Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  3 January

  Friends matter. Good that such things do again affect me.

  I really might be getting better.

  Yes, I must be, or the coming trip to see Shenagh in New Zealand would have remained an unachievable dream

  Roasted a chicken, in fresh-picked rosemary, garlic, olive oil, lemon and onion, for Beth and I together to share, the only meat she these days eats. We spent from six till eleven together and despite the other evening I feel that we’ll both be alright.

  4 January

  A card today from my dealer-friend in Cirencester, to say that the Minton-made garden seat can be mine, if I still want it.

  I do!

  I have another, the one possession I’ve always kept with me, taking it when I left home and later moved into Vera’s house in Wapping and, twenty years later, to Janet’s cottage over the hill at Aisholt. Bought for twenty-five pounds in 1972, newly married, it cost more than we could then afford, convinced that it would prove to be designed by A.W.N. Pugin, decorator of the Palace of Westminster. Only five other examples have since been seen on the market, and not until the Neo-Gothic exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1994 did proof emerge of Pugin’s authorship, recorded in a drawing of the 1840s found in the Minton archives. Today I’ve become owner of a dark-blue ground pottery garden seat or stool, small side table it might today be called, although originally used as a place on which to sit in Victorian hot-houses – it matches mine of turquoise ground, both of them transfer-printed with identical buff, green, rust and white gothic scrolls, top and bottom shaped a bit like an elephant’s foot. Will retrieve it on my return to England from New Zealand.

  I love it!

  5 January

  When I gave Jim’s bell a warning ring at 9.59 this morning and pushed to enter, I found the door locked, for the first time ever, on the last of my visits to him before flying tomorrow to Wellington for the next two months. He was there. He’d made a mistake and wasn’t expecting me.

  His mistake didn’t worry me. Maybe I’ll be OK?

  6 January

  I never again want to experience, with anybody, anywhere, anything near what happened yesterday evening between Beth and me, on my last night in this country till March.

  Must find the strength in the future to steer clear of such relationships, doomed to repeated damage, of self and other.

  Nobody’s fault. We must both let go.

  7 January

  Somewhere in the sky between Los Angeles and Auckland, on the penultimate leg of my flight from Heathrow, aware, in feeling that, although the nothingness of despair seems to have passed, I still do not understand what happened.

  Today’s date, 7 January, does not in fact for me exist, as we crossed the dateline before midnight. In The Hague on 7 January, original Beth and I were married.

  8 January

  I’m above the clouds, in the sun, on a domestic flight from Auckland to Wellington, to my sister Shenagh.

  At Auckland Airport I panicked. While waiting at the carousel for my haversack to be delivered, a sniffer dog – a beagle, brown, black and white – located an illegal apple in my canvas shoulder bag. The detectives black-marked my entry visa, leading a customs officer to remove from my pack the climbing boots, accused of retention on the soles of a particle of cow dung. He fined me 200 NZ dollars for falsification of my immigration form. The delay meant that I missed the connecting flight.

  I dashed about in a panic. Not as anxiously as I might, not long ago, have done. Bad enough, though.

  I’m calmer now, seated on the next plane. I’ll be safe.

  Like a child, I was suddenly frightened for no real reason.

  10 January

  Tins of cat food, the fork stuck in, have been left on the kitchen sideboard and my sister sits at the nearby table reading a government paper, while half-listening to a Leonard Cohen tape – a weekend picture of her home in New Zealand. The morning sun rises behind the steep garden, rays glancing through evergreen leaves, branches swinging in the wind.

  Why criticize?

  I don’t.

  This is how it is, here. People come and go: friends of Shenagh’s and various family members, including an ex-husband, his books, saucepans, work-bench tools and homemade side tables only recently removed from this house on the side of a hill.

  I’m surprised, interested.

  Need to have near to hold things of my own, to-me-necessities like pencil sharpener and rubber, left behind by mistake in my desk drawer in Somerset. Will buy on Monday replacements.

  Loo paper. I need to be sure there are limitless spare rolls of white loo paper in the house.

  11 January

  Sam, my middle nephew, is at home on holiday from his job in Auckland. I’m happy in his presence, last experienced at Lower Terhill three and a half years ago, when he was close to the height of his distress, fresh from three terrible days falsely confined by his adventure-school employers to a mental hospital in Cumbria. I failed at the time to understand the extent of Sam’s vulnerability, and, without adequate support from me, he was unable to survive alone, journeyed home to his family in New Zealand.

  I’m out on the slatted deck, which John, the father of Shenagh’s four children, dug into the hillside at the back of the house. It’s mid-summer, and I’m reading a collection of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, reflections on the early years of her life in Wellington, fourth daughter of a patriarchal father, a prosperous businessman.

  12 January

  A household different from my own: communal, and designed so to be.

  Fran, the youngest child, is fifteen, already independent – although they all remain committed to being available to each other for the rest of their lives. An assumption none of them question.

