Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  23 March

  Art is for doing not merely for thinking about, philosophising around. The ivory tower is a myth.

  I remember Angela Carter argued in her collection of essays Nothing Sacred that you can’t call yourself a writer unless you somehow publish your words, as the point of all art is the wish to communicate, that it should be called something other than art if you write only for yourself to read. If you do not at least aim to publish you are not a writer, Carter said.

  I agree with her.

  Which means, I suppose, that these pages are ‘something else’.

  What?

  But I am a writer, of nine published books.

  Sent a note to my dealer-friend in Cirencester, asking him when it would be convenient to him for me to collect my Pugin garden seat. I’ve decided also to buy one of his bookcases for the study – I’m not sure which, certainly an architect-designed creation, something to match the bold oak bookcase on the other side of the door, made by Gillows for the Palace of Westminster, also the work of A.W.N. Pugin. Maybe I’ll wait to make the drive until after I collect on Thursday my new car, a VW Golf Estate, 1.8 cc, S registration – the only problem: I swore never to own a red motorcar.

  Beth hurts, is in pain. How long can she sustain the strain?

  I found it possible today not to rush to defend myself against an attack which I know to be unfair, unmeant for me. This helped us both, as I refused to be drawn into the chaos of Beth’s damaged feelings, despite her tears and my compassion.

  From a dusty crevice in the trunk of one of the red-woods I watched an overwintered ladybird crawl into the spring light. How has it managed to survive?

  24 March

  Forgot to say: yesterday afternoon I planted six white rambling roses.

  25 March

  The roses are of three varieties, the first growing by the porch, two of another type and three of a third. They look content enough with their new surroundings.

  I have dug up from the wilderness another undamaged glass bottle, again with relief-cast lettering, this time for Yorkshire Relish, made by Goodall Backhouse & Co. The glass is a watery green colour, the top imperfectly formed. In it I’ve placed a single white tulip, self-generated in another part of the garden. Yorkshire Relish and Horse Embrocation are of the same design, with different lettering. Found intact a third small Eiffel Tower Lemonade bottle, made by Foster Clark Ltd of Maidstone.

  I have heard from Holland that Willem Boymans is ill, confined to bed with pain in his back. He very seldom allows hurt to defeat him. This must be serious. Years ago he raised his bed to waist height, to allow himself easily to get in and out. Able to look from this bed straight onto the sky, he has surrounded himself with chosen objects, in particular the radio, on which he listens to the World Service night after sleepless night. I want to see him once more before he dies, but don’t expect to be in Holland again until June. Trust he lasts. Find myself thinking of his meetings in Tokyo in the 1960s with Kenzo Takayanagi, a defence lawyer at the Tokyo Trial twenty years earlier, by then Chancellor of one of the largest Japanese universities. I placed both of them as themselves in the early part of my novel The Folded Lie.

  Takayanagi was a fine man.

  So is Willem.

  In the email note that I sent to him ten minutes ago, I at first wrote fiend instead of friend. He is difficult!

  26 March

  Prince Hassan of Jordan was interviewed on the radio this morning. He is an articulate defender of the need for incessant dialogue in his Middle East, the only way, he believes, of bringing bloodshed to an end. His mood is apocalyptic. If things continue on their present course he fears the terrorist bombing of nuclear material in Iran, Syria, India maybe, or Pakistan, and descent into the Third World War.

  I am thinking of Joshua. He was so incredibly alive. Maybe too much?

  Come and wave to your friends as

  the real becomes imagined!

  Come and be on TV!

  FN: No FuN without U and fun can

  seriously make you FN!

  Factual Nonsense: he chose a great name for his art gallery. Artists loved the FN bravado. In spring 1996 Gary Hume and Gavin Turk painted his coffin, carried by them and other artists from Charlotte Road to Christchurch Spitalfields for the burial service, accompanied by a jazz band and thousands of mourners, attended by Gilbert and George. I preferred to stay alone at home, two floors above his vacant premises.

  27 March

  The monarch (Danaus plexippus), I read, is a rare migrant visitor to the southernmost shores of Cornwall: ‘Such is the excitement that single sightings can be reported several times.’

  Saw the other day a black leather golf-bag and its trolley standing unattended on the grass of a picture-pristine village green, outside a cottage covered in early wisteria, with plastic-framed double-glazed windows. There was no person in sight.

  Drove quickly by.

