Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  18 January

  They were out last night with their searchlight mounted on the back of an open Land Rover, shooting foxes.

  This morning, at dawn, I hear in the cleared glade behind my byre the death-screech of a pheasant and see, through my bedroom window, a fox and his mate slink off home with their kill.

  Good!

  21 January

  Out before eight this morning and hear more birds singing. It’s mild for the season, and I’m up a little earlier than usual. Perhaps I awoke to the day less anxious, less preoccupied, and am therefore able to listen differently.

  Let me try to break the circuit of uncertainty with direct description of what I saw. Of what was. Of what is, these January mornings at Lower Terhill:

  It’s quiet. Not soundless. Quiet. That goes for the colours too. Monotone? Maybe. There are blunt edges to the picture of the lane and paths and hedges and trees this morning. Everywhere is wet. The sky is grey, substanceless, against which the outlines of trunks and leafless branches gain no perspective, are unable to impress on the eye their volume. Although the light is soft, the sun not yet risen, it is day already, beyond dawn. The birds have, I suspect, been singing for some time. I find I can visually follow the sounds of song to their source, sensing, as I watch the small movements of head and the broader shiftings of position, that several of the birds are carrying on what we would call, human to human, a conversation. The character of the light is such that I cannot identify the colour of any bird, am uncertain of actual shape, do not know the name of what it is which this morning sings with both control and abandon. Not a big bird. A finch of sorts? No matter. Enough for me to see the little head thrown back and the beak open amazingly wide to trill after trill.

  Better?

  29 January

  Saw today a flock of birds rise from the hedgerow and wheel at speed, in close formation, down and up and in and out and away.

  I go on and on about birds. What am I actually saying?

  31 January

  Wind batters rain against the study windows. Darkness has fallen, obliterating the giant oak at the end of the lane. With windows fore and aft, I imagine I’m on the bridge at the wheel of a ship which powers itself through the storm that’s been brewing since conception.

  Melodramatic?

  Feels true, though.

  1 February

  In the night the wind blew down the sole remaining apple tree in the old orchard, beneath which I watched last year from my study rams shelter from the sun.

  8 February

  With the fading of the rain and wind and the rising of the air temperature over the last few days the bees have woken, their hum so resonant, so vibrant that the hive seemed to tremble, as if about to take off and orbit the garden. Hundreds of bees crawled up the front of the hive, stretching after the weeks of sleep, brighter in colour and bigger after their well-fed rest. It’s in the winter, I presume, that they guzzle the honey, self-made from the pollen which last year they exhausted themselves gathering.

  Or are these bees a new generation?

  Another sign of life: big lime-green catkins have appeared on my favourite hazel tree. A twig from the tree lies on my desk, shedding yellow powder on the black ash. The hazel bark too is spring-coloured, a growing-green, different from the as yet lifeless-green of other trees, with tiny leaf buds pushing through. The end bunch of four catkins, each three inches long, is thick with pollen-dust – a shake and twirl of the twig and lines are drawn across my desk.

  And the rest? The bulk of life, the stuff I see and think and decline to write about?

  10 February

  It was one of those days of grey skies and windless rain, soaked in melancholy, when the blood-beat slows, spring hopes forgotten. In the walk to Podshavers for Sunday lunch, in the lower field a hare hunkered down beside a tuft of grass growing in the unploughed stubble and did not rise to run until I came within a few feet of it. Eyes lowered, frowning at some faraway thought, I heard the hare before I saw it, pounding across the ground towards the safety of a distant hedge. On my return, in the same state of mind, in the same field, I lifted my head at a soft chirp in front of me, to catch sight of the pale tail feathers of a bird as it flew low above the stubble to hide in the long grass on a ridge-division of the field.

  In the middle of an unpromising February day, were both hare and bird in some animal-way turned in upon themselves, less attentive than customary to their surroundings and to the danger of human approach? I can imagine a metabolic process of response to the circumstances of the day which made the hare and the bird not wish to summon the energy to move until absolutely necessary. I might, after all, at the last moment have changed direction, leaving each peacefully to lie low and safe on its warmed patch of earth.

  ‘Wish’, though, is a consciousness-word, primed by feeling and thought. Birds and hares are whatever they do.

  I try, I try. Try to observe. Try to be interested.

  It’s getting blacker inside. Soon I won’t be able to see myself at all.

  14 February

  A mild, mostly sunny day, in part spent digging up nettles from the verge of the lane and from the woodland glades.

  What will spring and summer this year reveal?

  The lane, I discover at my nettle labours, used to be cobbled from wall to ditch, in its heyday part of the home farm on an estate of model proficiency. For sixty years now, since before the war, not a penny has been spent on Lower Terhill, the tenanted farm buildings allowed to deteriorate until no longer of use. I like today’s haphazardness.

  Time, it takes time, we all need time.

