by Roger Deakin
What he calls the ‘countlessness’ of bluebells never fails to delight Gerard Manley Hopkins. Alone in Powder Hill Wood near Oxford on 4 May 1866, he writes in his journal: ‘I reckon the spring is at least a fortnight later than last year for on Shakespeare’s birthday, April 21, it being the tercentenary, Ilbert [a fellow undergraduate at Balliol] crowned the bust of Shakespeare with bluebells and put it in his window, and they are not plentiful yet.’ Hopkins is always trying to define the special essence of the bluebell’s beauty. In a little wood near Balliol College, he observes that ‘they came in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the land with vein-blue.’ Perhaps, for him, they bring the heavens to earth. A journal entry for 18 May 1870 reads:
One day when the bluebells were in bloom I wrote the following. I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it. It[s inscape] is [mixed of] strength and grace, like an ash [tree]. The head is strongly drawn over [backwards] and arched down like a cutwater [drawing itself back from the line of the keel].
Hopkins continues, almost as though he is patiently dissecting the flowers, noticing the ‘cockled petal-ends’, the ‘square splay’ of the mouth and the ‘square-in-rounding turns of the petals’, whose jauntiness always reminds me of a jester’s cap. The comparison with the ash, whose strength and supple grace preoccupy Hopkins, is interesting. He seems attracted to flowers and trees that hang their heads, as Christ hangs his head on the cross in medieval paintings: catkins, ash keys, bluebells. They all arch down ‘like a cutwater’. Elsewhere in the journal, he sees the ‘overhung necks’ of bluebells ‘like the waves riding through a whip that is being smacked’ and concludes ‘they have an air of the knights at chess.’
Although the taxonomists have rechristened the plant Hyacinthoides, I still prefer the old name we grew up calling it: Endymion non-scriptus. The shepherd Endymion, son of Zeus and the nymph Calyce, was lying asleep in a cave on Mount Latmus one night when Selene, the moon, first saw him, fell in love with him and kissed his closed eyes. He is said to have fathered fifty of Selene’s daughters and returned to the cave, where he fell into a dreamless sleep, never growing old but preserving his youth for ever. These are the bones of the story, as retold by Robert Graves. Keats, writing to his young sister Fanny from Oxford in 1817, where he was working on his poem Endymion, tells it like this:
Perhaps you would like to know what I am writing about – I will tell you – Many Years ago there was a young handsome Shepherd who fed his flocks on a Mountain’s Side called Latmus – he was a very contemplative sort of a Person and lived solit[a]ry among the trees and Plains little thinking – that such a beautiful Creature as the Moon was growing mad in Love with him – However so it was; and when he was asleep on the Grass, she used to come down from heaven and admire him excessively from a long time; and at last could not refrain from car[r]ying him away in her arms to the top of that high Mountain Latmus while he was a dreaming …
The dreamy lake of bluebells in Tiger Wood, some still in bud, like the snake’s heads Hopkins saw, and the hanging mist of their scent plausibly suggest the eternal sleep of Endymion. And each arched shepherd’s crook of a flower stem certainly belongs to him.
Quite why so many woodland plants are poisonous is an interesting question, but the bluebell is one of them. The sleep of Endymion is for ever. As a wood engraver, John Nash’s botanical triumph is the celebrated Poisonous Plants, Deadly, Dangerous and Suspect, published in 1927. In a review of an edition of Nash woodcuts in Hortus in 1988, Ronald Blythe writes:
His garden was always plentifully supplied with henbane, hemlock, monk’s hood, foxglove, meadow saffron, spurge laurel, datura, caper spurge, herb Paris, Helleborus foetidus and other such species which he had often been found staring at, much as one might at a murderer. He was proud, not only of their robust growth, but of their capabilities, and I have often watched him cast a wary eye over the gaunt reaches of the henbane. Gardens were not entirely benign places to him; they contained their darker moments.
