by Roger Deakin
Dartmoor. Little waterspouts at the side of the road at Ashburton. Ferny, high banks, holly hedges and hazel, built up atop the stone walls, and gnarled weather-beaten beeches, the trunks crusted with lichen and quilted with moss. Sheep penned in small stone-walled fields. Clumps of John/Paul Nash beeches on the hilltops, leaning, brushed into shape by the wind like a woman’s hair when she leans one way to shake it out and brush it. Trees all tend towards the east, brushed by the west wind and laid down. Crouching, flat-topped hedges – beech.
Swollen streams and rivers – the Beck and Brook. Hard to see which is snaking road and which river. Then up through a gate and across a cattle grid and you’re on the moor. Three-foot pillars of granite, forming a hut circle beside the road. Low clumped gorse. Pony dung, sheep droppings, the great jagged Hound Tor. Clitters of stones and rocks.
Otters trotting, the swishing of fish. Wistman’s Wood – a tangle of slender spidery tree trunks, hirsute with lichen.
Below Ashburton, the Dart careers down in straight cascades. You climb up to the moor through woods of tall spindly oak/ash/holly, ivy clambering up them all. Long houses hunker down into the hills/hollows, beauty in the undulations of their slated and thatched roofs, their eaves, their windows.
The great thing about walking is that it gives you complete licence to get into fancy dress and eat junk food.
At the lower Cherry Brook, near Manaton – a children’s swimming hole and a rope in an oak bough and a rubber tyre. I swing out over the little river.
Walking back from the Devonport Leat, the bright lights of the Two Bridges Hotel suddenly visible. A fox bounds across the moor in the headlights and melts into the hedge.
It was wintertime on the northern flanks of Dartmoor, and I was following the River Teign along the Two Moors Way when I noticed a pair of mallards swimming against the stream, edging upstream close to the bank, deftly following the eddy current against the powerful main current of a river swollen with winter rain.
They seemed to personify a great deal about Dartmoor – about the determined spirit of resistance to hardship and difficulty. Everything has to contend with difficulties of one kind or another. The toughness that underlies the beauty gives it a specially enduring quality.
Dartmoor is both intensely liberating and a prison. Sam North’s recent novel The Lie of the Land describes the sheer shackling grind of a working farm struggling to survive on the moor.
It is not a wilderness in the American sense – far from a trackless waste, it is full of the signs of human and animal life. People have swarmed all over this moor, and still do, in search of riches of one kind or another, or refuge, or recreation.
Everywhere are the signs of alchemy – the tinner’s delvings into the body of the moor. Someone far back in the pre-Phoenician days had discovered that tin ore, cassiterite, will smelt into tin at about 1,100°C. The tinner’s blowing houses were thatched and the thatch stripped and burnt every so often, to capture the particles of tin lodged there.
There is water everywhere on Dartmoor, tumbling in every direction. And it is by water that you may find your way in what is an otherwise trackless wilderness. It is one of the last great wild places in England, one of the fifty royal forests that still retains its integrity, one of the few places in England where you can stand alone and remote, and quite out of earshot of any road. The towns and villages that surround the moor are twinkling so far off you feel you’re in a different time as well as place.
You take the familiar silhouette for granted in winter, but you would miss it if it wasn’t there.
Fire: nothing gives me more comfort or more anxiety than fire.
Look up Cobbett on the laying of fires – talk about bread ovens and faggots of furze for bread-making.
The fireplace has been subsumed by the TV, pushed out of the nest as by a cuckoo. People now contemplate the TV, not the fire.
A fire only really comes into its own when it is genuinely needed – when the weather is so cold that you come in shivering, preferably red of nose, blue of cheek and perhaps white of toenail.
Our immediate ancestors bathed before the fire in slipper baths – hot water came from the copper. Life revolved around the fire and the kitchen range, and the coal cellar or woodshed. Think what we miss when we press buttons or flick switches or adjust thermostats – a whole world of mystery and delight.
