Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  Dolomedes/Archimedes. The fen raft spider, Dolomedes, like his near namesake, understands the principles of physics and the ways of water. He knows that the sum total of the surface tension acting on his eight legs on the water will keep him afloat. He is also ancient and wise, and lives by his powers of observation.

  10th September

  ‘All too short a span’ is the phrase that keeps coming to me as I think of moths. None of them lives long, and nature has not even bothered to equip many of them with the means of feeding: ‘mouth parts’, as they are elegantly termed in lepidoptery. There is a kind of Zen of moth-mounting, as there is of flower arranging, which dictates that moths be displayed with wings outspread, as if they were butterflies out basking in the midday sun on a sunny day. It is entirely artificial, and it makes it hard to identify moths in real life, because in real life moths settle with their wings folded. They only spread them out in flight, when they are a whirring blur.

  It is natural to associate moths with death because they generally fly by night. Some of them, like the death’s head hawkmoth, are overtly macabre. They themselves are liable to meet an untimely end, in the bellies of bats or birds or spiders, and their main defence is camouflage. This leads to their great beauty: the range and subtlety of their colours and designs.

  ‘Stridulation’ is the washboard effect of a grasshopper rubbing its back legs against its serrated thorax. Crickets sing this way, so do the larvae of the stag beetle and death-watch beetles, which head-butt the wooden beam they are tunnelling through to make the characteristic clicking. They are percussionists; they bash their heads against the wood.

  17th September

  To Orford Ness with Rob. He arrives in a tin fart-box on hire, and we load up a pair of holly walking sticks. Cook bacon and eggs and strong coffee to revive Rob after a cold night out on a bed of shingle and sand on Blakeney Point. He had woken with very stiff muscles down the left side of his back, and I apply ointment to heat and relax them, then we do stretching exercises against the kitchen door.

  We drive down the ley line of flint churches across Suffolk to the coast: Eye, Horham, Stradbroke, Laxfield, Ubbeston, Sibton, Yoxford, Snape, Iken (nearly), Orford.

  At Orford we register our names at the National Trust Office and are told we must stick to the marked paths and roadways on the Ness. We take the ferry across, and are met by a nice warden who tells us all the same things all over again. ‘There’s unexploded ordnance all over the place out there.’ Actually, they don’t want us disturbing the plants or the shingle. If there were any unexploded bombs here, we would never be allowed on the Ness at all.

  Rob and I talk a lot about Sebald on the way over, and about eco-feminism. Sebald on Orford Ness is very gloomy.

  He sees a hare and notes its terrified eyes. He feels the oppressive weight of the military might that was being tested in the bomb ranges here. When did he come over here, we wonder. How did he arrange it?

  We stick to the paths and walk out towards the distant horizon of red and white striped lighthouse, and a few concrete buildings. We head first for the Bomb Ballistic Building, black-painted brick and concrete, but we climb some ringing steel steps and arrive in a first-floor room that almost feels cosy by comparison with all the echoing concrete. It is panelled with six-inch pine boards tongued and grooved and stripped back trendily to the naked grain. Oblong windows give graphic panoramas of the lighthouse on the beach. It’s hard to see, in the grey light, where the shingle desert ends and the sea begins. Except it isn’t a desert but full of sea plants.

  All the plants are like barbed wire: thistles and teasels and brambles and prickly leaved compositae. Rabbits shit on old beams of oak from an extinct boat. Hen harriers hover and drop delicately now and again into the grass and bounce up again.

  Notices in old pre-fab concrete buildings with asbestos roofs. Richard Deacon-like scrap metal lies about the shingle waves.

  Sounds. A soundscape of wind, ringing steel of the bridge over Stony Creek as we stride across, our holly sticks running along the chainlink fence and vibrating, or tap-tapping on the steel floor. Feet on the ringing steel stairs or crunching through shingle on the windswept beach. Wind hooting across the neck of a water bottle, the note deepening as I drink the water level down.

  Lichens on the concrete like maps of all the Pacific Islands where they tested nuclear bombs. Dozens of different lichens on the concrete.

