Notes on Gleaning: The Book Club and the Barley Husk.  

It is my turn to host our village book club, my choice of title and I’m having a wobble at the thought: my house is small, disorganised, untidy; I have 6 chairs and only three wine glasses. A friend suggests meeting outside, where I am most at home, and it suits our subject, putting us in the scene.

I seek permission from ‘The Big House’ and we are allowed the use of a grassy glade beyond the ‘park pale’. We are hugged by woods on two sides, and have a view of stubble fields rising to the big sweeping arc of the downs soaring over everything else. I take a brazier down and my son lights it, keeping it going until we arrive. I make flapjacks and a flask of mulled wine.

We meet just before sunset to walk through the farmyard, past the long barn and the not-long-stilled combine harvester. Golden straw lines every edge and hangs festooned from low branches, even though we can taste frost on the air. Wheat, oat and barley husks whisper and skitter in little rolls over the dry ground. The sky is streaked with pink-and-orange mares’ tails. Beyond is the thin pale paring of a fingernail moon. We walk through the sheep and settle on a circle of chestnut logs. Pheasants cough up the dark in rising, massed crescendo before falling silent, and a robin sings wistfully. The first owls call.

Our book is Melissa Harrison’s All Among the Barley, set over a golden summer in Suffolk, 1933. There are parallels with rural discontent in the 1830’s, with now, in Britain. All is not what it seems. We go through our questions, prompting talk of other rural novels: Reservoir 13, The Horseman, Ulverton, The Go-Between, A Month in the Country, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. We discuss the themes of change, of nostalgia; of a sheltered, pastoral idyll that has never really existed, that is dangerous. We are cautious. Much of it feels very close to home, to the bone. Others join us, phone torches wavering like owl lights across the field.

We touch upon threads, pull at them. Toast marshmallows. We conjure up place and character: Edie, Elmbourne and Edmund – a rescued landrail (or corncrake) and a ‘familiar’ in the book. I reveal our own ‘Edmund’; a 100 year old taxidermy landrail I’ve been lent and tragically, the last one shot in our village. The downs above us a few weeks ago would still have been alive with their strange, rasping crex-crex calls for a little longer, along with the lonely, haunting wails of stone curlews and nightjar – now isolated to local heathland, but once, very much a ‘shepherd’s bird’.

Wreathed in woodsmoke, lit by firelight, we women discuss how hard life was then, how few choices there were. Coming over the freshly drilled field, we had begun, again, to remake our own desire path across, and felt some indication of the hardships wrought upon a body: twisting ankles and testing cannon bones and calves. The knuckled and knapped flints make their lacerations into the soles of our boots. We tell our own stories. The soft, hushed dark lends an air of close confiding, a careful listening ear, not felt before. We discuss the power or protection of witchery, madness and coercion: nostalgia, change, longing and betrayal; seasonal ritual, dread and comfort. Home.

Aided by the hiss of a barn owl, the rural past, its lessons and ghosts are tangible, mingling with the woodsmoke. Patterns and stories are repeated, traces remain, indelible stains, the same dust resettling. When it is time to go, I think we walk home through the dark, slightly different people, each one of our hands making its customary 180-degree turn on the time-worn gatepost, before going our separate torchlit ways home, calling out across the fields with the owls under the stars, until our voices fade.