Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

Mustn’t pretend ‘he’ is not me. Cannot charm my way, Harrovian-style, and refuse to articulate the rank distress still here every day.

  It’ll change, I will change. Slowly, slowly.

  4 July

  Rich and his assistant Phil called this afternoon to advise on the next steps to take in caring for this borrowed land of mine. They like what I’ve been trying to do, and we’ve decided to mark out on a map the separate sections, make a general plan of what trees to plant where, when to cut back which bits of undergrowth, and how to conserve and enhance nature’s way with the place. I feel appreciated, sense their green hands guiding me back from the brink of another bout of despair. Rich says I should keep a written record of all that we do on my land. He sees us season by season work, watch, explore, experiment together, here at Lower Terhill.

  I will pay for the work by a system of barter, scaling down my unpaid months of labour for them earlier this spring into fewer hours of their skilled attendance through the autumn.

  12 July

  Back from a week away on yoga retreat with Beth, I open my front door and enter to the scent of warm wood. On the bedroom landing, as in the rooms themselves, I notice with renewed pleasure the different colours of the boards, unsealed, sanded by hand by Beth to varied textures: schoolroom-style for my study, honey-smooth in my bedroom. She has an eye for the secrets which old materials reveal when worked upon with patience.

  Beneath the cane laundry basket from out on the Levels, a butterfly hides, trapped by my closing of all the windows before leaving. It survives. I cup my hands and release it into the garden air, where it flaps its tortoiseshell wings in dizzy flight off over the ridge of the byre.

  While we were on holiday the bullocks broke down a section of the iron fence to their field, and rummaged through my woods and garden. Carl, cat-sitting for three days before our return, stretched out on Beth’s settee reading a book after supper, heard the sound of munching by the window and turned to look out onto the surreal twilight sight of a dozen all-black cattle feeding on the lawn. Unable single-handed to persuade them back into the field, he telephoned my landlord, who alerted Michael, the Cothelstone cowman. But he too was defeated in the dark, and had to leave the invaders on the loose until morning light.

  The damage could have been worse. Sad, though, to lose rows of young lettuces, beetroot and spinach, cultivated by Beth from seed. The trampling of my wilderness also hurt. The empty beehive was knocked over, the occupied hive nudged askew.

  I’m not sure why I’m as fond as I am of the podgy box hedge which separates the lawn from the vegetable patch. The bullocks tore gashes in the hedge, and I’m in need of an efficient pair of new shears to cut it back into shape.

  Looks as though one only of Beth’s four artichoke plants outlived the stampede, nurtured in her greenhouse from seed, planted out a month or so ago on cleared patches of ground, not due to bear fruit until next summer. And the winter greens we were expecting to eat on into February next year are all uprooted.

  13 July

  Look up from the hammock at the sound of a bird, a single rising note, repeated, a plaintive cry, not loud. The bird is above me, hidden by the leaves of the rescued oak that filter the sun and splash synchronized shades of green. The sound is uncommon and I want to see the bird which thus speaks. I do see it, see the smallish bird’s sharp swooping flight, illusive, keeping close to the trees, the sight as special as the sound. A rarity, I feel.

  15 July

  A bumblebee lies dead this morning on the computer keyboard. Open the window and place the corpse on the brick sill, to be eaten by the wren which bobs about the lane.

  I’ve noticed three types of bumblebee gathering nectar from the purple, trumpet-shaped wild flowers that have recently appeared in my butterfly meadow: the usual kind, with honey-brown fluffy head and smallish black-brown body; a bigger bee, with lion-like ruff and striped tan and tea body; and the largest, a black-headed monster, with creamy-brown ribbon at its waist and thick jack-knife legs. I happen to know the name of the purple flowers favoured by the bees, but do not wish to use it. Not today. Another day, maybe.

  16 July

  Struggle to write.

  Nobody makes me.

  Know, at present, no other way of being. Can’t stop, don’t want to stop.

  Remind myself that I actually am a published author, of three novels and several non-fiction books.

  17 July

  In tears in her kitchen, Beth sobs at the sight of ants shuddering in the throws of death, their bellies swollen with poison. She carries out each ant to the path and, with a stone, administers a ‘blow of merciful grace’, the coup de grâce. She felt, she says, for her ants, nesting in a hole in the quarry-tile floor close to the heat of the Rayburn, where the oil pipe disappears underground. They were doing no harm, she had lived untroubled at their side for a month or more, why now poison them? An injustice, to herself, she feels: the murder of her own feelings.

  18 July

  There’s lots to be done, day-by-day things, resistance to the doing of which merely makes it worse.

  19 July

  Saturday morning shopping in Bishops Lydeard. Was once so proud of my local shops and claimed that Clive’s Bakery and Delicatessen was the best of its kind hereabouts, its homemade meat pies, fruit tarts and chocolate-coated flapjacks recommended by me to everyone. Since expansion of his premises the quality has deteriorated, and I’ve come to see that Clive cares mostly about money. Not unusual: to work for a living, save for a bigger house, smarter car. His stock may not, in fact, have changed much at all. The significant change is in me, in how I see things. Sweat breaks out on my face as I stand awaiting my turn to be served, not only in Clive’s place, also at the butchers.

