Müncheberg
13 November 2016 [3]
“Don’t walk through the cattle field,” she said. “The cows don’t have much
of a sense of humour.” And indeed they were long-horned and they looked mean.
Best avoided.
“Go round to the left,” she said. “You’ll find the wood crew working in
the forest.”
So off we went. Across the thick lush grassland, through the little mounds
of rich dark soil that had been thrown up by moles. And, all the way, we sang.
Because it is in our nature to sing. Much of the time we sang rounds, because
they are compulsive and well suited to the road.
Search as we could, no woodcutters could we find. All gone home for tea,
we supposed. And rightly so, on this chilly afternoon.
But we did find a kind of grassy glade, with a bank of dense forest
running down its opposite side. Somebody said something, and I realised that the
words had come back to us in an echo. I shouted short phrases into the trees,
and they came echoing back to me.
So I proposed that we should sing into the trees.
We grouped ourselves against large, rolled hay bales, cold in the frost
but warm in the sun. Our song was “Colours”, as done by The Men They Couldn’t
Hang. A song of naval mutiny. Our voices rose and swelled, and we delivered the
phrases staccato, leaving the trees time to echo and join our song. We were,
for precious moments, utterly at one with the universe. This was a sacred act,
and I think we knew it.
Then back to the farmhouse, delighting in the pleasure of being us in
the rich countryside, us walking together, us singing.
The kitchen stove is fired by wood. We stoke it with small billets and
begin the preparations for supper. The plan is to make a huge pot of soup. The
ingredients are immediately to hand – the potatoes, swedes, onions, carrots
that are grown on the farm. Our penny whistle player disappears into the garden
and returns with bundles of nettles to add to the brew. Our musicians settle
around the table, cutting, chopping and peeling. Separately we prepare a
casserole of aubergines, red peppers and garlic. And all the while, as we busy
ourselves, we are singing. Dragging up the songs from the inner recesses of
memory and sharing them with our fellow musicians. When one person forgets a
verse, the others supply the words.
We live a blessed life – and even more so when we set to table and our
hosts bring out goat’s-milk cheeses wrapped in paper – of their own manufacture
– and a special creamy cheese with chilli, and farm-made bread, and
home-pressed apple juice, and their own honey, and fruit compote.
We eat, we make merry, and of course we sing.
And when the meal is done, we fetch out our instruments and we make
tunes…