Rabbits, wells, and summer when you were young
With Elizabeth Garner, John Lewis-Stempel, and Rowley Leigh
There’s a lot of talk about childhood adventures in today’s issue of Boundless, which got me thinking about my own. I wasn’t blessed with the beautiful countryside that John Lewis-Stemple enjoyed as a lad, and there were no natural wells to be found in the inner-city Midlands like Elizabeth Garner writes about; the closest I got to nature was other people’s front gardens.
In the long school holidays, once we had exhausted our made-up games and the heat of the summer made us irritable, my grandma would take my younger brother and I on a walk to explore the fringes of gardens we could reach from the street. We’d each take a small metal mixing bowl, ready to gather a concoction formed from the flowers and leaves we could harvest. I prized aesthetics over mass, holding out for the bush on the corner studded with red bell flowers. I always felt bad plucking plants that were otherwise thriving, so I’d pick up the fallen soldiers that risked being trampled on the pavement instead. My brother had no such reservations.
Our potions would quickly be forgotten in favour of the rocket ice lollies waiting at home, but I still think about those walks when I see certain flowers starting to bloom in front of houses now spring has arrived. Even in the city, where the extent of nature we saw was weeds and forget-me-nots persevering through the cracks of concrete driveways, we sought its beauty. Over the weekend, I saw a bush with the first buds of the red bell-shaped flowers I once coveted, hiding a house from the eyes of the road. Maybe I’ll go back and salvage some blooms from the grass beneath.
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
A walk up the lane
John Lewis-Stempel on an unnamed street he once walked with his grandmother
The lane? I’m not sure it even has a proper name. English country people are not spendthrift with nomenclature. So, it’s always been ‘The lane.’ As in my grandmother saying, ‘Let’s go for a walk up the lane.’ There were other ways to go from the house (prosaically, ‘East View’) and other lanes, but one knew automatically the lane. As in my wedding to my wife, from London, the directions to the isolated church in the Black Mountains included ‘Go past the trees’, which everyone from Herefordshire understood but anyone ‘from off’ arrived, finally, saying, ‘There are loads of trees.’ Yes, but the trees…
Anyway, the lane. The approximate geography: in cartography it runs horizontal from the village of Withington towards Westhide in the county of Herefordshire. I’ll even give you the exact lines of latitude and longitude for the starting point, 52.085687, -2.636445. But it’s all immaterial. It’s simply the lane, and I first walked it holding my grandmother’s hand, and the recollection is clear because the weather was flawlessly clear and she stopped suddenly, raised her face upwards, and said matter of factly, ‘There’s rain on the way. I can smell it.’ I, a yard high, lifted my nose in mere imitation — and caught the shrill, swimming pool whiff of incoming precipitation. We scurried home, and as we reached the porch the first fat plops fell on our shoulders. On the back of my grandmother’s grey gabardine mac I had stuck a green tendril of cleavers, ‘sticky willy’, snatched from the laneside verge. A childish prank, Saxon-old. She had walked innocent of the green serpent tattoo on her back. As we went through the front door I pulled the strand of cleavers away.
I don’t think I have ever walked more than a mile along the lane, and for infant years my view was restricted by the parallel hedges, these in winter Brillo-wiry and fierce, and in summer lushly barricading. A straightforward place, a mile in length, 30 feet across, including the gabardine-grey tarmac. The constraints were, curiously, an escape. I got lost in the lane, absorbed by the enforced detail. My grandmother — a farm manager’s wife who made corn doilies as a matter of course rather than as a ‘craft’ — alerted me to weather forecasting by the flowers in the verge. If her nose failed there was the indispensable floral barometer of scarlet pimpernel, ‘the shepherd’s weather glass’, which drooped its pretty red head when rain was on the way. We never needed a watch; she could tell the time by the flowers, since some, like daisy (‘day’s eye’ in Old English), open and close as regular as clockwork.
John Lewis-Stempel is a farmer and writer. He is a twice winner of The Wainwright Prize for nature writing, Magazine Columnist of the Year, and author ofthe Sunday Times bestsellers The Running Hare, The Wood, Woodston, and England, A Natural History
The Well of the World’s End
The novelist Elizabeth Garner on the importance of water and one particular liminal space in her childhood garden
In a place called Blackden, in the garden of my childhood, there is a deep well. It sits in the corner of a spare square of land, held between two old halls: brick-fronted Toad Hall; the timber-framed Old Medicine House. They are connected by a corridor of glass. It is a place of memory, stories, stones and stars.