  It’s me not them.

  They work hard and seriously.

  Sweat pours in recall as I write. Can feel drips collect in the crook of my elbows, in the hollow of my collarbones. Fifteen minutes ago I was cold, five minutes ago hot, and now I’m again cold, vest and shirt damp in the chill air of a rainy night.

  Should have driven to Wellington, where nobody knows me.

  So easily unbalanced.

  The smallest setback threatens disintegration.

  It took an hour to write these few words.

  22 July

  Type as fast as it comes. To get it out, unedited. Want to say that I do recognize the world outside. While living in here I live out there too. Both worlds are, for me, fear-filled. I’m frightened. Very. Today the news of renewed fighting in Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, where 100,000 refugees are living rough, poorly fed, the supply of water disrupted. A spokesman for the Red Cross said they’d been piping in 1,000,000 gallons a day of fresh water, until last night, when their pump-station was blown up. Dysentery, cholera, death will follow within a few days if reconnection is not made to an uncontaminated supply of drinking water.

  On the radio news the screams of mothers bent over the punctured bodies of their children. Report of corpses piled in protest at the defended gates of the American Embassy.

  Elsewhere in the Today Programme’s bulletin: exploitation of Chinese immigrants in the vegetable fields of East Anglia.

  Disparate images spin.

  None of this, not the decline of the grocer’s shop in Bishops Lydeard, not the calumny of international traffic in cheap labour, not the years and years of the West’s unconcern for murderous unrest in Africa, none of this is cause of my flooding despair.

  I cling on, afraid of being washed away.

  Must ride it out. Quietly. Mustn’t dramatize. Yesterday I was able to conceive of holding to stoical acceptance of difficult times.

  Stoicism. A good word.

  To identify my state with refugees in Liberia is a frantic mistruth.

  I am unwell, but I am neither starving nor exploited nor a victim of war.

  23 July

  Another birthday is near: the day after tomorrow.

  My ex-wife Elizabeth’s too, on
the same day – Beth, as I used to call her. Then-Beth and now-Beth.

  A postcard to send to her lies on the desk in front of me, a coloured photograph of part of the garden at Rodmarton Manor, clipped box hedges lining a path leading to a summerhouse with conical roof of cut Cotswold-stone tiles. On my visit the other day I came across a stack of the tiles behind one of the greenhouses, at close quarters thicker, rougher than I’d imagined in looking up from the ground to the roof of the Manor. Wanted to steal one, bring it home, hang it on a nail on the wall, through the hole already pierced in its curved top-end, for securing to batons on the roof.

  Getting tense again. Anxious.

  Must stop. Must do something different from writing this stuff to myself.

  My mother has kept for several years on her mantelpiece, behind a pottery lion given to her by Elizabeth, the postcard of an adolescent girl wearing a white lace dress with black velvet sash, tied-back blonde hair hanging to her waist, standing in a pale room. A painting by James MacNeill Whistler, reminiscent to me of one of Goya’s Spanish princesses, the card unwritten upon. I’ve no idea what this picture means to Mother.

  I should ask.

  But I won’t.

  Where did she get it? From me?

  24 July

  On his early morning walks researching the movements of deer across the Quantock Hills, and out at work during the day with SWS, Phil has been gathering samples of wild grasses, the seeds of which he suggests we introduce to the butterfly meadow. Next week he’ll call to take detailed note of all that grows in the various sections of my wild garden. He’s already thinking about native shrubs to plant, envisaging this as a model conservation project, the way of the future. Order, they reckon, is losing its appeal.

  I’m wary of ‘shrubs’, which I associate with the hybrid hell of garden centres.

  It’s ages since I sat on the bench beneath the Monterey pine: not at all this summer, and seldom last. The wooden slats are green with mildew and marked my jeans. I’ve scrubbed the bench down now, with the brush which lives beside the outside tap and a kitchen bucket of warm water laced with organic cleaner. Maybe I’ll begin to use again this once-favoured place.

  The scent of the old red rose by the wall to the lane is so strong that I feel, eyes closed to draw in breath, its smell could be solid enough to see.

  A pair of rosebuds unfold on my oak table, standing in a small cocktail glass decorated with pink enamel elephants. The glass belonged to my father. When I was a child he often used to wear to teach in school a dark-blue tie embroidered with the rear end of a pink elephant, its tail hanging free, an emblem of membership of some club in Cambridge. He liked this tie. My mother loathed it. The accompanying glass is one of the few things of my father’s in my home. Another: a teak cigarette box from a houseboat on the lakes of Kashmir, the place of my conception. Neither of my parents smoked, and the packet of cigarettes they used to keep in this box, for dinner guests when my father became a headmaster and they officially entertained, stayed there for months, grew stale. The box, never put by me to use, I keep in the drawer of a cabinet in the end room downstairs, where in the winter I sit beside the wood-burning stove to read. One thing of his, a wide-rimmed blue glass fruit bowl, I do like, use every day. It was given to my father by his father, picked out from his Dad’s stock as a travelling salesman in commercial chinaware. My father, the youngest of four sons brought up in the suburbs of Birmingham, was the first in his family to go to university, proud and overawed to have made it to Cambridge.

