Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  Alone for supper I turn on the radio mid-concert, to hear the bird-song rhythms of a Messiaen piano piece. This is followed by his Quartet for the End of Time, written and first performed in a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia in 1944. Messiaen himself played the piano, in partnership with the only other captives who were practised musicians, a clarinettist, a violinist and a cellist. The notes tell the story more graphically than words, the clarinet sighing loss and loneliness in its solo movement. They played at Christmas, praised and privileged by the camp commandant.

  I saw Messiaen many times in the years before his old-age death, when he regularly attended London concerts of his music – with his second wife, Yvonne Loriod, the pianist, an ex-student of his at the Conservatoire. She performed all Messiaen’s later piano premiers.

  Much of the music I loved, still love.

  I miss his beret in the auditorium.

  Miss being there myself, confined down here in Somerset.

  4 October

  Encountered a herd of close to fifty red deer on the upper fields. On sight of me they were shepherded by a grand-antlered stag into a central pasture safe from people, two large fields below the path to Lydeard Hill and a distance above the top slopes of Bagborough Gallops. A calf baulked at jumping a barbed-wire fence over which the older deer had hopped, and ran in panic back and forth, back and forth, separated from the herd. No mother came to help.

  More Messaien on the radio tonight, the Turangalila Symphony, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a pianist whose concerts in London I used always to attend. Recall the joy of a previous time in my life, when I walked of an evening not across fields for supper at Podshavers but through the City and over Blackfriars Bridge to listen to music at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

  One unforgettable Sunday morning I heard Aimard play all twenty of Messiaen’s solo studies Vingts Regards sur L’Enfant Jesus, written shortly after the composer returned from the War. The experience, its intensity and beauty, took performer and audience down paths in the world seldom visited.

  I’ve lost this breadth to my life.

  Aimard played without a score, I remember. Seem to see, in memory.

  Unlikely, I now acknowledge. Though I do really think he did.

  5 October

  Felled diseased elm and invasive sycamore all afternoon. Ever since moving in to Terhill, I’ve wished to upend the sycamore near the head of the lane, but judged it too tall, at least fifty foot, its trunk sixteen inches in diameter, wider than my biggest bow saw. Today the task felt within my grasp. It fell, as intended, across the road. I had to stand on top of the wall and pull the tree towards me, jumping aside as it toppled, falling with a crash that would have crushed a passing car.

  It didn’t feel dangerous.

  6 October

  Constance – I hear from Frank – talks aloud at night to Ollie, as if he was there.

  7 October

  Alive spiders eat the dead.

  8 October

  On the night of his funeral Ollie came to sit for twenty minutes on the side of Constance’s bed, to comfort her. She couldn’t see him and he didn’t speak, but she felt the familiar weight of his sixteen stone frame rock her bed. She spoke to him, so Constance told us when she dropped in today for a mug of tea beside the Rayburn in Beth’s kitchen, on her way home from the chiropodist. Ollie couldn’t drive because of his epilepsy, and Constance has never learnt, so a friend who lives in a nearby Estate cottage had dropped her off at the end of the lane. While Ollie lived Constance didn’t bother much about herself, had not given a thought to getting rid of her bunions. She has a thick, rich-white head of hair. Janet does too, on the other side of the hill.

  9 October

  This morning I didn’t want to leave my bed, wished to sleep forever.

  10 October

  Part of me is a child, silent in a corner, refusing to be comforted, declining to be touched. Out of reach.

  12 October

  I’m in no external danger. This place is safe. Mustn’t panic.

  14 October

  Two years ago I clambered onto the roof of the byre to cut back a branch of the big ash which, before my time here, had battered in the wind a sizeable hole in the ridge. The ash has pushed out a thicket of new growth close to the point of my saw-cut. Over the rest of the tree the leaves spread loose and expressive, here they lie close and tight and ugly.

  Beth’s bees have flown both their hives. Unless they’re dead.

  16 October

  Sometimes my whole self goes numb. Which is dangerous because, cut-off from feeling, I don’t notice when I’m hurting myself with mistaken thoughts. An internal match to the blisters which regularly appear on the fingers and thumb of my right hand, through careless touchings of scalding tea and coffee pots, the burns unfelt because the nerve I severed at my wrist has yet to regrow.

  There’s no way out. I can’t wall myself up again in solitude, I’ve got to go on.

  Right now I just can’t quite see how, or where.

  I will, though, I will.

  17 October

  This afternoon I felled the eucalyptus tree by the old washhouse, an alien to this land, with its peeling skin and toxic foliage. I set methodically about my task, lopping branches one by one, clearing as I went. The tallest section of the tree in falling missed by inches the washhouse chimney pot.

  I do not regret the tree’s absence. About this I can be clear.

  Ambivalence is unavoidable, and yet I’ve never accepted it.

