton cannot survive the acidity of
the warming water. The loss of wildlife crashing to extinction at a rate
never seen in human history. Soil, where all living land life springs from, is
so toxic from pesticides that insects can’t survive.
My brain feels out of control. This anger was seething inside as I
travelled down to Dublin. It is still seething now as I speak with the first
Irish gathering of Extinction Rebellion, and I’m still nervous because it
might get rough or the police might come, as they have done during the
London protests. When I reach the end of my speech, I step away from the
microphone to breathe. The heaviness of it all. It is wonderful, standing in
the street, clamouring. What will it do though? My head hurts. I feel like the
child I am, powerless and inept. Yet, I shouldn’t be feeling this. This weight
on my chest has been unfairly dumped. Anger seethes again, which is never
a good thing. Or maybe it is.
Saturday, 20 November
I’d struggled to concentrate all day. Things have been going so well. I was
really starting to enjoy my life here at school, so why was I putting my head
above the parapet? Foolish. I couldn’t help the urge, though. One of the
history teachers had heard about my ‘work’ for nature and planted an idea,
left it hanging in the air. It wouldn’t go away so I convinced myself to try
again.
I’d tried and failed so many times at so many other schools. No one ever
turned up, except the odd well-meaning teacher whose interest would
eventually wane, ‘It’s not really my thing’. It was after one such day of
deflation, while I waited for an early lift home, that some kids started their
taunting and baiting. They pushed and they shoved and my face was in
gravel, a sulphurous bloom in my mouth. Quickly cleaned and easily
explained to Mum – I bit my lip, I bumped into something, quirkily I
missed a stair. And now I was about to try again. I have to start turning the
anger into something.
When school ended, Lorcan and I made our way to the designated
classroom. I can’t remember what happened first, but I was aware of myself
standing to speak and could hear my voice boom in my ears. I stood with
the kids from different year groups, some younger, some older, fifteen in
total (seventeen if you include Lorcan and me). They listened to me talk
about why nature has become so important to me, how I store even the
tiniest noticing so I can retrieve it on demand to help me navigate everyday
life, and why, because of this, I want to stand up for wildlife, shout loudly
about the wondrous things I’ve seen and learnt, all the magic that we can
see if only we stop and look. Then I stopped and stared and started to
breathe, and said we should go outside, which is what we did, in the waning
light after school.
They followed me out of the car park, across the damp sports fields, out
of school and into the trees and the presence of Slieve Donard, where I
showed them lichen on bark and explained how it was an indicator of clean
air, and asked them if they felt lucky having a forest on our doorstep. And
these mountains guarding us. The sea before us. Habitats of wild
importance. When we found some fungi I wanted to tell them how amazing
it was for all living things, but the buzzing in my ears had started and was
getting louder.
My heart raced. I could actually feel my brain disconnect as I tried too
hard to process the questions they started asking. How should I read the
way they’re looking at me? Do they respect and enjoy the answers I give?
The smells of the evening air and the rustling in the trees were becoming
thunderous. The effort it took to stay with them, to stay focussed, was
gargantuan. But it was worth it. None of the fifteen kids sneered. They
didn’t heckle. They looked at me, listening. They asked more questions, and
before we called it a day and walked our separate ways, we were making
plans and talking about when to meet next, calling ourselves an ‘eco group’,
and figuring out what the aims should be. As everyone left, I could see my
breath in the cold night air and felt the shape of a glow around me. The
herring gulls and jackdaws had all roosted, the rooks were in the trees
above. The oystercatchers piped their last notes to the dark.
Wednesday, 24 November
Every time Bláthnaid goes to ballet, after we’ve dropped her off, we amble
between the sea defences on Newcastle Beach. Even looking out to the
wildness of water, as the wind ricochets off boulders and pushes me out to
sea, you can feel them on your back: the defences here are as unnatural as
the amusement arcades and the water park. There’s so much beauty around
it, though. The mountains behind and the sea in front. It’s a shame about the
strip between, the human bit, for all the tourists and those who make a
living from tourists. It has a lovely library, though, because I can still see
Slieve Donard from the shelves in the children’s section.
The day is overcast. The skies look ink-dipped, steely. I leave the
promenade for the beach and head towards the waves. There are pebbles but
no sand now – the boulders have made sure of that, and shoreline drift has
rippled the sand up to glorious Murlough Beach, which I can see up ahead.
They’re talking about regularly importing sand, which is a ludicrous notion
if you think about how the coastal sea defence and promenade have
changed the dynamics of shifting sands. The whole lot will just be
continually transported by the waves. We can’t always control nature, and
here it’s almost impossible.
I sit on one of the groyne planks, blackened and splintered but an okay
resting place. I see movement at the shoreline, a whirring, an almost
mechanical spluttering. I reach for my binoculars and see them: sanderlings,
about thirty, moving erratically yet with wonderful purpose. Blurred black
legs. A flash of beak prodding the sand. Sand ploughmen. They whirl with
the waves, never stopping. Scurrying. Rushing. Every movement too fast
for me to focus on. Dazzlers of the shore.
Sanderling plumage is snow-white and pewter-back, the crown darted
with linear black-among-white. They come to winter in Ireland from the
high Arctic, travelling nonstop for over 3,000 miles. Their movements are
completely hypnotic, especially as I focus in on one bird and observe how it
moves relentlessly at speed between the waves and shoreline,
sandpeckering as it goes, and repeating it all again as the waves recede,
over and over, over and over. What tenacity. I’m not sure how productive it
all is, as they never stop for a second and must spend so much energy
making each tack from wave to shoreline. I think of the waddling
oystercatcher in comparison, constantly taking little breaks as if to enjoy the
scenery or have a quick ponder about life. Of course, I know this is silly.
Every species has adapted according to their environment, but I find all the
differences remarkable and thrilling to watch.
The magic is broken by a black spaniel careering across the stones, off
lead, acting as though it had been released from prison. Shattering the
gathering of sanderlings, sending them into flight, off to find an undisturbed
place. I hope they find somewhere.
Thursday, 25 November
Darkness is coming, light is becoming precious. By stealing the day, night
brings with it an urgency. It starts to snatch away the songs of the garden,
but also shows us places that have been hidden by the abundance of
summer. I can explore these new places, hide among them as the light
fades. There is still music to be heard in the fields, though, so we decide to
travel out to the River Quoile in Downpatrick and listen.
There’s a path leading from the car park, where the black-headed gulls
flock beseechingly, whirling like dervishes, screeching, the movements
tossing mallard feathers up from the tarmac. It’s unsettling but I can’t stop
watching as they keep landing on the bins and search desperately under
picnic tables. It all turns into a frenzy when a car pulls up and the lady
driving emerges with a bucket full of bread. I feel each gull movement like
a dart, feeding because their lives depend on it. A gull food bank. Mum
steers me towards the path, away from it all, but my heart is still hammering
as we walk and the ruckus is out of earshot.
I sit on a bench by the river to catch my breath. Mum goes with
Bláthnaid to collect sticks, Lorcan sits beside me. He felt it too. The hunger
of gulls. We chat about it until the high-pitched ‘tsee’ distracts us, and we
both look up for a glowing streak of goldcrest, and find it almost
immediately flashing through the leafless alders. It lands and starts pecking
at a moss-covered trunk, flitting again, hovering, foraging from branch to
branch for insects and spiders.
When I turn around, Lorcan is gone – he’s heard another sound nearby,
the gregarious whistlings of long-tailed tits, a gang of them. I join him and
we look on as a watery sun blasts out from the clouds and pours onto us
with warmth. The birds manically flit, precariously balance, rotund body
and disproportionately long tails. Lorcan and I look at each other, smiling –
watching the long-tailed tits, our contentedness doesn’t need any outward
cues. We hold it inside, a silver spun thread binding us both.
Walking on, we find Bláthnaid outstretched, dangling over the river on an
alder bough. We join her on alternate branches, balancing on air, and watch
a raft of tufted ducks float by. The sky turns amber, and there is a cool
crackling wind that I let descend on my chest and lips and fingers.
Something about one of the ducks looks different, and taking a closer look
with my binoculars I see it has a golden eye with a white patch just
underneath. It dives and I follow it until it rises again, a silky black head
with shimmering greens. A goldeneye duck. They’re so beautiful. Perhaps
it’s here alone for the winter because there’s no female around. We rarely
think of all that effort being made below the water, those webbed propellers
whirring so the bird can glide with such ease and grace on the river. It’s just
like being autistic. On the surface, no one realises the work needed, the
energy used, so you can blend in and be like everyone else.
I tell Lorcan and Bláthnaid, pass the binoculars down the line. Each of us
marvelling. Mum calls over, says if we don’t go soon we won’t be able to
get inside the bird hide before dark. We slide off our perch, reluctantly, the
three of us a trinity. By the time we reach the riverside hide the light has
faded. It’s still a magical place – and we’re alone, so it means we can each
sit at a window. We open them to let the cold in, and with it come the sound
of teal among the rushes, coots barking and bullying the mallards. The
movement on the far side of the river is a flock of lapwing feeding along the
bordering field, their plume-crowns fanned out. An unseen interruption and
they all rise, an eruption of flickering over bronze clouds. The last of the
sun, casting shadows on this mini murmuration. Peewit, peewit. Peewit,
peewit. Sprinkling and pulsing wings, they twist around together once
before coming to ground again.
The sun drops and time slips everywhere, but here it stands still and I can
feel the lapwings as if they were all beside me. The world moves so fast,
with too little care and too much cruelty. Here, everything is still and filled
with the music of wingbeats, bird calls, the odd human gasp and giggle. The
day was all golden, all light, despite the darkening skies around us.
Winter darkness, the ghost as it breathes the blast of freezing wind. Snow
days are magical, but what about the rest of winter? The drained days,
submerged in grey and brown, a dripping watercolour. The absence of
abundance reveals contours and shape in the land. Structure, spires of
bareness. Welcome in the gloaming, embrace the night as it takes up more
of the day. Feel the sky closer than ever, as it presses, sometimes gently,
more often forcefully. The beauty of it. The fragility of the air and the
tendency of darkness to overshadow all seasons. Winter, for me, is now
feeling like a time of growth, of contemplation, connection with our
ancestors and those that have passed. Their stories, messages, artefacts.
More darkness means more quietness in the evenings, when all that can be
heard is the robin’s song, the rook, jackdaw, raven or hooded crow, the
distant squealing of gulls. I can hear so much more between.
