by Roger Deakin
March
1st March
Cowpasture Lane Inquiry. I tried to make the case that in the Middle Ages people were on the land – on it, in it – in a way that we simply are not today. We live our lives outside the land. We stay off it, mostly.
The strange thing about the Cowpasture Lane Public Inquiry was how very private it actually was. For most of the two days of the sitting we, the villagers, sat as mute spectators to the abstruse process: a barrister’s attempt to pick holes in the case the County Council legal department had made for the status of Cowpasture Lane as a byway.
To anyone with much knowledge of the outlines of the local history of Mellis, it would have been fairly obvious that the lane was a market road leading to three neighbouring markets at the villages of Burgate, Botesdale and Redgrave.
What happened at the inquiry was that a small number of lawyers, County Council people, the lawyer for the objectors and another lawyer from Railtrack all pored over legal documents and maps at one end of the hall. The leading objector in the village, Lieutenant-Colonel Spence, even referred to the villagers present as ‘the audience’. There was an outraged gasp at this, but in a way he was right. None of us was a legal expert, so we were relegated to the sidelines.
I wrote in my evidence that until about 1850 the lane would have been the main road into the village, and that, with the coming of the railway about then, the whole axis of the village moved over to the eastern end of the common. The barrister asked me if I stood by the statement. Since writing it nearly a year ago, I had realized that in fact the village axis had already begun to shift west, away from mill, church, school and well, to a part of the huge common over half a mile away. There were in effect two villages, just as there were Thornham Magna and Parva, and Burgate Great and Little Green and Mellis Little Green. There were even two different Lords of the Manor.
This may possibly have occurred because of the plague, or it may simply have been some organic movement, a sort of natural gregariousness – you could be far closer as neighbours around a relatively small green. So the lane probably became far less busy than at its heyday in the thirteenth century, when it would have been a busy market road.
I wanted to explain how important all the immediately surrounding villages and towns were. I wanted to point out that Hoxne was where St Edmund was martyred, that in 869 a great religious procession carried his remains to rest at the abbey at Beadoriceworth, thenceforth known as Bury (or Burgh) St Edmunds. On the walls of Thornham Parva Church the martyrdom of St Edmund is depicted in an early painting. It is possible that the procession, which would have taken a ceremonial route, not simply the most direct, passed from Hoxne to Eye (an abbey), and thence to Thornham Parva. We know that at the end of the first day’s procession, the bier and its bearers paused to spend the night at Burgate, where a church was built. This is the origin of its name: ‘gate’, meaning ‘the way to’, asin ‘Burgate’ – ‘the way to Bury’.
If the funeral procession had gone via Eye and Thornham Parva, then it is more than likely it would have passed down Cowpasture Lane, crossed the common and gone up Stonebridge Lane into Burgate.
The main problem about the inquiry for me was that the inspector had not walked the lane before it began. It meant that we were talking all the time about a place that was, for her, an abstraction. None of the experts round the table knew any of the rest of the village. And, most seriously of all, none of them knew the common and the system of lanes that funnel in and out of it to all the neighbouring villages, settlements and commons. They only wanted to focus on Cowpasture Lane itself; nothing else. They didn’t want to take a holistic view of the common and its system of associated lanes and long greens as a single organic entity.
4th March
Snowfall and settling – three to four inches.
I have to admit to a lifelong habit of liking to form bonds with animals. Just now as I write, there’s a cock pheasant outside my window devouring a slice of bread I threw out for him in the snow. It is snowing hard, and the pheasant is a dignified, blurred figure, like Shackleton, only in full morning dress. Snow settles on his russet back, so he must be warm inside his feathers. Cornflakes, confetti, paperweights, pixels, interference. I think of a favourite garden plant my mother always grew: snow-in-the-mist. A snowstorm is a mist: the further away you try to focus, the more snowflakes come between you and, say, a tree. It’s only logical.
I look up the chimney and snowflakes are floating down, vivid against the soot inside – as though white were drawn to black by an attraction of opposites.
A walk in the snow up Stonebridge Lane to the Plantation Wood and Whitmore’s Wood. A wood in the snow shows up well – dark trunks against the white, and there’s more light in it, reflected.
There’s a wood bank up there – it is a plantation – with silver birches and cherries, not local species. But across to the right, in the wood that was cut down and replanted in awful straight lines, there are lovely big furze bushes in flower in the snow, and other local old species reasserting themselves.
In the field, six white bottoms of roe-deer in a row. Michael [Battell’s] farm is a single, huge white plain – not a hedge in sight. The flints of an old wood-entrance branch off the lane.
When I moved here in the 1970s, the whole of Suffolk was in disarray: barns were being pulled down, old cottages demolished with nothing more than a Land Rover or tractor and a stout length of cable. Farmers spoke matter-of-factly in the pub about the barns they demolished.
