Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  I want, so much, to free myself from dependence on medication.

  In therapy I believe, and in friendship, and in perseverance with the taking of these notes, difficult though they are to write, mind dulled by the struggle to hold my nerve. Five weeks have passed since I last saw Jim, who is off on his summer break. I’m missing him. We start on Tuesday again our work together. He has just passed sixty, could have retired.

  Therapy is his life. He’s good at it.

  9 August

  Beth tells me she has removed a dozen or more large yellowish-green caterpillars from the young leaves of her purple-sprouting broccoli, not due to be ready to eat until January. She tossed the caterpillars onto the tangle of bindweed, thistles, ground elder and hemlock beyond the vegetable patch, hoping they might there find alternative food, enough to persuade them to pupate, later to hatch into this year’s final brood of butterflies.

  Cabbage whites?

  There is another breed of caterpillar also on the broccoli, fewer in number, mottled brown, black and lettuce-green, scaled rather than smooth. Don’t know what they will transform themselves into. Must find out how long the cycle of change is from egg to caterpillar and on from cocooned pupa into the brief life of the butterfly. Some pupa over-winter, as do some butterflies whose lives, therefore, are not so brief. And particular species of butterfly migrate long distances. Do they lay eggs here, and do these butterflies, when their time comes, fly back to wherever their parents migrated from? I know very little.

  10 August

  It’s a Sunday morning, ten o’clock, the air heavy in the windless heat. This evening it is predicted that the weather will break. Fifteen minutes ago I came up the two steps through the always-open half of the doorway into my study and was halted mid-stride at the sight of dozens and dozens of small white-fronted black-headed birds swooping in to the eaves, where they hovered for several seconds, then flew away in a wide ark, chattering. They kept returning. The occasional bird alighted on the top of one or other of the three partly open windows, tucked in below the roofline. Smallish birds with forked tails and, in flight, sharply tapered wings. I know what they’re called: house martins. All the same, I checked in a reference book.

  I want them to think next year of building their characteristic nests below the iron gutters of my house. They’ve gone this evening, are on the point of emigrating to a warmer continent.

  I’m afraid this is the wrong thing to be doing.

  If only I could write un-self-edited. Each sentence in my head, each phrase, almost every word withers, has to be revived, propped up, frogmarched onto the page.

  Need to say to myself: you’re OK, you’re doing OK, this is OK.

  Am I? Is it?

  Feels … Can’t say how I feel.

  Vulnerable. Fragile. Mistaken.

  Many of the crinkled leaves of broccoli have indeed, I saw after breakfast this morning as I wandered in confusion around the garden, been eaten to shreds.

  11 August

  The soldiers in the barracks at Pen Elm are marine commandos not paratroopers. Armed guards patrol the perimeter fence.

  14 August

  Beth spotted crawling across the byre yard the other day a giant caterpillar, its articulated scales in mottled camouflage-greens, with a pair of cartoon-like eyes – circular, with black half-moon pupils and white corneas – either side of its head, from which projects a tapering trunk, waving around as it concertinas its passage across the warm stones. We looked it up in Michael Chinery’s Pocket Guide to Insects: clearly the caterpillar of an elephant hawkmoth, a beautiful pink and khaki creature that can, apparently, often be seen resting at dusk on fronds of honeysuckle.

  Never seen one myself. Then I’ve never looked. Did see, though, this afternoon, another of these big caterpillars feeding, as the book predicts, on a stem of rosebay willowherb.

  I’ve begun to read The Aurelian Legacy, bought over a year ago, about the early collectors of butterflies. Of Robert ‘Porker’ Watson (1916-1984) the authors write:

  Watson aimed not for a perfect collection but a collection of perfect specimens. Damaged ones, however rare, he always released. His setting was described as a miracle of perfection, despite his being virtually blind in one eye. Like many leading field lepidopterists of earlier times Watson was a first class shot and fly fisherman. He was also a hospitable and liberal man, holding open days when entomologists could view his collection, and often sending away young visitors with gifts of store boxes or setting boards. Among entomologists, Watson’s name will always be associated with the striking red form of the Cinnabar Moth, which he bred over some twenty-five years. The Watson collection of British butterflies and moths, housed in sixty-five Hill cabinets, was eventually bequeathed to the Natural History Museum, London.

  15 August

  Duck crowd the shelves and windowsills of Dr Merchison’s consulting room in Bishops Lydeard. Plastic duck nest in wicker baskets, ceramic duck swim in glass ponds, painted wooden duck waddle and peck at scattered corn. Half a dozen ugly threesomes hang in arrested flight across his blue walls. My doctor likes to shoot duck, displays cups and medallions won in this and other country pursuits.

  He’s a lousy doctor, who drinks too much. He has never once spoken to me of my attempt to die, although it was he who before then had subscribed anti-depressants, for the first time in my life. He never asks me how I’m feeling, what I’m thinking. Doesn’t look at my wrists.

  16 August

  Big caterpillar has disappeared. Eaten by a bird – or changing shape.

  Checked the nettles by the stables, and not one of the hundreds of those other caterpillars are still there either.

