streams, I and my five companions for the day entered the village orchard, where a maypole awaited us. To the maypole’s immediate rear was a large rock with a stone seat on top of it and five decades of young female names carved into it. A person could perhaps find a scene in Britain more suggestive than this of the declaration ‘We are ready for the sacrifice’ but it would be difficult. Outside the village hall old black and white photos of previous Lustleigh May Queens were displayed, and out of the ingrained habit of a person who has watched The Wicker Man fifty-seven times I could not help but check to see whether or not the 1972 photograph was missing. ‘They do love their divinity lessons,’ said my friend Andy in his best Christopher Lee voice. It was always only going to be a matter of time before somebody did.
May’s pay-off is felt even more acutely on the edge of the moor, the celebration of it perhaps even more necessary. Suzi and Fergus, whose hard-to-find house we have walked down the Cleave from today, have been snowed in for long periods during all but one of the twelve winters they’ve lived here. In that time, Suzi – a careful driver, like most people who live on or near Dartmoor – has written off three cars on these narrow lanes. Even the psychedelic moorland spring comes with its dark side: this time last year Suzi and Fergus had a weasel slaughter all but one of their thirteen chickens in two days flat. Deeply traumatised, the lone survivor had since moved next door. As I climbed back up the Cleave to my car, I was followed by a special Dartmoor sun: that sun you feel is palpably closer to you than it is elsewhere in the county, simply because you’re a little nearer to the roof of the world. The air had a slow, sparkly quality, as it often does on the moor, and this seemed to follow me home then stick around for the next few days. Cherry blossom and dandelion seed heads floated through the air in my garden, adding to its psychedelic reinvention. My cat Ralph, who has fantastic sideburns and a rugged late-hippy-era look about him, walked lazily through the blossom with a beatific expression on his face, and I felt like I was watching a dream sequence from a road movie made in 1969 by cats about cats.
All around us, everything was growing frantically. The garden’s copper beech hedge went from rust to dazzling green in barely more than a day. I mowed the lawn, nipped inside for a shower and a cup of tea, and it seemed that while my back was turned another twenty daisies had appeared. I mowed it again soon after, shaping two thick new border areas and leaving them free do their own thing where I’d scattered wildflower seeds, a decision that, though relieving me of part of a weekly chore, was made out of a wish to encourage more bees and butterflies into the garden rather than pure laziness. My current lawnmower had been a birthday present from my parents two years previously. Along with its assembly kit and instructions, the mower arrived with a lined pad marked ‘NOTES’. In here the true mowing connoisseur was presumably intended to make observations on the quality of his mow. My dad told me not to mow any pebbles because a bloke his friend Jeff knew mowed one and the pebble shot up and sliced off one of Jeff’s friend’s Labrador’s testicles. I don’t have a Labrador, and if I did and it was male I would almost certainly have it castrated at the earliest possible opportunity, in the normal legal manner, but the advice stuck with me, and I am careful not to mow pebbles. I viewed the notes section in the mower handbook as absurd for a long time, but I adore notebooks and can’t stand to see any of them empty and unloved, even – and perhaps especially – if they’re plain and dull, so I began to put it to occasional use, recording my user experience as a weekly handler of the Bosch Rotak 43 Ergoflex.
Even after the lawn had been mown short and smooth, a dark diagonal line remained visible across the largest segment of it. This line led to the place just beyond some brambles, through a hole in my garden fence, where a group of badgers had made their sett: the most direct route there from the copses on the hill above my house where they went to forage for grubs and rodents at night. I’d first noticed badgers in my garden the year before last, when one took a similar path across my lawn at dusk. It looked like an animal surprised at its own ability to run. Soon afterwards, another badger went through my recycling and separated plastic from aluminium: a needless gesture, since it all goes in the same bag in this part of Devon, as dictated by South Hams District Council. The following year, close to Summer Solstice, as I was taking a long cut across the hill overlooking my house to the post office, engrossed in a Garrison Keillor podcast on my iPod, I very nearly trod on a much younger badger, who scuttled away into the thick hedgerow. As the afternoon wore on a mixture of emotions set in: annoyance at my absent-mindedness, elation and that special remorse that only comes with almost treading on a very young creature that resembles a small snouty folk-rock bear. I read up on badgers a little when I got home and discovered that they are omnivores and not, as I first thought on a hasty misreading, ‘omnivoles’, which, being not a real word, does not in fact mean a vole who is in every place at once, which to me seems a shame and a missed opportunity. A couple of foods that badgers especially enjoy, I learned, are peanuts and cat biscuits, both of which I had a decent supply of in the house. At dusk that night I took some of both up to the hillside in bowls and sat in the long grass where I’d almost trod on the badger, determined to make amends. A bonus sight greeted me a few minutes after I arrived and scattered some of the peanuts and cat food: not just the reappearance of the original young badger from earlier, snuffling about on the shorter turf, but a shyer, smaller sibling, in the long grass and weeds a few feet away. Neither seemed hugely bothered by my presence, perhaps not yet being fully schooled in the lesson that human beings are massive bastards. I crouched in the grass and watched the two badgers for a quarter of an hour or so then emptied the remainder of my peanuts and cat biscuits from my bowls, which they duly chomped, the bolder one coming within about a foot of eating from my hand.
Over the ensuing days, without any special effort on my part, my life became very badger-themed. The following week I visited the annual summer Scythe Fair at Thorney Lakes in Somerset. To remind myself about the fair’s imminence, I wrote ‘Scythe Fair!’ on the appropriate day on my calendar. ‘Why does it say “Scythe Fair!” on your calendar?’ my girlfriend asked, and I told her that it was because I was going to a scythe fair. The Scythe Fair featured several stalls selling scythes, old and new, while children romped in freshly scythed grass heaps and competitive unisex scything took place in the central arena, some of it (male only) topless, some of the competitors surprisingly youthful. This gave the place the slight look of a Grim Reaper Hogwarts. Jay, my companion for the day, who suffers from the most virulent hay fever known to man, had not quite allowed for the results of this in his planning, so I took refuge with him and his ever-reddening damp face in the far corner of the fair, away from the scythed grass. Here I got talking to Leslie on the Dorset for Badger and Bovine Welfare Group stall; who was raising awareness about the government-endorsed badger cull, which, based on deeply questionable scientific evidence and with a ludicrously wasteful budget, was moving further into the South West. I told her that I’d recently fed my local badgers peanuts, and she said she went a step further and made peanut butter sandwiches for her local ones every day at dusk. The badgers had come to expect this and, with time, even view it as their right, but one evening when they arrived in her garden with their typical punctuality she realised she was fresh out of peanut butter. She searched her fridge and freezer but the only slightly appropriate meal she could find was a dish of oldish ratatouille from her freezer which, if she was honest, she wasn’t sure if she was ever going to get around to eating. ‘They loved it,’ she told me. ‘But they ran off with the dish afterwards.’ She paused and a wistful mood appeared to overcome her. ‘I really liked that dish,’ she added. At one of my spoken-word events only a couple of days after this a member of the audience told me about a close friend who’d been bitten on the bottom by a badger in the garden at a house party in Exeter, which made me wonder not just about the finer details of the attack but whether I was going to the right house parties. A couple of initial small signs of a sett appeared in my garden a week or so later. The badgers reconsidered and abandoned this but in early spring 2016 the other sett, at the end of the diagonal path in the lawn, appeared. Intrigued, I set up a trail camera not far from its entrance.
Each of the three springs I’ve experienced in Devon has been markedly different from the other two. When I arrived from Norfolk in March 2014 it rained relentlessly for weeks, transforming