  I hate golf. As a teenager, knowing no better then, I was very good at it, with a handicap of seven. By my early twenties I refused to play the game, with my parents or anybody else.

  Worked it out: to stay steady I need to feel safe and, at the same moment, free.

  Not easy.

  Only possible, if at all, by living alone, and celibate.

  For me, that is. Know nothing for anybody else.

  28 March

  The mown grass verges to my path beside the butterfly meadow look as particular as I hoped they might.

  Two years it would take, I was told, for the nerves to regrow from the spinal column back down through the shoulder to my damaged right hand. There is feeling still only in half of my third and the whole of my little finger. The others, and my thumb, suffer burns and cuts without registering pain. And the muscles of my thumb have perished. There are no signs of sensitivity to touch in these fingers and I struggle to pick up dropped pencils, frequently mishit the typewriter keys. Twenty-one months since that self-destructive day. The feeling has gone forever, I fear.

  I’ll manage, I’ll find a way. It could have been irrevocably worse.

  29 March

  Hill-walk again to visit Janet, to have lunch with her and the mutual friend who originally introduced us two.

  On that day the friend had first driven me over to this side of the Quantocks, stopping at her favourite spot, where she was appalled to see that the statue on top of a sandstone grotto had fallen to the ground.

  This favourite place of hers I later recognized as the head of the park here at Cothelstone, where the statue has been restored by Hugh, my landlord. Nearby, when I passed this morning, I saw my first butterfly of the English season. Not sure what it was, as I was not close enough, its hesitant flight through the rays of the sun an uplifting sight.

  A memory: of spending the millennium night in Janet’s cottage at Aisholt with Alex, who was staying with me in escape from London. We cooked a meal, talked and read, drank a glass of wine together somewhere around midnight.

  When Janet visits me now, she often brings the field mushrooms she gathers while feeding her sheep; I took to her today a gift from the garden of a brown paper bag full of Beth’s purple sprouting broccoli. In November Janet is returning to New Zealand to stay for three weeks alone on her island, still deserted, now a national nature reserve.

  30 March

  Due in Cirencester at midday to collect my Pugin pottery garden seat.

  Back home now at my desk, looking up every other moment to enjoy a favourite pair of pine hall chairs, a place for which I couldn’t find until today buying in Cirencester an open bookcase. Its columnar supports to the shelves are painted in red and gold with stylised flower-heads and now stands to the right of the studio door, either side of which the chairs perfectly fit.

  The royal-blue-ground of the pottery seat looks terrific, in the room downstairs.

  On wandering through my friend’s stock at Cirencester, I put into my ‘to-buy’ pile an oval cardboard box decorated in sky-blue and gold, the top p
rinted:

  LINCRUSTA-WALTON TABLE MATS, A Dainty Novelty … a set of these mats is a valuable, though inexpensive present, and will give great satisfaction alike to the recipient and donor, for they will WEAR WELL! WASH WELL!! AND LAST FOR YEARS!!! Solid in Colour! Solid in Relief!! Solid in Value!!!

  He gave the box to me!

  31 March

  I’ve left high bids at the Christie’s South Kensington auction today on several pieces in a consignment of two hundred and ninety-one lots from the disbanded Poole Pottery Museum and Archive, begun in 1873 as a tile factory on the coast near Bournemouth. I hope so much that I buy two particular lots, the first a blue plaque, its white tube-line letters stating ‘Camden London Borough Council. In a house on this site lived MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1759-1797.’ I want the next lot too, comprising three plaques, one of them on an unusual rust-coloured ground, again with white lettering: ‘The House of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, foundation laid 28 March 1772, completed 24 April 1774. Robert & James Adam architects.’

  2 April

  This morning Rich and Phil planted for me a native hedge and, elsewhere, my three new trees: a medlar, a mulberry and an Indian bean tree. I transplanted ash and cherry saplings in a potential wedge-shape leading towards the hedge that now flanks the back lane to my landlord’s coach house. Work is due shortly to begin on conversion into Hugh’s family home of these beautiful buildings and their cobbled courtyard; the Jacobean manor across the fields will be redecorated and let. Last week Beth and I constructed posts on which to hang an Edwardian iron garden gate to the mown path passing through a gap in the planted hedge, the thick old posts flanked on one side by an evergreen prunus and on the other by holly.

  Thomas, Beth’s cat, died two nights ago, and is buried in the kennel run, beneath a big Quantock stone. I liked him, and am glad he seemed to like his life here.

