Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  7 February

  I need, first thing, to walk out on my own into the hills. To place myself.

  Graeme’s five working dogs stand in line in their wire cages, ears pricked in silent expectation of being taken off along the miles of tracks seen from the house to thread high outcrops of black limestone rock. They know I’m not their master and don’t complain when I leave alone.

  Ten minutes on, in a rocky warren on the nearest hill-with-a-view, I disturb two feral tabby cats. Wanting as soon as possible to reach the heights, I ridge-walk up the centre of the McQuorcodales’ western territory, beyond the sprayers’ airstrip below me on the right, to the edge of a cliff that looks out onto land owned by a Swedish millionaire, heiress to the Alfa-Laval milking fortune. Her manager has built for himself a ranch on the sheltered bluff.

  Alfa-Laval, I later read, claimed in 1930 that three of every four of the world’s dairy farmers used their revolutionary machines to separate cream from milk. In Ireland, at old Erkindale, my grandmother’s farm, they were still milking by hand when it was sold at auction in the late 1980s.

  Seated on the top of a limestone pinnacle surveying hundreds of miles of cleared hills, I hear nearby a sharp bark, and turn to stare across the void at a goat on the next pinnacle. She is dark-brown, with slashes of white beside her eyes, and short pointed horns. Summoned by their mother, the mottled lambs jump off with her to join more wild goats in the shade of a distant ledge. Find in the rocky crevice of a gulley three strong shoots of the yellow flowers of ragwort, poisonous to cattle. Uproot the plant and wonder, when I discover nearby the carcass of a cow, if it was a victim of this hidden growth. The skeleton is intact, picked by carrion and bleached white by the sun, the black hide bodyless. I carry with me the skull, together with five unusual feathers found at different points on the trail.

  Pairs of black and white duck rise from the swamps, the female croaking as they circle above me, the male gurgling a supportive response.

  With the curve of my steps back down the track above the farm I think of Janet, at Aisholt, aware of the widow’s plight of walking home to solitude. It’s good to be returning to people, to other working lives, to an audience for my tales of the walk, four hours after I set out. This truly is sheep station country, still worked by itinerant gangs of shearers, of which Janet was one of the few young women shepherds in New Zealand in the 1950s.

  I pause in wonder at what is to New Zealanders a standard sight: the bright red forehead and beak of the pukeko, with its dark plumage and iridescent blue breast feathers. And other birds. With their absurd crimson combs and too-small wings, wild turkeys are as incongruous a country presence as our pheasants, imports hundreds of years ago from the forests of China. Wood pigeons here also have an oriental look, twice the size of those in England, with green and blue chests, and eyes like jewels, the fire-red pupils ringed as if in precious gems.

  The yellow and black striped caterpillar of the crimson and charcoal cinnabar moth feed on the leaves of ragwort, and nothing else, I read.

  8 February

  Janet would love it here, appreciative of the McQuorcodale ethos of hill-farming, their pressures and pleasures similar to hers, despite the difference in size of their properties. Maybe she worked the King Country years ago? It’s a landscape that Beth too would adore.

  Maori souls make return visits to the living in the form of moths and spiders.

  The concrete posts of the older sheep fences have been driven in silhouetted lines across the dividing ridges, hung with eight strands of stock-proof wire. These days, hill pastures are fertilized by biplane, and the soils analysed for their metallic content. Science subverts the natural cycle even here, in deep rural New Zealand.

  Negation doesn’t dissipate: inside, I continue to shriek ‘No!’

  I often do it: fold down, close up. Doesn’t much matter who I’m with. I can manage for a bit, and then run dry of human concern.

  Sitting in the back of the car on the long drive back to Wellington: ‘BEWARE! Men in Tights’ a notice on the highway warns of the approach to a ‘Medieval Market’ due at the weekend.

  Not funny, not to me. Horrifying, in fact.

  Alienating.

  People care for me, I know they do, and for each other. I wish I could be more loving, could feel positively about harmless attempts at communal fun.

  In the front seats of the car my sister and her daughter sing alternate songs to each other, and laugh, for miles.

  9 February

  It is the week of Shenagh’s promotion away from the State Services Commission to head the Ministry of Womens Affairs. Her boss is a Cabinet Minister and a woman; the Cabinet Minister’s boss is Prime Minister and a woman; the Prime Minister’s co-head of state, the Governor General, is a woman. Shenagh is the only one of this female chain not New Zealand born, eighteen years ago an immigrant.

  10 February

  Dinner with the poets Jenny and Greg at their house on the southern hills of Wellington. The evening was personal, special and happy, too present in my mind to spoil by writing about.

  Can say, though, that the room was full of the art of their friends, and of work by themselves too: a lithographed poem, a boat-like raku bowl, several oils of abstract waves, and coloured words painted on a cube. I picked things up, handled them as I would do in my own home.

