Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  All through the spring and early summer breeding season, I deliberately leave as much long grass as I can for small creatures – insects, spiders and snails as well as mammals and amphibians – to breed and make their homes.

  By the fluctuating volume of the trains going past the bottom meadow, I can forecast the weather. If they’re loud, it is going to rain. The droplets of water that constitute increased humidity carry the sound waves better than the dry air that brings sunny weather. If the intervening meadows were a swimming pool, the trains would be deafening.

  Iain Sinclair has been writing about King’s Cross and St Pancras, and Aidan Dun. He returns yet again to Dun’s 1955 poem ‘Vale Royal’ about Blake’s vision of St Pancras as a sacred place, a centre of energy, with St Pancras, the boy martyr, presiding over it, with Mary Wollstonecraft buried there, and Thomas Hardy’s ash tree rising, growing out of a rubble of gravestones like a stack of books in a bookshop. A tree rising out of the dead – Yggdrasil, the world tree, a great symbol of life in the face of the developers who have been under criticism for expunging this place ever since Dickens wrote his great passage on the coming of the railway to Camden in Dombey and Son.

  29th August

  I admire the great skill of my dentist Brian Williams. His conservation of my teeth is somehow like my work on the hedge, endlessly working back and forth along the rows of teeth, as I work back and forth along the hedge.

  The great majority of the conservation work in this county goes on inside people’s mouths. We should appreciate our dentists for the craftsmen and women they are.

  Inside your own mouth, a crumbling molar is an oak tree falling to its knees. Half grooming ape, half tree surgeon, your dentist sends men inside your mouth with tools to shore up the tottering gnashers. We mourn a lost tooth as we mourn the loss of a loved tree, or rejoice at its saving, springing from the dentist’s chair rejuvenated. I know of nothing so debilitating as toothache. (Dentists are kindred spirits with anyone with an interest in conservation.)

  Digging over at an outlying corner of the vegetable garden this afternoon, I unearthed a length of chain with a rusted spring clip on one end and recognized it as a goat tether I had last used twenty years ago or more. It was about a foot down under a retired compost heap and must have been buried, at least in part, by the ploughing of earthworms.

  To discover my own life becoming archaeology like this was a shock. I had now lived my way into a timespan in which my own artefacts, tools or relics had become archaeological finds.

  I was no longer digging up things from my own past metaphorically but literally.

  This morning I noticed the roof over my library was sagging in one corner, so I went up a ladder and fixed it. The tile battens had rotted and collapsed, and the felt was in poor shape, so I replaced both, then replaced the tiles. A good feeling.

  I also spotted the hornets’ nest. For weeks now, I have been under siege in my study at night from hornets. They drone in across the garden like Brabazon bombers, and I shut the window and door before they can get in. If they succeed in flying inside, I have a yoghurt pot and a postcard ready to trap them as they lumber towards the light; I then release them outside.

  No writer should bear ill will towards hornets: they are the inventors of wood pulp and paper, the original paper-makers.

  At night, they bash themselves against my study window, flying straight towards me at my desk out of the dark. A dozen of them crawl about on the other side of the windowpane, allowing me to measure them up with a ruler. Each one is exactly an inch long, and tubby, like a weekend footballer in a striped vest.

  Every writer likes a story with a sting in its tail. This is the real thing, on a grand scale.

  The first time I ever encountered a hornet here, I was up a ladder at the top of a chimney. I came down that ladder scarcely touching a rung and sprinted away across the lawn. When I looked back, the hornet was still hovering harmlessly about the chimney. I have since learnt that they are peaceable, harmless enough creatures as long as you don’t actually attack their nest. I have often encountered them, usually in the kitchen at night, and have never been stung. Last year they nested above the water tank. This year they have settled inside the roof of a dormer window upstairs. They are no bother at all, and I see no reason to exterminate them.

  Yesterday I took the tractor and toppers down to the Railway Meadow and topped the western side of it, decapitating docks and thistles. It is very tussocky, and will need some chain harrows dragged over it too, in the autumn (fast approaching). Today I shall light the vegetable garden bonfire.

  Sunny and clear and warm in the middle of the day; cooler, even a chill in the air, on my evening bike ride 7.45–8.15. The fields are already being ploughed. I passed several completely ploughed, with the heavy clay sods baking hard in the sun. Surely this means a huge loss of water and moisture from the land at a crucially dry time of year? What effect will the drying out of the stubble field and its wildlife have on the woodland?

  Sleeping north–south does seem to improve the quality of my slumbers. Last night I did 12.20 to 7.30 a.m. straight through, with plenty of dreams: a rope securing a log floating out to sea somewhere in Greece or Spain in a fishing port. I am going through the town seeking the rope, having come down from a high mountain.

  Sleeping, lying north–south, here in the railway wagon – away from the house, separated by half a field, tucked into a hedge, the wagon’s back to a moat to the north, and its open door facing south and plenty of air – does make a big difference.

  All this raises the question of geomancy. I felt more and more certain, as I built my house, that the geomancer must have been a most important figure in early settlements. How did people decide on this place rather than on that or on the other to site their house? I am more and more convinced of the truth of camping – because we are all in transit through life – and of deserts, a kind of tabula rasa to an artist, full of potential and actually full of life.