Rising in darkness is the hardest part for some, but I have always enjoyed
it ever since those very early childhood mornings with Mum – stories
smuggled under blankets, the games of chess before sunrise, whatever the
season. By the time it was light it felt like we’d done so much. Often I rose
alone, to trace the sounds before dawn, the ticking clock, the buzz of the oil
heater coming on, the creak of the radiators as they filled with hot water.
Cogs turning to set the day in motion before the sky brightened slightly and
the jackdaws danced on the extension roof. Then a singing robin. The
spilling out of a Lego box. The sound of wood on wood as I laid out Dad’s
old chess set, the brass latch falling apart, his name written in biro in
Gaelic script. Getting ready in the still of the dark is the best way to prepare
for the day, etching before daylight, making marks, watching the curtain of
time open up before the day unveils. So much more can be seen in winter,
the shiver of branches as wind travels through, more perching shapes too,
and so much uncovering still to come.
I vividly remember a day in December when everywhere along and
around the Lagan towpath was illuminated with so much white. I remember
the coat I wore, the beige duffel one, because I loved it. Blue wellies. My
curls have grown long, and Lorcan is running now. Are these his first steps?
What was I? Three years old? I wonder if other people can remember this
far back. To me these are the brightest memories, bell-clear, crisp as our
footfall that afternoon. The sun is low but bright and there is a long stretch
before we meet the willow trees, arching over the river. Possibilities hang
low. An island of life approaching. Instinctively, I quieten and move more
slowly; I see a rippling, unsettling the reflection of branches. Smooth back,
black, slinking. I point it out to Dad and we sit stock-still. Mum cuddles
Lorcan and whispers in his ear so he stays still too. Shadowy shape, otter,
raising its head and swimming – we see it so clearly, and there are no other
people. Just stillness and otter, otter and stillness. I feel the weight of the
moment, a tear slips down my cheek. I don’t know why it escaped. Otters do
that. And when it turns around and disappears, more life fills its absence:
beak first, a blue light darting across the river, a kingfisher so quick I must
have imagined it.
This is how the sobbing starts, such great sobbing. Winter brings it out,
the clearness of everything, the seeing without seeking. The same way that
sound carries further. Looking up and seeing the parts of things that are
always hidden. Of course, the length of winter does take its toll. It becomes
overwhelming, especially when the expectancy overtakes you with wishes
for spring.
After that Otter Day, the snow melted, and it seemed that every day after
that was greyer. I could still see the colours that weren’t really there,
halcyon, the shimmering ripples. And now, as I pass into the last quarter of
my fourteenth year, I still keep the memory to pull out whenever the
darkness becomes too much, when the night is more of a foe than friend and
it cloaks you and presses so heavily that you can barely see or breathe.
Inside, that’s where I store these moments, accumulated in a cabinet of
noticings and happenings, brought out when I need them most, to
illuminate. I must go into the world to find new things. They are always
there. Always.
Saturday, 1 December
We enter the holloway and I feel the string pull me along, the one that
connects us with things that no longer exist but are still real in our mind.
Recently, my inner wanderings have been spiralling and the conversations I
have with myself are becoming strange and unshapely, but feel profound
and electric. I keep visualising time as a length of string, with a flame
burning at one end that represents the present, where we can act and be
most alive. The ashes are the past, the intact string is the future. The string
splits every time something happens. The dead are ashes: they still exist and
never leave us. I can feel the string descending, still blazing in parts, but
mostly it is crisp and brown and stretched out ahead.
In the holloway, hazel overarches and I can see the exposed roots and the
earth curl around me, narrowing to a vanishing point of light in the
distance: a glistening full moon. My footsteps are loud in my ears, deeply
trodden into winter earth. Everyone else is way ahead but I feel like the Iron
Man, clanking along into another dimension, infused with sizzling energy.
A sound pierces the foot-beat: a robin in morse-code trills, an SOS
messenger. I shake my head to spill out the strangeness but the eeriness
remains.
A breath passes through the branches, a solemn creaking that almost
sings. I start to feel really uneasy, and suddenly my senses invert as I
emerge from the twilight passage. Strange shapes and colours emerge. I
turn to the right and stride into the daylight. The gorse is almost in full
flower here. Brambles too, with yellowing leaves. Hanging from the hazel
are cuddly toys, trinkets, swaying baubles, boxes which I don’t open. I
quicken my step and come to a green gate with a sign that reads ‘Ballynoe
Stone Circle’. I walk over grass tipped with sparkling frost; it crackles
underfoot, deafening, and still the string seems to tug and pull me along,
fire and ashes, towards the standing stones of the neolithic burial ground.
In late-evening light, the stones form an almost perfect circle, the
entrance to which is not frosty, and you can see a bold outline, a pathway
in. The otherworld is so present here. As I approach the enclosed mound,
the solid stones look as if they’ve just risen, full of life, filled with the blood
of shifting soil. That’s the peculiarity of time. The string can split into an
infinite number of possibilities. The ancient human remains buried here,
disturbed by excavation, have had their cremated ashes scattered out. The
string droops and truth unfolds around me. Those that left us so long ago
still exist in something. In earth, trees, the robin perched on one of the inner
stones, tapping out notes. The bird hops from stone to stone, stopping for a
few moments to sing.
Granny believes that the dead live in robins, or that their souls do.
Grandad died when I was two years old, and every time she went to visit his
grave, a robin appeared and sang gustily. It felt like Grandad, she said.
I wish I could remember back, to when his days were growing shorter
and he sat in his armchair. Granny tells me that I would notice when he was
thirsty and fetch his water bottle, and even brought it to his lips. ‘Just a
small bit,’ he’d say. I snuggled on his knee and was quiet for a moment. I
was rarely quiet then, always talking, always moving. But in those moments
I hushed.
The day he died, my dad lifted me up to kiss his head. I wish I could
remember how it felt, and how it felt before then, when he was alive. I do
remember Auntie Sharon, though, laid out – in Ireland we’re not afraid of
death, we embrace it. The dead are ‘waked’. Their body encased but
without covering. It’s a celebration with lots of food (constant food), tea
and alcohol. There’s conversation, too, of course, lots of memories, hugs,
tears. All the emotions. A coffin sits and people gather around it, to sit in
contemplation. Pray. Say the rosary. Bittersweet, melancholic. I remember
kissing Auntie Sharon’s head and Lorcan had to be lifted up, like I was with
Grandad. She was forty-one years old. It was September, and I was seven,
Lorcan was five, and Bláthnaid wasn’t even born. The cancer took her as it
did Grandad. I remember the cool, paper-thin feel of her skin. That she
didn’t look the same. She was a shadow. Her old self had gone somewhere
else, away from the thick air in the upstairs bedroom. People were sitting all
around, and she was in the middle.
There is a solitary tree on one of the cairns to the north side of the burial
tomb, behind the mound. It’s hard to say what species it is without leaves,
but like the hazel in the holloway, there are offerings dangling from almost
every branch. Amulets. Talismans. Hopes. Dreams. Rememberings. Some
withered and frayed. Ribbons, framed paintings of flowers, baby toys,
figurines. Seeing them all there, as the sun goes down, with the wind
whispering through stones, I experience the same feeling I have when an
otter appears or a kingfisher returns. Stretched. Everything is stretching.
Body, mind, intellect, all the space around me fills with infinite
possibilities.
The dead are around me now and the veil hovers. I lie down on the cold
earth, close my eyes and feel the pulse of what’s beneath. My eyes remain
dry though – I can’t remember the last time I cried. Perhaps I’ve had the
tears beaten out of me, dried, hardened. A sinking sensation crawls inside
me, my chest contracts. Mum comes and sits beside me, perhaps feeling the
sensitivity of the moment, or maybe it’s because, without realising, I’m
humming aloud. I sit up and stare out over the fields. The darkness tries to
come closer, but I pick up the robin singing in my ear and my chest feels
lighter. The weight shifts. I exhale.
I move up and off with Mum, Dad, Lorcan and Bláthnaid, up through the
holloway, now using a torch. We make our way out and into a different
night, with cars and streetlights, and we have to content ourselves with
being able to go out and in like that, creating a thin place where both worlds
intertwine.
Thursday, 6 December
Walking home from school in half-light, Lorcan and I are enjoying our
days, despite the sheet-grey steel of the sky. No blue now, not for days.
Light can come in many ways though, and each day we stop to hear music
coming from the ivy. Sparrow song, a coven of cackling. A raucous,
glorious racket. The ivy is pulsing below a leafless rowan tree, festooned
around the lower trunk like a celebration. Nervous flittings, in and out,
pecking at the branches. This ivy is a mansion for them, harbouring an
entire flock. But this sort of congregation is no longer ubiquitous. Numbers
have declined by almost seventy per cent in the UK since 1970. House
sparrows make their homes near human places, and finding a tree like this
one just outside the church is a blessing. Their feathers are fluffed up as I
listen to the phrasings and who is singing them, in what sequence: the
females go first, followed by the male birds, separately from brown to silver
crown, then they sing together. The droning traffic slicks through rainwater,
but the cold drops of water landing near us, on us, do little to subdue our
joy in watching and listening. This group is different from the one in the
shrubs outside our house – a few days ago, when I walked past the ivy, I
phoned Mum to see if there was activity at the house, at the same time.
Happily, both ivy and shrubs were full of chatter and twittering. Mum
counted twenty-five birds. I’ve counted forty here. These numbers make me
smile.
It’s amazing to think that house sparrows have an extra bone – the
preglossale – in their tongues, making them perfectly adapted to eating
seeds. In Greek mythology, sparrows are sacred and often associated with
the goddess Aphrodite, symbolising true love and spiritual connection. In
the second part of The Iliad, Homer writes about a serpent eating nine
sparrows, eight chicks and their lamenting mother, and thus deciding how
many years the war for Troy would go on. I wonder how many people look
at sparrows and feel that depth of connection, or simply marvel at how
lucky we are to share the same space in the ecosystem. All birds live
brightly in our imagination, connecting us to the natural world, opening up
all kinds of creativity. Is this connection really diminishing to the point of
no return? I refuse to believe it.
As I stood there in the rain, fluffed-up sparrows in conversation amongst
themselves, there was a spark. Noticing nature is the start of it all. Slowing
down to listen, to watch. Taking the time, despite mountains of homework.