  I, in contrast, presumed my right to be there.

  I bought for myself, some years ago, more Pink Elephants, a set of eight mail-art folding cards of found images by Gilbert and George, for each of which they composed a different drinking verse. One of them goes:

  Felt a trifle queer last night

  and couldn’t eat a thing

  couldn’t drink a thing.

  Lay very still for a few minutes.

  Drank a lot and later

  quite made up for it all.

  Cheerio

  Beth has made for the set an ingenious frame, of end-cut layered cardboard.

  26 July

  DISCOVERY FOR SALE: handwritten in capital letters on a sign outside a house on the road across the levels to Glastonbury. PERSEVERANCE WORKS: the address in Shoreditch of the friend of a friend, passed on to me over cream tea this afternoon.

  Found a new word I like: haulm – the haulm of a potato is its once-green shoots, which die back into the earth when the tubers are ready to be dug.

  27 July

  In the long grass close to where I sit in the sun, Bertie leaps to trap between his front paws a butterfly. He sets it free. Catches it again, in his mouth. Spits out the butterfly, its wings too damaged to fly.

  28 July

  Shaky. The worst for weeks.

  30 July

  On a dusty pull-in by the road into Taunton a traveller has parked his converted horsebox, an old vehicle with crafted coachwork, the oval relief on the hood of the cab colourfully painted: a bridled head within a frame of horseshoes.

  The tailboard has been removed from the back of the van to make space for a narrow veranda, onto which opens a cross-braced door and small window, the bright-print blind, drawn. Riding by on my bicycle I see, in a field nearby, a man in a camouflage jacket walking a dog, the dog alert, the man pale-faced, thin, hair teased into blonde dreadlocks which descend almost to his hips. Pen Elm Hill this road is called, less than half a mile from the paratroopers’ defended barracks.

  31 July

  On the turf path leading into my wild-cherry grove, wet with dew, I pick up by its hind leg the headless body of a rabbit, the flesh of the neck raw, a recent cat-kill. Further along the path is the rabbit’s head, chewed to the bone.

  1 August

  Phil came by this morning to add professional details to the rough map I’d sent him. We spoke of cutting down all the sycamore, laurel and dead elm in the copse beside the lane, half-cleared by me, and transplanting there some of the ash and hazel saplings which multiply in other parts of the wood, in years ahead to be coppiced for the building of bean and sweet-pea trellises. He wants me to think up names by which to call each section of my Terhill territory, as shepherd Janet does of her fields at Aisholt. Phil began to list the wild plants currently growing, with the intention of recording each year new arrivals, some species introduced by us, others already present in the soil, released to flower by selective cutting and clearing of dominant regulars.

  I was tense, uncertain, unhappy. The drizzle smudged Phil’s map.

  I know, of course, the value of formal record-keeping. It’s just not the kind of thing I want to do.

  I can’t, don’t have the knowledge. And don’t wish to acquire it.

  I’m looking for … I don’t know … something else, something different.

  3 August

  In the hot sun hundreds of hairy caterpillars have hatched on the leaves of the bank of nettles behind the stables, entwined four or five deep around some of the green stems, a feast for the birds. Butterflies are out now in numbers. Watch three very small small tortoiseshells flit from head to head of the whitey-blue flowers of oregano by Beth’s kitchen door. The chequered turquoise and dark brown bands at the base of the young butterflies’ wings are not yet as bold in colour as they will be.

  4 August

  Cat carnage: on the gravel this morning by the garden gate a dead bird, without a head; and at the edge of the lawn the corpses of three shrews.

  6 August

  Stopped my car fifty yards on down the road from the end of our rutted lane to allow a man and two women on horseback to pass. The man was mounted on a grey stallion, which knocked my wing mirror as it passed. The rider smiled at me: my GP, Dr Merchison, from the surgery in Bishops Lydeard.

  Animals at night raid the brick compost bins which Beth and her brother built this spring. Earlier today I followed a trail of celery, tomato skins and potato peel across th
e lawn to the laurel-shaded path beside the kennels, close to a well-worn badger run.

  8 August

  The traveller’s van has not moved. Maybe he part-time works on the land, baling straw through this week’s dry heat, or market-gardening, harvesting the summer greens and other vegetables which explode-grow beneath polythene sheets stretched across field after field by the road.

  The four fingers of my right hand can now fully straighten then close, and the vaguest sense of touch may be returning to the tips, the quicks all healed, none picked. Anxiety contained. Don’t know how. Don’t trust the battening down, the fierce control. My heart beats dangerously fast, is forced by my state-of-mind and by the prescribed mix of drugs to work too hard. Learnt at Wednesday’s check-up at the surgery that Dr Ahmed wrote a month ago to my doctor to advise the phasing out of amitriptyline, to prevent damage to the heart. I was never told. I’m worried. Fear the return of sleepless nights. A cardiogram has been arranged for next week.