Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  19 May

  The bee story is many-layered but my head is tight, will not release the words to communicate.

  Three cats live here now, in the old part of the cottage, old Thomas and the brothers Bert and Dennis, competing for territory long in control of the feral twosome, a marmalade and a tortoiseshell. The move from over at the Manor of Beth and her cats to live in the original half of my cottage is another story for the telling of which I lack the energy, the will, the desire.

  I’ve lost the spirit.

  7 June

  Today.

  23 July

  In my absence – first at Musgrove County Hospital to be stitched up, and then confined to the mental unit in Rydon House – things did grow in the red earth outside my door. Grew green and tall, unfettered. It was I who nearly did not survive.

  3 August

  The clover and dandelions and things grow mostly from seeds retained by nature in the soil, little, as far as I can see, from my sowings.

  Next year?

  The butterfly meadow may reveal itself next year.

  Patience, with my damaged self.

  4 August

  The cats have made themselves at home. The other morning I saw from my bedroom window, in the day-opening sunshine, Dennis at play in the yard in front of the byre. He tossed into the air the cadaver of some creature captured in the hedgerow, jumping with it, all four feet off the ground, willing it back to life, wishing to prolong his one-way game of cat and … young weasel, I discovered once dressed and out, its front paws with toes as expressive as the fingers of a bookish boy, white-furred from chin to tail down its long tummy, brown with charcoal streaks along its back.

  The screams I occasionally hear in the night are the death-cries of murdered baby rabbits. On the garden path and in the lane I frequently find the unpalatable body parts – liver, gizzard, shit sack – of voles and field mice, and the drab-feathered corpses of birds. Few song-birds nest now in the garden.

  Are the byre’s robins dead?

  The feral cats, who kill only to eat and thereby live in relative harmony beside the birds of this place, have retreated from proximity to the out-for-a-lark domestic threesome, supplied twice-daily with their pet-shop delicacies, killing for the thrill of it.

  22 August

  Don’t write much. There isn’t much to say, my head bubble-wrapped in medication.

  Although it was, as I knew at the time, a bad thing to do, I’m still sorry I didn’t succeed. I knifed my wrists in the wrong direction, didn’t wait long enough for the bottle of aspirins to send me to permanent sleep.

  I lament my failure.

  2 September

  I’m lost at sea, anchorless, rudderless. Winds blow, warm supportive winds, but I’ve mislaid the sails. I was convinced that I wished to cast anchor in this beautiful harbour of Lower Terhill, unaware of how far away I internally am from the shore.

  I begin to understand that I must first seek a place of safety inside myself, must find some anchored buoy within my own person up to which to tie, and from there reach out to connect to the land. Must build jetties, bridges across which to journey back and forth, wrapped in oilskins and sou’wester against the storms, head erect, eyes bright in the mild moonlight.

  Ugghh! The temptation to wrap it up in fancy words! When the reality is plain ugly, my action unforgiveable.

  7 September

  Poorly attended-to through this spring and summer’s alternate bouts of hot sun and sharp rain, my cleared woodland threatens to return to wilderness. Since my return I’ve attacked the giant nettles and burdock, sought to contain the bindweed, cut back surging laurel. Yesterday, while pulling out streamers of rampant brambles, I wondered at my habitual failure to harvest the wild fruits of the countryside, the hazelnuts, sloes, whortleberries, garlic, rose hips and myriad others. This afternoon, a basket on my arm, I walked over to Schopnoller Farm, where the hedgerows are laden with blackberries, and spent two hours wandering here and there, content in my seasonal pursuit. On returning home I gathered some windfalls from the grass below the old tree and made blackberry and apple crumble.

  Aged fifty-six, this is the first time in my life I’ve cooked a ‘sweet’ of any kind; never baked a cake, made scones, rice pudding, lemon tart. A simple act, of purpose and pleasure.

  Made aware that physical ease is possible, replacing the tension and distress my body has endured for the last couple of years.

  9 September

  Change, incremental change. Seasonal shifts. Play. Joy. Words placed on the page as they come. A walk in the rain of today, after a weekend of sun, the last warmth of summer.

  Cats enjoying their play in the yard.

  Wish I could watch and listen to the life around me and be filled, fuelled.

  Must partake, participate in the here-and-now – in the here at Erkindale, where another also lives, Beth, the owner of the cats; and in the now, not the rescheduled past or the pre-written future.

  11 September

  It’s September the 11th.

  The hawthorn trees in the lanes are thick with crimson haws, the sky with fighter planes, on exercise to mark one year since the Twin Towers assault.

  13 September

  This morning a neighbour died, Ollie, the eldest brother of builder Frank. Ollie lived with their mother Constance in the oldest wing of the farmhouse at the head of the lane. Aged forty-seven, a large-limbed grey-haired man, slow of speech and step, Ollie had seldom left his mother’s side.