  It has been nigh impossible, late in life I begin to understand, for me to hold in consciousness conflicting emotions. I imagine that I long to share shelter from the storm, but as soon as the waves carry me close to the shore I turn, instinctively, and swim back out to solitude at sea.

  Not surprising that four months ago I almost drowned. The danger doesn’t go away. I remain on the brink.

  Writing to myself is meant to help.

  It doesn’t.

  Does the opposite.

  19 October

  The giant Monterey pine’s canopy of branches, which rises in tiers above the bench by the iron fence, protected me from a sudden fall of rain, dropping vertically from a cushion-shaped cloud, charcoal-grey with silver scallops. The sheep pattered in file down from all corners of the park to shelter beneath the birch trees by the banks of the stream – with the exception of a single ewe, which declined the collective will and stood its ground. The shower was over soon after the most distant of the flock had reached shelter. The independent one continued eating, while the others slowly spread out again across the hill in quest of the sweetest grass.

  Before returning to my work on the raspberry canes I tore with my bare hands the ivy from the creviced trunk of the Monterey, already in the two seasons since my previous attack reaching higher than the tips of my fingers as I stretched above my head to grab its tentacles.

  20 October

  I’ve broken my promise to Beth.

  Assumption of responsibility to care for me during my recovery was her choice, taken on without pressure from me. In doing so she made only one request: that I promise to warn her if ever I again felt like harming myself.

  I agreed.

  And didn’t tell her. Couldn’t. Otherwise she’d have stopped me. Put me back in Rydon House.

  I failed, though. Lay naked this afternoon in a hot bath with a Stanley knife to my wrist and tried and tried to cut and plunge and twist. Red handle of the knife against white skin of the inside of my left wrist, the point of the blade pressed down. Pressing hard, in the right direction this time.

  I couldn’t do it.

  The water cooled and I got out, dried myself, put on my clothes again and negotiated the remainder of the day.

  22 October

  Unforgivably, in weak seeking of attention, this morning I told Beth what had happened two days ago.

  She cannot trust me now and every moment I’m out of sight will be frightened of what I might do.

  24 October />
  Flies congregate in my study, the windows spotted with their excretions. I regularly rise from my desk to open the windows and let out the flies.

  The flies, which are nearing the end of their lives, often fall on their backs on the window-sill, wings ineffectually whirring, and I pick them up by their legs and release them into the air.

  Some days I achieve nothing more.

  I’ve been apart from my wife for over twenty years, more than twice as long as we were together. We married young, in joy and belief.

  Stupidity and confusion caused me to leave her, for no apparent reason.

  I was frightened, not of not loving her, as I maintained at the time, but of love itself. In anticipation of pain from the obligations of love I turned aside from intimacy. Such a mistake. She’s so engaged. Sparkles.

  27 October

  After a night and a day of high winds the two crab-apple trees are bare of leaves. Tiny apples manage still to cling to the crooked branches, the fruit bright yellow against the grey-green coating of lichen. Can see the beauty. Do not feel it.

  29 October

  Used to say that, on principle, I do not miss: people; places; work. A delusion. A deceit, maybe. A defence, certainly.

  Having never been able to grieve, I am full fit to burst of sorrow.

  5 November

  The shooting season has returned. The woods and combes out there in the view are shattered today by gunfire.

  28 November

  The days and weeks when I write nothing, this is when the hard stuff happens.

  The little I do write is worthless.

  Too distraught to speak.

  Tears. Tears.

  And worse.

  2 December

  There was a moment, a moment ago, when I felt I might have something to say, to myself, here on the page. About wheelbarrowing horse manure from a weed-covered heap piled by Will in the yard of the broken-down coach house to empty onto Beth’s vegetable patch, which she has recently extended by digging over to … The words aren’t there; if they are, I can’t find them; the will isn’t there; I’m not interested in a single word I might say to myself.

  Paralysis. Of the spirit.

  A sort of death.

  31 December

  My New Year’s resolutions are: not to smoke, not even Beth’s roll-ups; and to write here something each day, something I’ve observed, something I’ve seen. Anything. Writing just anything may keep me alive.

  Janet lived as a shepherd for three years in New Zealand, spending part of the time on a deserted island two miles off the western coast in the north of North Island, to which Maori fishermen helped transport her stock of sheep and cattle in open boats. She loved it there, sea-swimming every day from her shack by the bay. Until a young shearer she had met earlier in her travels arrived with a shotgun, threatening to kill them both if she refused to marry him. A bullet lodged in Janet’s shoulder as she rowed away in a hidden boat, barely escaping with her life. He was sent to prison.

  The incident plays a small part in Janet’s autobiography The Sheep Stell. Writing helps.

  1 January

  An owl hooted in the dark this morning, later than I remember hearing before, at six-thirty, when I awoke.

