Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  Watched two hares feed and play in a field in the crisp early evening light on my walk to Podshavers for supper. Thought of Philip Webb’s drawing of a hare given to Morris to weave into a Merton Abbey tapestry. At dusk hares are abandonedly athletic in their movements, jumping and strolling and sitting and rolling, then haring off in one direction then another.

  Left over from my premises, I own a Morris & Co. painted tile of a hare, designed by Webb, presumably.

  Names. Everything has to be named, in order to exist.

  7 June

  On this day last year, 7 June 2002, I slashed both sides of both wrists repeatedly with a sharpened carving knife. Nine separate scars straight and white, bearing the dotted marks of over forty stitches. I will do no such thing again.

  Love the tail-feather flash of yellow in the dipping flight of a bird up the lane ahead of me. Love the gold glow at the transparent centre of an insect’s long tapering body, its tinted wings whirring at the closed kitchen window. Reach across the sink to let it out. So much to note. However long I live here I’ll never cease seeing things before unnoticed.

  Ripples of optimism in the stagnant pond.

  8 June

  The blind tricyclist, I call him. Because of the expression on his face, eyes hidden behind black glasses, and his hesitant relationship with the roadside, hearing the approach of cars without clearly seeing them. I coughed this morning as I approached, to warn him of my presence. He did smile to me as I bicycled past. Never does when I see him and his wife exercising their dog on Pound Lane. He can barely walk, his legs spindle-thin, bowed, unsteady, supported by sticks. Lone tricycling he wears the brightest of fluorescent racing gear.

  Sebastian, the lawyer, my weekend neighbour, sings to his baby as he wheels her down the lane on their afternoon walk. On his return I sometimes see him labouring to push the three-wheel stroller up the tractor tracks through the fields from down near the lake.

  Maybe I’ll ask him to teach me to fish?

  No, best not. Don’t want to have to speak.

  I’ve been thinking of taking singing lessons: a better idea. To learn to accompany my favourite bass passages of the St Matthew Passion, and to sing out strong and loud the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem.

  9 June

  Driving down a country road in the Cotswolds I spotted a handwritten sign to Rodmarton Manor. The name was familiar: the house in which Leonard and Virginia Woolf once lived?

  It was open to the public, and I drove in.

  Embedded in a path in the herb garden a shard of white china, with what I see as a small heart-shaped leaf resting on it. I pick it up, and find the shape of a heart has been worn in the glaze, the earthenware body of the broken dish nature-veined by the passage of time – in-animate, yet kind-of-alive – the beauty of fragments. Ordered beauty inside the house: furniture and ceramics and textiles made by masters of the arts and crafts movement, Gimson, the Barnsley brothers, Waals, Powell, and others.

  A misplaced memory: soon realize I know of Rodmarton from my dealing days, nothing to do with the Woolfs, built for the Biddulphs by Ernest Barnsley.

  An unexpected joy to wander around rooms occupied by a family whose love of the objects created this semi-secret place – objects which I too once loved. The house continues to be lived in and maintained by them, unaltered, the wood of floors and beams and furniture faded, a little dry.

  The Woolf retreat was not here, it was in Sussex, near the home of Virginia’s sister Vanessa, wildly decorated for her by Omega Workshops. My mistaken naming of these houses annoys me.

  Drove on to Thompson Park, the National Trust property at which Herbert Sayer, youngest son of neighbour Constance, is the Head Gardener. He lives in part of the converted coach house, with a lovely internal garden of his own, in which I heard his children playing.

  All the postcards at Thompson were in the new NT style, too big for me.

  The two Rodmarton cards which I bought were perfect. Back home, I picked out from the big black and gold bookcase in my bedroom Virginia Woolf’s diaries: she took a lease on Monks House at Rodmell in September 1919 – Charleston, of course, is the name of Vanessa Bell’s nearby home, the Bloomsbury set’s rural signature-piece.

  Good to know what they’re called.

  I gave the heart-fragment to Beth, a gatherer of the remnants of earlier lives, to reuse in her work.

  11 June

  A swarm of someone else’s bees has moved in to Beth’s hive. On the threshold lie dozens of dead drones, cleared out by the new residents. After supper, strolling down my freshly mown paths, I put my ear to the side of the hive and hear a peculiar whirring.

  Earlier, at breakfast, saw in the morning sun that spiders have woven webs across the outside of every pane of glass in the window by my kitchen table. The webs are so delicate they can be seen only when the sun shines at an angle.

  I miss my artist-friends in London, wish I was again involved with their street-events, partying, their creating of stalls of amazement at the Fête Worse Than Death.

  12 June

  I need more bookshelves, don’t have the space to set in place books newly bought. Keep putting this off, unable to decide where the shelves could best be built. Will have to rearrange post-war fiction, all of which no longer fits in the bedroom bookcase. I need to feel that every book I possess is rightly placed.

  On the lane today a bluey-green egg, broken, the colour so delicate. A blackbird’s? Do crows as well as magpies raid the nests of smaller birds?