Making a space in time to stop and stare, as the Welsh poet W. H. Davies
wrote in ‘Leisure’:
What is life if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep and cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
I don’t see it as ‘leisure’ though. This is good work. Heart work. Taking
the time to observe nature, to immerse oneself in its patterns, structures,
happenings and rhythms. It’s how mathematicians and scientists are
nurtured. Alan Turing studied the patterns in nature: the spherical
organisation of cells in an embryo, the arrangement of petals on a flower,
the waves on a sand dune, spots on a leopard, the stripes on a zebra. He was
looking for a mathematical formula for the development of cells in living
things. He called it the Reaction Diffusion System, the transformation of
pattern into stimulating reactions. The complexity of it! There’s no way I
can interpret his theory at the moment, but it was contemplating nature that
inspired him and his ideas. Nature sparks creativity. All we have to do is
start with the question, Why? The way my mind whirrs and whirls in
nature, or even when ‘daydreaming’, is way more productive than the work
I do in school.
I consolidate myself by thinking, and thinking whilst intensely watching
the flight patterns of dragonflies or starlings is explosive and mindblowing.
Who knows where watching sparrows will lead!
Garlands of ivy, heart-shaped leaves, laden, some still studded with
flowers, many with blackberries. A thrush appears and pecks at the fruit on
the ground level. A blackbird, appearing in the middle of the ivy to eat
more. My school clothes are soaked through now, and I realise Lorcan is
gone. He probably told me but I didn’t hear him. I was too busy. This pause
between the bus stop and home is so much better than the homework that
awaits.
Saturday, 15 December
The rain is falling in sheets, crashing on the ground like glass. Still the birds
come to the feeders, guzzling so ferociously that we have to fill them more
frequently. Seeds, nuts, suet. It is an avian food bank. The rain is blurring
the view, so I open the patio doors and pull a chair to the entrance, and then
pull another one up so I can put my feet up. I’m simultaneously reading
through my maths problems for the weekend and watching who’s visiting
us, marking and comparing the weekly tally. Most weekends I do this,
especially if the rain is belting down.
Despite the lashings, the two coal tits come and go, first scraping their
beak off on the wrought-iron handle of the bowl which houses some of the
seed, then gathering some and flying off with it. The robin sneaks below,
pecking at the ground mostly, but also landing on the bowl sometimes –
never the feeder. The dunnock is the same, always lurking, and has never
come to feed at the bowl. Amazingly, a wren lands near where I’m sitting
and pecks at the line of food accidentally dropped when I tipped the bag
over, distracted by the craking of a raven overhead. The wren comes so
close I can see the undulations of white and brown, I can see the wind
blowing through, lifting up its feathers, despite how wet they are. Its tail
cocks a little, something has changed. I’m statue-still as it looks in my
direction and lifts in one movement, off and around and into the Forest
Flame shrub beside the door, long established before we moved here
(probably bought from a garden centre).
Although not great for a wildlife garden, the Forest Flame has so many
bursting-through holes that birds have made, going in and out at speed.
Some of the holes are tiny, some are much bigger. What do the birds all do
in there? Sometimes, it sounds like a brawl has broken out inside a Tudor
inn, so many different ‘accents’, residents and visitors alike. A multicultural
community. All different, all bird. Once, a rook flew in and the whole thing
exploded with wings and screeches.
A great tit pops out and starts where the wren left off, chaffinches joining
in. The pair of siskins are still here, and one flies in to feed, usually the
female, with the male watching on at a distance until they both fly off. I
look down to see that a pool of water has accumulated at the entrance. The
rain is still pelting now, and my trouser legs are soaking. How did I not
notice? My trance world yet again. Time passing in a vacuum of watching.
I’m glued to the seat as three jackdaws fly in, bright-blue eyes. A magpie
hops in next and they’re all there, dishevelled and communally feeding,
shaking their feathers, sending sparkling droplets of waterlight into the
greyness. A feeling ripples through them (or they’re just full of food) and
they all leave at once. Their absence lets the sound of traffic into the garden,
and makes everything feel hollow. Shivering, I close the door and change
out of my saturated trousers.
We can create a safe space for nature in our gardens, especially during
the winter months when food is scarce. Caring for nature and for ourselves
can happen anywhere and everywhere: gardens filled with life, nature
reserves, resting spots, feeding spaces, nourishing places. Focusing in on
the activity and behaviours of wildlife in our garden is so satisfying, for the
mind, for the heart. Homework doesn’t feel like a chore after time spent
quietly feeling rain and watching birds. There is nothing better than tending
to this connection between all living things, and maybe even ensuring the
survival of some species living in our back gardens and along our busy
streets.
Sunday 16, December
The skies cleared today, breathing light into the continuous grey of
previous, dripping days. It feels like we haven’t been out for a proper walk
in weeks; a claustrophobia compounded by the end-of-year tests and the
ashen weather. We’ve all been going a little crazy. I’ve still been walking
through the dankness: early mornings up the hill in the dark, as far as the
horse trail in the forest park and back again. Brief moments of escape into
the rain. The rush of wind always blows away the lethargy and apathy that
builds between walls at home and in school.
It’s a massive relief when news of an outing spreads through the house.
We’re going out! To Rostrevor, the Fairy Glen. The whole family, Rosie
too, in her purple-spotted thermal coat. Granny lives close by so we’re
going to have dinner with her afterwards.
In my early days a new plan like this would have meant absolute brain
chaos. It wouldn’t have been possible. Quick transitions were pain-
thrusting; processing quickly seems so natural to most people, for me it was
bloodcurdling. Now, with gentle teaching from Mum, which required full
explanations of outings and lots of planning, I can manage spontaneity with
much more ease. I don’t think people realise what needs to happen behind
the scenes so ‘we autistics’ can look like we’re doing alright. Mostly
though, we hold it in, so controlled, until we reach a safe space. Then
release the pressure. A rushing river and an easy stroll. I think of how
Virginia Woolf’s characters in Mrs Dalloway are bound together by the act
of walking outside in London; my intertwining isn’t with people but with
the elements, with nature, and it has become inseparable from my daily life,
my own story.
I have been interacting with people, though. More so than at any other
period in my life. The eco group at school has grown to over twenty
students from all year groups. And then there’s coding club, the Amnesty
International group at lunch, as well as wanderings with my friends at break
– yes, friends is plural! On the surface, life seems normal. But my thinking
has started to delve more deeply. Because I’m not worrying about the day-
to-day so much, I’ve freed up space to think, to dream, to wander inwards.
It’s intoxicating. Spring and summer, the seasons of sun and daylight,
brought me despair. Darkness has brought comfort and healing. I don’t
‘socialise’ in the way other kids do, meeting up after school, snap-chatting,
bickering about YouTubers. I’m just not built to make small talk like that,
and at the moment I’m pleased that I’m not. There is so much to distract us
from ourselves and the nature around us, although it doesn’t mean I don’t
like video games – we need to be three-dimensional human beings, don’t
we? Multi-layered. And our connection to nature can combine with
technology. There’s no need to isolate us teenagers by constantly berating
our digital habits – and if you are going to, please check your own habits
first. Instead, provide opportunity and space for us to explore, and give us
an education system that acknowledges the natural world as our greatest
teacher.
Outside, the blueness is blinding after being in the shadowiness of
indoors. The riverside is busy with Sunday amblers, relieving a similar itch
to be outdoors. There are so many expressions of ‘Ah, isn’t it great to get
out after all that rain.’ People are smiling, enjoying the new brightness now
the veil of rain has lifted.
Lorcan and Bláthnaid scamper across the river, playing on stepping
stones despite the gushing. They have perfected the leg distance needed for
each hop, and there are no falters as they travel across the river and back.
Watching them, Mum takes sharp breaths every time one of them almost
slips, while Dad – amazingly – says nothing. The need to release energy is
palpable.
I sit on the cold rocks and take my socks and shoes off, letting my feet
sink under the coolness, feeling the water gush over my legs. I take out my
binoculars and scan the edge. Nothing. I just enjoy the feel of whirling
current and the sharpness of the water numbing my skin. After a while, it
starts to tingle, just a little too much. I stand to join the others but they’ve
stopped a little further ahead to look at something, so I stay put. Then it just
hops in front of me, on one of the stepping stones in the river. A dipper.
Cocked head, white throat. Bobbing. The bird dives under and I can see its
shape in the water, moving, walking, suctioned onto the stones with its feet.
It rises up, hops onto rock and starts preening hyperactively, bobbing
frantically. A flash of sherbet and silver on the bank lures my eyes away: a
grey wagtail scuttling like a boy racer up the bank. When I turn back to the
river, the dipper has gone and I realise my feet are nearly blue with the cold.
Scrambling on socks and boots, scampering painfully forwards, I don’t tell
Mum and Dad about my frozen feet. I don’t want them to fuss.
The Fairy Glen is an idyllic place. The entrance beside Bridge Street is
bordered on one side by ivy-clad cottages, stone walls and a grassy bank,
and on the other by Kilbroney Park, with the river of the same name
running like an artery, dividing village from parkland, wood from forest.
Oak trees line the riverside, and the beech here still have crinkled leaves,
burnished and golden, not quite ready to drop. There are still lots of people
so we decide to rush to the other end of the river, turn off and up to the
meadow where we start to lose the throng of Sunday strollers. We go a little
further, just in case, and then stop to take a breath.
Lorcan really can’t stand crowds, especially outside. He can’t let his
chest open and his heart beam out. He can’t feel the thrill of nature, he can’t
speak out. All three of us stim – ‘stimming’ is a word used to describe the
self-stimulatory behaviours of those on the autistic spectrum. Lorcan uses
sounds, squeaks, grunts, purrs, whistles, groans. Bláthnaid twirls her
fingers, hand-flaps and makes sucking-in noises which she calls
‘fluorescent stress-taking movements’. It’s not weird. It’s just different.
Some neurotypical people talk incessantly – so much small talk! I curl my
hair, jump randomly and sometimes, embarrassingly, do a few wiggles. I
control it when people are around. Lorcan is beginning to stifle it when
others are around. Bláthnaid, because she’s younger and less self-conscious,
is an unbridled stimmer. But so what? It’s who we are. It’s how our
happiness bubbles out, and how our anxiety seeps. It’s just how we regulate
our brains. You probably stim too, without realising. Ever bite your nails?
Twirl your hair? Pull at your ear? Yep, thought so. Maybe we’re not so
different after all.
As we walk through the sleeping meadow, everything seems empty at
first. Then the movement begins, flittings of colour and shape. Brown, hints
of red, ash-grey. Fieldfares. Redwings. Mistle thrushes. They’re all
pottering about. Neck up, side-to-side looking, dip to prod the earth. It
rained this morning, so worms are plentiful, but when a dog barks close by
they all rise up, at least a hundred, many more than I spotted when they
were on the ground. They land further up the meadow but it doesn’t take
long for them to start edging back towards us and the field.
