The water has been off again in the village. In these dry chalk hills, the pipes crack, letting the water leak away to nothing. The kitchen tap judders and spits with such reluctant violence, I am soaked. I fill half a glass to drink. It swirls cloudy and opaque with calcium.
At dusk, I walk up the track to the down. In June, the night glow that comes off the high chalk is at its most pronounced and dreamlike. The old lane from here to Prosperous Farm looks laid with concrete, but in fact it’s long-worn, hoof-hammered, wheel-hardened chalk, harder than tarmac and slick with a faint watercolour sheen of algae. The soil is so very thin here, the white bones of the earth gleam through its green skin.
Field margins and headlands glow with the light of moon daisies (called oxeye daisies in the daytime, or ockser daisies in our west of West Berkshire dialect). All is a grainy, cinematic monochrome in the still-light dark of midsummer, but the white accents of growing, glowing, living things take on a candle-haunted liveliness that is impossible to resist.
The pink blush has leached out of the pale dog roses and the fragrant tips of wild privet and ringlets of honeysuckle intensify their scent. At intervals, elder trees hold their flat, creamy flowerplates out to passing moths, like silver-service waitresses.
After the rain, the air seems as infused with chalk as my glass of water; the moon, a half-tipped cereal bowl, hauling up the light, water and chalk together, so that even the glow is drawn upwards, pulling the moon daisies, hogweed, the elder-waitresses and the new-eared barley stalks up straight and quivering.
I am back home in time to see the gauzy barn owl leave its box silently, like one of those elderflower plates, sheared off and lobbed like a Frisbee across the dark paddock.
The white track is undimmed. The land, one moon beaming back at another, in a silent exchange of percolated light, water it won’t hold on to, and chalk. The moon, a micraster – an echinoid fossil or “shepherd’s crown” – is half-buried in the flint bed of the night.
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