When the heart needs to go West

1

WHEN THE HEART NEEDS TO GO WEST

It’s 5 am, Covid era, October 2020, and in a ‘gap’ between restrictions on travel we have arrived at Caen, on the Normandy coast of France. As soon as our wheels touch the road, we are due to drive several hundred miles south-southwest to the Lot and Corrèze. Over three days I’ve booked for us to see seven properties. My suggestion, but I’ve cold feet.

We’re looking at property with land. Our future (our own personal future, but also the planet’s), we know, lies in forest gardening, permaculture, rewilding and/or allowing natural rewilding. Sensitive and careful organic land use, in harmony with natural ecosystems. (In my case vegan; I’ll explore the whys and hows, and the dilemmas, of that later.)

We’re leaving a very beautiful spot: a stone barn eco-conversion that The Man built on a South Devon hillside, above a wild valley with an alder-lined brook, spindle trees, deer, hare and badger, many species of birds, surrounded by two acres of woodland, orchard and a large vegetable plot. I have my own writing and painting studio separate from the house, where I can also lead groups. In front of that is a perennial vegetable, herb and bee bed that I’ve created.

Our little valley is being increasingly populated, in a good way, with people (often young, and often living in unconventional dwellings) doing interesting things.

The hillside is north-facing and on a steep often slippery slope. In winter, frost and ice can remain for hours, or even days. It’s hard work growing vegetables there. More, we cannot afford to keep living where we are (the mortgage is due), and we’ve found nowhere in Britain with even an acre of land that we can afford, and in which we’d actually like to live.

Now we come to travel south I’m beset with anxieties about moving so far south with its increasing drought, water stress (but also floods), and the environmental costs of flying or driving back so far to see family and friends in Britain’s Westcountry. Last night, in a snatched hour or two of sleep on the ferry, I had nightmares about road accidents, up close and personal, frightening.

It’s dark outside. I stumble down to the lorry deck, to where our pickup truck is parked, after TM, who is a strider. I’m off-balance from my dream, and also physically from a too-heavy rucksack thrown over one shoulder. I must have caught my foot on one of what they call ‘elephants’ feet’: iron protruding anchoring points for lorries in heavy seas. I’m on the floor of the deck, and unable to move.

By 6 am we’re in Caen hospital. Because of Covid, I’m alone in a rather packed waiting room for Urgences, TM is somewhere else. I hope he has a book. It takes 4 or 5 hours before I’m discharged: yes, I’ve broken my left arm, up near the shoulder, a clean fracture. They can’t plaster it so it’s slung, and I’ve received dire injunctions about not moving it. I’ve only just now been given painkillers.

There’s no chance for me of doing such a drive, even as a passenger.

I cannot start to describe the relief when TM turns the wheels right, heading West, to my beloved forest in northwest Finistère, somewhere to which, for many reasons, I’ve given my heart. (See the top photo.)

West is where my heart always leans. West on the version of the British Medicine Wheel that I follow is indeed the direction of the feeling nature; of the Otherworld and the Dreamtime; of our ancestors and their stories; of the dissolution, as I see it, of the ego into the bigger picture; of the subconscious. It’s also, physically, the land of the stone circles and the other megaliths of my people from the Far West of Cornwall; and Brittany hosts one of the densest number of megalithic sites anywhere in the world. Brittany, particularly the forest towards which we’re driving, for decades now has offered me a deep sense of belonging.

We enter the misty drizzle that so often characterises this land at the edge of the world, and despite the pain in my arm something lifts away from me and dissolves in the mists.

There is an addendum. When we arrive home a week later, there is a letter asking TM to take his vehicle to the nearest Toyota garage, as there is a recall of his model due to a fault. Maybe that dreamed road accident could have been really quite up close and personal.

It’s hard to give up the dream of the romantic south or southwest of France, in or near mountains: ancient golden-stone houses with red pantile roofs; sun and more sun; eating outside every evening; but we did. Little by little we reoriented our vision until it became obvious that we would be looking to move to misty, magical, mythical, damp, grey-stone, slate-roofed Brittany after all.

And we have; we are beginning to manifest the future that I spoke of at the top, in ‘The Beautiful Middles of Nowhere’. This blog is the story of that transition.