Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  What energy for self-preservation, emptying one by one the kernels from the half-used packet on the top shelf and bearing them down to the box on the floor, and then deep inside to the secret glass store!

  I wonder if the mouse’s intention was to hide his supplies from other mice passing by on their hunt for food?

  Don’t know what distances mice travel to forage. Thought of them as communal, but maybe they’re solitary. Maybe my mouse had not yet discovered that there was no way in and out of the larder. Or maybe it had, and was pleased to be left alone to sleep at ease beside its glass jar of pine kernels.

  28 March

  My house has more than one mouse. Last night the small bowl of nuts which sits on the oak table in the kitchen was emptied. Having destroyed the one, it seems there’s a second nest, another mouse larder. Noticed that paper has been torn from the packaging of pictures stored in the boiler room. I moved pictures and boxes around but couldn’t see the mouse-home.

  They live so privately, protected.

  How many mice are there, trapped now inside my house, barred from the larder, fearful of starvation?

  29 March

  On the third consecutive day of clear blue sunshine I walked from room to room after breakfast opening every window. Later, returning for coffee from work outside, I found a bumblebee stranded on a stair, unable to fly, wings ineffectually whirring, front legs clawing the air. The big bee had an orange body and its legs, with backward-sloping hairs, moved like the mechanical arms of an articulated crane. I slid a piece of paper underneath its feet and lifted it into the garden, where it crawled away to hide. To recuperate.

  I imagine bees may have self-healing powers.

  If not, with damaged wings the bee dies.

  Life is precarious.

  Struggled for three days now to make a mini-meadow of wild grasses and flowers from the stony clay soil outside my front door. Raked and sown and rolled and watered with the best of my care.

  30 March

  I came to Terhill with the intention of making for myself a home, not a work of art.

  That’s what I’ve done, though, I’m beginning to feel: made from the found-materials of this place a piece of sculpture.

  The image before my eyes when I moved into this house is almost realized. My builders have completed their tasks and cleared the site, only the final touches remain for me to do and then, despite my sense of imperfection, of disappointment, it may be time to tell myself that it’s done. Time to sign and date the work and move on to the next piece.

  I thought I was creating perfection.

  7 April

  By hand, from a gallon can, I water the red crust of earth that is meant to be my butterfly meadow, twice a day, pacing back and forth, close to hopelessness.

  I continue because … because I continue. With the thought, as I shake the last drops from another empty metal watering can, that it might just be this drop, or this drop, or this drop which nourishes into germination a sown-seed, that it might be this step and crunch of heel, or this step, or this step which nudges the barren ground into life.

  The curled bright green leaves of a camomile plant, Beth points out, already push through at the meeting of two cobbled paths close to the front porch. In the grip today of terror, I nevertheless manage to dream of drying the flowers of this plant from which to make an evening mug of tea. Should not a single one of the seeds I sowed survive, this patch of land is in itself capable of regeneration, nature tells me.

  I listen … I’m listening … can’t be sure I hear, the din inside distorts everything.

  The butterfly I saw late last year protecting a particular patch of sun-speckled woodland seems to have survived the winter. How is it possible?

  On the ridge of my roof two young birds are perched, chirping, wagging their long tails, the white and grey of their feathers intermingled, the traditional pattern of their species awaiting definition. These mottled fledglings, fresh from the nest, brimming already with confidence in flight, at sight of me dip off home, frolic as they go in the wind. The air is clear. I see this, see nature celebrate.

  None of this matters. Not really. Not to me.

  All this nature-talk is a ploy, attempt at escape.

  10 April

  In the old half of the cottage this afternoon I shifted the plain furniture back into place, made up the beds, beeswaxed the stairs. From the window of the little end room my eyes followed the orange wing-tips of a butterfly as it fluttered in bumpy – here-and-there, uncertain – flight around the perimeter of the lawn. The sight reminded me that the other day Morris Blewitt dropped by to take a cutting from the cooking apple tree – against which, he told me, he used as a boy to play cricket. An electrician, youngest son of the head groom at Cothelstone, he had rewired the family’s cottage for his diploma test. It is working still, I tell him.

  Feathers. Sticks. Stones. Bones. Gatherings from the walks I no longer make up into the hills. Tomorrow I’ll set them out where they used to stand on the shelves and sills of the Blewitts’ old cottage, ready for artist-guests.

  11 April

  Each day I water the cracked earth. By the time I’ve finished, the bit where I began is dry again. I stare down at stray signs of life in the drying crust, at tiny pairs of lobed leaves, sturdy-looking despite their infant frailty. I wander off to inspect the untended tracts of bulldozed earth at the far side of the wall, and see that the same plants have a toehold there too. Don’t know from where they come, can’t imagine how anything grows.

