Driving Away.
My son has a car. We pick it up with him from a former farmyard in Aldermaston where it sits beside a newly roofed grain barn. There are swallows on the wires like a musical score and enough room in the boot for a bass guitar and amp. The swallows fly in and out of the barn and house martins circle above the white, chalk-dusted yard. I watch them to distract myself from a thumping mixture of emotions and the fear of letting go.
Tractors are carting straw and newly made hay up the road and turning the windrows in the fields beyond. I think of the money I earnt haymaking, waitressing and at the counter in Our Price Records to save up for my first car – a cherry-red mini metro.
His first car is as old as he is, has a cassette tape deck and is the colour of a dark green fritillary butterfly’s hind wings in the shade. It has the iridescent gloss of ivy leaves.
A woodlark is singing above fresh stubble as we leave. And, as we wait at the train crossing at Thatcham Station, a Cetti’s warbler is loud in the reeds beside the platform; crossing Greenham Common, there are skylarks.
I think then of the wild places cars have got me and the wildlife I’ve seen by car. The late-night badger clans, herds of fallow deer, the stuttered, red, dash-and-dot streak of a stoat family, the goshawk sat on a branch overhanging the road, and fields and hills spreading away like a wild, embroidered map. I try not to think of the roadkill. Especially the very few casualties I’ve caused myself. Only recently, a midnight tawny owl came at my windscreen, wings spread right across it, talons outstretched to my face behind it. Neither of us had a chance; my car had swopped places with a wood mouse that, last moment, had run between my wheels.
Risking a talon through my thumbs, I scooped up the stunned owl, folded the feathered, wooded fan of its wingspan back in and tucked it under the 30mph sign until it recovered and flew off.
The car will give him freedom, independence and opportunity – especially living out here, in a small village where friends are miles and miles away and the bus and train routes are impossibly limited and the village shop is a board on a bucket selling fresh eggs and courgettes next to an honesty box.
All this comes with a huge burden of guilt, of course. It always has done. At University, house-sharing beside the new M4 extension at Twyford Down and taking time out to protest at Newbury Bypass, I used my car once a week to go home to work, frustrating my younger housemates by insisting on walking or biking everywhere else and, to their bemusement, slogging up the hill with bags of shopping. I owned a car, but didn’t want to drive it.
On a recent mountain bike ride in The Alps, my son was astonished by the abundance of wildflowers, birds and insects – and remarked on the amount of flies splattered on the car windscreen and the moth snowstorm in front of the headlamps of the car that got them there. He knows it is not like that here anymore. That it was. That it could be again.
He will walk and bike where he can, get the train when he can; but the buses have been cut beyond all usefulness or affordability, for a 17yr old.
He knows his freedom comes at a price and is humbled by that. I know, as I must let him go, that he will make amends as best he can.
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