The Bumblebee Flies Anyway Read online

  Nature is a healer. We know and have always known this. Regular access to green space reduces our reliance on antidepressants. Our blood pressure lowers, our heart rate falls. But you shouldn’t need to escape your life to find it, it should be with you already, should be part of you. Yes, it’s in the woods and the parks, the nature reserves, the mountains. But it’s also on our grey streets. It’s eating our food waste, nesting in our litter. It screams and shits, eats food, knocks over bins. It wakes us up. Foxes, seagulls, pigeons, rats. The 3 a.m. robin. Badgers and deer now roam the suburbs, soon they’ll conquer our cities. If only we could see.

  We’re so far removed from the natural world that people who feed pigeons are more likely to be seen as mad or lonely than as nature lovers. We crave nature but we don’t know how to look for it or get it back. We don’t see the tools we have at our disposal, the space behind and in front of our houses. We walk the dog in the park while looking at our phone. Some of us feed the pigeons while everything else is dying.

  So much of this could be fixed in our gardens.

  I always smile and say hello to the old lady at number 43. Above her and next door, disgruntled neighbours have erected pigeon spikes to stop them hanging around after they’ve been fed. She doesn’t seem to care. I see her defiant smirk as she scatters food over the pavement and road, as pigeons land on car roofs. Perhaps I should start with her. Have a word, donate a plant or two. Chuck a sparrow leaflet through the door – there’s more that you can do than throw stale bread into the road. I can help you. Would you like that?

  Summer

  When I dream, I dream of Mum or the garden or other things like being lost at sea or hurtling through space, screaming. I wake up and feel like I’ve been in a fight. I try to stay sane by running. But sometimes I cry when I’m running and my breathing goes all funny and people think I’m having an asthma attack.

  She, too, is still having nightmares. Each evening we take it in turns to sit with her as she tries to get off to sleep. She seems scared to let herself be taken, she resists it, despite her exhaustion. I lie in her bed watching peregrines on the laptop as she battles with sleep then falls too quickly and wakes with a jolt. Finally, I think she’s gone and I close the laptop and suddenly she calls out. She turns, slowly, breathlessly, to see if I’m still there, a frightened child. She stutters her relief as she takes my hand: it’s always nicer with a fffffriend. I kiss her and hold her and weep silently into her pillow.

  The peregrine babies have names now: Diplo, Chaos and Xena. At least two are female. They’re growing so big, the parents often leave them alone, huddled up together or playing tug-of-war with a pigeon bone or a sibling’s leg. The nest is full of pigeon feathers, the gravel base barely visible.

  Today I stop running because I see a coot out of the water and I am enchanted by its amazing foot. It’s standing on one leg, revealing the perfect giant clown’s shoe. A shoe made of pristine turtle skin. A shoe with incredible mottling and elegant sharp, pointed claws, a shoe not quite blue, not quite grey, not quite yellow. They’re incredible, coots’ feet, and mostly we don’t see them because mostly coots are in the water or sitting on a nest. But this one is doing neither. It’s standing on one leg, at the side of the water, being gawped at by a sweaty runner who hasn’t realised she’s stopped crying to look at a foot.

  The garden is a coven of witches’ fingers. Hunched-over spires of hooded bells twist and lean through the borders, each one ringing with the tinny sound of hidden bumblebee. We shouldn’t touch them, or so everyone says, but I can’t help it – there’s nothing in this world to rival their softness. The feel of them transports me back to when they towered over me, when I would stand beneath one and look up into a world I shared only with bees, a world of fairy footsteps or haloed spots, guiding the way to the nectaries.

  I’m deadheading. Cutting back here, sacrificing there. The compost heap is a mountain of colour and my foxgloves lie as hanged witches on top. As children we would wear the thimbles on our fingers. There were so many of them in June, the main border between the driveway and path full of them. For ages, uninspiring rosettes of slug-mangled, lizard-skin leaves, often yellowing at the tips. Then, suddenly, the most wondrous spires of deep purple, uncompromisingly announcing summer. Of all the flowers that take me back to childhood the foxglove is queen, but it’s only when I touch the blooms or sit beneath one and look up into the internal workings of the thimbles that I feel it. Memory’s a strange thing.

