by Roger Deakin
14th February
A walk down the lane with Andrew [Sanders] in a bitter cold north wind to Thornham Wood, the badger sett, and a circuit of some of the wood. Two or three squirrels’ dreys in oaks up the lane, amazingly complex pollard oaks. A crow nose-dived into the field. Meadows and grassy rides horribly ploughed by 4WD tracks. A recent and nasty development – urban habit of treating every meadow as a car park. Saw two hares only. Used to be dozens of them. Saw no deer at all. All shot, I suspect.
15th February
Saturday morning I wake up in London and walk over to the Festival Hall after a hearty bacon and mushroom breakfast. Over Waterloo Bridge, and see a long queue of people eddying and dropping down the narrow well of stairs to the Embankment below like water going down a bath plug.
Amazing forest of placards on pine sticks provided by the Mirror. I found myself marching behind banners I couldn’t read held by a bunch of women, with one reading, as I later discovered after being photographed by the press, ‘Cunt-lovers Against the War’.
There were quite a few dogs on leads, ‘Dogs of War’, as one placard called them, and several poodles, including one led by a priest in full cassock with a banner behind it that read ‘Poodle, Bite your Master’s Leg’.
There were also several beautifully made huge swans, which flapped their diaphanous wings and seemed to fly above the crowd, a striking image in the park. Mike [Hodges] and I spoke up for the daffodils in Hyde Park that were getting trodden down and crushed, and a man climbed up into a plane tree in St James’s Park to watch the march.
There were placards like ‘Pagan Queers for Peace’ and ‘Cold? Wrap Yourself Up in a Woolly Liberal’.
Richard discovered long-lost friends like the Berkhamsted CND and the Woodcraft Folk.
Mike, Sarah Martin and Carol [Law] escaped from the park, meeting Caroline Soper and Hanif Kureishi on the way, picked up a free bottle or two of Mecca Cola, and squeezed through a narrow iron gateway with thousands of others to reach Marble Arch and the warmth of a café, then adjourned later to Cigala for a dinner of Caldeirada and rabbit paella, washed down with several bottles of an excellent Ribera del Duero wine called Martin Berdugo. Sarah Martin says she knows of a cork oak forest, where black pigs graze in the woods in the west of Andalusia near Murcia; and the hotel is owned by some people called Chesterton.
Drove home at 1 a.m., arriving at Mellis at 3 a.m., e-mails to Australia (big 500,000 march in Sydney), bed at 4 a.m.
16th February
Yesterday was a beautiful clear, sunny, cold, February day and I went walking in the Eye Town Moor. Dark, peaty earth and tracks soft and springy through the damp fen; I cross a wooden sleeper bridge over a brook laced with fool’s watercress. The path weaves through the pale slender trunks of ash trees I helped to plant fifteen years ago, now twenty feet high. This is a partly planted wood that has evolved in a random way through the imagination of an artist, Ben Platts-Mills.
There’s a circle of tall ashes, planted two feet apart, entered through an arch formed by two branches bent over and pleached together. Then you wander past a pond with a mound beside it and a lover’s bench with a pair of heart-shaped seat backs, and just beyond it you catch sight of a living woodhenge of stubby pollarded willows of different colours, their pollard heads like the hedgehog heads of comic characters from the Beano, or bog brushes (mop-headed).
There are the ruined remains of hippie-ish structures like a willow wigwam plaited together.
18th February
I had to fiddle about putting the car on the battery charger, then went up the field to rummage about in one of my sheds looking for an architrave. I love it in the shed. Half the tin roof has rusted through and caved in, but, instead of mending it, which would have meant cutting down some brambles to get round the back, I simply moved all the wooden architraves and mouldings into another part of the shed away from the drips.
The whole floor of the shed is under attack from the rabbits whose warren it is, so all the contents are constantly subsiding into the earth. It is a shed with subsidence.
I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.
Removing several sections of stove pipe, I came across the canvas bed that would have been used to convey the grain and chaff to the threshing drum. I moved this and uncovered the pile of architraves and mouldings. All beautiful but all too short, and not a single one matching. I never knew it was possible to plane wood in so many different ways.
