Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

I went down to Redgrave Church, on its hill above the cornfields, and stumbled upon the grave of Julie Ward. It was a shock, realizing I was standing before the grave of a young woman who had been murdered in 1988 in the Kenyan bush, her body mutilated and half burnt, and her murderer relentlessly pursued by her grieving father, outraged at Kenyan corruption and laziness.

  Julie Ward was a talented photographer and had taken some fine pictures on her African travels. It is obvious from the photographs that she was courageous and adventurous. The simple square headstone bore an engraving of a hippopotamus above her name. The animal stands on the savannah plains of Kenya, with a few sparse trees in the background. I hadn’t expected to find a hippo amongst the rabbits and moles of Redgrave Churchyard. But why Redgrave? It was good to think that the young woman had been buried here in this beautiful, isolated place, overlooking the African-looking bleached cornfields from high up.

  Redgrave’s plague history lurks under the glacial hill on which the church stands, giving the impression of thousands of victims. As Oliver Rackham remarks, there are, if you reckon it up, ten thousand bodies buried beneath every English village churchyard. With its air of solitude and isolation, and elevation, Redgrave graveyard hovers above the surrounding countryside, looking across to Redgrave Fen, and begins to conform to Thoreau’s idea that graves should bear the legend ‘Here rises’, not ‘Here lies’, the soul of x or y. Graves, he thinks, should be starry-pointing.

  Robins are the angels of my vegetable garden. You turn round and they’re not there. Then there they are, next to you.

  If you want to know what it’s like to be a tree, sleep with a cat on your bed and feel it manoeuvring and exploring your curves and hollows for the most comfortable nest.

  Yesterday, I put on shorts and a pair of waders and waded into the front pond to drag out the dead branches left there after the razing of the spinney. I tied a rope to the garden rake and lassoed a big limb of ash that had lain in the pond like Excalibur for months, reaching out of the black pond as if beckoning, beseeching rescue. I leant on the rope and towed it out, ever so slowly, and, as it rose from the water, it dripped like a breaching whale and glistened silver with fish spawn.

  I mined dark orange clay from a small pond edge where tadpoles were crowding in a wriggling mass, and barrowed it round to my dam at the neck of the front pond. The water level had been dropped too low by the digger-man, who didn’t understand that the system of ponds on the common is meant to collect water, not to drain it away.

  The signs are all there for anyone to read if they want to: ‘Cowpasture Farm’, ‘Cowpasture Lane’. The twenty-four ponds on the common were reservoirs for the long, hot summers of grazing. The trees were there for shade. The seventy acres of furze were for fuel for firing the bread ovens, and the moats were to keep the cattle off the arable land, away from the corn.

  Grandpa Wood – cracking open the coal to show me fossil ferns, the concealed history of the carboniferous forest.

  Grandp Trees make time stand still.

  Hands and trees, hands and wood.

  24th June

  Midsummer Day. The perfect morning for it. Wood pigeons cooing in the young elms, and ashes surrounding the garden in deep shadow. Spider’s gossamer threads glinting in the sunshine. Robins on the lawn. There’s a goat-beard head stuck in a jam jar swivelling in the breeze at the open window of my study. An earwig explores the window frame, and an ichneumon fly elegantly strolls up and down the windowpane. A distant cockerel across the field, and even the neighbour’s distant barking dogs, or Michael’s crop-scarer across the common, sound benign this morning.

  Yesterday I stood by the front pond and watched a carp slowly emerging from the black depths, rising imperceptibly by slow degrees until I could see its face, and its eyes, and its great gaping, gulping mouth, and then, as it caught the sun, its golden scales. I calculated that it must be at least twenty-five or even thirty years old and was one of the fish Barry Day deftly caught in his digger bucket when he was removing the silt from the moat fifteen or eighteen years ago.

  A willow warbler sings in the spinney by the old goat sheds. Bumblebee workers, all from same colony, gather pollen and nectar from the new deep crimson flowers of the water figwort. Great three-and four-foot spires of elegant little flowers of the most amazing deep crimson. I record them, and the post van arriving too.

