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Coming Home
Daisy Greenwell • Apr 14, 2021
Two weeks before the first lockdown, Journalist Daisy Greenwell left London with her husband and three young children, for a sprawling 45 acre plot of meadows and woodland on the banks of the River Deben.
Here she describes the reality of returning home to Suffolk after nearly 20 years of city life, her awe and wonder for the natural world, and the newly experienced grief she feels for its present demise.
It’s been a year now since I left inner city Hackney for rural Suffolk, with my husband and three children under-5. We went from a Victorian terrace where we could see through our front window into numerous friend’s living rooms and the corner shop, to being a twenty minute walk to the nearest house, and five miles to a shop.
Where before there was never silence, the thudding of our neighbour’s reggae, toddlers wailing as they sailed past in their buggies, and the general chaotic background roar of London ever present, now there is only our cockerel Jerry crowing, blackbirds announcing spring, wind in the trees. It wouldn’t be for everyone, and I certainly wasn’t sure if it was for me.
Although I’d grown up on a farm in Suffolk, I spent the last twenty years in cities, first at university and then London, where I worked as a journalist at The Times. So the countryside was something we saw at weekends, and I was very disconnected from it. It’s hard not to be so when you’re living in an entirely man made environment, nature only present as decoration. But I suppose something of my childhood was calling when we stumbled across a cottage for sale in Suffolk with 45 acres of meadows and woodland on the banks of the river Deben, and fell in love.
In lots of ways it made no sense. Our roots were embedded in the city, my eldest was settling into her first year at primary school, my husband’s company was based a 10 minute cycle away, and my job required me at my desk each day. And yet it felt like fate, somehow, and so we threw everything and the kitchen sink at it, made peace with the idea of commuting, and uprooted our lives two weeks before the first lockdown.
Whilst the outside world seemed to crumble around us, we felt like we had stepped into the pages of a children’s adventure story. Whenever work and homeschooling allowed, we’d be down by the river, cooking over a campfire, swimming and looking for crabs in the mud, waiting for the leaves on the oak trees whose branches dip into the river at high tide to finally burst their buds and unfurl. It was exquisitely beautiful, and we couldn’t believe our luck. If I managed to escape the endless wiping of kitchen surfaces and kids bottoms in the house, I’d go and roam around, just staring at things, transported by awe at the world around me.
I had no clue, though, how to look after our fields and woodland, what if anything they required of me. In the grand scheme of things 45 acres is tiny, but for us it felt like a leap into the unknown. It’s hard for a country person to understand just how alien this is to someone who has been living in the city, failing to keep alive even a pot plant, for years. The whole language of it, the acronyms and euphemisms, seemed wilfully mystifying. We were in an SSSI and an AONB, we need to apply for BPS from the RPA and to think about GS2 Mid-Tier Options in a CS capital grant application, we should join a facilitation group and get a CPH number so we could put together a woodland management plan. It made me feel quite stupid, but also a bit cross - was it assumed that I knew what these things meant, or was it deliberately obstructive, like the language of the financial world is said to be, to scare people away and keep the power in the hands of those that do know?
A local shepherd bought his flock to graze the meadows, armed with reels of electric wire to bolster the patchy fencing. Our rough, hilly fields reminded him of his days farming up in Cumbria. It was bad land, very bad land, he assured us. The fields began to explode with nettles and thistles, the sheep to limp, and everyone, from the milkman to the old boy helping us build a chicken cage, told us to start spraying it with glyphosate, for heaven’s sake! We balked at this, aware that our reluctance was regarded as foolishly sentimental.
I began to read books on farming and conservation, not just from a dutiful sense that I really should know more, but because I found that rural life suddenly fascinated me. I couldn’t believe that I had grown up here, with my eyes firmly shut, not realising the depth of debate and antagonism generated by the very practice of land management and food production. I started with Ask the Fellows Who Cut The Hay by George Ewart Evans, then moved on to James Rebanks English Pastoral, then Isabella Tree’s Wilding and George Monbiot’s Feral, Our Place by Mark Cocker, Wildwood by Robert McFarlane, and Rebirding by Benedict McDonald. I felt like my head was exploding with every page, the ideas inside making me gasp and want to text my friends, none of whom would have understood at all why hawthorn thickets, hedge management and mob grazing were getting me so worked up.
Alongside this new knowledge, though, came grief. I knew about climate change, and that rhinos would soon be extinct, and the rainforests were burning, but I didn’t know that the spring we were experiencing was comparatively silent compared to that of our grandfathers. That there were 44 million less birds in Britain today than there were in 1966. That we were one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. As I read about the global collapse in insect populations, a cold fear descended when I recalled that our car windscreen would be gooey with yellow bee smears and a veil of insect life after every journey, and now there wasn't even a gnat.
This dive into nature came to a head one summer weekend, and I found I could not stop weeping. We were standing on the edge of a precipice, I realised. Every parent has the hope that their children will lead lives as good, if not better than their own. My children, all of our children, faced a bleak future unless radical change happened, and fast. And as important as looking after them today, is looking after the world they will inherit tomorrow.
The one thing that whispered to me of hope was rewilding. There is something beautifully simple in the relinquishing of control to nature, of trusting that nature knows best, that it will rebound with astonishing speed if only we let it. In Britain we seem to be uniquely obsessed with dominating and subduing it. Even tiny, overcrowded Holland is abundant with nature by comparison. With our small patch of land, I realised, we have the opportunity to let it thrive uninhibited. The thought fills me with joy. For us it was a simple decision, our land was never going to make us an income anyway, being too rough, marshy and unfarmable for anything other than grazing.
And so we began. To do nothing. To watch, and wait, and learn. First of all we didn’t spray it, we let the nettles and thistles run riot, and allowed the insects that live off them to thrive. We ripped out lots of unnecessary barbed wire fences, and began to save up for a perimeter fence so that we can eventually get a few cows, which will boost biodiversity further with their grazing and trampling. We’ve coppiced some old collapsing hazel thickets in the wood, and fenced the fallow and muntjac deer out with Heras panels (at £17.50 per 3.5m panel, it was the cheapest and most flexible option).
We are now impatiently waiting to see what this new mosaic of habitat will bring to the woodland. We’ve discovered we’ve got a barn owl living in a giant dead poplar stump in the field, a ‘siege’ of herons nesting on the Scots pines overlooking the river, and an electric blue kingfisher, so bright he looks lit from within, fishing from our sluice gate. Every evening hundreds of waders, ducks and geese fly in to feed on the mud flats on the other side of the river wall. We plan to rewild our canalised reedbed streams, and plant hundreds of metres of hedging as and when we can.
What I’ve realised is that most of all, this is about changing the way we see nature. Recognising our readiness to view neatness and uniformity as good and unruly wildness as bad, and relinquishing our instinct to master and control. We need to remember what humans throughout history used to know instinctively. That we aren’t separate from and above nature, the boss in charge of taming it. We are dependent upon and part of it, we are from it, and unless we regain that knowledge and way of viewing our place on this planet, we won’t be here for much longer.
I know our small patch of land isn’t going to change things on its own, but perhaps as one by one, friend to friend, person to person, we pass on the message, and return as much space to nature together as we can, we could bring Britain back to it’s natural state of abundance.
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