Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  Exceptional? In my experience, yes. The whole of this autumn such brazen extravagance in the colouring of the leaves before they fall. It must have happened before, and I did not notice.

  I’m pleased also with my insistence that every room in this house be lit by two windows, at either side. From my bed, without raising my head from the pillow, I see trees and grass and sky through both windows, to the west and to the east, and the ever-altering light is indeed, I feel, remarkable.

  17 December

  W.G. Sebald is dead, killed in a car crash.

  19 December

  The night silent as I walked home across the fields in the dark from Podshavers, my restaurant in the old milking yard of an adjacent farm, eyes adjusting to the clouded peacefulness. On up from the gatehouse I heard and felt the crunch of gravel beneath the grass, on the forsaken drive which winds across the park, its route unreadable at ground-high sight, unused for sixty years.

  Sebald, I learn from a newspaper cutting sent to me by a friend in this morning’s post, collided with a lorry on a country road near his home in Norfolk. His daughter was injured in the accident. He may have had a heart attack.

  20 December

  Difficult to accept that the others who winter with me here, the fauna and flora of Lower Terhill, do not also have feelings. Maybe they too, in different ways are quietened by this windless weather, set to restorative sleepiness in their leaf-lined homes.

  In Austerlitz Sebald wrote, I today read:

  Now and then a train of thought did succeed in emerging with wonderful clarity inside my head, but I knew even as it formed that I was in no position to record it, for as soon as I so much as picked up my pencil the endless possibilities of language, to which I could safely abandon myself, became a conglomeration of the most inane phrases … It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyse my entire system … I became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the destructive effect on me of my desolation through all those past years, and a terrible weariness came over me at the idea that I had never really been alive, or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death.

  21 December

  Slow down, you’re overwrought. Stop, breathe, find your balance.

  These things that I instruct myself are easier to say than do.

  I know it’s bad for me. That worse stuff can happen if I get too intense.

  Wish I didn’t mind so much about the mouse. Anxiety at not-knowing where it lives, how and when it comes and goes, why it has taken to nibbling an occasional carrot.

  Control! Control!

  Will it ever stop?

  24 December

  It’s the time of year when the one-time greyhound kennels are most visible at the corner of the garden, a ruin when I arrived, totally restored by Beth and I, her first job at Terhill.

  We cleared barrow-loads of rubble, lowered the fallen roofline to its original dimensions, installed a window in the bricked-up opening and made the place, with its three small rooms and two walled yards, watertight for Beth to occupy. The room with a chimney as a workshop, the second to store her Bee paraphernalia, the third a haphazard sanctuary of bits and pieces.

  It mattered to me so much to restore this neglected little building.

  I’m not sure why.

  Remember our excitement at discovering in a messy corner of the byre enough double roman ridge tiles for the kennels, in rounded terracotta. Rarities these days, a hundred years old. They look perfect.

  25 December

  Soon after nine I cut an armful of holly from my five-trunked tree, the only one for miles around still in berry, and a second armful of variegated holly and ilex from the overgrown arboretum, and walk down across the Cothelstone land to redecorate Podshavers’ tables for Christmas lunch at the restaurant. On my way, in the big field beyond the lodge, the wind rises, blowing clouds across half the sky. Although ahead of me the sun shines, rain begins to gust at my back, stinging my ears. I turn to look behind and find that I stand at the centre of a complete rainbow, both its ends grounded in the field I’m in. A solitary figure framed by a rainbow, holding in each hand bunches of evergreen foliage, on Christmas Day.

  26 December

  No better than any other day, the dark hours awake in bed no less fear-filled.

  It’s the time of year when thoughts of family press for attention.

  Can picture, in detail, the cricket fields in winter outside my schoolmaster father’s house. See me and my sister playing French cricket in our duffle coats, defending our legs with a bat from attack by tennis ball.

  Another memory of these same playing fields. Of clambering on the spectator stands, the woodgrain deep, bleached by the sun. As a boy I stood in mounting excitement with the crowd gathered in front of the pavilion at the end of school matches, to see who might be sent to run around the old building in a spotted boater, notice of the coveted award of Flannels. Boys without their 1st XI colours wore grey trousers, all eleven of the final team gaining their whites by the time of the match against Eton, played out on the MCC pitch at Lords, the school teams occupying for two whole days the England dressing rooms and balconies. Male spectators dressed up in tails and topper, with a Harrow buttonhole of sea-blue cornflower, the stems wrapped in silver foil.

  In my head the sun always shines on the cricket grounds of Harrow School.

  That’s right, I remember now: Jonah ran the Harrow School Clubs off Latimer Road, in West London. My father used to escort schoolboys up to town on Community Service at the club. That’s how we knew Jonah, my link with West Somerset.

