Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  Reading of this I was reminded of the thought, years ago, developed at the time in pictorial detail in my mind, of taking a large piece of paper up on holiday to Bird How, in the upper valley of the Esk, below the crown of Scafell, Eskdale Pike, Bowfell and Crinkly Crags. On holiday with my singer-friend and her two children, I wanted to draw the outline of the immediate land around the shepherd’s kippen, divide the map up and describe square by square every living thing, plant and creature we could between us find. The closer we examined the small stream and stonewalls and patches of bracken and trunks of trees the more excited I imagined us becoming. Sue (aged nine then), who loved drawing, and Bevan (aged eleven), who loved order, I saw being sceptical at first until, in the peace and pleasure of the place, they lost their inhibitions and threw themselves into the project.

  Walking giant shapes into the dewy grass on the side of the fell, in imitation of Richard Long, was as far as we got in art-making.

  7 October

  My house is full of spiders, of varied shapes and sizes. In the corner of a wall by the log burner in the small end room sits a spider I hadn’t before noticed, rust-red in colour, with relatively short back legs and pronounced white eyes on its lozenge-shaped body. There is, I am told, not a single spider in Britain which hurts man in any way at all.

  Beth will soon be moving from her family home, the farm at Appleton, now sold, to the first of two cottages at the side of the path between the big house and church over at Cothelstone Manor.

  9 October

  Waking earlier and earlier, wrapped in uncertainty.

  In the still-warm sun of a cloudless October morning the air in the lane and wood reverberates with the sound of bees collecting the last pollen, which they mostly find in the spiky light-green ‘flowers’ currently in bloom on the older bits of ivy. Big-winged butterflies too are still around, in sheltered glades pierced by the sun, in summer delusion. The other day I gathered from the wooden postbox on my wall an envelope of

  Landlife Wildflower Seeds

  The Butterfly Collection: Cornflower, Field Scabious,

  Greater Knapweed, Hardheads, Musk Mallow,

  Ox Eye Daisy and Yarrow

  My name and address had been written across the printed information on the back of the package. I recognize the handwriting but cannot, for certain, attach a name to it.

  11 October

  It’s just a mole, I know.

  12 October

  Pre-breakfast, I surprised one of the jays feeding by the lower path. Flashing its bands of blue wing feathers, it took flight into the sheltered trees behind the byre, where it maybe knows no human track passes. My intention in clearing, with considerable physical effort, this extra-dense patch of laurel was to create a wildlife haven – this is the first evidence I’ve noticed of it being used as such.

  17 October

  If I don’t panic, don’t allow fear to take hold, nature itself cannot harm me. My responses are the problem, harm-by-self the danger.

  21 October

  Found beneath an oak on a steep slope of the park my first chanterelle, late in the season and therefore contorted in shape, but with what I hope from now on to be able to recognize as the mushroom’s characteristic smell of dried apricot, clear in comparison with one of the false chanterelles which grow in the pine-needle litter near my clothes line. There are, as noticed last year, masses of waxcaps in the old grasslands: yellow and white and crimson and an electric bottle green.

  Parrot waxcap is their full name.

  Naming, naming. Saying nothing.

  24 October

  Looking out into the picture from my bench I witness the pair of buzzards wheel and glide in closer tandem than I’ve before seen. They are almost touching wings, flying in formation – pilots pushing their body-planes through showground aerobatics, calling to each other.

  Jonah was the name of the friend down here in Somerset with whom we used to stay when I was a boy. The bursar then at Queen’s College Taunton, in later life he studied to be ordained, and was placed for his first church job as a curate at Cheddon Fitzpaine, off the back road from here to Bridgwater. I’ve been to see again his bursar’s house at the school, where it still stands – although science laboratories have been built on the playing fields beside it. I’ve tried to find the rectory where he lived at Cheddon, but can’t.

  I’ve let him down, it feels.

  We roller-skated, my sister and I, around the fives courts on visits to Jonah, steel wheels screaming.

  He never married.

  I did, years ago, when too young to deal with love. And left her, without any explanation.

  26 October

  It is the eve of my move into the renovated half of the cottage, a year and two months since work began.

  3 November

  A wren entered my new study, through the window opened to dispel the night’s condensation on the panes. It flew instantly out through the narrow gap, barely ajar.

  Lost weight these last months.

  5 November

  Cutting down a thicket of small dead elm has opened the view from the lane-side windows of my study, and I often now find myself leaning on the high windowsill, looking out at the sweep of sky over the Brendon Hills. Nearby, at the other side of the hedge, I can see the whole of the old orchard, where Will’s horses and Hugh’s oldest rams graze. At ten, the moon clear in the western sky above the line of oaks beyond the paddock, three of the rams stood in the shade of the single remaining apple tree, and on their backs perched crows pecking at lice in their fleeces. Nearer, below my window, in the shadow of the foliage bordering the lane, I spotted the grey rump of a rabbit. Saw its ears prick where it sat eating leaves, then rise to its hind legs, look around and disappear into the brambled bank behind the hedge.

