The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  One of the cows ambles over, inquisitive, wraps her pink tongue around a holly cutting and starts chewing. Another joins her. They stare into the distance, across the quiet winter fields, as if they can see some secret I cannot.

  18 DECEMBER: 3pm. The trees fret in the coming Siberian blast.

  We no longer fear winter like people did, when their clothes were thin and ragged and they were obliged to be out in the woods, tending cattle as I am today. Shakespeare mentions it over and over. In King Lear, there is that haunting line of Edgar: ‘Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind.’

  People claim they enjoy winter, but what they really mean is they enjoy winter as a livener, a cobweb-blower-away, a quick flirt with the elements before resorting to their real love, central heating.

  For anyone working outdoors, like I am, winter hurts. The bale of hay on my shoulder scratches into my neck; the baler twine slices through my glove into my left hand. So does the wind, which comes seeking down the path, seeking me.

  I cannot shake out of my head the ‘Cold Song’ libretto Dryden wrote for Henry Purcell:

  See’st thou not how stiff and wondrous old,

  Far unfit to bear the bitter cold,

  I can scarcely move or draw my breath?

  Let me, let me freeze again to death.

  The four red poll cows are at the top of the wood, in the middle of the oaks, forlorn backs to the wind. I toss the hay bale into the rack and almost run back to the Land Rover, to throw myself on the mercy of the heater.

  19 DECEMBER: I decide to let all the pigs out of the paddock to have a rummage at the very south end of the wood, where they bulldozer away all morning, particularly under the sweet chestnut and beech, looking for old mast and new bluebells.

  ‘Mast’ in botany is derived from the early German maesten, meaning to fatten or feed. A mast year is a natural phenomenon in which certain trees, such as ash, chestnut, English oak and beech, produce a glut of seeds. Beech, for example, produce a mast year every five to ten years. No one knows what produces a mast year, though self-protection, through fecundity, would seem to be an obvious explanation.

  There is a surprise in the snout-ploughed earth. A rusted Victorian gin-trap. This wood could tell tales.

  Often oaks will keep their leaves until February, but not this year. From one ivy-clad ruin a wren, as small as a moth, peers at me. It is too feeble to tisk its default alarm.

  The ground is iron, and the previous night’s frost has frozen-in the usual toadstool smell of woodland. There is just the exhilarating purity of ice, a wipe-clean of the senses. But a rope of rank scent stretches across the path by the stile – the odour of fox.

  The winter wood echoes with sounds distinct to itself: the hand-clap of pigeon wings as they exit the skeletal trees, the paper-rustle of rabbits scuttling across dry sycamore leaves to hiding.

  Deep into the wood I startle a pheasant under briars. Or rather it startles me, racing headlong for take-off. Beak-shriek of pheasant; another sound loving a wood. The bird’s feathers, caught in the bramble’s barbs, flutter up.

  The grey squirrels have entered the mating season, so I blast the two dreys in the wood with the 12-bore, a smoking barrel apiece. The twiggy domes, sequestered unlawfully from a crow, are atomized.

  The squirrels are not at home.

  In our first year at Cockshutt the rampant squirrels ate every clutch of greater spotted woodpecker eggs, every clutch of blackcap eggs, the chicks of the willow warbler. Call me a nature boy but I rather like songbirds in an English wood.

  Lights Out

  I have come to the borders of sleep,

  The unfathomable deep

  Forest where all must lose

  Their way, however straight,

  Or winding, soon or late;

  They cannot choose.

  Many a road and track

  That, since the dawn’s first crack,

  Up to the forest brink,

  Deceived the travellers,

  Suddenly now blurs,

  And in they sink.

  Here love ends,

  Despair, ambition ends,

  All pleasure and all trouble,

  Although most sweet or bitter,

  Here ends in sleep that is sweeter

  Than tasks most noble.

  There is not any book

  Or face of dearest look

  That I would not turn from now

  To go into the unknown

  I must enter and leave alone,

  I know not how.

  The tall forest towers;

  Its cloudy foliage lowers

  Ahead, shelf above shelf;

  Its silence I hear and obey

  That I may lose my way

  And myself.