  Buildings left as ruins. Even quite ugly buildings begin to look beautiful as ruins.

  On the beach we crunch along, wishing we had brought a tape recorder to record the soundscape of the place. The clack of holly sticks against the pebbles. Rob searching for special hag stones and flecked flints; me picking up bits of wood with the grain raised – by erosion of the softer sapwood between the lines of tough grain – and burrowed by shipworms.

  In a glass display cabinet in a building called ‘Power House’, a selection of pebbles and driftwood from the beach. People have left a few things on top of the glass. I hope they leave them there. A turned wooden screw-stopper of a lemonade or beer bottle. Amazing piece of work, with the pinholes where it fitted into the lathe still showing clearly. The barbed-wire flora of thistle, the small-leaved, stringless nettle Urtica minor. An ancient piece of yew-wood flotsam.

  When we at last reach the sea, forbidding and turbid grey-brown, there is a makeshift wooden bench, and someone had collected bricks and bits of concrete and built a little stove-like structure right at the edge of the shingle ridge. No fire had been lit in it; it was just a little sculptural den, a tiny cave, a fragment of shelter on seven miles of the most exposed beach in Britain.

  A patch of brilliant crimson samphire to the left of the road as we walk out, raked by the invisible beam of a hovering hen harrier’s eye.

  Square concrete blocks the size of small chests of drawers, each with a steel ring in the top, for marching protesters or spies, a surreal touch that suggests they are portable. Dumbbells for fork-lift aerobics. Machines need regular exercise, same as the rest of us. Try shutting away a car for a year or so, and then try starting it up.

  We find ourselves walking across steel duckboards, perforated with circular holes four inches across. Some sort of humus has collected in these circles, dirt from people’s boots, rabbit dung, windblown sand, and each one supports a different group of tiny plants. It would be interesting to study them more closely.

  How many people visit Orford Ness each year? Three thousand. Many are National Trust members, and in summer holidays there may be a hundred a day. Today there are four of us, or seem to be. The warden has a bicycle and goes off to the Police Tower to sit and keep watch. There’s a long history of espionage here.

  All the wild, remote places in Britain are commandeered by the military, yet by an odd irony their wildlife often thrives and survives as nowhere else as a result of two main factors. First, the places aren’t farmed or subjected to the ravages of agriculture. Second, they are often fenced off and people are excluded from them, apart from the odd soldier, the military police or tank.

  Many of our wildest, most beautiful places are under occupation, and we are denied access. Orford Ness still belongs to the military because, so we are told, it is a minefield. As Englishmen, we cannot freely walk our own country because it is mined, and we are under threat of death.

  Salisbury Plain, Tyneham and Worbarrow Bay in Dorset, the Breckland surrounding Watton in Norfolk, St Kilda, Dartmoor – all are dominated by the war machine. They are no longer places of peace: they are firing ranges, and there are unexploded shells underfoot. So they are ‘no man’s land’. On top of the threat of being blown up, there’s the nuclear question. Why are the pagodas of Orford Ness out of bounds? This makes me feel like a schoolboy and want to break bounds.

  19th September

  I found a dead female stag beetle in the flower urn, drowned by me with a watering can, I think, and a rare species now too.

  Jayne is here, drawing the spinney on the comm
on in its own charcoal, catching the light slung across autumn ponds or flooded across the common through its tree fringe. She says she is constantly chasing the light, that this is an obsession of landscape painting and its great bane. As a landscape painter, you are always racing to get things down, to show a tree and the shadow it casts across a pond before that shadow has moved round on to its bank.

  By drawing the spinney in its own charcoal, she’s expressing its essence in its essence. She works on the ground, spreading out a big board of cardboard and unrolling a scroll of printer’s paper, cadged from a printer in Norwich. Halfway through one of the pictures she discovers the printer’s boot print where he walked over it. Her idea is to make an endless scroll, a frieze, a Bayeux Tapestry, of the woodland fringes of Mellis Common.

