Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  Then you yawn, lick your lips, stretch your back, flex your forepaws on my basketwork chair, and purr again to yourself and to me as you settle back on your haunches on the table and begin to wash yourself. You lick your back, you lick your paws, you raise one hind paw and scratch your chin. Then you pause to gaze at Alfie in his black sleekness, stretching out one hind leg like a mutton-chop to wash, to lick.

  A family tree is something of a misnomer because it is how we trace our roots, and as the ‘tree’ bifurcates and proliferates upwards, we go back in time, so that when we reach the leaf tips we are reaching the oldest parts of the tree.

  The higher up the tree we go, the deeper we are tracing our roots.

  17th July

  Last night, a big cloudburst as I lay in the railway wagon, the rain hammering down on the felt roof and resonating through the wooden ceiling, like being inside a drum. It woke me up and then, from 3.30 to 4.30, I lay half asleep, half dreaming. A cloud like a punchball rolled in over the common, suspended low over the land – if I were to punch it, the rain would spill down. It was full to bursting, like the bags of muslin we hang up full of the hot pulp of crab apples or rosehips when we’re making jam or wine.

  Yesterday, in the rain, a bedraggled little hedgehog appeared in the kitchen, on the brick step. It shuffled round the kitchen, hoovering up bits of food or crumbs. The uneaten cat food was soon polished off and the bowl left gleaming.

  Later, I saw its wake of moving grass as it disappeared through the long grass of the lawn, then swung back across to the vegetable garden, where I think it lives, probably in the lee of the draining board and sink of the summer kitchen, in the sheltered part of the compost heap.

  Last night I left out some dried cat food on a log for it, and by morning it had gone.

  A spider’s web is strong, but only strong enough to catch the size and weight of the prey it wants. It will break under the strain of anything bigger. It is only so strong.

  ‘We’ll let the weather clear its throat,’I say. ‘We’ll wait until it’s got this rain and wind out of its system.’ ‘It must work in some sort of rhythm: just think of the patterns you see on the weather forecast.’I say all this to Rob, about our Rogue Male trip to Dorset. ‘Rain makes better copy, I know, but bodies glinting in surf under a crystalline Dorset sky make even better words.’ Better still when the water’s still and clear under Durdle Dor, just rolling pebbles back and forth a half-inch, rocking them on their roundness.

  Trees are the measure of things. A tree grows, and we measure ourselves against it. I still have my wooden ruler from school, ink-stained and written on: we used rulers as batons to pass messages covertly round the class. The first measures of length must surely have been cut on sticks. Trees have given proportion to things too. The proportions of this house are decided by the size and length of the timbers available for its construction. The standard width of a timber-framed house or barn, between sixteen and twenty-one feet, is the distance a single beam from an oak will normally span. Of course, you could find longer beams, but they would be correspondingly heavier to move to the building site and lift into position, and so would need greater support. They would also need to be of greater girth to create the span without sagging or flexing in the middle.

  Clearing out the workshop in the barn with Alison. Sorting through woodscrews (old-fashioned slot screws, bolts, nails, etc.) and bits of wood kept for woodturning (blocks, etc.). Sorting through my mother’s things: drying-up cloths, embroidered tablecloths she never quite finished embroidering, cutlery.

  Then, on Wednesday, Alison painting the workshop windows. Out on the common, Michael is cutting the hay on the other side of the railway crossing.

  Wood. Two wooden o’s at its heart, my grandparents Sidney and Lucy. Two haloes, two theatres, two Globe stages full of stories and love, passion, anger, terrible secrets, warmth, laughter.

  That moorhen (another double o) was never going to last long. It was my first thought as I watched it standing on one leg like a crane or a stork, stretching its wing and preening, then tucking in its head incautiously to snooze.

  People have always got to be over-elaborating things. You can’t just go for a swim any more or dive off a board; it has to be flumes and jacuzzis. A walk in the woods isn’t enough kicks; you must walk the canopy. You might as well put a ski lift up Kanchenjunga.