  The origin of ‘foxglove’ is unclear but it may be a mutation of ‘folksglove’, referring to faerie folk. Scandinavian folklore tells of fairies teaching foxes to ring the little bells to warn others of approaching hunters. But also that the foxes’ tiny feet were made quiet by wearing the thimble-shaped flowers as gloves, better allowing them to raid henhouses. Its botanical name, digitalis, comes from the Latin digitanus, meaning finger. Foxgloves have many common names: goblin gloves, dead men’s bells, fairy’s thimbles; but witches’ fingers is my favourite.

  If administered in high enough doses, foxglove leaves can decrease the heart rate, cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and death – a botanist killed himself by eating foxglove leaves in 2005. And yet, if administered properly, they can help treat heart conditions. They can ‘raise the dead and kill the living’, so the old saying goes. Long associated with witches and witchcraft, foxgloves were used as a folk medicine for heart complaints, the knowledge passed down through generations of medicine women, mistrusted and tortured, burned or hanged. The knowledge survived Witch Fever and in the 1700s a doctor called William Withering learned of the remedy from ‘an old woman in Shropshire’. Its main toxin, digoxin, is still used as a heart medicine today.

  I grow foxgloves as a nod to my childhood and a nod to powerful women, witches. And for the wildlife, of course. I’ve seen only two types of bumblebee use foxgloves – the common carder, Bombus pascuorum, and the garden bumblebee, Bombus hortorum. Aggressive little wool carder bees, a solitary species that I’ve yet to attract to my bee hotel, too. Those with the longest tongues, necessary, I assume, for reaching the nectaries tucked up at the base of each thimble. If you sit by one you will see the bees zone in and out, working their way through the spire of blooms, travelling upwards as if climbing steps. Growing up to two metres and housing up to fifty individual flowers, each foxglove bears a lot of pollen and nectar in a small space. Good for small gardens, foxgloves.

  It’s not just bees that like it. The lesser yellow under­wing, angle shades and setaceous Hebrew character moths use it as a caterpillar food plant. Biennial, there are so many in the garden now because the ones I planted last year didn’t flower and then I planted more, just in case. Most are your bog-standard purple affair but there are some different ones, some cultivar or other, which are pretty and have pinker petals with a sort of internal magenta stain, rather than spots. I like them but I wonder if the bees do.

  It’s nice to be in the garden, which threatens once again to become a stranger now I’m so often elsewhere. Three hours on the motorway and I’m spending the last of the day here with the secateurs and still-at-work bees. House sparrows assemble in next door’s holly. The blackbird on his Leyland cypress three doors down, a baby seagull each on its little bit of chimney. I trim the lawn with long-handled shears, snip rogue flowers here and there for the vase or compost, fish out blanket weed from the pond. The garden is mine again and I feel whole again. Only a few hours from the motorway and sadness of looking after Mum.

  She’s doing so well but she can’t see it. She talks in riddles but mostly she tells us she’s bored. And of course she is. She can’t read, hold a conversation, go on a nice walk, do the crossword – all the things that make her Mum. She obsesses over tiny things – elements of her personality exaggerated. What time is it what are we doing next what’s the plan where’s Pete why don’t you do this I think I might put my pyjamas on. It’s 4pm, don’t be putting your pyjamas on, the sun’s shining, we’re doing the crossword. But I�
�m bored I’m so bored, she says. I persuade her to come with me to walk around the lake. She doesn’t want to, makes some excuse. But you’re bored, Mum, come on! I know it will floor her but at least when she’s falling asleep in the chair she’ll forget how bored she is. Give it a chance, we can always turn back.

  She reluctantly agrees. We walk to the car and I drive her down the road to the car park by the lake. Nice and easy. Out we get. Will we be long? No. Will we see anyone we know? No. But we might see great crested grebes or the black swan, and I heard a cuckoo a couple of weeks ago, Mum. Yes, all right, she says. Her anxiety is palpable and I wonder if it’s a fear of being seen or if she just feels so awful that she can’t bear to be away from home. It’s heart-breaking bearing witness to this, from the woman who owns the dancefloor at family weddings, who plays table tennis on a Wednesday, who quotes Shakespeare as she skips down the stairs each morning, not caring for a second who she’s waking up.

