Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  Delete. A word on a key.

  Notice its shape, the form of this particular configuration of letters.

  Not seen ‘delete’ in this way before.

  That’s all. Nothing more.

  17 May

  Start. Shut Down.

  Thought I might rescue the day by writing, but can’t.

  18 May

  Bought the wrong-sized postcards on a visit yesterday to Knightshayes Court. Dithered before deciding. After all these years of collecting the standard size postcard, I can still get it wrong. On discovery of the mistake I tore them up, unwilling to endure sight of them stacked ready to send in the wire tray on my desk, a record of foolishness.

  In my Thames & Hudson furniture book of 1987 are two photographs of designs by William Burges for Knightshayes, and one of the interior of the library as executed by J.D. Crace, following rejection by the clients of Burges’s incomparably more adventurous proposals. This was my first visit to Knightshayes, a National Trust property forty minutes drive from here. Billy Burges used to be one of my Victorian heroes, would be still if I still cared. Saw there the giant satinwood cabinet sold by me in 1981 to the NT, designed by H.W. Batley, similar to a prize-winning piece of his in the Paris 1878 Exposition Universelle.

  19 May

  Palestinian suicide bombers were at their terminal work again this weekend in Jerusalem.

  I’ve stayed in Jerusalem several times, once for three whole months, in the ground floor of a large old house ten minutes walk from the Damascus Gate. It was a happy period of my life.

  20 May

  Carl Freedman’s next exhibition in Charlotte Road is six paintings of cats by Fergal Stapleton:

  The paintings are lush and affectionate. Each one is a still, a motionless silent screenshot. In sequence they make a blow-up animation of sorts. The cat has been painted with veneration but you wouldn’t want to call them religious paintings. Yet the title of the show – I SHALL ARRIVE SOON – is clearly prophetic.

  Beth is laying the floor of the arbour in a mosaic of cut pieces of roof tile and terracotta bricks and the green ends of glass bottles and odd bits of salvaged stone. Her work is a delight, obsessive. The arbour itself she has constructed entirely of curved branches of Laurel, cut down by me over these two and a half years at Erkindale.

  I loved the time I spent as a boy with my grandmother at the original Erkindale, occasionally for Christmas but usually for the longer summer holidays, out all day with Uncle Dave, bringing the cows in for milking before dawn, shutting the geese, hens and turkeys in to their huts at dusk. Neither he nor Auntie Dinah ever married, never left the farm. Not easy lives. Dinah was slow, stubborn, quarrelled with her much younger brother.

  I can’t remember at the time taking in the fact of my mother being the tenth and youngest child. Granny was too thin, and bent, too ancient for me to register her as Mother’s mother, dressed in high-necked ankle-length black, grey hair drawn into a bun, eyes sharp, broad country-Irish brogue, loud cackling laugh.

  When I drove down in March to Lymington to stay with my mother in her flat for two days and a night, she showed me two group photographs taken of the family spread out across the steps of the veranda, one from before she was born. We also turned the pages of her wartime album: a tent hospital in Basra; the Sphinx, visited on leave from front-line duty with Field Marshal Montgomery in the North African desert; the Al-Aksa Mosque and Wailing Wall, on a wartime trip to Jerusalem.

  21 May

  Despair is too elegant a word. There is nothing salvageable from the pit of refuse I dig for myself. To call it the ‘despair of depression’ flatters, inaccurately describes my pitiful state. Pity. Self-pity. Horrible.

  Refusal of joy.

  Rather than get out there and join in, rather than make the effort to … to conserve butterflies, say, I turn my thoughts to death. I allow myself to think … No, I choose to think of self-murder rather than face the ordinariness of my failures here at Lower Terhill. I cannot let go, cannot relinquish …

  What? What can’t I relinquish?

  The illusion of omnipotence?

  That’s intellect-speak. It must be something else.

  It’s something basic. But I don’t know what.

