Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  A late-afternoon walk in the big black overcoat with a stratum of mist settling above the common, severing the trees and bushes, pale, soft white line decapitating the trees. I took photos as the sun went down, then gathered hawthorns off the cow-worn thorn tree in the cattle dip on the way to the stone bridge.

  An amazing sight across the valley of the Pountney Stream: Michael’s tractor towing a muck-spreader disgorging clouds of smoke and fire from the hot steaming dung it was flinging on to the field. A horizon of wild steam against the silhouette of the dark wood at Burgate.

  The cow-worn hollow under the thorn tree: dark loam scattered with flints.

  29th November

  Last night, blood-curdling sounds of a squirrel either fighting another or, more likely, being carried away by a cat or some other predator. Its gurgles, gratings and screeches gradually grew fainter and more distant, until they disappeared into the night wind.

  My early life as a trespasser in the farmland on the fringes of the suburbs laid the foundations of the Robin Hood in me. We learnt to live lives in the woods and fields like rabbits constantly on the alert for signs of Mr Stimpson, the farm bailiff, or any of his henchmen. He was the Sheriff of Nottingham, and we were Robin Hoods. We crept about in the corn, or hid in the fringes of the wood intently observing Stimpson’s movements about the farm. We studied the patterns and rhythms of his day. We learnt to recognize the excitement of his poultry when he fed them and knew he would be sufficiently distracted at such moments for us to make a bolt across the green field to the cover of the trees, which had a carp pond at their centre.

  I remember the day we first discovered the carp in that pond. It was like finding pieces of eight glinting out of the green depth.

  30th November

  Tonight at 8.15 p.m. in pitch darkness, a goldcrest suddenly appeared on the study window. It clung to the window frame and looked alarmed, but stayed there, pecking at the odd insect, then flew away after a couple of minutes, back into the windy night.

  December

  Fire. It begins with a slender, splinter stick of poplar, a matchstick. How many matchsticks are there in a single poplar?

  When wind blows through poplars, they sound like a match alighting when you strike it.

  To light a fire, you start from small beginnings. Good firelighters understand small beginnings. Kindling, what a pleasant word it is – how warm and friendly.

  Writing about building the house. My inky notebooks of the time are smudged with brick dust and thumbed with grimy hands. The record drawings of roof trusses, lengths of nails, calculations of moments of force: all the stuff I wish I had paid attention to in Physics. The engineering I had needed to learn. A crash course, if that’s the word, in engineering.

  6th December

  Pockets. Boys pick up odd things – a snail, a pebble, a leaf, a dead beetle, a chrysalis, a bit of sheep’s wool on a fence – and their pockets soon come to resemble birds’ nests. The contents of the pocket have no intrinsic money value, but they do have great sentimental value to their owner. They become a microcosm of the local landscape, of the boy’s habitat and haunts.

  The boy’s pocket is marsupial. It is close to a secret drawer – or a secret safe, such as the biscuit tin I had buried in the garden full of my fossils and even pocket money. The biscuit tin was buried under a false roof of moss, earth and dead leaves.

  Is Larkin any good? Try this: ‘It deepens like a coastal shelf.’ Or try this: ‘the moon thinned/To an air-sharpened blade’. What about Ted Hughes? ‘Deep as England’ (the word ‘deep’ again). ‘The hare strays down the highway/Like a root going deeper.’

  We are always talking about the visible, the tip of the iceberg, tree, but what of the roots?

  On a frosty morning, apples shining in the sun on the bare tree by the roadside and the gleaming litter of apples beneath.

  The harrow patterns on the frosty fields. A solitary blackbird begins a spring-like song in a tree. A man is in his bath behind a massive wall of cypresses in the row of cottages, singing. ‘That’ll be the Day’ by Buddy Holly, over and over again. Man and blackbird. ‘That’ll be the day when I die.’ That is the line he keeps singing.

  The hazel handle round which I wrapped my kite string and unwound it as my yellow box kite rose and swooped in the wind. The hazel handle became smoother and even smoother, its freckled bark polished to a perfect mirror that reflected the sun. And it became a musical instrument as it hummed and thrilled to the vibrations of the taut kite string.

