Quiet

I’ve come down to the farm for a few days. The silence is sweet music. When I arrived on Thursday afternoon I stopped on the stairs, listening. Nothing. No sirens wailing. No speeding BMWs down Ladbroke Grove. No warning of lorries reversing or sigh of the number 52 outside my door. No shouts. Five months into London life and my nervous system acclimatises to the insistence of noise with energetic certainty; I sleep through it, mostly, but paused mid-step on the stairs at the farm, black and white photographs lining the walls of childhood summers, my children growing frame by frame, every antennae in my blood stream takes a breath and waits and breathes out.

I am experiencing the farm now how others have experienced it for the last thirty years; as respite, as healing, as nurture. The cats curl about me and I remember how much I miss them. My horse shakes his head and bumps his shoulder against mine and I remember how much I love him. The trees wave, the house ticks, the ants go about their business in the sink and I notice changes. The Oak in the bottom field has dropped another giant limb to the parched ground, a balancing which speaks of drought and intelligence. The Vine over the pergola is rooting into the terrace. The sapling Gingko is almost dying but not quite and I turn on the hose and leave it running, water taken direct from the ancient well. The Willow says everything’s fine but the grassland is fit for fire. The wall behind the kitchen door is crumbling.

And I keep up the relentless effort that is writing a new book - once in I cannot stop - it is every morning five till seven or whatever two hours are present; in London it was inching backwards to four-thirty but here, with sleep deeper, it slumbers forward again. Two hours no matter what, and the most productive are often the ones I’m least enthusiastic about meeting. This morning I tried very hard with it’s Sunday but the writer in me wasn’t having it and somehow, as with a therapy appointment when you think you’ve got nothing to say, into that unmanaged space came words unpredicted. They are often the best.

It is slow, this novel-writing business. I think of Zadie Smith describing it like a bear hunt. Into the woods I go leaving civilisation far behind. I may come back with something. I may come back with nothing. I may not come back at all.

I’ve watered the Cacti family in the kitchen and moved the Money plant to the sitting room window where my lovely neighbour who feeds the cats won’t forget it. I’ve scattered black gold from Poppy heads into grassland for next year’s glory. I’ve watered the Cherries moved recently from pots and also my neighbour’s new hedge and also the Olive which is happy now, dancing outside the Granary. And the silence brings space to my limbs, and the quiet rushes my ears and leavens my brain, and my muscles subside into butter. I am here and deep in a novel. I wish it would rain.

Eleanor

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