Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  Now there’s late sunshine turning the elms golden. I’ve planted out my sprouting broccoli.

  There are butterflies all over the buddleia flowers: red admiral, peacock, tortoiseshell, comma, painted lady, cabbage white, gatekeeper, hedge brown, spotted wood. Nine species.

  Houses were once unassuming and unselfconscious. Now they’ve become suburban, twee, like women made up to the nines, they look only vulgar. When will people learn that less is more when it comes to doing up houses?

  These drinker moths: soft, pale bear-brown, furry, chubby, sturdy. The whole insect quivers with life, with the will to live. It’s such a thoroughly complex animal, with its antennae, its eyes on stalks, its furriness – why is it furry? Its flurries of activity and drunken movement, then its prostration before my notebook with its antennae lopsided. I want to put them right, but daren’t because that would set it racing and burning up energy pointlessly all over again. Should I feed it honey?

  Moths are such exquisite creatures. I begin to love them very much. This afternoon I stopped the tractor and grass-toppers and climbed off down just to rescue the most beautiful, big, orange, furry drinker of some kind.

  The poor drinker moth on my desk has been poisoned and drugged by a house spider, the giant mother spider that lives on the south window of my study. The innocent moth flew innocently into the web for just an instant last night, and the spider pounced out of nowhere. Her speed was spectacular, as was her technique. She pinned the moth on its back, straddled it with all her many legs and bit it squarely in the breast, seemingly all at the same time. Then, cradling the moth in her undercarriage like a baby in a sling, she moved smartly off, climbing straight up an oak beam and then stopping just as suddenly, puzzled by how to squeeze the moth through the crack of her hideout. I closed the door beside it, and the spider dropped its prey and fled. The moth appeared almost completely dead, its body just pulsating very faintly now and then. It lay immobile on my desk, and I placed it carefully on a pencil box in front of me.

  Debby [Moggach] spoke today (at Terence’s) of how moths and crickets would enter the little goat house she used to have in the Dordogne in summer and arrange themselves on the wall ‘like brooches’. Moths are somehow more cuddly, more like mammals, than butterflies. Perhaps they’re more subtle, in their colours and behaviour: the way they walk about, and seem to feel their way with their antennae.

  The next night I picked up the drinker moth to take a closer look and it came to life, fluttering and staggering about the desk, but unable to achieve lift-off. The spider venom must have begun to neutralize in the moth’s body: somehow its immune system was fighting the poison. It eventually quietened down again on the desk, but in the morning there was no trace of it. It must have flown off into the night.

  At night you write out of guilt, but in the morning you write out of hope.

  Last night in the railway wagon, a trickle of thunder, a toothpaste squeeze of it along the horizon. Then silence. A few light raindrops on the roof, tentative. Then, after another pause, a downpour kettle-drumming the roof of the old wagon, so loud that it almost drowned the thunder that rolled and tumbled in across the meadows and woods. I lay listening to a symphony. Everything modulated: the rain waxed and waned, there was no wind at all, so it fell straight down, heavily, thudding the wooden roof. And the thunder was stereo thunder, rolling from left to right and back again in the blackness of the horizon. At once a gift from the heavens and an assault on the roof and the land. Lying in bed, dry and sheltered and warm, is a marvellous feeling, sensing the massive increase in humidity, and the subtle wafting of damp breezes, an updraught from the drenched ground.

  In the morning, bright sunshine on the flattened grasses.

  I have been looking at blackberry bushes for years but never noticed the tiny black beetles that live within their flowers. Each flower may have seven or eight beetles, all busy working the anthers to garner the pollen. Each one is barely more than a millimetre or two long and iridescent black, blue and purple. They look like little jewels in the crown of anthers. And I have no idea what they are called. I might try and find out, but ‘blackberry beetles’ will do quite well.

  Mellis – Robinson’s Mill Advertisement. The people at whom the smart, whole-page ad is aimed are ‘dog-walkers’. ‘Mellis common is ideal for dog-walkers.’ Why not just walkers?