Fire is by no means silent; it crackles, wheezes, whistles. There are few sights more beautiful than wood smoke hovering over a copse in autumn/February, when the coppicers are at work.
At the party last night people talked about walking in the hills, or the countryside, but they always had to prefix ‘walking’ with ‘dog’. As though walking were not a sufficient end in itself. Going walking is eccentric; going ‘dog-walking’ is a practical necessity, and the dog is perceived as a connection with nature, whereas in fact the opposite is true.
A dog cuts you off from much of the wildlife you might otherwise encounter by disturbing and alarming things. In the larger picture, dogs are a serious disturbance to, for example, ground-nesting birds and hares. They have successfully chased away both of these from our common over recent years, when there has been a rise in the population of the village and in particular of newcomers developing and building what were once farmyards and barns into new homes. Almost all of them appear to own dogs, in some cases as many as six, and many ignore the injunctions of the Suffolk Wildlife Trust to exercise their animals on a lead.
I keep uncovering more and more evidence for a Murphy’s Law of publishing: that if a book is truly wonderful, it is certain to be out of print. Last week I tried to buy a copy of T. H. White’s The Goshawk for a friend and found it unobtainable. This week I’ve been on the trail of Richard Jefferies’s Bevis, also out of print, and number one million-something in the Amazon.com sales ratings. I eventually discovered twenty-nine copies available, all but one in America. Richard Jefferies deserves better than this, and he is getting it from Green Books with this essential collection of his later writings, at a time in his life when he had become more mature and thoughtful – his prose better than ever.
Yesterday, I began cutting and reshaping the overgrown ash arch from one end. I laid the branches, half cutting through them at an angle, then bending them down as I stood on the ladder or step-ladder, and weaving them into the arch to hold them down, or securing them with string.
Later, at dusk, I went out and planted a few maples and hawthorns on the common outside the house by the big willow. I bought them from Eddie Krutysza this morning in Metfield, and I bought a red-flowering may tree too, and planted it in the corner of the garden.
Something pale in the darkness caught my eye, a pale ghost gliding silently about the common – a barn owl hunting six feet above the grass, dropping almost petulantly now and again, only to rise empty-clawed almost on the instant.
I kept on digging and planting, digging and planting, well into darkness until I could see nothing.
The barn owl was there again this afternoon about three o’clock, its wingspan huge and its lightness palpable in its floating mode of flight. I know how frail and fragile owls really are when you lift them, and worry each time a car or lorry comes belting far too fast along the common. The owl likes to fly along the verge, perilously close to the traffic, with no apparent fears for its safety.
I worked on the ash arch for three and a half hours yesterday afternoon. It feels like a chess game, or giant pick-a-stick, circling the arch, trying to decide which branch to bend next, and in which direction.
The branches of the ash arch are now laid like a hedge and folded into each other, ready to bud and thrust into new life in spring as soon as the sap rushes back up the trees’ veins and seeps through the hinges of grisly bent wood that connect trunk and bent bough.
I love the creasing and wrinkling of the tree’s skin at the points where branches have been bent over and then healed, like the bending of an elephant’s trunk. Woodmen call these ‘elbows�
��, and I have often found, in Welsh or Cumbrian hedges especially, that the laid branches of hazel or ash will pleach themselves together, two or three different trees fusing into one in a series of swollen, gnarled elbows.
23rd January
The first wood pigeon cooing in a tree by the house. I open the curtain and there is a squirrel. We all know how a squirrel moves, yet my heart leaps at the sight of its sudden rushes in the grass around the base of the mulberry, seeking out peanuts that have dropped out of my improvised feeder – a recycled orange-bag from the supermarket filled with peanuts. His sleekness and perfect fur; waves of fur as he moves. Then he suddenly takes fright as he makes sense of my shape at the window desk, and runs off.
Coppicing is like making waves. You cut down a wave of vegetation, then another comes a few years later. Wave upon wave, making a wood’s history, and evident in the rippling waves of the annual rings.