When I was a child that square was wild grass. When the wind was high it would whip round in a vortex, like an echo of the well’s depths cast above, stirring the grass into a circle. My brother and I would chase the run of the weather, clockwise and widdershins. But we knew better than to ever stand on the wooden plinth of well lid, no matter how wild our games.
Alongside play, it was also a place of practical ritual. The well was our only water source and it needed to be watched. My father would test it every Autumn, dipping a marked pole into the depths and recording the measurement on the family calendar. In the summer months that same stick would dictate the allowed inches of water in the bathtub. My mother would then run a hose out of the bathroom window syphoning into the vegetable patch. The water was always returned to the land.
Alongside the playfulness and the practicality there was something else. Wells are liminal places which echo our natures back to ourselves and provoke transformation. I was raised within a world and library of folklore. At the heart of it was the Joseph Jacobs collections.
There was the Well Of The Worlds End, where the banished girl was sent by her Stepmother with the instruction to bring water home in a sieve. At the wellside she made a bargain with a frog who revealed the trick of it: “Stop it with moss and daub it with clay, and then it will carry the water away.” In return for this, the girl was bound to a promise: to do whatever the frog commanded for one night. So it was that she opened her door to him, lifted him onto her knee, fed him supper, took him to her bed and then was given her final instruction,
“Chop off my head, my hinny, my heart,
Chop off my head my own darling;
Remember the promise you made to me,
Down by the cold well so weary.”
She followed his command. The enchantment was broken; the frog-prince returned to his true human form and they were wed. Even at that early age, I understood the truth in this versus the more palatable retelling: a sacrifice demands more courage than a kiss.
Elizabeth Garner is the author of two novels, Nightdancing and The Ingenious Edgar Jones, both of which were influenced by traditional folk tale narratives and motifs. In 2022 she published Lost & Found, her own retelling of a selection of traditional stories. She is also the arts trustee at The Blackden Trust, an educational charity established at her family home in Cheshire.
Listen to Elizabeth chat to Erica in Keble College about folk tales and liminal spaces on the latest episode of the Boundless podcast — available now on Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Wild rabbit with onions and ramsons, from Rowley Leigh’s A Long and Messy Business
‘Ramsons’ is the English country name for wild garlic. Young and tender leaves are less pungent.
Serves eight.
2 small wild rabbits, weighing about 800g–1kg (1lb 12oz–2lb 4oz)
2 tablespoons plain flour
2 tablespoons olive oil
50g (13⁄4oz) butter
4 garlic cloves, peeled and finely sliced
2 large onions, peeled and thinly sliced
3 or 4 sprigs of thyme
1 bay leaf
6 juniper berries, crushed
1 chicken stock cube
½ bottle of white wine
6–10 wild garlic leaves (ramsons), depending on potency, cut into 5mm (1⁄4in) ribbons
a squeeze of lemon juice
salt and black pepper
Remove the hearts, livers, kidneys and other scraps from inside the rabbits and reserve. Wipe the rabbits dry with kitchen paper, then joint them into six pieces each: two legs, two forequarters (front legs with shoulders attached) and the saddle, cut in half.
Place in a bowl and season well with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Add the flour and toss until the rabbit pieces are evenly coated.
Heat a large heavy sauté pan with the olive oil and a good knob of the butter and fry the rabbit pieces in two batches, colouring them well on both sides. Remove to a plate and discard the fat.
In the same pan, heat the remaining butter and lightly colour the garlic. Before it burns, add the onions and turn them over, keeping them on a high heat. Continue to cook for 10–15 minutes until softened and golden brown.
Return the rabbit pieces to the pan, together with the thyme, bay leaf, juniper berries and stock cube. Pour in the wine and stir well, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon, then add 350ml (12 fl oz) water.
Bring to a very gentle simmer and cook for one and a half hours. Trim the rabbit offal, cutting the livers into two pieces and heat a small frying pan, season it well and sear it in a little butter.
Add this to the stew along with the wild garlic ribbons and cook for 5 minutes. Check the seasoning and sharpen with a squeeze of lemon juice. Serve with polenta, mashed or new potatoes.
WINE: Such a savoury dish will work well with many wines. A full-bodied white would be good; my own preference might be for one of the full-bodied, riper styles of Cabernet Franc from the Loire Valley, from areas such as Bourgueil or Saumur Champigny
Rowley Leigh’s A Long and Messy Business was published by Unbound in 2018