Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  I love lists of names.

  In the dark I’m drawn out by the scent of turned earth, remembering to collect from the shed the morning’s delivery of bottled milk. Take pleasure in moving my muddied Ford for the first time to its parking place behind the wall, leaving the lane-side of the old cottage free from motorcars.

  26 November

  Yesterday I was away from my desk all the daylight hours, therefore didn’t glance up at the oak, which I now see has in the space of a single day and night shed millions of leaves, the shape of its branches this morning revealed against a blue sky. The light is so bright today that, by contrast, everything in shadow looks black.

  On the walk up over the hill this afternoon from my new home to my old, from Terhill to Aisholt, to see Janet and The Old Granary which I used to rent, I picked two crimson waxcaps of exceptional depth in colour, funghi which I’ve never seen on her side of the hill and believed Janet would find beautiful – which she did, expressed delight with my gift, surprised at their unseasonal appearance. Walked back in the dark beneath the trees of Watery Lane and up the sharp slope of Janet’s Middle Hill Meadow, then out across field after field of Hugh’s until I arrived at my own gate, the gibbous moon so bright there was never a thought of reaching into my bag for the torch. On crossing the ridge I was shocked by the barrage of artificial orange light spread across Taunton Vale, marking villages which can hardly be seen by day.

  Michael, the farm-worker on the Estate, this morning told me that the birds are feeding voraciously. Buzzards are killing grown pheasant, something he’s seldom seen before, and the other day he watched a dozen crows demolish the carcass of a ewe, all this despite the mildness of the weather and abundance of food. The sign, Michael’s country lore predicts, of a cold winter to follow.

  The mouse is back. Unless there were two. Anyway, within a day of ejection, I noticed renewed feeding on the outer skins of onion, on the stems of pumpkin and on the glue in a roll of swing-bin liners. Upset by the attack on my winter store, I for several minutes banged a stick against the steel sides of the ugly filing cabinet hidden in the larder, seeking to sound-hound the mouse from its lair.

  29 November

  Changes for the mouse: a new elm door hangs between the larder and kitchen, beautifully carpented by the girl who made my beds and the kitchen table.

  Is the mouse resident still? Or has s/he been coming and going beneath the lane door from some external nest to raid the larder?

  Frank, confident of his building, claims there’s no way in for the mouse, insists my stores are safe.

  30 November

  I think I might be in trouble.

  Shovel the fear out of sight.

  Mustn’t give in.

  1 December

  Thousands of times though I may walk my paths, the variations are endless. No sight precisely repeats itself. At midday I happened to walk out into the park through the old wooden gate in a neglected corner of my wood and wander in the opposite direction normally taken, northwards down the field-side of the iron fence, where my eye was drawn by an uncommon chirp towards the top branches of the Monterey pine. And there I watched, in bright sunlight, the pair of nuthatch feed. From my customary seat on the bench inside the fence, unable to see up through the dense branches, I can catch only fleeting glimpses of these birds. I didn’t know they were still here. Lovely creatures, with solid little bodies, strong necks and long beaks, their chests light pink, heads and backs grey-blue, with white and black slashes around the eyes. They get on with life.

  Reading this evening the latest published work by my current favourite amongst living writers, W.G. Sebald, the German academic who teaches in East Anglia. Find that he relates an incident in his character Austerlitz’s childhood, trapping moths at night in egg boxes with Uncle Alphonso and brother Gerald. Sebald is as interested in names as I am:

  I do remember, said Austerlitz, that the two of us, Gerald and I, could not get over our amazement at the endless variety of these invertebrates, which are usually hidden from our sight, and that Alphonso let us simply gaze at their wonderful display for a long time, but I don’t recollect now exactly what kinds of night-winged creatures landed there beside us, perhaps they were China-Marks, Dark Porcelains and Marbled Beauties, Scarce Silverlines or Burnished Brass, Green Foresters and Green Adelas, White Plumes, Light Arches, Old Ladies and Ghost Moths, but at any rate we counted dozens of them, so different in structure and appearance that neither Gerald nor I could grasp it all.

  The mouse seems to have departed. The nuts are intact.

  2 December

  Late last night, in the darkness and silence, while the human residents of the hamlet of Terhill slept, and many of the birds and animals too, I looked out to find the sky covered in weightless rippled clouds, like the marks of receding waves on the sand in a low-tide estuary. The moon had moved to a place where I could not see it, the night air was cool, clear except for this rippling of the entire sky within my view. Something affected the quality of light reflecting from the wet ground, the stillness, the whole scene a uniform silvery-grey, as if wash-painted – like an opera set, reversed reality, day turned arbitrarily into night, the earth turned upside down, sea-sand in the sky.

  3 December

  Enveloped in mist, the light of the just-risen sun failing to break through, I watched from behind the five-bar gate to the back-lane of the demolished mansion two kennel-men on bicycles escort the Quantock Staghounds up the wet road on morning exercise. The men called in dog-directed voices, the older, capped and raincoated, ahead of the pack, a younger man in a blue anorak at the rear, both straining at the pedals of their bicycles on the hill, backs rocking with the effort.

