The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  I am a traveller in a new land. Spring.

  Through the stand of Norwegian spruce … Yes, around every bend of a wood is the possibility of surprise. As I pass the Wishbone Oak, I glance right, and there on the parallel path under the hedge is the dog fox, with a rabbit in his trap-jaw. He is on his way home to the wife and demanding blue-eyed cubs.

  The fox looks at me, I look at him. We both have burdens; we give each other a knowing, matey eyes-raised-to-heaven sigh.

  For a full minute we carry on our perfect symmetry, jogging our parallel paths, separated by twenty yards of bramble, until the fox disappears down behind the hollies.

  By now I have reached the glade at the top of the wood, where a heifer is still mooing her big announcement to the world. This morning she gave birth to her first calf, a conker-shiny girl, now arched under her belly and suckling away. The calf looks happier than the cat that got the cream. She actually appears to be smiling.

  I certainly am. Spring flowers are blossoming, I am down to wearing one coat rather than two. And a calf has been born.

  21 MARCH: Morning, the leaves still countable, and the enormous silence threaded with song.

  There are rabbits running every which way. More ivy for the sheep. From a beech limb, I hack some ‘chips’ for smoking pork.

  22 MARCH: Another day of grateful warmth.

  The wood pigeon is surprisingly virile in flight for a dove, and easily confused with a sparrowhawk. In flight, the pigeon loses dumpiness.

  The pigeons are nesting in the larch. (Climb up later; peep at their china-white eggs, two as per usual. The white of the eggs is precisely the brilliant white of the wood pigeon’s necklace and wing bars.)

  About 6.30pm: the light drains away, the heat too. Cold on face and hands. The pheasants late to bed; the stop-ups. Blackbird vespers from a poolside ash. There is a crashing in the bramble; thudding, hitting – and in me, a primitive frisson. A rabbit bolts.

  I am here because of my work, checking sheep ‘folded’ (fenced) to clear brambles.

  Overwhelmed by multitudinous sensations. The leaves are coming; from the encompassing fields the child-cries of lambs on thin April grass.

  A treecreeper: up it hops, defying gravity.

  I lie in the bend of the Wishbone Oak and absorb the brown earth, the breeze in branches, the song of the birds.

  Turning my head towards the pond: the utter romance of moonlight on water seen through trees.

  23 MARCH: 6.20am. Greater spotted woodpecker drumming. Chaffinches playing kiss-chase, all the day long in the trees.

  Walking along the ride there is the tiniest mewing in a be-ivied sycamore. So I now know where the grey squirrels’ new drey is. And they have kittens.

  24 MARCH: Usually I only cry about dogs and horses. Even when I bade goodbye to my father, as the rollers took his coffin into the oven at Hereford Crematorium, I stood military straight in my covert coat, and merely inclined my head.

  Just after 7pm my wife comes into the kitchen to find me sobbing my heart out. I cannot believe that tomorrow the boy who went to Hereford Library aged twelve and packed his briefcase with BB books will be the guest of honour at the BB Society AGM.

  25 MARCH: The BB Society AGM at Sudborough, Northamptonshire. Drive past BB’s Round House, his last residence, into the village.

  In the village hall, meet Gordon Wright and Ray ‘Badger’ Walker – men who actually knew BB. I begin my talk. ‘I’ve won prizes for my books, I’ve been on the Sunday Times top ten bestseller chart, but to talk to you today is the greatest honour of my professional life.’

  And I mean it.

  Some days later, I receive a mysterious flat package in the post; it’s from Gordon Wright, the secretary of the BB Society. Inside the cardboard is the only print of BB’s painting ‘When Rufus Came to Stay’, featuring a fox in a snowy wood in low winter light.

  By the strangest coincidence the view through spruce in ‘When Rufus Came to Stay’ is exactly the same – the angle of the land, the point of penetration of the morning sun – as that in Cockshutt.

  Rufus is the fox in The Wild Lone, perhaps the greatest of all BB’s books. I gape at the painting for hours, trying to pinpoint what exactly in the scene is so mesmerizing. Is it the bluey exactness of the dawn snow? The ember-warmth of the pelt? Then I see it: the fox is on point, almost weightless, in just the manner of the alert Reynard.