  For the greater part of today I couldn’t see myself cooking, feared that I really won’t much longer survive this warfare with food. Can’t count the number of times I’ve had to leave supermarkets in a panic attack, without being able to decide on a single purchase.

  Got out a sirloin steak from the freezer, purchased last Friday at the fine family butcher in Bishops Lydeard. Put it away again, as Beth doesn’t eat steak, and I wanted, if I was going to make a meal, to cook also for her.

  Decided to try salmon.

  Surprised myself by producing a cucumber and tarragon sauce, incorporating the juices of the foil-sealed grilled fish, served with leek, celery and aubergine ratatouille, boiled new potatoes and steamed broccoli, followed by strawberries and cream!

  I can do it. Don’t want to, but I can.

  To cook a decent supper for someone is an act of lovingness.

  I’m unwilling to love, don’t trust myself sufficiently. Which maybe helps explain why I’m reluctant to engage with food.

  23 May

  Hit a car yesterday evening in the narrow lane beyond Bishpool, on the way to swimming in the school pool at Quantock Lodge. More accurately, the other car hit me. We hit each other, let’s say. She was driving too fast, while I, for once, was not. Gerald, at the garage in Bishops Lydeard, reckons the insurers will write my car off, paying me at the most a thousand pounds. In January the metallic grey 1800cc Golf cost almost three thousand.

  24 May

  Close my eyes, cover my face with my cold hands. Dissolve. Disappear. Am still here. And not here. Absent. Where have I gone?

  Beth and her cats have lived here for a year and a week.

  25 May

  Carl is down for the Bank Holiday weekend. After supper – cottage pie cooked by me, and pear and chocolate tart baked by Beth – we three, on Beth’s insistence, went out into the twilight to set free a crow she’d seen earlier in the day in a wire cage in a clearing amongst the trees where the big house once stood. The trap was primed with carrion to capture fellow crows, drawn to investigate. By upending the cage and blocking open a hinged flap, Beth managed to release the crow, which flew low across the ground to the sanctuary of a hazel thicket. Crows attack pheasant chicks, thousands of which will soon be transferred by the breeder into several giant pens scattered across the Estate. Beth dislikes even more than I do Cothelstone’s ritual shoots, the ‘game’ of slaughter, and said she wouldn’t have been able to sleep knowing of the crow trapped in the wood. She believes that there’s room for all of us, that nature adjusts, finds a balance, if we let it. She avoids hoovering up spiders and lifts woodlice from the kitchen floor onto a piece of paper to shift them to the byre.

  I too tend to avoid killing woodlice – because I like the way they roll themselves into a ball under attack, tucking their multiple legs inside sort-of-armour-plated bodies.

  This morning I’m afraid I’ll be punished for the transgression of saving last night the lives of crows, fear that Hugh Warmington, my landlord, will know we’re the culprits, will be angry. Anger frightens me.

  26 May

  When Beth’s father dropped by for tea today, he pointed to the wild sorrel and asked: ‘Is that what we used to call sour grass?’ As a boy, during the war, on Scout Club outings, he picked and ate sorrel leaves to slake his thirst. Rupert is his name, a retired surgeon. He lives in Crowcombe, fifteen minutes drive away, with his second wife. Beth’s mother died three years ago, aged fifty-six. As a young nurse she had fallen for one of the NHS junior doctors, for Rupert. My mother was also a nurse when she met my father, a man of similar temperament to Beth’s Dad. Similar in looks too. They’d have enjoyed a round of golf together. Neither of them believed our mothers were as unhappy as they both claimed to be. These
men, like others, were mistaken.

  My right hand is getting better at doing up the buttons of my shirts, suggesting that the severed nerve of thumb and first three fingers may regrow.