  Simply ‘walking’ is conceived as a cranky, long socks and shorts, Ramblers’ Association, left-wing sort of thing to do. The affluent have dogs and go ‘dog-walking’. ‘I’m just going to walk the dog down to the post,’ they say, unhooking the Barbour from its peg by the door.

  When I draw, I do lots of sketched-in lines that gradually add up to the finished line, which I then draw in with greater firmness once I know for sure where it lies. When I build a house, or turn a bowl on the lathe, I have an outline in mind, but proceed pragmatically, often improvising as I go and adapting the building, or the bowl, to the material. The building may alter if I come across a special window in a skip and decide to make an opening somewhere to put it in. The bowl may alter in form if I come across a fine-looking knot halfway in.

  24th July

  A long, vivid dream last night: Tony Axon and I were at a school in Walsall, wanting to tell them about our ancestors and their noble traditions as working people. It was the end of term, everyone was assembled, and we were due to go on the stage to address the school: Tony had posters and newspaper cuttings about John Axon the engine driver; I was ready with similar material and stories of the Walsall Anarchists and Joe Deakin. I was wearing a pair of much patched patchwork jeans with floral material in some of the patches – of considerable interest to the girls, who coveted them. The children – adolescents – were dressed like working children of the 1890s or possibly 1920s: smocks and pinafores; and boots for the boys.

  The headmaster was Mr Norfolk from Diss Grammar, or someone very like him, and he had a male teacher with him who somehow, during the course of the proceedings, persuaded the head that it would not be such a good idea for us to speak, and we, waiting in the wings backstage, were told that our services would not, after all, be required.

  We rebelled, and insisted on speaking, and eventually, having signalled this to the children, managed to get into the hall with them and gather them round us during the temporary absence of the head and his sidekick (probably Mr Matheson = Matheson = maths = all that I most detested and feared at school).

  We told the children, with some passion, that they too could educate themselves and stand up for their rights in Walsall, just as our forebears had done. We said they had been noble people, and described life in the goods yard at Wednesbury as a sort of folk university, with books being passed round amongst the workers, and the libraries buzzing. Our message was entirely pro-education and learning, yet we were being treated as deeply subversive.

  Last night I bicycled up the common, tracking a barn owl as it slid back and forth above the long grass, the uncut hay, pirouetting and fluttering into a hover now and then and dropping down on to the grass, then rising back up, with something in its talons and adjourning to a tree to consume the prey.

  Then two little owls, or even three, in the oak tree outside Wicks’s farm, the Hall. One sits on a branch and glares at me, calling its sharp call in complaint.

  Quite how the pale barn owl moves at such speed without seeming to flap its wings is a mystery.

  26th July

  How can I be expected to like squirrels when they have left such a debris of half-chewed walnuts beneath the old tree by the barn? Each year they come and raid the tree and vandalize it like the sort of burglars who have to half smash a house, not content with simply stealing things. I want to say to these squirrels, ‘Grow up, act your age. Just take what you need and bugger off.’

  27th July

  Lying in pain, half feverish with a swollen knee from bashing it on something sharp on the tractor as I jumped on it in a hurry, carting hay this afternoon. It is a still, clear n
ight with a sliver of quarter-moon and a silky mist suspended over the meadow.

  I am lying in bed in the railway wagon, thinking of John Wolseley’s wagon at Leatherarse Gully.

  There is a sort of world train of these wooden railway wagons, and we are all going to the same place: somewhere in the imagination. Transports of delight, we talk of being transported, transported by pain in my case tonight. The wagon embodies every train journey I have ever taken; it embodies my railway roots. I was born to it. It also embodies all the high standards of the old railways as they used to be before privatization. Solid, wooden, oaken, reliable, built to the highest standards, perhaps less than practical, perhaps a little lumbering.