  Edward Thomas

  20 DECEMBER: Our pigs are Large Blacks, Welsh, Berkshire: native breeds, with some bristle on their backs to protect against the elements, hardy character, long noses for rummaging. In a wood they forage – saving me money – and improve their health. Pigs are what they eat.

  Alas, pigs are indiscriminate feeders, meaning they will happily plough up the two grassy glades I have made by clear felling. Neither are saplings safe from the pigs’ sharky mouths. Moving the pigs around the wood requires electric fences (three horizontal strands of polywire and the big ol’ tractor battery, producing a zillion watts to power the deterrent shock) and tree guards with a ring of barbed wire.

  Our native swine also have the instinct to get out and about, beyond manmade, arbitrary boundaries. And so the pigs escaped (again) this morning, requiring me to stand on the field gate at the entrance to the ride to prevent Tinkerbell, a 300kg Large Black, getting free and joining her raft of piglets in a neighbour’s field, where they spun around happily.

  All this makes me late feeding the four red cattle at the top end of the wood; it is about 5pm on this dark night.

  Over my head, a slight misplaced breeze. Old Brown is on his rounds.

  I wonder, can owls see in the dark? Almost. When it is bat-black like tonight the iris of an owl’s eye opens almost completely to allow in all the light there is. Owls have the best ‘stereoscopic’ vision of all the birds.

  With this light-sensitive optical equipment, Old Brown can navigate Cockshutt at night, although he is also dependent on my technique for traversing the wood in the dark: the map in my head.

  He screams at the night. For all of our street-lamp civilization, in a December wood at five o’clock, you can still hear the call of the wild.

  From a distant farmhouse chimney comes woodsmoke, which is the scent of the countryside in winter. Someone has lit a fire.

  21 DECEMBER: 7.38am. Sitting in the silly white plastic poolside chair. Owls still hooting; jackdaws start singing, though more like the warble you get trying to tune a radio than chansoning.

  In the afternoon the sun makes the trees into steel engravings; at night the ash grasps the moon.

  Few trees hold the moon as well as the ash.

  22 DECEMBER: The bleak trees, the lonely silence, the dead leaves underfoot. There are no flowers; it is really flowerlessness that gives December its distinction.

  23 DECEMBER: Stormy, wet, windy. The old trees moan, as if they were old people protesting against the indignity of movement.

  It always gets dark in a wood first.

  24 DECEMBER: It is a year of holly berry dearth. The Viking birds, the redwings and the fieldfares, have descended from the north and plundered all the other hollies for miles around. In just two or three days.

  The scarlet and the green of the holly is shockingly vivid on this midwinter afternoon. As Henry VIII wrote in song:

  A! the holyt grouth grrene

  With ive all alone,

  When flowerys can not be sene,

  And grene wode levys be gone.

  Grene growth the holy, so doth the ive:

  Thow wynter blastys blow never so bye,

  Grene growth the holy.

  Holly is apotropaic
, the symbol of Christ, and was for centuries the physical mnemonic to remind us that ‘Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ on Christmas day in the morn’ because its berries are red like His blood, its prickles (‘sharp as any thorn’) are akin to the Messiah’s crown at crucifixion, and its leaves evergreen, an arboreal metaphor for eternal life.

  Is the Nativity superstition? Perhaps. In my family we have always believed it. In late summer my family decked their house with hops, at yuletide with the holly and the ivy.

  As a son of the country, I do not care to be without holly at Christmas. As a boy my grandfather gathered holly for the Christmas decorations. On this Christmas Eve I am his reproduction.

  In a wood, time obeys different laws. It is always the past.

  25 DECEMBER: A log on the fire; an atavistic delight, which takes one way beyond childhood, Victorian coaching inns, Henry VIII’s Merrie England, to the beginning of human time.

  I myself sawed this log from a fallen arm of oak.

  The burning log warms body, soul, the night. And with the curtains drawn, we four are cave people, the walls flickering in firelight’s glow – the released sunlight of years gone by.