  There was nail-biting, and the bitter aloes they painted on the nails to stop it. Then stuttering. Dreading my turn to read in class. As it came round to me, I would be searching ahead in the prose for the hurdles, which all stood out as if in orange headlights: ‘the this’, ‘the that’.

  I arrive chez Ronnie down the hollow-way track that skirts the steep brown side of a ploughed hill at around 3 p.m. Ronnie’s washing is on the line and a couple of plastic bowls and a biscuit tin full of wooden pegs are beneath it on the lawn. The washing line has been stretched between a pair of old apple trees.

  You go up a couple of stone steps and walk straight into the living room, with a low beamed ceiling and fire glowing in the open wood-stove. To the right of the inglenook, where the copper used to heat the household water, is a neat stack of split firewood five feet high. Ronnie splits it himself, and enjoys the exercise with the axe. Two spotted white cats drape themselves on the back of armchairs as Ronnie goes upstairs to fetch yet another book he has just written or edited.

  He tells me about the Singing Men of the church bands in Thomas Hardy’s time, and Hardy’s story of how, when one of the Singing Men was buried, the others wanted to stand round his grave singing, but the vicar forbade it because it was too wet and stormy, so the Singing Men went back at night after the burial and sang anyway.

  Ronnie is always full of stories like this, squirrelled away in his head: how Keats went to see the publisher he shared with Clare, although the two never met, and, finding the publisher out and a sheet of paper on the table, wrote a note on the back of one of Clare’s poems. How the gamekeepers always kept a gibbet on which they hung the dead bodies of the animals they killed: weasel, stoat, magpie, kestrel, sparrow hawk, squirrel. Moleskins were collected to sew together and make moleskin waistcoats.

  Ronnie says much nonsense is talked about Suffolk houses having low ceilings because the people were shorter in those days. Actually, it was about the availability of trees and their natural proportions – they dictated the form or proportions of the house.

  People working outside in the fields all day weren’t at all bothered about having windows in their house. A view was the very last thing they wanted after eighteen hours on open fields. They wanted to creep inside somewhere warm and comfortable and sit down to a meal and go to bed. There was no time for gazing out of windows.

  18th December

  A tortoiseshell taxies up the windowpane, flexing its wings as if seeking the optimum angle for flight. The little insomniac should be fast asleep, immersed in hibernation, its metabolism slowed to the point of torpor. Instead, its colours are vivid with life, antennae raised straight, and the fur on its back luxuriant. Now it suns itself beneath my anglepoise. Amazing to see such beauty of summer in winter.

  Cycling out this brilliant morning, I think the bike ride is like boring a geological sample through the strata of local Suffolk. First, I encounter a walker, who returns a surprised ‘Good morning’, clearly caught off guard by my salutation, and not at all sure about the correct form. Then I pass an old boy in a car who slows down for me and we exchange waves. His is a proper Suffolk wave: lingering, with the forefinger raised as if for the peak of the cap. Then I pass another cyclist coming the other way. I say ‘Good morning’ and she just keeps looking straight ahead with no sign of acknowledgement even. I very nearly turn round and remonstrate, I feel so angry and offended at such manners. Most of the people I see are armoured in some way – the people in thei
r enormous 4WD armoured vehicles.

  The little shadow of each fallen leaf across the common. The old hawthorns, pruned by the cattle to look like orchard apples. The single clouds hanging like balloons.

  The shadow of a hedge thrown across the road like a rood screen (opposite Burgate Church).

  Reading Howards End under the elm, you come to see more and more what isn’t there but once was. You see the ghosts of once great trees that have fallen. You understand how Forster felt when he spoke of the ‘red rust’ of suburban sprawl creeping across the countryside. Now its equivalent is the creeping disease of unsociability. People have brought the manners of Oxford Street with them to the country and look at you oddly if you greet them in a lane or out walking on the common.

