Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  I split more logs, too, and carted them inside while they were good and dry, before the big rains heading here from the west could get at them. Dried by the wind and sun, they sit in a bookend stack at one end of the woodshed.

  Here’s how time works. When you’re young, your mind is running really fast, like a camera over-cranked to produce slow-motion film, so the days and weeks and summers seem incredibly long. When you grow old, the mind slows down, doesn’t clock so much sensory stimuli, so the days and years flash by. The same kind of thing happens in a day. Morning time seems longer because your mind is whirring. Evening time goes by faster, because you’ve slowed down – unless you’re being stimulated by lively company at dinner.

  I have a bonfire of nettles and dead burdock in the vegetable garden, and the dense smoke is whirling about in the wind.

  Making and tending a bonfire is an art. You must first build a small kindling-wood fire in a wigwam shape and get it roaring with red flame and glowing nicely. Then pile the bonfire material on top of it, being careful to leave a way for the air to get in and fuel the fire. What you’re doing is constructing a temporary store of vegetation and garden weeds. The heat from the fire is trapped in it, since it is really a powerful insulator, and the whole thing keeps on heating up until at last it spontaneously combusts. A lot of what looks like smoke is actually steam. In other words, the smoke from a green bonfire is largely steam, and a lot of carbon particles too.

  I love the way a bonfire whistles and sings as it burns. Sometimes it can sound like a fireworks show.

  As the bonfire burns, it will keep on opening up in the middle, like the mouth of a volcano. Your job is to fill that back up with fresh material from the outer edges of the bonfire stack, hooked and flicked in with a pitchfork. Never leave the pitchfork in the fire for more than a split second. Its ash handle is valuable, and very dry and inflammable.

  This house is where I’ve run away to. I ran away from London suburbia, and this is where I landed up. It was the place I imagined must exist all the time as a child, that I knew must be out there, in the country the other side of Pinner Hill and the Grimsdyke, which gave its name to the local elementary school.

  As a boy growing up in our tiny half-bungalow in the London suburbs, I longed for some alternative habitat to the cramped two bedrooms, tiny kitchen, bathroom and living room, and my father built it for me at the bottom of the garden. It was a wooden shed, and we called it ‘Cosy Cabin’.

  23rd October

  A noisy autumn afternoon. Minutes after the passing of the three whooping yelling boys and their dogs, the kingfisher is calling from the pond, and a pair of little owls are screeching from the oak on the common. Magpies, squirrels, a wren, a robin. Then a chainsaw strikes up across the field.

  It is extraordinary how fastidious bluebottles are. One stands on my desk notepad before me. With its front legs it preens its face, passing them repeatedly over first one eye and then the other. Then it seems to mime handwashing like a little actor playing Lady Macbeth. Next it raises its back legs, always squarely supported on the other four, and preens first its bum, then its wings, one after another, raising the legs in a double-jointed way over its back to reach behind and over each wing. Then it does the handwashing routine with the hind legs, rubbing them together almost as if in disgust at its own filthy ways.

  It is strange to think of flies being so fastidious, yet they are, and, considering the places they visit and the things they eat, very sensible they are too.

  Today, the trees suddenly look half bare, and leaves are tumbling down everywhere. The crows call hungrily, and birds flit from every branch. The kingfishers are here, fishing a swarming shoal of ten-spined sticklebacks in the moat by the common at the entrance to the garden. Every eight years or so, sticklebacks swarm in this way, perhaps after a summer of plentiful food. Keep some in an aquarium around April/May breeding time and see the males build nests and colour up dark black and deep red. Sticklebacks are the brambles of the ditches, with endless genetic variations between them, and local varieties.

  Desmond Morris’s first scientific paper, published in 1958, is entitled ‘The Reproductive Behaviour of the Ten-spined Stickleback’.

  The crow sits in the top of the tree.

  28th October

  A little dancing troupe of four roe-deer appeared on the lawn, flouncing their white bottoms and skipping like rocking horses from front to hind legs. They circled uncertainly, and took off for Cowpasture Meadow, accompanied by a hen pheasant that flew about them in circles. Men were shooting in the fields beyond my hedges and the lane, and they had probably come for sanctuary. I went out and stood watching them from the field entrance, and the curious thing was that wherever they went, the pheasant went with them, landing and taking off and circling round them like a familiar spirit. They soon decided that I meant them no harm and settled to browsing the clover tips. They were still there an hour later, but no sign of their pheasant friend.

  A little flock of fifteen goldfinches rose off the burdock burrs outside Rufus’s old cabin as I approached. They reminded me to sow seeds of the lesser teasel in Cowpasture Lane for their greater pleasure. We need more goldfinches here.

  29th October

  Bike ride – rooks and starlings feeding together on a ploughed field. Nasty orange weed-killed grass. If they’re going to ban smoking in public places, how about banning pesticide spraying in the open country?

  Can growing hay for horses be regarded as an agricultural activity? We no longer use horses for ploughing, and we don’t eat horses in Britain. Isn’t keeping horses, including racehorses, a branch of recreation? Harvesting hay from a common for sale to horse-owners, whose sole use of the horses is to ride them recreationally about the lanes, is not really an agricultural activity.

