Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  After the yo-yo craze, and about a year before the hula-hoop craze, we had a stilts craze.

  In fact I think the roller-skate craze came immediately before it, or at least it did in our street. The neighbours, who had been driven half mad by the sound of roller skates clicking over the gaps between the paving stones and the grinding trundle of steel wheels on concrete, were just drawing a collective sigh of relief when the hollow clip-clop of an army of stilts hobbling on the cobbles assailed the net curtains of the neighbourhood.

  Stilts-racing, and long-distance stilts-walking, had arrived, and my playmates and I discovered the novel experience of greeting the grown-ups in our street with a lofty, condescending ‘good morning’ from a great height. Suddenly, we could look down on them. We could even have patted them on the head. For the short-arses like weedy, sickly little Colin, stilts were the perfect answer. Not only could they achieve parity of height by adjusting their blocks a notch or two higher, but they were actually more nimble stilts-walkers, being less top-heavy.

  Our suburban stamping ground, for that is exactly what it was, was blissfully free of traffic in those early days of the 1950s. Low brick walls separated the bungalow front gardens along Randon Close and Broadfields from the pavement, and we made use of them as mounting blocks.

  My father had made me a pair of stilts in his workshop. You moved the blocks up or down by loosening a thumbscrew and inserting it in a different hole in the pine stilt leg. Beginners started with the blocks close to the ground. The higher you set your blocks, the higher your centre of gravity, and the harder it was to balance. Losing your balance from a great height could be unnerving, and beginners tended to make crash-landings. There was soon an outbreak of grazed knees and elbows in our street. Landing safely was always the problem. The simplest solution was to step off the stilts on to a garden wall. Otherwise, you had to fall forward as gently as possible and step off at the last moment using the stilts in the manner of a pole-vaulter. Good stilts-walkers could pole-vault up on the stilts as well and career off along the street in long, confident strides. Beginners shuffled along, wary of lifting their stilts high enough, and often tripped, with disastrous results.

  I am teaching myself to draw, and Alfie obliges each morning at breakfast-time by posing on the kitchen doorstep, just outside the door, in the early sunshine. He adopts a pose, holds very still for five minutes while I sketch him, then shifts into a profile, or turns his great black head to face me, fixing his owlish golden eyes on me as I draw. He likes to be admired, and if I compliment him on his beauty in words, he will purr. The more I word-stroke him, the louder he purrs.

  When he scratches under his chin, he looks very superior and snooty. When he licks his paw he looks dainty.

  A perfect windy, clear autumn morning. There’s a whole lot of buzzing going on. A bluebottle or butterfly on the windowpane, a wasp-faking ichneumon fly whirring and hovering along the beams of my study, looking for a hole in which to tuck himself away for the winter. Alfie sits in a pool of sunshine on the floor, cries out about nothing in particular, then wanders out. Through the open door, the buzz of a chainsaw floats in across the fields.

  Listening to the chainsaw, you can tell when they have got to the interesting bits of the tree: the thicker parts of the main trunk make the saw labour on the way through and modulate the engine note, like a car going up a mountain.

  A few hundred yards along the common, one of a pair of old oaks that stand outside Willow Farm has rent itself in two. The split runs straight down the trunk from the top to some three feet off the ground. There’s a lot of weight up there, and the leverage of cantilevered branches is increased by the weight of summer foliage, and its action as sails in a wind. It was the leafy sails more than anything else that accounted for the capsize of so many trees in the October storm of 1987, which came early in the autumn, when many of the leaves were still on the trees.

  The Suffolk Wildlife Trust, lords of the manor of the common, had wisely decided that the tree should be pollarded before the strong winds of the autumn equinox.

  All day the chainsaws buzzed and growled: great thirty-inch McCullochs and Stihls for the main trunk; yet, hearing them from a distance back at home in the knowledge that they were doing good work, they seemed benign, and quite without their usual menace.

  Next afternoon my friend and neighbour Ben Box and I began clearing the ‘lop and top’ of the oak from around its roots and loading logs and branches into my tractor trailer, carting them to each of our wood stacks – ready to be sawn up and split into firewood, or turned into bowls on the lathe, or carved into interesting shapes.