  Up and breakfasted, I opened the front door at the first sight of the sun since Tuesday, low in the sky, shining through the trees. Everywhere wet. Drops of water lined themselves up along the bottom edges of the leafless branches, rainwater glistening on the ground, on everything garden-planted, on everything built, on every man-or-nature-made bit and piece of this place of mine. Windless. The world sparkled. A single drop of water on a pine behind the byre, the light refracted in a particular way through earlier drops along its path, shone bright turquoise from where I stood. The simple beauty of light and water. When I shifted my stance the colour vanished and this drop became indistinguishable from the infinite others.

  2 January

  In the wood at the side of the waxcap meadow lives a bird with a thrilling winter song.

  Don’t know what bird it is.

  Silly to feel bad about my ignorance. I do, though.

  Pleased, on my return, to find myself picking out from the nature books on the shelves by the kitchen table E.W. Hendy’s Somerset Birds and some other folk, a wartime publication, of 1943, and noticing in the chapter on the Quantocks that ‘combe’ is spelt ‘coombe’. In the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ‘coomb’ and also ‘combe’ are both marked obsolete, ‘not found in OE or ME literature, but occurring in charter place-names belonging to the south of England, many of which survive’. Hendy describes the combe (I’ll continue to use my spelling) at Huntsridge branching out into four oak-clothed ‘goyals’, or wooded valleys, a terrific word of which I’ve never heard.

  Standing by his Rayburn on Christmas morning, Frank lost consciousness, fell to the ground and banged his head, awaking twenty minutes later to find himself stretched out on the floor beneath the table. He called one of his sisters, who drove him to Casualty at Musgrave, where an infection of the inner ear was revealed. Frank looked frail, vulnerable, when he called by on Boxing Day. His father died at the age of forty-four, of a heart attack, and Frank has always feared that he’ll go at the same age and in the same way. He is forty-three.

  3 January

  At the kitchen sink, doing the dishes, I watched a rose-breasted bullfinch and its mate fly down to perch on the stems of old dock and peck at the seeds. This patch of land bordering the lane I’ve let run wild, to the delight of the birds – to my delight too, in them.

  I’m fortunate in my neighbours, closest in one direction Frank, the master builder, and in the other, at Keepers Cottage, one of the Quantock Rangers, whose wife is a gifted practitioner of Shiatsu. This morning I paid my fourth visit to her, and felt the tension in my muscles begin to ease a little.

  Rest.

  I’m so so tired.

  4 January

  Fifteen minutes ago it looked as if it was going to snow. The sky has lightened. My stomach flutters.

  I’ve always wanted not to be English. With all this drivel about the weather.

  5 January

  Sharp frost, clear blue sky, no wind. Everything outside, the birds in the branches of the birch, white pancakes of ice suspended in the ruts of the forest tracks, everything I saw reminded me …

  No, now I’m making it up, fabricating.

  Not everything. There was one moment, only. Maybe two. The first: when I stopped in the high wood, aware that if I stood still I’d be able actually to see the birds singing in the trees, the light at a perfect angle. And I did. Saw and heard things, saw nature, heard things of beauty, the nature of things. The second: the sporadic drill of a woodpecker heard not seen on a raddled oak in the middle of a ploughed field, two-thirds of its branches dead, white, like bones, the bent bones of an aged man. Three moments, not two. The third: in a wood on the way up from Grub Bottom another oak, also old, shaped like … Won’t say, can’t describe what I saw. Unlike any tree I’ve ever seen. An image to hold privately in mind.

  A muddle. Not too bad, though. The day has passed, with three things worth remembering. Hold to reality, if I can manage it.

  6 January

  Walked to Kingston St Mary, five miles away, for the first session of the New Year with Jim Wilson, the psychotherapist I see three times a week. On my way back I noticed the shape of the ancient oak trees in the park here at Cothelstone. One leans at an angle, blown askew maybe a hundred years ago, by then two hundred or so years old, the major branches already fully formed, only its highest limbs changing direction to correct for the accident. The trunk on the weather side has expanded, a root partly exposed, like a muscle, extra-developed in strength and size to take the strain of the tilt. At another spot two trees stand close together, their fat trunks by now only a few feet apart, the entire upper parts shaped as two halves of a single tree. They must, I presume, be exactly the same age. I’ve seen these trees hundreds of times, have adm
ired them, but never before looked at them as I did today. If one fell the other would soon die too, of loneliness. Like Gilbert and George.

  7 January

  A cold day, yet I sweat, in anxiety at this afternoon’s meeting with Dr Ahmed, the psychiatrist in charge of Rydon House, the man who prescribed my electroconvulsive therapy when I was confined in his care. After an emergency appointment at the Clinic a fortnight ago, I declined to raise to the maximum a second dose of anti-depressants – he had wanted to double my 75mg dose of venlafaxine, even though I’m already on the highest recommended dose of mirtazapine.