  On the other hand, harvesting hay for cattle is an agricultural activity, consistent with the traditions of a common.

  If recreation, rather than agriculture, is to be the new ‘harvest’ of our common, then surely we should be taking into account the needs of nature as a prime ‘user’ of the common. It means adjusting our thinking about the constituency of the common beyond the purely human. The old agricultural practices left plenty of slack for the plants, insects, birds and other animals to exercise what you might call their natural common rights. Under the traditional view, the owls and foxes exercised hunting and fishing rights over the common. The bumblebees exercised their right to gather pollen. Certain butterflies and moths exercised their long-standing right to lay eggs on particular plants or trees and their caterpillars exercised their right to forage on them. Skylarks exercised their right to rest undisturbed amongst the grasses of the common. Frogs, toads and newts had ancient rights to breed in the ponds and to enjoy unobstructed passage, often over quite long distances, to and from these ponds to their terrestrial feeding and hibernating grounds.

  We see all these sorts of activities going on in places like the African Serengeti on television, and we admire the spectacular examples offered to us, and the harmony of nature. Yet we can observe a process and a web of activity just as marvellous right here on our common, under our noses, if only we will take the trouble.

  November

  I went to exercise my rights to gather watercress from a pond on the common this morning. A brilliant clear, windy, sunny dawn, and I filled a small knapsack with cress and brought it home. When I washed it in the sink, and then left it floating in the full sink, little slugs and worms, perhaps nematodes, appeared on the bottom. It would be interesting to put the pond mud under a microscope.

  Fire – bathwater. At Steward’s Wood they had a bath poised over a wood fire to heat up the water. Trouble was they were in danger of being cooked, as cannibals are traditionally represented cooking missionaries (a thoroughly sound idea).

  6th November

  The swarming shoal of ten-spined sticklebacks is still active in the front moat by the common. The kingfishers are delighted. Much sounding of their little piping
hunting horns. ‘What time the grey-fly winds her sultry horn’ (Milton).

  The foundation of a first-class talent is eyesight – perception. The first-class writer always has first-class eyes. Those who observe quickly and vividly hold us with the details they see. Their stories have a flow that carries the reader.

  The rare first-class writer has, in addition to keen sight and hearing (it may be because of them), feelings or emotions that are equally keen.

  8th November

  I sawed up some of the kindling wood in my dry hedge by the big willow beside the common this morning. It was satisfying slicing through the laid and dried boughs, turning them into useful kindling and firewood, so no part of the trees I had cut two years before was to be wasted. Making bonfires of perfectly useful kindling wood for the sake of convenience is as stupid as driving an SUV because it wastes valuable fuel resources. Frittering is something we can no longer afford.

  A robin came down and joined me as soon as I shut down the din of the chainsaw, hopping about the sawn wood, pecking up grubs as I loaded logs into a wheelbarrow. It is good to feel the blessing of a wild bird trusting you like that.

  Starfish of orange peel drying on the stove top. The skin of the outstretched arms tautening as it dries, filling the room with the aroma of my mother’s Seville orange marmalade stewing in our kitchen.

  9th November

  Tonight in the Sunday-night stillness of my study, I listen to the buzzing of an ichneumon fly. Where does it get its energy from? How can it possibly keep on flying and flying round the room as interminably as it does? It comes to rest close to the black windowpanes, settling on an upright oak beam that seems to hold some fascination for it. It has returned again and again to hover around the entrance to a peg hole and even to enter it and explore inside. Perhaps it thinks of hibernating there. But for now it rests for twenty minutes at a time, almost camouflaged by the nutty brown of the beam, and just ruminates. It chews its mouth parts and preens its antennae, then rests motionless on the oak, then rubs its front legs together as though washing its hands.

  The strange thing about ichneumon flies is that each time there seems to be just one individual buzzing and droning about the room. Eventually it lands on the windowpane; I open the window for a moment, and it flies out. Five minutes later there’s another ichneumon fly in the room, and I go through the same rigmarole all over again. And so it goes, as though the same fly knows a secret door into my study and keeps sneaking back.

  Outside on the window there’s a moth, a small olive moth with a row of darker spots like hemming stitches along the lower border of each wing. Its plump little body is pressed against the glass, perhaps for warmth, and the creature has a wing span of just over an inch. It is a cool night, but not frosty, and there is no wind or rain.

  The ichneumons keep coming in here, keep bumping into the same spider’s web and getting hopelessly entangled before freeing themselves at the last moment as the spider dashes towards them to give them a lethal bite.

  Watching this fly and its continual buzzing, I realize all insects are living batteries. They charge themselves up on sunny summer days, then fly about discharging that energy.

  10.05 p.m. Now he’s stopped for a tea-break and a wash and brush-up. First the front legs and face-washing, then tip up the other way and rub the hind legs together, and reach them back over the abdomen and slide them up under the wings to give them a dusting down. Then wring the back legs together again as if in anguish, which it probably is, because a spider’s web is a hard thing to shrug off once you’ve got one stuck to you.

