Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  7th August

  A damselfly lands on the map I’m reading in the garden. Feminine presence of the resting insect. Intimacy.

  9th August

  Early sounds: kingfisher, chaffinch, great tit, crow, moorhen, blue tit, goldcrest, mallard, magpie, green woodpecker, wood pigeon. Pigeons mating on the telegraph wires, on my own telephone lines, as I lie reading in the railway wagon. Much noisy flapping and an occasional tumbling off the high wire.

  10th August

  I am reading Paul Theroux’s new book Dark Star Safari. An account of a journey from Cairo to Capetown by train, bus, etc., but no planes, all across country the old way. He is passionate about travel as a means of escaping the pell-mell of faxes, e-mail, phones, etc. Just fucking right off out of it, as I would like to do right now.

  A hornet flew into my bedroom last night and droned about in the dark, uncomfortably close, so I trapped it in the shade of my anglepoise lamp.

  Early evening, I walk down to the railway meadow with spade over my shoulder and rucksack with bin bags in it, dig a few more docks, then pick up sticks of scorched dock stem, lying about like spent arrows on a charred battlefield. I clutch them into quivers and stash them in the black bags, also collecting any seed I find to take away. Little woodlice in the unburnt composting hay and under tussocks on the ground. Hundreds of tiny seedlings sprouting on all the open earth. When I dig up the docks, the earth is very brown and full of worms: it looks festive.

  I have been stripping paint off a couple of thirteen-inch pine boards that came out of a skip outside the old Greek Orthodox Church in Camden Town. They were painted brown, in several layers. Gradually, the delicate pale grain of the bare wood begins to appear. The pine is undressed in layers, and reveals itself. It is like restoring a painting.

  Idea: use the ‘planks’ of pallets from the skip at Diss to make a curving bridge or curving outside lawn table, as on the cover of The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville.

  The day when I was seventeen years old a policeman came to the door and told me my father had died that afternoon might actually have been the moment that made me into a conservationist. When I was writing poems like ‘Gentian’ and later on fighting for Cowpasture Lane, I was wanting back what I had lost. I wanted my father back. I didn’t want to lose anything more. I had lost such a big part of my life that I needed to compensate by holding on tightly to everything else.

  I wanted not to lose Cowpasture Lane. It was traumatic to lose part of it. I reacted strongly. This may be the source of my passion for conservation. Does this matter? Is it too personal a base? Too emotional a base? Not philosophical enough? Is it even the wrong reason?

  14th August

  In the late afternoon, having done almost no work at all, I drive down to see Ronnie at Bottengoms. He is in shorts and looking very fit. The stream water is flowing past one end of the house as strongly as ever, and splashing down into a brick culvert with a cool sound that pervades the garden.

  Ronnie and I sit either side of the empty fireplace where the Rayburn used to be and talk. He serves up currant cake and tea, then Australian wine (Oxford Landing). We speak of Australia and its unbearable, exhausting heat. Ronnie goes to see D. H. Lawrence’s house along the coast from Sydney, a simple place. He says how disgracefully Lawrence was treated by the British. He fled to Australia after the Cornish at Zennor thought he was a German spy. He wrote Kangaroo – about fascism in Australia –and The Boy in the Bush –must read! D. H. L. was on great form with his poems in Australia.

  Freud: ‘The pattern of our every day lives is repetition’–so walking through a wood is a constantly reassuring experience, tree after tree, the same only different, like waves on the sea, like telegraph poles on a railway journey, or the rhythm of the wheels on the cracks between the rails.

  15th August

  Another fine morning and a night in the railway wagon with Alison after dinner with Gary: a good, simple fish pie of garlic/ ginger/blue onion sweated in oil in the pan, then tipped into an oblong Pyrex dish of prawns and pollack; sliced courgettes, lemon and grated cheese added on top and popped into the oven for a half-hour. Add rice to serve.

  The honesty seeds have dried out and need harvesting for insertion into letters. Also the roses and jasmine are unruly and need pruning.