  Anarchy reigns on this green and yet it works well enough in its way and still produces some spectacular flowers.

  Today my task is to scythe down the cow-parsley that billowed in waves of white lace before my window until last weekend. Now I have to cut it before it seeds.

  The scythe–sharpened on the whetstone from the River Usk.

  And later on I must make two croquet mallets for Terence on my lathe. And attend to the tree nursery – weed it, and weed the felled spinney of nettles.

  At about 5 p.m. I go out and begin scything the cow-parsley in the garden outside my study facing the common. Its flowering is over, and it is going to seed. I need a new scythe blade, really, but they’re getting harder to find. I shall buy one in Chagford next time I’m on Dartmoor.

  Working with a scythe is silent, rhythmical and conducive to thinking. A power tool simply jams the brain solid with its din and violence and sense of hurry. A scythe is unhurried, but it can fell a fair-sized area of grass and herbs in an hour of steady work, and by six I have very nearly cleared the whole front lawn.

  Now I fetch the pitchfork and rake all the cut cow-parsley and long grass into compact heaps and carry each one to a bigger haycock in the middle of the lawn. As it grows higher into a cottage-loaf shape, it becomes springier, and bounces a little each time a new load is dropped on the top. It will soon settle, especially when it begins to heat up inside and compost.

  This is my idea: to make a pile of the cut stems on the lawn and let it compost down, thus reducing its weight and bulk to something more manageable for eventual carting to the vegetable garden.

  As I work all the robins in the neighbourhood gather on the cut grass and begin feeding and hunting for flies. Then both cats come and sit in the new-mown hay, observing the robins with feigned indifference. All of them are following deep instincts, attracted by the smell of the hay, the sounds of me working and the smells of fresh-cut herbs.

  On my daily bike ride later on, I had stopped outside Gislingham, opposite a small wood and a pile of blue cartridge shells, to satisfy my curiosity about an unlikely plant community growing along a high field bank where the road has become a hollow-way on the descent into Gislingham. The ditch was dug much deeper along here two or three years ago, and the fields were drained. Growing in the ditch and on the bank are: fool’s watercress, water figwort, tufted vetch, common yellow vetch, cornflowers, whose seed must have already been in the ground, meadowsweet.

  I was sitting on my bike admiring all this when I heard the rumble of hooves thundering lightly up the road in my direction. I looked round and there was a pair of roe-deer galloping straight up the middle of the road towards me. They saw me and veered off into the cornfields, one bounding off one way, the other off to the far side of the road. Both were hinds, and probably had fauns hidden up somewhere, perhaps in the shooting wood. Deer move through fields of corn like dolphins through the sea.

  Tomatoes on toast was about the only thing my father knew how to cook, and when my mum was away we would eat the dish for breakfast and dinner too, with toast and dripping for lunch. I used to love arranging the halved grilled tomatoes on the toast like jellyfish.

  Cats are, as Norman O. Brown says in Life Against Death, ‘polymorphously perverse’. That is to say they are gloriously alive in every part of their body and get equal pleasure from the stimulation of any part of it, free of what Brown calls ‘the tyranny of the genitals’.

  This morning Alphonse lies on the bare earth outside the front of the house full length on his back, stretching and rolling from side to side or raising all four legs into the air and just lying on h
is back. He purrs to himself and gives that cat-smile by narrowing his eyes when he looks across at me.

  Cheltenham. A walk with Steve [Ashley] from the top of Cleeve Hill, where the road crosses over the crest. We went up a green lane past a field where I once slept and was disturbed by police at 2 a.m. Wind blowing ash trees and exposing the pale undersides of all the leaves, silver flash, vulnerable, like pale leg skin. Steve says willow leaves look cold and white blown from underneath, blown back to front. The tree turned inside out, caught unawares. A whitebeam stands out.

  Steve talks of ‘Lord Randall’ and the ‘Babes in the Wood’– folksong stories of dark deeds in woods: infanticide with a penknife that won’t wipe clean of blood, but spreads more and more of it all over the wood. Green turning to red.

