Bog Myrtle & Peat

The sun sank stifling to the reeds in a margin of dusk. All the warming day I’d held my peace on the tarmac roads until I fell at last to stop on the Levels with the hawthorns already in flower to show how far from home I’d come. I was down in the Outrageous South, in sight of Glastonbury Tor, struck and sickened with premature summer in the last week of April. I rolled from the car and placed myself in the verge, facing the blank gable-ends of house-tall reeds and the unrelenting rot of roots in tepid, slimy water.

Then beneath the skim of low-flying ducks and the early seeds of willow down, a sound came into me with a single roiling swell. This was what I’d come to hear, and I’m glad I saved this sound for now and didn’t rush to hear it a decade ago. I’m only just well grown enough to bear it in the rich and mingled associations of the fen; sediment swirls around the baby in the bulrushes; King Alfred forced to hide in the marshes and the frog-skinned Anglians wading half-seen and steamily on stilts. It’s the backdrop sound to a thousand old stories, and newer too from Frodo in the Mere of Dead Faces to Howland Reed and the deal of the Crannogmen.

They’re not my stories, but fens like these stir lasting stains in the imagination. Whatever we used to call fens in Galloway have gone now, but you can still find them marked on old maps before the drainage men came. And it doesn’t matter that I cannot place my finger on a specific memory that brings that old world close to mind, because in the warm insipid water and the gathering gloom, there was something universal in these amniotic Levels; a sound of sleep and prebirth; miasmic recollections of a time before you ever loved or a knew a thing, fattening in your pod like an iris seed. There’s no reason to love this place with all its life reduced to the soup of its composite parts, and it’s not love I feel but something more inevitable.

I thought of that essay called Mossbawn by Seamus Heaney (1980), in which he remembered the sound of the waterpump in the farmyard of his childhood home. He throws a shape around that sound, naming it to evoke the liquid swell of water rising in a pipe. He called it omphalos; the navel; root of our word umbilicus. That pump is his beginning; a start that harked for him just as this sound drew me back to memories I never had, and hearing this at thirty six I understand why it is that when you run a bath, you have to stir the waters as they’re drawn; otherwise they’ll lie in layers and shock you.

You can try and call it birdsong and the simple booming of a bittern in the marshes, but I cannot vouch for that sound which slid like mucus in the darkening reeds with all its weight on the opening syllable; OOM phalos, OOM phalos, OOM phalos, and the tailing phonemes trailing to fricative slittery sibilance like a breeze in the reeds. Hearing it play in a solemn pulse for more than an hour until night fell, I’d use Heaney’s word to touch it like a sounding pole and feel again how very young we are.