  Walked back to my sister’s along empty roads which curl up and around the cliff-hung houses of Mount Victoria, then down towards the lights of city skyscrapers, of luxury tour liners in dock, the bay beyond. Down there, the main City streets are deserted. Then up another hill towards Shenagh’s house, tucked out of the way of the wind – exactly one and a quarter walking-hours door to door from Ha Taitai to Wadestown. It spat warm misty rain for the last couple of miles.

  In New Zealand, early February, of course, is summer.

  11 February

  I went this morning to Shenagh’s Maori welcome to the Ministry, a powhiri ki a, with traditional songs and ritual, all the whites managing to give speeches in the native language of this land. For a moment I saw Shenagh as a child, a look on her face of worried surprise, her wide forehead scarred where I pushed her down the flight of ten stone steps at the front door of our house overlooking the cricket fields. She was four, and I was six and a half, in my first term at day preparatory school on the other side of the hill.

  12 February

  Learn that Mother visited the McQuorcodale farm, taken by my sister to stay with her friends for a night and a day.

  Reminded of my mother, I recall harvest time at Erkindale when our Grandmother was alive – me aged maybe ten, walking beside the horse-drawn hay cutter and at the corners of the field whacking Rosie with a stick to encourage her to keep pace with Paddy in pulling the machine. Rosie was a long-legged female bay, Paddy a shorter male grey. The next day I stood on the wooden sled behind the primitive bailer which the horses drew, and piled the squared hay into stacks of six before pushing them off the back. I can see the neat rows in which my stacked bales stood on the stubble, the field sloping away from the barns towards the river. In summer Uncle Dave, my mother’s youngest brother, kept his cows down there by the water and the shade from the big willows, a rosette-winning herd of black Aberdeen Angus.

  I looked like Uncle Dave, I was told, and was pleased to hear. By the time summer holidays ended I spoke with an Irish lilt to my unbroken voice.

  Long after Granny’s death, three years after leaving my wife and following the closure of my antiques dealing premises, I journeyed to Erkindale, intending to work free on the farm for the summer. The place was dilapidated by then, the roof leaking and garden a jungle, Uncle Dave and his old helper Bill sleeping in rooms on the ground floor, down to which the rain had yet to penetrate.

  Understandably, he did not recognize me, smiling with pleasure when I explained myself, but saying, in a musical drawl: ‘Ah, sure, kind thought, but this is no place for the likes of you.’ There was no choice, no conversation. I got bac
k into my hired car and drove away beneath the overhanging trees of the drive, spent the night at a country inn in Rathdowney, the nearest town.

  While working on the bank in Shenagh’s Wadestown garden, releasing fruit trees from the press of undergrowth, I watched a large butterfly display its veined coppery wings. The colours looked bright, although it didn’t alight. I think the butterfly might be called common copper. They don’t exist in England.

  13 February

  Two of Mother’s elder brothers emigrated from Ireland to virgin land in Western Australia, in the vicinity of a then-little-known national landmark, Wave Rock. One of them, the fourth brother, had been a substitute father to her. She must have missed him. Their father, while he was alive, was a hard-driven man, the source, I imagine, of my mother’s distressingly harsh demands first on herself, and then on me. It has never been possible to be good enough for Mother.

  My grandfather died when my mother was eleven. During his childhood in the Slieve Bloom Mountains he never learnt to read or write, and worked too hard down in the valley to have the time or inclination to learn later.

  This morning wrote a postcard to Shenagh: the blue monogram of ‘S’ from an exhibition of New Zealand print-design at the National Library. I thanked her for being my sister, said a few other emotional things. I have pinned the card image-outwards to the family notice board, and there’s no reason for her to see and read my message. I like this, am happy with the thought of Shenagh or one of her children taking down the card months if not years later and receiving my dateless words.

  14 February

  An invitation has arrived to the Rosalie Gascoigne show which Greg has curated. The card – a strip of randomly printed plywood packing case – was designed by his teenage son; it’s terrific, in itself and in reference to the themes of the artist.

  The Director of the City Gallery in Wellington is, I notice, a woman.

  15 February

  Some questions that people ask are already answers, discussion censored in advance. I find this difficult and am crab-like and withdrawn in response. My nights are disturbed by dreams, whilst conflicting images punctuate my days. Do not mention this, and nobody I meet would guess that not long ago I couldn’t really speak at all. Not to anybody – except Beth.

  Last night I took the family to a David Bowie concert at Westpac, the giant stadium at the foot of Wadestown Hill, scene the weekend before of the rugby seven-a-side finals. Not the balmy summer’s night it was meant to be, Wellington instead at its windiest. Bowie was fantastic, an ageless rocker, he and his band performing at full throttle for two hours. The light and video synchronisation surprised me in its complexity, matched by beautiful use of four-camera projections onto a screen immediately above the stage. Bowie was soaked by the rain. ‘If you can stick it out, we can,’ he promised with a South London slide in his voice to the Kiwi audience of twenty thousand, half of them in the open-air.