  How did the geomancer decide on this place? Or have I put the question right? How was this place decided for the geomancer? How was its exact location revealed to him? We shy away from such questions now, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the time when I settled here, such ideas, such questions, were very much alive. Plenty of people I knew then would think nothing of dowsing over a map, let alone a place, to discover the numinous hot-spots.

  We all experience a geomancy when we come to decide on a camp site, and, most particularly, the precise spot and orientation for the pitching of the tent. It must be absolutely level, or as near as you can find, and there must be some degree of shelter. On the other hand, it must not be under a cliff down which loose rocks may tumble in the night, or in the dry bed of a winter-bourne that could suddenly flood in a storm. But these are mere practical considerations. There is yet another thing that makes a place feel right. And nobody knows what that is. Some places simply seem to be blessed. Others are unquestionably cursed. I know a dark, deep pool in what was once a quarry in the Malvern Hills where I instantly felt a doom and deep foreboding, and would not swim, or even linger there by its banks.

  When I first settled here two questions interested me. First, what made me choose this place above all the others I had found in Suffolk, Norfolk, Herefordshire and Wales? I had even considered a derelict watermill deep in a Cornish valley, and a railway station at Dulverton Junction in Devon, and a crossing keeper’s cottage near Denver in the fens.

  There had been Denver Hall itself, and Snore Hall just up the road, near the banks of the Black Drain, one of the main channels out of the fens on to the Ouse. But this was the place that spoke to me, the place I fell in love with.

  The second question was how did the very first people who settled here decide this was the place? At some point, perhaps long before the building of this particular house about 1550, this was all wild lane, and people came along and chose it as their home.

  The presence of springs must have been a vital factor, an
d the presence of the common for grazing. Siting the house at the moated perimeter of the common, like most others in the village, suggests the early settlers were graziers.

  What a pleasure and a change to see a real live bull with cock and balls, full scrotum of his own sperm, grazing harmoniously with his harem on the common.

  The farmer, however tamed and highly pedigreed his cows, still carries the magical connection with our Neolithic ancestry most of us have lost. People grope at it with dogs and cats, even guinea pigs and goldfish, budgerigars or a tortoise on the lawn. But it isn’t quite the same as the cow and, even more, the bull. The horse is another question altogether: mostly, apart from gypsy piebalds, tamed, subjugated and above all gelded out of all potency. Slaves used to hard labour every day. They are now running to fat and silliness in the vacancy of their indolence.

  30th August

  Tomorrow, I shall make steps up to the railway wagon entrance out of willow logs, using sections of trunk from the tree I planted at one end of the moat. I dug it up in Cowpasture Lane and carried it in across the field.

  Tonight I write by candlelight and a torch in the railway wagon, where all I hear is the ticking of the clock.

  A spider has attached one corner of its web to the lid of my lap-top, so that when I opened it to do a type-up of my morning’s longhand riff, I inadvertently upset the spider’s entire universe, and it went into spasm in the almost invisible trampoline of its devastated web.

  It has slung its web smack in front of a framed close-up photograph of orchids and a mass of other spring flowers in the wild profusion of the Coliseum in Rome. I wonder if it thinks it is in a meadow? Or in Rome, even?

  31st August

  Commas are flying on plums and fruit. Already the sallows on the track are up to six feet after their coppicing in March to April. The hazel in the wood is up three feet and the ash too is back in business at the front spinney. The ash-arch tunnel is up three or four feet and producing ash keys.

  Ramparts of ripe black blackberries surround the old green lorry I used to drive to school on Wednesdays, so the Sixth Form could all pile in and we could drive out to an old wych-elm at Wortham and sit under it and read Howards End beside the Datura stramonium – the hallucinogenic thorn apple.

  The plums are ripe and deep purple and maroon on the tree, hiding behind leaves like the elusive courgettes in the vegetable garden.

  A night of black imaginings and dark dreams that jolted me awake in the pitch darkness with only a curled-up cat between me and the abyss. Her gentle purring brings me round, and I think of all the eras of the house delineated by the cats who reigned here. Like the Elizabethan or Caroline or Georgian ages, this house has the first age of Willy and Woody, the grey and the tortoiseshell. Then Alice, then Choirboy and Gringe, successive ginger toms, then Twinkletoes, mother to generations of fine kittens, fathered by a feral tom cat with flowing white fur. Then Millie and Alf, or Millicent and Alphonse to give them their proper names. Alphonse is a son of the white feral tom and half wild himself, born in a hedge and only very gradually tamed, still only half tame.

  The cats are all buried beneath the ash arch, which is sited on the old midden of the house, still wildly fertile and full of phosphates from the original feeding and bones of the people who lived here; huge eight-foot nettles and hogweed and hops grow up there every year.

  September

  1st September

  A speckled wood butterfly on the windowpane to the north of the study. Always on the north windows. Always speckled wood. Three spots on the lower wing, one spot on the higher. It sits on the windowpane trembling, like living stained glass. Pale beige windows in its brown wings. The serrated outline of a leaf on its wing edges/borders. Target-shaped spots. The dark brown penumbra shows up the spots.