  26 MARCH: Sycamore leaves out, golden saxifrage growing in the ditch. New fern fronds push up through the earth; they are known as ‘croziers’, ‘bishop’s crooks’, ‘fiddle heads’, although what the furled heads most closely resemble is a horse’s head when rearing.

  Blackthorn crystals crack open. Blackthorn is a flower of frost, a late taste of winter. There is no softness in it, unlike the bloom of hawthorn which is heavy with summer’s promise.

  A storm in the night; I stand amid the crashing trees, getting off on the fury. Nietzsche considered the urge to destroy a creative urge. The wind screams like a vixen on heat.

  27 MARCH: On the leaves of the bramble bushes there are lightning zigzags; the trail left by the caterpillar of a bramble leaf miner moth (Stigmella aurella). The moth lays its egg inside the leaf, where the larva hatches and slowly eats its way through a tunnel just below the leaf’s outer skin.

  The larva overwinters in its ‘mine’, and emerges in the spring, silver, sheeny, and no bigger than a midge.

  I lay my collection of mined leaves, with their individual white serpent trails, on an A4 piece of white paper; it should be an exhibition in a gallery.

  In the afternoon: cut back the crack willow around the pool; the fluffy flowers fall on the water. Locally, the flowers are known as ‘goslings’.

  Water. It has no motion of its own; it is the mechanic betrayer of other forces. The breeze gently drifts the goslings to the far shore.

  The jackdaws of a neighbouring wood fly up and mob a pair of red kites.

  Last noise of the day: the clockwork whirr of a cock pheasant trumpeting, flapping its wings.

  An unexpected item in the pigs’ water trough. A toad.

  I gaze hard into its primeval eyes. Toads are utterly inscrutable. There is no connection, as there is with a dog or a pig.

  The first alder leaf appears. The Norse regarded March as the ‘month of lengthening that wakes the alder’.

  28 MARCH: Bramble buds; perpendicular to the stem. I pick them; they are good to eat as a wayfarer’s snack. Useful too, I suggest, to the old Norse. March might have woken the alder, but it was also the time of enforced fasting, ‘Lenct’, as stores ran low. The Christian Church appropriated the word and the idea in ‘Lent’.

  The snakeskin buds of sycamore instantly catch the eye; when the buds unfurl, the leaves are languorous parasols, colonial umbrellas.

  The sycamore is native to central and eastern Europe and western Asia. It was probably introduced into Britain by 1500, in the Tudor period, and was first recorded in the wild in 1632 in Kent. One telling proof of its interloper status is the dearth of native, local names. To my father, the sycamore was always the ‘sick-of-more-work tree’, because of its habit of dropping its large mucilaginous leaves on the rockery which then needed to be cleared way.

  John Evelyn hated it equally:

  The sycomor, or wild fig-tree, (falsly so called) is … one of the maples, and is much more in reputation for its shade than it deserves; for the honey-dew leaves, which fall early (like those of the ash) turn to mucilage and noxious insects, and putrifie with the first moisture of the season; so as they contaminate and mar our walks; and are therefore by my consent, to be banish’d from all curious gardens and avenues.

  However, sycamore makes good firewood (easy to saw, split with an axe, producing a hot flame), thus was it planted and coppiced in Cockshutt.

  The johnny-come-lately tree has already achieved an ineradicable footnote in British history. Under a sycamore at Tolpuddle in Dorset, England, six agricultural labourers formed an early trades u
nion in 1834. They were found to have breached the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 and were transported to Australia. The subsequent public outcry led to the release and return of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

  The Tolpuddle tree is cared for by the National Trust, who pollarded the tree in 2002 and again in 2014.

  In Scotland, sycamores were a popular tree for hangings, because their lower branches rarely broke under the strain.

  At the entrance to the fox hole: brown chicken feathers from the poultry farm down the lane, which has wire walls six feet high. I have a sneaking regard for the sneak-thief that is Vulpes vulpes.

  The chicken has been expertly, economically plucked.

  Beyond the wood, in the fields, is the call-and-response of sheep, ewe to lamb and return. It is constant and rhythmic, in the way that waves gently lapping a harbour wall are constant and rhythmic.

  29 MARCH: Evening, 8.15pm. Lichen light.

  Robin sings with gusto, trying different refrains, experimenting. He is the philosophical songbird.