  The mulberry. The tree that was the basis of all wealth for thousands of years, the Creator of Silk. We kept silkworms at prep school, watched the weaving of their cocoons, and the moth emerging. Yesterday I watched blackbirds, and even a blackcap, eating white mulberry fruit off the tree.

  18th–20th July

  Trip to Dorset with Rob. We set off from Cambridge at 1.30 p.m. I had been rushing about all morning at Mellis, packing things in the car that might come in useful. All kinds of food: tins of sardines and mackerel, nuts and raisins, junk chocolate and biscuits, Bourbon creams especially, and baked beans, a solitary tin. Also tools: a slasher, a fearsomely sharp billhook, a triangular bow-saw, an iron griddle for our fire, a corkscrew. Also secateurs and the trusty beech-handled Opinel knife from the Dordogne, where all the farmers and lorry drivers carry them and eat with them in restaurants and routiers. Also packed: bivvy bag/pup tent, sleeping bag, matches.

  On the way down we stopped at Stockbridge and leant over a railing to admire the brown trout, hanging suspended over gravel in the River Test. Bought muffins and sardines at the delicatessen.

  At Mike and Carol’s farm, we walked up into the evening meadow on the steep hillside, a mass of flowers: pyramidal orchids, bellflowers, harebells, yarrow, yellow bedstraw, heath bedstraw, dwarf thistles, hay rattle, restharrow, yellow vetch, kidney vetch. And, in the old hedges on edges of the wood, the giant lianas of old man’s beard the children swing on and climb.

  Dinner of amazing tender lamb, potatoes and broad beans out of the garden. Mike has banned the badgers by pouring buckets of his own pee on their runs. We speak of Vietnam, and a book called Tunnel Rats á propos Geoffrey Household and Rogue Male and burrowing into the soil – ‘going to ground’. Also Thurber’s Thurber Carnival and a story about a Morgan driver and a driving lesson in ‘A Ride with Olympy’.

  Next morning we set off for Bridport and Chideock. We drive down the lovely quiet valley, through Winterbourne Strickland with the deserted, steepled parish church near a stream.

  Approaching Chideock, we suddenly breast the ridge of the horseshoe of hills Household describes, and all is clear. A deep half-circle of hills with the horns resting on high cliffs by the sea, with Chideock and North Chideock nestling in the centre.

  We bought a map (2.5 inches to the mile) from the village stores and drove up to North Chideock, where we left the car in the leafy, shaded car park of the Catholic Chapel of Chideock Manor. It is a hidden, well-wooded, secluded place, reached by walking along a tall box hedge and passing the spreading arms of laurels, limes, planes and oaks. All its traditions relating to the Chideock Martyrs, the Catholic priests, are about hiding, outlaws, covert activities. The Chideock Martyrs actually hid from the authorities and lived in the woods for some weeks – sixteen, I think.

  We packed our rucksacks with water and food, and camping gear, and set off up the hill through the village towards Venn Lane, which we entered about midday. Past Venn Farm, going north uphill, it soon became deeply sunken and damp, evidence of a winter-bourne when the land was flooded by the rains. Sticks were jammed into little beaver dams, and the plants of stream banks, brooklime and water mint, grew in profusion, as well as various sedges. Further up the lane we found ourselves walking between ‘steep, high banks reaching to fifteen or twenty feet, with the hedgerow trees growing along the bank’, as described by Household. To our right was a grazing pasture, rising away up to a rounded down, and to our left the land fell away steeply in other grazing fields, with a double hedge of thick hazel, ash, blackthorn, sallow and holly, with here and there an oak tree or a massive ash.

  Towards th
e high point of the lane, the going became harder than ever, as the brambles, bracken and ‘shoulder-high nettles’ closed in from either side in a deep, dark tunnel. We persevered, and came to a place beside a huge, slightly ragged ash tree with a trunk some twelve feet in girth. The bank wall of the lane to the east here was fully eighteen to twenty feet, and to the west the hedge was so dense that it would be possible to sit within its cover all day observing the comings and goings in the valley below without ever being seen.