  We late-called afterwards at a house in Brooklyn, another suburb with a view, to attend a party given by friends from the Golden Bay tramp. Their daughter, Amy, the young artist, had designed an invite dedicated to ‘Björk and Barney’, the Icelandic pop-pixie and American filmmaker, together parents of a baby. A short Matthew Barney art-movie played in a continuous loop on their television set. At the Pompidou Centre at Christmas I had bought a postcard of Barney dressed as a carpenter for the last-made of his series of five films, The Cremaster Cycle. Blood ran from his nose. He is a close friend of several artist-friends of mine in the East End, with a following here at the far side of the world. Uplifts me, somehow. Even though Barney’s posturing and pomposity irritates.

  It’s raining again this morning.

  While my mother was away on a bridge holiday last week one of her elder sisters died, wife of the man who managed the grain mill where we played as children. As Uncle Dave fell down dead checking stock in the fields of Erkindale a decade ago, only two of the ten siblings now remain alive, my mother one of them …

  16 February

  In three weeks’ time I’ll be home again in Somerset. For the last twelve mornings I’ve done exercises in my room before breakfast, pulling out the tense muscles of spine and thighs. I wonder if I might follow an emergent plan: regularly to spend three months of the year at the McQuorcodale hill station, writing things for myself in the mornings and working for them on the land in the afternoons.

  Not practicable, I suspect.

  I’d maybe do better returning to London for part of every week, to work again in the art world.

  Graeme McQuorcodale’s five trained dogs have learnt six different commands, whistled through his teeth, thirty distinct calls to each of which the individual dog separately responds. He has hound-crossed barking dogs as well as his closer-working collies.

  17 February

  It’s hard living with others. Rather than relax and let everyone get on with things, I sit there half-reading, endlessly anxious, disturbed by the absence of control.

  Looking forward to beginning again psychotherapy sessions with Jim. I need him. There’s no going back: that’s Jim’s ultimate argument. Find myself reflecting that, over the years, I’ve sent thousands and thousands of postcards: a way of keeping in touch with people. And yet, and yet … two years ago I lost contact, for a time with everybody, several times even with Beth. Thus we die. To live, each must reserve a space somewhere inside for the existence of others. Not sure I’m up to this. Room for not many, anyway. For very few. This worries me.

  18 February

  In mid-afternoon the rain stopped and by five the skies were again the clearest of blue. I took an exploratory walk up through the forest above town, eventually locating the Tinakori Ridge Trail leading me across to the other side, from where I followed winding roads past old houses and down precipitous pedestrian steps to the rear end of the Botanical Gardens. I got lost there too, faced with a steep hillside of ancient trees, a ravine at the bottom. With the help of a woman out walking her dog, found my way to the top stop of the cable car and from there down ninety-two steps to the head of Dixon Street. On this last part of the walk I passed through Victoria University, built piecemeal, like a flourishing hospital, and lower down stopped to inspect St John’s Presbyterian Church, designed by Thomas Turnbull in 1885, a mass of gothic arches and pinnacles in painted timber.

  Time for a quick bite before the first of two Fringe Festival performances of the night at BATS Theatre. I enjoyed again being in the blackened space of an experimental theatre, some of the packed audience seated on the stairs for the company’s inaugural piece: ‘Sharing an interest in asserting the autonomy of the stage, the group is dedicated to investigating the language of the uniquely theatrical in the text.’ Thought of Elizabeth and of the opening years of our marriage, during which she went to drama school in London - when she graduated and left on touring repertory, earning her actor’s green card, I joined her from Sotheby’s at the weekends. Before I fled our home she had played Viola at Regents Park, a performance I remember for her innocence and energy. Beth – Elizabeth – is a playwright now, with work commissioned by the Riverside Theatre.

  On the walk back I stopped at Regan Gentry’s Skip It, parked on the main road near the entrance to Wellington City Council’s offices. I’d met the young sculptor at the party on Friday, and the next morning we had together checked the weekend fate of his ten day installation, a 1980s sitting room assembled inside an orange Dimac skip, at night the lamps lit and the TV flickering. A telephone periodically rings on the table in a corner. As I stood to look, two passers-by peered over the sides into the rain-spattered space. ‘Not bad. Prefer it to your pad, as a matter of fact,’ one of them said. ‘Bigger too!’ the other agreed. In London in 1997, Gavin Turk exhibited an extra-large black skip at the Hayward Gallery in the show Material Culture. He called his piece Pimp, and it was bought for the Saatchi Collection.

  Further along my route back to Wadestown, on Lambton Quay, the city’s main shopping street, I touched wi
th my hand Jeff Thomson’s Shells, unsure whether the rippled surface was in the original wrought iron or cast in concrete, daubed by him in multiple shades of pastel paint and rising above the height of my head. A brass plaque records that this municipal commission was funded ‘with the aid of EEC Lighting’.

  19 February

  Motorbikers in the squalls on the mountain road across to John’s land near Masterton wear winter gear, black and white skeleton masks protecting their faces, mouths covered, leaning back into the upholstered seats of their Harley Davidsons.