  October

  1st October

  A sunny morning and door open to my study; a hornet, obviously a queen, came to inspect my lintel for a possible winter quarters. I went out and met her and she looked me in the eye, then flew off. I can hear her now, twenty yards away in an ash tree, with a low buzz: the Marlene Dietrich of the insect world.

  Drove down to Cambridge, having spent the morning writing a poem, ‘Weasel Words’, to Lily Macfarlane [daughter of Robert, then two years old] to go with a posy of lesser teasel seed heads I gave her to sow in the garden in spring. I drove past the finest hedge of traveller’s joy (old man’s beard) in Suffolk, at the sugar beet factory, disguising the steel mesh and barbed-wire-topped security fence. There’s often a subtext to such conservation corporate gestures.

  Rob and I talked about Ivor Gurney, a great lover of trees, going mad in England, refusing to go outside at his mental hospital because it wasn’t his home county of Gloucestershire.

  Jays are harsh and scarifying. Jackdaws’ calls sound somehow sweetly reasonable.

  Spiders move like lightning, and lightning moves like spiders, legging its jagged way across a night horizon, illuminating the path of a storm.

  3rd October

  I picked three pounds of elderberries from a single tree by the entrance moat and stewed them to a deep purple-crimson ink. I strained the juice through a sieve and stored the pulp, full of seeds, in a jar, then made a daub-painting from it, using the seeds to represent fruit on a hedgerow.

  I raised the three ash trunks off the concrete pad to allow the air to circulate around them. I levered them with crowbars, slid the car jack under each end and jacked them up to the height I needed, then slid blocks of willow underneath as cradles.

  4th October

  Strong wind driving rain in curtains across the common, waves of spray and spume flecked with the first autumn leaves. Rain and leaves skidding past my window.

  Lifting a log yesterday, I found four newts: three palmate, one a baby, and a young great crested newt too, all sleepy and resentful – orange belly in the dark leaf mould.

  8th October

  Last night a strange thing. I left out a dish of baked salmon fillets I had offered the cats. They had refused the fish on the grounds that I had cooked it with ginger. I covered the dish with a plate overnight, intending to offer it to the vegetable-garden hedgehog. This morning, the plate knocked off, and no salmon. Beside the dish, a dead weasel with a gash in its side and one front leg bitten off. A fox? A badger? I don’t think it was a cat, and weasels are fierce fighters. I imagine the gutsy little mustelid standing up on its hind legs to square up to a fox, lashing out with its front paws and losing a limb to nervous snapping jaws. I shall give the creature a decent burial, Barry Lopez-style, and just possibly see if there’sa wide-jawed skull in a year or two, but more likely let it rest in peace.

  9th October

  A fine sunny day and a starry night in the railway wagon, with moorhens and pheasants calling. Moorhens sound like a cork twisting in a wet bottleneck.

  Recollections of childhood, sparked by Les Murray on lists of changes.

  The bomb shelter on our street, or on the corner of Broadfields outside the Newmens’ house, with its cherry tree on the corner and the laurel hedges that I raided to fill my butterfly-killing jars.

  Miss Heinz’s house on th
e corner.

  Singing lessons with Mrs Gillard, who put her hands on my stomach as I sang.

  Skating with Ann Wilks.

  Curly at the rec and the sound of the bass booming into my pillow on Saturday nights from the dance band at the Recreation Pavilion.

  The sound of roller skates bump, bumping over the gaps between paving stones as we sped downhill, past the railings through which we fed Mr Stimpson’s chickens with bread crusts. ‘Mum, can we go and feed the chickens?’

  Mr Farnborough. Mrs Houlden. Mrs Morongi. Mrs Cracknell and Major Cracknell.

  Mrs Cracknell yelling at Hitler to get off her garden fence. ‘I can see you, you bugger. You think I can’t see you, but I know you’re there. Come out of there, you devil!’ And she would rattle at the fence with her broomstick. We minded our own business.