  My hand on her shoulder. Come on, Mum.

  We walk along the winding path overgrown with cow parsley, red clover and bird’s foot trefoil. The first of the sloes, still small and green, tease us from branches above. It’s quiet and calm at this time of day, most of the fishermen have packed up. Birds sail unseen among verdant trees. The last time she was here was March. Things were still brown then, just peeping through. Now everything is lush. We reach the lake and stop. Here we are, look, it’s not so bad, is it? The lake stretches out before us, reflecting the pylon-striped sky. No, she says. No. She stands for a moment and I wonder what’s going through her head as she looks at this view that, at one point, none of us thought she’d see again. I wonder if that’s what she’s thinking, if that’s what this is – a reluctance to confront one’s fears: I am here at the place I thought I’d never see again. I am here but not completely. I am here but broken, halved. I am half but this is still whole. We turn left as a cormorant smacks into the water for a fish. She stops again, surprised. It’s OK, Mum. Then onwards, as baby great tits call from hidden nests, coal tits seesaw in the canopy, chiffchaffs flit half-heartedly. There’s no cuckoo today. But there are grebes and I point them out to her as we stop and stand again. Oh yes, she says, greebies. She asks, constantly, how long we’ll be and eventually I sit her down on the grass to stare at the water. She likes that, she says, but she’s happy to turn back. For all her anxiety she walked around half the lake and we can tick off another thing she has done and Can Do. Back in the car to home and her chair, where she sits with a cup of tea and piece of cake and drifts off to sleep. I pack my things and drive back to Brighton, to my garden and the foxgloves. They can raise the dead and kill the living. What could they do for Mum?

  Teenage peregrines poke their heads out of the nest as police sirens wail below. Xena and Diplo perch on the edge, pulling at their down feathers, desperate to be let go. Only Chaos still looks like a baby, stuck in the nest while his siblings explore. I feel sorry for him. I lie in bed with tea, watching them.

  The garden is two. It’s been two years since I exhumed it, brought it back from the dead. Mum’s in recovery, the garden’s in recovery. It’s only me now who needs rehabilitating. Two months of stress and fear, of not eating, of too much drinking, of endless driving and of living out of a bag. I feel like it’s I who have been exhumed. My neck aches with the weight of my head, every bone hurts. Like altitude sickness, when I stop I feel as though I’m glued to the bed, the chair. There’s no energy left, no life. Every day I survive rather than thrive. Like Mum, like the garden. None of us is really doing that well.

  I spend a rare couple of hours in the garden, inspecting this, cutting back that, weeding out this, moving that. I open the back door and the sparrows send alarm calls. They’re in the borders, fishing out caterpillars and aphids for their young, I think. One sits on my wooden bee block and watches me while the others carry on until I move forwards and, cheep!, the lot of them disappears. How wonderful that they can hide here, finally.

  It changes daily now. We’ve had rain and the space has gone mad. ‘Bill Mackenzie’ has claimed the trellis and is in full bloom, clashing wildly with ‘Shropshire Lass’ – I wasn’t expecting them to flower at the same time. Self-seeded field poppies have turned up everywhere, competing with a sea of white and blue love-in-a-mist. Foxgloves tower, phlomis jostle, lychnis, cranesbills and cornflower flash, here and there, advertising their wares for a thousand buzzing bees. A small tortoiseshell butterfly rests in the lawn while a holly blue bounces through the borders. Wow.

  I can barely get to the back now, to reach the bee hotels. I squeeze through anyway, lifting out the block to see nest cells made by eight red mason bees. Eggs and grubs abound, all looking good. There are no leafcutters yet. But soon. ‘Frances E. Lester’ is in bloom, her leaves as yet untouched but it’s only June. There’s plenty of time. My bee block has residents too. Although I’ve no idea who. Solitary wasps, perhaps. A lump of sawdust pokes through from one of the holes. I smooth it down and whatever is inside pokes it back out again. Whose garden is this? I sit and watch for a while but nothing emerges and my mystery guest remains just that.

  It’s so alive, suddenly. I fish weed out of the pond and a common darter larva jumps out onto the lawn. I ferret among the grass and find it, this squat, angry-looking thing, built for killing. What does it kill, I wonder, in my tiny water? Hard to imagine a full-grown dragonfly will emerge from here, mate and lay its own eggs in the water it came from. My two-year-old pond – I could cry with pride.