Music is like the decorative, symphonic possibilities of a wood: endless combinations of notes or twigs, leaves and wind, branch shapes against the sky.
‘The lost score of a jig’–fighting back beyond the oblivion of last night’s sleep to the thought I was too sleepy to write down.
Richard [Mabey] and I talked about the upsurge of religion in America. Why is this? Perhaps because of a need for history, a hunger for the history they lack. The bible supplies a kind of instant history for them. Its simple presence in their homes gives them a rooted feeling in history.
Others have turned to the land for their sense of history: to nature and the millennia of evolutionary and geological history. These are the deep ecologists.
We talked about America and I said I would like to go in search of Robert Frost land –the land I inhabited through my adolescence reading Frost, the New England of ‘The Road Not Taken’–and I said I hoped there wouldn’t be an interpretation board at the bisection of the two roads – a sign pointing at ‘The Road Not Taken’.
We talked about interpretation in Tasmania and America – how there are different zones or grades of land –National Park, Nature Reserve and, in America, State Forest, National Nature Reserve, National Park, etc.
In Tasmania, when I followed certain ‘walking tracks’, I would reach some wild eminence and encounter a sort of viewing platform with a wooden banister rail and a plaque inscribed with a line or two of a poem telling you what to think and feel, and which way to look.
I talked about Colin Ward’s new book, and his idea that houses should not be built fast, on seven-month schedules, but organically, by slow accretions, over many years of habitation and out of the natural needs and requirements that arise.
Richard told me about a woodworker who made something out of a piece of the Selborne yew. He said yew cracked too much to turn. I went and fetched Matt Marchbank’s beautiful yew bowl, turned a few Christmases ago, to show him. ‘Must have been a young tree,’ he said.
24th January
In the early sunshine, I strip to the waist, sit outside on the kitchen doorstep before a mirror propped up in a cane chair and cut my hair. It feels good, even rejuvenating, to strip off the professor-like abundance of locks and to feel the sun on my skin.
25th January
I am at Mellis in drenching fine rain with a deep grey pall of sky, a wide skirt of it overhanging the common.
Aconites, a little yellow clump by the moat, are just beginning to come up. I scare two mallard drakes parked up, as it were, on the moat. The moat is a kind of holding bay for drakes, where they hang about waiting for the rare moments of sudden sexual frenzy when a duck appears and there’s a gang-bang. Mallards seem incapable of ordinary, fonder bird-love. With them, it has to be a violent chase, wild pursuit, followed by an unceremonious ducking of the object of desire and a gang-bang, with a lot of ruffian quacking.
The tower room. Towers have a reputation as refuges for writers. Yeats had one at Thoor Ballylee, Montaigne had one in Bordeaux, and Keats and Cyril Connolly were always imagining them. There was a tower at the gamekeeper’s cottage near Beccles where my London flatmates and I used to escape at weekends in the 1960s. You couldn’t reach it from the house, but had to go in from the garden and up a spiral staircase to a little upstairs room with bare walls and just a table and chair. You sat looking out into the woods, or stared out of the window, sharpened pencils, etc., and wrote. Or at least that was the idea.
Previous occupants of the table had made contributions to an informal anthology of graffiti, variously inspiring or depressing. ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our lives.’ And the whole of Robert Graves’s poem about the young bird-catcher on his way through the woods. Other contributions included the lines from Yeats about ‘marriage with a fool’, and an original couple of lines by Tony Barrell about Magritte and kittiwakes.
Water had to be pumped out of a well, and an old Lister petrol engine inside a box in the garden had to be hand-cranked. The crank had a nasty habit of kicking back or running away with you, and bandaged wrists were one of the regular features of life at the cottage. Bandaged ankles were another, thanks to the deep ruts everywhere. The place was sequestered in the woods far from any public road and was generally reached by train from London to Beccles, where we kept an Austin Champ, a kind of four-miles-to-the-gallon military jeep, in the car park. A sign of the times was that we always left the keys in the ignition. You drove as far as the Little David petrol station at Stockton, then turned off along a muddy track across the fields and through the woods.
