Ash before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

  29 February

  It’s a leap year: today is Sunday the 29th of February. On the lacquered black piano in the room in which I’m staying for these two nights in Auckland stands a photograph holder, empty, the frame painted with grey images of feathers on a mustard ground.

  Down on the harbour, in the warehouses of the National Maritime Museum, I very much liked a walking stick made from the spine of a shark, with a pattern of drilled holes in the shaft and carved teak handle.

  Maoris lined the insides of their Kahawai fish lures with the fluorescent shell of Paua.

  In glass cases there are scale models of the steamboats which used to trade the waters of the South Pacific, and I am taken back to my Sotheby’s Belgravia days, to cataloguing such things for auction in the Collectors Sales, a title and category which I invented in the early 1970s. Most of these Kiwi ships were made in Glasgow, their funnels shortening as the mechanics of steam streamlined. Can see, as if yesterday, the collection of tin toys sent for sale by the Maharajah of Hyderabad, in their original cardboard boxes, unopened, made by Bing in Germany immediately before and after the First World War.

  A later memory crowds in: of my appearances in every one of the BBC’s first twenty-four programmes of the Antiques Roadshow.

  I continue to wrestle with whatever it was which impelled me to leave this seeming success, against the wishes of many others – my parents, in particular, who loved the bridge club kudos of having a son on primetime TV.

  In the Museum they exhibit the wooden hull of the eights boat which won for New Zealand a gold medal in the 1972 Munich Olympics, and a fibreglass model of Auckland’s Black Magic, the only sailing boat built outside the United States that has – to date – successfully defended the Americas Cup.

  A day late, I realize that the Southern Cross cannot of course be seen in the skies of the northern hemisphere.

  1 March

  I was shown, in the weekend national paper, large colour photographs both of my sister in her new job and, in the arts section, of Greg, talking of his time as a surfer poet in the hippy heyday of the 1970s.

  Both of them look good.

  I never guessed, until seeing some here in the National Museum, that the weavings and ornamental dress of Polynesians could be of such beauty – their painstaking use of shells and teeth in complex patterns is wonderful. Maori artefacts, from New Zealand itself, are more primal, more powerful, in ways.

  Find myself drawn to sit on the benches and rest, from where I continue to watch and to think.

  Maybe I haven’t slept well on the folding couch. Maybe the constant presence of people has exhausted me. My heart, I trust, is not again protesting.

  I am looking forward to arriving home on Sunday at Lower Terhill.

  I stare for a long time at the traditionally carved whale-bone handle of Te Kooti’s battleaxe, which he presented in the late 1870s to a British General. Te Kooti, the most notorious leader of the Maori rebellion, saved himself and his fighters by taking sanctuary in the forests of The King Country, before eventually being pardoned by the occupying forces. With the blade of this axe he had slaughtered many Pakeha, as Maoris called the stubborn white tribe which had invaded their lands.

  In the park at the centre of which the museum stands, overlooking the waters, two teams of twelve-year-old boys play a cricket match. At Orley Farm, in my last prep-school term, I scored the most runs the school had ever witnessed, took the most wickets and caught the most catches. I deserved, I felt, to be awarded all three of the season’s cricket cups but was permitted to win only one, for batting. From then, thread by thread my competitive nerve snapped. By now, long solitary swims in the sea is the exercise I like best. And working in my wood, at home

  2 March

  I’ve received, wrapped in a silk bow, a joined pair of oyster shells and a poem, from a close woman friend of Shenagh’s. For me alone. I like them both: the shells and the poem.

  I love dates like today’s, numerically neat, balanced.

  I’m back with my sister in Wellington. A hoe lies on the bank, hidden by flowering bushes, dropped there by Shenagh while I was away in Auckland. Does it matter? My mother would think and say so, in a temper.

  It’s late; the cats have not been fed; they cry in the dark at the glass garden door.

  3 March

  Seated on a tall round stool at the bar of a café tucked behind the City Gallery, I look up from my glass of wine and see that the sky is blue after another rainy day, the wettest summer Wellington has known. There is no natural object within my sight. All is man-made: the green marble point of a stone pyramid; a concrete and glass segment of the concert hall; the corroded copper of a metal Palm tree. I like what I see, its geometry, the arm of a yellow crane in the distance, set against the clouds now bowling by.

  As the sun’s rays lower they skim the curved line of a chrome roof.

  4 March

  On the bank below the nearest house to Shenagh’s there is a damaged native beech, a large old tree its branches bare of leaves on the weather side. It will recover. In the meantime birds flock to it, and I spotted this afternoon two, perhaps three kingfishers alight to eat cicadas noisy in the sun; these long-beaked creatures are whiter than in England, and smaller, have different habits. Scruffy turquoise-tinged tui, the largest of New Zealand’s honey-eaters, fail in their attempt to chase away the young kingfishers.