  12 April

  Today, kneeling on the cobbles of the path and placing my eye parallel with the ground, I see that there also are, there really are wild grasses growing where I’ve raked and rolled and sowed and watered. I check, several times, unable to believe that I may indeed be guiding into life a butterfly meadow on this abandoned patch of damaged land between the cottages and the byre, where oil leaked from a tank and farm debris was dumped and bonfires of derelict timber burnt to ashes.

  In the angled evening light, the iron-red earth is seen to be lightly washed with uneven strokes of green.

  14 April

  A sturdy dark-feathered bird with thick neck coloured slate grey and stylish black hooded mask worn over the eyes and front of its head strutted across the roof of the byre to peck at and pick up in its beak twigs fallen from the ash. The bird was testing material for its nest, looking for the driest strongest piece – as big as it could manage to carry. It fiddled until the selected twig felt balanced in its beak, and then eased into flight, disappearing over the roof of the cottage. Several times the jackdaw journeyed back and forth from byre to … I was inside, and didn’t see where this season’s nest is being built.

  Birds know trees.

  Ash twigs must have qualities that appeal to the jackdaw. And the species of tree in which to make its home will also have been specifically selected, some birds better than others at choosing safe spots.

  Trees for feeding, trees for observing, trees for sheltering, trees for grooming, trees for courting. Amongst themselves, do birds distinguish by name-call the trees of their homeland? Only five native trees in England: elm, oak, ash, yew and prill (these days known as hazel).

  What do birds know about trees?

  A foolish question. Even jackdaws, amongst the cleverest of birds, ‘know’ nothing.

  Dozens of different birds live here with me at Terhill, and I see them day by day, admire the beauty of their song, the brilliance of their various patterns of flight, am breath-taken by their physical agility, yet will never understand how they function, why they exist.

  This thought doesn’t please me.

  15 April

  In the midday heat a little blue butterfly flew close to the ground back and forth across the centimetre high tops of the wild grasses of my infant meadow.

  The sun shone down all afternoon on my line-full of white cotton sheets, which I found, on gathering them in, to be spotted with beads of fly-shit.

  1
8 April

  In the lane the quickening of my breath at a whiff of wild garlic, released, I saw on reaching the spot where it grows, by the recent passage of some animal, crushing the slick leaves whilst rummaging in the earth for food.

  And then, almost instantly, the descent from pleasure in nature to pain within self.

  My brain is numb, exhausted, at a loss for words. I recognize the grandeur of the sunlit shapes of giant white clouds careering across the sky and wish, without hope, that one afternoon I might find that I can again rejoice in them.

  19 April

  Up in the fields on the hill behind the house I saw this afternoon the first of the season’s swallows. It had been difficult to set out on the walk, overcome as I am by … whatever it is, this pain.

  The state isn’t new, it’s been with me for years. Always used to be able to pull myself free, outrun the threat, now I can’t. Just can’t see any means at all of … Can’t make sense.

  I hear the blood beat through my skull, nothing else.

  Or maybe there’s too much else. Cascades of fragmented feeling.

  Out there on the hill, in a sheltered hollow I lay down in the grass and wept, curled my body into a foetal ball and shrieked.

  20 April

  No need in recent days to water the butterfly meadow, for at intervals it has rained.

  All through the wood my eye is drawn to the threatening growth of nettles and burdock and thistles and ground elder and bindweed and hundreds of sycamore saplings.

  21 April

  Saw a fat rat visit the compost heap through the tunnel I months ago noted had been dug beneath the boarded sides. The mouth of the hole is black, the compost is black, the rat is brown.

  22 April

  On the gravel path at the side of the house this morning as I collected the mail, I was halted by the sight, close to the toecap of my shoe, of a dead bird, with white flashes on its folded wings and bright pink chest. Drops of blood fell from the Finch’s beak when I picked it up, its body warm.

  On the green patches of the red earth of my ‘meadow’ several blades of grass have attained an inch in height.

  23 April

  Last night the mice made their way back into the larder. Found mouse droppings also on my desk.

  On a morning when the young cabinet-maker of my beds, my green-oak kitchen table and my elm door here at Terhill gives birth in a Bristol hospital to her first child, I allow myself groans of despair at a few mice. How pathetic! Central city life gave me the illusion of control – the pain of facing here in the countryside the failure to sustain this habit of order feels closer and closer to insufferable.

  Need to find ‘the courage to be’ – the responsibility mine alone, nobody else can do this for me.

  It’s serious.

  Very.

  A tiny triumph: in tightening panic as I waited for the return of Beth to help, I myself cleaned out the larder of non-food storage boxes and, while doing so, located and blocked a hole in the ceiling where electrical wires rise from the fuse box into the in-between floor space and out through the wall. The last place in my house to be made mouse-proof?

