Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  Ash, Song Thrush, written with capital letters at the beginnings of the words – like Richard, or Sarah Jane, the trees and birds are individuals, deserving of my respect, with as much right to be here as I have.

  3 June

  Watched numerous thrushes and blackbirds feed on the red-ploughed earth out in the park. Beyond the Monterey and bench my eye follows the line of the iron fence, over which it is effortless to step out and stroll. I regularly stand beside one of the big beeches towards the crest of the intermediate hill, from which the underwood has been cleared, and, as I gaze down at the bench, empty within the picture-frame, see an image of myself looking up at myself looking down on myself, in ceaseless solipsism.

  Other things happen, other thoughts appear.

  11 June

  Trespassed again this afternoon onto the hilltops of the Quantocks, where public right of way is banned in precaution against the spread of foot-and-mouth. The absence of man-and-dog for many months means that the flora and fauna grow and breed undisturbed. Saw sixty of the eight hundred head of wild red deer in the Quantock-wide herd resting mid-afternoon in the middle of an open field, accustomed by now to tranquillity, unaware of my approach, their ears visible above the long grasses.

  The rabbits, I notice, have eaten to the ground every stem of wild dill.

  12 June

  Took my book and binoculars out to the bench by the fence to the park. All the time I was there, at first staring out in dull nothingness, then reading, a buzzard was perched on the bare top branch of a douglas fir in the line of trees eighty yards away. It began to summer-rain and I returned to the cottage, to my desk, to these notes. The buzzard will by now also have moved, I imagine.

  17 June

  Noticed today that the last family pet given an inscribed headstone down beside the overgrown avenue was a spaniel called Scrap, buried in 1967, three years after Cothelstone House, the nearby Georgian mansion, was raised to the ground. Its dilapidated coach house alone remains to mark the grandeur of the past, its stonework and proportions more like Italy than England. The verse inscriptions on the graves attest to the companionship of dogs, ponies and horses, family rhymes, simple, sentimental. The Estate survives, considerably reduced, workable all the same by my landlord. I have lifetime tenure of this large cottage, attached to a small grain store, with an open byre across the yard, the stable-barn along the lane, and a double privy and the greyhound kennels in the garden. A tumble of debris today, the kennels were a luxury home a hundred years ago to the prize pack of hounds which hunted hares down on the flatlands of Taunton Vale.

  Five months ago, Mother refused to let me go to Father’s funeral, for fear of what I might say about him to family friends.

  2 July

  Rich, heavy July.

  The lawn a rash of white clover and daisy. Running riot at the margins the white bell-shaped flowers of bindweed and bursts of ground elder. Wild raspberry canes are in white flower to the height of my head … it’s endless, endless.

  Richness reversed to internal desolation.

  Found today on the lower path a chequered blue and black feather, from a visiting jay. Nice if the woodpecker would drop a green feather and the goldfinch a golden tail feather. Since leaving London to make this patch of the West Country my home, on my long walks of discovery I’ve collected feathers and bones to display in clear glass bowls and tumblers in my cottage, hidden round the bend of a beaten-earth lane.

  This whole undertaking, the land clearance and house restoration, the expense of time and money on a property I do not own, is it imaginative or insane?

  Why am I doing this?

  10 July

  Last night deer ate my roses, the leaves as well as the flowers.

  Let them. They’re off now on the trail of some other delicacy.

  I imagine an animal’s choice of place to forage is conditioned as much by memories of safety as by the quality and quantity of food. What kind of specific recall, I wonder, do deer have of where they last ate?

  They mostly go, I suppose, to where they regularly feel secure.

  I turned, not long after writing this, to my place in reading Natural Goodness, where the Oxford philosopher Philippa Foot offers an answer to my question, telling of the concerns of Thomas Aquinas for the nature of choice made by sheep in where to eat in a field: ‘Aquinas stresses that animals, having perception as plants do not, may do what they do for an apprehended end. Nevertheless he insists that in doing something for an end animals cannot comprehend it as an end … Without speech small children, like animals, are able to have ends but do not see them as ends. And the same point could be made in terms of what is seen to be good. For it can be said that while animals go for the good (thing) that they see, human beings go for what they see as good: food, for example, being the good thing that animals see and go for and that human beings are able to see as good.’

  13 July

  Walking along the mown path through the dell this morning, I thought about the damage gardeners do to natural life with their fetish for tidiness – all the cutting and strimming and mowing and poisoning, followed by replacement of existing beauty with crowded inappropriate planting. The narrow path in my wood, which looks like grass, isn’t: it’s the waist-high wilderness of wonderful everything that grows uncut at its side. Looking also at the shapes and colours of the lane, where I’ve done little more than dig out the nettles and brambles and cut down marauding infiltration by laurel and sycamore, I understand what anodyne destruction is wreaked by use of machines, the ubiquitous garden brush-cutter and highway tractor-trimmers. This summer I’ve done almost no work on the land, sat and watched nature take its way, confirmed my preference for the sound as well as the feel of doing whatever I have done by hand. It was only with the greatest reluctance that yesterday I mowed the lawn, wishing to prolong the parade of buttercups, daisies, plantain and clover.