  This, we decided, was the most plausible spot for our hero’s hideout, burrowed into the sunken lane. However, in terms of strict textual accuracy, we were unable to find solid sandstone here, only ochre sandy earth – could a burrow be safely constructed in such earth? A couple of hundred yards further up the lane, running away downhill to the west, was a dense and ancient coppice of hazel and ash, with a few geans – wild cherries – that had somehow seeded themselves in.

  The whole wood, as we entered it, was a dense, dark mass of ochre tumuli, where the badgers had dug the fresh earth from their setts. It was a truly industrial landscape, and the virgin earth had been well trodden into tracks that had all the makings of miniature sunken lanes, given time.

  Rob spotted a badger skull on a tump, unmistakable, with its wide, flat jaws and eye sockets, the broad shape of the badger face quite evident in the bones.

  A few paces away we came upon the entire skeleton of a badger, possibly poisoned by the local cattle farmers. It was still only three quarters rotted, so must have died quite recently. There was a suspicious low shelter of corrugated iron with some poisonous-looking plastic tubs beneath. It could have been for pheasant feed, but our strong feeling was that this was part of some scheme to poison badgers. Rob’s badger skull contained a nest of tiny red ants, which had whitened the bone efficiently.

  We walked the full length of the lane as it breasted the ridge and plunged northwards into the Marshwood Vale. We found one or two other promising hiding places, but none as comprehensively deep and inviting and densely vegetated as the one where we had left our rucksacks, camouflaged under bracken fronds in the approved Household style.

  We found a dead, fallen oak that could have formed a ladder in and out of the lane, and Rob bravely climbed on to its branches. I took a photograph of him, or thought I did, until we discovered I had failed to press the button hard enough.

  We walked the ridge of the entire horseshoe of hills, returning along another lane close to Hell Lane that had more solid walls of sandstone, hollowed into caves here and there by more badgers. On the way downhill, the footpath went through a farmyard, and we were all but attacked by a menacing, yellow-eyed, grey-coated lurcher that made several lunging low runs at us, and almost succeeded in scoring a palpable hit.

  Back at the place where we had hidden our rucksacks, we lit a fire in the lane, having dug a little fire pit with our garden trowel and made a hearth and fireback out of some old logs of oak. We were anxious about the smoke giving us away to the farmhouses on the far side of the valley overlooking the lane, so followed the Vlach practice of making a tiny wigwam of sticks, all of small calibre, in order to produce the maximum heat as quickly as possible.

  Once it was going well, we kept an eye on the valley downhill to the west, which was unfortunately where the breeze seemed to want to waft our smoke. But the denseness of the hedge and trees above formed such a filter of greenery that the smoke was indistinguishable from the evening mist of the valley by the time it emerged and rolled downhill. Only the cows noticed it, and came up to investigate from the far side of the hedge.

  We cooked spaghetti, and were puzzled by the dark brown hue of the water until Rob realized he had left a teabag in the cooking pan. We added chilli con carne to disguise the taste, most successfully.

  We lay in the bottom of the lane, reclining on bracken and grass, sipping Glenfiddich and spooning up spaghetti Tuaregstyle out of the same cooking pan. Then we made tea, stoking the fire for warmth and light as dusk and then night came on. Pudding was to have been the banana we roasted on the embers, but Rob stepped on it, perhaps because I had earlier made use of it as a demonstration model in a short impromptu lecture on male circumcision in aboriginal initiation ceremonies.

  At last we left the dying embers and clambered up the steep bank past the ash tree into the higher field to the west above the lane. Here we camped, well concealed in the lee of the thick cross-hedge that divided the field from the rough pasture that ran uphill to the summit of the down.

  We pitched the pup-tents side by side on an almost-level sward and slept soundly in the silence under a mackerel-sky perforated by stars.

  Morning broke with a perfect blue sky and tiny fragments of puffy white cloud. The insect hum of farm tractors was starting up far below us in the valley. It was clearly going to be a scorching day. Rob sprang up and strode to the summit of the down, where, he reported, he saw the whole of the Marshwood Vale filled with white mist.