  It’s not hard to imagine a wildly dancing woman into the ash tree that embraces the house. The way the wind silvers her hair in the backs of the leaves. The way the whole tree sways and bends with the wind’s passion.

  Sometimes an author and his title become one and the same thing in your imagination. So it is with Eric Rolls, whose Australian classic A Million Wild Acres tells the history of the Pilliga Forest in northern New South Wales through the hundreds of stories of its Aboriginal natives, settlers, woodcutters, timber-getters and outlaws. The writer himself has come to seem a million wild acres, filled with histories and natural histories, so deeply in love with his land that he has become the land. Like a shaman, he has taken on its skin.

  I was introduced to A Million Wild Acres a few years ago when my Sydney friend Tony Barrell sent me a copy with a note saying ‘I think you’ll like this.’ I certainly did. I have never really stopped reading the book since then. It has been a never-ending source of pleasure and fascination.

  Eric Rolls writes his history of the Pilliga Forest in a series of anecdotes and portraits that accretes bit by bit into a whole picture. Les Murray calls Rolls’s technique ‘pointilliste’ and says he is disobedient in the best sense, for being his own man when it comes to writing.

  I love to watch a storm approaching across the fields and over Burgate Wood, with the dark backdrop of sky rolling up, and the willows and ash trees still lit up by the sun close by, so they glow and radiate the brightness of their winter architecture. Here I am in my study at half past nine in the morning with the electric light on, and two pullovers.

  The Whole Earth Catalogue, our bible as self-builders of our residences in the hippie-ish days of the 1970s, was subtitled ‘access to tools’. ‘With tools,’ ran the editorial preface, ‘you can do more or less anything.’

  Buckminster Fuller weighed in at the front with an encouraging piece about geodesic domes, and a movement was launched all over the world. They showed the earth as a tiny planet on the front cover, as photographed from space.

  Tools were what we needed, and tools were what we went out and sought. I went to farm auctions and bought impossibly long wooden stack ladders nobody needed or wanted any more for a few pounds. I bought a giant 1948 Fordson Major tractor with a six-cylinder Perkins diesel engine in perfect working order, and a full armoury of ploughs, harrows, cultivators and hay-cutters to go with it, for well under £600.

  Something is eating a leaf. Everything is so still I can hear it – like my rabbits in their cage in the morning before school, chewing on the hogweed I collected along the lane. The moat is frozen. Leaves are frozen in it like ash in amber. There’s a slight smokiness under the ice where water flows in through a dyke. Chirruping of magpies, scolding, tut-tutting of blackbirds.

  Very bright blue frosty day. Moat and ponds properly frozen for the first time this year.

  In Burgate Wood. Dozens of squirrels scamper off across the ride. Clattering of dry brown oak leaves falling like snow.

  Huge old cratered coppice stools of hazel, hornbeam and maple. A hornbeam stool has collapsed, spreadeagled on the wood floor like a starfish.

  Pulmonaria patch. Hornbeam with thirteen stems. Moat is dry round the banked manor site. Dead hornbeam leaves. Hazels on the site, dead nettle stems, coppiced ash and hazel and oak, remains of an old causeway. Walking along the bottom of the moat. Shrivelled dog’s mercury. Stumps, like rocks, mossed, lichens.

  Sudden ‘sinking’ into moat. Huge coppice ash, cratered coppice maple, ten feet across the wandering stool. Snail shells amongst dead leaves. Rabbits bolting through wood. Sudden shocking pink of spindle-tree fruit.

  What kind of freedom is it to walk or to cycle on our roads if we are forced to wear luminous jackets like lifeboatmen in broad daylight?

  Outside loo frozen up. Stopped down the mains tap and wedged up the cistern ballcock.

  Christmas Eve. Rufus and I spend Friday in the snow and frost, wooding in the spinney beyond the round pond – old dead hawthorns that have crashed down in gales.

  In the morning I walked out past the shepherd’s hut in the snow and up flew two cock pheasants (arguing), a magpie and a wood pigeon.

  Walnuts. Open a walnut and something very like a brain drops out.

  A walnut boat in the bath with a sail.

