They darkened further. Driving back to the house one afternoon I passed a huddle of walkers staring at a rabbit crouched in the grassy verge on the other side of the road. They were upset. Their shoulders were hunched in concern. I pulled in a little further up the road and waited. I did not want to talk to them, but their concern pulled at me. They knew the rabbit was sick and wanted to do something, but no one knew what that could be, and no one was brave enough to get near it. For minutes on end they stared at it, unable to intervene, unwilling to leave. Then they walked on. When they were gone I got out of the car and went up to the little lump of fur. It was a small rabbit. Its muscles were wasted, its head covered in tumours, its eyes swollen and blistered. It was matted with mud. It could not see. ‘Oh rabbit,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Leaning down I hardened my heart and put it out of its misery.
The rabbit had myxomatosis. It arrived in Britain in 1952 and in two years the virus – originally from South America, but already introduced by humans to Australia and Europe – killed ninety-five per cent of the British rabbit population. Tens of millions of rain-soaked corpses littered the roads and fields, and their disappearance had huge effects on the countryside: rabbit-grazed grasslands grew thick with scrub and predator populations crashed. Rabbits have recovered since, though never to the numbers that we once thought normal. And while the virus is less virulent now, outbreaks still occur.
That small rabbit sat huddled in my mind. It would not go away. It felt like a revenant, something pulled from the past, from back when I was small and the countryside was in crisis. It wasn’t just the rabbits dying. Hawk populations were in freefall from agricultural pesticides. Skeletal elm trees were chopped down and burned. The otters were gone, rivers were poisoned, there were guillemots drowning in oiled seas. Everything was sick. And we’d be next. I knew it. All of us. I knew that one morning there’d be a siren, then a double flash of light on the horizon and I’d look up and see a distant mushroom cloud, and then, on the wind, the fallout would come. Invisible dust. And then everything would be dead. Or we’d go back to the Stone Age, and live in rags huddled around ruins and smoking fires. But even that slim dream of survival was dashed. ‘Are we going to build a nuclear fallout shelter under the garden?’ I asked my parents one afternoon after school. They looked at each other. Maybe they didn’t understand, I thought, so I went on. ‘In the leaflet it says we should build a shelter under the stairs and there’s not very much room under ours for you and me and James.’ There was a long pause, then they gently told me that our house was very close to several very important military targets. ‘There’s no point in worrying,’ they said. ‘There’ll be no fallout. If there’s a war, we won’t even know about it. We’ll be instantly vaporised.’ This, needless to say, did not help at all. I scratched my name on bits of slate and buried them as deep as I could in the garden, under the earth. Maybe they’d survive the apocalypse.
The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world. The rabbit was a ghost from the apocalypse of my childhood, and later that week another appeared. This one was not a rabbit, but a book. I had pulled it from my friend’s shelves: a new edition of J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, the story of a man obsessively watching wintering wild peregrines in the Essex countryside of the late 1960s. I’d not read it for years. I remembered it as a poetic celebration of nature. But as I started reading it I found it was not like that at all. This, I thought with a chill, comes from the same place as that rabbit. I saw in it the writer’s awful desire for death and annihilation, a desire disguised as an elegy for birds that flew through poisonous skies, falcons as searing-bright and pewter-flashed as reflected sun, already things of memory before they were ever gone.
I was frightened of Baker and what he meant. I was not as frightened of White. Despite his disaster with Gos, despite his desire for cruelties and his dreadful politics, White fought hard against death. He loved the small things of the world, and knowing war was coming, he lived in hope of miracles. In Baker’s book I saw no hope at all. For him the world was dying, and his hawks were icons of extinction: ours, theirs and his own. There was no struggle in him. He shared the falcons’ fate; had no choice but to follow them. He was lured towards them just as the gulls and plovers in his book rose helplessly towards the peregrine’s killing strike, just as the compass-beaks of all the small birds hiding in hedges pointed in fear towards the magnet that was the falcon in the air. There were no place names, no people in his book. They’d fallen away. I understood this better now, for I knew the pull of the hawk, and I knew how the world could disappear in the light it cast. But his hawks were made of death. Troubled, I hoped my hawk was life. I hoped it very much.