Sometimes called ‘winter thrushes’, fieldfares and redwings come here
from Scandinavia and Continental Europe, and I remember the worst winter
since we were born, back in 2010. We had frozen pipes and no water. We
used snow to flush the toilet. On Bláthnaid’s first birthday, a friend brought
us bottled water from the other side of Belfast, because ours had run out.
Temperatures were down to minus ten celsius, but it felt exciting to me, and
we only had a fire for warmth in the living room because, like others with
split pipes, our central heating had seized.
Dad remembers a particularly horrific day, walking home from work
alongside the Lagan River, when he saw frozen redwings dead on the street.
More were stumbling and banging into walls, or falling onto the road,
dying. It upset him terribly. There was nothing he could do. He tried, but
the life inside them had gone. They had arrived here to get away from
adverse conditions, to find warmth, shelter and food. Instead, they perished.
I’d never known such coldness. In our tiny house, cuddled up, we cried for
the redwings and all the other birds.
We stand in the meadow and watch the birds for a little while longer,
very much alive and well, before Mum and Dad remind us we have to go to
Granny’s for dinner. How lucky we are, to always have somewhere warm
and welcoming to go.
Friday, 21 December
It’s very early and I’m in the forest park before school, looking for little
pockets of colour and light. The rooks are waking now too, splitting the air.
This morning, I don’t enjoy their call – I would never not want to hear
them, but the sound feels icy, gnawing. I zip my coat up further – bright-
blue, it’s the brashest thing around. The grass is damp below foot, the lake
swirling with waves and almost black. I feel sunken in. I came out for
comfort but strayed away to the edge of feeling safe. An eeriness settles. I
scramble back, away from these feelings, and as I do a brightness comes. I
look at my watch, it’s late. I really don’t want to go to school today. But it’s
the last day, a half-day.
I drag my heels until light relief comes at breaktime, while I’m
wandering behind the football pitch. It’s a nice spot at school, and even
better now that there’s a bright-blue sky above, freezing but cloudless. I
lean on the trunk of a beech tree and feel its silver bark on my back, through
my jumper and blazer. Thinking about today, I realise I’ve forgotten about
the solstice. Or maybe I hadn’t. Maybe that eerie walk this morning was
something to do with it. I was pulled out of my bed, up and out before
everyone, drawn to the steely lake for Yule, Alban Arthan. I went for a walk
in a dark wood; the Druids gathered mistletoe and burnt the yule log,
gathered and dusted with flour, doused with ale, set alight by a leftover
piece from last year.
When I get home from school, Mum will have collected holly and ivy.
The evergreens. Our Christmas tree will be up too, taking up the whole
room, pine needles everywhere. It’s exciting, having a whole tree in your
house. We normally have a fire burning but we don’t have one in the new
house. It’s the first time we’ve not lit a fire in winter, and I hadn’t realised
until just now. But neither had I realised how much I embraced darkness,
and from today this will start to fade away. It’s a turning point. The light is
coming, and at home there will be candles – and Christmas. It might be the
year’s darkest day, but there is always light. Darkness and light. Both
needed for respite, for regeneration.
The school bell pulls me out of daydreaming. A robin chimes too, telling
me about the coming of midwinter, perched at eye level on a beech branch
covered in moss and lichen. The bird doesn’t move when I do, it keeps
going, and as I bound back to school I can still hear its trilling and wonder
if anyone else hears it. I stop in my tracks, run back on a whim to hug the
beech tree and thank the elders that have watched over me these last four
months, the best four months of school I’ve ever had.
Tuesday, 25 December
Christmas day dawns with Bláthnaid’s excitement filling the house. A bike!
A bike! And soon she’ll be outside, when it’s a half-respectable hour, with
all the other kids, riding around in the rain. I’m always up early, and
Christmas morning is no exception. The excitement is heightened and all
the usual noises are drowned out by the ripping of paper. Two presents from
Santa each. Chocolate coins, stockings filled with sticker books, a pack of
cards, an orange or homemade gingerbread men, Lego or Playmobil figures
– I never ‘played’ with the figures. I would build them and line them up or
arrange them in varying formations. Lorcan always played with his, though,
fiercely. Brothers, both autistic, but not carbon copies.
I think Christmas mornings have always been happy. I can’t remember a
distressed one. I was always with my family, in my house, safe. Every year
we watch The Snowman somewhere on the telly. Last night, Christmas Eve,
we all got a small pile of new books to read over the holidays and over the
last of the winter months. It’s another annual ritual. I got The Book of Dust
by Phillip Pullman and a secondhand Cadfael, along with some nature
books and fantasy novels.
After the presents are opened, dinner is prepared early so we’ve got
plenty of time to wrap up and go for a walk. Mum is the designated and
self-appointed cook – nobody argues with that, but we all help with peeling
vegetables and tidying. Well, a little bit – this Christmas Mum and Dad
gave us an Xbox because we like to play open-world strategy games
together. Sometimes we get violent, but we always try to be pacifists first.
Negotiate, compromise. Is this like the real world? We can differentiate.
Most teenagers can. We play on computers but we also get bored of them,
and that’s when it’s time to go outside. Which is exactly what we do, after
we’ve managed to persuade Bláthnaid to leave her bike behind so we can
take Rosie out.
We all head into the eddying wind, aiming for Murlough Beach. It’s
raining when we get there, and the sky feels as if it’s pressing against our
heads. We usually walk the opposite way, but today we turn right towards
the beach and walk over the slick boardwalk. When we reach the dunes,
Bláthnaid finds some dogfish egg cases – mermaid’s purses – and a raven
feather. I find a kestrel feather and think back to the bird I saw here in the
autumn. I stroke its strong compacted form and put it carefully into my
pocket – I’ve never found a kestrel feather before.
As we walk down towards the shoreline, dunes on either side, the sea fret
comes from nowhere and sucks up the horizon so we can only see a single
strip of waves, frothing and spewing. On the beach, the wind whips at our
ankles and our faces, punches our stomachs. We run at the waves, turning
just in time to miss. Lorcan and Bláthnaid have found some dead seaweed
and are whacking each other with it, giggling hysterically. I leave them to it
and continue back up the dunes.
The mist envelopes me as I walk, curling up from the waves, smothering
me in wispy tendrils. I can taste the salt and hear the crashing, but I can’t
see more than a few feet in front of me. I can feel the vastness of what I
can’t see and huddle down to take shelter by a perfect, intact dune.
Shapes suddenly burst through, rainbow scarf and hat: Lorcan in Viking
mode, charging at me. I run too and we all roar into the mist, roaring for a
better world. The cry is half-rallying, half-despair. It’s also for the depth of
feeling we have, for this place, for each other. We hold hands and run down
the dune path in a line, unbroken. We are all warriors now. We run to the
waves, wind slapping our cheeks red. We stop just shy of the shoreline and
hug each other. Sometimes it comes over us like that. An uncontrollable
urge, like a bodhrán rhythm, with flutes and fiddles, drifting in from
somewhere else, wrapping around us. With wind buffeting, we laugh and
pull ourselves apart, running down the length of the beach towards Mum,
Dad and Rosie.
We return to the car park feeling euphoric, breathless. There’s chatter in
the trees, but I have to stand very still at the fence bordering the reserve to
see into the mist, making out the shapes of twite or linnet, one perched on
every bare branch. Little clockwork movements, a chittering chorus. They
rise up and land in the field and start busily scuffling at the ground. A song
pierces the chatter, as bold as a robin’s but this one is a dunnock, throat
pulsing with effort, and mist all around it, lilting with phrasings, bursting
through matter. I do one of my little wriggly jumps because no one is here
to see it. Skipping to the car, I realise I’m ravenous.
The day spins with no fuss, no stress, no table decorations (besides
crackers) or party games (other than draughts, the Sleeping Queens board
game that Bláthnaid got for Christmas, and of course the Xbox that Mum
starts to regret buying when Lorcan and I sing the Skyrim theme tune).
Later, looking at the photos of us at Murlough beach on Mum’s phone, I can
see the wind whipping the marram grass, the dunes sculpted by aeolian
erosion, and although our family is small and insignificant in the wide shot,
by looking closer you can see how alive we felt.
We end the day with Mum reading The Dark is Rising aloud by
candlelight – she’s even more emphatic than usual in the way she reads.
Maybe it’s the red wine.
Friday, 4 January
It’s late afternoon. We’re following red kites as they flit from tree to tree,
field to field. We watch them from a distance, perched like statues. So far
we’ve counted seven birds, but many have moved from last year’s roosting
spots, and we’re a little early in the season for them to settle on new roosts.
Amazingly, I spot a leucistic bird, all white, standing out against the trees
but blending with the sky.
We’re here with our friend, Noreen, who knows every red kite secret
there is to know. I met her here this time last year while doing a red-kite
roost survey. I remember it vividly. It was as clear as it is today, with the
evening sky blazing over the Mourne Mountains and red kites passing just a
few feet over our head in lazy, dawdling flight. Their slow motion let me
pick out details and markings, even feather breeze. It was breathtaking. We
counted sixteen individual birds on that tungsten evening.
Red kites were the first to pull the string and lure me into the world of
raptors. Aged six, I started reading everything about them, learning all I
could, and planning how I could get closer to them. I wanted to understand
them. I wanted to help them. Red kites were once extinct in my country, but
in 2008 birds were collected from Wales and reintroduced to the Mourne
Mountains after a 170 years of absence owing to persecution. Our eyes can
once again see these resplendent swallow-tailed birds, and we’re able to
spend time watching them stream in and out of sight, diving into our
imaginations.
A decade since the red kites were reintroduced, their story is a tapestry of
despair, endurance and hope. There have been poisonings, there have been
shootings. But a small group of dedicated people refused to give up, and
now the community around here are fighting back because they’ve become
fiercely proud of ‘Our Kites’. I feel part of that community too, and going
back to witness their flight is a privilege. I’ll never grow tired of their
wingbeat.
We watch them for a little while longer before Mum confesses that she’s
got an itch to see starlings. She can see small groups of them in the
distance, starting to gather. It’s murmuration season. She starts telling
Noreen and one of the volunteers about our searches to find the famous
roost around here, and that so far we’d found nothing but a few strays and
stragglers. Noreen smiles and gives us the new location.
The kites are hunched on boughs, not budging, looking intent on staying
put. I’m reluctant to leave, a little disappointed that this evening was not as
spectacular as last year’s display, but as we head to the car and drive off, I
can feel that familiar tingle. I’ve never seen a murmuration. We’ve always
been too early or too late or completely in the wrong place at the right time.
Maybe this will be the night. Will kites lead us to starlings?
