by Roger Deakin
Sometimes, when it gets too noisy in the country, I escape into the sheer throbbing silence of my flat in the city. I hear only the blackbird in the back gardens and, pressing my ear to the pillow at night, I hear the distant rumble of the tube trains on the Northern Line far beneath the house, heading out of Chalk Farm, uphill to Belsize Park, deep under Haverstock Hill.
9th May
Picking up Alfie is like tickling trout: you slide your hand along his belly and gently ease him off the ground before he knows it.
Today I heard swallows over the house, but didn’t see them. I heard their wittering. I saw an orange-tip butterfly resting on the aubrietia on a flower, wings folded up to reveal the exquisite green-mottled whiteness of the wings.
10th May
There’s a deep-sprung excitement about the English woods precisely because they are forbidden places – they’re in private ownership. It’s like Poland under the Iron Curtain. It was more exciting to visit them in that time because of their vibrant life, their exuberance, subverting the dour regime imposed upon them.
11th May
The ants are out on my desk again tonight, my Lilliputians. To them a pencil is a mighty tree and I have to be careful not to sweep them away accidentally.
12th May
I spent an hour and ten minutes servicing the Aga at lunchtime: taking the burner to bits and scraping out the caked carbon. The copper oil pipe leading into the base of the burner was choked with it. I used a screwdriver and drill bits to clear it.
Another cold, sunny day with a chilly east wind. I biked over to identify the intermediate dead-nettle for Betty Wells, and to see the green-winged orchids at the other end of the common.
Needled by a nettle, I come in nursing a knife and with a wet bunch of chard tucked under my arm.
I have disturbed a nest of bumblebees with my work around the dead trunk of the apple tree. How shall I make it stand upright securely? What buttresses shall I employ? Gary [Rowland] says drill the trunk and insert hazel rods, bent down and driven into the ground in an arbour round it. But how long will they retain their sprung strength?
I walked over to the badger sett just before dusk. Hard to walk into the wood silently – there’s been so much growth recently in the rain. The rank vegetation hides the twigs lying in wait to crack. My overcoat gets caught in brambles. It is cold. Even more fresh diggings, but no sign of the badgers: no surprise, really, I made so much noise. I saw the back of some disappearing roe-deer. One hare.
Fed up with sitting inside at my desk, I went out and started up the tractors and attached a chain to the three big ash trees lying out in the long meadow. They soon would be invisible in the growing hay, and I wanted to get them on to the concrete pad where I do most of my woodwork so I could raise them on to chocks to season clear of the ground, with a free air current all round. Just climbing on to the tractor and chugging about the land was stimulating and got me thinking about the trees when they were growing tall beside the pond.
I wrapped the chains round the first trunk and dragged it behind the tractor into the home meadow and on to the concrete pad, then dragged round the other two, flailing about in the tractor’s wake like dolphins.
Today, I went all round Diss trying to buy an organic chicken. Safeway doesn’t sell them, and at Brown’s the butcher Roger Brown said I was the first person to ask for one for years. He said he could order one in for me, but it would take several days and cost £12 for a four-pound chicken. ‘Maybe I should start rearing these birds myself and sell them to you,’ I said.
Goosegrass has begun to grow up so high in the flowerbed outside my study window that it is already a foot or two over the panes, like a green shutter, threatening to block out the light. Because the window faces south, the stems are backlit against the deeper green of the lawn, and I notice the tiny hairs on each stem and on the edges of leaves. I have a rough idea that the function of these hairs is to catch hold of things and give the rampant plant a leg-up as it grows. But I have to admit that I should be very interested in the science of these hairs: how they evolved, how they relate to other kinds of hairs on other plants; the whole question of plant trichology.
13th May
Early swim. Ramona [Koval] on the phone 8 a.m. All one asks of one’s friends is that they remain one step ahead. To have them lagging behind risks plunging into banality.
The Mellis boys now express their joy at the coming of spring by riding little trail bikes all over the common, drowning out the lesser songs of blackcap, chiffchaff and song thrush. These fart-boxes resound across the wide surface of our inland sea of green. We have sunsets worthy of Turner to a soundtrack of sterile adolescent testosterone.
15th May
If I can be enchanted by my cat, rolling in joy on the brick terrace before me, why can’t I be enchanted by a green shield bug in my vegetable garden, or two ants meeting and exchanging information with a flourish of their antennae? Or the billowing fizz of cow-parsley in full flower?
Midday. Blood-curdling screeching of foxes – probably cubs – from the hedgerow up the field through my open study window. A fox-tussle. Millie stands, or crouches, in the kitchen doorway with her ears flattened on her head. She looks at me in alarm. On the kitchen floor, a patch of fresh blood: a mystery. A field mouse? No, surely too much blood? Pale red blood, soaking into the brick and mortar of the kitchen floor.
I walk up the field to investigate. Little haloes of stamens’ ruffed courtiers (as all the plantains flower, like tiny courtiers’ ruffs, all bowing and nodding to each other).
Later, at 2 p.m., I notice a sudden, persistent, almost frantic buzzing at the windowpane and forsake my desk to investigate, imagining it must be a bumblebee, temporarily nobbled by an old cobweb, or tricked by the glass into exhausting itself.