  I see from the book that it was a spoonbill that we saw at Castlepoint, a bird which has demonstrated impressive powers of recovery since being declared in 1975 an endangered species, both in North and South Island.

  Leah, the tabby cat, has just been here again, on a fleeting visit.

  5 March

  My last full day in New Zealand. The morning sun catches the tops of trees and patterns the ferns I have uncovered at the brow of the bank. Last weekend, while weeding in the garden, Shenagh noticed my work, told me that she lacks the vision to see how such changes as these need to be made, my many marks on the land barely noticeable and yet, in visual effect, transforming.

  Like this praise – although I already take private pleasure in what I’ve done, have often sat in one of the canvas chairs on the deck and gazed around, spotting slight improvements to be made and clambering up the bank with the bowsaw to execute them.

  Shenagh and I had supper in town, brother and sister alone together for a couple of hours on my final night. We both cried at the table.

  6 March

  I’m in town for a farewell swim before the thirty-seven hour journey home to Lower Terhill. My regular swimming haunt in Wellington, a twenty-minute walk from the house, has been this 1930s open-air pool, with clapboard changing cabins, swan-neck shower stalls and a pebble-dash flight of concrete steps on which to sit in the sun and watch others. Front crawl for twenty-five minutes, a session of stretching exercises, shower and off soon to the airport.

  I have gained in strength here, am impatient for the future.

  We’ll see, we’ll see!

  On the plane. Resolutions. I will send postcards to whomever I like whenever I want. I will invite to stay whomever I wish whenever I choose.

  7 March

  Almost back, today’s date lived through twice.

  Swirl of half-remembered things.

  Versions of events, each view personal. The details matter such a lot to the individual and so little in general. It’s important that we try to hold to permission for difference and not seek to impose on each other our personal stories.

  Shenagh is seldom alone, I almost always am.

  Two people can disagree, see shared things conflictingly and yet can both be unmistaken.

  Staying with Shenagh has been good for me. My sister is a blessing.

  I am frightened that I may be sad, lonely, disconnected from the lives around me at Lower Terhill.

  If so, so be it, I wish not to despair.

  It is not the place itself which hurts, this I now know, learnt by spending these two months in New Zeal
and. There is no escape.

  8 March

  First sound heard from outside on waking in my own bedroom, curtainless, is the cooing of a pair of wood pigeons – the second, from the third from top branch of the Scots pine, the croak of a raven.

  I cannot manage to operate the bicycle pump on these new-style valves on my bicycle. The front tyre of my car is flat and I severely cut my hand trying to undo the nuts. A moment of panic. Calm down. Must calm myself.

  I have done.

  The clothes pegs, pink, white and green, I used laboriously to insist on placing in pairs to match the colour of my laundry. Today I find it possible to take from the bag each peg as it comes in hanging my washing out on the line.

  Proud of myself.

  9 March

  Looked from my study window in the early morning to see Hugh and Michael seeking to shift a flock of forty sheep from the old orchard and along the lane to new pastures. The two men flapped plastic sacks to direct the sheep and called to them, hoping they’d think they were about to be fed. The animals wandered through the gate in dribs and drabs, some feasting first on the verges, others running back into the field and refusing to follow instructions. Michael, who prefers his cows, cursed the stubborn flock of sheep. Eventually they trotted off down the lane behind his pick-up truck.

  Found in the wire tray on my desk the last of the cards I had bought of Matthew Barney, dressed as The Entered Apprentice for his Cremaster 3 film, made in 2002. He is wearing a leather apron, with pouches for tools, standing against an Art-Deco lift door. Send it to Amy, the young artist in Wellington who gave the Björk and Barney party and loves his work.

  10 March

  This early morning’s dream, taken note of in pencil before falling again to sleep, contained no women, I notice. We are all male, boys and men. In the dream I make a passionate speech and return back up Harrow Hill to my cave. I am close to tears. Happy. I don’t know what the darkness contains, the mouth of the cave overgrown with ferns. I am not afraid of entering.

  Through bare branches I noticed in the middle of Taunton a walled garden and sat on a bench there on the mound of a Norman keep, to eat for lunch fresh sandwiches and a piece of cake bought at the Women’s Institute Market around the corner in Bath Place. A notice dated the keep to 1160. On the sheltered moss grew dozens of the most delicate blue spring flowers I have ever seen, a form of wild crocus, I presume.

  Continued on my bike to Musgrove Hospital to be fitted with a heart monitor.

  11 March

  Beth struggles.

  12 March

  It’s snowing.

  13 March

  I struggle.

  14 March

  Tired.

  In the evenings I nod off to sleep at my desk.

  I’m drawn to the books I attempt to read, but my mind cuts off.