I begin pollarding the oak by the vegetable garden. I ponder the word ‘nasty’ as applied to oak by Forster in his first description of the wych-elm in Howards End. Why is the oak ‘no nastier than ordinary oaks’? It saws easily, the branches cut cleanly in March, they aren’t sappy yet, although the buds are just beginning to redden and swell. But the hairiness of the oak tree is notable: the profusion of little side-shoots all the way up the trunk. It is almost prickly, and this could be said to be nasty. Most of all, it tastes nasty to herbivores because it is full of tannin.
The little apple trees in the vegetable garden are just beginning to show their pink terminal buds and to open them into tiny leaves. The roses, little Kyrgyz too, are coming into leaf.
Visceral – is when your hair stands on end, when your teeth are set on edge by nails on a blackboard, when you experience a kind of sympathetic reaction, such as when a man with an artificial leg sits down opposite you across a café and gets it caught on a chair as he manoeuvres in behind his table. Such things catch at you in unexpected parts of the body – like foot massage, when a tweaked big toe can tweak you in the testicles.
9th March
I’ve been doing all the usual lonely-man things tonight, ringing up friends all over the world and hanging on the phone for hours. Reading alone, eating a big plate of spaghetti alone. Not drinking alone, although I thought of it.
13th March
New moon. Last night the cats had a magic about them, a new devilment in their eyes. Their fur flooded up over their body – waves went through their fur – physical waves. They went out and stood on the kitchen step, peering into the night, twisting their whiskers. All was still.
When I picked up the kettle to fill it this morning, there was the very first ant of the year, exploring the butcher’s block in the kitchen, pondering crystals of sugar with its antennae.
Everything has its antennae out at full stretch, fully extended.
In the sunny outside loo, writing this with the door open, and Alfie sitting outside, the first gnat flies aimlessly about.
These are the outriders of spring.
The great spotted woodpecker – a completely medieval bird, like a joker, or a jester with mask, cap and bells. The black and white skullcap, the deep red velvet tail, the barred, flamboyant costume and the outsized conk of a beak, absurdly vigorous in its hammering. How on earth does it stabilize its brain?
What joy, after weeks of cold grey days, to get out the tractor. Toda
y, I back it out of the shed, hear the music of its engine burst into life, hook up the old two-wheel elm-sided trailer and trundle off down the field for wood, having waded up with chainsaw, hard-hat, fuel, chain oil, bow-saws, billhooks and a selection of hedging gloves. In the wood, I coppiced two hazels with the chainsaw. The tall poles fell outwards like a star around each coppice stool and lay on the floor of the wood. I then set to work with the short-handled billhook, stripping off the side branches, trimming the feathery tops of the poles and laying them together as neatly as the pencils on my desk (in a pile). Keith [Dunthorne] had shown me how to hold the work over the fresh-cut coppice stool, so that the cut ends fall directly on to it, building up into a loose protective cage through which the new shoots will grow straight up towards the light, safe from the rubbing of deer, hares or rabbits.
I was thus engaged with my billhook when my aim went awry and the sharp, glancing blade sliced straight through the leather glove and cut a choice fillet out of the ball of my thumb. The sudden sharp pain, the surprise and shock, then instant self-recrimination, are all still vivid enough. But what really struck home was the immediate and overwhelming realization that this is what it feels like for the tree. It was a real moment of inscape, as Gerard Manley Hopkins called it, a sudden illuminating impulse of sympathy with, in this case, the hazel tree, the living, green hazel bough. Only the night before I had been reading Hopkins’s poem ‘Binsey Poplars’. The red sap welled up and began to trickle over the glove. I took it off gingerly and bound my handkerchief tightly round the thumb, literally grafting the severed flesh back on.
As I walked back up the field to the first-aid box in the workshop, I ran through the Hopkins poem in my head, and felt the hurt he felt, as I always do, but this time throbbing in my own fragile flesh.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew –
Hack and rack the growing green!
I myself felt ‘hacked and racked’, and the healing of my bandaged thumb would now be linked with the healing of the coppiced hazel trees through a kind of sympathetic magic.
As I worked, I reflected that even the brushwood I was leaving behind me heaped over the coppice stools would, in former times, have been bundled into faggots, brought under cover and stacked to dry for fuel to bake bread.
Hazel too has skin. It comes out of the wood, and is misted matt-green with algae. The smooth, delicate brown bark can be polished to a high sheen when you work with hazel rods in the carpentry shop. It will peel too, though nothing like as readily as a birch, and, twisted up, it has a certain strength as twine, though nothing like as strong as the bark of lime.
It has the same freckled skin type as the birch family. The leaves of hazel are the cling film of our grandmothers, and still used to wrap cheeses in France, Italy or Greece. I used to make goat’s cheese here and always wrapped my cheeses in hazel leaves to keep them moist and succulent. Hazel leaves aren’t toxic, as clingfilm is said by some to be, and as packaging, what could be more beautiful?
So here I am, with a chainsaw, spending an afternoon amputating the limbs of trees. ‘Tree surgery’, they sometimes call it. I have chosen a mild day, when the forecast is for even milder weather. I want to avoid cutting trees when frost could damage the new wounds – the wound is living tissue and must heal.