  In the morning the trees are backlit, and in the evening the westering sun highlights their leaf colours, with the textures of the undulating hedge and woodland like a seashore, or the shores of a great lake. It takes Jayne two days to get the hang of these woods, and how on earth to portray them. She wants to avoid what have become the clichés of local art: a kind of trendiness characterized by a cartoon approach, a graphic rendering of detail, usually with handwritten notes across the page, jottings identifying field names or tree species, or the presence of garden warblers or shield beetles.

  The Sticks. This is supposed to mean the countryside, the places people go away to at weekends from ‘the Smoke’, or disappear to in order to raise a young family and grow vegetables – they are never heard of again.

  22nd September

  I’m picking up the apples. Je ramasse les pommes. The windfalls at Mellis – hard, back-bending work. There was a big wind and storm yesterday, so now lots of Bramleys all over the lawn.

  Certain things are missing from Mellis Common this year, not entirely explicable through natural phenomena – neither weather nor temporary changes in climate. There are no skylarks singing. Very few butterflies. No buttercups on the fifty-acre section of the common known as Compartment 2 at the west end. No wild flowers on areas that are suspiciously rectilinear – no buttercups – next to no cuckoo flowers.

  The simple pleasures of old-fashioned bird-watching are good enough for me. I still prefer the modest excitement of a woodpecker arriving on my apple tree, a flock of goldfinches in winter, or even a moorhen strolling across the lawn. This is about advanced bird-watching.

  Trees are defenceless organisms in relation to man. Their only defences are longevity and fecundity.

  Therefore they are places of sanctuary, of refuge for the persecuted or the hunted.

  Return to the woods is like our nightly return to the unconscious.

  Staverton Thicks. Oak, holly, beech, leaf mould and ferns on forest floor. Pine beyond. An old gate into a ride and dells. Scythe-shaped stools.

  A pigeon feather and a magpie feather stuck in the trunk of an old oak. Also a charm hung on a branch – a necklace of green cut glass – this is witchery. An oak and holly growing out of the same root.

  Full of growing things. Ancient rowan, gnarled, bowed, holed, twisted. An ancient chestnut, huge and twisted, and a holm oak too. Some hollows run right through the tree, so you could pass a child right through, like the eye of a needle. And cobwebs all up the tree in the twigs.

  The bracken becomes impenetrable in the middle; you can be tripped or stopped by the branches.

  A little circle of sky suddenly visible and swifts, hundreds of swifts, and a solitary seagull, pigeons cooing, a reminder that there’s a world up there beyond the forest.

  The trunks spill out beneath the trees like melted candlewax at the base of a candle. Is that thunder or is it the sound of Bentwaters RAF Base? ‘Every little sound just might be thunder/Thunder from the barrel of his gun’–Bob Dylan.

  Sleeping giants here too. The trees will listen, overhear you, so you whisper thoughts to yourself. Like being in a great cathedral.

  Boles and carbuncles so vast. Huge paunches and bellies on these trees. Birch with shiny bark, rowan, hollies, collapsed and serpentine. Long, leafy wickerwork branches of hollies – males, females, locked in a slow, everlasting embrace. The hoof marks of deer.

  In the middle of woods, a bird table sticking out of the bracken. Wrinkled skin and bark. Creeping on all fours to get through, suddenly a lovely clearing, carpeted with brown leaf mould. Shadow, silence.

  The bark of a fox. It seems to be getting closer to menace me. Deer tracks and deer droppings.

  Here’s an oak that’s hollowed itself and split right down its trunk –a hermit’s home like the one on Lesbos, some ancient lightning bolt having struck it. The presence of ancient thunder.

  I emerge into a field of onions, completely lost. Can’t even hear a road. A thunderstorm is on the way, rumbling. I stumble away in exactly the wrong direction. I stick to the field of onions –at least I can live on them.

  Oaks? Rising up grey in their nakedness, supplicant, reaching to the sky. Leaves and trees so intertwined they mix colours, indistinguishable.