We drive on the narrow road with brambles on each side, then climb to
where we can see over the fields and trees. At a sudden dip, a dark cloud is
moving. Mum parks at the side of the road, we get out and listen as
wingbeats shatter the country silence. Flying in and around our heads, a
river wind, they rise and fall on the barn roof where cattle are feeding on
silage. Spiralling, they move further on up the hill, so we chase them,
running, feeling air sharp in our lungs. We stop by the twisted branches of a
hawthorn hedge, and look out and above to the starling shadow funnelling
and sweeping across the sky. Confluent wing beaters, shapeshifters. The
magnetism, their gathering in for safety, fails as a peregrine cuts through.
The starlings pull in opposite directions, splintering, slithering. Again the
peregrine torpedoes, and is gone. Stunning. Mission accomplished, perhaps.
As the starlings regroup there’s no way of knowing if one of them has
been taken. The sky grows darker, the starlings still bloom and bellow,
origami shapes against the limestone greys of the sky. When the pulsing
starts to slow, Mum and I can see them start to land on cypress trees, small
groups at first, then all of a sudden they’re all sucked away for the night,
taking with them any warmth left in the evening. A deep silence replaces
them, turns the night to basalt. We drive home in the highest of spirits, the
dark of the night illuminated by our smiles and chatter and ‘Oh my gods’.
Sunday, 13 January
A few days ago we had a warm spell which conjured up a patch of lesser
celandine, unbelievably early. I couldn’t celebrate them. Not really. It was
as if they were growing in the shadow of a planet that’s out of sync.
This morning I feel exhausted. These days, Chemistry is the story of my
evenings. Homework, revision. School is still okay but I feel a simmering
inside. Is the social interaction starting to take its toll? Perhaps it’s the
constant flow of people asking me questions, both in the real world and on
social media. It’s overwhelming. My ability to process it all is slowing, and
it feels as if there are many areas of blankness spreading in my memory.
This worries me. I manage one thing – a speech, an article, an interview,
and another comes my way, domino after domino. Things are spilling and
I’m starting to step outside of my usual boundaries, but my brain is short-
circuiting. Too much of everything. I need to reboot, rebuild. I even have to
haul myself outside at the moment, a deadening weight in my feet. It’s like
dragging lead. The week stretches ahead, and it feels endless. I’m trying to
find it by walking and writing. Most of my days include at least one short
walk to the promenade and beach, or up to the forest park to feel the wind
and find the words. Writing it all down, spilling it out, helps me make sense
of the world. What started as scribbles and scratches on the page has grown
into an essential shape in my days. I need to find energy from something,
somewhere.
Saturday, 19 January
It’s at height, among clouds and granite, where I find the energy I need, on
Hen Mountain, after an exhilarating run up without stopping, facing into
raven land with proper, expansive wind at my face. Looking at Dad when
we reach the top, I wonder if we went too fast, so we rest a while. It’s just
the three of us today: Lorcan, Dad and I. (Bláthnaid wanted to stay home
and play with her friends; Mum was disgruntled but had to stay back.)
The walk up to Hen and neighbouring Cock and Pigeon rock is a steep
one. You rise and rise and feel the stretch in your legs, and you need a blast
of energy to scale it fast. This is Lorcan’s dream climb, fast and furious. He
wants to be a fell runner when he’s older, and watching him here I can
totally see it. He really changes when his energy is released. And there are
very few people here – Slieve Donard is always packed, and it’s hard to lose
yourself. This place, though, doesn’t get the same crowds, especially in
winter. Maybe Hen Mountain is becoming our new Gortmaconnell or
Killykeeghan. A more grownup playground.
We reach the top, where carved-out granite chutes lead deep into the tor’s
heart. Three rocky outcrops, shaped like a crown, forged from fire, sculpted
and weathered by time. As my hand runs along the rock’s coarse surface, it
doesn’t feel wet but it leaves behind an imprint of moisture. The mountain
leaves its mark, water transfusing out and into me; every touch and tingle is
nourishing.
Between two of the rocks – two ‘bull horns’ – there’s a bog pond, winter-
still. I put my hand in and feel the peaty cold. The feeling on my fingertips
reminds me of a Seamus Heaney line from ‘Death of a Naturalist’: That if I
dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it. We’ll need to come back in
spring to see if there are any tadpole stirrings.
Whenever I’m high on a mountain I make an agreement with myself to
leave behind all human worries, problems, thoughts. They mustn’t veil my
experience of nature, of this place. Learning to do this took huge effort, and
it doesn’t always happen, but doing it lets everything sweep in. I glean
every smell, sound, flutter, flicker, until it takes up all the space in my head.
When people ask me why I experience nature so intensely, the truth is
that I only know I’ve experienced it when I’m writing it all down later. The
intensity gushes out and I feel everything again. I relive moments by
scratching them out on paper or typing them up. I don’t need to think about
it much; all the details are right there in my mind and it surprises me every
time. And high up here I’m not thinking. I’m feeling, observing. The brain
camera clicks away at the puffed-up cloud on Cock Mountain, the hollowed
indentations in the granite that hold pools of water, the shadows of the
surrounding Cock and Pigeon, all the things that catch my eye.
We jump off some of the outcrops – several have thirty-foot drops, so we
sit on the edge instead, dangling our legs out, feeling no pressure
underneath. It’s exhilarating. As we scale and rest on one of the bigger tors,
a raven lands near Lorcan. I can see every feather, iridescent purple-black in
the light. I’ve never seen one so close before. It feels like my heart might
burst, or move in the wrong direction. I steady myself, take it all in. I can
hear wind brush its feathers, the hushed sound of throat plumage ruffling
out, and that incredible black eye, unblinking. Lorcan (for once) is
speechless. He’s squeezing my hand, to control the urge to shout out. It rests
with us for about a minute, a marathon minute. A mountain minute.
Because time slows up here, there’s no rush whatsoever. No need to hurry. I
hear wingbeats overhead as another raven lifts, silk rising. I watch the two
elevate and caw off together; Lorcan and I can lie back and exhale
everything we’d been holding in.
The rebuilding is not yet complete, but I feel more sturdy, more relaxed.
My smile is definitely broader.
Sunday, 20 January
Such a heavy, deep sleep last night. I can count on one hand the very few of
these I’ve had in recent years. It leaves me even more refreshed and a little
stronger, and this morning Mum says she needs to get out and go
somewhere, a little further than usual. She suggests Castle Ward, a National
Trust estate made famous by Game of Thrones. I’ve never seen the TV
series, I’m a little too young, but I can imagine it all. Castle. Courtyard.
Turrets. And when we arrive, Lorcan groans at the sight of the tour buses
and people walking around in costume. They all want their little bit of the
screen magic! A selfie for Twitter or Instagram. I hope they know that
magic exists everywhere.
While we wait for a crowd from one of the coaches to go on ahead, we sit
on a bench and look out to Strangford Lough. We can hear redshanks
whistling and curlews lamenting, their winnowing calls blowing off the
water. I watch one prod the mud with its curved beak, foraging.
Remarkably, curlews and redshanks have almost bendy bills. The final
section can flex upwards, independently. It’s called distal rhynchokinesis,
the way the upper jaw moves, and even when buried in mud or wet sand,
the beak can open and grab food. These adaptations are fascinating and
wholly mind-blowing.
Later in the day, once we’ve explored the castle and grounds, we find an
earwig with her eggs nestling under a stone from an old wall. Most of the
wall is covered in ivy-leaved toadflax (also known as mother of thousands).
A native of southern Europe, it has naturalised in Ireland over several
hundred years, and is growing here at Castle Ward with its ivy leaves and
three snapdragon petals, scrambling over nooks and crannies. In amongst it
all, the female earwig patrols her batch of butter-yellow eggs – they’re
diligent mothers, and if the nest is disturbed and the eggs dispersed, she will
gather them up into a cluster again then continue to stand guard. Woodlouse
are important lumberers too. They also break down decaying matter,
recycling, tidying. Such essential, intricate parts of the ecosystem.
A wall is an entire world to an insect, a universe brimming with life in
winter. Looking closely, noticing, brings everything to life. The tiniest
creatures can be the most interesting and easiest to observe. Watching
micro-dramas play out, many questions rise up to the surface. Woodlouse
look like they’re riding on the dodgems: it seems random but maybe it isn’t.
I remember a battle between centipede and earwig in my garden in Belfast.
I lay on my belly and tuned in, utterly transfixed. I don’t know how long it
took, but the earwig stabbed the centipede on one side. I wasn’t upset by the
death, knowing it was nature. Balance. Order in a wall-shaped universe.
Sunday, 3 February
I’m processing it all, under a big oak in Mount Stewart, a nature reserve
overlooking Strangford Lough. I can hear the brent geese honking, the
sound entwining with hard wind rushing up from the shore. It’s icy cold.
The sky is clear, duck-egg blue. Branches look startling and crystalline, like
intricate maps or dendrites outreached to the air. If only we used trees more,
to guide and inform us, to teach us about community, about
interconnectedness.
A buzzard soars and wheels over the field in front of the oak, while
another joins in and they fly together, spiralling in courtship, touching
talons and wings, rising up, falling down. The beguiling display draws out
some grieving in me. Some things are so right in the world. I need to hold
on to all these moments, to stop myself eroding.
February has rushed in, following days of so much doing. My chemistry
exam is over and I’m just back from London again, for another speech and
event. Exhaustion is setting in. One of the more bizarre things was meeting
the Environment Minister at London Zoo. Of course, he was late. Very late.
His speech was persuasive, tripping off the tongue with ease. But words are
all too easy sometimes. They can shapeshift and are easily forgotten without
being translated into action. The Minister made grandiose promises and
plans that day, but where are they now? And he never stayed to hear my
speech, or the speeches of any of the young people. He was swept up and
shortly afterwards it was as though he’d never even been.
Luckily, the Galapagos tortoises who live in the Zoo gardens redeemed
the day. Stroking their hard shell and feeling the smooth symmetrical
outlines was a relief because the rest was just a photo opportunity for the
Minister and the Zoo. For me, though, it was a chance to get close to
magnificent creatures, three of them, that I’d only seen on television until
then. The largest tortoises in the world. I can’t bear to think of Darwin
riding on one, let alone eating their meat.
Like so many events I’m asked to go to, that day in London felt like a
hat-tip. Kids are invited to ‘have a voice’, to share their ideas, hopes,
dreams, anguish, and then very little actually happens. The adults never
dole out an invitation for us to sit down and plan things. We hand over our
hearts, beating on a platter, for nothing. At least nothing tangible. Globally,
we have lost sixty per cent of our wild species since 1970. And it’s my
generation that is labelled ‘apathetic’, ‘self-indulgent’, ‘less focused’!