‘Consideration’ is the word my parents always used. ‘Have some consideration’ was the phrase, or ‘Show some consideration’, a slightly different thing, so I was taught to raise the peak of my school cap to passing neighbours in the street, to give up my seat on the underground train to just about anyone unfortunate enough to be standing. Ladies, certainly, and older people. There’s sense in this. Who needs to sit down when they’re seven years old and bursting with energy?
This basic idea of consideration is at the heart of all true conservation. You act out of consideration, out of fellow feeling, for other living things, and other people. Most of the degradation of our land, air and water is caused by selfishness.
Selfishness and consideration. These are the two opposites that were constantly before me as choices when young. Should I do the selfish thing, fire my airgun through the neighbour’s garden fence, perforating it almost to destruction? Or should I do the considerate thing and fire it dutifully at the target pinned to a tree? Or not fire it at all? I confess I enjoyed shooting very much and only gave it up when I had ‘worked it out of my system’.
When I gashed my thumb and the blood spurted, I couldn’t help feeling a hint of the pleasure I used to feel, or pride, at bleeding when I was a boy. ‘Who’s a wounded soldier, then?’ my mother would say.
16th March
Yesterday it turned mild for the first time in ages and last night I found a newt crossing the kitchen floor at some speed. On Sunday night I saw frogs and toads crossing the road, catching one in the headlights at Syleham by the Waveney, and another on the common at Mellis. At Thrandeston, where there’sa notable frog pond on the village green, two people were fixing up a road sign with a crossed-out frog on it, and this morning the first toads are in full voice beside the moat.
The first bumblebees are out foraging. It is sunny and still, after all the wind. Birds are singing in the hedges. A single pair of sparrows nesting – in the roof probably – and visiting the peanut dispenser outside my study window.
Once, in Suffolk, the i’s were all undotted and the t’s all uncrossed. Now everyone’s busy crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s in the landscape.
The old thatched garage at Redgrave, gently rotting and derelict for years, is now being rebuilt.
At the swimming pool, I met my friend Ken Burrell, the history teacher at the high school in Diss. He used to take a hiking party of Fifth and Sixth Formers to the Lakes every Easter, and I went with him several times. He is a superb hill-walker, always fit, and highly experienced. He knows the mountains and the lakes backwards, every inch, and we would always climb Helvellyn, Great Gable, Scafell, run the scree at Wastwater, bike up Borrowdale, etc. etc. Now, he has received a letter from the Norfolk Education Authority telling him he isn’t allowed to take any pupils higher than 2,000 feet unless he has been on a special mountain course and got a certificate. So this year, for the first time in twenty-five years or so, he won’t be taking anyone to the Lakes.
It is the same for other schools of course, so the lakes and mountains of Cumbria will be relatively quiet this Easter, and future generations of school students will be deprived of an important part of their education.
The human relationship with farm animals is fundamentally a deceit. It is a betrayal of the animals’ trust, since all the time, as the farmer nurtures them, and their trust in him deepens, he is concealing in his heart a murderous intention.
To murder your own family like this requires a high degree of ruthlessness, or denial, or both.
I want all my friends to come up like weeds, and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don’t want the kind of friends one has to cultivate.
Timber-framed houses leave very little remains. Any useful timbers are taken and reused, or burnt as firewood. Any bricks or tiles would certainly be gathered, or sold, and reused elsewhere. That leaves only thatch, which might be burnt, or just rot down.
This afternoon I resumed pollarding the oak at the corner of the vegetable garden. I used the big bow-saw to cut through the trunk 8′ 6″ above the ground, leaving three big branches intact beneath it. The green oak pinched the saw blade halfway through, and I had to hammer in a wedge behind the saw to open up the cut and free up the saw. It was very tough going. I counted the rings in the sawn-off trunk, and there were something between eighteen and twenty. The tree has yielded a lot of underwood – faggots, kindling, etc.
18th March
Bike ride – impossible to remain at my desk today, it is so warm and full of spring! Fieldfares clacking and churring in the ash-tops, driven off the common by the village school cross-country race. The fatties all bringing
up the rear, and after less than half a mile many of them are walking.
The common has been invaded by a great rash of luminous yellow: hundreds of police traffic cones on our country road, and dozens of marshals in luminous waistcoats (we always used sticks to mark out the course).
In Burgate Wood, on a wide lane along one side of the wood. Ash coppice now fenced with wire netting as a pheasant area. Coppice hornbeams seem to gesture like hands thrown up generously, or the ash coppice like fingers thrust up through mud – the fingers of a drowning man. Hazel coppice like sea anemones. I snorkel through.
The polished steel, the gun barrels of hornbeam. Grey gun-metal, gleaming and polished.
A small pile of old bottles, farm horse medicine mostly, under a tree round the roots. Wood banks everywhere up to six feet deep or more. Massive in their day. Ash stools ten feet long and wide.
I am fooled by a purple chocolate wrapper into diving for an early violet.
Looking, just looking, is all we have to do, to see the essential truth. This is all Turner did, with his travelling palette.