  Intently aware of where we come from, I’m not surprised at Shenagh’s pleasure in the loving intimacy she has created: it is what she has always most wanted in parenthood.

  Whereas I remain solitary and unchanged, doing many of the same things here that I do at Lower Terhill: clearing overgrown trees from the land; walking into town to visit galleries, churches, Mansfield’s birthplace; irregularly cooking and reading.

  Into the ravine up above the rear of the property, a neighbour’s cesspit leaks and liquid sewage oozes in a muddy runnel across Shenagh’s rough grass.

  13 January

  I see again an image dismissed by me as worthless during the times of trouble.

  Postcard Piece, I’ve named it. My stored cards assembled on the white walls of a gallery, composed to flow out and up into visual forms that tell a sort-of story. See a printed plan numbered according to picture-type, the back descriptions also listed. On one, possibly two walls of the gallery hang three other of my works already made, framed and glazed: the thirteen-by-thirteen Leavers panel, of my and Father’s mementoes from our time at Harrow School, his as a schoolmaster my own as a boy, the card-mounted leaving portraits of one hundred and sixty-nine eighteen year olds, now business barons, generals, Kings, judges, and forgotten unknowns. And the four photographs of my prep-school teams at Orley Farm, portraits of formal young boys in each of which I’m captain, framed by posed cigarette card shots of bathing belles and film stars of the 1950s. Also, my personal homage to Gilbert and George’s mail-art pieces of the 1970s, in which coloured postcard images from the Tate of the artists in victory pose surround cards of Prime Ministers Wilson, Heath and Thorpe at the Cenotaph on Poppy Day, at their centre a cartoonist’s view of the iron lady, Margaret Thatcher. Dream of seeing this exhibition happen.

  Yesterday at Old St Pauls, the cathedral built of wood by Frank Thatcher in 1864, I noticed on a pillar a brass plaque presented in 1905 by the Wellington Submarine Mining Volunteers, to commemorate the lives of four soldiers, a sapper and three non-commissioned officers, who died at their work in the harbour.

  On the ferry from Wellington to Picton, on South Island. The landscape is so quickly primitive, the cliffs and hills stark, uninhabited,
less than thirty miles from the country’s seat of government – until we pass an established farm, the house protected behind a copse of tall cypress trees, its sheep pastures spreading across two plateaus and up the bush-fired sides of several mountains, steps leading down the cliff to a jetty on the beach.

  Birds fly at speed, their wing tips almost touching the water as they outpace the ship, alighting briefly on the waves to catch fish. Smallish blackish birds, which the book identifies as flesh-footed shearwater, down south in summer to lay a single white egg in a burrow dug into soft soil in the cliffs, where it is incubated by both sexes.

  It’s different once we steam from the straits into Tory Sound, where each bay has been colonised by two or three people, to build sophisticated bachs, their holiday retreats. Tory was the name of one of the sail-ships carrying emigrants from England to virgin land; it arrived at Port Nicholson, as Wellington was then called, on 20 September 1839, with the young artist Charles Heaphy on board, the man who drew and wrote most about this settler land.

  14 January

  A night at friends of my sister’s. In the presence of strangers I sweat and stutter, my sense of safety still fragile.

  Find my way after waking, before the others are up, to a deserted beach, the tide out and grainy sand golden, the smooth sea insisting I swim. Strip down and wade in, naked. No towel, no trunks, nobody here, except at the far end some early water-skiers, the water so clean that the rocks are encrusted with oysters and mussels.

  Content.

  Katherine Mansfield writes about herself, about her most difficult feelings. All the men in her stories, most of them, are if not absent then disappointing – and disappointed: they in themselves and she in them. The edition I’m reading of The Garden Party & Other Stories is introduced and annotated by Lorna Sage, who lived for several months each year in part of the converted stables in the ex-convent of San Francesco di Paolo, just outside the city walls of Florence, on the main floor of which John and Chiarella Winter made for a decade their home, where I loved staying. Sage is dead now, awarded posthumous praise and a prize for her mother-bloody autobiography. She describes here a female character in one of the Mansfield stories: ‘The girl’s namelessness is interesting and suggestive, emphasizing her archetypal quality, and the ready-made role the world has handed her.’

  15 January

  Near the Rest House in which we’re staying for three nights the bay is tidal and, on the long mudflats across which I walk for my early morning swim, birds with black backs and long red beaks feed. They are called, I know, oyster catchers, and are digging for lugs in the sand. Four shy brown birds rise as I arrive, and fly fast and low to the safety of the headland reeds. They may be godwits, which I see from a chart on the wall are a speciality here. Surprised how few butterflies flourish, many fewer in number and variety than at home in Somerset.

  17 January

  Heard, faintly, a skylark above the marshes at the outset of our three-day walk along the coast of Able Tasman Peninsula.

  A Dutch explorer, Able Janszoon Tasman was in 1642 the first European known to have reached New Zealand; he was cooked and eaten by Maoris on this shore when he tried alone to land.