Whereas the adults, who are actually in control of our access to wildlife, the
boundaries between busy roads, housing developments and green spaces,
carry on making decisions and spending public money in conflict with
nature.
The gap is ever-widening. It feels like a ticking time bomb to extinction.
Is it any wonder that almost a quarter of young people are experiencing
mental health difficulties? Our world is increasingly divided between
attainment, materialism and self-analysis. We’re at a tipping point in the
relationship we have with ourselves, with each other, and our world. A
world which is so intricately connected, so interdependent, so intrinsically
linked. So delicate. The power struggle between huge organisations,
economics, development and the species we share our planet with is
growing so out of control that it’s easy to become overwhelmed, depressed
and disconnected.
I battle with it all the time. Sometimes my heart beats as fast as a
dragonfly wing, and my mental health has really suffered because there
isn’t anywhere to express these feelings of despair at the inaction. My
intense connection to the natural world does ease and alleviate these
debilitating emotions. When I’m immersed in nature, I am less focused on
myself and more aware of the other organisms around me – trees, plants,
birds and fellow mammals (if we’re lucky). During these encounters we
experience joy, and it is perhaps in these moments that I understand so
clearly that we are all in a position to make sure that this magnificent
beauty is cared for, protected. We are all custodians.
I’ve also found that focusing in on a local level, on my immediate
surroundings, is where I can be most effective as a force for hope and
change. When I started the eco group at school, I didn’t know if anyone
would turn up because I assumed that other young people didn’t care. I was
so wrong. Perhaps I was haunted by my previous efforts to set up
environmental groups at a different school. I now also realise that teachers
are so stretched, yet even though we still need their help and the help of
other adults we can also take action on our own. The eco group is now full
to bursting with all ages, and those who have joined tell me it makes them
feel good to be a part of it, to put ideas into action, to share how they are
feeling, to fight back. Maybe they were just waiting for the opportunity.
Maybe we all need more opportunities to take meaningful action.
In a fast-paced and competitive world, we need to feel grounded. We
need to feel the earth and hear birdsong. We need to use our senses to be in
the world. Maybe, if we bang our heads against a brick wall for long
enough, it will crumble and fall. And maybe the rubble can be used to
rebuild something better and more beautiful, enabling our own wildness.
Imagine that.
Friday, 15 February
I’d never stood so still in such a cold wind. Alone in my uniform, on a
school day during school hours I was clutching with gloved hands two
placards which read ‘School Strike For Nature’ and ‘School Strike For
Climate’. Not a cloud in the sky, yet the strongest of all this winter’s wind
was blowing, challenging gravity. Blowing me, blowing sand over the sea
defence wall on Newcastle beach. Four hours, I stood. Stood up to the
avaricious world. Stood up to those that take instead of give. Those who
steal my hope, and steal hope from future generations who will inherit a
planet so extracted, diminished, less bountiful. People stopped to ask me
why. Passers-by, teachers, parents, radio stations wanting interviews. I
wasn’t expecting that. Instead of talking about the issues, they wanted to
talk about ‘me’, how ‘I felt’. Not the science or the facts. Not the
abomination of climate change and mass extinction, or why young people
around the globe have been forced to act – young people who value
education profoundly but are nevertheless compelled to act against the
inaction. I’m not a doomsday prophet, though. I can’t be like that because I
see so much beauty every day, and this is a huge privilege. I would never
question anyone’s grief or fear, because these are real things too. Millions
are already facing an ever more precarious existence in the climate
catastrophe that is manifesting. Their experiences are real, their fear is real.
How will those waves crashing over the sea defences behind me be in ten
years, in five years? How will everyone in this seaside place be affected? So
yes, I joined the others, like Greta Thunberg and thousands around the
world. I walked out of school, with the blessing of Mum and the tight-
lipped permission of my school. Although I know they are all ‘proud’ of
me, they can’t be seen to be outwardly encouraging civil disobedience.
Mum stayed with me and brought a hot chocolate before I went back into
school. I was frozen. Numb. But going back in with my signs was
important. I needed to tell the other students why. Turning it over in my
mind now, I wonder how effective it was. Was it just camaraderie? Were
they only interested because I had rebelled? The feeling that I had to do
something has been bottled up for years. And this single act has attracted
more attention than all the other things I’ve done, all the work with raptors,
the talks and awards for the things I’ve written. Is this more powerful? All
the grown-ups are telling us how amazing this generation of activists is,
commending our actions on social media or in the press, while doing what
themselves? My generation has pulsed, and that is exciting. What doesn’t
sit well, though, is the search for ‘leaders’. Climate leaders. Young leaders.
The expectation seems preposterous. It appears that I’m now one of them.
Just one single act of walking out and I’ve been crowned. It doesn’t sit easy.
It’s not me, not me at all.
Sunday, 17 February
Last year, I saw my first frog towards the end of January. Not yet five
degrees but there it was hopping across our path while we were hiking in
Cuilcagh Mountain, perfectly content on the icy ground as it disappeared
into the heather. This morning, almost a month later than last year, I find
one sheltering in bramble shadows, slinky skin and limbs tucked tightly,
resting on mud and decaying oak leaves. I wait and wait for it to move, but
the frog outdoes my patience and determination to stay motionless, because
we’re in a rush.
We’ve only stopped briefly at Peatlands Park, a nature reserve just off the
M1, to break the journey back to Fermanagh, where we’re heading for
Granda Jim’s birthday. He’s seventy this year. It’ll be so good to be with
him and Nanny Pamela again – we haven’t seen much of them since we
moved east to County Down, and they’re always so enthusiastic to spend
time with us. Nanny is a couple of years older than Granda Jim, and has the
energy of someone half her age. Granda has such sparkling eyes, and the
kindest soul. Going west again feels halfway home and halfway to
heartbreak.
The interlude at Peatlands Park is welcome, a stretching of our legs (with
frog) before we travel the rest of the way. While we drive on, my thoughts
wander to one of my first proper memories of being with Granda. It was
when we were visiting the Crom Estate in Fermanagh. Lorcan wasn’t born,
yet the image is completely lucid: we’re walking on a path adjacent to the
ruined castle, which stands on the edge of a high bank overlooking Lough
Erne. I drop down to listen for grasshoppers, but don’t realise it’s too cold
to crouch down in the grass. I remember Granda’s hand in mine as he told
me about where he was born and how he walked miles to school every day.
He told me how his father made saddles and school bags and delivered the
post. I was mesmerised by his lilting voice, his gentle nature.
Mum thinks I invented this memory from a photograph, because I wasn’t
even two years old. But I’m convinced it’s real. Maybe I processed more of
it when I was older, attached new memories, but that moment left such a
deep, warm feeling. I’m sure I was babbling on about something, probably
starting with a ‘Did you know’. I talked early, which was tough for
everyone because I never ever stopped talking. Asking questions. Retelling
facts about space or a woodlouse. Granda was so patient. He listened. And
as we walked, the long grass tickled my legs. Usually, when I was out in
local parks or playgrounds, I was taunted and mocked because of my
longing to pass on information, to talk. It wasn’t welcome. And it made me
a target for bullying. There was none of this with Granda Jim. He listened,
talked, and lifted me up in his arms to look at the castle. We felt the stone
walls together, I kissed his head.
That day was one of my first memories and I hold it tenderly close. I saw
the sadness in Granda’s eyes, the way that Mum hugged him, her Daddy.
Always Daddy. I can’t remember stopping off to see his old cottage after
the castle. But Mum has told me about the twisting and turning roads to
Crieve Cross, and driving further on into the countryside until there it was,
whitewashed, not much bigger than a tool shed; apparently I couldn’t
believe that so many people could fit inside. I still imagine the countryside
around that cottage is perfect, with open skies and hawthorn everywhere.
I’m taller than Granda now, and when we arrive at the pub it’s all hugs
and hellos. I embrace him and Nanny extra tightly because life is fragile
and achingly beautiful.
Sunday, 3 March
We live really close to the mountains: Commedagh, Donard and Bernagh
dominate my everyday at school. It feels wonderful to be surrounded by
them, and even better being able to whizz off on a whim towards them, like
we’re doing this morning because the persistent rain has subsided.
We’re heading towards a car park on Slievenaman Road, so we can go
for a quick traipse into Ott, just to shake off the lethargy left in our bones by
the constant wet. As we climb, the air changes suddenly, and coming over
the brow of a hill, we drive into a blizzard. We can’t see two feet in front of
the windscreen. It’s unexpected and terrifying; we’re lucky though because
we can just about see the entrance to the car park.
This is the only snow I’ve experienced all winter, so we bale out of the
car, not for a walk, but just to feel it. On our tongues and cheeks. Dimming
all sound, snow creates so much space in the mind. Only in this weather can
I process experience in real time with such clarity. Usually, it can be
frightening because sights, sounds, feelings rush over me all at once.
Sensory overloads that mean I can’t properly process most of my
experience until later in the day, in a dark room, when I relive the moment
from scratch, spilling it all onto the page. In snow, things are different.
Expansive thoughts unravel in the moment. There are fewer colours, less
depth, less of everything. It really is quite a magical experience, secluded
but with so much intense feeling, and even now in the howling wind and
with cascading, blizzarding flakes of snow, my mind thrums differently. I
can feel synapses sending signals. I can listen, I can hear. I can think and
speak and feel and move all at once, instead of one process knocking
clunkily into another. I never know if it makes sense to anyone else when I
explain this feeling. I guess you would have to be me to really know. But I
think we all have this sort of reaction to snow, just with different intensities.
The new palette of the land reveals bird tracks, and I suddenly remember
being much smaller and close to the ground, following a fox track in the
snow from our house across the road to Ormeau Park in Belfast. It was
early on another Sunday, there was no traffic on the roads, no people, no
sounds. Just fox tracks. Lorcan was in the sling because he was tired from
not sleeping the night before and hadn’t been walking long. We never found
the fox itself, but it was following that mattered, a journey in the silence of
the city, through one of the most peaceful days of my eight years living
there. I’ll never forget. I remember plunging my hand into the snow, to see
what it would feel like, and then rolling over in it like a puppy wearing
snow trousers. Laughing. Laughing with such relief.
From the car park on Slievenaman Road, I climb up some stone steps to a
better viewpoint, the flakes dazzling, swirling, as my feet sink into the new
depths. Everything is white except the stark outline of trees. I hold my face
up to it, welcoming the tingle and taste. I want to stay for longer but Dad is
anxious about our journey back. We have to go, just like that, and as we
descend the hill, get into the car and drive away, the blizzard and the
whiteness vanishes. All is as it was. A wet residue glistens on the land.