  The noise.

  Such a horrid noise.

  The whine and grind of rotating blades tearing at the grass.

  Oliver Rackham writes, in his The History of the Countryside, a book of passionate opinion and the observations of a lifetime: ‘More intractable than destruction in pursuit of a purpose is the blight of tidiness which every year sweeps away something of beauty or meaning.’

  I want to learn to live decently here.

  14 July

  Taking an impromptu break from work at my desk, I wandered down what used to be the back drive of Cothelstone House, and delighted in an ordinary sight: a blue butterfly in flight. By physically following the flight of this one butterfly, I was drawn back towards a patch of brambles already passed, and made suddenly aware of three others, a painted lady, a small tortoiseshell and a comma sunning themselves in close proximity, wings wide open.

  Pleasure also at the flash of colours of the goldfinches in shuttle-flight between lane and apple tree, from where they drop down for a thistle-feast. Four now, the young of my pair already out and about on the wing.

  Periodically throughout the summer, watching these sparkling birds, I’ve thought of a picture which I haven’t seen for many years, in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the city in which I was married. The small oil painting on board is of a bird on a perch, by Carel Fabritius.

  In truth I’m unsure what the bird’s colour is, fear that, in habitual enhancement of reality, I may in my mind have turned the painting of a greenfinch gold.

  This evening, in a review in the Times Literary Supplement of an exhibition at the National Gallery, by chance I read that Fabritius did indeed paint a goldfinch. In Christian tradition, it was a goldfinch which pecked irritant thorns from the flesh of Jesus, nailed to die on the cross.

  It might be working: this attempt at nature-cure.

  19 July

  Below the giant Monterey I today found an almost new golf ball. It’s the third time I’ve picked one up there, two white and a yellow, six miles from the nearest golf course. A bird – the cothelstone buzzards, or a loud crow? – p
resumably bears the prize away, belatedly to discover that a golf ball is useless.

  Exhausting error.

  I’m curious to know what mistaken instinct suggests to the bird some benefit to be gained by carrying off home a golf ball.

  28 July

  Hot and sunny early, and a speckled wood, the butterfly which looks its name, toasted itself in a patch of sunlight in the glade, on big leaves of cow parsley. When disturbed, it moved on to smaller leaves of … don’t know what it’s called. The butterfly flew up to fight off from its territory a rival male.

  The talkative finches returned to the thistles. Amazing how fast and thick these grow in the rubble which infills a mini-pond that a previous tenant dug for the geese he used to keep. I have removed the debris in rebuilding the kennels with Beth Ferendene, a strong, slim young woman, born and brought up locally, who wants to learn traditional builder’s crafts to supplement her professional skills as a carpenter and carver. She seems to me to hold within her a sense of belonging to this land, along with my builder Frank Sayer, who, into his forties now, has never lived anywhere else but Lower Terhill.

  It’s a butterfly day. Three minutes ago a small tortoiseshell flew into the house and past my desk, fluttering at the window to get out, the beat of its wings frantic against the glass. Very gently I enclosed the palm of my hand around the beautiful thing and lifted it to be released into the garden. The brush of its wings against my skin felt like … felt like?

  Earlier I’d seen what I excitedly identified as an adonis blue feeding on horseshoe vetch in the patch of grass which used to be the front lawn of the big house – horseshoe vetch is a low-growing plant with pendulous yellow flower heads, the only thing adonis blue eat. I rang my landlord, Hugh Warmington, to share the news of this rare visitor, and he gave me the name of the officer in charge of Somerset Environment Records and, in time to save public idiocy, double-checking, I concluded that all I had seen was a common blue – which reinforces everything I already know if only I didn’t keep forgetting, that the miracle is the sight itself, however ‘common’.

  Decided that if I’m to continue regularly taking these notes, I should do so in my actual state of no-knowledge, and seek to describe with the eye-of-ignorance what a small tortoiseshell (and a goldfinch, and a leaf of cow parsley, and an adonis blue, the horseshoe vetch, etc.) looks like, what it is that I see, feel, smell. The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland says: ‘The Small Tortoiseshell is among the most well-known butterflies in Britain and Ireland. The striking and attractive patterning, and its appearance at almost any time of year in urban areas have made it a familiar species.’ Oh? Odd, that. When I saw ten days ago, on the wilting blossom of a bramble, turning towards becoming a blackberry (simply so: a black berry which forms as the petals fall from the head of a white hedgerow flower, tight and green to begin with, turning red, growing black and, in a good year, juicy), this creature with wings sloping backwards, like a fighter plane, the scalloped back-edges dabbed in turquoise, the rest, yes, the colour and pattern of a turtle’s shell, I didn’t remember ever having seen one before. Although I must have, I suppose, for the book’s dotted map of sightings charts its presence in every part of the entire British Isles, and it is more than likely that I’ve several times before been told, or read, its name.

