The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Acorn coffee

  Take the acorns out of their cups, add to a saucepan of boiling water and roil for 10 minutes. This is to soften the shells. Drain, let cool and peel. Leave to dry for a day or two. A windowsill or airing cupboard is ideal. Then roast on the middle shelf of the oven, 120ºC/Gas Mark ½ for about 15 minutes. Grind. Use the acorn coffee as you would ground coffee; put into the cafetière or percolator at the rate of 2 teaspoons per cup. The acorn coffee can be kept in airtight jars or tins.

  Acorn coffee tastes nothing like coffee. It is, however, a perfectly pleasant beverage, something like the health food shop favourite, Barley Cup.

  The acorn does seem to be a nut most valued in times of privation. In the second century AD the Roman doctor Galen recorded poor country folk making flour from acorns. Again, the acorns need to be boiled and de-shelled. Then place the acorns in a muslin bag and immerse in water for two weeks or more, taking care to change the water twice a week. To dry them, place in a sunny spot (inside, out of the reach of birds) or in the oven at low heat. When the acorns are completely dehydrated, grind and place the flour in a paper bag. Like the flour of sweet chestnut, it will not last long in the cupboard before going mouldy.

  Usually, oaks do not produce acorns (which, botanically, are the fruit of the tree) until they are forty, and trees are often biennial.

  15 NOVEMBER: Dusk is already seeping through the trees like silt when I go to look for the deer. Up into the wood, past the alder, the beech, into the stand of spruce. Here the accumulated century of pine needles has made the ground springy, yielding. Silent.

  Wind, undiluted from the Urals, enfilades Cockshutt, although this evening I count it my robber friend; it steals my smell away. Out in the wintry towers of the oak are the five fallow deer, hungry enough to eat the iron rations of bramble leaves. I get to within fifty yards of them. Forty yards. Thirty, before they exit.

  16 NOVEMBER: Torrential rain; leaves on the floor, flattened. Patterned lino.

  Time and light are failing. I follow the faint ink-line of the path as it squiggles between the dulled obstacles of beech, sweet chestnut, hornbeam. A single stick, hidden under the wet vinyl of leaves, snaps; the cannon boom around the vast empty chamber of the wood sends pigeons clattering through the tops of the trees.

  The naked trees. Every last leaf was stripped off in the storm. In twenty years I cannot remember such a violent undressing. (It was a north, Viking gale.) In a day the wood was transformed beyond recognition.

  Walking quicker now. Dog-trot. To my left, glimpsed between passing trunks, a finger-smear of dying sun.

  The more the blindness, the greater the sense of smell. Ah, the full autumn Bisto bouquet, the sweet smell of rot, comes powering to the nose: mouldering leaves, decaying mushrooms, rusting earth.

  I’m just skirting the dingle when the woodcock explodes from under my foot. An avian IED. I shout out unmanfully in the silence. Luckily, in a wood on the far edge of Herefordshire there is no one to hear me scream. Unless the Jew’s ears on the elder heard my cry, and translated it for the trees. Is the elder the listening tree?

  Softly, softly now. Richard Jefferies, author of The Amateur Poacher, provided the masterclass on how to tread softly: ‘The way to walk noiselessly is to feel with the foot before letting your weight press on it; then the dead stick or fallen hemlock is discovered and avoided. A dead stick cracks; the dry hollow hemlock gives a splintering sound when crushed.’

  I can hear the cattle moving; the crackle of branches under hooves, the slow drumbeat of massive beasts in motion.

  There they are, out in the towers of oak, four cows, prehistoric shapes plodding up to the top of the wood.

  Cattle come from the old time, and are no strangers to death amid the trees.

  And I am the killer in the wood. The little tricks: do up coat and collar to break face; hunch the body to look less like a man; scope floor to treetops. A few, shallow, regularizing breaths … I press off the safety catch of the shotgun, and slip into the noise shadow of the cattle.

  The cattle shuffle under the extended, flamboyant ballerina-arm of an oak, on which rests the silhouette of a cock pheasant …

  The flash-blast of the shotgun rips the wood apart. The cattle trumpet alarms. The tawny owl cries out.

  The pheasant plunges head first, tail streaming behind. A black comet falling to Earth.

