Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  6 August

  As I walked to post a letter in the red box on the corner beyond Keepers Cottage, I saw a bird of prey on the top of a telegraph pole (which around here are not high, the straight-trunk size of a small pine). Recognized it as a hunting bird by its long built-for-flight tail, hooked flesh-tearing beak and air of elegant energy. One of the Quantock Rangers happened to pass in his jeep, frightening the bird before I’d had a chance properly to look. Must have been a sparrow hawk, he told me – not a merlin, as I’d romantically imagined, drawn to the name.

  I’ve seen what must be the same bird fly ahead of my car along the lane, skimming from side to side low between the hedges, wholly in control. Like, and unlike, the jet fighters trespassing above the combes of the Quantocks.

  7 August

  Moles have again been active, retunnelling their crossing points of the path of brick and stones which I embedded in the earth along the track to the far bench. When the moles build their underground roads in unsightly relation to my own ways of passage I tend to stamp their roofs flat, hoping they will opt for an alternative route. The territory is fertile enough to satisfy the needs of all of us who live here. A process of practical negotiation occurs, the dialogue of interaction. No tedious committee meetings, no battering out of a mutually agreeable form of legal words. Live and let live.

  Let go, let go.

  Please.

  10 August

  With neat observations I make myself seem rational and urbane.

  Far from true.

  I’m vulnerable, sinking several times each day into sharp anxiety. Threatened by the tiny everyday.

  Can’t begin to write what it actually feels like – even writing that I can’t do so is soberly expressed, declining the desperation that washes through me.

  11 August

  As I passed along the path by my cottage door this morning I caught the tail-end dash of a small brown mouse-like creature disappearing into the long grass. If I had seen it before it saw me I could have watched it for a second or two, before it made it to the cover of its hidden run at the base of the wall. On the other hand, I could have been looking in a different direction and seen nothing.

  To see without looking.

  My aim.

  It seems true that if humans move not too fast or boisterously about the place, and stop still as soon as they see almost any animal, large or minuscule, the creature doesn’t flee. The other day, down on the fields above the cliffs, it was a hare. The hare doesn’t always perceive our stationary shape as dangerous. Maybe, in time, people who seek to live alongside the natural life of a particular piece of land acquire the habit of dressing in appropriate colours, absorb some of the non-human smell of the place.

  Living things have their territory. Spiders have their territory. It is the same spider I always see in the corner of the room by the door, and a different spider which occupies the window space.

  The three ant nests which I disturbed yesterday in cutting the lawn have not been abandoned. In the clover the ants had allowed eggs to be laid above ground level, where they were exposed by the arrival of my mower. The white eggs have been removed now from sight, taken back down into the earth through remade holes in the top of the nest, the tiny black ants busy again at their disciplined labour. The birds seem not to have noticed this larder door ajar for an hour or two. Maybe there’s plenty for them to eat elsewhere at this time of year.

  Acceptance.

  Nature accepts the way things happen.

  12 August

  As night falls down by the Monterey pine the bats fly. I’d forgotten this. They make sounds too. Bat sounds: high-pitched squealings.

  15 August

  Work on the house, though slow, is beautifully done. Three people work next door every day, as Frank and his labourer have been joined full-time by Beth Ferendene, who builds rough stone walls with lime mortar, lays reclamation floorboards, does whatever is required of her.

  16 August

  Though we may seldom see it, life is out there, busy, separate. I caught brief sight today of this other world, when, pulling bindweed from its hold on the long grass below one of the crab apple trees, I disturbed a field mouse, observed for the few seconds it took to cross a mown grass path. Saw it for long enough to recognize a cousin of the slightly darker brown mouse which has strayed into the house a couple of times.

  17 August

  Another streak of brown in the open, a sleek, super-fast animal crossing the lane. I didn’t have time to see its head, but there was a tail. A weasel?

  And, in the mid-morning sun, a butterfly with exquisite ‘eyes’ on the top corners of its wings, dark outside, with bright liquid-shaped centres and splashes, like tears, on the lower wings.

  The wings of butterflies fade, grow ragged. Within days, for some, not weeks.

  The deadening effect on me of such a sight is out of proportion. As is the elation at seeing healthy butterflies in flight.

  19 August

  The moles have been energetic in the rain-softened earth. Out in the red plough of the park, in which the lines of sown grass are greening, dozens of fresh molehills have appeared – like the mouths of tube stations, the precise track of their subterranean network unmapped.

  Saw scurry from the step to the kennels what I thought might be a child mole. Seen barely for a second, I was struck by the blackness of its body and the pinkness of its feet.

  22 August

  Whether it is the weeks of early summer rain, or some crop infestation, or a regular look which I’d failed previously to notice, I’m dismayed by the greyness of a field of Cothelstone wheat, ears darkened with mildew. Plucked an ear of the corn and absent-mindedly winnowed it in my hand, and inside the seemingly-diseased husks revealed ripe wheat, rich and deep in colour.