  29 July

  The family of wrens busy on the ground at the base of the burdock scrambled away at my approach, the young just about taking to the air; except for one laggard which stood trembling at my feet, its mother twittering from behind the leaves of the lowest branch of a nearby tree.

  There is a bird which plunges and sashays through the air catching flies, then perches on the ridge of the byre to bang the larger flies against the tiles till dead. After eating, it cleans its beak on a branch.

  I fretted at the thwarted energy of a little red-brown butterfly, never stopping, the rapid beat of its wings taking it from leaf to leaf without finding the occasion to alight. ‘Stop, please rest, or you’ll die. Please, choose a place to be,’ I said, beneath my breath.

  Later, again seated on my second bench, by the wall, reading Dying We Live. The Final Messages and Records of the German Resistance, I look up to see a young rabbit thirty feet away in the middle of the lawn, munching clover. Alfred Delp wrote, not long before he was beheaded by the Third Reich: ‘Alas, how limited the human heart is even in the capacities most characteristically its own – in hoping and believing. It needs help in order to find itself and not flutter away like some shy half-fledged birds that have fallen out of their nest.’

  30 July

  In the dry heat my vegetable patch riots. The endive reaches out longer and longer stalks with fewer and fewer leaves, then bursts into raggedy purple-blue flowers which attract small white butterflies. The sharp-tasting leaves of another salad, rocket, are also shooting up thin dark green stems, ending in four-petal flowers, cream in colour with mauve veins. The orangey-red flowers of runner beans, climbing now to the top of my coppiced hazel poles, look good against their green heart-shaped leaves. See that some have been eaten in places to skeletal webs, so thick were the eggs of the insects laid. The buzz of these insects everywhere. In the soft mornings bees progress in and out of the flowers of bindweed, enemy of the conventional gardener.

  These insect lives interweave, touching humans only when we slow and quieten to inactivity. To purposelessness. Very difficult for me to do.

  I have so much to learn. Not facts, not all these facts. Stickier things. Treacle. Quicksand. Bog.

  31 July

  Sitting in the sun, thinking about my sister in New Zealand whilst also looking, listening. It occurs to me how lucky I am that this garden, which has become mine, is mostly green and white. Another white torch-shaped flower has shown itself: the buddleia, following the massed candles earlier in the year of both the bird cherry down by the pine and the white lilac beside the front gate. The new flower of the buddleia has a heavy scent, the petals white, dark yellow heads and pink trumpet stems. I’m lucky because all three – also the valerian which sprouts from crevices in the wall at my back – more commonly come in dark, to-me-less-pleasing colours.

  Wonder if a past head groom, whose tied cottage for generations this used to be, chose these flowers to be white?

  Amongst the half-dozen ever-present darting white butterflies, a flash of yellow. Followed with my eye the brimstone’s flight, and when it landed on the runner beans I walked over, to find it perched on the end of a red flower, wings furled, light green on the underside, with two black beauty spots, veined like leaves, shaped on the curve perfectly to the point, and with long strong legs, sharply bent at the knees, yellow like its body. It walked from head to head of the bunched flowers, giving a couple of flaps of its wings, bright yellow on the upper side, to rise to the next bouquet.

  My landlord tells me that the tree I’ve been calling bird cherry isn’t. He knows about trees, and yet has never been able to identify what this is.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Must be rare. Lovely thing,’ he said. High up in the tallest ash the sound of a bird I can’t see, hidden in the leaves, making the same music as yesterday – a lilting trill, the notes quickening and rising always to the same conclusion. The song of this season. A mother’s relief at the release of her brood, in flight to find a territory of their own?

  I wish I knew what this beautiful sound means to the birds, to those that sing and to those that listen, let out and taken in without a thought (as we think of it) and yet not, I like to believe, without meaning.

  The misting rain of this morning sends up this afternoon, in the heat of full sun, rich scents from the foliage. Two more yellow butterflies have hatched. Like to believe that the over-wintered brimstone, the sight of which I remember being astonished by back in early March, may be the parent of these three seen today, and that, as larvae, they fed on one of the eaten leaves out there in the glade.

  To associate myself with the fate of life around me, something I�
�ve never before done in all my fifty-five years, feels like a risk. A necessary risk.

  Until now I’ve sought, and mostly achieved, control.

  1 August

  I do love to hear the call of the buzzard … keeuuu, keeuuu, keeuuu. It is, by now, the buzzard, a distinctively large bird which spends many hours of every day perched on and flying above the trees in the inner ring of my view. The cry plaintive, tension attenuated, refined, matched to the drawn-out spirals of its flight. Don’t know in which precise tree he lives (this particular voice is male, I reckon). Don’t need to know.

  People live near here as well as birds. I just don’t speak to them much. Don’t have to. Don’t want to. Nobody seems to mind.

  5 August

  Early this evening I went out on impulse for a stroll and met, for the first time, one of the owls in my wood. All I saw was a broad brown back and flanged tail, silent in motion, disappearing within seconds of my appearance, gone to perch in the high branches of the biggest of the sweet chestnut trees, concealed from my view by layers of leaves.