  It’s funny, you read someone like T. H. White for an hour in the early morning and your mind grooves on to him and you find yourself writing away downhill as if guided and balanced by his invisible hand at your elbow. You don’t have to even think about a thing. Just push off and freewheel.

  ‘Then, when I am dead, they must bury me in a bend of the river, like Colonel Leslie.’ What does it mean, the bend in the river? Why might a place at the bend of a river, in the crook of its twisting, be regarded as sacred? Is it that the river contains it somehow? Why would the river choose to kink itself at such a place? Perhaps because of some special power in it. Some force field.

  27th December

  Snow, early morning, settled on everything. Trees sugared and frosted. Tracks (a few morning pheasants and a feral cat) in the snow.

  The hedge in the long meadow casts shadows of shelter: marginally warmer spots, protected from the chill of the wind, where the snow doesn’t settle so much and where the grass remains green and the molehills brown. I looked for blewits but found none.

  This is the one moment when you can be in a wood alone, and know for certain you are alone, because there are no other tracks but yours.

  30th December

  The very act of writing at this time of year is a ritual reaffirmation of life to come in the longer, lighter days, like the lighting of a Yule log. The phoenix – flame of the imagination.

  The very presence of birds in the hazel tree by the moat presages spring, even though they’re starving and in a state of deep dependence on the bird feeder I fill with peanuts every other day.

  31st December

  New Year’s Eve walk.

  Dad and I used to sing songs on our walks to keep the rhythm going. ‘Ilkley Moor Baht’ at’. ‘John Brown’s Body’.

  At night you can see the parish boundary pear tree before you. It’s not a real tree, just a shadow of another tree.

  You look up at the stars and you’re at sea, you’re sailing. All round the common are the landlocked people, their lights winking from behind their curtains. They’re stuck in front of their televisions, having their dinners, doing up their shoelaces, ironing, worrying about tomorrow, working on their computers, voyaging on the web. They’re all far, far away from here, not navigating through the wind across the wide open sea of the common.

  I watch the planes criss-crossing the night sky. Their lights are flashing; they’re flying out of Mildenhall and Lakenheath. And a pond looms up like a mirage, just the dull reflection of the moon in it. The moon is also lying in a puddle, and the lit windows are reflected too.

  ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave…’

  Now, as I turn back along the common, the wind is at my back, and I am no longer battling it. All is suddenly quiet and peaceful, and the wind is no more than a gentle hand on my back. Clouds riding the wind under the stars and the orange glow of Diss beneath them as they cross the common. I hea
r a distant car approaching, make my way off the road on to the tussocky grass and move deeper into the darkness. As the headlights swing round a bend behind me, I feel like a rabbit caught in the sudden sweep of light, and see my long straight extended shadow marching half a mile and more over the lit ground.

  The car is slowing down. It’s stopping. Why? Because it caught a glimpse of me as it rounded the corner and its headlight swept the common. Just a glimpsed figure far out in the open ground at dead of night. What is he thinking? I feel like a hunted animal. He just sits there, lights on, and keeps putting his foot down on the brake pedal – a nervous twitch? Now he moves off, slowly, as if undecided. I watch the lights recede.

  I half trip in the softness of a molehill. A young owl twitters on a straggly hedgerow by a stream.

  My overcoat is like a sail, with the wind driving me forward, the collar straight up like a ruff around my neck and the vulnerable back of the skull, a little button fastening it right up round my ears.

  I’m following the dark brown line of a cow track. The sudden dazzle of headlights approaching me, radiating into a thousand icicles in the dark. A porcupine of light.

  Puddles in the scuppers of the road. Pushed aside into the scuppers of the road. Drenched in the scuppers of the road as the car speeds by.

  This wind is what an oak has to stand up to every night. A pair of big trees stand on the common outside Hall Farm. The poplar almost threadbare, the oak solid and substantial; the poplar trying to emulate the way the oak defies gravity with a long horizontal bough, but failing – the next really savage gale will probably tear it off. Now it stands like a matchstick, a scarecrow in torn rags.