  6 November

  Put up in the house today, with Beth’s help, two more works by artist-friends. One of them hangs above my Waterhouse table in the spare bedroom.

  Waterhouse. Does anybody remember who Waterhouse was?

  Who cares?

  I do, apparently.

  8 November

  I’ve been so happy down here in Somerset these last couple of years and don’t understand how, as soon as the final move is made into my home, constructed to my specific requirements, in a perfect country setting, how tension builds and builds.

  Where will this tightening end?

  I don’t know but … maybe I somehow imagined I was making ‘perfection’ for myself, and am, inevitably, disappointed.

  Mother made me seek perfection. Anything less and she was dismissive of me, furious in her disappointment. I had to be good, very good to justify the cost to her of my being her son.

  9 November

  The third consecutive day part-spent at my new desk in this slow return to the rhythms of writing. I keep turning my head to the right to look south along the line of the old cottage roof, with its chimney near the gable end. It’s not the roof, though, to which my eye is drawn but beyond, to the vast oak a hundred yards away at the corner of the lane, close to the back gate to the demolished mansion, my eye drawn beyond and above the oak too, to the sky. The south window of my study is high, four feet from the floorboards, and tall, another four feet, and the line of vision from my desk cuts with geometric precision down the new iron gutter of the roof, square to the big branches of the tree, its trunk rising parallel to the chimney stack, but higher, a third of the way up the upper pane of glass. The leaves on the oak look green still with the sun behind, though I know that many have fallen and that the green I think I see is closer, from a different angle, to the golden yellow of autumn. Since my arrival at Terhill I have constantly admired this tree and feel privileged to be able to watch it now day-by-day, to observe the great old thing’s seasonal changes near the close of its life. How old, precisely, is this oak? A marker on this significant corner at a sharp turn in the road certainly for three, maybe for four hundred years. Generations of labourers on the Cothelstone Estate have watch
ed it grow from their homes here in the four modest cottages which I have made into one person’s house. With four bedrooms, a study and a library, two bathrooms and a big kitchen. This building was here before the tree. Although there may have been another great tree nearby, since demised. Over the wall into my wood, recent felling of laurel has revealed, fifty feet from this giant, an offspring already reaching as high as the neighbouring sweet chestnuts, preparing to play for centuries to come its turn at the role of marker.

  10 November

  Does purple hairstreak, a beautiful butterfly, seldom seen because it dwells in the high canopy of oak copses, live in my tree? They colonize large old single oaks, the book says. Imagine the time it took someone, some man, some Victorian, on discovering the existence of this secretive butterfly, to observe that – the book again says – the pupae of purple hairstreak fall to the ground and are taken by a particular species of red ant into its nest and fed through the winter.

  Evasion. I seek escape by concentrating on nature.

  Hiding here in private, inviting nobody to stay.

  I dither and sweat at the idea of seeing people. Never telephone anybody. It’s better that way.

  11 November

  Looking into my study on the way to breakfast I see through the window the rams at rest in their places of the night, tight to the hedge. Not noticed them so close before. The paddock is higher, by ten feet or so, than the land this side of the lane, and the rams lie level with my eyes. I see that they are indeed old. One of them stands to piss, and urine flows from the middle of his belly uninterrupted for a long time. The frosts have come, the grass ceases to grow and the sheep and cattle in the fields will soon depend on Hugh to winter feed them.

  12 November

  The softest of openings to the day, the mist low, rolling East to West from the stream at the base of Cothelstone Hill, thick enough to look like rain, yet lacking the weight to mark the puddles in the lane. Hugh drove by in his green jeep, towing a galvanized sheep trailer, backed into the gate and loaded up the rams. They filed up the ramp without hesitation – whilst the young horses whinnied and raced and leapt all four feet off the ground, unsettled by the departure of their companions.

  With both internal doors of my study closed against the draft, the second window behind my desk is reflected in the glass panels, projecting an image across into my stairwell of the paddock, with a horse standing there, framed by the hawthorn in the hedge. I’m mesmerized by the tone and texture of these pictures, the outside inside, the landscape floating in internal space.

  The rams may have been taken to the slaughterhouse.

  Or perhaps to cover the ewes?

  Early mornings remain a challenge, the void inside a struggle to fill. I trick myself into action. Force breakfast down.

  Oaks protect their hold in the ground by letting die branches which, if they continued to grow, might outweigh the ageing root system and topple the tree. Poplars, disliked by traditional woodmen, tend to outgrow themselves and fall in full leaf, devastating the trees around them – the lopsided shape of the Monterey pine by the bench is due, Frank’s forester brother told me, to a poplar crashing through the left flank of the tree. Two of the topmost branches of my marker oak, on the weather side, are dying back and currently stick out leafless into the sky, like the antlers of a stag. On each of them a raven perches, hefty-bodied birds, shaking their wings, and scraping their curved beaks on the bare timber.