  13 June

  Seen several more of the glowing-centred insects – they have yellow and black striped legs and their bodies end in a dark bullet-shaped tip.

  Find myself returning in mind to the Rodmarton visit, picturing the pleached apple trees in the walled garden, as firm as girders. High on the walls of the dining room are hung lustre plates painted in blue on cream with views of the building. Lovely things. Elsewhere, wedding photos, a collage of cut-out helmeted heads of members of the local hunt, and framed snapshots of favourite dogs: a host of family mementos. The house is their life, I can feel it. The wife, in a ragged straw hat, was seated at a table in the sun outside the front door, selling tickets and postcards – the same woman appears in the photos as a young bride forty years ago.

  In the unaltered coach house country teas, homemade cakes, elderflower cordials, scones and clotted cream are served at metal garden tables, on a miscellaneous mix of china services.

  I don’t envy their life at Rodmarton, not at all, happy though I am that the place exists.

  Jealousy I rarely feel.

  Hard at times though I find it being myself, there’s nobody else I’d rather be.

  15 June

  While washed sheets dry in the sun I decide to turn my mattress, for the first time since the bed was carpented for me two years ago, of figured ash with ebony pegs, in the ‘muscular gothic’ style which Pugin’s genius spawned.

  The cats, I see, now that the days are warm like to lie in the long grass. They flatten patches of my butterfly meadow. It doesn’t matter, the grasses will right themselves after the next rain, and the cats look luxuriantly at ease, pleased with their lot.

  Alex is staying the weekend. We walked across the fields to Cothelstone, and I saw in the churchyard that a new tombstone marks the grave which Ollie Sayer shares with his father, of grey granite, chip-carved with the image of an overhanging oak, and inscribed:

  Happy memories of our Dad

  The death of him was very sad

  In our hearts he will remain

  Till the day we meet again.

  The flowers in three vases by the headstone are fresh. Primroses, no longer in bloom, grow at the buried feet of the two men. Alex and I walked on up through Cothelstone Wood and down an ancient drover’s track to Cushuish, from there across the bountiful fields of Bewick Farm to lunch on Sunday roast at Podshavers.

  After lunch, we returned through the great meadow by the lake and passed close to a lamb sleep
ing in the sunshine.

  Not asleep, we discovered, but dead, its stomach bloated, lips drawn back from its mouth, in and out of which flew huge black flies.

  16 June

  At this time last year I don’t remember my wilderness being overwhelmed by trails of robin-run-the-hedge. It’s everywhere, climbing up and pulling groundwards the tallest cow parsleys, sticking to my jeans as I pass. Galium aparine is its official name, also known as: cleavers, goosegrass, kisses, sticky willy and claggie meggie’s. Seems to feed off the air itself, rootless, rampant – I haul in, as a fisherman draws from the sea his nets, armfuls of the stuff; impossible to control, suffocatingly dense, a menace. In a week or two the goosegrass will be a mass of small white flowers, seed spreading. Must learn not to fret at these seasonal bursts of nature.

  It’s odd, unknown to me until after I’d moved to West Somerset, that the Warrs had lived in retirement at Cushuish. Tim Warr joined the staff at Harrow School in the same year as my father, 1948, for both of them their first proper jobs on being disbanded from the army. His support for me as a child though seldom direct was never in doubt. On recent holidays in the Lake District I’ve regularly hiked past a previous house of the Warrs, once visited as a boy, at the top of a remote vale in Borrowdale, without electricity, accessible only by rope bridge across a stream. The clothes he wore, the smell of him, the texture of his face, his welcoming voice … I hear and see him still, can touch my own astonishment at his holiday home. It must have felt wonderful to be one of the boys at school invited up by Tim and Phyllis, his wife, on adventure holidays.

  The Warrs’ two sons and I were sent to Harrow, at minimal fees to the children of teachers at the school. Few of us subsidized boys came to terms with Harrow’s ethos of privilege, some of us disturbed for years afterwards by the connection.

  17 June

  In the lane, as I wheelbarrowed up from the abandoned coach house more loads of manure, I saw a fledgling crow, its mother flapping about nearby. As I approached the mother flew away over the hedge, whilst the fledgling hopped into the verge to hide at the heart of a fern. The same happened a second time. By my third approach the mother had disappeared from sight and the fledgling merely stepped aside to let me pass, scrawny blue-black feathers in disarray.

  By dusk it may have learnt the trick of flight and saved itself from the foxes.

  18 June

  These days have witnessed the revival of my plan to make an orchard of the paddock below the farm stables. Beth and I are studying lists of West Country apples – although there’s plenty of time to decide what to order for the December planting. Intend to include the biggest type of old English pear tree in a corner of the butterfly meadow, in front of the byre, in my line of sight here through the open half-glazed door of my study and down out of the window on the landing at the turn of the stairs. A tree-in-its-own-right, which happens also to be a bearer of blossom and of fruit, will stand as visual herald to the orchard.