  In the poker game of life and death we all have our tells. The pheasant had roosted on the same branch for a month, each night dropping his white guano on to the ground.

  As I pick up the pheasant, a gap comes in the clouds.

  The North Star shines brightly, more brightly than usual.

  This is Brendon Chase for grown-ups. And why not? I manage the wood for wildlife; should not wildlife in return provide me with a meal?

  17 NOVEMBER: The wind gets up; the close-planted larch brush and rattle each other. There is a certainty of a storm in November, like there is of a shower in April.

  The autumn wood: vitality has gone, and in the trees we witness our own ageing.

  18 NOVEMBER: Since there are no jays, nature’s master oak planters, in this wood, I do the planting. I, the apprentice, spend the afternoon with a spade, slitting the earth and popping in acorns, here, there, everywhere. Wrens sing all day from the understorey.

  Somewhere, from over the hill, the caw of a rook rolls over the sodden land. Rooks are also apprentice planters of acorns. They will take and bury acorns, as much as a mile from the provender tree.

  19 NOVEMBER: The hardest thing in watching nature – to be here, now. Not thinking about something else, as I am doing. (And I do notice that the oaks and hazel are still leafy, and the ash is already forming buds.)

  So: we are moving house, going to the other, eastern side of Herefordshire, Ledbury way. Only twenty miles, but a big thing for us after twenty years of hill farming on the wild, west edge of the county. A new life beckons, that of growing hops; it’s an old life too, the one I knew in childhood …

  I am very proud of my late father who, aged seventeen, joined the Royal Navy to fight for his country, and for several years of my childhood raised me alone.

  During packing, I find his pension policy with Hearts of Oak.

  For more than a century, Hearts of Oak, which was founded in the Bird in Hand pub in London’s Covent Garden in 1842, operated as a pensions business. It is difficult to think of a more appropriate pension provider for an old seadog.

  In a Wood

  Pale beech and pine-tree blue,

  Set in one clay,

  Bough to bough cannot you

  Bide out your day?

  When the rains skim and skip,

  Why mar sweet comradeship,

  Blighting with poison-drip

  Neighbourly spray?

  Heart-halt and spirit-lame,

  City-opprest,

  Unto this wood I came

  As to a nest;

  Dreaming that sylvan peace

  Offered the harrowed ease –

  Nature a soft release

  From men’s unrest.

  But, having entered in,

  Great growths and small

  Show them to men akin –

  Combatants all!

  Sycamore shoulders oak,

  Bines the slim sapling yoke,

  Ivy-spun halters choke

  Elms stout and tall.

  Touches from ash, O wych,

  Sting you like scorn!

  You, too, brave hollies, twitch

  Sidelong from thorn.

  Even the rank poplars bear

  Illy a rival’s air,

  Cankering in black despair

  If overborne.

  Since, then, no grace I find

  Taught me of trees,

  Turn I back to my kind,

  Worthy as these.

  There at least smiles abound,

  There discourse trills around,

  There, now and then, are found

  Life-loyal
ties.

  Thomas Hardy

  22 NOVEMBER: They came in the night. I heard them. Chacka-chacka-chacka. I have been waiting for them. In an early morning of squinting diamond-brightness I go to the wood to see them. The ground is gone to white and iron, so they are up in the hawthorns, pillaging, plundering, robbing.

  Fieldfares. More than thirty of them.

  The grey birds signal the arrival of winter as surely as plunging mercury.

  Winter trails in their wake as they wing down from the north. Chaucer, in ‘The Parlement of Foules’, dubbed them the ‘frosty feldfares’, because their first coming so precisely coincides with cold. (Some locals, long in the artificial tooth, still call the fieldfare the snowbird.) They say timing is everything, and nature does synchronicity perfectly; the haws in the wood are lipstick-glossy with ripeness, and give themselves in shameless kisses to the birds.

  By a mystery I cannot fathom, the fieldfares have coincided their migration with the availability of berries on bushes on a small, high farm in Herefordshire, a county unknown to most people, let alone avifauna. Perhaps, though, I am not meant to understand; perhaps I am meant only to wonder. The seventeenth-century Herefordshire poet Thomas Traherne believed man fell from a state of innocence because he turned from nature to intellect. There are days, days like these when I am looking at birds which have travelled a thousand and more unerring miles, when I cannot disagree with Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation.