  14 November

  A blackbird hops from branch to branch of the hawthorn in the hedge at my back, taking in its yellow beak the dark red berries, holding them there for a few seconds and then with a jerk of the neck swallowing them whole. The hawthorn fruit is quite large, must soon fill the bird’s crop. A man in Minehead, less than ten miles distant from Terhill, recorded for a Richard Mabey research project the first flowering dates of his hedgerow hawthorn – May-tree, he preferred to call it – between 1984 and 1994, the earliest being 19 April (in 1989) and the latest 26 May (in 1987). Over several pages in his Flora Britannica Mabey records other country lore about the hawthorn/May.

  16 November

  See that mice have discovered my larder. Resting in a basket on a shelf there was a bunch of dry wild oats, once standing in a vase. Every single ear of corn has been removed.

  I wonder when the deed was done.

  Occasional mouse droppings scatter the shelves, but as nothing else has been touched, these are, I suspect, field mice who have rummaged under the lane door.

  21 November

  Saw the mouse this morning: dark brown, with pointed nose and rounded cartoon ears erect on the top of its head. It has eaten the remains of a health food packet of shelled walnuts, and I hounded it out of the larder, poking and banging with a stick. I’ve had enough. After opening the back door to the lane, I searched for the mouse and found it cowering in a corner of the boot room, behind as-yet-unpacked cartons of books, and chased it towards the outside threshold. The agile animal moved so quickly that I can’t be sure it didn’t double back under the boiler-room door.

  The mouse miscalculated, got itself into a spot from which it now cannot easily escape. I know my home so well, from below the floors to the tiles on the roof, and am sure that, in time, I’ll force the creature to leave.

  In London, on cornering a luckless mouse, I impaled it on a shelf with the kitchen knife, then took another knife to cut off its head.

  The bees and birds and animals and insects of Terhill may hold some atavistic knowledge that these buildings are available for use, information which, after my reclamation for human occupation, they must now unlearn. Until a few weeks ago, flies and wasps swarmed into my study in search of winter safety, just as the swallows flew in and out of the stable doors while Frank and his team sat smoking during their breaks from work. By the time the swallows return next year the broken windows of the stables will have been replaced and new double doors fitted in the open space through which they have for generations been accustomed to swoop to their nests. There’s a round window in the northern gable which I will leave unglazed, for the time being. They’ll not be homeless.

  I need to know inch-by-inch my home, for instant action should anything go wrong. Water. A leak – the devastation of falling water, wet and filth and rot.

  Tonight the moon is lower, the mist deeper.

  A silent howl, to hold myself sane.

  23 November

  This morning I saw the dormouse run into the sitting room, where it hid behind the drawers of my small chest of feathers and butterflies. Half an hour later, as I drank a mug of tea at the table, I watched it sitting, head up, paws held to its chest, in a shaft of sunlight on the honey-coloured boards of the hall. When I rose to my feet it ran back into the sitting room, where I heard it in the log basket, which I picked up and took outside the front door, and as I began to remove the wood, out the mouse jumped, to a height and distance incredible for its size.

  Where is it now?

  Not far away. For it lives here. Along with all the other mice whose acquaintance I’ve yet to make.

  The week ends with the work around the reconstructed part of my house today complete, the cobbled path laid and the red topsoil levelled and dug, to be planted in the spring with native grasses and wild flowers, a mixture marketed by a local Somerset firm as Butterfly Meadow. Their label: ‘In the nursery we have an old pasture field no longer grazed and which has been more or less left to its own devices wherein both wild flowers and butterflies have flourished. There we discovered the grass species present are of significant value in providing food for larva. With a few nectar wildflowers added to the field we have butterflies from June to September. This is now presented as our butterfly meadow mix containing flowers to feed on and important grasses on which to breed. Wildflowers: Knapweed, Devil’s-bit Scabious, Common Sorrel, Wild Basil, Autumn Hawkbit, Small Scabious, Betony, Yarrow, Birdsfoot Trefoil, Greater Knapweed, Field Scabious, Brown Knapweed, Common Cats Ear, Rough Hawkbit, Selfheal. Th
e flowers have been chosen to coincide with the emergence of adult butterflies breeding on the associated grasses. Many other species will be attracted as adults and will vary with area but our observations have included: Comma, Small White, Red Admiral, Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell, Small Copper, Small Skipper, Common Blue, Yellow Brimstone, Painted Lady and Clouded Yellow. Grasses: Common Couch (for breeding by Speckled Wood, Wall, Grayling, Meadow Brown, Hedge Brown), Cocksfoot (for Speckled Wood, Wall, Marbled White, Meadow Brown, Ringlet), Small-leaved Timothy (for Marbled White), Smooth Meadow Grass (for Meadow Brown), Meadow Fescue (for Small Heath), and Common Bent (to help create the sward).’