Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  In the motorway café, I think how much I hate those silly diddy little drawings of men and women on the lavatory doors, born out of embarrassment. The horrible blowers you put your hands under, and the obsession with hand-washing. Much more economically done in Kyrgyzstan with the plunger things on posts outside the door.

  The poetry is all being efficiently removed, excised, from our land. Where there once stood a magnificent old barn, a rick yard and some half-ruined cow byres and feeding sheds at Withersdale Street, there is now a deeply boring ordinary converted barn. We need ruined barns like we need ruined woods. We need more ruins in our countryside, more evidence of a past, a living past. Ruins have a special life of their own.

  I walk along the river on the way to Metfield, the bend in the river near Harleston on the Waveney, and I hear the crackling of a bonfire behind a hedge. It sounds just like heavy rain splashing out of an overflowing gutter in a downpour. Or like the unwrapping of a Christmas present.

  Put the hawthorn berries in the fridge for two weeks.

  Sebald is a great adventurer – an adventurer in the mind. And he has the genius to take people with him, to keep them as fascinated and curious as he is himself.

  On the evidence of history, he is right to be gloomy. After all we’ve had Cambodia, Kosovo and Rwanda, and many other examples of appalling human behaviour since the Holocaust. There’s been no shortage of horrors.

  It’s hard to drive past the smoking chimney of the sugar beet factory at Bury St Edmunds without involuntarily thinking of far worse things, or the Cambridge pet cemetery on the A505 to Royston – another chimney. Or Golders Green Crematorium.

  He is that beetle, he is that hare; like Keats and his ‘negative capability’. Sebald clearly believes, like Keats, that writers should whisper results to their neighbour, not shout them from the rooftops. Read Sebald and you can never look at the landscape in the same way again.

  At the Village Hall last night, a meeting about the common with Suffolk Wildlife Trust. We discussed the cutting of thistles and nettles at Dam Lane, a modest patch of about one and a half acres, not much trouble to a tractor, but nobody offers to cut it. None of the old sense of commonwealth. Much talk of ‘untidiness’, of baling up the cut thistles, etc., and burning them! People kept talking about weeds on the common (meaning wild flowers – food plants).

  We talked about the recent gypsy invasion – visitors from another planet – an alien landing – and what to do about the mess they left behind – Calor-gas cylinders, old boots, clothes, skirts, plastic bags, fag ends, fire sites, drink cans, etc. I suggested a whip-round in the village to help cover the costs of this nuisance: 300 people × £5 each, say = £1,500, a good contribution towards the total costs, including legal fees. But people said it would be a total non-starter. Better to go and clear up ourselves, they said, and that’s even better as far as I’m concerned.

  In Puzzle Wood. The whole experience is hugely diminished by the feeling that one has been robbed of any sense of adventure or discovery. You already know what you’re going to find. Indeed they tell you on your way in. Also the path is too well worn. In fact I quite liked the smoothness of some of the yew trunks where generations of people have clung on to them for support on the way up or down the steep bits. There should be a law against putting up notices in woods or wild places. One of the notices announced that people found leaving the path would be asked to leave.

  Alison and I wandered off the path and immediately lost ourselves in the wood. We made our way towards where we thought the path should be, and it wasn’t there. It’s easy to lose direction in a wood. Then we heard voices and realized the path was beneath us, almost directly, in a ravine.

  The really shocking thing is that nobody said hello to us. Nobody returned our ‘good morning’ or ‘hello’, they just stared straight ahead and trudged on. Very odd, out of a dozen family groups or couples we met, only two acknowledged us, and yet there we all were, miles from anywhere, lost in a wood together.

  Later, at Spout Farm, we saw the two barns Mr Plant is letting fall down, and the wonderfully down-at-heel green and cream flaking paint on the windows and doors. Either side of the front door of the farmhouse great knotted ropes of ivy root climbed the walls, weaving and knotting themselves into twisted arthritic knuckles of wood. There were even a few bedroom windows missing, and I imagined the family moving from room to room as the house fell down around them and each room became unendurable.