  18 January

  Slept last night on the beach for the first time in my life, the sole person there, looking out at the moon over the sea and the lights of boats at anchor. From the sleeping bag it was a few paces to the high-tide sea for my morning swim. There are eleven family friends with us on our walk, sixteen of us in total. One of them is a lovely girl of nineteen, a poet and film-maker, wearing a floppy disc converted into a hairslide, thoughtful, an undergraduate at Victoria University in Wellington.

  There’s a small bird that lives in the bush, brown, unremarkable – until it on occasion opens its tail in a wide fan, two black feathers at the centre the rest white. Fantail (Rhipidura fuliginosa) it is called, the female building its elaborate nest in only three days, composed of fine grasses, lichen, moss and small pieces of bark which she binds with cobweb, and invariably leaves with a ragtail wisp hanging below.

  19 January

  Sam has departed by water-taxi, bus and then aeroplane to his job as a clerk of the High Court in Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand. He is tall and quiet, a cook and movie-goer, twenty-five last September. He finds it difficult not to allocate to himself emotional responsibility for his father’s sorrow at separation from the family.

  20 January

  We are spending a day and a night at a bach in Awaroa, just us and one of the other families on the tramp. I was allotted a single tent in the garden, four others the larger tent, supplied by the household. It was a stormy night of rain, wind and thunder, and the big tent blew down in the early hours of the morning – although I didn’t hear a thing, slept through the exodus from tent to the crowded floor of the bach. It’s a bright morning now and I’m taking these notes seated on the prow of a metal rowboat. The sun is beginning to heat the washed air – should have brought my hat, and my heart pills.

  Yesterday in the late afternoon I walked at low tide across these fifty yards of sand which is now water, and swam off the golden beach, in the ocean beyond the scrubby spit thick with the nests of oyster catchers. This morning an elegantly ageing woman in a scarlet bathing costume, suntanned, waves at me from the deck of her bach. Martins skim low and close, catching sandflies. Move on, and come across the fresh paw marks of possums’ recent scuffles in the strip of fresh sand released by the tide. Gather shells on the beach, which I rinse and sort now at an outside table at the Lodge, drinking a cup of flat white and eating fresh croissant with plum jam. Wander back to my temporary home, delighting in my existence, my independence. Pass five active beehives at the edge of a grass-mown airstrip, sheltered by flowering manuka bushes, the bees gathering pollen from its crisp white blossom.

  The bay was settled by farmers in the 1870s, this small alluvial plain then virtually untouched, apart from sporadic occupation by Maoris in the summer fishing season. The white men came by boats and for sixty years brought everything they needed by sea: steam engines for the granite quarry, corrugated iron for the roofs of their shacks and canned alternatives to their regular diet of roast boar from the forest and boiled vegetables from the garden. They battled with rampant bindweed.

  Darcy Hatfield, the direct descendant from an original settler, won bronze medal for single skulls in the 1921 Olympics at Antwerp, in Belgium. He hand-built his boats from wood that he and his family cut and milled on Awaroa Creek.

  21 January

  Tiredness. Not in bed till after 2 a.m. this morning, delayed in the storm-force return crossing by ferry from Picton. Shenagh’s daughter and I stood out on the open deck, laughing at the salt lash of the spray.

  Spent much of today cleaning and hoovering in the house while Shenagh was at work, preparing for her new job in the Civil Service, as Chief Executive of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

  Fran, my niece, tries to maintain order in the duty-shared kitchen. She is organized, and today passed her provisional driving test, available in New Zealand at fifteen. It’s good to spend time with her.

  22 January

  Too often I hear my mother’s voice issue from my own mouth: harsh, unfair, bitter. Yesterday I heard my sister speak with this same voice, repeatedly demanding her daughter do something, a matter of little real concern, in truth immaterial. Like Mother, Shenagh failed to notice that her need was to be obeyed, thus to clear a space in her own head – it had nothing to do with her daughter.

  She’d be shocked, and upset, if I told her this.

  It may not be true. Maybe it’s my over-recognising something that in practice is not a problem for either Fran or her. My problem, must be.

  I’m the one who couldn’t bear to be alive.

  This family gets so much right, lives in such good basic health.

  In essence, Shenagh is completely different from our mother.

  They keep their front door unlocked, unless away for days, e
liminating the need for endless losing and cutting of keys. They have never been burgled.

  Shenagh showed to me the letter written by a one-time colleague, a management consultant, sent on instruction to a dozen specified friends after he was found dead at home from a single bullet to his brain, his disintegration from multiple sclerosis no longer tolerable. My sister was an appointed bearer of the coffin at his funeral, each moment of which was pre-ordered by the dead man. The letter is precise, his decision made and executed without telling in advance anybody, not even his wife of forty years, warning notes for whom he left on both front and back doors. His meticulous letter contains a single mistake: ‘besting’ replaces the intended ‘besetting’. He wanted, Shenagh confirms, always to be best – this was indeed his besetting sin.