This new opera influenced by homeless children shines light on UK's housing crisis

The garden is filled with dahlias – yellow, pink and lilac pompoms that cheerlead from the flowerbeds. They nod encouragingly in the breeze as I wrestle with the hose pipe, laughed at, silently, by little dogs. I continue dousing pots and rockeries as instructed, until I get to the final task: check the electric fence that borders the neighbouring field.

My friend, for whom I am house-sitting, suggested that this particular chore was optional. The buzzing barrier is there to keep out badger, deer and anything else that fancies a nibble of these resource-sapping blooms. It also ensures the perimeter to the property is not compromised so that the dogs will not escape.

The trouble is, this lovely house is slap-bang in the middle of the countryside, surrounded by woods, meadows and riverbanks. It is the animals’ manor. In both rural and urban areas, freedom of movement is essential for all. “The fence will run out of battery in a few days,” my friend advises, adding kindly, “I don’t expect you to recharge it.”

Foxes, formerly the most divisive of our wild mammals, are arguably now ahead of badgers in the popularity polls. In Patrick Barkham’s book Badgerlands, the reasons for their apparent controversy are laid down in black and white: badgers transport disease (bovine tuberculosis), fleas, and their subterranean communities get in the way of property developers. The woodlands where, in the 1990s, I fed badgers peanut-butter sandwiches was turned into a housing estate while I was at secondary school. It was called Badger’s Copse, which I duly dubbed ‘Badger’s corpse’.

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But now, despite the disdain of some, badgers are better protected. Indeed, their right to housing is
seemingly above their human counterparts. If badgers are evicted, as Jeremy Clarkson discovers in Clarkson’s Farm, all hell breaks loose, administratively speaking.

This juxtaposition feeds Uprooted, a new work produced by Garsington Opera’s Youth Company (29 July at Garsington’s Opera Pavilion).

Composer Hannah Conway and librettist Hazel Gould have worked in close collaboration with Bee Squad, a community organisation in Manchester that works with children affected by homelessness.

The one-hour opera – performed by the youth company, for which places are fully funded and awarded on potential rather than connections or experience – draws on stories from Bee Squad and those nearer to Garsington’s base in Buckinghamshire.

Uprooted focuses on Brock – an alternative name for a badger – who is being evicted to make way for a new estate. Living in a small room in a B&B an hour’s bus ride away from school makes life difficult for our young hero. “If a badger mother is expecting cubs the set cannot be unsettled, you can be prosecuted for it,” writes Gould. “That’s positive, but that protection does not exist for human beings.”

Conway’s music uses a central theme based on a cipher comprising the notes B-A-D-G-E-R (R is ‘re’, as in Do-Re-Mi) unfolding into songs that are both poignant and powerful. Brock and the badgers come nose to snout; their lives joined by the precarious unknown. 

“Families that find themselves in homelessness are doing everything they can to provide stability and care for their children,” says Gould.

“I think those of us who have never experienced this might like to imagine that through our intelligence, strength or status we would be able to negotiate a different path through – but I’m not sure that’s true.”

Uprooted tickets are on sale now (£6 adults, £4 under-21s).

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