  Patience.

  In a few years I imagine my home at first sight looking as if it might be abandoned, on keener gaze understood to be occupied with gentleness. There’s nothing I want to do but wait, wait and see. Wait and we’ll see, we will see.

  22 February

  It’s begun: the press of Terhill’s trees into life. The tallest tree behind the byre, seen from the kitchen table, has gained in weight of silhouette against the sky, caused, I discover on picking up a branch fallen to the ground, by the springing open of green buds, from which red fingers poke out, to be extended in time to soft-pink catkins. And down in the wood I notice a round puff of fluff has emerged from the buds of a tree split at its bowl into half-a-dozen trunks. I happen to know what both of these trees are called, one a native hybrid, the other an eighteenth-century import. Nothing gained, though, from naming them. Indeed something lost, I feel.

  You cannot lose what you never had, a friend once said to me. I’m afraid I may never have had something vital that I’ve always needed.

  Don’t know what it is that I lack.

  Fearful that, whatever it is, I may not survive without it.

  23 February

  Mice in the traps on three consecutive nights, eight caught in total to date.

  A branch of one of the hawthorn bushes in the lane is in flower, in February.

  Hailstorms today, the wind so strong and cold that the windows of my study mist over, then clear as the sun breaks through, and mist again with the return of the hail, the cycle several times repeated. By now the wind has dropped, the sun sets beautifully, and the buzzard preens its tail feathers, perched on a high branch of the big oak.

  I love the call of a buzzard.

  This time it doesn’t speak as it flies away, wings slowly beating, back towards its home in the trees by the stream in the park. I’ve never before seen this bird so close to the house, the largest and therefore the oldest, the grandfather, I reckon, of the Cothelstone buzzards.

  24 February

  Last night a mouse must have knocked the trap before entering, for this morning it was closed but empty. Two days ago I blocked the gap beneath the back door. The mice seem to have other entrances and exits. Or I may have closed their only route to their homes outside, leaving those already inside with no choice but live here with me.

  I’m confused, hesitant about what to do. Bes
t perhaps to ditch the trap, unblock the door and let them freely come and go.

  What am I frightened of?

  It can’t be the mice. They’re the carrier of my fears, not the cause.

  Like a child in a fairy tale, the darkness chills my blood and I dare not look.

  Silly, I know. Because whatever it is, once accepted, might be manageable.

  I doubt it, though. At the heart of things I’m almost certain that it’s … that I’m in trouble.

  25 February

  It is blackthorn, not hawthorn, which flowers earliest, Beth tells me. She suggests I record the hedgerow locations on my walks, to return to in the autumn and pick sloes for gin.

  3 March

  At midday the wind drops, releasing the sun quickly to warm the air. The bees are busy, returning to the hive with yellow sacks of pollen high-loaded in balance on either side, just in front of their wings.

  Can’t be much these days on which to feed. Maybe the gorse, which is in flower – much the same colour as the bees’ gatherings.

  The daffodils and primroses are also mostly out, a less dense yellow.

  4 March

  Managed to shortcut the cycle of batterings in bed this morning and rose in time to listen to the seven o’clock news, while I ate a quartered orange standing in my dressing gown by the kitchen sink.

  On wandering through my wood, pre-breakfast, I again had to fight off the enveloping blankness.

  No, not fight, not the old flailings for escape, more like pushing aside, fold by fold, a grey weight of helplessness.

  The grey blackens at each removal of protective layer.

  Terrifying.

  Saw a field mouse scuttle across one of the paths and, on stooping to examine the ground, found the hole from which it had emerged in the loose earth of the ‘wilderness’ and, six feet away, across the grass-growth of the old gravel-bedded path, the other hole down which it bolted.

  Beth knows that I’m somehow not well.

  I wish never again to retreat into the belief that I can face this pain alone.

  5 March

  Beth’s mirrors have sold out in Bath. She’s busy making frames, from old iron.

  6 March

  Stood this afternoon at the double doors to my study, through which the grain once entered to be milled, and watched Frank hang a new door to the stable. A stocky man in his mid-forties, he has lived all his life here at Terhill, and as a boy had wanted to become a shepherd, inspired by the wisdom of an old man on the Estate who looked after the flock and with whom he worked in spare moments from school. He has learnt other skills, become a master builder, who applies himself to each task of his trade with a quality of attention seldom these days seen.

  8 March

  The trees, I can see, will again grow leaves this year. They mightn’t have. I really didn’t think they would.

  It’s raining hard and I drink my coffee inside, at the kitchen table, thumbing Flora Britannica. Read that the Scots used to recite:

  Ash before oak, the lady wears a cloak.

  Oak before ash, the lady wears a sash.

  In Surrey they appear to have believed the opposite, predicting drought when the ash came into leaf before the oak:

  If the oak comes out before the ash,

  ‘Twill be a year of mix and splash.