  I will never again see the two of them pass below my study windows on a Wednesday afternoon, wheeling their barrow full of bags of rubbish to place for collection at the crossing of our private lane with the narrow road.

  In the Estate house in which Constance has lived for almost fifty years, there are several sixteenth-century plaster relief-panels of figures and flowers. The first of her nine children to be born is the first to die. A child for the whole of his life, an overgrown boy, Ollie needed to die before his mother, his guide to recovery from the seizures by which, without warning, he was regularly floored.

  Not yet, though. He needn’t have died today.

  14 September

  We call ourselves human beings. Not easy, I find, to live by our name. Human-doer better describes the way I’ve existed.

  Beth lets her cats ‘be’.

  I can’t.

  Can’t permit them the freedom to wander unchaperoned in my half of the house, am unable to accept their clawing at the kelim on the sitting-room floor. Looking back to childhood, I’m afraid I allowed myself to be made to ‘behave’, failed to assert the need to unfold feelings, the desire to expose my own person. It’s a bit late now. I’m frightened. More fear-filled even than I must, at the very beginning, have seen my mother to be if I misbehaved.

  I once wanted to love my mother, a long time ago, and suffered for it.

  Important to remember, for safety’s sake, never again to love.

  15 September

  I woke at dawn to the intermittent cry of some animal in the yard, loud, articulate, not a sound I recognized. A stoat, fighting the cats? I didn’t get up to investigate. Lay in bed and thought: how rigorously I defended myself in Charlotte Road from the world, how cut-off in actuality I was in London from the day-by-dayness of other lives, alone there in my fortress, two-way contact with those young artists an illusion.

  My sanctuary. My prison.

  For fifteen years a place at least of safety.

  A bay of the byre is piled high with cut branches of ash, cedar, pine, laurel, elm, elder and sycamore, stored in the dry, waiting to be sawn into logs. I enjoy the sorting and carrying of the wood in from the stacks that I’ve raised over the last two-and-a-half years in selected spots of the cleared wilderness, and find comforting the autumn sight of it now from the kitchen window in the open-sided byre. This afternoon Beth has also been placing things in store, stacking on my larder shelves her jars of blackcurrant, damson and plum jam, made from fruit gathered from tre
es in our garden.

  Distracted by my troubles from care this summer of her bees, Beth neglected their health and when last week she collected the honey found the main hive infested with wax-moth and the swarm in the second hive dormant. Two jars are all we have of home honey.

  17 September

  Walked over this afternoon with Beth to pick sloes from a stretch of blackthorn in the hedge two fields this side of Schopnoller, on the branches of which, while blackberrying the other day, I’d noted the sloes clustered as blue-black as grapes on the vine. Drawing down with the handle of a walking stick the thorny branches to within reach we picked under pressure, distressed by both noise and smell of two giant tractors approaching closer and closer, the blades of their hydraulic cutters reducing the wild wealth of these great old hedges to mangled nothingness, square-cropped to a quarter of their height and half their width.

  Three weeks ago, when a comparatively mild attack by tractor blade was launched on the hedgerow of my lane, the shape and composition of which I tend, I felt personally brutalized, doubted my strength to survive, feared I might be forced to abandon hope of creating here a life of self-respect.

  18 September

  Seated at midday on the bench outside the kitchen door I know that it is this precise spot that I must return to when my mind dreams escape, from here that I must learn step-by-step to walk. As frail as a baby, the flayed muscles of my neck strain to hold upright my head on my shoulders.

  Phrases too neat, too reasonable. Nowhere near what it’s really like.

  19 September

  Today found myself drawn to pick up from the cliff path at Lee and bring home to place in the baize-lined drawers of my specimen chest two small black-tipped white feathers.

  20 September

  Another culinary first: cooked this evening a shepherd’s pie, flavoured with rosemary and sage, the herbs I most like to use, in pleasure at snipping sprigs from the two old bushes rescued from strangulation by bindweed. I made too much and ate too fast, while listening on Radio 3 to a concert recorded a month ago at the Edinburgh Festival, of Alfred Brendel playing two of Beethoven’s twenty-three Diabelli Variations.

  Found myself at supper noting in my diary, from a leaflet which has lain unread for a week on the kitchen table, the dates of several meetings of the Somerset Wildlife Trust, of walks and talks, on dormice and damsel flies.

  My attention was drawn back to the radio by the voice of Stevie Smith reciting her poem Not Waving But Drowning, which the presenter insisted on describing as ‘universally familiar, a cliché’. I do hate this cultural snobbism, sneer-nosed disregard for recollection of the impact – shock, in my case, at the poet’s resignation to pain – on first hearing this well-known poem.

  Because ‘everyone’ knows that Brendel plays brilliantly the Diabelli is ‘nobody’ meant to listen?

  Confusion.

  I’m confused.