Ronald and I had walked through Tiger Wood in the snow the winter before. The day was brilliant, the trees sparkling and frilled with frost. A white line of snow was pencilled up the north-east side of each tree. John Nash loved woods, particularly in winter, when their architecture is revealed. The lines of the nude trees are so much stronger. The bones of the landscape stand out. He loved the ruins of woods: dead trees fallen over one another, fungi and brittle twigs. He hated woods to be tidied, and the fashion for management that rubbed out all evidence of past inhabitants, all natural continuity of living denizens. As a war artist in the First World War, he painted the shattered woods on the battlefields of France. They came to stand for the dead and maimed of both sides. Some of the action took place in or around woods, which afforded cover for troops or tanks, until they were blown to pieces. Their skeletons might be the only landmarks left on the trenched and cratered waste land. Nash writes of ‘the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas’. He went out to France as a member of the Artists’ Rifles, taking only a copy of George Borrow’s The Bible in Spain. In the winter of 1917 he found himself in the front line at Marcoing near Cambrai, and on 30 December was ordered to advance from the front-line trenches across open ground with eighty fellow soldiers. Nash returned with just eleven of his comrades and painted Over the Top to commemorate the experience. Bayonets mounted, the men clamber out of a trench and advance into a mist across a bleak expanse of snow. Some already lie dead; some have even been thrown back into the trench. Trees, snapped off by shells, their limbs amputated, appear in most of Nash’s war paintings, and woods often provide their titles: Oppy Wood, 1917, Evening, for example.
The trenches consumed vast quantities of wood, since they had to be floored and connected with miles of duckboarding over the mud and water, and often reinforced with wooden stakes to prevent a collapse of their walls. And the stretchers, thousands of them, were of canvas between a pair of ash spars with turned handles. In his great war poem In Parenthesis, a first-hand evocation of life and death on the Western Front in prose and verse, David Jones writes of the ‘muffled hammerings of wood on wood’ he heard continuously as trenches up ahead were dug and timbered, and wood piling driven in. Jones was an infantryman in the London Welsh Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Western Front in the winter of 1915/16. Part 4 of the long poem contains the dramatic account of the death and wounding of the poet’s comrades and enemies in close combat in Biez Copse. Those who planned the campaigns were so deeply divorced from any sense of nature or history that the French woods were all given codes. Like John Nash, Jones, who was himself an artist as well as a poet and Catholic scholar, often describes war in terms of wounded nature and the disfiguring of trees and woods:
Very slowly the dissipating mist reveals saturate green-grey flats, and dark up-jutting things; and pollard boles by more than timely wood-craftsman’s cunning pruning dockt, – these weeping willows shorn.
And the limber-wheel, whose fractured spokes search upward vainly for the rent-off mortised rim.
In David Jones’s poem, as in the paintings of John Nash, the ravaging of nature, the dishonouring of woods, comes to represent the unnatural perversity of the war. The limber-wheel’s broken spokes detached from their mortised rim suggests Hamlet’s ‘The time is out of joint, O cursèd spite/That ever I was born to set it right.’
Shakespeare is ever-present in the undertones of the poem. Both artists are acutely aware that the woods being desecrated are one with the forest of Arden, or the ancient mythology of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. They are the province of Oberon and Titania. ‘No one, I suppose, however much not given to association, could see infantry in tin hats with ground-sheets over their shoulders, with sharpened pine-stakes in their hands, and not recall “… or we may cram,/Within this wooden O …”’ writes Jones in his preface. Later he describes an old timber barn where the soldiers wer
e given lectures on the very wet days, ‘with its great roof, sprung, unpreaching, humane, and redolent of a vanished order’. The woods represent human culture as well as wild nature. And the ‘woodsman’s cunning pruning’, one of the staples of rural life, has also fallen victim to the barbarity of war. The flowers, trees and birds are the only vestiges of anything familiar left in the waste land of the trenches, and they themselves are as vulnerable as the soldiers:
And now the gradient runs more flatly toward the separate scared saplings, where they make fringe for the interior thicket and you take notice.
There between the thinning uprights at the margin straggle tangled oak and flayed sheeny beech-bole, and fragile birch whose silvery queenery is draggled and ungraced and June shoots lopt and fresh stalks bled runs the Jerry trench. And cork-screw stapled trip-wire to snare among the briars and iron warp with bramble weft with meadow-sweet and lady-smock for a fair camouflage.
The perversion of traditional greenwood values by the war, and the natural kinship between human beings and woods, between sap and blood, pruning and amputation, are constant themes throughout In Parenthesis. The irony is that in this strange land, he is in two woods at once. The old, self-renewing, playful, benign greenwood with its unicorns and may queens has given way to a vision of hell: a dying and deadly wood, an ambush, abandoned by its animals and birds, its magic suppressed.