  I remember the dusty street trees of Moscow, and the lumbering drone of approaching lorries, their outsized wheels designed to accommodate the potholes of Moscow and the even worse craters of country roads. A dense trail of black fumes trails each truck, in one case settling like parachute silk on a flock of starlings on an apple tree. The spiders in my hotel proceed, unhindered by plugs, in and out of the baths and basins. Hooded crows strut hopefully outside a kiosk selling tea from a samovar.

  The apple trees along the road to the university, a linear orchard down the central reservation, are dusty and blackened. Melanistic moths no doubt abound. All moths have a tendency to vary their shades of colour, and I was enchanted to look at the subtle gradations in the illustrations in Barry Goater’s moth book the other night. The dark spinach has many forms, with shading that ranges from pale green to dark. Hot weather can cause the minor mutations that control these colour changes. Melanism is sometimes the result, as in the black pepper moth during the Industrial Revolution.

  Trees make time stand still.

  18th August

  Today, the kingfisher arrived with his hunting call, which I heard from the vegetable garden, where I was busy in the beginnings of my Kyrgyz outdoor summer kitchen. I had lit the portable cast-iron charcoal-burning stove from Morocco and was cooking a pair of fish and vegetable kebabs. I left them to roast and went over to the pond to see the kingfisher. There he was, springing from his perch on a nettle stem and flying off in a straight line of blue.

  The first ash leaves have fallen on to the pond and float above its surface.

  21st August

  The squirrels raid the walnut tree and I sit indoors munching pistachios. The garden floor under the walnut is a scene of devastation, nutshells and hollowed nuts everywhere. Here and there is a whole walnut, nibbled at the stem and knocked out of the tree but not yet devoured.

  The squirrels have begun stealing the cobnuts too. They lie about under the tree, cut down but not consumed so far. The nuts are still green and juicy, so I steal them back.

  Tonight I saved a pygmy shrew from Millie. It seemed half-blind, running round in tight circles looking for a way through the grass.

  Plenty of wind in the wagon, bashing the ash branches against the stove-pipe chimney, playing it like a percussion instrument. A beautiful sound that I’m quite used to, like the creaking of timbers in a boat, so it actually sends me to sleep. Going out into the dark meadow at night to pee, you could easily mistake the shadows of the young walnuts for deer.

  22nd August

  The scab came off my keratosis on my arm. Benign it may be, but it’s ugly all the same. I shall keep it in a little jar of formalin, white spirit in an inkwell in fact, or clear malt vinegar, pickled. I had stepped out of a hot bath designed to cure my back and knocked off the scab with my vigorous towelling, having forgotten about it.

  Today I feel at last there’s the possibility of a clear run: writing in the morning; lawn mowing or hedge cutting or apple planting in the afternoon.

  I live in the Waveney Valley in Suffolk, and the names of the villages here evoke the wooded place this once was: Fressingfield, Metfield and Cratfield were clearings, felled out of the surrounding woods, fragments of which remain. Palgrave was a grove of poles, in other words a coppice wood for roofing poles, long and straight. Redgrave was a grove of reeds for thatching them. Thornham, Oakley.

  What were once lapwings on the plough in late autumn or winter are now seagulls on the gleaming new sods in August. A footpath sign points forlornly at uninterrupted stubble as though pointing at something departed.

  This morning I am reading Oliver Rackham on ponds and moats, p. 365 of History of the Countrysi
de, and a dragonfly comes and perches on the page. It flicks its head now and again, like a nervous twitch, then flies off for a moment, only to return. Its wings cast beautiful latticework shadows, magnified by the angle of the morning sun, across the page. When it eventually flies away five minutes later, there is justice in that it alights on pale grey concrete. It must enjoy every last scrap of reflected light.

  Digging docks in the railway field in eighty degrees of dead-still heat is, astonishingly, extremely satisfying – mopping a wet brow, thinking how hard work is the best, and perhaps the only way to come close to the heart of the land. The land opens its heart to you, and admits you to a greater level of intimacy.