  Hedgehogs now out of hibernation from their watertight nests of grass and moss. As I’m sitting in my chair one shuffles absentmindedly over my wellingtoned feet.

  The wood is ‘filling out’. There are no longer clear views through the trees. Gone is the sense of space, and light. The trees are crowding in.

  31 MARCH: The floor of the wood around the stabilizing tripods of the larch is potholed where the rabbits have scraped holes to get roots, these now white raw in the ground. Under the larch and the spruce I am submerged in silence as thick as water.

  By 8.20pm Garway Hill is lost in darkness. I can smell the pheromones of spring.

  The tranquillity of it all. The old Saxon line of settlement ran just west of me, beyond Garway was wild Wales. The difference still pertains.

  The blackbird has finished her nest in the elm. The nest is a perfect bowl, of grass, straw and twigs, and plastered inside with mud. Years will pass, but the mud cup will last.

  APRIL

  Flowers

  The blackbird’s gamble – Willow the pony – wood sorrel – bluebells – a reading of bark – Edward Thomas – what bird do you identify with? – the colour tide of the woodland floor – wild garlic dolmades – fox cubs – the leaf parade – transfiguration – alder gall mites

  1 APRIL: The buds, the leaves, the flowers, the blades of grass; they increase so rapidly that I cannot number them. Today the pool deafens with insect music, caused by a million gauzy wings vibrating. The rising noise of the insects signs spring as surely as the coming of the cuckoo.

  Two chiffchaffs in persistent competition. A cock pheasant makes a lovely chicken cluck-cluck and a noddy-headed walk.

  2 APRIL: The blackbird in the elm lays her first egg; as blue as the sky which looks down on it. The blackbird’s nest is half open to the elements. Every species takes a reproductive gamble; by being blue, and exposed to light, the blackbird egg develops quickly … but is within sight of predators.

  Inside the shell, the speck which begins life.

  3 APRIL: I go to the wood, briefly, but my mind is elsewhere. Willow the Shetland pony has broken into the pig paddock and gorged himself on weaner pellets, causing grain overload. It sounds innocuous, but he has poisoned himself so severely he cannot move, and his eyes and mouth are blazing red. At 7.30pm Helen from the vet’s arrives, looks, inserts a thermometer, listens to his heart. And pronounces: ‘We should put him down.’ She begins to shave a patch on his neck to administer the lethal injection, then suddenly says, ‘Maybe we should try something else.’ We, between us, half push and half lift Willow into a horse trailer on the yard, where Helen rigs up no fewer than two IV drips, then pours a gallon of bio-sponge mixture (to absorb poison) down Willow’s neck. She sticks as many needles into him as a pin-cushion will hold. We agree that if his condition worsens overnight and he looks to be in pain, I will kill Willow with a shotgun blast to the back of the head. (There is a good reason farmers have shotguns: for mercy killings.) I sit beside Willow for most of the night, the Lincoln 12-bore on my lap.

  4 APRIL: Helen visits ‘the Little Man’, as she calls Willow, in the morning, and at night. ‘Well, he’s no worse,’ she says, cautiously optimistic.

  5 APRIL: Willow’s heart rate is nearly normal. He is still in the danger zone, however, because of a possible secondary condition, laminitis, where sensitive tissues inside the hoof become inflamed. Again it seems relatively harmless, again it can be fatal. Helen makes little booties out of foam and gaffer tape for Willow’s front hooves, to push the weight on to his back hooves, which are less likely to be affected.

  Take a slasher to the nude, wiry bramble remnants left by the sheep, and still hung with tiny flags of their fleece. Build a bonfire in the wood, always a pagan delight, adding some spruce bits and pieces to the bramble tendrils; curls of smoke rise languidly through the oaks.

  The first bluebells have chimed.

  The tawnies have four chicks, and Old Brown is forced to fly by day to feed them.

  7 APRIL: In the dingle there is an old toppled beech tree, which lies at full length, a shattered tube filled with the decay of its own substance, and tunnelled with beetles in shining armour. In the detritus the wood sorrel I planted two years ago is flowering wildly, so the prostrate beech has a second coming, as a gigantic ornamental planter.