None of the pieces was right. A man called David Bill at Shepperton Studios had given them to me years ago, leftovers from commercial sets. Mock-dado rails. Spoof Edwardiana. And now here they were, a palace for spiders, a dust museum, a nuisance for the rabbits. In the end I drove to Diss and bought a new architrave from Jewson’s.
Bright sunshine and cold at Mellis. Snipe drumming on the common in the big pond hollow on the way to Stonebridge.
I watch hundreds of fieldfares and starlings feeding on the molehills on the top common.
A walk in Burgate Wood with Robert Macfarlane. We try to work out the right word for what a pheasant call is – a squawk? Not enough. With grouse it is a ‘crick’ or ‘cricking’. We climb into the high seat of a gamekeeper’s deep-shooting vantage point at the crossroads of four rides and survey the autumn wood – the old coppice and pollard stems.
Rob spoke of Spitfire Books, publishing ripping tales for men in the spirit of a Rover comic or the Eagle. Also of Geoffrey Hill, writing on the countryside, and Ruskin leading his students off to dig a road outside Oxford to learn about hard work as the prerequisite of clear thinking. Same goes for Morris – obsessed with working with the hands, with crafting and shaping things.
We agreed to:
(1) Go together in search of the Rogue Male lane and hideout in Dorset.
(2) Go hiking in the Peak District and look for the white mountain hare.
(3) Have dinner in Emmanuel and drink port and look at the enormous plane trees in the gardens, etc.
Rob spoke of the need to find a new language to write about, say, wood. We both had written poems as a way into the work. I wrote Waterlog poems to limber up – my Chatham Docks poem, and my wheelbarrow poem. And Robert wrote his personal climbing experiences as poems before he wrote them as prose. I said Arthur Miller did this with his plays. Hence the very particular stage directions, as at the end of The Crucible: ‘He touches her cheek, they both laugh, etc.’ But also there is a preoccupation with shaping things – Miller had his workshop and furniture-making, and his barn-building and tree-planting.
20th February
I stand inside the kitchen doorway and watch sheets of rain blowing right to left across the field. Overnight the curtains I had washed by hand in the bath blew down off the washing line and had to be washed again.
An e-mail from Rufus in Ecuador after a 22-hour journey by bus from Lima. He speaks of a ‘three-foot machete’ he has bought in Peru. Andrew came to lunch, and I tried to clear up the appallingly cluttered kitchen. Everything covered in dust.
9.00 a.m. drive to Norwich to meet Jayne for a swim at UEA – superb feeling at last, gliding up and down in the green-blue water. Special sides which swallow the waves before they can ricochet. Monsieur Hulot effect on Jayne and me as we try to get past all the automatic barriers and gates with our entrance cards. (Great feeling of suppleness and fitness glow afterwards – all day.) A good day – lots of energy released.
21st February
I woke at 7.30 to snow. Snow sugaring the trees, snow three inches deep. The birds are busy feeding in the peanut tree, the only tree to bear fruit in February: pendulous cylinders of peanuts.
Blackbird, robin, sparrow, coal tit, greenfinch, chaffinch, blue tit, sparrow, great tit (more occasional), long-tailed tits, great spotted woodpecker, pheasant (cock) ci
rcling beneath, pecking up the peanut crumbs from the upper table. Mallards sliding under the hedges on the far side of the moat.
At 8.45 snow suddenly begins falling from the trees. When it snows, half the snowflakes seem to float upwards, not down.
It is starting to snow hard, a flurry and a confusion of big snowflakes, and the cock pheasant circling under the peanut tree.
Where there’s a tree stump, an upturned bucket, a flowerpot, a watering can, snow settles on top and builds up like the crust on a loaf as it rises out of the baking tin, so everywhere you look in the vegetable garden you see appetizing white loaves.
Now here’s Alfie, my black tom cat, all speckled with snow, and the snowflakes aren’t melting on his coat at all – a sign of how well insulated he is inside his coat of fur.
