Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  Then on to the moated mound where the windmill once stood that gave Mellis its name. The moat runs most of the way round the mound, and probably used to run all the way round. It’s hard to tell now, but the northern part of it is deepest and still full of water, with woody nightshade growing in it, festooned with manes of algae. The mound used to be a mass of cow-parsley – now not nearly so much. It must have been weed-killed with a broad-leaved herb spray by the farmer who cut the hay a few years ago. It is now recovering: sorrel, cow-parsley, knapweed, lesser stitchwort, buttercup, all grow here. I think the whole of this section has been fertilized too, because the grass is unusually long and thick. It has the feel of a fertilized grass sward. Should this moat be dug out, ‘cleaned’ out, de-silted? Yes, I think it should. But a part of me is very glad that the windmill mound that gave the village its name isn’t signposted or marked by an interpretation board or anything: that it passes unnoticed by most people, an anonymous, numinous place.

  In London, in Museum Street, I find a little country spider on my rucksack. It comes crawling out and walks up the arm strap, then pauses and wonders where it is, and where to go next.

  I keep finding it about my person: on my sleeve or on my jacket lapel. It stays with me somehow all the way home on the train to Suffolk and escapes on to my study desk, then out into the garden through the open window.

  Richard and Ronnie, both priest-like in character: Ronnie preaching sermons, Richard preaching flowers and birds – both wanting to communicate the sacredness of the earth. Oliver [Bernard] too, trudging to Mass with the nuns each morning at Quidenham. ‘The priest-like task’, ‘divine landscapes’, sanctified by walking.

  The old tracks underlie our modern arterial system. The word ‘artery’ isn’t right, because they are part of a more circular system of overlapping circles; each parish had people who overlapped into the next – the fishmonger, the timber-hauler.

  All the friends who once came here to stay now have places of their own near by, all preoccupied by rebuilding and extending them: building brick-walled vegetable gardens or extension wings, or converting old barns with as much oak as possible. Oak represents value now and is like gold teeth here: you have an oak staircase, an oak floor, oak banisters. Yet I can’t help preferring the things an earlier generation of us did on far less money – the things done on not enough money, like Tony Weston’s house, with most of the barn left in its natural condition as a barn.

  Poem for Frank [Crook, Roger’s uncle]

  A ragged kite slips sideways down the motorway

  Tawny wood floor of a beech hangar

  Rhododendrocide committed in the wood.

  Livid green of spring beech in sunshine.

  It’s fifty years since I rode ponies

  Or rose early to head out with a poacher’s gun.

  Once, we felled a squirrel.

  Touching the warm, thin fur as you slotted back the gun

  Into the innocent walking stick.

  Yellow tulips on a roundabout

  Fanned into flame by an east wind.

  (Modest stillness and humility.)

  A golden evening in Burnham Beeches.

  You first showed me compost and its making.

  We sat in the kitchen window watching jackdaws in a nest.

  It is your birthday, Frank,

  And Woods draw together.

  Woods and Crooks have always gone together.

  A springtime autumn, with the summer still to come,

  To warm you in your ninetieth year,

  With your nine bean-rows in a bee-loud glade.

  Sea-urchin fossils along the codger’s windowsill

  Next to the lych gate.

  You’re gaining on the ninety-nine churchyard yews.

  Armed with a fossil hammer,

  To Painswick Quarry we went,

  Past Finbar Luney at Prinknash Monastery.

  We found belemnites and devil’s toenails,

  Ammonites and an occasional sea urchin.

  The trilobite eluded us,

  Questing on Haresfield Beacon

  Or damming the millstream down Edge Lane.

  The secret, rushing, ivy-covered derelict mill.

  Ring out, wild harebells,

  You’ll soon reach retirement age.

  Frank, now an in-law to the outlaw Woods,

  Only nine fewer years than yews in Painswick Churchyard.

  Crooks, outlaws, finding a natural home amongst the Woods,

  Became in-laws.