  We followed a footpath across fields of cows to the ruined stump of the Great Oak of Newland, once one of the biggest in England. The tree came down in a blizzard in 1955, and its giant stump was still there: a hollowed reef of brown and half-charred oak surrounding a dust bowl created by the cattle. The charring must have been the result of either lightning or a half-hearted attempt to burn out the stump. There was plenty of the original oak left lying there in a ruined heap. I paced out the diameter and it looked like twenty feet (about seventy feet all round). This made the tree incredibly ancient. I stuffed a piece of the great oak under my cardigan and walked back with it to the car. Shameful souvenir-hunting, but why leave it to waste in the field and end up in a farmer’s bonfire?

  A yard or two from the remains of the old oak a new tree had been planted, presumably about fifteen years after the demise of the original. It was even producing acorns.

  The real wages of potters are in the daily silent appreciations of each of their customers as they pour the morning tea from their teapot, or drink coffee from their mug, or eat dinner off their plate. To be thus involved in the daily lives of people who appreciate and admire your work enough to buy it must bring deep pleasure and reassurance. It is a kind of immortality you can enjoy while still living.

  The same goes for the woodworker. You are part of the community.

  Read biography of Turner – his stroppiness and competitiveness. At the Royal Academy summer show, on varnishing day, Turner would be in there painting over his entry, taking everyone by surprise as all the other painters varnished their work, putting in an indeterminate scene of light, cloud, sea. He would see what competition he had – and do it better. Right from the beginning he had fantastic drawing ability. Then he abandoned all that and moved into pure painting and light.

  I am sitting at my desk observing a lacewing exploring a piece of yellow paper on the windowsill. It swings its antennae before it with the same corkscrew panache as a drum-majorette swinging her baton as she leads a march. Time passes as I watch this little creature, and a friend telephones and says she thinks maybe it’s looking for somewhere to hibernate. She recently purchased a lacewing hibernaculum by mail order. I’m pleased this lacewing will hibernate in my study.

  Bang! I’m shaken out of my reverie by my neighbour’s twelve-bore. It is dusk, time for the fine cock pheasant that roosts in the hedge that divides our two meadows to ascend into the branches. So he is communing with nature too.

  If you shake the branch of an ancient oak above an outspread cotton tablecloth in summer, you will be amazed by the beauty and diversity of the small beings that tumble from amongst the leaves. Some 280 different insects and other small creatures subsist in the bosom of an oak tree, not to mention birds; hundreds more plant forms – lichens, algae, mosses and fungi – may also find their homes in the same tree. The older and mightier it is, the greater the plant and animal diversity it houses.

  Tribes of aphids, bugs, thrips, beetles, moths, flies, butterflies, wasps, gall mites, spiders… The relations between these beings and their host tree is generally ancient and intimate, yet when we walk in a wood or along a hedgerow, it is the oak tree that we see, not the sum total of its many tenants.

  Just as popular history has, until recently, tended to focus more on kings and queens, admirals and generals, than on the everyday lives of ordinary people, so natural history has tended to favour the bigger creatures and plants over the smaller ones. Whales, lions, elephants, sharks and anacondas generally command more column inches or televi
sion time, while their smaller counterparts in creation are, literally, overlooked.

  Often, as an old tree enters the long history of its old age, the insect and the plant life it supports may increase and diversify. Exploring the New Forest recently with a lepidopterist friend, we discovered a ‘goat moth’ oak surrounded by clouds of butterflies and hornets feeding tipsily on the rivers of sweet sap that flowed from the labyrinth of tunnels bored into the trunk by the caterpillars of the goat moth. The tree had probably been inhabited for years by successive generations of goat moths returning to lay eggs and parasitize it.

  If poetry is about making connections, then Barry Goater taught me poetry. That’s what the poetry of earth is. Those first names of moths and butterflies were like the names of first girlfriends. They were emotionally charged with all the potency of an early revelation.