  David Holmes – making bird-boxes. Paint them yellow! Someone he knew made thirty bird-boxes and his wife painted them colours. Yellow was best – hole more obvious. David’s boxes are architectural, amusing, interesting bird-boxes.

  29th July

  Yesterday I went wandering through the still-standing hay in the home meadow and noticed a beautiful spider’s web like a cocoon, binding several tall stalks of cocksfoot together at their flower heads. I bent to look closer and there was an elegant mother-spider, with a clutch of eggs and her long legs stretched out as she carried them to safety, clasped closely to her body. I was concerned that she might disappear when the hay was cut and thought of moving her, then changed my mind because I didn’t like disturbing her house.

  Then, this morning, Eddie came with his tractor and began cutting the hay. I was busy racing about, on my own grey Ferguson tractor, towing trailers and machinery off the hay meadow to give Eddie a clear run with the cutters. Then, I remembered the spider. It was too late. That part of the meadow had already been cut. I’ve been worrying about her all day, and shall go out this evening and search in the hay for her. There’s not much chance, but it’s worth searching. By now, she has probably beaten a dignified retreat anyhow. I haven’t even had a moment to look her up in my spider book by Theodore H. Savory, my old zoology teacher from school.

  Hardy: Under the Greenwood Tree (IV, ‘Autumn’). Geoffrey, the gamekeeper, and Enoch, his man, are ‘shovelling up anthills in the wood’–that is exactly what I did this morning in the Barn Meadow, standing atop the giant anthill in the middle of the meadow and driving in my fork to split it up and level it before the hay-cutters passed over. Queen ants and workers fled in all directions, and there was panic amongst the ants. A field mouse nest inside too.

  I walked out across Cowpasture Meadow minutes after the hay was cut, and Eddie and his tractor had left the field to go for lunch. Already there were swallows, a pair of them, swooping low over the rows of cut hay fanned out flat in the intermittent sunshine. They were catching flies, horseflies, I hope. Millie, was out there too, and already on to the scent or movement of a mouse in the hay. Within a minute or two she had pounced and caught a short-tailed field mouse. I went over to see what it was, and she ate it straight away, crunching it efficiently, head first as ever. Later on, she was still roving the same part of the meadow, and I reflected that a single cat couldn’t possibly cover more than a fraction of a field at all efficiently, and so dozens of field mice must happily survive by disappearing into their holes at haymaking time. The harvest mice must suffer the most, with their nests suspended in the grasses.

  In my cabin I learnt the sheer luxury of daydreaming. It has been my making and my undoing too. How many days, weeks, months, have I lost to it? But perhaps it isn’t lost time at all, but the most valuable thing I could have done.

  Outside my window I hear industrious tapping, like a gardener at work. Is he banging home a fencing post or mending a gate? It sounds like hammering, but is the vigorous percussion of a thrush’s beak and a snail. This thrush is constantly at work at particular anvils round the house: one by the pile of peg tiles next to the ash arch, and one by the woodshed close to a young walnut tree.

  August

  1st August

  The hedgehog came to my window last night, snuffling, huffing and puffing like Roy Hattersley, and nosed about in the irises for snails. I gave it a handful of dried cat food, which it accepted without even curling up or missing a beat in its wheezing. It reminded me of the sounds lorries and fork-lift trucks now make to indicate that they’re reversing. You can imagine in the hedgehog world: ‘There goes that Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. I’d know that wheeze anywhere.’

  Water provides a metaphor of space for people – of mental space, of freedom, free-floating. All water – river, sea, pond, lake – holds memory and the space to think.

  Water levels the spirit too (spirit level). It is the only opportunity we have in the landscape to see a truly level flatness; the rest of the landscape, especially in Britain, is always spiky, full of virtual lines–grass, trees, hills, buildings, people themselves, like Lowry’s stick-people.

  Space in nature, ‘wide open spaces’, are important for all of us, especially people in cities – we just need to know they’re there.