My tame cock pheasant looks at his best in the snow. It shows off his tropical colours, the warm russets of his breast and his scarlet face, the park-bench green of his neck, and the sweep of his tail like a rudder in the snow.
Now it’s snowing really hard – pixels of snow against the deep purple and crimson-browns of the sallows out on the common. You realize where Christo got the ideas for his sculptures when you see snow wrapping everything in white, softening all the outlines. It transforms things. Suddenly I have a snow car, with snow doors, a snow boot and a snow bonnet and windscreen.
We built a snowman here once, facing south beside the moat, and when the sun came out it softened one side of him and caused him to lean over backwards like an acrobat somersaulting. A somersaulting snowman. Winter-saulting.
There was a full-grown fox with big pads here, and he knew exactly where he was going: due east. Ah, but here he paused, saw something, went due north for a couple of yards, then resumed his course to the east. The tracks disappear into the hedge. In summer the foxes run along in the ditches, but it’s too wet for that now.
Now here’s a green woodpecker feeding like a blackbird under the mulberry tree, pecking about for tiny grubs in the grass. The velvet-green of its breast and the crimson lake of its nape are perfectly complementary; except they are never simple colours but a subtle, complex blend of many.
The cock chaffinches are a shifty lot; they hang around the bird-feeder, surreptitiously advance up the hazel poles to pole position at the top, sing a little song of ‘King of the Castle’, then wait for a hen bird to come to feed, and swoop on her.
22nd February
Another frosty, light-snowy night and a brilliant sunny morning.
When the sun comes out and shines on the molehills, you can imagine them as a mountain range. The molehills on the common – who says we live in a flat county? Who says the common has never been ploughed? The moles plough it.
What you need to write is energy, sexual potency and solitude. Swimming gave me plenty of all three, stimulating the hormones as it sharpened up the stamina, and isolating me with one of the great universal elements.
Walking up Stonebridge Lane, I wonder about its true width – surely greater than this strip of patchy grass left unploughed?
There’s a myth in this country that the professionals are better at things than the amateurs: that they know more, and get things right. I believe the opposite to be true. At any rate there is far too great a gulf between the two worlds of the amateur and the professional.
Take country history and archaeology. The County Definitive Maps people, researching away in the Records Office, looking for documentary evidence of rights of way and so on, are unaware of the existence of Norman Scarfe and the Suffolk Archaeological Society – they live in a separate, sealed world.
Last night, in the Bury St Edmunds Tesco car park, a single song thrush singing clearly, perched six or seven feet up in a low tree – some ornamental tree amongst the cotoneaster shrubbery beside the River Lark. It sang in the full glare of an orange sodium lamp and hardly faltered when I approached within ten feet of it.
I mentioned it excitedly to the Indian doorman. ‘I don’t know about birds – only parrots,’ he said. The woman inside at the tobacco counter knew about the bird. ‘It’s been singing for a week or so now,’ she said.
My contention is that in every weed, bramble and migrating bird, the wilderness asserts itself, so when Hopkins wrote ‘Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet’ at the end of ‘Inversnaid’, he was articulating the essential drive of nature towards the re-establishment of the wilderness. Growing up immediately after the war, I witnessed how quickly and rampantly wilderness took over the bomb sites, covering them in fireweed, brambles and buddleia.
When pheasants are on display, they drop their wings slightly, like a woman with a bun letting her hair down a little, but not completely. The frock-coat effect is incredibly elegant. The drooping wing feathers like a low bow.
24th February
Lunch with Vicky [Minet] and Sally [Mantoudis] and a walk in Vicky’s wood, Slough Grove, afterwards. Lots of underscrub of mossy elder and overgrown hazel. Slender ash, and cherry, and some poplar. The ash was once coppiced, now very tall and waving in the wind. Rooks beginning to think of nesting. Chas, a friend, has coppiced and cleared an area of wood and protected the hazel stools with big domes of woven sticks.