  It is in the thrill of winter that you can feel the terrible, lovely contradiction of nature best. Beauty and barbarism always go together. Haw and thorn. This Canaletto-blue sky, this stark frost. Yin and yang.

  There is no fear in the eye of the fieldfare. They are big thrushes with a flock mentality; the local sparrowhawk, attracted by the commotion that is fieldfares breakfasting, slips a low circuit around the wood. He is a twisting blade of badness. The fieldfares let rip a machine-gun pattering of chacka-chacka-chacka! The sparrowhawk, no fool, veers off for easier pickings, down the hill over the sheep fields towards where the mist lies in a pearl sea.

  Within two hours the fieldfares have plundered to their fill. Ever restless, they suddenly lift into the air, and away. Felde fare is Anglo-Saxon for traveller over fields. I too must go travelling, on my farming round.

  By 6pm ice is clamping the world, it is darkening fast, and I am still chopping wood for the log burner so we have heat in the cold.

  Down in the valley, a fox yaps away, which is Reynard’s equivalent of chatting on Tinder. In the dying of the year, the foxes are beginning their cycle of life. Then, as I’m stacking logs by the field gate the Cockshutt fox shoots past me and cat-arches on to a rabbit; the rabbit screams into the night. Haughty in his firestorm coat, the fox gives me a dismissive angel-eyed stare, then trots into the dark.

  The rabbit is still wailing in the fox’s jaw. Suddenly this remote world is very cold. Under the starlit sky, more fieldfares come over.

  24 NOVEMBER: Deep into the wood now, past the sheeny boles of beech, the ground dry here. Crackle, snap of twigs under wellingtons; vandalism on this silent night, despite my cat-walk efforts. Weaving in and out of the trees, into shadow then out into the moon’s glare. Black and white. Ahead, the bob-flash of a running rabbit.

  The woodcock whirr away, banking left, banking right through the moonlit beeches, flying on an instinct perfected down the centuries to escape falcons and men bearing guns. In their escape, the woodcock make a sound like ripping paper.

  In the stark light of the moon I pull off a row of the Jew’s ears from the elder, and stick them in the breast pockets of my boiler suit. The mushrooms will be fried with egg as tomorrow’s breakfast.

  The elder tree gives me a Judas kiss; I forget to duck, and get a whip from a branch across the face.

  Fatty moonlight gleams on the pool.

  29 NOVEMBER: During the early day, trees on the horizon line up, lungs on the shelf of a medical display.

  The pool is frozen. Frost calls down the final lingering leaves.

  I take my last walk through the wood. The dingle, as ever, is a degree lower in temperature than the rest of Cockshutt.

  I touch the oaks, give the BFG redwood a friendly punch, blow a kiss to the moorhen …

  It is the end of my tenancy of the wood. I may never see it again. How will the trees, the birds, the fox, the butterflies get along without me? I noted it all so lovingly, day by day. Every tree, wood anemone, owlet, fox cub, beetle, mushroom and berry. It is not easy to say farewell.

  I thought the trees and the birds belonged to me.

  But now I realize that I belonged to them.

  Sources

  A Woodland Reading List

  H. E. Bates, Through the Woods, 1936, reprinted 2010

  BB (Denys Watkins-Pitchford), Brendon Chase, 1944, reprinted 2000

  John Stewart Collis, The Wood, 1947, reprinted 2009

  Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, 2007

  John Evelyn, Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber, 1662, new edn 2014

  Richard Fortey, The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood, 2016

  Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora, 1975, reprinted 1996

  Nick Groom, The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year, 2013

  Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, 1887

  W. H. Hudson, Hampshire Days, 1903, reprinted 2016

  Thomas Pakenham, Meetings with Remarkable Trees, 1996

  Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside, 1986, illus. edn 2003

  Jeffrey Radley, ‘Holly as a Winter Feed’, The Agricultural History Review, Vol. 9, no. 2, IX, 1961

  Eric Simms, Woodland Birds, 1971

  Martin Spray, ‘Holly as a Fodder in England’, The Agricultural History Review, Vol. 29, no. 2, 1981