  2nd August

  It was strange, last night, driving home across Suffolk from the levity of the ukulele orchestra to the just-killed fox on the road at Denham. It was a most beautiful fox, in the pink of condition, its coat thick and a rich, deep red, and, when I gently lifted it up off the road to lay it to rest in dignity behind the hedge, it was surprisingly heavy: perhaps twenty pounds, certainly fifteen. There was no blood and there were no marks on it. Its neck must have been broken as it glanced off a car. Strange that foxes, which are supposed to be so clever, can’t learn to avoid the headlights of cars. This fox had come out of the Denham woods. It was in such perfect health, yet they say the average life of a fox is no more than three years!

  I am not a twitcher of woods or trees, forever searching out the tallest, rarest or most exotic trees. I’m interested in individual, and individualist, trees, unusual trees.

  I am interested in the society of trees. A wood is a society of trees, and it stands for democracy and society.

  Hardly a week goes by without an important story relating to wood and trees; last week, chainsaw commando vigilantes felling sixty plane trees overnight along a French roadside. This week, Mugabe in the Congo – loggers – war.

  I walk into my local organic food shop and am invited to sign a petition from the people of Diss in support of the Kayapo Indians in the Brazilian rainforest, whose way of life is threatened by murderous loggers. Why not go to visit them, I think.

  A sparrow hawk. Died at 10.00 a.m. outside the kitchen door. Probably kamikaze dive-bombed on to the hosepipe and killed itself on impact. Or was feeding on leftover cat food from the bowl outside the door and surprised by a cat. No blood – warm and supple when I found it. Death caused by a broken neck – neck broken immediately behind the skull.

  Weight: 4–5 oz.

  Length to tip of tail: 1 ft exactly.

  Beak: ½ in. long. Black, shiny, but yellow at base and around nostrils.

  Talons: 1½ in. long. Four very sharp, hard, hooked claws, each ½ in. long. Dull yellow, scaly black, needle talons.

  Wingspan: 20 in. Wings barred dark brown and pale grey underneath. Five bars of brown. Then speckled brown and white on small downy feathers.

  Dark brown on its back, feathers edged in orange/russet, white and brown speckled around head and chin and breast. Tail 5 in. long. Twelve tail feathers barred brown and pale grey from underneath.

  Slender legs 6 in. long. Feathered trousers down to knees.

  The favourite Welsh way to dispose of a car is to set fire to it and push it off a hillside so it rolls down in a ball of fire. They now stick in bits of railway line to prevent this at heads of valleys. Kids often steal a 4WD and drive it a long way into a wood and leave it there. Also people drive their cars into woods and leave them, or strip stolen cars of all their useful parts in a wood.

  4th August

  A flock of tiny goldcrests, the smallest birds we have, tinkling like faery bells in the ash tree. Utterly fearless, feeding on minuscule invisibl
e insects, moving amongst the leaves and bunched ash keys. Often hard to spot, but they come very close to my face, quite without fear. Tiny, weightless birds, bundles of feathers, little pinched beaks. The gang descends, does the tree over and evaporates as suddenly as it appeared.

  Ants, jostling to take off on the nuptial flight scheduled for take off at 5.30 p.m. I’m reminded of Randy Newman’s song ‘Short People’–the vigorous dissension amongst workers, drones and queens – and today the vigorous dissension between the short-arses of the garden birds, the goldcrests and the wrens.

  Drones smaller than ponderous queens, all taking off querulously into apparently aimless flight, all responding to the slightest of stimuli: a change in the weather. The nest under the study step is in perfect sync with the one under the kitchen doorstep forty feet away.

  5th August

  Why would anyone want to go to live abroad when they can live in several countries at once just by being in England? Yesterday was hot, clammy and humid, with sunshine and dramatic cloud. I might have been in Singapore, fighting for breath. This morning, it is another country, soft and damp after rain, cool and breezy. Last night we were in monsoon India, and, according to the weather forecast, we shall be in the sunny South of France this weekend.