  27 May

  Making their presence felt in my butterfly meadow are maybe a dozen plants each with several dark green necks snaking towards the light, ending in tight oval buds which, in the sun, are one by one opening. I’m fond of them: the sunburst yellow of their dandelion-like heads close up again at night. They are already taller than the highest grasses. I’m not sure of their identity. Amongst the YSJ wild seeds which I sowed are common cats ear and rough hawkbit, either of which they could be, according to the Collins dictionary of wild flowers. Beth has lent to me a larger format book of her mother’s which I like a lot: The Concise British Flora in Colour, published by the Ebury Press in 1965, with a foreword by Prince Philip, which forty years on doesn’t irritate me now as it would have done then: ‘The dedicated and painstaking skill which has gone into each plate in order to ensure complete accuracy in colour and detail will, I am sure, make this book invaluable to both amateur and professional botanists.’ The names here given for the genus Hieracium differ: rough hawk’s-beard, mouseear hawkweed, swine’s succory, etc. I’m pleased with the sound of this plant’s possible names.

  Telephoned Hugh to confess our act of crow-sabotage. Without hesitation he accepted my apology.

  Easily forget that I’ve been a landlord myself. On moving into my Victorian furniture factory in Charlotte Road in 1985 there was nobody living on my side of the street. My ground floor tenants operated till late at night a traditional City printing press, and an East End seamstress on my first floor made lingerie, Best Curve Ltd their company name, nightdress-makers to the Queen Mother.

  The ground floor is in the only part of the building I still own, Carl my tenant, with his contemporary art gallery.

  28 May

  Radishes from the garden, washed and left to dry on the white sink leave behind drops of pale lilac water of an astonishing hue.

  For over a year, other than working visits to my restaurant Podshavers, I’ve taken almost every meal with Beth, usually cooked by her. Until recently, tears poured down my cheeks while seated at the table in her kitchen, through the connecting door from mine. Silently, on and on, night after night. Without cause or explanation. She used to hold my clasped hands in hers. There was nothing either of us need say.

  29 May

  The first night of summer, warm and still. On my walking-way to Podshavers I plucked from the edge of a field a handful of wheat, in multi-shades of green-on-the-turn-to-yellow. Slim, tender. In the country air, not yet sedated by heat, a scent of eagerness, of possibility. Lying in bed on my return, the quiet of after-midnight was shattered by the roar of my Combi boiler, bringing back up to temperature its internal tank of water. As loud, to me, as an aeroplane. I hate, how I hate this sound. Two new flues from my cottage invade the lane, destroy its peace. Destroy my peace.

  Unforgivable to install such a thing. One in each section of the house.

  An insult. Nature deserves better of me.

  In the post a letter from the Bishpool woman’s insurers, blaming me for the accident.

  From the field behind me the snort of a horse. Will’s pedigree mare progresses at the side of her nearly-grown child, step by step across the field, their necks arched out and down to pull at the grass. Will and his family are being evicted, after renting for seventeen years their cottage, two paddocks and the stables in the coach house yard. Will refused his landlord’s fair offer of an alternative home for his horses, took his landlord to court, and lost.

  30 May

  Set out straight after an early breakfast up the hill with basket and knife to gather mushrooms. Last weekend Carl and I picked what we discovered to be a St George’s mushroom, marked in one of the reference books with a black chef’s hat as ‘choice’, the highest grade of edible.

  Again warm. Ahead of me, on the grassy farm track through the park, sat a pair of wild duck. They flew away as I approached, leaving behind a feather, almost transparent, white incised with shaky brown lines. Good to be finding feathers again. Counted sixty-seven deer, in the usual place. No mushrooms, though. It’s been too hot, I reckon. In my unrelaxedness I didn’t properly look, soon turned round to hurry home.

  Slowed only when I noticed, in the small field below the disused quarry, the yellow flower I like seeing down in my butterfly meadow, and stopped to pick a bunch. They stand now in a vase on my kitchen table. In the Ebury Press book, readers interested in learning more about Hieracium are advised to study an article published in the Journal of the Linnean Society in London by a Mr H.W. Pugsley, in which he identifies two hundred and sixty different species.