  Beth is going to be fine. I mustn’t dramatize.

  3 April

  Yesterday and today a spate of internal placings, through the rediscovery in stored cardboard boxes of things I like and had forgotten I still owned. On the rosewood hanging cabinet, also bought the other day in Cirencester, I’ve positioned a selection of the oddities kept from art events with which I was involved on the streets of Shoreditch, erratic flights of imagination by youthful British artists before the world had heard of them: the Tracey Emin badge CLARITY = HARMONY; Gavin Turk’s original one-Bull and ten-Sheep notes; a pair of Beck’s beer bottles dot-painted by Damien Hirst; Contemporary Art in a Can, the Heinz-type small food tin with the image of a Gary Hume picture; Sarah Staton’s papier-mâché Camel cigarette packet; Abigail Lane’s the Complete Arthole’s bottled Eye-for-an-Eye; a silver-foil envelope of Survival Seeds; and several more artists’ play-things.

  Names.

  Everything I own is named.

  Unpack from tissue paper Joshua Compston’s blown hen’s egg, painted by his schoolmate Zebedee Helm, designer of the Factual Nonsense logo. Place it too on the small rosewood cabinet, now hanging in my sitting room.

  The cabinet itself doesn’t have the name of designer or maker. Definitely ‘by’ someone. By someone good. The square turquoise tiles on the doors were designed and made by William de Morgan, in his iznik style of the early 1870s. This at least I know.

  At the back of a deep shelf in the storage cupboard I find some earlier artwork too: Peter Blake’s drawing of the Great Theatre Company’s production of Frankenstein; and Gilbert and George’s litre of Chinese wine, personally-labelled with images of the pair. I select places of display for all of these. Also for the kelim saddle bag from the Sinai desert, with a cowry shell border, given to me twenty-five years ago on my first stay in Jerusalem, in the house close to the Damascus Gate.

  Changes have been made in every room during these two last days. My house is alive again, is mine. I have arrived back home. It will now be possible, if I wish, to leave.

  We’ll see, we’ll see.

  4 April

  Not finished. Far from done with life.

  I think, though, I’ll stop right here this writing to myself.

  On a good, numerically balanced date.

  5 April

  Caught!

  An addiction?

  Not sure I really want to stop.

  In town by bike this morning I bought from Kings Cycles a black rubber patch and tube of vulcanized glue to repair a cut in the side of my gumboots. They are my oldest boots, the pair I like best, French-made, dark green in colour, slim at the calf. I’m pleased to have saved them from the dustbin.

  6 April

  Heard from my sister that the sewage leak across her upper lawn has been fixed. This weekend one of her sons dug a T-shaped ditch to follow the natural lay of the land, placed pierced drainpipes at the base and filled in the trench with pebbles, topped by turf. Problem solved.

  7 April

  There’s always more to say.

  8 April

  The Wollstonecraft plaque was bought at three times my bid, a dealer-friend told me, by Yuri Geller, the bender of spoons. The Royal Society roundel I have installed on an outside wall of my house, below the window to the stairs, to the right of my front porch.

  Yesterday, in London, for lunch at the Museum of Garden History I sat beneath the branches of a medlar tree, Mespius Germanica the notice said, its presence in England first recorded in the year 995.

  Planted mine in West Somerset in 2004.

  Need a quince too. Must also be an ancient tree, I reckon, both names with the ring of age.

  Acknowledgements

  The author is grateful to Helen Knight, Frances Richardson and Corinne Schneider for use of photographs taken at Lower Terhill.

  About the Author

  Jeremy Cooper has recently given to the British Museum an important collection of artists’ postcards; his book on the subject, The World Exists to be Put on a Postcard, is published by Thames & Hudson. He appeared in the first twenty-four episodes of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, was co-presenter in the early 1980s of Radio 4’s The Week’s Antiques, and is the author of four novels and a number of works of non-fiction on art and design.

  Copyright

  Fitzcarraldo Editions

  8-12 Creekside

  London, SE8 3DX

  Great Britain

  Copyright © Jeremy Cooper, 2019

  Images © Jeremy Cooper, 2019

  Originally published in Great Britain

  by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2019

  The right of Jeremy Cooper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 978–1910695–89–0

  eISBN 978–1910695–90–6

  Design by Ray O’Meara

  Typeset in Fitzcarraldo

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Fitzcarraldo Editions.

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