  As a naturalist you hope never to lose your virginity, always to be looking with wonder, to remain innocent, wide-eyed.

  Night thoughts: the stampede as you enter the Women’s Institute market on a Wednesday morning at Eye. You have to be there at 10 a.m. on the dot, else everything’s gone by ten past: cakes, jam, loaves, plants, carrots, the lot. Even embroidered birthday cards.

  I’ve been making fig-paintings: gluing the eaten-out fig skins face down on to paper so they look like purple flowers, painted in dense brown/purple oil paint.

  I’ve also made a sculpture of elderberry pips and skins, using the pulp left over from stewing them into ink the other day. I made a little Martello tower in a yoghurt pot, left it to dry, then gently tapped it out and set it on a metal tray in the lower oven to gently bake. I finished it off for half an hour in the top oven, placed it on a square of wood and left it outside in the autumn sunshine to dry. It would have been better in a cone-shaped mould, perhaps wound together in thin card, to make a cone or even a pyramid, but this is a beginning, anyway. I might try blackberries next.

  I still do all the things I did as a boy: pick up feathers, roll spiders’ webs into balls between my fingers.

  All the time you’re working with your hands, you are desisting from going crazy.

  My mother and I were always at our happiest indulging the outlaw side of our family nature. I still gulp with emotion when I think of our trips north in her open-topped Triumph from Suffolk to the gardens and nursery of Holkham Hall. In autumn, the espalier fruit trees that grew up in the walled gardens were laden with plums, pears and apples that the estate never bothered to harvest. Mum and I would lean innocently against the wall feasting on ripe plums, and always scrumped a few pounds into our ample pockets. ‘It’s a shame to see good fruit going to waste’, we would reason on the way home, sorting the plums into a box of hay.

  Another time we stole the stone urn that now stands outside the kitchen door from a grand house in Hatch End, under demolition to make way for blocks of flats.

  David Baldwin and I went out and got Davy Crockett hats made of rabbit skin with raccoon tails down the back and sang the song as we chopped:

  Born on a mountain top in Tennesseee

  The greenest state in the land of the free

  Raised in the woods so’s he knew every tree

  Killed him a bear when he was only three

  Daveee, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.

  We were kings of the wild frontier in Headstone Lane. We had wooden rifles, potato guns and a Vibro catapult (aluminium) that would shoot a boy’s eye out at twenty paces.

  And we had crystal sets. My crystal set was housed in a plywood box next to my bed, and the wonderful thing about it was that the signal was so weak you could only hear with headphones. This meant hours of pleasure after lights out, beneath the blankets, and I mean Radio Luxembourg and, later on, Radio Caroline. I bought a length of coiled copper wire from the government surplus shop in Harrow and strung it aloft from the gutter pipe to a pole at the bottom of the garden. This brought me Connie Francis, Eddie Calvert’s golden trumpet, Danny Kaye, and ‘Magic Moments’ with Perry Como loud and clear to me beneath the blankets. More importantly, it brought Davy Crockett and ‘Tammy’. ‘I hear the cottonwoods whisperin’ above, / Tammy, Taa-a-my, Tammy’s in love,’ sang Debbie Reynolds, and I was entranced. What exactly cottonwoods were, I had no idea, but Debbie could sing no wrong and Tammy was in love, and I with Tammy, whoever she was. Cottonwoods and the mountain forests of the wild frontier were elsewhere, a landscape you could only imagine, and therefore a landscape we happily located in our own woods, with ourselves as heroes.

  Stroking two cats at once is like bonding both terminals of a car battery. They short-circuit and you get a shock, or a flash, or both.

  15th October

  Today I sawed off the dead branch of the walnut, leaving three feet at the stump end to lean my ladder on. The wood is still sound. Will it make a bed? Or bed-ends? Could it be turned on the lathe?