The keepers in this wood set their traps for men, driving out unicorns as well as birds and foxes. War drives out poetry from the woods, its natural habitat, and Jones, as steeped in Shakespeare and the classical world of myth as Keats, laments ‘the pity of it’. He knows that woods were always places of sacrifice and ritual death as well as merry-making, freedom and romance.
As Ronald and I walked through Tiger Wood that winter’s day, following a stream along the valley, he spoke of the woods as havens for intimacy in the past. All country children, he said, were conceived in woods, because the cottages were simply too full of other people. Children, grandparents and others lived hugger-mugger in the cramped rooms, so couples adjourned to the woods for privacy. David Jones is intensely aware of the irony that his war-racked woods in France once stood for continuity and procreation: ‘To groves always men come both to their joys and their undoing. Come lightfoot and heart’s-ease and school-free; walk on a leafy holiday with kindred and kind; come perplexedly with first loves – to tread the tangle frustrated, striking – bruising the green.’
We walked over the dormant bluebells of Tiger Wood that winter, flicking at the snow with sticks selected from a sheaf Ronald keeps near his door. His was a bird’s-claw stave of blackthorn that had belonged to John Nash, topped by a palm-smoothed egg of hard, dark wood clutched by a scaly foot. Mine was a thumb-stick of hazel, originally carved and owned by John Masefield. As a means to boost morale and keep the soldiers under his command from losing their wits as they sat in the trenches, he taught them to cut coppice sticks from the woods and whittle them into walking sticks. Masefield had given this stick to his Oxford friend Dr ‘Bird’ Partridge, who eventually handed it on to Ronald Blythe. Asked by Robert Frost why he had enlisted to fight in the war, Edward Thomas famously scooped up a handful of English soil and offered it as his reply. Perhaps the hazel wand I held, carved by a soldier-poet who had survived the war, would have been part of his answer, a green baton to pass on.
The Rookery
At dusk I crossed a hilltop Essex meadow towards the swelling tump of a wood, Slough Grove. The General, who used to live in Little Horkesley Hall down in the valley, always pronounced it ‘Slow Grove’, with two rounded ‘o’s. There’s a spring and a damp, ferny place in the middle halfway down the hill, so perhaps that’s the slough. Venus shone from above the trees in an inky-blue sky, and the wood was a black castle, its roundness echoing the greater roundness of the hill itself.
The last of the rooks had hoisted home and settled in their dark constellation of nests to roost. They raised a chorus of alarm and flew up as I approached, scattering into the sky as if I had a gun, then circled off downhill to the lower part of the wood, slipping sideways to lose height. No stars yet, only Venus, and a fragment of a vapour trail from a jet leaving Stansted forty miles away. Strange how beautiful such sky-litter can be. I entered the wood through a farm gate that clanked, went downhill along a ride, then turned left on another that traversed the hillside. In the softening dusk, the wide wood floor glowed with bluebells, the kind of pensive blue Les Murray invokes when he says, ‘Shade makes colours loom and be thoughtful.’
I wanted a front-row seat at the rookery and headed towards the very tallest of the slender ashes reaching up to top the canopy. It is a mixed bluebell wood of hazel, ash, sweet chestnut, oak and cherry, with a good deal of elder in its under-storey, and interesting things like wild redcurrants. The elms that once dominated the top of the hill and would have housed the rookery are beginning to grow back. Rooks always seem to favour elms, provided they are tall enough. Some of the other trees, mostly cherries, lean at odd angles, monuments to past storms. These are called widow-makers by lumberjacks because of the explosive energy in the sprung trunk, coiled to kick back and fling the saw in your face or just knock you flat. Beyond an old hunched sweet chestnut, I came to a glade directly beneath a group of nests and pitched the bivouac pup tent facing east on to the ride. Pink campions and tousled goosegrass rose on either side, camouflaging it nicely. Nettles were splashed white. I turned in early and lay on my back in my sleeping bag with my head out of the tent, studying the noisy neighbours upstairs. Gilbert White writes of a little girl he knew who, as she was going to bed, with the rooks chorusing outside the village, used to remark that they were saying their prayers. The parent birds had all returned from their foraging and sat about the nests with their young, now almost fledged. Every now and again, as if blown by a gust of wind, they would all take off and flap about above the wood, cawing loudly, then settle back one by one.