  28 December

  An animal has dug a hole in the filled half of my compost heap. With highish investment of animal effort.

  Basic things – parenthood, cooking, newspapers, guns – mystify and frighten me. With some – food, intimacy – I’m beginning here to sense the possibility of comfort. As for love, Sebald feels to me a greater personal loss than my father.

  Because I never loved him. Whereas Sebald’s books I adore.

  It’s a long chain and I have neither the time nor inclination to examine the links. All I want is to free myself.

  See from my file of quotes that I noted, a decade or so ago, on reading Nietzsche’s The Will to Power: ‘The task of spinning on the chain of life, and in such a way that the thread grows more powerful – that is the task.’

  30 December

  Slept solidly through the night for the first time in many months.

  Beside my bed, I like, a lot, the small cabinet with specimen drawers of bones and feathers and shells.

  Yesterday, walking with Beth by a stream on the fringes of Exmoor, we watched a pair of birds that neither of us had previously seen. The initial sight was of their flight up stream, inches above the water, dark wings swinging high and low, on each beat almost meeting. Looking down farther along the path through the forest onto the bubbling water below, swelled by melting snow, we spotted the birds perched on a log jammed against a midstream rock. Their heads and tails dipped and bobbed. When we drew parallel, the pair of birds flew in close formation back down towards the place where we first came upon them, and as they passed we were struck by the whiteness of their breasts and by the pointedness of their heads, with longish beaks. ‘I think they might be dippers,’ I said.

  And they were, Heinzel, Fitter and Parslow confirm in their Collins bird book: ‘unmistakable for conspicuous white front and habit of constantly bobbing on rocks in midstream’.

  Were?

  Are.

  Still there, if not, then somewhere else, as solid in existence before I saw them as they remain after, out of my sight.

  Me too. I’m also still here.

  2 January

  The mouse is hungry. On New Year’s Eve it made its way into Beth’s leather bag on the floor by the boot rack, where it nibbled an apple, bit a hole in her pouch
of tobacco and gnawed at her wallet and at the paper edges of a cheque book.

  What as yet undiscovered damage is it doing to my books on the shelves, and to the works of art stacked in my storeroom?

  I’ve heard of a trap which doesn’t kill. Think I’d better get hold of one of these, and remove the mouse to the old coach house, where it can share the food of Will’s horses.

  Daydream of bare ankles speckled with the yellow pollen of buttercups. They are my own feet and legs, cut-off from sight above the knees, torso-less, running through tall grasses and scattered wildflowers of a summer’s meadow. And the paler legs of a young woman, the beautiful legs of Beth, my singular friend, in a separate yet connected dance.

  3 January

  Spent the day and night at Beth’s place, in the cottage she rents beside Cothelstone Manor. Beth worked on the pebble mirrors she’s making for sale through a shop in Bath, while I tried to read. It’s hard for me to be there. Hard for her too.

  5 January

  The temperature has risen and January damp descends. Badger tracks turn muddy. No visible growth on land. The fallen leaves lose their crispness, begin to rot, scuffed by animals in search of grubs. The so-said dead of winter feels, in nature’s patient way, discrete with life.

  It’ll come, it will come.

  6 January

  Walking home from Sunday lunch alone at Podshavers, I veered from the direct path to pass along the banks of an unfrequented stream, so full of bird life that the brambles below hawthorn bushes are washed white with droppings. Dozens, maybe hundreds of birds flew away as I approached. Crossed the footbridge and walked back around the cut oval of Cothelstone’s National Hunt racecourse, a residue of the family’s historical wealth, liberally extracted from a vast field, planted at its centre with beans.

  Called for a tea with Beth on my way home. She remembers going to point-to-points there as a teenager.

  We used to go to a point-to-point meeting too, every Easter, one of the family outings I looked forward to, below a bare chalk hillside ten miles from the Berkshire town in which we then lived, my father by then headmaster of the old grammar school.

  Although twenty years separate Beth and me, our memories coincide.

  9 January

  Exactly two years ago, three months before moving into the unheated cottage, each day walking over the hill from Aisholt, when I first began to clear Terhill’s woodland wilderness I came across a place of enchantment that I instantly knew I’d never want to touch. A big tree had uprooted itself, its trunk and branches long since cut and carried away, and around the disturbed terrain elder trees had flourished, they in their turn half-falling under the weight of ivy which now festoons the stump and the tangled underwood, creating a nook rich in mosses and ferns and damp-loving wild flowers. In the meantime I have cleared the surrounding territory of nettles and cut back the laurel, unveiling the shadow-limbs of old garden paths, nowhere plainer to see than where the big tree fell, blocking the main thoroughfare of this section of the nineteenth-century arboretum. Redouble my determination not to seek a return to the past, affirms my affection for the curl of my own narrow meanders, crossing and re-crossing the wide straight lines once mapped out by the formal creators of the garden. Strands of ivy have plunged, jungle-like, from a branch of the elder clump vertically to the ground, where they have laid extra roots, and new shoots now grow back up their parental self.