  We walk down the track, turn left into a field and come to a stop at a farmyard – derelict barns, roofs teetering on fractured stone walls half crumbled and collapsed, and an oozing midden of cow muck in the yard. A dead stop, and somehow symbolic as we turn tail and walk back. ‘Comeuppance Farm’, we call it.

  I sleep beside Steve’s paper birch, the only stately paper birch in Cheltenham.

  Laugharne. Here’s a classic case of the Heritage Industry getting its dead hand on a wild place and taming it to death. [Iain] Sinclair and his A13 and celebration of the Beckton Alp is a necessary antidote to all this. Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse, brown-signed from the M4. Tarmac all the way, even on the path along the steep shore of the huge estuary to the garage.

  You arrive in Laugharne, go past a wooden hut with a cowboy on horseback painted on the door, and up to where a path branches off the road by Julianne’s Uni-Sex Hair Salon; past the Three Mariners and the graveyard where Thomas is buried under a mound of fresh flowers. Brown’s Hotel, where he drank, is down the street.

  Thomas mostly wrote not in the boathouse but in its wooden garage. So, like garage music, his was garage poetry. I see straight away that it has the optimum dimensions for a writing shed: fourteen feet by nine, with a whitewashed boarded ceiling over a pair of pine cross-beams a foot above head height.

  There are two windows in the shed, now brought up to a standard of repair far higher, I imagine, than in Thomas’s day, and a wooden floor with a single diminutive scrap of a rug on it.

  The place has been window-dressed to look as if the famed artisan has just popped out in mid-flow for a cup of tea, or more likely a beer or a pee. One imagines that DT must have been a much stained man: his fingers nicotine-stained, and perhaps his trousers eroded by dribbled pee in the frequent visits to the gents at Brown’s or the Three Mariners.

  The shed, or garage, has a wood-stove on one wall, wooden kitchen table by the window that faces south out on to the estuary and miles of mud flats, and two simple slat-backed wooden chairs, one with the poet’s jacket half slung over it. Balls of screwed-up paper litter the floor, perhaps drunkenly misaimed at the waste-paper basket, which overflows with failed stabs at ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’ or ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. These days, he would simply have pressed the ‘delete’ button.

  The waste paper would have constituted a serious fire risk once the stove was under way.

  Around the pine-boarded walls a little gallery of pin-ups is displayed. Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce and Thomas himself, as painted by Augustus John, are all featured. On the desk, an exercise book lies open and the manuscript of a poem, scrawled with plenty of crossings out, is displayed, also an inkwell and blotting paper. For some reason the expression ‘blotting his copybook’ comes to mind.

  The barking of a heron across the estuary and the tide surging out down a snaking mud channel. Boats lying beached on the mud on their side. A sweet chestnut spreads over the garage roof from the garden beside the path on the opposite side. Tin roof.

  The wooden garage doors padlocked and a peephole, courtesy of English Heritage, allows us to peer in at the scene, like some person from Porlock stalking the great poet.

  Dylan Thomas put himself on the edge of the known world, in this minimal space, looking out across the estuary, about as far away from human civilization as possible.

  And if he wasn’t leaving it that way, he was leaving it down the alcohol route at the bar of Brown’s Hotel in the village, or down the dream route.

  Cornwall – Falmouth – the Maritime Museum Boat Store. I liked the boat store best, because there were so many boats there all under polythene dust sheets, which we lifted up, and then went clambering about under a forest of spars and beams supporting still more wooden boats.

  I liked the old wooden Rothschild being restored bit by bit in the shed. They stripped down the two Perkins diesel engines and cleaned every part and painted the cases green. Boats are often altered insensitively, and it takes a shipwright’s eye to recognize what the boat once was and to bring it back into its natural shape.

  If sailing boats were invented now, they would be either hailed or written off as some quaint form of alternative energy, a green alternative to the powerboat.

  The sets of oars are crucial to pure sailing boats, in lieu of an engine, to get them out of trouble.

  The skills of sailing these boats, with their older rigs, are disappearing, as are the skills to make them.