  Disguised summer gold, nature’s currency.

  Two years ago, exploring from the place I rented on Janet White’s farm on the other side of the hill, I first took the footpath through the centre of a sloping field of corn towards the spire of Cothelstone Church, with the Jacobean manor house at its side, and cried tears of amazement at the beauty of the sight. I hoped then, in proximity, that shepherd Janet’s country-wise contentment would somehow feed down to me.

  9 September

  There is a robin here which sings to itself. Like a person humming, audible only when close by. An affecting sound, muted, the bird’s throat throbbing, its beak closed.

  19 September

  In the sudden wind the big old oak at the end of the lane is shedding branch-end twigs, each with several leaves. They litter the ground: an autumn preface.

  Things are disintegrating.

  21 September

  The call of a pair of ravens between the top branches of two of the sequoia, their bass voices making adolescent altos of the crows. On a quiet evening, in the slow beat of their wings as they flap across the park to their nest I catch the sound of wing feathers vibrate, and think of the idling engine of a tractor.

  What is going on?

  I wish I knew.

  23 September

  In the mist this morning I hear the rain-shower approach before I see or feel it, hear drops rattle the leaves of the trees which descend beside the farm track, then cross Constance Sayer’s garden, reach the big poplar and two large ash behind my byre, finally to fall at my feet on the cottage threshold. Until the moment of seeing the rain splash on the ground I had thought the shifting sound was something else: aeroplanes unseen in the sky, or a lorry climbing the road on the far side of Cothelstone Hill. How I hate getting things wrong.

  24 September

  A three foot long mole-ridge appeared overnight at the edge of the lawn, almost on the grassed-over path beside the house, where I would have thought the earth was too hard and the passage of feet across the ground too frequent for the comfort of moles. Without hesitation, I rollered the underground tunnel flat. Within two hours the mole had re-excavated. I rolled again.

  When I returned af
ter dark from a long end-of-summer day on the beach, the whole ridge had reappeared. This time I left the roller standing all night across the line of the mole’s trajectory, and in the morning there was a six-inch high ridge at one end.

  Questions tumble. To be answered by watching.

  I’ve always watched, always been on my guard. Mostly failed to see what I needed to.

  If this morning I met a mole that could speak, this is what I’d ask: ‘You reach this spot via, I presume, a deeper underground network of passages. Why have you chosen this particular place to come close to the surface? Is there special stuff here to eat? Or does rock block your below-ground passage? Why the stubborn plan, whatever the man-made barriers, to excavate this fixed route? Where are you heading?’

  Another question occurs: ‘Are you a he, a she? Or do you prefer to be addressed as they? Do you live singly or in a clan?’

  The mole, efficiently, like a railwayman laying the track’s iron curves along the lie of the land, has extended the run another five feet in the direction of the old front porch.

  And the bees. I need to speak of the arrival at Lower Terhill of some honey bees.

  The other day Beth and I moved her father’s hive of bees from Appleton Farm to the place we’d prepared for them at the bottom of my garden – behind rampant wild-raspberry canes, beneath the black-berried branches of one of the remaining elders, close to a section of the iron fence to the park where bees face the sun to wake them in the mornings to their work. The evening before, at dusk, Beth had taped the bees inside the hive and tied a strap tightly round its layered tiers. In the dark, at six in the morning, we drove Frank’s pick-up truck the eight miles to Appleton and together lifted the sleeping hive to place it in the back of the truck, roped it down and set off for Terhill.

  It was light by the time we bumped down across the field by the fence to ferocious buzzing of the bees trapped inside the hive. We lifted them over the fence and set the hive onto the brick platform we had prepared. When Beth pulled off the tape from their entrance-slit, hundreds of bees crawled out and up the side of the hive, stood stationary for several minutes as they tested their wings, before making their first flights into the unknown. After our breakfast Beth boiled them up a treat of sugar, donned her bee-suit, lit a pump-gun of smouldering fibre to calm them and then settled the layers of the hive securely into place. After a day in which the bees were busy finding their way around, by sundown there was no external sign of activity, just the inner sound of humming.

  Down in a nearby wood a bee-professional from Dunster keeps five of his two hundred hives, and this year one of them produced the most honey of them all.

  I’m happy that Beth’s bees have safely made this journey.

  26 September

  A rash of neatness drew me again today, before breakfast, to roller the mole’s tunnel flat. It had reached the path by the front door.

  I regretted my action.

  The mole has refused to be diverted by this idiocy of mine: within half an hour it had noticed the intrusion, and in ten minutes reopened the entire underground track.

  I’m glad to have been given another chance to live less rigidly alongside my animal neighbours.