  Historically the yule log burned at Christmas was an oak log, and the remains of the log were kept as charms against fire and lightning, and as kindling to light the next year’s yule log. The poet Robert Herrick gives the particulars in his ‘Ceremonies for Christmasse’, 1638:

  Come, bring with a noise,

  My merrie merrie boyes,

  The Christmas Log to the firing;

  While my good Dame, she

  Bids ye all be free;

  And drink to your hearts desiring.

  With the last yeeres brand

  Light the new block, and

  For good successe in his spending,

  On your Psalteries play,

  That sweet luck may

  Come while the Log is a-tinding.

  The anthropologist James George Frazer suggests that this may be a relic of ancient oak-tree worship. The early Celts titled their priests after the oak. Druid derives from dru plus uid, meaning someone who possessed ‘knowledge of the oak’.

  Britain has two oaks; the common, pedunculate or English oak, Quercus robur, and the sessile oak, Quercus petraea. Sessile means sitting, and refers to the way the cups of the acorn sit directly on the twig and do not have a stalk of their own. The oaks in Cockshutt are Quercus robur, and have the sort of acorns on long stalks that gnomes use for tobacco pipes.

  The oak. To the British the oak was as the buffalo to the Sioux. The all-provider. In his Sylva (1664), John Evelyn, diarist and xylophile, listed some of the oak’s usages in traditional medicine:

  Young red oaken leaves decocted in wine make an excellent gargle for a sore mouth; and almost every part of this tree is soveraign against fluxes in general, and where astringents are proper. The dew that impearls the leaves in May, insolated, meteorizes and sends up a liquor, which is of admirable effect in ruptures … also stops a diarrhoea. And a water distill’d from the acorns is good against the pthisick, stitch in the side, and heals inward ulcers … and refrigerates inflammations, being applied with linnen dipp’d therein: nay, the acorns themselves eaten fasting, kill the worms, provoke urine, and (some affirm) break even the stone itself. The coals of oak beaten and mingled with honey cures the carbuncle; to say nothing of the viscus’s, polypods, and other excrescences, of which innumerable remedies are composed, noble antidotes, syrups, &c. Nay, ’tis reported, that the very shade of this tree is so wholesome, that the sleeping, or lying under it becomes a present remedy to paralyticks, and recovers those whom the mistaken malign influence of the walnut-tree has smitten.

  Oak gall, crushed and left in water with rusty iron, made a kind of ink. Tannic acid from oak bark was used for tanning leather, while coopers valued the oak for cask-making. Acorns fattened food for pigs. Oak leaves made wine. Oak flavoured whisky. Village matchmakers insisted on the efficacy of May dew gathered from oak leaves as a beauty treatment for young women.

  Of course, the main reason for the veneration of the oak tree was the timber, which was probably the strongest wood in Britain. The seventeenth-century poet Renatus Rapinus versed:

  When ships for bloody combat we prepare,

  Oak affords plank, and arms our men of war;

  Maintains our fires, makes ploughs to till the ground,

  For use no timber like the oak is found.

  It is estimated that it took two thousand trees to make one warship in Nelson’s navy.

  For centuries English churchgoers took advantage of the broad canopies of oaks to mark parish boundaries; these trees became known as gospel oaks, since Rogation processions paused beneath them while a passage was read aloud from the Gospels.

  Oaks define the landscape, and our history. It is the prevalence of Quercus robur in Britain, more so than in any other Western European country, that forms this pride in what may be seen as our national tree.

  At Boscobel in Shropshire stands the Royal Oak, where the would-be King Charles II hid from Cromwell’s men after the battle of Worcester in 1651. Robin Hood and his Merry Men are said to have feasted beneath the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest. Oak provided the cruck frames for the black-and-white Tudor cottages of national longing. Oaken ships defeated the Armada, bested the French at Trafalgar. Admiral Lord Collingwood, one of Nelson’s band of brothers, walked the hills and lanes of Northumberland with pocketfuls of acorns, planting them in hedgerows and patches of waste ground so that the Royal Navy would never lack oak.