  Returning to my desk I register on the upper shelf of my steep-roofed corner cabinet, for the first time in … I don’t know how long, at least a year, I guess … the presence of a terracotta jug decorated with turquoise, ochre and black enamel stylized flowerheads, an object I’ve always loved owning.

  19 June

  Today I bicycled past a small rough-earth field in which camomile and poppies thrive. Last year there were enough yellow and white heads of camomile growing here at Terhill for Beth to brew home-grown herbal tea: a languorous summer-holiday smell when I passed her kitchen. This year there’s almost none. Much of the ground must be too rich now for camomile, decades of leaf mould and garden compost a natural breeding ground instead for nettles, cleavers, bindweed.

  Butterflies like nettles, bees bindweed.

  Oh, yes: the bees have a queen.

  My fridge has been repaired, painlessly, not a difficult job, done by a man-with-a-van from Wellington. The Trafalgar Cinema, a single screen family-run 1930s survivor, is in Wellington. So is the best greengrocer in the district, an excellent fishmonger and a decent delicatessen.

  20 June

  In the lane I met an old man on a bashed-about quad bike, leading his flock of newly shorn sheep, at their rear alone a small black and white mongrel, beautifully respondent to the shepherd’s requests.

  Partnership.

  21 June

  Midsummer’s day, lucid, hot. Near the close of a morning’s steady work clearing cleavers, as I passed near the large sycamore to which one end of the hammock is attached, it occurred to me how much better things would look if I cut off the four lowest branches that swoop almost to the ground under the weight of the tree’s big sticky leaves. Didn’t hesitate, straightway fetched the bowsaw and a ladder.

  Can’t imagine how I’ve failed in three years at Terhill to effect this simple improvement, the sight lines in my wilderness-of-a-wood transformed.

  Awareness.

  Confidence.

  23 June

  Today Beth and I planted two fig saplings against the south-facing wall at the top side of the parking space, one nursery-bought, the other a sucker separated from the enormous old tree in Cothelstone’s walled garden. Needed a pickaxe to dig holes deep enough to secure the plants in the rocky ground, a terrain they relish.

  24 June

  Hops begin to trail the twisted laurel arms of Beth’s arbour, varnished seat-slats shaped on the curve, log-feet inset below the crazy-paved floor, like no other I’ve ever seen, strange and beautiful.

  26 June

  I’ve given up my conservation work with SWS – I’m cack-handed and clumsy, able at last to accept that it’s not for me.

  It saved me, though. Saw me through. Hauled me to my feet.

  I’ve switched instead to sorting out Rich’s accounts, and am happier for it. Driving back from Over Stowey on completion of the current batch of paperwork, beyond Bishpool Farm, close to the corner of last month’s collision, a squat game bird ran ahead of my car, neck and head swaying from side to side with the earthbound effort, until it took flight, tail-feathers spread, bright brown, guiding the elegant airborne course of its escape. Would love to pick up a fallen feather from that tail.

  A partridge?

  Bit by bit I’m becoming not too awful a cook. This evening: black cabbage from the garden, and other local things, nothing special, except for the fact that, not long ago, I was convinced I could never ever enjoy making a meal for myself. On my own, without Beth.

  27 June

  A morning walk in the rain, up the hill and across into Bagborough Wood. Beneath the trees, rain beating on the leaves, my footfalls on the wet earth made no sound and I twice found myself looking through breaks in the brush at deer, as near as the window here at the turn of the stairs, several seconds passing before they became aware of my presence and leapt away.

  I am differently frightened. Frightened of anger, of bitterness. Mustn’t run, mustn’t hide.

  Near the big farm at Schopnoller, I gathered cherries from the low-hanging branches of a handsome tree, and on my return scattered them on my kitchen table. The cherries range in colour from dark red to yellow.

  A striped snail has climbed to the top of my front door, relatively safe there from being eaten by birds. Wonder what it finds to eat.

  28 June

  Not honest words these days.

  Paper pasted over the cracks.

  29 June

  Cleaned the house. Nobody is coming to stay, I did it for myself. Most of the hoovered-up spiders were already dead. Took down to dust the terracotta jug and was surprised to find it unmarked, expecting to see on its base an imprint from the Watcombe Pottery, Torquay. ‘Knowledge is Power’ was painted in the 1870s by the designer Dr Christopher Dresser across the lintel of his study door. I like to believe he designed this jug of mine, as Dresser-documented examples of the same type are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  The sheen on the cherries has dimmed. I’ll tip them into my compost bin.

  30
June

  The old rose-arch which I saved on my first days here is a mass of loose white flowers, its boldest stems climbing into the branches of two adjacent trees, a laburnum no longer in yellow flower and a buddleia yet to bloom.

  2 July

  I’m troubled by the preciousness of these notes, last month’s just now re-read.

  Tight. Contrived. Fragility concealed.

  And anger. And violence. As if it was somebody else who not long ago threw into the back of his car a bale of dry straw and gallon can of petrol, to burn himself alive.