  Preparing for the ascent of Painswick Beacon

  With a fossil hammer and a sandwich box.

  It is your birthday, Frank,

  In Painswick Churchyard ninety yews are garlanded for you.

  Patiently, you fostered our passions:

  Flowers, fossils, quarried from the beacon.

  Slad, Nailsworth, Woodchester, Haresfield

  Beacon, Birdlip, Pitchcombe.

  A grass snake swimming a pond at Woodchester.

  A mass of dandelion clocks in a meadow on the slopes

  Of Painswick Beacon. Faces in a crowd – a wind farm,

  Wood pasture on Cooper’s Hill above Gloucester.

  27th May

  The hottest May Day for fifteen years they say. Moat hits boiling point at 16°C or even up to 17 or 18. I swim a few lengths, head well up, breaststroke, avoiding the odd floating algae. Water clear enough underneath but heavily dusted with pollen, clouds of it off the cow-parsley and the buttercups in the meadow, and the billowing may blossom.

  Well-fed blackbirds sing better because they develop fuller throats – like busty opera singers.

  Sleeping in Burgate Wood on the moated island of the old hall, I put my cheek against the loam and the cool ground ivy, and when I close my eyes I see the iceberg depths of the root-world of the wood. Walking here, picking my way through the wood, I thought of it as perpendicular, until I lay down and entered the ground-world. This is the part of a wood that only reveals itself occasionally after a big storm, when trees keel over and the roots are thrown suddenly upright, clutching earth and stones. How deep do roots go?

  A radio thought: the soundtrack here, the singing of countless birds throughout my waking hours from 4 a.m., is of the utmost importance. It is actually quite noisy with birdsong here, all concentrated into a mile of hedgerows – full, wide, dense hedges like the ramparts of a castle. A kind of maze of them surrounds the little fields, and the birds love them for making nests. So there is great competition amongst all the birds for space, for a few square yards of territory, and so they sing longer and louder and more lustily. Because the surrounding fields have been made into bare-blown, featureless prairies, they flock to these hedges as an oasis of green and blessed cover for their nests, a place they can call home. And for a bird the most important aspect of household maintenance is singing. Perching as high up as you can and singing for as long and as hard as you can.

  30th May

  Swallows and swifts flying high above the house at last – but in transit, I think, not planning to stay. Still moody weather, sultry sunshine, lush grass in between clouds of cumulus. Cow-parsley immense. Roses coming out or budding.

  June

  There are definitely two different orchids in Cowpasture Meadow now: spotted orchids on the left side, halfway, and green-winged over to the right.

  Dozens of cuckoo flowers at the bottom of the field: probably two hundred. Two or three elms need to be cut down and burnt because diseased. There are plenty of healthy elms thriving, and twenty to thirty feet high.

  6th June

  Outside my study window there are tits, a little family of four or five, all diligently pecking off the aphids on a rose. The perfect gardeners, so much better than a spray.

  There was a time for us too when Suffolk and the whole of the Waveney Valley was terra incognita, like the hills, woods and ponds around Thoreau’s cabin at Walden.

  As Thoreau said in Walden, heaven is under our feet as well as over
our heads.

  Last night at dinner I sat between two women. The one on my right told a story about a sudden increase in the numbers of green woodpeckers in the Fens where she lives with her husband. The woodpeckers couldn’t resist the clapboard walls of their house, and pecked a hole and built a nest in the cosy recesses of the insulated cavity wall while they were away on a spring holiday. They reacted with annoyance instead of delight, evicted the woodpeckers and had the wall repaired. ‘It cost us £600 in new insulation and builders’ bills,’ she said. She complained they were forced to hang balloons all round the house from the eaves to repel the woodpeckers. I suggested it might be more rewarding to have the builders adapt the chosen section of wall into a built-in woodpecker bird-box.