  To where do caterpillars slip away to entomb themselves in a cocoon? When? At night? How far do they have to travel?

  At kindergarten I think we must have kept silkworms, as I’ve a memory-feeling of the tension of waiting and watching each day in class for the transformation promised by our teacher that I just didn’t believe was possible. No such thing was allowed at home. No pet-anything permitted, other than my mother’s spotless cat. Not even a to-be-beautiful butterfly.

  17 August

  Walk out after breakfast around the newly mown paths, and there’s a hint of revival of my old interest in the shaping of this place. Fret at the thought of losing one of the bigger trees in a storm.

  It happens, and we adjust.

  Too tired tonight to describe what I’ve seen, will have to make do instead with a list of butterflies newly identified today: gatekeeper, wall, meadow brown.

  Twice this afternoon I arose from my desk to let out trapped small tortoiseshells.

  19 August

  Named, in draft, the sections of the plan of my territory: Hemlock Dell, The Wilderness, Cherry Grove, Kass Glade, Shadow Wood, Poplar Alley, Beth’s View, New Zealand, The Orchard, Groom’s Garden, Butterfly Meadow.

  Naming ties things down.

  20 August

  Down for the weekend, Ginny, Alex’s Oxford girlfriend, has adjusted my computer, and I can delete virus-suspicious emails now without opening them.

  Names! I’m doing it with people too, as if labelling is all that’s needed – this butterfly is a meadow brown, that person is Jim: end of story.

  So dismissive. And Ginny is so much more than just a bright Oxford undergraduate – she is gifted with an ease-of-being that makes her a special joy to have to stay, with Alex.

  10 September

  Today at Kings Cycles in Station Road, Taunton, I consigned my broken old Raleigh in part-exchange for an almost-new twenty-one speed town bike. Before me in the queue to be served was a man carrying a box of disassembled child’s bicycle parts, which the enthusiastic owner of the bicycle shop identified as a particular model of the late 1950s, of outstanding quality, spare bits of which he had for ages been gathering at his home store in Wellington. It had been the owner’s first bike as a child, then already second-hand, and he wanted it restored for his young son now to ride. The
man at Kings was happy to take on the task.

  21 September

  Called with Beth at YSJ Seeds, hoping to ask their advice before choosing more wild meadow plants. There was nobody around, and I explored with Beth this strange place. She found buried beneath the undergrowth the carcasses of several vintage cars, once common family models of the 1960s, and gathered the shining shards of window glass to weave this Christmas with silver thread into stars. In the village of Winsham we climbed the wall of a deserted garden, ate apples from a tree and explored the dusty contents of old working barns.

  We can still have pleasant days together, despite Beth’s distress and fury with me at other times.

  1 October

  Today, 1 October, is the day that foxes, Constance Sayer says, piss on any blackberries that remain on the bushes, giving them maggots and making them uneatable.

  Recall with sudden clarity the disorientation of the six electric shock ‘cures’ at Rydon, the blind fear of each day-a-week ritual, my powerlessness to resist the cycle of treatment, the memory loss and distress.

  2 October

  I’ve brought myself up to date with readings of the two publications received weekly by post, the Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman, the latter order recently resumed after a break of five years. This return to standard patterns of reading has happened without intent. As if my head has taken to itself to regrow. Earlier in the year I threw away a back-pile of TLS, admitting to myself that they could never be read.

  I haven’t watched television for twenty years and seldom read daily newspapers, never wish to own a mobile phone.

  The philosopher Colin McGinn won’t watch television either, not because he’s virtuous but because it doesn’t work for him. He feels emotionally darkened by the box, not enlivened by it. Not relaxed by it, not even stupefied.

  Me neither.

  9 October

  Whilst attacking the burdock I was stung on the inner lip by a nettle. The burdock grows bushy tall on the edge of Shadow Wood, thick as saplings, brought to the ground with a bowsaw, the debris piled in the bottom pit of garden refuse, near the cedar.

  Not long ago, within Carl’s memory at home in Leeds, the parents of friends made beer from burdock, by boiling its roots.

  While taking care not to distribute the burdock burrs about the place, I’ve failed, nevertheless, to notice how many of the smaller clinging seeds of cleavers stick to my clothes, lodge themselves in my shoes, get entangled in my hair. At my door at the end of the day I brush off as much as I can, and too many seeds blow onto the butterfly meadow, where I’m afraid they may propagate.

  Want to describe the beauty of the chest-high walls behind the kennels, freed long enough by now from the throttling presence of common dock and nettles to reveal the richness of life in the damp native mosses, ferns, lichens, creeping blue-buttoned plants and the occasional wild violets which flourish in the crevices. Broken segments of glass bottles and fragments of iron have been placed by Beth to rest on the flat tops of the walls, lined with their original slabs of slate. There is an outside privy at the kennels, and the remains of a kiln.