  Only by digging the docks could I learn how their roots go, how strong their tree-like tap roots are, or how the tap root often divides into two, so that when you uproot and overturn the dock, it waves the pair of them in the air like the legs of a defrocked milkmaid tumbling in a haystack.

  Digging up docks one by one, instead of simply driving a tractor and sprayer through them in a matter of minutes, is highly satisfying not because of any holier-than-thou, smug feeling of organic sanctity, but because it is just a far more interesting and harmonious thing to do.

  In the course of it I notice the half-burnt stems of the docks lying about the meadow; striped deep crimson and black, they have the same jungle look as the stems of horsetail, bamboo or Japanese knotweed. But they also have the look of red-hot iron, as though the fire has somehow tempered and toughened them.

  As soon as you see a plant in its entirety, below the plimsoll line as well as above, you want to know what is in its roots – what properties they hold stored up, medicinal, perhaps, or culinary; or what lives in its roots – what larvae feed parasitically on them, as the witchetty grub does on the roots of tumbleweed.

  23rd August

  There must be a Moroccan word for the little cast-iron stove I’m cooking on in the summer kitchen. It is incredibly efficient, and I realize how much we have to learn about energy conservation and fuel economy from people in places where fuel is scarce. Out in the Moroccan desert, wood fuel is at a premium, so you want to keep your cooking fire small, compact and efficient.

  The earthenware tagine pot is exactly the right size to fit snugly into the cast-iron fire-bowl, which holds a tiny fire of kindling sticks and a half-dozen pieces of charcoal. The other night I put on a dozen charcoal pieces, and they were more than enough to cook a lamb tagine. Last night I cooked beetroot on it too.

  Tonight, at nightfall, the owl comes by and screeches twice outside my study. I get out the sound kit hastily but too late. Silence. He is gone.

  The kingfisher has been on the moat too.

  Eventually I set off for Devon and drive as far as the service station twenty miles short of Bristol. Leave Mellis at 5 p.m., arrive there at 8.30 p.m., then break down at the petrol pump – burst my hydraulic pipe on power-steering system behind steering rack. RAC man comes, fluid all over the tarmac, police car comes swanning up with lights flashing: ‘Switch off that mobile immediately – you could blow up the entire petrol station.’ Good thing too, I think. At 11.30 p.m. RAC recovery lorry arrives and loads up the car, and I decide that instead of going back to Norfolk, turning tail, I should head on down to Newton Abbot and the Audi garage there. A long, tedious, two-hour drive to Newton Abbot – the driver insists on closing all the windows, smoking and eating crisps all the way – where I meet Alison. We leave the Audi in the garage entrance. No letterbox at the garage so leave the keys next door and a note on the windscreen. Instant feeling of loss of independence and freedom. Claustrophobic. I pack tent and sleeping bag in rucksack, ready to camp at the service station if necessary.

  Alison and I walk up and over Hameldown and down to the Miner’s Pool; we find an old mine-working pit, with a great mossy sallow and some rowans growing out of it. A tangle of twisted branches grope out of the dimness for light. The disused mine was at West Combe – the combe was full of oaks, rowans, sallows, all mossy and bent.

  We disturb a solitary woman sitting reading a book beside the Miner’s Pool. She rises, grey, elegant plaits and handsome lovely face, and spotted black and white dog, friendly. Probably lives in the house along the track of concrete.

  We walk back uphill through a huge storm – sleety rain, freezing on the soaked trouser legs. Boots, no socks, squelching – full of water.

  Dartmoor – a treeless landscape that was once forested, then clear-felled by the iron and tin smelters.

  Now only a few solitary hawthorns or rowans.