There is no sign of snow. Did it actually happen? Did we all dream it?
There’s still snow on my boots and my hands are red raw, proof of Narnia.
In and out of one beautiful, strange yet familiar world. Probably the last kiss
of winter. I’m glad to have raised my head up to feel it.
Thursday, 21 March
There are unfurlings in the forest. Anemones and ferns are springing from
patient earth, from dim and ancient spaces. Evensong is erupting and the
airspace is once again crowded with music after the winter silence.
Bluebells are on the cusp. Spring light and warmth are spreading across the
mountains and into me. I have embraced the darkness but now this feeling
of light is intoxicating, explosive and alive. By March I usually get
impatient, itching for the spring. But not this time; I’ve been enchanted by
every day, drinking in every moment.
Tomorrow I’ll be taking to the streets of Belfast with other students,
giving voice with many – not on my own like last time. I feel happier about
it all. Civil disobedience is better in a group! And I won’t have to bear so
much weight and attract too much attention. The eco group will be taking a
break soon, while I study for some of the GCSEs I’ll be taking this year, but
we’ve also been upping our game in school, giving up lunch breaks to
gather round with banners, spreading awareness. I’m bursting with
excitement about it all. I’ve never felt this way, it feels so alien, refreshing
and electrifying. I wonder if it’s because of the busyness. The action. The
cramming in of wild experiences. I’m unfurling too, and feel so much more,
dare I say it, stable. Not stagnant, never stagnant. And never blindly taking
it all for granted. I think that would be disastrous. I know everything could
change at any moment, but so many more pieces seem to be fitting together.
Last Sunday, for the festival of St Patrick, we made a pilgrimage to
Glendalough, a glacial valley with two lakes and an ancient monastic
settlement founded by St Kevin, my blackbird saint. It was the first time I’d
been and all I wanted was to feel solitude and peace, but it was impossible.
Standing on the bridge looking out over the restless Glendassan River,
foaming over boulders, towards the round, thirty-foot tower, I could see
people rushing here and there, tourists everywhere. But I was one, too. A
pilgrim of St Kevin. And although it didn’t feel like they were there for
solace, as they swarmed with phones and clicking cameras and booming
voices, rushing from one church to another, maybe all the people were
longing for the same thing as me.
I was entranced by the place, with its granite structures covered in lichen
and ferns, the walls with forests of polytrichum mosses and liverworts. We
took our time, found pools of tadpoles, stopped to listen to a full-throated
mistle thrush singing in an overstorey of oak and understorey of holly, hazel
and rowan, with bluebells, anemone and sorrel resplendent and glittering.
The sun was shining, everything was golden and green, laden with morning
rain, and I travelled inwards to fade out the voices and unnatural rumblings,
tuned into the wildlife around me. Bláthnaid was in heaven too as she
caressed the bark of the best climbing trees, and while resting her cheek on
one mossy bough, she insisted she could hear a heartbeat. I could see it in
her eyes, she really did feel it.
After circling the lower lake, we walked the longest of the Poulanass
Waterfall routes, and by the time we reached Reefert Church we were by
ourselves. Silence, as we climbed the steps of a rocky spur towards St
Kevin’s cell – only the foundations remain now, a circular set of jutting
stones. There was still a granite slab, etched with the outline of downcast
eyes, the noble nose, a slight smile. I really wasn’t prepared for the intensity
of emotion when I noticed a carved hand and a bird. A blackbird. I traced
my finger over shapes in the shimmering quartz, and right there, under an
overhang, there was a ladybird at rest. An orange ladybird, seeking shelter
above the head of St Kevin.
My family carried on up towards the waterfall while I stayed there to rest
my back against the stone. I looked out onto the lake, my body filling with
shuddering – otter feelings. I thought of Kevin and his long journey from
solitude to community, from being alone to being with others, and the way
he must have found a space for both his own learning and the hospitality he
offered to anyone who wanted it. I wondered how he balanced his need for
silence with public work, and how his time with the elements and nature,
with stone and wing, changed as more and more people came here.
I held out my hand to feel the tickle of the wind. A blackbird might never
choose to nest and lay its eggs in my palm, but I know that my hand will
always be outstretched, to nature and to people. Because we’re not separate
from nature. We are nature. And without a community, when you’re always
on your own, it’s more difficult to share ideas and to grow. I’m so used to
keeping my thoughts locked inside and being in a space where it’s only me
and my family. But now there are concentric circles, rippling out through a
digital, online world into the very real world of activism, social action and
interaction. It keeps on rippling. I have to drift and swirl with it, but always
I’ll need to retreat, back to the foundation stones of myself.
The vernal equinox has come and gone, and I’m now on the cusp of my
fifteenth birthday, midway between late childhood and adulthood.
Everything and nothing has changed. Again, Seamus Heaney’s words are
with me:
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life.
At equinox a couple of years ago, we visited Caldragh Graveyard on Boa
Island in Fermanagh. A nestled place, tucked behind the lake shore, hugged
by a circle of trees. Bluebells were everywhere, and some had been picked
and placed on one of the early-Christian Janus figures, in the dipped hollow
of its stone head. These almost 2,000-year-old figures both look forwards
but in different directions, a duality. And that’s what I felt on that day. I was
thirteen, small in every way but with big thoughts. I put my hands on the
stones and felt a rumbling ancestral roar. It was the sort of sound your
mother might make if she were scolding you to warn that your life was in
danger. Urgent. Pleading. I felt the heat of it when I placed my hand on my
cheek.
On both Boa Island and Glendalough, with the traces of St Kevin, I felt
gateways opening, choices to make, roads to travel. I have a longing to
spend more time with the intricacies of nature, without the interactions and
complications of people. I yearn for this simplicity, but I also want to go out
into the world and weave my way, however overwhelming and painful it
might be. Nature and us, at odds, at one.
As I ran to join my family for the last stretch of the walk at Glendalough,
leaving St Kevin and the blackbird behind, a solar glare draped over us,
connected us to the land with invisible strings. A longer, heavier line is
about to be cast into the world. My heart is opening. I’m ready.
My soul is in the trees
It’s in the sap that fills the wood
It’s in the rings that tell her age
It’s in the smoke that marks the days
It’s in the fire in my heart
It’s in the embers in the soot
It’s in the place I put the ash
It’s in the soil
It’s in the grass
It’s in the mouths of all the herd
It’s in the beetles and the birds
It’s in the feathers that I found one morning lying on the ground
It’s hallelujah, aye and oh
It’s where I’ve been and where I go
It’s in the people that I meet
It’s kneeling silent at their feet
It’s ever dutifully yours
It stems my pride
And opens doors
from BOTTOM OF THE SEA BLUES by Johnny Flynn
banshee (BAN-SHEE) bean sidhe
Meaning ‘fairy woman’ in Irish. Banshees are considered harbingers of
doom, calling out with blood-curdling screams. According to legend, if you
came across a Banshee in the form of an old woman cleaning blood from
clothes at a lakeside, this was a warning that you or a family member was
about to die.
Beowulf (BAY-O-WOLF) Beowulf
Considered one of the most important works of Old English literature,
although the exact date of composition is unknown – the surviving
manuscript dates from the late tenth to early eleventh century.
binn (BEN) binn
Irish and Scottish Gaelic for mountain peak, particularly high ones. Often
anglicised as Ben. The plural is Beanna. See also slieve.
Bláthnaid (BLAW-NID) Bláthnaid
Means ‘Blossoming One’ in Irish, from ‘Bláth’ which is Irish for ‘flower’.
Boa Island (BO ISLAND) Inis Badhbha (IN-IS BAA-V)
Badhbh’s (Baa-v’s) Island. Badhbh, meaning ‘carrion crow’, is the name of
a Celtic war goddess. Boa Island in Lough Erne, is long and narrow,
connected to the mainland by two bridges.
bodhrán (BOAR-ON) bodhrán
An Irish frame drum made of goatskin commonly used in Irish traditional
music.
bran (BRAAN) bran
Bran (which means ‘raven’ in Irish), along with Sceolan, were Fionn Mac
Cumhaill's legendary Irish wolfhounds. Their mother, Tuiren, had been
transformed into a hound by a fairy woman.
cairn (KARN) carn
A human-made pile of stones; in Ireland, often a prehistoric burial
monument.
callows (KALLOWS) caladh (KALL’AH)
A river meadow. From the Irish ‘caladh’, this is a type of seasonally flooded
grass wetland found in Ireland.
CaoimhÃn (KEE-VEEN) CaoimhÃn
Dara’s third name (Kevin in English) and an important Irish saint of the
sixth century who founded Glendalough Monastery (40 miles south-west of
Dublin).
cashel (CASH-ELL) cashel
Means ‘castle’ in Irish but generally cashels are stone circular wall
structures that date from the early Iron Age in Ireland.
Children of Lir (LEER) Oidhe Chlainne Lir
The tragedy of the Children of LÃr. LÃr, an Irish god and member of the
Tuatha (TWO-UH-THA) De Danaan, married Aoife who turned his children
from a previous marriage into (whooper) swans.
County Fermanagh (FUR-MAN-AH) Fir (or Fear) Manach
A county in the south-west of Northern Ireland, derived from the Irish ‘Fir
Manach’ or Men of Manach. The most westerly county of Northern Ireland,
it borders the Republic of Ireland and is one of the nine historical counties
of the province of Ulster.
Country Park / Forest Park / Nature Reserve
In Northern Ireland there are seven government-owned Country Parks
managed by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) including
Castle Archdale Country Park alongside a number of nature reserves. There
are also Forest Parks but these are managed by the Northern Ireland Forest
Service.
Crocknafeola (CROCK-NA-FOAL-A) Crock na feola
‘The Hill of Meat’. A small forest peak in the Mourne Mountains.
Cuilcagh Mountain (CULL-KEY) Binn Chuilceach
‘Chalky Peak’. The mountain owes its name to the limestone geology of
Fermanagh.
Dara (DA-RHA) Dara / Dáire
Meaning oak, wise, fruitful. Believed to be derived from the Irish Doire, the
name is very common in Irish mythology.
Erne (ERR-N) Éirne / Érann
Name of a goddess who gave the name to the Érainn, an ethnic grouping
widely scattered in Ireland and to whom belonged the Manaig of
Fermanagh, a Celtic tribe originating from Belgium. The Erne river widens
out into two large lakes: Upper and Lower Lough Erne.
Eimear (EE-MER) Eimear
Irish female name meaning ‘swift’; the legendary wife of the Ulster hero
warrior Cuchulain.