  The woman on my left then chimed in with a story about the swallows that would insist on nesting under the eaves of their house. (They may in fact have been house martins.) Her husband had knocked down the nest, and was obliged to put up wire netting to keep the hapless birds at bay. ‘They were so messy,’ she said. ‘Droppings everywhere, and they were so noisy too.’

  Roses just coming out fully in this first flush of heat. Up at six this morning, the sun rising through trees directly, centrally, in end-bedroom window of the house.

  I lay in bed this morning, trying to think what exactly it is that a crow’s call resembles. How to describe the hollow, cast-iron, metallic, mechanical ring within the crow’s throat. For some reason it reminds me of Watford, and Benskin’s Brewery at Croxley Green, and the viaduct the train passed over on the way to my violin lessons on Saturday mornings with Mr Piper. It makes me think of the old Albion lorries the brewery used for its deliveries of Benskin’s brown ale, and the sound of their starter motors. That could be it, the special quality of sound of a starter motor that hasn’t quite engaged the under-note; the abrasive call is so haunting precisely because it is so hard to pin down, so defiant of description.

  I never wanted to be at those violin lessons; I wanted to be with my friends gathered on bicycles outside Giles Record Shop in the middle of Hatch End. I can remember the real thrill and conviction of going up to the counter at Giles and buying Buddy Holly’s 45 with ‘Peggy Sue’ on one side and ‘Everyday’ on the other the moment it came out. Or buying Sidney Bechet beside my friend Ian Keynes, who boldly demanded ‘Anything by Dizzy Gillespie’, putting the accent on ‘Gil’ and eliding the ‘es’.

  The great antidote to racism is travel. If only people would travel more adventurously, they would soon learn the deep respect for other peoples and cultures of the true traveller. I don’t mean tourist but traveller: one who finds himself depending on the goodwill and hospitality of other people – the natural human civility of other people in other countries – and who knows what it is to be a foreigner.

  Building the new table top at Mellis in the study. Perfectionism kicks in, and all the same self-critical criteria that go into a piece of writing. I make a yew bracket to fix to the oak beam and support the top, and a careful wooden subframe or chassis. I fill the grain with Polyfilla and carefully stain it pale blue with a tiny paintbrush. In one of the holes in the top I shall set a watch face, or a smooth round pebble from the beach.

  I slept in the shepherd’s hut last night after an eight-length evening swim in the moat, now beginning to weed up – a beautiful, nearly full moonlit night. Very bright, hardly proper darkness at all. At ten to four I was woken up by a warbler (not sure which) hopping along the tin roof of the hut, then striking up the most beautiful song, at first utterly solo in the half-light, soon joined by other birds. It sang its heart out, moving about the roof now and again between phrases or cadenzas to a new vantage point. Easing myself up on one elbow about twenty past four, I inched back the curtain and surveyed the field. Yellow pools of buttercups, and here and there a pyramidal orchid, and even a lovely lush marsh orchid in intense purple and with a huge stack of a flower like a wedding cake.

  A crow was flying in big circles about the field, climbing steeply now and then, then gliding down, as if for pure pleasure. I dozed back to sleep but was awoken by a most terrific rumbling and shaking of the whole hut, and a scratching sound. I thought a cat must somehow have leapt in through an open window and on to my bed. But I think it was the roe-deer, the one with the faun, rubbing against the hut, as I heard what sounded like hooves disappearing through the long grass. The birdsong now far too raucous for sleep, so I adjourned to the house over dewy grass for breakfast, and to wrap a leaving present for Frank Gooderham, my lovely postman.

  I found myself in tears as I wrote his card, inscribed a copy of my book for him and wrapped the present: a bottle of Graham’s port, the book and an audiotape, and my card. I hadn’t fully realized, until that point, how deeply important he has been to me: working and living here alone for so long, I looked forward each morning to the cheering flash of his red van through the trees, tuning my ears for the hum of its Ford engine as it approached and changed gear along the common and down my bumpy track.