  David Streeter and Rosamond Richardson-Gerson, Discovering Hedgerows, 1982

  Edward Thomas, ‘The Maiden’s Wood’, in Rest and Unrest, 1910

  ——, The Woodland Life, 1897

  Mike Toms, Owls, 2014

  Colin Tudge, The Secret Life of Trees, illus. edn 2005

  Wood Music: A Playlist

  Foals, ‘Birch Tree’, 2015

  Arnold Bax, November Woods, 1917

  The Beatles, ‘Norwegian Wood’, 1965

  Igor Stravinsky, ‘Berceuse’, from The Firebird, 1910

  William Boyce and David Garrick, ‘Heart of Oak’, 1760

  George Butterworth, The Banks of Green Willow, 1913

  ——, ‘Loveliest of Trees’, from ‘A Shropshire Lad’, 1911

  Editors, ‘I Want a Forest’, 2009

  Edward Elgar, String Quartet in E minor, Op. 83, 1919

  ——, Quintet in A minor, Op., 84, 1918

  ——, Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, 1919

  ——, Owls: An Epitaph, Op. 27, 1907

  Keane, ‘Somewhere Only We Know’, 2004

  Lindisfarne, Dingly Dell, 1972

  Oasis, ‘Songbird’, 2002

  Pink Floyd, ‘Careful with That Axe, Eugene’, 1969

  Camille Saint-Saëns, ‘Le Coucou au Fond des Bois’ (‘The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Wood’), 1886

  Pablo Casals, ‘El Cant dels Ocells’ (‘Song of the Birds’), 1961

  Antonín Dvořák, Waldesruhe (‘Silent Woods’) for cello and orchestra, Op. 68, no. 5, 1894

  Edvard Grieg, Lyric Pieces, Op. 43, no. 4, ‘Little Bird’, 1886

  Franz Liszt, Legende S.175 no. 1, St Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds, 1863

  Monty Python, ‘The Lumberjack Song’, 1975

  Van Morrison, ‘Redwood Tree’, 1972

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, ‘Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja’ (‘The Bird-catcher, that’s me’), from Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), 1791

  George Perlman, ‘A Birdling Sings’, from ‘Ghetto Sketches’, 1931

  Pulp, ‘The Trees’, 2001

  Radiohead, King of Limbs, 2011

  Robert Schumann
, ‘Jäger auf der Lauer’ (‘Hunters on the Lookout’), from Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op. 82, no. 2, 1850–51

  ——, ‘Freundliche Landschaft’ (‘Friendly Landscape’), from Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op. 82, no. 5, 1850–51

  Jean Sibelius, ‘The Aspen’, no. 3, ‘The Birch’, no. 4, ‘The Spruce’, no. 5, from Op. 75, ‘The Trees’, 1914–19

  Trad., ‘The Trees They Do Grow High’

  ——, ‘The Willow Tree’

  The Verve, ‘Sonnet’, from Urban Hymns, 1997

  Paul Weller, ‘Wild Wood’, 1993

  Acknowledgements

  They helped, root and branch: Julian Alexander, Susanna Wadeson, Lizzy Goudsmit, Deborah Adams, Sophie Christopher, Ella Horne, Nick Hayes, Beci Kelly, Geraldine Ellison, Kate Samano, Josh Benn, Ben Clark, Paula Lester, Mark Hedges, Julian Beach, Freda Lewis-Stempel, Tris Lewis-Stempel, Elizabeth Mitchell, Tracy Pallant, Geoff and Sue Pallant, Leslie Smith, David Hill and all the Transworld sales team. And, of course, and most of all, Penny Lewis-Stempel.

  About the Author

  John Lewis-Stempel is a writer and farmer. His books include Meadowland, which won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing in 2015, and Where Poppies Blow, which won the Wainwright in 2017. His The Running Hare was a Sunday Times bestseller and Radio 4 Book of the Week. He is a Magazine Columnist of the Year for his nature notes in Country Life. He lives in Herefordshire, where his family have farmed for eight hundred years.

  Also by John Lewis-Stempel

  England: The Autobiography

  The Wild Life: A Year of Living on Wild Food

  Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War

  Foraging: The Essential Guide

  The War behind the Wire: The Life, Death and Glory of British Prisoners of War, 1914–18

  The Wildlife Garden

  Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field

  The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland

  Where Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature, the Great War

  The Secret Life of the Owl