  Then I loaded the firewood logs from the front into the trailer and hauled them round to the woodshed with the tractor, having unloaded the big oak piece. I threw them all into the woodshed, piling it to the roof with sawn logs, mostly of willow, some ash.

  I wish I could give a clear account of exactly how one space in the house feels in relation to another. On a given day, I can do so, but the feelings alter from day to day; are not entirely consistent. From the outside, the state of weather and temperature will have much to do with it. From the inside, my own mood will affect things.

  The matter assumes greatest importance when I am deciding where to sleep. I do not always sleep in the same bed. Living alone in a house with several bedrooms gives me a choice. On top of that, there are two other bedrooms outside, one in the shepherd’s hut, the other in the railway wagon.

  I find I go through periods of sleeping in one place or another. In spring, summer and autumn, my preference is generally to sleep outside in the railway wagon or the shepherd’s hut. But in heavy rain both become too noisy; the rain beating on the roof reverberates through the wooden structure and wakes me. Rain also puts me off because I may have to walk through it to the house in the morning, hardly an auspicious start to the day.

  Within the house, I have a choice of a big, tent-like bedroom with a high ceiling of oak beams, and a tall sash window at one end facing a green wall of trees, wild hops and a gigantic Paul’s Himalayan Musk climbing rose. This can be beautiful and peaceful in spring, or it can feel too big and airy – not containing enough as a sleeping space.

  Instead, I can choose the smaller, more intimate bedroom at the opposite end of the house, directly over the warm kitchen and therefore very attractive in winter. But at other times this can feel too unadventurous, too safe, too ordinary a place to sleep, and I crave the mild adventure of sleeping outside in one of the huts or sheds.

  At the time of writing, I am sleeping in the railway wagon and enjoying it very much. The location seems to have a direct effect on my ability to sleep soundly. Leaving the house at night after a day’s work, I seem to leave behind my cares, and enter a relatively simple world, in which there are only candles, and a small Tortoise stove for heat. In autumn, I take a hot-water bottle out with me.

  21st October

  The October winds, the equinoctial gales, have arrived and turned the trees into waves of sound, the wind gushing and sighing through them all night. It is through trees that we appreciate and judge the strength of the wind.

  To make this much noise, the leaves must still be on the trees, although the wind is busy blowing them off, bashing the branches together to shake them free. It is as if the wind were sent specially to do the job.

  In a big wind you wonder whether a tree with many trunks, such as the hazel, or any coppice tree, is designed to withstand wind by dispersing the stress through multiple, slender, streamlined shoots.

  I have been out gathering ripe haws along the hedges in Cowpasture Meadow. Six pounds of them sit on the kitchen floor in a yellow bag. After a night of tempest, a piercing clear blue sky and a wild, windy, sunny autumn d
ay. Unable to resist going out and slinging a big yellow Ikea bag incongruously over my shoulder and plucking haws off the bushes as shoppers in the big store pluck goods off the shelves. The rich clusters of berries so red I could scarcely look them in the eye. Plump, squidgy, pulpy things that tumble into the bag as I move my clenched fist down each branch, running it over a thorn here and there and mingling my own blood into the general redness. This is aboriginal work, all right.

  Aboriginal people from the central deserts of Australia would be astonished at the richness of our wild fruits here. I imagine them digging dandelion roots and roasting them into coffee, harvesting comfrey leaves for their minerals and medicinal powers, preserving the giant crops of blackberries to live off and nourish them all year round.

  I could eat these haws if I wanted to: stew them into a paste and add sugar or honey, or make some sort of savoury gruel – admittedly not very tasty but nutritious. I had soon picked enough to germinate into some seedlings two springs away from now. Crataegus monogyna is notoriously hard to germinate because there’s such a thick, hard sheath around each seed. The sheath is designed to break down slowly in the ground, or in the digestive system of a bird, and its thickness is meant to prevent the seed germinating prematurely in the autumn and being killed in winter.