  The Greenbank Hotel at Falmouth. Ghostliness of the waiters – ‘Would sir prefer a fish knife and fork? – or of the poached talbot –tasteless, on a tasteless ‘bed of fennel’–or of the ‘seared Falmouth squid with tempura prawns’– only a single prawn and a handful of squid slices. Woken by seagulls above my window at 4 a.m.

  The deserted house and grassy quay at Restronguet, on my walk along the shoreline from the pub (Pandora) into Tregonwith Wood. Lapping sounds of water. Deep turquoise water beneath hanging woods.

  Ralph Bird’s workshop with the souped-up VW Beetle at one end and the jig for the gig keel running its length. I wondered how he gets the boats in and out – diagonally through double door at one end, perhaps.

  Old boats riding off the Devoran Quay in the Carnon. Used to be a big harbour and deep-water quay here, but silted up by the mines of tin and copper.

  The Cob Course. Jackie Abey lives at Burrow Farm, a long, thatched Devon farmhouse built of cob with a rambling range of barns outside. We all met in the dairy and looked at cob tiles –floor and wall – made by Jackie and Jill [Smallcombe] and varnished with linseed oil and beeswax. By varying the earth source they made tiles in different colours. Earth varies in colour often within a few hundred yards. Allow for shrinkage when you make a tile.

  We all went out into the concrete-pad farmyard, where several piles of different-coloured earth sat under tarpaulins. One of deep red Devon earth, another of pale yellow ochre. Jill and Jackie often use them in strata to create coloured variety in their buildings or sculptures.

  We scattered straw from a bale in a long line (one small straw bale to one ton of earth), heaped earth on top of it, turned it from either side with long straw forks, then jumped on top and trod on the mix. We barrowed it to the foundations of a circular garden shelter and laid a first ‘lift’ of cob on to the stone foundation and left it to dry.

  Back in the dairy, we made cob bricks in 4″ × 2″ frames hinged with canvas or steel, 4″ × 6″ × 12″. You turn out the bricks to dry on a pallet – keep air circulating. (Brick mix bashed in with a small mallet.)

  We then began work on the bread oven. A 3′6″-diameter brick foundation, infilled with gravel and shale. On top, we placed cob bricks in a rosette and infilled with cob mixture, which we bashed in with a mallet, and then a 2″ layer on top of that, flattened with a cricket bat. We also stood on top and trod in the mix, so all the time the cob is being mixed, turned and worked. On up to 2′6″ level or 3 ft. Then we corbelled in the dome, leaving a doorway at the front and 4″ chimney at the top.

  We fired it up, and, as the fire burnt, the water came trickling and sweating out of the damp clay, and the interior began to blacken, with pale grey streaks as it heated
up.

  The journey home includes arriving at 6 p.m. at Liverpool Street from Bristol via Paddington and finding thousands of commuters staring at a display of departure boards that all say only one word: CANCELLED. There is almost total silence amongst the people: no one talks to each other, only into their mobiles. Everything is happening in the private sphere; they have all withdrawn from the public sphere, faced with a crisis. This is pure George Orwell 1984, and it is exactly how it will be when a really big crisis hits London, like a major terrorist attack. People will be talking into their mobile phones to folks back home, or their friends. The idea of public engagement, of spontaneous dialogue with your neighbour, has almost ceased to exist.

  And so it is in the train itself: everyone talking like mad, but apparently to themselves, not to each other. I can’t face the crowds cramming on to the 6.30 train, so pause in St Botolph’s Churchyard and wait for Min [Cooper], who comes over and we sit on a bench for a while, then go for a Filet-O-Fish at the McDonald’s, prior to my boarding a Trainful-O-Sardines at 8.30 p.m. There is standing room only, and we eventually leave at 9 p.m. and reach Diss at 11 p.m. Eight hours from Bristol! 3 p.m. to 11 p.m.

  Note: On my way to Bristol, crossing London by the Central Line, I notice the wooden banister rails at Paddington and Baker Street stations: the worn mahogany must have lost at least a quarter inch in wear, sandpapered by generations of Londoners’ hands. The rails give a warm, friendly feeling to these otherwise dark, slightly threatening stations, all stairways and dark tunnels, and asphalt floors.