  2nd September

  Why do commas sit on my hazel bender in the afternoon sun, while tortoiseshells sit on the brick terrace and speckled woods drink deep at the wounded plums on the plum tree?

  Pine is a wood I like much better in its material form as timber than in its vegetable life as a tree. Pine is the stuff of Shaker furniture and of cottage kitchen tables.

  I once made half my living from pine during the very early days of stripped pine. I was stripping pine in my mother’s backyard in Headstone Lane in the early sixties, driving out to remote junk-men in places that seemed the end of the world, like Molehill Green in Essex, somewhere the far side of Bishop’s Stortford, or buying from Mr Carr near Audley End – he had an emporium of chaises longues, Windsor chairs, smoker’s bows, corner cupboards, chests of drawers with white porcelain handles, Welsh dressers, blanket chests.

  The junk-men never looked happy. They were hunched and wrapped up in pullovers and overcoats, or jackets with leather patches on their elbows. The pained expressions they wore were professional, always looking unhappy about the prices they were offered by hopeful bargainers, or about the escalating prices at the auctions, never satisfied.

  I love the graininess of pine, the way the wood erodes into little valleys between the lines of the grain, and the knots that appear like dark brown islands on a sea chart, with the wavy lines of the grain like currents or contours.

  Pine left bare and simply oiled with linseed or walnut takes on the patina of its daily use. It absorbs the grime and sebaceous oil of the hands and elbows that rest on it deep in thought. It glows and grows golden in the sunshine that slants in through the window.

  Wood is by no means just brown, and yet it so often is brown. I have always liked the colour brown. I like brown corduroys. I like the varied subtle browns of a tweed overcoat. I like brown leather shoes. I liked the brown and cream of the old Pullman railway carriages.

  I began to ask my friends, ‘What colour is wood?’ ‘Depends which kind,’they said.

  Holly is very pale, almost white. Ash is blond and sometimes nearly silvery inside, flashing like silk as you move it about under the light. Yew is definitely red, orange and yellow. But elm is distinctively brown, and seasons down into a lovely nut-brown. Oak may be white or brown, depending on the activities of the beefsteak fungus in its roots. All trees have fungi living symbiotically in their roots, an arrangement of mutual benefit to both plants. One of the incidental benefits of beefsteak fungus is that it bestows a lovely depth of brown on the timber in an oak. And as oak ages, the tannins in the wood cause it to darken and become the rich brown that surrounds me here in this house.

  Instrument-makers often choose wood for its colour as well as for its timbre. Rosewood for violins, and the pale gold of straight-grained, slow-grow King Billy pine for a violin.

  4th September

  I spent the afternoon lying under the choir stalls of Norwich Cathedral looking at misericords carved out of six-inch-thick blocks of solid oak. Some of the hinged seats have lovely knots in them. Jayne and I ducked under the ropes and were busy lifting seats and examining their undersides under the disapproving glare of a deaconess who came in and switched on the lights. ‘We’re looking for the Green Man,’said Jayne. ‘He’s over here,’said the deaconess. ‘And you won’t have to climb under any more ropes to see him either.’

  There were choirboys’ sweet papers under the cushions.

  Cricked neck again, peering up at roof bosses in the nave. Great one of Adam and Eve and the apple tree, and of Noah’s Ark; rows of little medieval faces peering out of post holes, then a row of sheep and cows.

  Elbow-rest carvings of faces, angels, etc., nearly worn bare by generations of fidgeting choirboys.

  What is so strange this year is how few insects are eating the plums. A huge crop, ripe for the eating, yet where are the wasps? Or even flies? And few swallows either. I strongly suspect this is connected with the spraying of a field of tick beans next door to Cowpasture Lane.

  As soon as you have farm or garden machinery, you have straight lines. It is just too inconvenient to mow round curves and circular boundaries. A tractor towing a grass-cutter much prefers a straight line, and th
at is why our farming landscape is the way it is. Even a ploughing team of horses prefers a straight line, as in the old ridge-and-furrow patterns. A circular wooden stockade around the garden is a tempting idea, but would be difficult to mow around from the field side for the tractor. I would scythe it instead.

  5th September

  Another lovely, fine, dry morning – hardly a drop of rain for days – earth very dry. Grass seeded in vegetable garden. Spiders’ webs everywhere in the garden today, garden spiders with a white cross. Two crane-flies struggling in a web at the corner of my door frame in the study. Ungainly legs flailing the air.

  6th September

  Yesterday I noticed that on the tin roof of the woodshed, where I have lined plums in rows in the valleys of the corrugated-iron roof to dry in the sun as prunes – an experiment – a spider has noticed the numbers of visiting fruit flies and other insects, and constructed a funnel-necked web immediately next to the rows of plums. It has got lucky straight away and a dozen victims were struggling in their silky bonds by the late morning.

  7th September

  Spiders invented abseiling, paying out their own silky thread, lowering themselves at will, letting the silk thread run or check as they please.