  Beneath one feeling another lurks, and hidden beneath that a second, different, contradictory feeling, and a third, and a fourth, and … Hold on. Breathe. Take a deep breath. Must hold on and also let go. Stevie Smith sounded like a … The music sounded to be … What am I trying to say?

  The pills which I’m being made to take put a fuzz in my head. Although they do sustain a kind-of appetite.

  21 September

  Walked up through Cothelstone Wood to Paradise.

  Enchanted to see, at close quarters, a badger. Watched it scuffle and snuff amongst the dry undergrowth in the shadow beneath packed plantation trees. They’re big, badgers. Not surprised their tracks in my copse are well worn, from heavy night-time traffic in search of food.

  Looking down from the high slopes of the waxcap field I saw that a white double-poled marquee has been pitched in the middle of the parkland grass, five minutes walk across the fields from Cothelstone Church, where this afternoon will be married the sister of the man who rents the cottage adjacent to Constance Sayer’s. Sebastian is his name, a solicitor and a fisherman, keeper of a boat on the Estate’s lake. Their wedding guests on this Indian-summer Saturday will barely believe the evidence before their eyes, transported to the centre of a landscape of old English beauty, not a road, not even a path in sight, a pasture-roll away from the Jacobean jewel of a manor house and its attendant church.

  Off over the hill from Aisholt, when I first walked across these fields to Cothelstone I cried, wept tears of longing to share the idyll of this land with a loved other. Did not, at the time, know I’d live beside this view. Could never have envisaged what I’d do to myself in the woods this June.

  22 September

  Been feeding the cats this weekend. Thomas – large, handsome, slate-grey with white bib and paws – has a urinary infection, and is fed special food to prevent crystals forming in his bladder, from there flowing on to block the urethra, leading to rupture and death. The ‘boys’, Dennis and Bert, tabby twins, are small and lithe. They kiss-lick each other’s faces and bums. Dennis’s short front legs are white.

  I’ve grown particularly fond of Thomas, whose watchfulness I respect.

  Like the old half of the cottage, prefer Beth’s home there to my own here.

  23 September

  Ollie was buried today, beside his father, in the plot in Cothelstone churchyard his mother had reserved for herself. The second-youngest brother, Herbert, head gardener at the National Trust’s Thompson Park, read to the full congregation an address of memories and messages dense in the unsentimental strength of this family’s closeness. At Herbert’s side stood another of Constance’s sons, the tallest, a supportive hand placed in the small of his brother’s back.

  Beth and I walked home arm-in-arm across the fields, conscious of our tread in the footsteps of Ollie and his mother on their regular trips to tend the Sayer graves, bearing clippers and hoe and watering can. We took tea and sandwiches in Constance’s neat garden, the daily focus of activity in her life with Ollie. Sebastian told me that last Saturday the bridal pair spent their wedding night in a large army tent, separate from the marquee, pitched in seclusion at the edge of the lake.

  Inside the church at Cothelstone are two sculptural tombs: in unpainted stone, the recumbent thirteenth-century images of a crusader knight and his bride, her feet resting on a stylized squirrel; and in alabaster, the Jacobean effigy of a later Stawell couple.

  Tim Warr is also buried there, a Somerset rose growing up the porch in his memory. I knew Tim, a housemaster at Harrow School until retiring with his wife to a cottage in nearby Cushuish. While alive he stocked and fished the lake at Cothelstone. A rugby international, Tim re-visited time after time during the week of his death the try he had scored for England at Cardiff Arms Park, toppling out of bed onto the floor as he dived in his mind across the line.

  Boarding school myths, ever-enduring, difficult to obliterate.

  25 September

  Reading Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

  28 September

  The berries on the holly are already reddening. Not all the swallows have yet left their summer nests in the stables.

  29 September

  On the outside of the window pane, their black bodies silhouetted against the sky, two spiders together weave a web. The sight surprises me. I find I’d assumed spiders live alone. But they don’t; they cohabit, it appears.

  Not necessarily.

  The web is not the spider’s actual home, it is the equivalent of a fisherman’s net, the means of entrapment of food, the making of which they undertake in company. On other occasions, when disturbed, I’ve seen spiders scuttle into holes and crevices where it’s fair to presume they live, breed, bring up their numerous progeny. Separately, maybe, as single parents, thus to affirm my image of spidery solitude.

  30 September

  Beside the outline of the old drive to the demolished mansion down which I walk on my way to eat at Podshavers, where it passes the lake, a row of horse chestnut trees drop in the wind conkers at my feet. I’ve adored since childhood the sh
een and swirling layers of colour on a conker fresh from its shell, pith adhering white and soft around the conker’s crown.

  3 October

  I am startled on my morning walk up Cothelstone’s hidden combe by sight of the bare white side of a tall beech. Then notice that its sister tree, which for decades had sheltered its bark from rain, had fallen in a storm and has been cut up, stacked ready to be carted away. Within a winter or two lichen will have formed, moss grown, turning the bark of the surviving tree green.