  Watched from the window-seat on the landing half-a-dozen dazzling goldfinches chase each other through the still-leafless branches of one of the two big ash trees at the back of the byre.

  Not long ago such sights raised smiles of joy at living here.

  Now nothing.

  24 April

  Words they flee too.

  25 April

  Small birds fly regularly in and out of the byre. I assume they’re nesting. But maybe they feast in there on spiders. I’ve looked in vain for the nest. I’m not always sure what the birds are, although I do not doubt the fact of often seeing a robin pottering about the byre. Sometimes, though, I think I see sparrows. At other times chaffinches fly between the chamfered posts, their beaks full of insects with which to feed their young.

  Can be certain these days of nothing.

  26 April

  Morning. It’s a pair of robins which lives in the byre. Both birds have red breasts.

  Despair.

  Early afternoon. The leaves of the big oak are a mustardy green.

  Late afternoon. Despair.

  Despair.

  27 April

  Must accept that there’s no ‘getting better’, that in feeling fear I am being me, that this is where I am destined to learn to live, with the moles and mice and birds.

  Unlike them, I know not how to feather my nest, make myself comfortable.

  Long for rest.

  By any means.

  29 April

  I continue with the construction, from hazel branches coppiced last year from the hedge in the lane, of a runner bean trellis. Like the look of what I’ve made, interwoven, no string. Later I hand-saw logs, gather kindling and stack uncut branches to dry in the byre. I’m busy outside all afternoon. While having supper I watch a blackbird gather worms from the rain-soaked earth of the butterfly meadow, close by, just below the window. The worms twist around the bird’s yellow beak while it hops about, head cocked, listening for movement in the earth.

  2 May

  Yesterday I heard then saw two larks hold their seeming-stationary place high in the sky above my head.

  3 May

  At seven o’clock this morning, with the sun’s beams warming my face where it rested on the pillow, I wished to be permitted to lie there and die. Three maybe four days it would take me, I reckoned, if I declined to drink or eat. I was serious. I am serious. It’s what I want to do, be left in peace to die.

  Please, look for some other form of letting go, an alternative way of escape: Beth sought to persuade.

  Later, I rose from my bed on an impulse to mow the paths that wind through the glades of my leased land, my borrowed territory. Then found myself clipping Mr Blewitt’s funny box hedge. Felt that I was … Something about benign shaping, about acceptable self-representation.

  Don’t really know what I’ve done, what I will do, what I can do.

  4 May

  Four rabbits munch on the grass in the old orchard, the setting sun angled so low that its rays shine through their ears, which glow pink. The fallen apple tree bears blossom, I’m astonished to see.

  5 May

  My mother’s anger burns inside me, burns my insides.

  Does it?

  Probably.

  6 May

  Unable to feed myself lovingly. It has become difficult to cook and eat anything much at all.

  7 May

  Three days of sun have bleached yellow many blades of the young green grass at my door. It looks too far gone to revive in today’s rain.

  8 May

  Typical of me to have pre-imaged an aesthetic death, a refined, quietly-smiling letting go! I must somehow know that if I am to carry on, then my hurt, caged, enraged, can no longer be contained. I claw with my hands at the ribs of my chest to tear myself open, set myself free. I growl, howl, hiss, spit. I cower and pant, like a creature from the forest, blind, unminded.

  I’m sick of the shit of deceit.

  I’ve stopped behaving.

  9 May

  I am ill. Feel a poison inside me, in my stomach, upwards flooding to my heart, a poison which I must suck out of myself before …

  11 May

  All along the lane the hawthorn is in its full May flower. A fledgling robin, born in the byre, is learning to fly.

  14 May

  Two afternoons ago a swarm of bees alighted on a low branch of the purple Lilac tree in the nearby garden of Terhill Cottages. Beth put on her protective bee-suit and … no, I’m again wordless.

  17 May

  The bees! The swarm of bees! The bees, they survived! Are busy at life in the second hive!

  Strange the way they marched up the planks of wood into the hive, and then slowly emerged to cluster on the front of the hive, hanging there through two nights and a day of rain and wind. They were dead, I dreaded. Had lost their queen and, alone
, could no longer exist. With the appearance of the sun they revived, and were enticed by Beth’s trail of sugar to take over the home prepared for them.

  18 May

  There are dozens of mothering ewes in the parkland beyond the iron fence. This morning a fox sat for several minutes beneath the herringbone stone wall of the demolished house, watching the sheep and their lambs wander past within a few feet. He noted, with pricked ears, my presence on the bench a hundred yards away and, in his own time, sloped off into the wood.