What I find instead is a housefly, snagged in a spider’s web and firmly in the grasp of a small house spider’s fangs. The spider has the fly by its bottom and just holds on stoically, anchoring itself on a favourite old birthday card, appropriately sent to me by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, the makers of Microcosmos.
For about two minutes the fly keeps up the same note with its wings, then gradually begins to tire. Then the wings cease to whirr, but the legs keep on clawing the air. One by one they fall still, until only the fly’s antennae (or mouth parts) are moving. Then, when it has fallen still after seven minutes, the spider makes its first move and advances over the paralysed, moribund corpse to bite into the head, presumably injecting more poison.
Now the spider is moving backwards, still gripping its prey by the head and dragging it between the twin sheets of the card into the shelter of its interior.
But the fly is too plump to fit, so the spider, now ten minutes into its kill, crawls about the corpse as if inspecting it, pauses for thought, then wheels about abruptly and disappears inside the birthday card. The fly, now apparently quite dead, remains aloft in the web.
The whole exercise has taken a quarter of an hour.
The walnut is coming suddenly into leaf, and flowering, and all the flowers are falling on the ground like green caterpillars, hawkmoth probably, and they leave a yellow dust of pollen on your fingers.
The ash is coming suddenly into leaf too – a big growth of leaf today, as it has turned much warmer and mostly sunny, with a few clouds, and a red, red sunset reflected on the pond in red stripes of cloud bands.
A sudden eruption of squealing outside in the dark and I am on the edge of my bed, staring vainly out of the open summer window into the dark. Is it moorhens? I can’t tell. Silence again. Foxes are out there somewhere, terrorizing the neighbourhood.
Planners have a lot to answer for on the commons. Roof heights are all wrong now. The monster executive villas dwarf the older, vernacular language of the Suffolk houses, which all had more or less the same roof height and alignment. Planners have allowed the scale and alignment of the houses round the perimeter of commons to go out of kilter altogether. So we have lost the g
raceful natural proportions of vernacular building.
18th May
Worked in the vegetable garden in the evening and pricked out little seedlings of salad endive. The mustard is up and needs digging in.
Bumblebee workers of several kinds busy in the blue comfrey bells. Cherries and blackcurrants now ripening on the trees and bushes. I was woken early by Alfie with a baby moorhen in his mouth, but he dropped it on the terrace, I rushed him, and it got away into the long grass and, I hope, the moat, back to its squawking mother.
The reason Suffolk people feel so close to the sea is perhaps because to travel the landscape itself is to be at sea, navigating by a row of flint church towers, or encountering a tractor, trawling its plough across a sea of furrows with a flock of seagulls in its wake.
The skies are always beautiful.
I’ve seen few butterflies this year at Mellis: a couple of bedraggled orange-tips, a dozen or so limp cabbage whites, with even these beginning to be precious and rare. I’ve seen precisely one red admiral on the nettle patch, no peacocks on the buddleia, and no tortoiseshells or commas, and it’s 18 May already.
When I used to mow the hay, the tractor radiator was plastered all over with meadow browns and hedge browns and speckled woods. Where are they now? When I walked up the seventy acres past Potash Farm, butterflies rose before me in a continuous cloud like pollen out of the grass. They were all over the deep blue flowers of the hardheads; they love knapweed. It is as though someone has come along and swept them all up.
What does a bird hear? What does the blackbird on my lawn hear as it cocks its head to one side and listens, then picks a worm or a grub out of the soil?
Cats are angels. They sustain me invisibly by their presence. They are full of love, and they engender peace. They are household angels, like the swallows in the chimney.
24th May
A walk with Andrew in Burgate Wood. First, the beauty and mystery of ancient coppiced hazels round the wood’s edge. We clamber in over the ditch and up the ditch bank. It is still a deep ditch and a substantial bank, and must have been enormous in medieval times. Now it is full of nettles, enriched with the nitrogen of centuries of leaf mould. Inside the wood it is dark but quite open under the canopy of the huge old hazel and hornbeam trees. Hazels were once coppiced in the usual way, but they have been allowed to grow on for perhaps seventy or more years, since the 1920s even, and are now massive and very tall, the poles fanning outwards and leaning under their weight like vast Italian pavement restaurant parasols.
The hornbeams were at one time pollarded, often quite low, at about three feet, against rabbits and deer. They are now great twisted giants, plaited and knotted into fantastical shapes, with huge, spiralling, sinewy branches reaching up into wine-glass shapes.
Underfoot is a dark green carpet of dog’s mercury, and, as we strike into the light of a ride, there are dense patches of royal-blue bugle, yellow pimpernel, stitchwort, ragged robin, herb Robert, silverweed, cuckoo flower. Also St John’s wort and wild strawberry, and the woodland hawthorn. Soon we encounter a great moat enclosing the banked mound of a big earthwork, perhaps the site of a wood-framed hunting lodge in earlier times. We cross the moat at a shallow, muddy point where there are deer prints, and explore the earthwork, a big raised islanded platform some two hundred feet square that must have represented a huge expenditure of hand labour with primitive tools.