  On waking early this morning and looking out of my bedroom window I saw in the yard flames rise from the massive beams of the old cattle pen leaning against the brick wall. Wearing only my dressing-gown and slippers I stood for twenty minutes directing the hose onto the embers. Twice last night, apparently, without causing me to wake, Beth had risen to put out the remains of her bonfire, so strong that the concrete had exploded and set alight a thick old timber bulkhead. Frank had heard the 2 a.m. commotion and had also got up, walking over to assess the danger.

  It seems I do sleep.

  14 October

  My heart has given up, swelled in size, ceased fully to function. No sooner does my spirit strengthen than my heart is freed to express its distress and register the strain of these many months. Today my legs are no longer the liquid tree trunks of three days ago, have been reduced by medication to spindly muscle-less sticks, and I’ve this afternoon returned from another stay in Musgrove Hospital.

  Will in time be OK, as I’ve changed GP and am being properly cared for now. In neglecting to give me my specialist’s drug instructions, Dr Merchison endangered my life. He should be forced to retire, disqualified if he refuses. The villagers of Bishops Lydeard don’t deserve to suffer his incompetence.

  15 October

  The autumn leaves of the cat-piss tree by the kennels are graphic, the external shape of the leaf repeated in decreasing outlines of yellow then green then purple.

  Nearby, the cooking apples on the old tree fall.

  The latest bulletin produced by the Somerset butterfly fanatics informs me that the final broods of red admiral and speckled wood feed off apples in October. They and commas also like the late blackberries.

  25 October

  Remember that, on the morning after the fire, when I opened the front door to the sun I saw Tom seated on the red tiles of the barn floor, surveying his domain. He looked at me, white bib and paws prominent, and with his usual decorum walked over, came in, talking, and followed me up to my study.

  I’ve begun to clear the lane, pruning and shaping the two hazel trees, cutting the holly and hawthorn further back than ever before, revealing not only remnants of a drystone wall, in herringbone pattern, but also the curve of the ditch and its hidden banks of fern. Found the work tiring, took frequent stops for breath. Satisfying, though. The same with raking and clearing the butterfly meadow, strimmed three days earlier by Phil.

  A bat has been stuck inside my house for three days, flying back and forth from room to room each dusk. By stealth, I persuaded it to escape last night through the double upper doors of the study.

  26 October

  Saw an unusual butterfly, orange the dominant colour, its flight distinctive. It dashed from the vine which Beth has planted on the sunny gable-end of the byre, to the elder behind the compost and then up into the ash. Didn’t see it for long enough to identify.

  Micro-cobwebs spread unbroken from the rose in the glass bottle on my kitchen table, to the bronze candlesticks and over to the pierced pottery fruit bowl, given to me years ago in Israel by Vera, made by a friend of her daughter’s. I love this bowl.

  Will and his wife have been thrown out, forced by bailiffs to abandon their rented home of almost twenty years.

  28 October

  Do not understand how the force of the unconscious can grow to be so powerful, how it was able, according to Jim, to act as the primary cause in summer last year in sending me to the brink of despair. Mystified as to how I convinced myself that death was a better alternative to life.

  Can find no more than a few stray clues as to what has guided me now for three consistent months out of the worst of the darkness.

  Want never to go back – must not go anywhere near that dreadful internal place.

  Aware that, however different I might wish it to be, there will be times to come of anguish.

  And of joy?

  Maybe. There may be.

  29 October

  The two tall ash beyond the byre must be male and female. I don’t know which way round. Both are bare of leaves, while only one of them retains its bunched seed pods, shoe polish brown in colour. The female?

  I have the feeling that things with Beth may have gone beyond the point of no return. For me, that is. I can’t, don’t want to speak for her. The ups and downs have today become too frequent, too violent to continue to be tolerated. This morning the fury was impossible, and I fear I may have to call it a day, ask her to leave. While I know that my behaviour goads her pain, she is not crazy, is herself in control of what she does with her feelings, however bleak they may be, and I’ve been reduced to believing there’s nothing I can do that she finds acceptable.

  Part of me wants to go through the passage door into her kitchen and simply sit with her, be at Beth’s side through her day of … whatever it is, as she so often was for me.

 
I can’t. I too am hurt. My heart is not in it.

  Though I know that I am alive in a large part due to her care.

  Things with Beth get worse not better. I pour water into a bucket with the holes of a sieve.

  I write about Beth’s distress while unable, at the time and even now, to describe my own. No mention of standing on the ridge in the wood, swallowing dozens of aspirin with water from a bottle, the violent slashing of my wrists with steel carving knife, falling, rolling through the dead beech leaves and bracken and ferns. Later waking up alive and staggering back home, soaked in blood, collapsing on the mat at my own front door, cradled by Beth.

  Or was it a bread knife? Whichever it was, Beth threw it in the bin.

  On my way back from posting a letter I wandered down the country alley to the back of Keepers Cottage, and saw Will’s wife feeding their horses. Walked over to speak to her, told her how sorry I was to hear that the troubles had come to eviction from the house. Eighteen years they’d lived there, she told me. ‘Can’t let it get you down, can you?’ she said. ‘That’s life.’ They are living in Taunton now, close to the children and grandchildren, and she rather likes it, she says, with a smile. She has dyed red hair and looks younger than her age. I have never known her name.