HEDGE LIGHT, TRAVELLING  

On a train, I make a hedgerow. I make finger puppets for clouds and pigeons, then my whole body finds shapes for branch, nest, and storm. It is my response to the train carriage, as a leaf is the earth’s response to the sun. But I struggle to find the hedgerow. I turn my head from side to side. The ticket inspector asks if I am okay. I tell him I am looking up and down a hedged lane.  

The hedgerows are thick and overgrown on either side of the lane. They fill up the train carriage like unwieldy newspapers. I do not agree with flailing the hedgerows, but summer growth is so profuse. I have to do something or none of us will be able to see each other for branches and leaves.  

If I look left or right I encounter the same thing. Myself. The Lane. A blackbird. A song.  

Old hedgerows wind and bend through the land. Straight hedgerows are often a result of enclosure. Sunlight filters through these tangles of twig, leaf, and centuries, onto the train carriage table.  

I reach out a hand and my fingers move under one patch of hazy light, lifting it into the air. When it is above my head I turn my hand palm downwards and the sunlight falls back onto the table. It splashes like a dropped plastic cup of tea. I jolt back in the seat to avoid getting burnt.  

Outside the train there are real hedgerows. I stare at them, surprised. Visitors to Devon often talk of the strangeness of driving in these deep, hedged lanes. Do not bring hawthorn flowers into the house or death will result.  

Other people tell me stories about hedges, although not on this train. A childhood game in a hedgerow near their house. Like childhood, the hedgerow is a natural phenomena, but within an adult world. Only by selective trimming will saplings grow into hedge trees. Trim as far into Winter as possible, and never during bird nesting season.  

Let us all pick blackberries. I show you how, breaking the process up into its stages. Look at the hedge. Identify the berries. Decide which one to pick. Feel the movement begin deep in your own hedge heart. Move your hand towards the blackberry, grasp it. Pull. Shaping your lips as you bring the berry up to your mouth.  

Such description misses out a thousand stages. Start with the hedge. Then pick berries from the sky. From your own body. The dead. Spit out if bitter.  

Plushed and pleached. Plashed. On a good day the hedgelayer works with the sound of words alone. Like tools and voices, they vary throughout the country.    

In India I plant a hedge to make my fortune. Sheep will leave their wool on the thorns and I will become rich. In England I prove my love by jumping over a high hedge. In Germany I find someone sleeping in the open air and make a magic hedge appear around them to protect them.  

I do not tell these stories on the train. It is winter and for spring to come I must take the branch between my fingers. I do not want people to be able to turn away saying “oh, that is just a story.”  

In the Hedgerow Regulations of 1997 the sole criteria for determining if a hedgerow is “important” is whether it contains certain species. Only if a hedgerow is “important” can it be protected.  

Hedgerow’s can be dated by counting the number of stories in any thirty metre stretch. Each story represents one hundred years.  

The train enters a tunnel. The lights are not on in the carriage. I panic in this sudden dark. My performance has been too convincing. We are all far inside the red earth hedge banks, stones at our backs and on the look out for worms.  

First a sheep pushes through the hedge and makes a hole. I leap from my chair to pace up and down the aisle. We emerge from the tunnel and light returns. Lets go and hunt the wren, I say. I look under the seats. I look through hair on other passenger’s heads. I go into the vestibule areas between the carriages and I ask in the buffet car. There is no wren on the train. Without the wren there is no hedgerow. The whole hedgerow is coiled up inside the wren, with several fields and a generous amount of sky and my house. If the hedgerow is not maintained then slowly it disappears.  

I am exhausted and sit back down again. No one is paying me any attention so I take out my notebook and write: Nostalgia. The darkness. On the surface. Of violence. Relaxation. Of men. Wrens. The troubling fields. Remembrance. A joke. Prophecy. An afternoon.  

Is the end of the hedgerow like the end of a rainbow? It was today as I walked up over the hill to the other side of the valley where I have never been before.  

The train is pulling into its final station. People stand, get coats and bags from the overhead racks. I will wait until everyone else gets off. This tangle of bodies in the carriage is a hedge bank, plants tumbling over each other and getting confused.  

When the train is empty I continue to sit there, amongst the left behind newspapers. From an estimated 980,000 kilometres of hedgerow in the mid- 1940’s, Britain lost an average of 8,000km per year from 1945-70.  

I have used imagination to respond to this loss, but imagination affirms and builds. It is unsuited to loss and disappearance. Hedgerows themselves revolt against such stories with the slightest of movements in the faintest of breezes.  

I get off the train. On the hillside, across the river from the station, strips of hedges from the former fields have become parts of house gardens and parks. Instead of hedge trees street lamps grow out of them.  

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