Enniskillen (ENNIS-KILL-IN) Inis Ceithleann
‘Ceithleann’s Island’ Ceithleann was the wife of the legendary Formorian
giant Balor. It is said that she swam for refuge to the island on which
Enniskillen stands after inflicting fatal wounds on the king of the Tuatha Dé
Danann at the battle of Moytura in Sligo.
Fianna (FEE-UH-NA) Na Fianna
Thought of as a special army of the High King of Ireland based in the
ancient capital of Tara, County Meath.
Finn McCool (FIN-MAC-COOL) Fionn Mac Cumhaill (FEE-YUN MAC-COOL)
Chief of the Fianna and subject of many Irish legends.
Fomorian (FORE-MORE-IAN) Fomhóire
An evil race of beings who had their capital on Tory Island, County
Donegal. They enslaved Ireland fighting battles with the Tuatha na
Dannann.
Glendalough (GLEN-DA-LOCH) Glendalough
‘The valley of the two lakes’, 40 miles south-west of Dublin in the Wicklow
Mountains National Park. It is an ancient monastic city with monuments
and round towers dating back to the sixth century, the early medieval period
in Ireland. Founded by Saint Kevin.
goldfinch (LAA-SEER COLL-YEH) lasair choille
Translates into English as ‘flame of the forest’.
inish (IN-ISH) inis
Irish for island, with variants of inch or inse. It is often anglicised as Inish
or Ennis, i.e. Enniskillen, or Inis Ceithleann (Kathleen’s Island).
Isle of Inishglora (IN-ISH GLOR-RA) Inis Gluaire
An uninhabited island off the west coast of Ireland beside the Mullet
Peninsula, Erris, County Mayo. Dara’s Great Grandmother was born in the
Erris area.
lagan (LAG-HAN) an lagáin
Means river of the low lying district. The River Lagan is the main river that
flows through Belfast City – the Lagan towpath is a beautiful walking and
cycling path through woods on the outskirts of Belfast.
lon dubh (LAWN DOO / DUV) lon dubh
Blackbird in Irish.
Lorcan (LOR-CAN) Lorcan
Means ‘the fierce one’ in Irish.
lough (LOCK) loch
Lough is the anglicised or English version of the Irish Gaelic word loch,
meaning lake. The use of lough tends to be restricted to Ireland and does
not extend to anglicised Scottish place names.
Lough Derravaragh (LOCH DERRA-VAR-OCH) Loch Dairbhreach
The Children of LÃr spent three hundred years here, before moving to the
straits of the Moyle between Ireland and Scotland and then three hundred
more in the west of Ireland between Erris in Mayo and Inishglora.
Loughnabrickboy (LOCK-NA-BRICK-BOY) Loch na breac buÃ
‘Lough of the yellow trout’, located in Big Dog Forest, Fermanagh.
Mallacht (MALL-OCT) Mallacht
The witch whom Fionn Mac Cumhail and his hounds chased across
Fermanagh. Her name means ‘cursing one’. She stopped during the chase to
turn the hounds into stone hills known as Big Dog and Little Dog (Bran and
Sceolan).
McAnulty (MAC-A-NULL-TEE) Mac An Ultaigh
Meaning ‘Son of an Ulsterman’. This clan is a sect of the Mac Donleavys
who ruled the Kingdom of Ulster, or Ulaid, from Downpatrick until it was
conquered by the Norman knight Sir John de Courcey in 1177.
Mourne Mountains (MOURN) Múrna / Beanna Boirche
A granite mountain range in south County Down named after the Irish
clann Múghdhorna or in modern Irish, Múrna, who settled there in the
1300s. They are also known as the Mountains of Mourne made famous in a
song written by Percy French in 1896 and covered by many artists
including Don McLean. The more ancient name of Beanna Boirche (banna-
bor-ka) is said by some to mean peaks or benns of the mystical herdsman
Boirche who tended the King of Ulster’s cattle in the third century.
Quoile (QU-OIL) An Caol
Meaning ‘the narrow’, the River Quoile is a river in Downpatrick, County
Down. On the north bank sits Inch Abbey, a pre-Norman Celtic monastic
settlement. Quoile nature reserve is situated on both sides of the river.
RóisÃn (ROW-SHEEN) RóisÃn
An Irish name meaning ‘little rose’.
Samhain (SAH-WIN) Samhain
Gaelic festival with pagan roots, marking the end of the harvest and the
start of the darker winter time. Historically observed in Scotland, Ireland
and the Isle of Man, it was traditionally celebrated from 31 October to 1
November, and Christianised as Hallowe’en.
Sceolan (SH-KYO-LAN) Sceolan
Brother of Bran and one of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s legendary Irish
wolfhounds.
scréachóg (SCRA-OH-G RAIL-YA-GA) scréachóg reilige
Irish for Barn Owl, meaning the graveyard screecher.
Sea of Moyle (MOY-ULL) Sruth na Maoile
The strait of sea that separates South West Scotland and Northern Ireland,
also known as the North Channel or Irish Channel. It is possible to see
across in clear weather. The narrowest point is approximately 12 miles
wide. Maoile is Gaelic for Mull (of Kintyre) meaning bald summit.
slieve (SLEE-VE) sliabh
There are many words in Irish to describe mountains, most commonly
sliabh, anglicised as slieve, and found in the names of Irish mountains or
ranges; also used for hills. See also binn.
Slieve Donard (SLEEVE DONN-ARD) Sliabh Dónairt
Meaning Dónairt’s mountain, it is nearly 2,800 feet high (850 m),
impressively rising from the sea and one of the twelve chief mountains of
Ireland. It is the tallest mountain in Northern Ireland. Saint Dónairt,
formerly a local pagan king and warrior, became a follower of St Patrick
and lived there as a hermit.
Slieve Muck (SLEEVE MUK) Sliabh Muc
One of the Mourne Mountains. Meaning the ‘mountain of the pig’ or
‘mountain of wild boar’. The northern slope is the source of the River
Bann, the longest river in Northern Ireland.
Slievenaslat (SHE-LEEVE-NA-SHLAT) Sliabh na slat
Located in Castlewellan Forest Park, meaning mountain of the rods or
sticks – there’s still a lot of willow and hazel scrub here, perhaps once used
for weaving, basket-making, etc.
Stormont (STOR-MONT) Stormont
The building in Belfast that houses the Northern Ireland devolved
Government Assembly and executive, set up after the 1998 Good Friday
Agreement.
Tamnaharry (TAM-NA-HARRY) Tamhnach an Choirthe
The ‘clearing in the upland of the standing stone’. Tamnaharry, near
Mayobridge, Newry, County Down, has a significant standing stone, an
ancient megalithic structure, on the hill looking down on it. The farm in
Tamnaharry is where Dara’s great-grandfather McAnulty was raised.
uaigneas (OO-IG-NUSS) uaigneas
Not easy to translate into English but can mean ‘a sense of loneliness, an
eeriness’.
Acknowledgements
With heartfelt gratitude to my family, for your unswerving, unconditional
love and support. For giving me wings and allowing me to fly in my own
direction, to the beat of my own drum. Your patience, sacrifice, humour and
adventurous spirit have allowed me to thrive and soar. I hope I can one day
repay you all – Mum, Dad, Lorcan, Bláthnaid and Rosie. You’re the best!
To Adrian at Little Toller, for not trying to ‘adult’ my voice in the editing
process. For smoothing my edges and for giving me, an autistic teenager,
the opportunity to tell my story, in all its irreverent rawness and childish
wonder. Working with you, Gracie, Graham and Jon, has been as humbling
as it has been adrenaline pumping. And thanks to Lily and Luca for loving
and supporting their parents – and Luca again for his last-minute
proofreading skills! Hoping we all have another adventure together.
To Tony Smith, my amazing scout leader and friend, who showed me that
I can push my limits, fall out of my comfort zone and try ‘hard things’ –
and then celebrate success! Our wild scout camps are amongst my best
childhood memories; eating wood sorrel atop a wooded quarry cliff,
canoeing, rambling – these experiences made me. And although these
memories aren’t mentioned in the book, they are one of the main reasons it
exists.
Dr Eimear Rooney and Dr Kendrew Colhoun, ornithologists
extraordinaire, your guidance and expertise hasn’t turned off my raptor
obsession – so you’re stuck with me. Sorry!
To Chris Packham, for your friendship and patience, while being my
teenage-angst soundboard. You watered my roots and gave me the
confidence to grow. For your unswerving devotion to the natural world and
for elevating the voices of all young naturalists and activists. I’ll stop now
before you hate me!
To Robert Macfarlane, for the hagstone, the literary advice and stalwart
support, enthusiasm and encouragement. From the very beginning, you
championed my words and my voice. You are a gentleman and a scholar
(that’s the highest form of praise on the island of Ireland).
My school friends and community – you have turned my world on a
positive axis. I may be constantly spinning out of control, but your gravity
constantly levels my spirit.
To these organisations for providing me with scaffolding to climb and
shout loud for the natural world: Northern Ireland Raptor Study Group,
Ulster Wildlife (The Grassroots Challenge), Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds, #IWILL campaign, Our Bright Future and The National
Trust. I hope we can continue to work together for a better world – you all
have my continued support and energy.
And to nature: my source, roots, beat and thrust. My canopy. My shield
and sword.
D. McA.
County Down, 2020
Dara lives with his mum, dad, brother Lorcan, sister Bláthnaid and rescue
greyhound Rosie in County Down, Northern Ireland. Dara’s love for nature,
his activism and his honesty about autism, has earned him a huge social
media following from across the world and many accolades: in 2017 he was
awarded BBC Springwatch ‘Unsprung Hero’ Award and Birdwatch
magazine ‘Local Hero’; in 2018 he was awarded ‘Animal Hero’ of the year
by the Daily Mirror and became ambassador for RSPCA and the iWill
campaign; in 2019 he became a Young Ambassador for the Jane Goodall
Institute and became the youngest ever recipient of the RSPB Medal for
conservation.
textpublishing.com.au
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Swann House, 22 William Street, Melbourne Victoria 3000, Australia
Text copyright © Dara McAnulty, 2020
Photography copyright © McAnulty Family, 2020
The moral right of Dara McAnulty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication
shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Originally published in the United Kingdom by Little Toller Books, Ford, Pineapple Lane, Dorset,
2020
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2020
Cover illustration and endpapers by Barry Falls
Page design and typesetting by Little Toller Books
Author image by Elaine Hill
‘Bottom of the Sea Blues’ words and music by Johnny Flynn
Copyright © 2013 Cold Bread Ltd, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd, all rights reserved, international
copyright secured, used by permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited
ISBN: 9781922330000 (hardback)
ISBN: 9781925923445 (ebook)
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