  In the darkness I drive past the Rendlesham picnic area, a major site for fornication and adultery. Ragwort everywhere. I’m driving into the thunder, lightning, roof open, rain goes over the top. A dead rabbit.

  It is raining, and I gaze out of my study window pondering the drainage system of the white mulberry outside. How many drips, in steps from leaf to leaf, like a waterfall, to the ground? Rain softly decelerated by leaves, so is gentler on the ground. Angle of leaves, spread of roots – umbrella effect.

  The young owls tentatively calling in the hedges and on the common in the hour before dawn.

  Obscurity is what a writer needs to get on with work well away from the public gaze. Under the glare of lights is the last place you want to be, so, moth-like, you burrow away into some basement or corner of the country, where you can talk to yourself, pace about and think. In the days of letter-writing and the penny post or earlier, it was easier. Forster, in Howards End, speaks of a world of ‘telegrams and anger’ inhabited by the Wilcoxes, and it is the quieter, less accessible world, closer to dreams and sleep, the writer needs. Above all else, though, the writer needs not to think too much about what he’s doing.

  ‘If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all,’ says Keats. Running two at a time downstairs you are fine until you start to think too much about what you’re doing, and stumble. I blame the Romantics for all this self-consciousness about landscape and inspiration. Wandering lonely as a cloud may be the last thing you need sometimes. Going round the corner for breakfast in a steamy cafémay be much more like it.

  As to my landscape in Suffolk, I chose it originally more than thirty years ago because of its relative obscurity. I pored over maps, deliberately seeking the least-frequented corners, hoping for a ruin drowned in trees a long way down a bumpy track, and that’s what I found. Most of my friends lived a hundred miles away in London, and Walberswick and Southwold were relatively quiet little places, where parking a car was not something you ever thought much about, let alone traffic jams on sunny days.

  I fixed my house, and chums came to stay, and we had long conversations, walks and bike rides and swims in the river or the sea together. This went on for years.

  Walberswick was on the rim of the known world then, and Suffolk itself, or large parts of it, were almost off the map. We were on the margins, les marginaux, and we identified with the gypsies in a romantic, starry-eyed way.

  Bungay Horse Fair changed all that, and later the Rougham Tree Fair.

  ‘Off the beaten track’and ‘unspoilt’were the watchwords. The treks on holiday to find an unspoilt beach. The mad scrambles down to remote coves, simply to get away from other people, to be sequestered, to escape ‘the masses’–yet we were socialists.

  The myth of the obscurity of the rural retreat. Something mawkish about it, hermit’s cell, leaving the world. Now people go to ashrams in India, or Tibet, or Hertfordshire. Like the myth of wildernes
s, the place where no man is. When I was a child, ‘No man’s land’ was what we called the spinney at the bottom of our garden.

  No wonder we want to escape our fellow humans when each day we read how nasty they can be to one another. Best to get away from all that in ‘the countryside’, preferably safely inside a 4WD.

  The elver count in the Severn has dropped in recent years as dramatically as the sperm count amongst the young men who traditionally put out in boats from Lydney to harvest them. Nobody quite knows why, but it may well turn out that the two phenomena are really one and the same: something in the water.

  27th September

  Mum’s birthday. Cold and grey at Mellis. Jays, or long-tailed tits, squeaking in the willow trees. Amazing how many birds a tree can conceal.

  Mum was a nature girl, always out in the garden, always fiddling with plants, raising a tray of seeds – seed trays were wooden then, knocked up by the thousand out of poplar wood sliced thin for lightness.

  28th September

  The station car park at Diss is now jam-packed. Impossible to find a space after nine o’clock, and cars parked at odd angles in obvious desperation all over pavements and in assorted corners. Only a few years ago, you could drive up to the station and park in a bumpy, cinder-covered yard, the same one they used for shunting wagons and unloading coal into the coal yard opposite. Parking was free, and there was never any congestion.

  There was even a little pub in the yard where you could ‘sink a pint’ as you waited for the friend you were meeting off the train; and rabbits in the station garden.