  Wood sorrel delights in such local names as cuckoo’s meat, fox’s meat, Easter-bells, cuckoo’s bread and cheese, cuckoo’s clover, Easter shamrock, sour dock, butter and eggs, bread and milk.

  The plant was cultivated in earlier times; its lemony leaves are edible, and give a zing to fish sauces. George Orwell, in his autobiographical guise as George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, recalled that for an Edwardian boy sorrel was ‘good with bread and butter’ but ‘sharp’ on the tongue. Sorrel is from the Old French for sour.

  In the southern parts of the country wood sorrel is out to greet the cuckoo and Easter, hence the multitude of country names citing the bird and the festival.

  8 APRIL: When I was a boy we made expeditions in spring to Woolhope woods to bring back flowers. I remember my mother methodically searching a bluebell’s petals with her fingernails. She had just been reading a book of Greek myths (Robert Graves’ collection, I think) and was looking for an ‘AIAI’ mark on the flower. This she explained – she was a teacher – was the Ancient Greek for alas, said to be written by Apollo in memory of the death of the Spartan prince Hyakinthos. Since the bluebell was a member of the hyacinth family, it had occurred to her that the bluebell might bear the stain.

  The bluebell was unbranded, and it was only on consulting Grigson’s Flora when we got home that we discovered why. The bluebell is Hyacinthoides nonscripta, the unusual specific part of the scientific name meaning ‘unlettered’, to distinguish it from the hyacinth proper. For me, it was already too late. An idea had lodged. The bluebell was the flower of Greek tragedy. It remains so, and breathing in the sweet, cool scent of the bluebells this evening I see the writhing prince in the mauve haze.

  According to folklore, fairies were said to trap passers-by in bluebells. If you wore a wreath of bluebells you would be compelled to speak the truth.

  Half the world’s bluebells grow in Britain: they have played their part in our island story. When mashed, bluebells emit a sticky substance – the white gluey means by which, for centuries, pages in book spines and feathers on arrows were made to adhere.

  Edge of the wood: there is a drifting blizzard of blossom from the wild cherry, or gean (hard G), four of them in Cockshutt. As the poet A. E. Housman noted, cherry blossom makes the tree appear to be ‘hung with snow’.

  Willow warblers, which arrived last week, are singing. The hawthorn, elder and sycamore are in leaf. A bumble bee lands on a goat willow catkin, soft bundle on soft bundle.

  Sitting by the pool: overhead, the chatter of swallows passing north.

  8.10pm. A walk around the wood with the .410; fourteen pigeons emergency evacuate from the larch
.

  Shooting wood pigeons requires observation of nature, quickness of wit and pure, distilled cunning. It’s the way of the fox.

  Pipistrelle bats, out of hibernation, hawk the pool. A casual sling-back moon.

  A reading of bark: I’ve done this before, learned to identify trees by Braille of their bark. But Cockshutt has trees new to me, including the gean, with its pimply but precise hoops rising up the tree, to infinity. It is my abacus tree, the one I scratch when counting sheep, a hoop for a ewe. The spotty hoops are lenticels, raised pores that allow gas exchange between the atmosphere and the internal tissues.

  9 APRIL: The anniversary of Edward Thomas’ death at Arras, and I go into the wood to attend evensong. Me to the birds: ‘Sing!’

  Thomas was never decisive. Frost’s globally renowned poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ is less an existential statement, more a joke about his friend Thomas’s endless havering, in all things. While Thomas realized the necessity of fighting for England’s fields, woods and streams he was nonetheless molested by irresolution. An owl, finally and irrevocably, convinced him to do his bit for King and Countryside:

  All of the night was quite barred out except

  An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

  Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

  No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

  But one telling me plain what I escaped

  And others could not, that night, as in I went.

  And salted was my food, and my repose,

  Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

  Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

  Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

  This was no poet’s posing. Thomas was so connected to nature that he considered his true countrymen to be the birds. Or the trees. When someone queried the meaning of his poem ‘Aspens’, about a stand of the trees beside a village crossroads, he replied, ‘I am the aspen.’

  Later: in the immense, pure quiet of the wood I hear the death of the vole, taken by Old Brown: a semiquaver of wail as it recognizes its anciently ordained fate, that the talons of archaeopteryx will some day puncture its back.