  If the ash comes out before the oak,

  ‘Twill be a year of fire and smoke.

  9 March

  Within minutes of rising from my bed, unrested, with shrouds of uneasy dreams wrapped around my head, I watch in gratitude from the kitchen window two rabbits – a couple, they seemed – lollop in and out of the hedge, unaware of my presence ten feet away behind the glass. Early mornings in the lane are theirs, foraging on the verge, a couple of jumps from their burrow amongst the brambles.

  A little later, dressed by then, wandering out to collect my post, I inspect the spot where one of the rabbits had for several minutes sat, and see that it had made for itself beneath the dogwood roots a leaf-upholstered bed.

  12 March

  In the blindness of anxiety I fail to see the signs around me of new life. The other day I wrote this paragraph in a letter to a London friend:

  An image has entered my mind: of a body so red and raw from head to toe with open wounds that the only possible form of survival is to lock itself away in the dark where nothing, not a beam of sunlight, not a breath of spring breeze, not the gentlest of intimate human touch can be allowed entry for fear of the agony of contact. This pain is real, it isn’t imagined.

  Pairs of birds, I see, have registered their territories, selected places to nest. In the human calendar it’s almost Easter. Will eggs then slip from the song thrush, sharp and shy and alive in its nest in the hedge beneath my study window?

  At Easter, as a child, I loved to bite off the ears of chocolate bunnies.

  13 March

  It looks as though there’ll be dozens of foxgloves this summer in my cleared glades, their pale green leaves stretching up where the light now reaches down to warm the seeds that have maybe lain dormant for years. Good to see signs of nature’s benefit from my presence, in a small way to compensate for other truly terrible intrusions: how I loathe the sound in the lane of my two combi-boilers lighting up, pumping fumes into the air through low, horizontal flues – their awful noise, here in this beautiful place. I gasp at my ignorance, at my stupidity. All for the sake of ‘convenience’!

  Why oh why didn’t I insist on pursuing one of the alternatives?

  I hope I can forgive myself.

  Hard, very hard, I’ve always found, to tolerate my own mistakes, to feel acceptable as anything less than perfect.

  I’m frightened.

  Patience, patience. I’m still a child … less than a child … I’m a seed, an egg …

  Nonsense!

  Diversionary defence in words.

  14 March

  I am unwilling to plant, disinclined to sow, all I wish to do on the land here at Terhill is clear the ground of invasive weeds and underwood and set the earth free to bring forth whatever wild flowers may there lie hidden, buried alive.

  18 March

  Awoke at five to the sound of foxes barking. Surprised to sense some possibility of rest, of release.

  19 March

  At midnight, in the fields, I smell the safest moments of my boyhood, at Erkindale, my grandmother’s working farm outside Rathdowney, in County Leix, at the centre of Republican Ireland. Here at Terhill I smell the same wet wool of sheep, my landlord’s large flock of pregnant ewes pattering ahead of me for half a mile in the dark across Cothelstone Park, and every step of the way I breathe the wake of their scent, taking me back to Ireland.

  Aged seven, I was the one at Erkindale who found, in the snow on Christmas Eve, the ewe missing for two days, silent but alive at the centre of a hawthorn thicket. It was I alone who stood with the animal, in mourning over the body of its stillborn lamb.

  21 March

  These recent days I’ve seen and heard the Terhill life around me but have not digested it, so far away have I fled in my head.

  A mild morning, and as I sat before breakfast on the bench beneath the pine, the flight of a wood pigeon registered in a way I’ve never before consciously noticed. My mind is so trouble-tired I cannot summon the energy to describe the bird’s dead-weight swoops in flight – I did see it, though, and am grateful.

  Coming back to the house, heard such a loud buzzing on the path by the side of the kennels. The noise came from above my head, and I looked up to see that hundreds of Beth’s bees were gathering pollen from the tiny white and yellow flowers of the big willow.

  I’m glad Beth keeps her bees here, not over at her cottage by the Manor.

  24 March

  In the sun this afternoon I saw a butterfly, the first of the year. And hundreds of flies.

  At the end, now, of the day, I hope I might have drawn a safety line in the sand.

  25 March

  At mid-mo
rning one of the two feral cats seen from time to time out and about at Terhill, the big marmalade, trotted through my gate with a baby rabbit in its mouth. The rabbit squealed and kicked, to no avail. The cat disappeared behind the byre, to silence the cry of its prey.

  27 March

  A mouse-proof bar has been fixed to the bottom of the larder door, and still food is being eaten.

  And today I found my house mouse’s home: in the middle of a cardboard box full of mugs and tumblers, wrapped in London by the removal men in superfluous masses of paper, quite a bit of it shredded in the building of a nest. My industrious companion had stored the pine kernels at the bottom of a glass, with shredded paper on top, most of the wrapping paper still intact.