Shoots are coming through after just one year. Bluebells everywhere, and we walk down rides Vicky keeps open by cutting with a tractor or topper once a year. Two ashes have toppled, crashing down and snapping six feet off the ground.
25th February
Fay Godwin on Ted Hughes’s death. ‘I still cannot believe he has been felled.’ Poets as trees – see Keats, and Kim Taplin’s essay on Keats.
Poaching is a symptom of poverty. People have to need a rabbit or a pheasant and need it enough to pluck or skin it and gut it too, and hang it a few days in the shed.
Nowadays you would simply wander into the supermarket and nick something more portable.
Pheasants, not rabbits, have more than a token market value now. Pheasant-poaching stopped when the gamekeeper began feeding the birds a fungicide or pesticide in the food to stop them catching some kind of poultry disease. Deer-poaching used to be profitable. ‘All the poachers came from Wood Green for some reason,’ a Diss police sergeant told me; you could get £500 for a red deer in a London hotel. Then came Chernobyl and the hotels stopped buying. Wild deer ingest far more radioactivity than any other animal and high concentrations build up in their bodies.
My police informant used to work in Hertfordshire around Bishop’s Stortford, and the gangs would come out from Wood Green and work the woods. Rifles were more strictly controlled than shotguns, and so carried higher penalties if found on a poacher’s person. Instead, the poachers converted shotguns into rifles like this: they undid the top of each cartridge, carefully poured out the lead shot and instead used roofing lead that had been cut into a strip and rolled up tightly into a solid plug. This they inserted above the gunpowder (in the top of the cartridge). ‘We used to have to catch wounded, lame deer all the time and take them to the vet’sto be put out of their misery,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ve seen entry wounds the size of a tennis ball, and exit wounds like torn-open pancakes.’
One favourite way to poach pheasants used to be to follow the gamekeeper’s feed line: that’s the line of grain he would scatter on the ground in a clearing for the pheasants. You took a fishing line and laid it out where the pheasants were in the habit of feeding. Every two feet along the line, you tied on a side-shoot with a fishing hook on the end, baited with a raisin. Raisins are irresistible to pheasants, and once the birds had hooked themselves, the poacher returned and silently pulled in the line and the pheasants.
Most of the real action in the country takes place under cover: it’s deceit or crafty dissembling of some kind. During the daytime, everyone in the village and even in the fields feels they are under surveillance. Night-time is different: it is the traditional time for poaching and skulduggery of various kinds. Darkness offers a respite from the neighbours’ spotlight attention.
The n
ew collection of essays by Eric Rolls. If my house had a belfry, I would be ringing peals of bells for this book. As it is, I fell on it when it arrived as a man does after Ramadan or a forty days’ fast.
You still can’t buy the collected essays of Les Murray in Britain. What is going on? How can the greatest poet of our times have his essays out of print in a civilized, English-speaking country? Why is Britain so blind to the glories of Australian writing? And, in particular, its glorious ecological writing?
The naturalness of an unnatural product. The great chrome Jaguar over the entrance to Marshall’s garage showroom opposite the airfield at Cambridge. The early motor car names were all about grace and speed: Swallow, Jaguar, Alvis Silver Eagle, Singer Gazelle, Humber Super Snipe (Reliant Robin or Reliant Scimitar, you take your choice).
Or status: Austin Cambridge, Morris Oxford.
Or more aggressive: the AC Cobra, the Grinnall Scorpion, with a sting in its tail – something you had better watch out for. The Chevrolet Stingray. They were the precursor of the present rash of 4WDs, SUVs. We will pass over the Jaguar SS.
28th February
Another very cold, snowy day. I peel oranges and place the peel on top of the wood-burner in my study, and their drying out perfumes the room with orange musk.
In the afternoon I feel so much better than I have done all week that I go outside to a coppiced ash tree growing near the bank of the front moat and bend its poles into a series of spirals, held in position by wooden stakes driven into the soft ground. Ash is by far the most muscular and resilient of trees, and I love to feel its resistance as I wrestle each pole into shape, gripping it in an armlock, and flexing it almost to the limit of its pliability.