  We packed, cleared up our camp of the night before, scattering the charred firewood in the bushes and covering our fire pit with turf. Then we set about cutting ourselves the walking sticks we had so sorely missed the day before in our defenceless encounter with the devil-eyed lurcher. Dogs like him are mostly cowards and will melt away on the pretext of having important posts to sniff and mark if threatened.

  We chose the coppiced holly directly beside our camp, and went to work with our penknives on a pair of its straight, greenish poles in a kind of re-enactment of the kind of task Our Hero would have had to perform as silently as possible in his lair. We could have sliced through our holly in seconds with the billhook we had elected to leave in the car: a minor mistake, as it turned out.

  It took us half an hour of concentrated clipping and whittling before we had cut down our two holly poles and trimmed them into sticks. But the work seemed well worth while, and the further pleasures of whittling these sticks by the winter fireside will be more than compensation for the sweat of sitting on a prickly bank of holly leaves and sawing away with inadequate tools at an awkward angle.

  We hiked out downhill, leaving the whitethroat that had sung to us in our camp and the woodpeckers in the ash tree, washed in the little ‘lavabo’ thoughtfully provided by the Weld family next to the church, and drove to Burton Bradstock for a bacon sandwich and coffee breakfast outside the Hive Beach Café, overlooking a perfect, deep blue, flat calm sea.

  We then swam off the beach under the sandstone cliffs, striking far out in the cool water. We dried off in the sun and made miniature sculptures of the polished pebbles. We swam a second time after a lunch of fish soup, scallops and bacon, then headed for home, mission accomplished.

  Household, with his interest in concealment, thinks unconsciously of Chideock and the martyrs hiding in their natural bolt-hole. And the badgers, persecuted and in hiding underground too – a topical touch. Even the mason bees made little burrows there in the wall of the lane.

  Roofed by hedge as we were, and diving through tunnels of brambles and thorn, I kept getting hooked like a fish by the scalp. Vertical bramble lianas dangled like fishing lines in our path, and we wove through the lane like two hapless gourmet sardines on our way to be hooked and tinned. Brambles and thorns were impossible to complain about, however, because they were such a vital part of our defences.

  We had encountered memento mori at every turn: Catholic martyrs, hung, drawn and quartered at Dorchester Assizes, badger skulls and skeletons, a rabid devil-hound that was probably the reincarnated Major Quive-Smith. Interesting that Chideock is also the site of an extinct castle. We ourselves were searching for an extinct castle of a different kind, one that even had a ballista as a defensive front-line weapon system.

  The dappled floor of our retreat.

  Buzzards circled and soared above the hills all day, sometimes riding the wind on the ridge almost completely motionless.

  Rob has e-mailed me a nice quote from W. H. Murray: ‘In short withdrawals from the world there is to be had
unfailing refreshment. When his spirit is burdened or lightened, the natural movement of a man’s heart is to lift upward, and this is most readily done in the wild, for there it is easy to be still.’

  21st July

  The kingfisher arrived on Wednesday – or at least I saw it dash along in the deep groove of the common moat behind the railway wagon, but soundlessly. There have been herons too. I think they come when they sense the water levels dropping, making the fish vulnerable to them.

  Is there a correlation between the propensity to take physical risk and a tendency to take intellectual or creative risks? I’m thinking of Samuel Beckett – plunging out of the tops of trees, or riding his AJS motorbike at high speed across the Irish mountains in TT races.

  23rd July

  A red admiral is resting on the study window frame outside.

  Frogs and froglets in the vegetable garden under the endive plants.

  The sunlight is rather strong at this south-facing window, so I’ve made a kind of stained glass of walnut leaves by standing them up in the window; they filter the sunlight into a beautiful, soft green light. This is the real-life William Morris effect – now with real leaves!

  It is a pigeon-cooing evening, still and dry and quite warm. No sun, but light, high clouds of small cumulus like sweetbreads, or the flecked milk when it goes sour, or even the surface of a brain. There are horseflies about, biting stealthily.