3: Of tempests, trees & the light from ancient stars…

We could look at it as provision of firewood from the land without our doing anything. We could look at it as an abundance of brash for – hooray! – the woodchipper, to make mulch. We could also look at it as an opportunity to spend more time outdoors, clearing, clipping, bow-sawing.

We could look at it, too, as an opportunity to realise just how very reliant we are on the national grid: something I very much want to move away from. Even our wood-fired range in the kitchen depends on electricity to run the pump to deliver hot water to the radiators (last winter, before its installation, we woke up a few times with frosty patterns on our Veluxes in the bedroom): there have been dire warnings not to use it, ever, without the pump running. I feel grumpy about not having taken in the fact of its grid-dependency when we ordered it. But at least the woodburner is working.

So this period – four days so far – is also an opportunity to test my resolve to get by off-grid. If I had my way, that’s how we would live. And for sure we can wean ourselves off the computers and internet, at least for a while. We can use candles in the evening; even if we can’t listen to music, read a book, or watch a DVD, we can relax and watch the flames. I almost never just sit and reflect, or even – shock! – do nothing (though I’ve been advised to many times by medical professionals – and friends. There is just too much that inspires me, and sometimes that can be pathological.) We can make tea, and cook, just about, slowly, on the woodburner in the sitting room. While there isn’t much food we can eat raw right now, there are carrots, apples and walnuts; a couple of lettuces.

Yesterday, by the light of the woodburner and ten candles, I wrote three poems; more than I’ve written since we moved here last year, apart from the squeezed-out ones I’ve committed to writing at the quarter and cross-quarter dates of the year. Certainly more than I’ve written spontaneously in that time. And – you know what? – regardless of their quality, it feels so good.

For yes, the hurricane hit us here. Winds on the coasts gusting at 170kph; inland, 130–150kph in gusts. As you know, we are very wooded, and we have lost many large branches and even the odd large tree. We’ve been lucky: the old house and its solid roof have survived, and even the rickety sheds are more sturdily built than Some People had assumed. In places, trees have crashed down on our newish fences, and that has done some damage – the fences were not cheap to install. (We need them so that the local hunters – as far as I am concerned, one of the definite negatives about being here, though if one eats meat better the odd wild caught animal than the lifelong captive intensively-farmed anonymous prisoners of our exploitative culture – can’t kill anything on our land. But also we need them so that our own dogs, ironically hunting lurchers, don’t tear off into the woodland on the trail of a deer or hare or wild boar; or indeed get shot by mistake by said hunters.) But in a couple of years’ time we will have plenty of wonderful dry firewood from the land.

Sadly, the magnificent and enormous beech at the corner of our property has lost a huge limb, which has left an angry and raw scar down two or three metres of her trunk.

It’s useful to be reminded of how little we humans are really in control. And our primary response here was how privileged we are only to suffer such minimal inconvenience with – what did ‘they’ name it? Hurricane Ciaran: we have food, we have safe land, we have a dry and intact house, we are in a quiet corner with kind neighbours.

We can sleep at night; we don’t have to write the names of our children on the soles of their feet, just in case; we don’t need to fear the sound of planes/missiles/gunfire. Our olive trees have not been bulldozed; none of our relatives has been taken hostage. Over and over I’ve remembered this, lately. SO many people have nothing like this degree of security.

It’s also useful – and I always appreciate this – being reminded of how little we need, rather than how much.

We have no electricity, no phoneline, no internet, no mobile signal. (If you are reading this, I’ve made it to an internet café in town – remember those? And because I have little connection there may be errors in this.) There are also fallen and broken trees all over our lane, the newly-installed – just last week – fibre optic cables tangled up in their branches. I drove out yesterday and the new phone cables, kilometres of them, are drooping, tangled, severed. In places, the wooden telegraph poles have been snapped like matchsticks. Massive trees are down throughout our area. The village itself has no water, due to the pump being electric; so far we have, but who knows if that will change. My beloved Forest hasn’t done too well in this storm, as it didn’t in the big storms of the 80s and 90s.

We are thinking again about how we might aim to be off-grid; or at least, not dependent on the national grid (nuclear here in France) or on fossil fuel. But then I remember the woodchipper…

Thursday was TM’s birthday. I’d booked a table at a crêperie in Pont Aven, a pretty little estuarine town on the south coast of Finistère; rather like St Ives, a homing point for artists like Paul Serusier and Paul Gauguin. We were intending to walk the Promenade Xavier Grall, named after the famous Breton poet, and including riverside and woodland. And to spot whichever of the local erstwhile 14 mills remain. I was feeling pleased with myself for having thought of another Aven, or Avon, as a substitute for the lunch and walk through turning beech and oak trees alongside the River Avon that we always did in South Devon for his birthday. (‘Avon’ comes from the old Brythonic Celtic word for ‘river’, afen or aven as in Pont Aven (Breton being a Brythonic Celtic language like Welsh, Cornish and Manx, which is why there are a few Avons in southern England).

Of course we didn’t make it, unable even to get out of our gate. (I do have to say that the Mairie did a wonderful job of clearing the trees in our dead-end lane pretty quickly, however.) Probably, the crêperie wasn’t even open, and driving in Finistère was in any case interdit yesterday. I had no signal anywhere near us to phone them.

We did later walk up the lane, amongst the debris and the fallen looping fibre optic cables, to check on neighbours. Both lots nearest to us have lost apple trees, as did we; but we have three little orchards, one of which was newly-planted by us in January (that’s another story) and had a second flowering in the heat in late September and early October, and this one, with the young trees and not a lot of shelter from the southwesterlies, is doing fine. Although it’s sad when a tree keels over, we can spare the two we did lose from the old cider orchard back to the earth. One neighbor had just planted a mass of cuttings in her greenhouse – which was shattered as if a doll’s house.