  Maybe the ivy will in time become thick enough to sustain itself upright, independent of a host tree.

  Bought in Taunton this morning two Live Capture Mouse Traps, an ingenious black plastic square-section tube with an angled bend in the centre, designed to entice a curious mouse by its own weight to cause the trap to tilt and the entrance flap to close. The recommended bait is peanut butter.

  Item 4 of Directions for Use: ‘Check trap regularly to avoid distress to the mouse. The timing of the checks should be no longer than six hours apart.’

  Other than the attack on Beth’s bag, I’ve noticed no sign of the mouse in the house since moving the vegetables to an inaccessible larder shelf. I intend, all the same, to set the traps before going to bed and, in mouse-respect, to check when taking my early morning piss.

  10 January

  5 a.m. and the mouse traps are empty, peanut butter untouched.

  Wake at 7 in terror at half-asleep images of water pouring down the walls, caused, I saw as I rushed in my dream upstairs, by the implosion of a radiator, opened up to its steaming, copper-gut innards.

  After a break of several years, my nightmare has returned: I see my home disintegrate, reduced to rot and rubble by floods of falling water.

  After an afternoon preparing the paddock behind the stables for transformation into an orchard, I’m disheartened by the extent of damage to the land by abandonment of agricultural rubbish. Pickaxing below the surface I unearth broken bricks and rolls of bailer twine and sheets of plastic and bits of iron and great lumps of concrete.

  It will mend, the land will mend, with my care.

  11 January

  Caught a mouse last night.

  At least I think I did.

  Just before going to bed I found one of the traps closed, seeming to feel heavier as I carried it to a window. It was dark, though, and I couldn’t see if a mouse jumped to the ground. Why didn’t I put on my coat and boots, take a torch, release the trap down by the garden bench and watch what appeared?

  I’m left in uncertainty.

  Little, if any, of the peanut butter has been eaten.

  I don’t understand myself.

  12 January

  No doubt this time! On late-waking found a captured dormouse, which Beth and I carried down the lane and let out at the centre of the cobbled coach house yard. The mouse did not wish to leave its black box for the unprotected light, kept turning and turning inside. In the end we had to shake it out a touch roughly, and it sheltered for a moment behind the heel of my gumboot, before careering in desperate leaps for the undergrowth at the base of the nearest wall.

  How did this appealing little creature – beautiful dark-brown flashes, I saw, on the nape of its neck, narrowing to a point along its back – experience the trauma of imprisonment?

  I cannot know.

  13 January

  Twenty-four black rooks are resting in a double row along the top branches of the old oak, silhouetted against a heavy blue-white sky.

  14 January

  Catch myself standing for many minutes, head cocked, staring at the end ridge tile of the kennels, and recall the man I periodically used to meet in London on my way to swim each morning at 7.30 a.m. at the public baths in Ironmonger Row, a youngish man wearing an old-fashioned pair of corduroy trousers, navy blue woollen sweater and tweed jacket, standing stock-still on a corner of the street, eyes fixed to the meeting of sky and building, in a gaze of intense enquiry. I never saw the man move, although he was always alone, and must, I presume, have arrived and departed unaided. He was cared for, his black hair washed and cut. A man in his mid-thirties, helplessly at sea on the City Road.

  15 January

  Another (greyer) dormouse (big liquid black eyes) now lives down at the coach house.

  Trapped.

  Like the troubled man in the City Road.

  Like me, entangled in morbid thinkings.

  16 January

  Nobody but I walks up over the hill from Terhill to Aisholt, and the cross-country route I choose to take through fields and woods feels private, mine. On a moonless night I experience a lightening of the spirit as memory of the shape of the land leads me to unseeable gates at the far sides of switch-back sloping fields.

  This knowledge is in part physical, sensed by the limbs and muscles of the body, and in part intuitive, a feeling for the shape of the land and for the appropriate passage of man and animal across it. Knowing that on Aisholt’s fields I follow not only in my own footsteps but also in those of Janet and her sheep, and of innumerable other country people over hundreds of years b
efore her tenure of the farm, I let myself believe in and be guided by my sense of the travelled way. Tucked into a border-bank of Beech, the style out onto Aisholt Common from Middle Hill Meadow is invisible to me until close enough to touch – there it is, though, in the pitch dark of the shadow of the trees, precisely where trust in my feet takes me.

  When unseen branches comb my hair I do not, not for a split-second, flinch, so confident do I feel in the acceptability of my presence.

  Unusual, for me.