  ‘Hearts of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men,’ we sang at school in the 1970s, the wood-panelled hall hung with Union flags on Remembrance Day. (Not ‘Union Jacks’; we were not at sea.)

  ‘Heart of Oak’ is the official march of the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom. The music of ‘Heart of Oak’ was composed by William Boyce, and the words were written by the eighteenth-century English actor David Garrick.

  The oak is also recorded in many British proverbs, such as:

  An oak is not felled in one stroke – signifying patience.

  Great oaks from little acorns grow – from little things grow great things.

  The willow will buy a horse before the oak will buy the saddle – referring to time, as oaks grow much more slowly than willow.

  The oak is recognized in folklore for weather-forecasting:

  Oak before ash,

  In for a splash.

  Ash before oak,

  In for a soak.

  (But surely ash never comes into leaf before oak?)

  Another bit of old verse, about safety during a thunderstorm, is:

  Beware of the oak, as it draws the stroke,

  And avoid the ash as it counts the flash.

  Best creep under the thorn, as it will keep you from harm.

  Early humans likely believed that the lightning hitting oaks and setting them afire was sent by sky gods. From this belief it was a short step to perceiving the oak as sacred, the fire-maker. Some stands of oak are believed to have been the sites of pagan temples.

  The Green Man, the primitive’s tree spirit often pictured with wise eyes peering from a face composed of oak leaves, was absorbed by Christianity, and can be seen in many old English churches. He is also known as Jack-o’-the-woods.

  As the naturalist Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald observed, in the past ‘the oak may be said to have touched the lives of Englishmen at every point from cradle to coffin’. Not now, thanks to Ikea fibre-board furniture, steel, and my plastic poolside chair.

  27 DECEMBER: The morning is frosty, and at home the redwings in the paddock glow in the dawn.

  When I go to the wood in the afternoon, the pond is bare steel, but in a while the reeds will erupt in their accustomed place. The primroses will bloom on the bank.

  I spend the afternoon fencing the top of the wood, four horizontal strands of barbed wire against posts, quick and cheap, until dusk. Pheasants cok-cok from wood to wood, a chain reacti
on. The cry of the cock pheasant is another declaration of ownership, the announcing of a fiefdom.

  On the way back down the path, I pass under the arm of the Tall Oak, on which is perched a roosting pheasant, who thins and crouches, and watches me warily, as well he might.

  As I leave the wood, the jackdaws start up, the original neighbours from hell.

  28 DECEMBER: At the pig paddock I leave the tractor engine running, because on an afternoon like this, when the wind is flailing wire, it is warmth and heartbeat.

  Pavlov had a whistle to summon his dogs. I have a half-brick to call our pigs to dinner. I rap the brick bit against a steel trough. Ding, ding tings out over the glassland.

  The pigs are off in the wood, rummaging. Pannage, the practice of releasing pigs in woodland, was anciently important. Indeed, according to the Herefordshire Domesday not much else mattered locally. ‘There was woodland there for 160 pigs, if it had borne mast,’ runs the entry for Pembridge. My mother’s family held the pannage rights in the Golden Valley, up the lane, till the 1600s, a matter of carefully preserved, and jealously guarded, record.

  Pannage also kept beech nuts and acorns away from cattle and horses, who find them poisonous.

  The ‘girls’ are safe enough out in the wood but, akin to an anxious father, I like to make sure they are back in their home field at night.

  There is no answer from the pigs. Damn. This time I bash the trough with the brick. Dong, dong bells out; the vandal sound echoes around the hard hills.

  From the recess of the wood, from the recess of time, there is a pig’s answering squeal.

  Down come the pigs, shadow shapes weaving in and out of the dulled columns of beech.

  The pigs follow the old path, pounded into the clay by generations of animals’ feet, by Brock, by Reynard, by Bambi. The path only seems to meander aimlessly. It took me a year of walking it to realize that in its avoidance of subtle hazards and inconveniences it was the fastest, surest way through the trees. Once, some American academics pitched a computer against cows in a competition as to which could find the quickest route over rough terrain. The cattle won every time. You see, the animals know best.