  24th August

  Dartmoor. A great walk with Alison from Batworthy Farm, across the moor towards the stone rows of Shovel Down (two parallel rows of stones running north – south, which must have been a processional route for rituals or celebrations close to Scorhill stone circle). We then turn due west and walk across open moor to the bend in the Teign and the swimming hole known variously as ‘Teign Turn’, ‘Turn Teign’ and ‘The Elephant’s Tail’. Lovely, deep (six-foot) pool some twenty or thirty feet long and wide, with level picnicking grassy banks either side. Three friends and a little girl are picnicking, and the mother and child paddle into the shallows near where the pool has been dammed, by the local swimmers I suppose. We follow the banks of the river – emperor dragonflies, dark shadows of trout dashing into the cover of the bank, water buttercups. There are small, elongated islands now and again, stiff with heather and miniature gorse, and wherever the river gushes through a jumble of rocks, there are twisted, crouching sallows and ferns and mosses. I photograph a bent and windswept flat-top hawthorn beside the river. Solitary, as so often. Yesterday saw a single hawthorn with a raven perched in it.

  Higher upriver we find sandy banks, like miniature cliffs in the peat, where dozens of wasps – Sand-wasps? Dark bodied but perceptibly striped – buzzed about as though locked out of home or waiting to be let in. Why? I must look them up. Same phenomenon, around 5 p.m., on every sandy bank, both sides of the river. I see two or three lizards. There is a miniature harebell or campanula near the river, and ripe whortleberries. A treeless landscape, this part of the moor. We reach a fence and wall, a boundary, and another time it will be good to walk on upriver to the deserted Teign Head Farm and eventually to the Teign head itself.

  In the evening, I walk up to Moretonhampstead Church and find a big wych-elm growing out of a stone wall and hedge bank in one corner of the churchyard (northern corner).

  At Yeo Farm, just past the river bridge downhill of the farm as you descend from Batworthy to Chagford, there’s a lovely wood pasture of small oaks and a hazel copse in a dell to the right of the road, near what was once a little ‘dame school’ where wealthier Dartmoor farmers’ sons and daughters used to go.

  Everywhere I go, in Devon, or in Somerset, the men are out in the churchyards mowing every blade of grass in sight. Nobody seems to care that Francesca Greenoak has written her book about churchyards, or that they can be such rich repositories of parish plants that may be rare or locally extinct, or that creatures like grass snakes, frogs, toads, lizards, slowworms, hedgehogs, field mice and voles of all kinds depend on long grass for the cover they need to survive.

  Here I am with a cricked neck and a stiff back from too much Green Man hunting. I’ve been lying on my back along oak pews, or twisting my face upwards to try to make out the details of the features of the Green Men in the roof bosses of South Tawton or Sampford Courtenay churches in Devon, or craning up to look at bare-breasted painted angels in Muchelney Church in Somerset. I couldn’t help but see the bosoms and their ripeness and rosiness reflected in the apple trees in the orchards outside, in the churchyard and church house, and in the farm orchard by the barn of the abbey opposite.

  Why don’t vicars plant orchards in their churchyards? Especially in Somerset, where there are orchards leaning their branches in over the churchyard walls all around. The apple is such a symbol of continuing life, of eternity, of completeness and goodness. Surely it is the perfect
churchyard tree? And its fruit could be harvested for the harvest festival and then distributed amongst the parishioners.

  You approach my place along a bumpy track across a Suffolk grazing common. It is hidden behind tall trees beyond a moat that runs around parts of the perimeter of the common – a strip of spinney, ash, maple, goat willow, holly and old, gnarled thorn trees. You can just see the chimney above the trees. I thought when I first saw it that it must be a fantasy, a form of East Anglian mirage, and I still do. Its grip on reality, its relation to the rest of the world, remains tenuous at best. Crossing the moat on my return here, and making my way past the ash and the walnut – a pair of guardian trees that watch over the place, throwing shade, algae and mosses on to the roof, and regularly damming the rainwater gutters with composting leaves – I always experience the relief a badger must feel as it eases itself back into the sett after a hard night’s foraging.

  A warm, sunny day, but cooler in the evening, and a change to wind and rain said to be on the way. Emperor dragonflies about, and the carp very frisky and bold in their planet orbits of the pond.

  I must have trees about me. The more I become involved with the lives of the animals and plants of this place, the more passionately I find I dislike what is being done to them in other parts of my village. It becomes personal. If the man next door shoots the cock pheasant who struts on my lawn every morning and takes raisins almost from my hand, how should I feel towards him? Has he not murdered my friend?