  Recognising now the call of a woodpecker, I can look up from my desk when I hear its voice nearby and see it pecking at the lawn – today it was one of the young birds, its head barely red, tail feathers not fully formed.

  Am curious to know what form the relationship takes between parent green woodpecker and its child. Earlier in the year I often saw the old pair feeding one beside the other. Now that I think of it, they seem always to have been together, always within sight of each other, keeping mutual watch, and I wonder at what stage they cease to accept the home-staying of their offspring. Or is it the woodpecker couple which moves on, motivated by some impulse to start every year afresh, build a new nest, leaving behind the young birds to find their adult way, housed in the familiar territory of childhood?

  Maybe they’re not a couple at all, briefly connected merely in parenthood. Ravens, I do know, mate for life.

  Anything is possible.

  Across the span of the four seasons most birds and animals mature from being produced to be reproducers, some nursing two broods within a single calendar year. Nature’s year measures the same seasonal span for every creature that lives here, whatever the total length of its customary life. How long do woodpeckers, for example, live? There’s no reason, which I know of, to suppose that birds retain a concept of time. Nor awareness of intention. Birds retain no sense of what the purpose of anything might be.

  I doubt if we, in truth, know better. I’ve the feeling that purpose is a spectre of man’s delusion, that it does not, did not, never will exist, that we’ve invented purpose in the hope of easing our burden while, in fact, torturing each other with the prospect. We may, quite soon, impale ourselves on purpose, extinguish the human race in our attempt to conquer meaning.

  28 September

  My boots stand on the quarry-tile floor of the old kitchen here in my cottage. This morning I put my foot into one of the worn leather gardening boots, felt what I thought was a lump of mud, and shook out a small frog onto the mat.

  The mole has extended his tunnel by another six feet, heading past the corner of the house.

  1 October

  While largely ignorant of matters of nature, remembered facts tread water beneath the surface of perception, alongside implanted rules and phobias and fears of childhood. When this morning I saw crimson berries shining like glass, something warned me that they were poisonous. And yet, recalling the neat purple and yellow flowers on the same plant earlier in the year, I doubted this received wisdom. A name sprang to mind: deadly nightshade. Mabey’s Flora Britannica informed me I’ve been misled. Deadly nightshade has single purple berries. This is bittersweet, or woody nightshade:

  Popularly known as “deadly nightshade” in many parts of the country, this is not only a misidentification but a misnomer: it is one of the less poisonous members of the family. And, though it is common in shady corners of the garden and has rather tempting scarlet berries, like miniature plum tomatoes, cases of poisoning even amongst children are very rare. The intense bitterness that gives the species the first part of its name (the sweetness is an aftertaste) causes most curious nibblers to spit the berries out immediately … The leaves, if you crush them, have a disagreeable smell of burnt rubber.

  Soon after five in the afternoon, with the wind racing and the sun low in a brilliant sky, I sat beneath the Apple tree, its fallen leaves as well as fruit beginning now to pattern the grass. Picked up my white porcelain mug of tea from the grass and clinging to the side was a ladybird, in the brightness of the sun seeming to be glazed, an inset jewel. Craft-like in form and decoration, crisp, pure, perfectly symmetrical, machine-tooled and coloured. I’ve never before noticed white crescents at the sides of the black heads of ladybirds. The precision of this creature’s markings astonish me.

  The mole has reached an island of wild grasses, where bluebells bloomed in the spring, and after twenty feet of the undulating ridge in the lawn his/her passage now ceases to be visible. What is the … not the purpose … the function of this path?

  I ask questions of the mole which I’d do better directing at myself.

  2 October

  During the night, beneath the long grass, the mole turned sharply to the left, downhill in the mown dip along what used to be the path between Mr Blewitt’s lawn and his vegetable patch, before later tenants allowed the old man’s ‘proper garden’ to meadow itself. The tunnel is just below the roots of the grass, which the mole pushes up in a hump, with no need for the removal of earth into piles. The grass continues to grow, and the pattern of the animal’s trail is curiously beautiful, not offensive at all, the mole’s path curling beside my own.

  3 October

  The mole has veered off to the right, in the direction of the kennels, and has just dived down into a hollow in the lawn caused b
y my earlier assassination of an errant clump of pampas grass. The mole-tracks extend now for sixty meandering feet – sixty man feet, thousands of pink little mole feet.

  5 October

  Compulsive, this need to name things, so to give them meaning. I name birds and tools and things, while unable to find the words directly to nail a helpful thought about the personal feelings which most matter to me.

  Aware, through the books I’ve ordered, of my interests, the proprietor of Brendon Books in Taunton left out for me the other day a copy of The Flora of Somerset, written for the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society by a retired naval officer, Captain R.G.B. Roe. His twenty-year project to record the flora of the county was structured around division of the Ordinance Survey Map into square grids of land, for each of which a card was kept noting every growing plant, common and rare.