Sandstone Press

Hawthorn blossom

Posted by RLD on 22nd July 2010

When Gareth Edwards finally ended his distinguished rugby career as, probably, the most athletic and skilful scrum half ever, it was Cliff Morgan whom journalists sought for comment. Cliff was just about old enough to be Gareth’s father although was probably more akin to a youngish uncle. Like Gareth he enjoyed a world reputation in the sport. He was also articulate, an innovator and maker-of-things-to-happen, journalist and author. Standing beside a rugby pitch on a cold spring day, his hands plunged deep into the pockets of his overcoat, the question he had to field was as follows. ‘What will Gareth miss most?’

I imagine the answer expected was ‘adulation, glory’. My own immediate thought was ‘comradeship’. Cliff’s answer surprised even me. It was ‘physical fitness because, no matter what he does in life from this point on, no matter how assiduous he is in matters of health and wellbeing, no matter how he tries, he will never again feel as he feels now.’ I am working from memory in this. You won’t find the interview on You Tube.

For me it stuck though. At the time I was very fit myself. Although far beneath the standards of these two men I had enjoyed sixteen years of rugby after discovering the game at seventeen and taking a few more years to realise that there is more to it than drinking and girls. My own representative career ended when I walked off the Northern Meeting Park on Saturday October 16th 1982 after a cowardly assault had left my jaw in three pieces, to be reconstructed that night by Mr Campbell MacLachlan at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness. Thank you again, Campbell. I hope you are enjoying your retirement.

The following years made Cliff Morgan’s point for him only too well. Attain these levels of fitness and there is more to it than movement and strength; heightened senses and awareness go with it. Jackie Stewart tells the story of putting two wheels of his car, now in the National Museum of Scotland, off the track when all his concentration was on the race and finding that the cockpit, his nose, his head, his mind, were suddenly filled with the smell of cut grass – and, such freshness.

I had four more games in me before the crushed disc in my back finally gave out. My high level of fitness left me and didn’t come back until I immersed myself in hillwalking. Gradually a good level of fitness returned and hill competence grew with it. I got to know the Ross-shire hills like the back of my hand or, a better way of putting it, like the OS maps that got soaked and dried, folded and battered and, in those ways and through experience, wholly mine.

Right now I am looking at OS25: Glen Carron, remembering the day I parked just off the single track road at Craig, heading on foot across the railway line and the bridge over the Carron. Between the two was, and still will be, a hawthorn bush. With its seamed bark and thorns it had an air about it of great age but was, nonetheless, in blossom. I noted it, immediately forgot it, and continued on one of Ross-shire’s bigger days.

The uphill forest walk into the pass between Sgurr nan Ceannaichean and Sgurr na Feartag would be sufficient for an active day in itself, and more than enough for me as I am now. The day really comes alive though, with the drop down to Pollan Buidhe and the shoogly bridge crossing of, that day, a fairly turbulent river. Ascending thereafter to the Bealach Bhearnais takes you into real wild land but then the ascent of the two Munros that were my target, Sgurr a’Chaorachain and Bidean an Eoin Dearg, takes you out on your own.

That day I truly had the world to myself. Passing the Bidean summit I looked across Loch Monar 800 metres below and understood what it was to be fully alive. How much greater it all was than my own life’s troubles and frustrations, which at that time were heavy. How, in some way, it must point towards greater meaning. I was reminded of Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality and ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’.

It rained off and on through the day, but I had enough energy and fitness to see me through. I made my way back down over the bealach, across the river and through the trees. When I crossed the Carron again on its great, wide bridge I was tired but in command of myself, and took no small satisfaction from the achievement as an athletic endeavour as well as an aesthetic one. The road came in sight and then the car. My mind was busy returning to the mundane when I passed the hawthorn and the sweet scent of its blossom invaded me, reaching into my consciousness like a voice. It felt like communication; certainly it was an interruption. Today, more than twenty years later, I remember its full sensual urgency as if it was here in this room beside me.

Sometimes I stand at my window and look out across the fields to the Cromarty Firth and contemplate where I come from. What I was taught was simple, Creation. The Lord took dust into his hands and made Man, having already made everything else. In the course of one hundred and fifty years this myth has been destroyed by science. More so now that we look across the universe and see detail enough to understand that we are not at the centre of things. There was no seven day creation, no Eden and therefore no Fall unless we think in metaphors. No Fall means no original sin and, with that, the elaborate edifice of sacrifice and redemption crumbles away, its purpose gone.

Down at the shore I pick up a handful of dirt of my own, from which I can subtract all bacterial life in my imagination as I can from the water running through my fingers. I can imagine, or try to imagine, how it was when the world was settling, inanimate and senseless and, that done, try to accept that these same elements have somehow assembled without outside aid to take both form and life, to develop first consciousness and then self-consciousness and then, I dare not say ‘ultimately’, inventiveness and creativity. All this I find scarcely more credible than the breath of God.

Something may be lost but feelings of wonder remain, and of the miraculous. The sense of oneness with all Life is no less a sense of shared origins and familial empathy than it was in the palm of a supreme being. Allowing for communication being, among much else, a loss of self I find myself with the notion that the hawthorn really did communicate, not merely to a passing individual but to a fellow. Broadcasting an essentially sexual message it was also singing from the darkness of the insensate to whom or whatever was enabled to listen.