AS the man-made climate crisis pummelled Barnsley and the rest of Europe last week I took to having a cool shower in the early evening and then sitting in the garden as the light slowly faded and the moon rose behind the trees.
I’d be reading a bit of translated poetry, marvelling at that space where English meets other languages and the translator tries to find points of contact, points of understanding.
As a younger man I always reckoned I’d try to translate poems from French or German into English but I’ve not found the time or the available space in my head, yet.
Mind you, I’ve recently been translating that great opera The Marriage of Figaro into Yorkshire Dialect, so maybe that counts. As I sat in the evening half-light, (or was it quarter-light by that time?) I started to hear a scrabbling and rustling noise by the hedge between our house and next door.
Mind you, at first I thought it was the sound of my brain wheezing and clanking as I tried to make sense of the translated Norwegian poem I was reading, but then I confirmed to myself that the noise was coming from outside my head.
The rustling got louder and louder. Something was approaching. I sat as still as I could. Then, wonderfully, a hedgehog appeared through the leaves and began to nose its way toward the little water dish that we put out for birds and any passing hedgehogs that might be ambling by.
The sight of the hedgehog, or to be more specific the sound of the hedgehog took me right back to a time many years ago when our children were small and we were camping in Brittany.
We were all fast asleep (I always think it should be slow asleep, by the way, because the fact of being asleep seems to be a slow thing rather than a fast thing, but that’s maybe just because my brain is addled by heat and efforts at poetry translation) and then suddenly it sounded like there was an army marching across the tent floor.
Not any old army, though: a scratchy army, an army marching on pins and needles, an army with sharp metal feet. By now my wife and I were fully awake and the army sounded very loud indeed. It was this time of year and so the tent wasn’t fully dark, indeed it wasn’t even half-fully dark and so we could make out a huge hedgehog wandering across the tent. It was so big it looked like The King of All The Hedgehogs.
Maybe they just breed them big in France. I gazed at the hedgehog; it’s safe to say no mutual understanding passed between us.
Two of the three children woke up. One slept through the whole event and has been ribbed about it ever since.
Readers of the Chronicle: I confess that I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to pick it up for obvious reasons.
I didn’t want to shout GERRART ON’T TENT because I wasn’t sure how good its knowledge of English regional dialects was. I shrugged my shoulders like I’d seen waiters do in cafes in Paris.
My wife suggested that I sweep it out of the tent with the brush that Canvas Holidays provided; what a great idea! It wouldn’t hurt the hedgehog but it would evict it.
I picked up the brush and swept the hedgehog out. It didn’t seem to mind; indeed it seemed to be enjoying the ride.
Was that a hint of a smile on its face? It was hard to tell in the gauzy light of the tent. I went back to bed. Well, I went back to sleeping bag. I nodded off, dreaming of giant brush-resistant hedgehogs.
A scratching sound invaded my dream. The hedgehog was back. I swept it out again. It returned. I swept it out again. This weird choreography seemed to go on all night.
The next morning I chatted about it to our German tent-neighbour, a lovely older man who wrote poetry. ‘Egil’, he said, smiling. ‘Hedgehog’ I replied. ‘Egil’ he said.
Of course I thought he was saying ‘eagle’ and of course ‘egil’ is German for hedgehog. Two words, one living creature. Two living words, one creature.
Back in my garden in 2026 the hedgehog shuffled away. ‘Goodnight, Egil’ I said. Ah, the power of translation!