  An ichneumon is a big beefy fly dressed up to look like a wasp or bee. This one looks like a honey bee. It’s the right size and shape, and it’s even got a furry top to its head. And of course it sounds right too: it buzzes like a bee. It doesn’t actually sting, though, because it’sa fly. And its absolutely harmless. It wouldn’t even hurt a fly.

  I think you can understand a lot about a person from their taste in wood – especially furniture – chests of drawers, e.g. the featureless hardwoods of the 1920s.

  10th November

  Today I swam (thirty lengths) from 1.45 to 2.15, worked on TV outline of Touching Wood and finished carving my cherry sculpture for Viva [Pomp]. I carved out the centre with the chainsaw, smoothed the front surface with a sander, placed the piece on a willow log out on the concrete pad where I was working and filled the hollow with wood shavings. I set fire to these and they kindled immediately and flared up, flaming vigorously and smoking, the hollow acting as a chimney. The fire was so quick and fierce that, before I knew it, it was licking around the lips of the hollow and beginning to char the front surface, which I had meant to remain unsullied in pale contrast to the blackened interior. I doused the fire at once with the watering can and examined the steaming cherry wood. The chimney fire had produced just the right effect, and all I had to do was clean up the front surface with fine sandpaper and rub in a liberal dose of linseed oil on the flat cross-section of the trunk and on the convex outer surface, clad in beautiful deep red-brown flecked bark.

  I was delighted with this sculpture and felt my long-distance apprenticeship to David Nash was going pretty well. I had followed his principle of charring the interior, thus emphasizing the hollow, and accentuating the pure line of the aperture running gracefully from top to bottom of the upright wood.

  None of this was in the least original, but it felt profoundly satisfying to be doing the work. The making itself was pure pleasure, and I felt that as long as I was always honest about the origins and inspiration of the piece in the work of David Nash, it was perfectly legitimate as a form of five-finger exercise.

  I drew the piece in charcoal from the burnt spinney, and then wrapped it up in black cartridge paper for Viva’s fortieth birthday present.

  11th November

  It’s mid November and crickets are still singing outside the kitchen door at Mellis, and bumblebees are still visiting the nasturtium flowers.

  12th November

  I have a hedgehog in residence beside the Aga. It’s a young one, no bigger than my outstretched hand, and I found it in a stupor, exposed beside my track in broad daylight. Young hedgehogs are vulnerable to this kind of inexplicable malaise at this time of year; lacking enough body mass to withstand sudden cold, they seem to run low on blood sugar and grow torpid. This leaves them dangerously exposed to attack by winter-hungry crows, or magpies, or hawks. In any case, once they have grown this cold, they often simply lose the ability to get up and look for food and water, and decline further into death.

  I brought this animal inside and placed it beside the Aga, where it curled up and slept for hours before stirring and eating some cat food. It then drank vigorously for six minutes, emptying a large dish of water, then slept again, creeping inside a cardboard box of dry leaves of ash and mulberry. The cats take little interest in it, as they’re quite used to sharing their feeding bowl with wild hedgehogs. The little thing has gradually gained strength over the last twenty-four hours and has explored the kitchen, eaten more food and retired into the box again, where it noisily goes about its occupational therapy with the leaves.

  There’s something medieval about a hedgehog: the scavenging peasant of the undergrowth, the hedge bottom. What we love about them is their vulnerability, which they share with human babies: the way they curl up in that foetal ball, shielding the soft furry underbelly.

  I’m trying to work out what that sound is, exactly, inside the box. Is it chomping, the squeaking of one mandible against another? The animal is an indefatigable trencherman or woman.

  A brilliant sunny day, and an excellent full night’s deep sleep from 12.30 to 8.30 a.m., in the big room, scented with stored apples, early sunlight slanting in.

  In a dark Norfolk lane driving at speed behind Adam Nicholson in his VW, the brown toasted beech, oak and chestnut leaves swirling and tumbling in the slipstream of three cars as we whiz along beside wide verges and hedges. This is how roads are
meant to be. No mean farmers pinching bits of land.

  We go through North Creake, past endless brick and flint walls with brick copings beautifully made by craftsmen. Walls, endless, five feet tall, fine verges where I’ve camped in the past. Out through Holkham, past the hall, and still the flint wall continues, the beechwoods and the fallow deer within.

  ‘As I walked out one midsummer morning’ is how Adam sees my journey. He sees the interludes at home as being OK too. In a way, you end up writing about home when you travel away like this.

  18th November

  I set out up Clay Street in Thornham Magna this afternoon, in quest of a little medieval meadow full of ancient pollard oaks. It was, I had been told in strictest confidence by a local tree-detective, a pheasant park in miniature, a tiny wood pasture, and so it proved.

  Clay Street is a narrow no-through road branching away from the Thornham Horseshoes between old hedges of ash, maple and blackthorn with an old pollard oak every fifteen or twenty yards, and patches of the shocking pink fruits of the spindle tree.