  He arrived in his van for the last time at about twelve o’clock, and when he handed over the mail to me it was all either of us could do to even speak, both choking back the tears. I shall miss him terribly.

  A chiffchaff lustily singing in the garden all morning, sunshine, pigeons cooing, warblers, all the roses are out. A call from Richard, who has discovered a lane, Darrow Lane, near his house, with sulphur clover, meadow vetchling, bee orchid and hoary plantain, all growing happily.

  How much better to scythe down one’s grasses after having allowed them to reach their full height and flowering glory. People forget that grasses are flowers, and magnificent graceful things too, that will dry and preserve themselves in winter.

  How much quieter and more contemplative to scythe than to mow with a machine, and how much better to make a haystack on the spot, a roofed house out of which all the insects, beetles and grubs can crawl back on to the lawn and resume their lives, perhaps in some neighbouring bit of cover.

  After scything and working up a sweat, a long swim in the moat; cleared out the Canadian pondweed, hugging armfuls of it to my breast and breaststroking one-armed to the bank.

  Drove up the M1 to see Richard at St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton, a lovely pale sandstone Palladian house where John Clare lived for years to the end of his life.

  Richard and I sat in the sun on the terrace and looked out across acres of mown grass and park trees. Big, mature acacias, cedars, sycamores, copper beeches. The sycamore was also copper, from the red pigment you see in the leaf veins. As we sat there, from 3.20 p.m. until 6.00 p.m., different shifts of birds came and went, feeding on the lawn: first a half dozen blackbirds, then wood pigeons, then a pair of crows, a wagtail, then magpies, etc. A hen sparrowhawk had been hunting up above too. Then out came the rabbits, dozens of them all over the lawns outside the hospital, all very tame. Richard had watched one roll in the grass on its back like a cat the day before.

  There are foxes and badgers, and no doubt hedgehogs.

  Richard talked with enthusiasm about the great reed-bed at Peterborough and the plan by the RSPB, which has already created another at Lakenheath.

  He also spoke of an invention for the study of the canopies of rainforests: a kind of giant jellyfish, inflatable, on which scientists can walk about and study the canopy, having been dropped on to it by helicopter. They discovered ‘leaf shyness’ or ‘top-leaf shyness’, in which the leaves all grow apart from each other, seeking light, but also sharing it.

  I told Richard about the Wollemi Pine and its discovery near Sydney in a gorge in the Blue Mountains only be reached by abseiling in.

  Richard spoke of the possibility of creating at least two riverine forests soon, and how two East Anglian estuaries were being considered. Sallows, willows, alders, etc. Cuttings would establish them very quickly.

  We talked of the long root systems of figs, and of the fig forest on the Don at Sheffield, where an interesting flora has developed: three different kinds of balsam,
tansies and bluebells, washed down from the Pennines.

  The root of a fig at Magdalen College, Oxford, reached through into the cellar and planted itself in a bottle of port.

  I spoke of the fig tree at Manaccan, and Richard said the fig has very long roots that could travel down inside the hollow of a wall and find moisture in the ground.

  Every now and again you find yourself slipping into a little pocket, a little envelope, of country that is unknown to anyone else, which feels as though it is your own secret land.

  I got up at 4.30 a.m. and went over to Wortham Long Green to look for orchids, etc., and especially the dyer’s greenwood. Followed Richard’s directions saying that it was at the far end of the green, but couldn’t find it at all. Did find yellow bedstraw (lady’s) and the white heath bedstraw, and knapweed, self-heal and a marsh orchid. Ox-eye daisies too.

  In other parts I found marjoram, meadow cranesbill in the verge, two or three feral cardoons, forget-me-not, a big stand of dozens of marsh orchids at the other end, near the T-junction, bee orchids next to more marsh orchids, hay rattle at the end near the tennis courts, hoary ragwort and the gnarled old pollarded trunk of the black poplar, still just about alive with a single surviving branch. I have seen others on this common deliberately set on fire up their hollow trunks, which act as chimneys.