Above us now as we run the dogs in the North Field there are redwings and fieldfares in small flocks in the laden holly trees, over the maize stubble. Jays flash around; green woodpeckers too. A buzzard risked a few minutes of blue sky in between wild dark clouds; the local sparrowhawk, the female of the pair who reared a chick or two this year in our vole-rich North Field, cruises over the Bramley orchard.

There are still flowers: the lesser stitchwort, periwinkles, clovers, one or two mallow and yarrow flowers, the white bladder campions I was so pleased to find here. Out of the window in my study, a last deep red rose is waving above the roofline. In the potager the nasturtiums are flourishing (last week I collected some seeds to preserve in red wine vinegar with thin slices of fresh root ginger, and spices): their bright flowers, along with the marigolds and the very plentiful borage, are nourishment for human eyes and insect bellies. Yesterday, Sunday, in between squalls, I cut back all the stems of rainbow chard in the potager: white, yellow, pink, orange, ruby, crimson beauties, trusting they’ll sprout again; and staked all the broccoli, purple sprouting and kales.

On the bank of the Bramley orchard, some large branches from the even larger oaks dangle out over the lane, precariously. Because we’re trying to get away from fossil fuels we don’t use a chainsaw, but it will be impossible to manage the amount of damage without, now.

Despite the storm, there are still one or two butterflies outside. In the evening, indoors in the warmth of the woodburner, one after another tortoiseshell, perhaps roosting in the loose stones that constitute a whole wall that includes the deep hearth blackened with centuries of smoke, wakes up and flutters round the room.

On the carrot stems two or three weeks ago there were stripy green, black and yellow swallowtail caterpillars: I’m wondering where they go to pupate – perhaps in the pile of rich black compost at the bottom of our potager? And today two fat golden bees were scavenging among the few remaining blossoms in the hugely rampant pile of roses and honeysuckle that has been blown off our arch, and will probably need more than the rope, four arms and one hour that were needed, with much effort, to heave it all back into place in the early summer after TM had built the arch to replace a fallen, broken and inadequate structure under which we had to creep to get from one part of the garden to another. A winch might do it. Mechanical, not fossil-fuel-driven, naturally.

Now in the early evening we’ve made a sanctuary of our sitting room, candlelit and warm. On one side of the woodburner is a huge pot of dogfood. On the other, a large saucepan of a make-do stew, mostly from garden produce: fat white flageolet beans and a dhal (lentils not by us) that we’d frozen and that had thawed themselves in the power cut, plus our onions, squash and sweet potatoes, all cooked up with coconut milk left over from the chocolate torte, spices and canned tomatoes. Second night running and it’s even better.

This feels like an old and sane way of doing things.

Although this is not really la France profonde (have I said? Golden stone, pan-tiled roofs…), this is one of the things Brits come to appreciate in rural France, Brittany included: the fact that it reminds them (depending of course on their age) of their childhood in Britain; rural Britain, anyway – the relative slowness, the lack of traffic on the roads, the old not-too-tarted-up houses, often still with wells and woodburners (though there are also plenty of newer houses, it has to be said). There are still hamlets of small stone houses, unspoilt, with great granite curved arches over the front doors. Breton working horses, a distinct and valued breed, are still occasionally used on the land. I imagine now there are few places where the only modes of cooking are wood-fired; but there will be some (I know, I know, woodsmoke is also polluting; in our defence, we burn very dry, seasoned wood that emits minimal pollution; and the hearth is still a heart to a house).

And I find in myself a deep and rare contentment at the lack of rushing and trying to accomplish too many things in too short a space of time. Attending to essentials: bringing in wood, finding something to cook slowly on the top of the woodburner, giving the dogs a run, foraging for a bit of wild sorrel or a parasol mushroom, peeling more large chestnuts from the trees on the land we share with the other-than-human, writing a poem…

Outside, at the moment anyway, all is calm. I open the long French windows in our bedroom (TM sorted a metal balustrade immediately so that we in the night, or the dogs at any time, were no longer likely to step out into the Beautiful Middles of Nothing) for a few brief moments to breathe post-storm air. The sky is temporarily clear. The stars – astonishing to think that the light from some of them will have taken hundreds or thousands of years to fall into our eyes – are bright here; there is never any light pollution. The storm clouds are absent except maybe towards the west; though we are promised more immense winds at the weekend, for the moment it couldn’t be more tranquil.

A gibbous golden moon rises to the north of the chestnuts (from where today I gathered some of the biggest I’ve seen), and above us Venus burns especially bright. I think of her, and the beautiful fivefold rosette-like pattern she scribes around us as she, too, orbits the sun. I reflect on her symbolism of the talents for love and for the creative life; and I think of ‘her’ islands, the mythical Hesperides, perhaps cognate with the Blessed Isles of the West. I think of her ruling of my sun sign, and of Fridays; I think of her as Jungian Jean Shinoda Bolen describes her in her Aphrodite form: a relational goddess who nonetheless remains independent unlike, Bolen tells us, the vulnerable goddesses Hera, Demeter and Persephone; and unlike, too, the non-relational Athena, Artemis and Hestia.

What this has to do with our situation I’m not sure; but I suppose it returns me to a continuing reflective focus of mine: how, as women particularly, we can remain in healthy relationship without, as they say, ‘giving our power away’. (Perhaps that’s why I’m thinking of this: our powerlessness when our infrastructures crash.) Relationality and independence both. To know we are all one; to be able also to function alone; to remember we are always interdependent; especially, to live as if relationship is all, as indeed it is.