We seemed to spend a great deal of our time servicing the house. The rule was that you saved up and collected at least as much firewood as you burnt. There was no electricity, so fires, candles and paraffin were all the more vital. There was a stove in the kitchen over which we spent much time huddled. It took ages to get into its stride and was usually just about going nicely when it was time to leave.
There was always the pub, of course: the Wherry at Geldeston was not far away. There were beds everywhere, upstairs and down, and several layers of the rags and carpets you could pick up for next to nothing at auctions (bare feet being one of the orders of the day).
Star favourites in the paperback library under the stairs were the novels of Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male in particular. Barrell derived the verb ‘to quive’ from this book (Major Quive-Smith is the gentlemanly villain of the piece) to describe wriggling along a leafy ditch bottom, flat on your chest in pursuit of, or flight from, whatever or whoever you didn’t want to see you. The whole of Rogue Male may be said to be one long quive from beginning to end. Barrell and I used to write blurbs for Oliver Caldecott, then the Penguin fiction editor (I did Rogue Male, A Rough Shoot and Watcher in the Shadows).
We wore corduroy in those days: Barrell wore navy, Chapman wore black, I wore dark brown. I also went in for brown herringbone tweed jackets or overcoats. The jacket was very expensive, bought from Jaeger after working with Ken Russell, who wore the full works: brown herringbone trousers, jacket and matching cap. I couldn’t even afford the jacket, but bought one anyway.
I now realize that all these English country-gentleman outfits were designed to make you look as much like a ploughed field as possible.
The modest scale of the cottage, the large number of us and the informal proximity of beds and copious intoxicants created a dormitory atmosphere, and there was much talking after lights-out. Barrell invented an organic breakfast cereal to be called ‘Dobbin’. I think it was dried cow-pats, flaked and mixed with a few raisins. Now and again there were mushrooms. And in that era there were still plenty of authentic Suffolk bumpkins to be met, or seen stumping about Beccles.
Stockton Wood was well supplied with pheasants, and we all learnt to appreciate them as individual characters. Our affection for them probably led to their downfall, by making them far too trusting. The boy at the Little David garage kept tame magpies and jays in an aviary. They were very clever, and no doubt well fed, but we felt sorry for them all the same. There were good second-hand bookshops all over Suffo
lk then, and we rarely returned to London empty-handed.
One of our main preoccupations was photography. Barrell, in particular, took it very seriously and toted a Pentax or a Nikon around the woods and hedgerows. We made weekly expeditions to Bungay, to the fish café for lunch and some covert portraiture with the telephoto lens. Elizabeth Smart lived a few miles outside Bungay, deep in the Flixton estate at the end of a very long lane in a place called ‘The Dell’. And that is exactly what it was: a cottage built on the site of what once was a sand quarry. Elizabeth had made a beautiful garden that shaded off into the wilderness of the surrounding thickets and woodland. It was full of ramshackle sheds and summerhouses where visitors could sleep, carpets slung over the earth floor. There was even the old estate gas house with boiler and brick chimney, home of the bar whenever Elizabeth had one of her parties.
I turned up there once with a friend one evening, long before there were mobile phones. We had been canoeing down the River Waveney and had beached our craft close by, when a sudden thunderstorm caught us. We found Elizabeth and George Barker in the full swing of a wake for their late friend Patrick Kavanagh, and joined them for an evening of strenuous whiskey-drinking.
I missed my friends as I missed my trees when I was away in Australia. I missed Ronnie and preferred to think of him at home in Suffolk like an oak.
There are many of us for whom the shed is a natural habitat. Mine is full of woodworking tools: a classic Myford ML8 lathe, band-saw, circular-saw and various drills, Skil-saws, planes. A whole wall of screwdrivers, chisels and gauges, and little drawers full of screws and fixings. Shelves of varnish, oils, stains and paints, and more drawers with drill bits, seeds, cramps, vices, an adze and several wedges for splitting wood. Hand-saws, jigsaws.