Emerging back into the wood, we went on, ducking under half-fallen branches of hazel and hornbeam and meeting superb individual ash or oak trees here and there. Some trees had holes or hollows, and we speculated about what had inhabited them.
Down the sudden vista of a ride we saw a deer. It saw us, and crashed off into the undergrowth. Then, deeper into the darkness of a big sweep of ancient hornbeams, I caught sight of a fox. It was looking straight at me and lying down. Why? It seemed to move its head, and as I unfroze and we both moved closer to it, we realized it was dead, and the movement I had seen was that of flies. It was lying across a tumulus of raised, freshly dug earth and sticks, surrounded by a circle dug deep into the wood’s floor, a deep groove clawed out of the ground by the frantic animal, which had been trapped and half strangled round the waist by a wire snare tethered to an iron stake. In its efforts to escape, the fox must have tightened the noose of the wire and exhausted itself as it raced round and round the wall of death it had excavated with its torn and bloodied paws.
We left the animal with some reluctance, dragging ourselves out of the magnetic field of its all too recent suffering – it could not have been dead for more than twelve hours, and we both wished we could have come upon it sooner and somehow rescued it, probably getting bitten in the process. I imagined approaching the terrified fox and trying to reassure it. Would I have talked to it? Certainly: ‘I’m not going to hurt you. Look, I have no gun.’But I would almost certainly have needed to fetch my wire cutters from home. Or would we have been able to pinion the fox between us, perhaps with a heavy branch, and somehow loosen the noose and work it off the body?
It is quite legal to use snares to kill foxes, provided they are not the free-running kind that can sever an animal in two. Leg snares are illegal; the noose must tighten over the head, although this one had somehow gripped the fox round its belly. But the law says that such snares must be inspected regularly, every day, and this one clearly had not. Perhaps it was simply that the fox had had the misfortune to get caught on a weekend. The gamekeeper was at home with his feet up, watching football.
We soon came to another moat, even wider and deeper than the one before, so we took a wide swing through the ranks of ancient hornbeams to skirt round it. More deer tracks; roe-deer, by the look of them. We swung along a wide ride on to the track that leads to Hall Farm, passing an old pollard ash tree that had completely enveloped an iron gate as it grew, so gate and tree were a single structure, and the tree itself had pleached its boughs together, giving it a buttressed, column-like appearance. The wood full of robin song but otherwise silent.
Home to tea and wine, then I worked later and slept eleven hours, from 11.30 to 10.30!
Worked on the shepherd’s hut and taped up new glass into the end window. The hut needs a coat of paint and some repairing to keep it weather-proof, although it is still remarkably cosy inside, with candles in Moroccan lanterns and birds singing in the hedges all around. As I sit working at the table, I hear gentle fidgeting and squeaks of fledglings in the wall – tits, I think, that have found their way into the cavity between the boards.
Inside the hut there is a mirror, a pine bed, a small table and a chair, and a little Summerfield No. 20 iron stove in one corner near the door, with a stainless-steel pipe that sometimes glows in the dark in winter when the stove is opened up and roaring its miniature roar. There are steel plates up the walls all round the stove to reflect the heat back inside and to prevent fire. In the other corner, by the door, is a little corner cupboard with extra blankets, spare candles and matches, and warming bottles of whiskey and red wine.
The hut looks out over the middle field, now filling with yellow pools of buttercups, ox-eye daisies and the purple of vetches. Dusk is falling, and the robins are last to sing.
25th May
Today there is a frog in my woodpile in the vegetable garden. I swim two lengths in the moat. It is 15/16°C and the water is clear after recent rains. Cold, but not impossible. The ladder seems to lose another rung each year. Time, perhaps, to make a replacement. I’m also considering building a new landing deck for the front pond, to take the place of what used to be a fishing platform for the village children, before parents stopped allowing their offspring out into the countryside alone.
Longhand. The advantages of longhand, like longboat, long term, longbow. All good things, and longing too.
The short cut and the long way round. The long view. Long leg.
The idea of ‘creepy-crawlies’ discussed on the Today programme – on the TV show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, someone cal
led Phil Tufnell had eaten five plates of ‘creepy-crawlies’.
These TV shows treat nature as a threat – compounding the couch-potato problem by actively alienating nature.
Why write? A writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just to reflect or report them as they are. Mine is to promote a feeling for the importance of trees through a greater understanding of them, so that people don’t just think of ‘trees’, as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.
Look at Richard Flanagan and his strong political campaign against Forestry Tasmania and its destruction of the old-growth forests. He has very publicly withdrawn from the literary prize sponsored by Forestry Tasmania, and he has even produced car stickers attacking the use of poison to kill marsupial animals in newly felled forests.
Walk/cycle: to far end of the common. Now two smart signs outside Pountney Hall. Nobody ever had names or signs outside their farms or houses, least of all Alice Bailey, who lived at Pountney Hall with her cats, chickens, ducks and geese all pottering in and out of the brick-floored kitchen with her. She rode a bike up and down the mile of the common to catch the bus into Diss or to Stowmarket in all weathers until well into her eighties. Nobody ever had house signs because everybody knew their neighbours anyway.