  What devotion. Was he married, was he a father, was he wealthy enough not to have to work for a living?

  Helping Beth lay her crazy paving to the arbour, I hit the index finger of my left hand very hard with a hammer. The nail is black the flesh blue. It hurts to type.

  31 May

  Nine days now without a car. It hasn’t yet been inspected by the insurance assessor. Another couple of weeks, probably, before I get it back – if it’s not written off.

  This is not the cause of my tension, of the pain in my body every morning.

  Need to remind myself that my front door opens onto a meadow-full of golden buttercups and white and purple clover, as well as russet stems of sorrel and yellow heads of hawk-weed/bit/beard, with several other wild plants yet to bloom. And that in my woods maybe a hundred foxgloves are already in flower, mostly mottled mauve, some creamy-white, and scores of giant umbellifers.

  Nourishment.

  1 June

  For twenty years I’ve been a full-time writer and in the last sixteen months I’ve written nothing of the slightest worth. A few letters, and this irregular journal, this vain, vacant talking to myself.

  Running out of postcards. Want to drop one in to Francis, Hugh’s brother-in-law, who lives in a nearby cottage, thanking him for yesterday’s gift of two rainbow trout, morning-caught by rod and fly from a boat on the lake, cooked by me for supper, stuffed with fennel, doused in white wine, and wrapped in foil.

  I’m improving.

  Don’t wish to telephone, much prefer to write a card. I can choose my words, make a distinct impression.

  Control.

  3 June

  Bicycled this afternoon to Taunton for my appointment with Dr Ahmed, at which I spoke of signs of a new steadiness over the last ten days. He asked if there was still nothing I looked forward to, nothing I’ve these days achieved which has brought me joy, contentment, satisfaction. He chose these three words carefully. I shook my head. And then corrected the denial: ‘Yes, some satisfaction. A start, maybe.’ Dr Ahmed advised keeping to the daily dose of 150mg amitryptiline and 45mg mirtazapine, at least until our next meeting, in August.

  4 June

  The other day, walking back from a Jim session in Kingston, I passed a woman hauling herself with the help of two sticks along the lane towards her parked car. Her face was a uniform chalky white, the skin taut, her short hair grey. The smile she gave me wiped from her features the mark of pain. ‘You’ll be home before I get to my car!’ she said, playfully, her eyes alight. Today, on my way to therapy, approaching fast from behind on my bicycle, I saw the large letters ASDA printed in black on the back of her green T-shirt. She works, I guess, on the checkout at the superstore in town.

  5 June

  This studied ordering of words on the page is designed to conceal rather than reveal the truth, to flatten out feeling. Like crops of cabbage hidden beneath sheets of plastic stretched across nearby fields, unseen, my fears flourish.

  The thrice weekly visits to Jim also centre on concealment, despite the show of openness.

  Don’t know.

  Do know that I’m frightened, sweat-beads forming on my upper lip as I write. Things are not as they seem. What I say is of nil significance
in itself, just a device to keep me going.

  Nothing ends, ends nothing.

  The ASDA lady lives in a row of semi-detached Council-looking houses built on the top side of a slope, with a bank to the road and angled steps up to their garden paths. Today I noticed that Taunton Deane Borough Council have dug out the bank to provide a single parking space for the invalid’s car, close to the iron banisters on steps leading to her cottage. The road is narrow and steep at this point, and other residents drive off to the left into a parking lot some distance from their front gates.

  I like bicycling. In my home lane I saw a small animal shuffling about at the base of the hedge. It didn’t hear my silent approach on Beth’s almost-new bike. A tawny brown animal, its back arched in motion, about twelve inches from rounded face to the dark-brown tip of its tail. Aware, at last, of danger, it reared on its back legs, revealing white bib and tummy, then darted, quick as silver, for safety. A stoat? Don’t have a book in which to check.