  15 March

  High in the grey sky above fields past which I cycle to Taunton to see Jim, I hear skylarks sing cascades of notes. It is spring, warm, I am out on the bike without a coat.

  Alex telephoned from Paris. He’s been puzzling about the parking places I noted with the mark RAISON, and rang to say he reckons they must be street-damaged versions of LIVRAISON. In translation: ‘unloading’. More prosaic than ‘reason’ as I’d willed it be, drivers justified in parking if they articulated a convincing French argument!

  16 March

  In too many places postcards are changing size. At the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of the artist Tom Phillips’ collection of WWI postcards, their reproduction cards have moved to a larger format than the original, after a century of satisfaction with the standard size. Bet Phillips is furious! How could the NPG make their copies larger than his standard originals?

  17 March

  On exhibition at the refurbished Camden Arts Centre, in the main space, is a chandelier and computer work by Cerith Wyn Evans, titled Rabbit’s Moon, similar to the piece I saw at White Cube last November, to accompany which Michael Clarke had created a dance that I watched he and his company perform. At Camden, on the single computer screen, is a quote from Keywords by Raymond Williams:

  The earliest meaning of image in English was, from the thirteenth century, a figure or likeness … There is probably a root relation to the development of intimate, but as in many words describing these processes (c.f. vision and idea) there is a deep tension between ideas of copying and ideas of imagination and the imaginary.

  Cerith Wyn Evans was a supportive friend to Joshua. At Cambridge I attended, for a year, Raymond Williams’ legendary lectures on the English novel. I love lateral links.

  The buses in London have been transformed, charges reduced to a standard one pound for every journey and congestion more-or-less removed through Ken Livingstone’s code-zoning system. Such a pleasure now travelling on the top deck of a red bus, in spring sunshine, watching from above places familiar to me day-by-day for thirty years. Much has changed. Much too has stayed the same. In my eyes.

  18 March

  What is it that makes special, makes especially beautiful, to Beth and to me, the patchwork of salvaged wood she has built to fill the vacant wall of the shed backing onto my to-be-orchard?

  Two concentrated days of work, this wall with chicken-wired windows and steps up to an iron-hinged half-door, rusted chains and nails in the places they’ve been for a hundred years on certain bits of the … collage, yes … It is art, a work of art. I’m very pleased with Beth’s creation.

  She lives to make things, does it all the time. Not to sell. Beth is bad at selling.

  Another thought: about a different aspect of this art thing: about Carl Freedman’s gallery on the ground floor of my old Charlotte Road home, which I visited yesterday when I was in London. A friend criticised Carl for failing to make it possible for passers-by to gaze in from the outside and decide whether or not they wished to look at each exhibition. What matters is that people already know that they wish to enter. The black steel door is plastered with graffiti and Carl has raised a blank white wall flush with the inside of the plate glass window. The building is confusingly divided into two entrances, and the numbers of the street travel down one side to the junction with Great Eastern Street and then up the other to face Rufus Street. There is no facade sign. Nothing is clear. Available to the determined, the only kind of person Carl needs to meet, he protests.

  He’s right. You’ve got to want to. That’s what art is.

  19 March

  I can do distance; not too good at close.

  20 March

  Wind and rain beat against the prow of my study jutting into the lane, so hard that water seeps beneath the closed window. I stand to look out down the curved line of the lane and am content to see the blackthorn beginning to push into white flower, in many more places than past years, a response to my careful clearings.

  Bumped into old Constance, yesterday. Ollie’s ghost doesn’t visit her at night any longer. This winter, though, birds still from time to time tapped with their beaks at his bedroom window, expecting to be fed.

  21 March

  The other day Jim gave me a Xeroxed copy of Freud’s essay Mourning and Melancholia, the final draft completed on 4 May 1915. I read it last night, and for a second time again today, taking note of several quotes, including:

  In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself … This picture of a delusion of inferiority is completed by sleeplessness and refusal to take nourishment, and – what is psychologically very remarkable – by an overcoming of the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.

  Walked over the hill this afternoon to Aisholt for tea with Janet. Helped on the farm, where she works through the nights on her fifty-seventh season of lambing. In the brightness of a spring afternoon she put on rubber gloves to pull, by its projecting feet, a lamb from its mother’s womb. Over our mugs of tea by the Aga she told me of the time she spent down on the coast at the edge of The King Country, in the 19
50s, the only non-Kiwi in her shepherds’ squad. On the deserted island which she then went to farm, up in the Bay of Islands, Janet kept three working dogs, one of which was a hunter-barker, like Graeme MacQuorcodale’s. She has always loved her dogs. Dart, the elder of her two current Collies, coughs blood, has not long left to be alive.

  If this distress continues to recur one of us must go.

  Maybe it should be me. Maybe London is the place I need to be, leaving Beth to her life here in Somerset.