  It’s a sunny day and the garden is parched but it will rain later or so I’m told. I carve holes in the lawn and plant daisies, self-heal and bird’s foot trefoil I half-inched from a bit of lawn on Nevill Road. Just red clover to find now and my list of lawn weeds is complete. Dandelions found their own way here but everything else had help. Next year the lawn will have patches of purple, red, yellow and white among the green. And the bees will have a feast. It will be beautiful.

  Past the longest day and it will be only a few weeks until everything starts to die down. Flowers are already going to seed, roses to hips, leaves to earth. The season is turning but it’s only just begun.

  Xena, Diplo and Chaos perch on the roof of Sussex Heights. Their parents are around, all five of them call to each other while shoppers and pub-goers mill beneath them on busy roads. They’ve well and truly fledged now. I think they’re practising flying; one by one they launch from the roof, do a little turn and fly back. Baby steps.

  They’re so big and powerful, so majestic and so cute. I stand at the top of Regency Square with my binoculars, ignoring the bemused stares of passers-by. You know they’ve got their own website, says a man smoking on his doorstep. I turn to look at him and say yes. I want to tell him these three birds starting their lives on a tower block in central Brighton have been the only thing that’s kept me going in the last three months but I think better of it. I say yes, yes, and smile, and get back to my birds. They continue to fly above me in little baby circles, their large, angular wings effortlessly launching them skywards. Their wing beats scarcely seem necessary, camp, almost. I wonder how these babies will go from this to being the fastest animal on the planet, when they will do their first dive. Will it be for a pigeon? I see them in the suburbs, sometimes. If I sit in the flat with the back door open, the gulls will tell me when the peregrines are here. Every one of them rises up from its rooftop nest and flies in agitated circles, cawing loudly. Pigeons scarper, house sparrows fall silent. Whole streets react in this way, gulls screaming, pigeons running, sparrows hiding, until the intruders leave and everything returns, instantly, to how it was. I’ve never been lucky enough to see a dive.

  One of them flies to a rooftop car park and calls from there; pigeons and house sparrows scatter beneath them but they know it’s not feeding time. They’re cautious but they know they’re safe. A hierarchy, a food chain played out on the mean streets of Brighton. Five birds own the city.

  She was coning by the time her GP was called, he tel
ls the student doctor sitting in on her routine appointment as she tries to convey her latest list of haemorrhage- or hospital-related ailments. I look it up: it means herniation of the brain. It means there was so much swelling inside the skull that her brain had started to be pushed where brain tissue isn’t supposed to be. Coning. It’s usually impossible to survive. I feel sick but I should feel lucky. I can’t speak. I should feel grateful that she’s not dead or brain-dead, that she doesn’t have locked-in syndrome and that she can move all of her limbs. But I just feel sick. She had started to die.

  It’s still so impossibly early to know how well she’ll recover. She’s started cooking again, given up the bars of chocolate and whole packets of fish fingers she seemed so wedded to when she first got home. She’s preparing veg, getting back to her routine. I call her and she tells me about the garden. Her speech is better but inconsistent. She wants me to come up and do some sausaging, she doesn’t like sausaging alone. I’m confused for a minute before I realise sausaging is gardening. She wants me to weed the bloody veg patch and do something with the ornamental quince she tried to train up into an obelisk ten years ago and which still just sprawls out of the bottom. My fault for ignoring them while she was in hospital. My fault for leaving the worst jobs until last. Who knew she would come out of hospital having nearly died and be so concerned with sausaging? Mother of mine, I should have known.

  I buy chips on the way home from watching the peregrines and let myself though the flat into the garden. I sit on the grass next to the pond forking salty, vinegary fingers into my mouth. I close my eyes, tune into bees. There are bumblebees still on the wing, the tinny whine from within a honeywort flower versus the low even buzz of flight. It’s been a sunny day and insects abound. The back fence takes the last of the sunshine as the sky begins to pink. Herring gulls clack-clack into the fading light. The baby is at its rooftop sentry, its lone parent looks the other way. I can hear the house sparrows but I don’t know where they are.