Ghost Species

After half a mile or so, Justin and I emerged from our hedgerow on to a rutted lane and brushed the twigs and leaves from our clothes and hair. From there, it was only a short distance into Methwold Hythe itself. Near the crossroads in the centre of the village, we turned left into a farmyard with a vast chalk-walled corn barn, its door propped shut with a fifteen-foot scaffold pole, and its red-tiled roof slowly caving in.

This was the Wortley farm, belonging to Eric Wortley and his identical twin sons, Peter and Stephen. It was Eric in particular that I had come to see. Justin knocked on a whitewashed door. ‘Come in,’ we heard a high voice cry, and Justin creaked the door open. I followed him into the kitchen, ducking my head under the lintel.

‘That’s a lazy wind,’ said Eric, smiling. ‘He never bothers going round you, just goes right on through you.’ He was sitting by an old iron stove, whose belly glowed with orange embers. His legs were crossed and his hands clasped. Even in the low light of the kitchen, I could see the milky glaze of cataracts over his eyes.

Eric unclasped a hand and pointed to the empty chair pulled up tight against the stove. ‘Sit down here by the fire, get yourselves warm.’ Justin took a third chair from the kitchen table. We sat together quietly for a few moments, hands splayed towards the heat. A saucepan of water grumbled on top of the stove. A ginger-and-black cat was curled up on the brick ledge nearby, enjoying the warmth.

Eric is ninety-eight years old; Peter and Stephen are somewhere in their fifties. Between them Eric and his sons have put in more than 150 years of service on the farm. Eric is old enough that his early experiences on the land would not have been much different from those of someone who had grown up in the 1700s. No one knows quite how long a Wortley farm has been in the Hythe, but Wortley is accepted to be one of the most venerable names in the village. At present, though, with neither Peter nor Stephen married or with children, there is little prospect of the farm’s survival. They are the last of their line: ghosts of a kind.

Eric tilted his head back and leaned towards me, trying to focus. ‘These eyes of mine,’ he said, regarding me with a grin, ‘they’re so smeary, they even make you look pretty. That’s how bad they’ve got. Have you come far today, then?’

In a way I had come very far indeed. Only thirty miles or so from my own home; only thirty miles or so from Justin’s. But to step into Eric’s farm was to step back in time. Eric was born in 1910, in the house in which we were sitting. He had lived there for nearly a century, and the house had barely changed around him. Apart from a battered white electric hob and oven in the corner of the kitchen, little dated the room from after the First World War. Whitewashed walls yellowed by decades of stove smoke. A free-standing wooden dresser with wide eye-like cabinet windows. Gun hooks on the crooked ceiling beam of the room, from one of which hung Eric’s flat tweed cap, its rim and crown worn to a shine. A dark pinewood kitchen table.

‘That’s the same table I sat around as a boy,’ said Eric. ‘I was the eighth of twelve, not thirteen, because Mother had one that died when I was two year old. What was there? There was Dolly, John, Harry, Javie, Tom, Peggy, then me. I was eighth.’ He half-sang this list of names, with the lilting Norfolk habit of prolonging and deepening the first syllable of a word, and shortening and heightening the second. ‘And then there’s Mary, Dick, Renie and Ted. That’s how they was born. Every two year Mother had another one. Now I’m the only one alive out of them all. Whether I been lucky I don’t know. Still, I’ve had a good life, I’ve always done my word and I’ve always kept here.’

Distance doesn’t mean the same to Eric as to most other people. He lives in an unexpanded world. In ninety-eight years, he has barely left his parish. He has never gone to London. He has been twice to the Norfolk coast and once to Norwich, the county capital of Norfolk, about forty miles from the Hythe. At the end of the first afternoon I spent with Eric, a year or more ago, just before I got into my car to drive home, he asked me where I was returning to. ‘Cambridge,’ I said. ‘Will you be able to get home tonight?’ he enquired kindly. ‘Won’t you need a place to stay?’

Eric has exceptional kinds of local knowledge. He knows the water tables, the weather habits and the wind histories of every part of his parish. He holds in his head a detailed memory map of the surrounding landscape. He has walked, ridden and ploughed every foot of his land countless times, and watched its changes through decades as well as seasons. He knows the stories of the inhabitants, living and dead, and the species of bird and animal that have thrived or failed here throughout the twentieth century. And he has no interest in questions about the land that can be answered in the abstract.