  On a misty morning of peculiar Englishness, in countryside of particular beauty, the purpose of working to keep alive the traditions of the chase must surely be the blood-to-the-heart thrill of riding a horse? Despite my dislike of the hunt, I can imagine the joy of riding on a broad-backed, sure-hoofed hunter out across the winter land to exercise and train a pack of pedigree hounds.

  Bicycles, indeed!

  The shrouding of my vision as the mists roll through my garden glades leads me to feel invisible. Layers of wet on grounded leaves silence the fall of my boots as I walk. Maybe the illusion today of invisibility concerns sound more than sight, springs from non-hearing of my clumsy human passage. Three blackbirds eating holly berries do not cease to peck as I approach.

  I love to move unseen, as if absent.

  In the urge to find the occasional answer to repeated questionings, five tree books lie open on my big desk of black ash. The books are: Trees & Woodlands in the British Landscape by the master tree-writer, Oliver Rackham; two Collins publications by the equally authoritative and independent-spirited Alan Mitchell, his discursive Trees of Britain and detailed field guide Trees of Britain and Northern Europe; Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica; and the Reader’s Digest Field Guide to the Trees and Shrubs of Britain. From which I learn that only female holly trees bear berries. That the evergreen oak, short branches of which I yesterday gathered for decoration, is called holm in English and ilex in Latin, both of which are occasional names also for holly (Mitchell: ‘the hollies have no real claim to the classic name Ilex as this was used by the Romans for the Holm Oak’). That there are over three hundred species of holly recorded in Britain, including bacciflava, ‘infrequent’, with bright yellow berries, a specimen of which grows in the jungle beyond the coach house. That one of the highclere hollies, hybrids between common holly and canary holly, has grey-brown bark and usually forks low.

  This last sounds to be like mine, but there resemblance to my tree ends, and I still don’t know what its name is. Do and don’t mind not knowing.

  4 December

  Mice are nice, I’ve decided. Tonight I found that the house mouse had carried each ear of oats up from the bottom to the top shelf of my larder, to store in the least used of places, in the narrow space behind a box of fish cutlery angled against
the wall.

  Ideal!

  I can’t think why these ivory handled silver-plated knives and forks continue to travel with me, for I’ve never used them, will never use them: a wedding present to my parents.

  I presume the corn was carried to the secret store in one session at the start and has since night-by-night been eaten. The discipline, the diligence of this little brown mouse!

  What paradise the grain stores must have been to the mice of Mountmellick, in the flour mill managed for thirty years by the husband of one of the many elder sisters of my mother, herself the tenth of ten children of an embattled Protestant tenant-farmer at the bog-centre of Southern Ireland. I remember as a boy bicycling down ‘miles’ of concrete passages beside the giant wooden bins of winnowed ears of wheat, in which we dared to play, sinking each step up to our young knees, fearful of slipping down the open chutes and suffocating beneath a golden avalanche.

  7 December

  It’s only in the countryside, as I walk in steady step through the lived-over landscape of hill-fields and heathland, that beauty feels fixed, immoveable from the middle of this sun-drenched winter’s day. In the city it never occurred to me that things seen could be anything other than momentary, a flash of brilliance, ignited and extinguished in a stroke. Here now at my desk, I’m surprised that the biblical sunset lasts as long as it does. Offering time enough to reflect on how many images of war are placed against skies of the same dramatic hue, streaked in orange and purple – Scapegoat colours, mirroring a postcard I bought years and years ago, of the Holman Hunt picture in the Tate.

  Blood colours.

  Last year at lambing, Janet White found on her morning round of inspection a ewe on its back, alive, its blooded udder eaten by a fox, the lamb standing at its mother’s side bleating for milk.

  8 December

  I rose from my desk chair at an unexpected sound in the house and went downstairs to investigate, finding no explanation. Five minutes later the same sound. And I saw flying about the roof of the stairwell a robin. He – unthinkingly, I gender it male – fluttered around, streaking the least accessible wall in the house with rainlines of shit, then flew into my study and out through the window which I opened for him. There were several more droppings, I discovered, in my bedroom, the bird-stain on my white duvet cover difficult to remove.

  This experience has coincided with the emergence into consciousness of feeling that, until now, I’ve lived alone in a world of my solitary making, self-separated from family and friends. And that now, for the first time in my life, others enter.

  What a time it has taken.

  Heard today the call of what I know to be a magpie, loud, quarrelsome, a bossy bird. Knowledge of this fact came with the experience of living on the other side of the hill, at Aisholt, where magpies steal eggs from Janet’s farm-kitchen table. Here at Cothelstone Hugh traps and kills as many magpies as he can, hating their raiding of the nests of songbirds, and I have thus seldom seen or heard them on the Estate. Even Janet, in frustration, once set up a magpie trap, and captured six, only to find that neither husband nor son would kill them for her. Unable to bring herself to do the deed, she loaded the cage into the back of the Land Rover and drove off six miles to the beach at Kilve to release the birds.