At ten o’clock it was dark and they still hadn’t settled down, but their treetop conversation was more spasmodic, their cries more tentative: an odd sort of lullaby for a solitary camper. Then, nest by nest, they fell silent, until all I heard was the shaking out of wing feathers or the click of preening bills. The night was so still, and sound carried so clearly in the humidity of the wood, that I could even hear the fledglings as they shifted position in the nest. I wriggled about in my own nest, drawing up the sleeping bag to lie face to face with the stars, head and shoulders out of the tent in the warm May night.
Twilight, the gradual softening of the day into darkness, is surely the gentlest, most natural way to prepare for sleep. And yet it is a pleasure we deny ourselves with the switch on the bedside lamp. Even the guttering of a candle or the afterglow of a paraffin lantern is less abrupt. A couple of generations ago most country people went to bed when it was dark, at least in summertime. And so we miss the time of darkling shades in which our pupils can dilate by slow degrees and dreams drift in as, wide-eyed, we enter the rook-black night.
Trevor, Vicky and their children Thea and Luke, who own and care for this wood, said they often encounter badgers and foxes, muntjac and roe-deer in it. Whenever I see a muntjac, with its neat brown coat and apparently docked tail, my first thought is always that I am seeing someone’s stray dog. I lay half expecting to see one skipping innocently along, taking the occasional nibble at a plant-top, sampling the wood. Unfortunately, they have a preference for hazel, as roe-deer do, and can prevent the regeneration of coppice hazel by nibbling the young shoots. All grazing animals have their own favourite leaves, and others they find distasteful. Oak is not generally much liked because it is full of tannin. Holly and ivy are popular, and fallow deer enjoy ash. Most deer, according to Oliver Rackham, hate aspen and chestnut, and all love elm and hawthorn. The special food fad of muntjac, he says, is to eat the flowers of oxlips.
The sky can seem very pale in summer once you’ve grown accustomed to the darkness. I could make out the silhouettes of t
rees, but the rooks and their nests melted into the general blackness. In the wood, complete silence but for the occasional minor rustling further off. Starlight filtered down, strained through the black leaves. Then I heard a tawny owl enter and traverse the wood calling to other, more distant owls, which called back. Even the cuckoo was singing in the dark for a while. As I began to drift in and out of sleep, drugged by bluebells, I felt doubly submerged, a long way beneath the surface on the sea floor of the wood. Once I was woken with a jolt by a sudden mad commotion in the rookery caused, I suppose, by a bad bird dream: a pouncing fox in the skull of a rook that sent a wave of alarm through the canopy. Some rooks took flight and circled briefly in the dark before they settled back. Do birds fly in their sleep? I heard the whisper of wood-pigeon wings as a pair slipped away into the darkness.
Hours later, while the sun was still in the horizon, I drifted back into consciousness to the most raucous of dawn choruses. It was still only ten past four. Rooks are early risers, but not as early as crows, which are often already on the wing above my meadows in the hour before dawn. From my rabbit’s perspective I was aware that in the birdsong, as in the physical zoning of the wood, there was an under-storey. The sweetness of robins and chiffchaffs descanted subtly from hazel or elder beneath the harsh, relentless chorus of the rooks in the ash-tops. Blackbirds arrowed silently through the shadows. Mist swam into the deep green of my glade through the waving seaweed of nettles, goosegrass, pink campion, bluebells, grasses and ferns. In the foreground, burdock, ground ivy, self-heal and bugle. Further off, layers of vapour hung in the new shoots of the hazel coppice. In Suffolk, when a misty wood like this is called ‘rooky’, as in Macbeth’s ‘the rooky wood’, it has nothing to do with rooks. I turned and lay on my back, sliding myself like a caddis grub out of the mouth of my tent to gaze up the skirts of the wood, following the long, smooth limbs of ash to their golden tops where the rooks’ nests are. They say rooks nest high like this when the summer will be fine. Young rooks will always return and try to nest in the parent rookery, but may have to settle for nest sites on an outlying tree somewhere on the margins. Settling my head back into the mossy pillow, I exulted in the luxury of waking in a rookery in full cry.
