WARNING! STRONG(ISH) STUFF! INCLUDES DESCRIPTIONS OF GARDEN WILDLIFE COMING TO A STICKY END! (DESPITE OUR BEST EFFORTS TO PREVENT THIS!).
Our garden is an amazing thing; particularly after having lived with a postage-stamp-sized patio in London, for years and years. Our countryside garden is large and long (I don’t feel too boastful saying that, because most of the garden goes up a hill – and is completely useless. It’s only purpose, it seems, is to be mown).
The garden is full of an incredible array of wildlife: bouncing bunnies, pheasants who fly here to escape nearby hunting, muntjacs (small piggie-looking deer), the list goes on. We’re like a more-dysfunctional Durrells.
Sadly, however, our own back garden is also a veritable wildlife war zone… full of animal carnage.
Much of this carnage is due to the intervention of our pet dog Cedric into the natural order of things. The wonderful menagerie of creatures, happily prancing about on our lawn, provide Cedric with a wide-ranging menu of things to eliminate.
His favourite victims are the bunnies. Frequently, I’ve tried to intervene – defending the hapless rabbits from Cedric with any twigs I can find lying around, like a crap lion tamer.
The sheer number of bunnies is against me, however (they really must be going at it like rabbits). Cedric always manages to sniff one out in the end, in the far reaches of the garden. And after the inevitable, heart-breaking lepocide, the ritual is always the same… I’m forced to pick the deceased bunny up on a spade and throw it into the woods at the top of the garden.
I might be a lily-livered, liberal Londoner at heart, but I’m not ashamed to admit it – I find all of this as grim as hell. Cedric! How could you do such a thing? Being a dog doesn’t seem like enough of an excuse.
Once, it wasn’t a dead rabbit we found in the garden, by the mound of grass clippings. It was a deer. A baby deer. Like Bambi. But dead.
Cedric, of course, was the prime suspect. Even though there wasn’t any evidence the poor baby deer had been mauled.
Had the baby deer had a heart attack instead? Had Cedric actually scared it to death? Maybe.
I couldn’t bring myself to pick the poor, tawny animal up on my spade – and schlep it to the top of the garden. It was too big for that, anyway.
So what am I going to do with it? I wondered.
Eventually, I came up with a solution. I’ll bury the dead deer in our pile of grass clippings!
At the time, I thought this was a terrific plan. When clearly it was terrible. Hadn’t I seen the film Shallow Grave?
So, anyway, I dragged the dead deer over to the pile of grass… and started piling the musky, brown clippings on top of it. Soon, the deer was completely buried. And that, I thought, was the end of it.
Except, of course, it wasn’t.
Within a week or so, the pile of glass clippings began to smell. Flies hovered over the mound.
Eventually Cedric’s sniffy over-interest in the grass pile took a macabre turn… when he managed to pull one of the buried deer’s legs free… and then ran off with part of it.
Ugh.
I felt like a character in an Edgar Allan Poe story… one who has becoming increasingly, hideously aware that they will soon have to exhume a corpse they’ve only recently buried.
When the day came of the inevitable exhumation, it was pouring with rain and overcast. This wasn’t pathetic fallacy… the West Midlands are like that pretty much the whole of autumn and winter.
And so, I began to dig down into the pile of grass clippings. Soon my spade struck the spindly form of the dead deer… and the decayed, wretched thing was quickly uncovered (I won’t describe what it looked like here. I’ll leave that to your imagination!).
The rain continued pouring down… and I thought, that dark moment, of how much I’d looked forward to moving to the countryside when I’d lived in London.
What a fool I’d been! The biggest problem I’d had, back then, was my latte not being hot enough! Now I was stuck in some kind of real-life ‘folk horror’ tale. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Vincent Price had popped up at that moment, in his Matthew Hopkins guise, and denounced me as a witch.
I now began digging a proper (non-shit-grass-mound) grave, for the deer. It was still fairly shallow (about a foot deep) but it was definitely an improvement on the last one. I shunted the unfortunate thing in and threw earth over it.
When Cedric began sniffing around the new grave, minutes later, I laid down a bunch of heavy stones and branches over it (the grave, not Cedric).
As the rain continued to pour, I briefly thought of all the bucolic folk music I’d listened to back in London. The Trials of Van Occupanther by Midlake. For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver. I Speak Because I Can by Laura Marling (with the gorgeous song Goodbye England, Covered in Snow). Wonderful albums, which had all contributed to my mental picture – back in my city days – that a better, folksier life awaited in the fields of Merrie Olde England (OK, Midlake and Bon Iver are American, but you get the idea).
But now I was living the reality. Burying a dead deer in the pouring rain. It was hardly romantic or rootsy. It wasn’t earthy; it was just shit.
And now I recount this sorry tale, as a warning to all ye city-folk thinking of leaving your homes for fair country climes. You know not what you do!
The grass is not always greener.
So, foolish traveller, be careful what you wish for.
P. D. Clifton 
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