  Janet was greeted by laughter on return to the farmyard, her men claiming that the magpies arrived back home before she did.

  Jonah Mitchel-Jones died from the effects of Parkinson’s Disease – as my father did, a decade later.

  After Jonah’s death, thoughtful friends of his gave me several books from his library, which stand at home on these shelves, in their original dust covers, signed and dated in his spindly writing, amongst them: Sedgemoor and Avalon by Desmond Hawkins (1954); from The King’s England series, Arthur Mee’s Somerset, County of Romantic Splendour (1941); and Life of the Wayside and Woodland by T.R.E. Southwood, revised by T.A. Coward in 1963.

  10 December

  A Monday night dark and cold, the first of winter. At my desk with a glass of wine and memories of a happy day, spent in the company of two artist-friends from London, down for a song recital I organized last night at Podshavers, the country restaurant I helped set up two years ago.

  A comfort to know that it’s possible to be normally sociable, put on a good public show outside my mute vacancy.

  And a relief that there’s no woman around.

  Intimacy never seems to work for me.

  11 December

  This is the third consecutive morning I’ve rounded the corner of the garden wall to meet the same bird breakfasting alone on the few apples which remain on the ground beneath the old tree. On the two previous mornings it hastened away, a thrice-dipping flight, as if mechanically powered, attached to chains hung from a line of invisible posts across the garden. woodpeckers have a similar pattern of flight – not the same, though: faster, the loops longer. Anyway, the sound this bird made yesterday was different from a woodpecker, with more notes. This morning I slowed my approach, and was able to observe the bird, with its pronounced white, blue, brown and black markings on body and wings. Not yet full-grown, I felt: because of its slightly awkward movements and the suggestion of plumage in the process of discovering colour. A young jay, I suspect. Not that the name matters. Just the fact that it … yes, what I like is this: it’s a bird which I never see in a flock, and although a common-enough presence amongst my trees, is reluctant to show itself. If this is a young bird, it was presumably born here, and has thus grown up accustomed to my presence, walking the paths, always at the same pace and in similar clothes, at regular times of the day. To this youthful jay maybe I’m a large animal that’s around the place, a scraggy mongrel cross between Will’s chestnut horses in the old orchard and Hugh’s glossy black bullocks in the park.

  On most nights I hear owls hoot and screech to each other amongst the trees – exactly how many I cannot be sure.

  From my table at lunch, the sun intense, I spotted a small owl seated on a branch of the ash behind the byre. On stepping outside it was not there. Back inside I again saw it. In the act of reaching for binoculars I realized that the light fell in a particular way on a knotted turn of the branch. Without needing to check, I knew it was my mind which saw the owl, not my eyes.

  While writing this sentence I hear the sound of a tractor, and rise to peer down onto the lane below, seeing in the back of an open trailer Michael with his team of beaters seated on straw bales, on their way to the next pheasant drive. Michael has worked this Estate for twenty years, and is content to labour on for another twenty or more, living with his family in a tied cottage by the Manor, on a salary of a few thousand pounds a year. The man driving the tractor is the old warrener whom I see with his boxed pair of ferrets netting rabbits in my lane. Both these men give the impression of trusting their own sense of value, of cherishing familiarity with this land, of accepting the fact that they’ll never gain material wealth. They possess alternative ambition. Michael talks of his desire to secure the return of barn owls to Cothelstone, to which end he and Hugh, his employer, have for several seasons sown wood-side strips with the plants that a particular kind of vole eat and on which these shy birds like to feed.

  I like these people. They welcome me, but I find it difficult to make for myself a convincing place in their world.

  I try. I try. These notes are part of my attempt.

  12 December

  Central things unsaid, these words sanitised, a travesty. I … I can’t … I can’t say it.

  I do things, plan a novel, make a home, normal sorts of things.

  Except nothing is normal.

  I’m fading.

  And I am pleased to be. Despite the pain, it’s what I want. To disappear.

  15 December

  Herzog, the filmmaker, wrote in his Fitzcarraldo journal: ‘Why do these animal dramas preoccupy me so? Because I do not want to look inside myself. Only this much: a sense of desolation was tearing me up inside, like termites in a fallen tree tru
nk.’

  Imagination carried Herzog through.

  I’m stuck with dull words and mind. No way out.

  16 December

  ‘This inconspicuous rather than actually skulking little bird’: says Collins’ The Birds of Britain and Europe on the hedge sparrow, or dunnock as it’s also called. Take pleasure in watching, as I eat lunch, the bird’s bluish head bob and shake, its beak piercing the moss on the roof of the byre, pink legs wide-astride for balance. They are secretive, I’m told in The New Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland, nesting in the thickest middle of brambles and thorn. With a social system the most complex amongst all our native species, the dunnock is the main British host to the cuckoo. The precision beauty of this semi-invisible bird of everyday life startles me.

  Orange is this year-end’s colour, spread across the sky each afternoon as the sun sets – the quality of air during these exceptional weeks of weather makes light into a physical substance, a liquid spilling through the atmosphere.