  The Brabys and Mr and Mrs Hall minded theirs too, the other side. Vivien Braby, a tough, pleasant, somehow Australian sort of girl, who went to Grimsdyke, not Woodridings. I would have gone to Grimsdyke if I hadn’t gone to Wellington. Grimsdyke and Harrow Grammar, had I done well in the eleven plus.

  The mud and surfeit of wet bread at Headstone Manor.

  Today, sunny and glorious after a misty-sunny dawn (I was in the railway wagon listening to three kinds of owl, all screeching and hooting around me as I tried to sleep, then awoken by the railway-track repair men).

  The sheer joy of reusing things that others have discarded, rejects left for dead in skips, or the walking wounded of old chairs or beds in need of repair being auctioned off for a song.

  I am interested in the practicalities of life – in clothes, tools, things that serve a purpose with elegance – form or function.

  I love craftsmanship. In Morocco I saw people making things everywhere. I have a pair of Moroccan shoes – bought in Tafraoute from a man working in a tiny wooden booth with a modicum of equipment – still going strong. I wear them every day and have done for fifteen or sixteen years. Why don’t people make things as good as them in this country, which is so much more technologically sophisticated, or so we are told?

  Alison told me a story about shoes. There are three main skills involved in making the uppers of shoes. They are called cutting, closing and finishing. They are taught only one of these skills as apprentices, so that they can’t leave and set up as competition. But of course they can join forces with two others and have a business. Hence Freeman, Hardy & Willis.

  Also I’m interested in the land, and shoes are our contact with it. Shoes radiate contact with land.

  I’ve had enormous satisfaction and pleasure from good boots that have taken me hundreds/thousands of miles across the land.

  It’s when I do all my thinking –when I’m walking.

  The question about nomadic people is whether their way of life means they are naturally disposed to be nomadic in personal relations too, moving from one friendship to another, even from one wife to another; or does their life predispose them to closer permanent ties? Especially of family? I think the latter. Boots are especially important to nomads. ‘If I were in your shoes’–Kazak, Kyrgyz and English. Boots and a good horse, a donkey, a camel –and SHELTER.

  Which of us has the more profound relationship with nature? The nomad or the settled, rooted farmer? The Kyrgyz or the Uzbek? In Uzgen in 1990, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks rioted and killed a thousand of each other. Why?

  In between stands the transhumant shepherd or herdsman who goes up to the highlands, the alpine meadows rich with flowers, in spring and returns to a lowland homestead in autumn.

  The need to travel, to ‘get away’, is a powerful urge; it has to do with hope and desire and, above all, imagination and the invention that goes with the necessity to improvise from whatever is to hand.

  The Tree of Life: the serpentine umbilical cord that feeds and attaches us to the earth-mother, but from which we also break free at birth. Our roots sustain us, but bind us too.

  Satish spoke on Monday night about how trees are sacred to all Hindus, and how Buddha always sat under a tree or trees to teach. Satish sits by the fireside for the same reason. In India the fire is a god and can witness a wedding with no one else present at all. If I say ‘You are my lifelong wife’ before a fire, this constitutes a binding vow, because it has been witnessed by fire.

  I walk about the common with my imaginary medieval friend. ‘The ponds are so shallow. Why are they nearly dried out?’ he says, amazed at the state of the grass. ‘What’s happened to all the cowslips and buttercups – and the hay rattle flowers? Where are the clouds of butterflies that used to rise up before the scythe?

  ‘It’s so quiet. Where are the voices of the children stone-picking in the fields, where is the birdsong, where are the grasshoppers?’

  The elemental nature of a Russian sauna – fire, wood, stone, water, herbs, the heat of the sun released into stone, the small volcano of steam, its thunder, the grumblings and mutterings of the wood stove. The sweat pouring from the body, the pores opening like the stomata of a leaf.

  Our own growth – hair, fingernails, like the annual rings of a tree. Autumn – sense of loss, putting extra demands on our capacity for hope.

  All of us, I believe, carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there: places where, like the child that ‘feels its life in every limb’ in Wordsworth’s poem ‘We are Seven’, our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened. By way of returning the compliment, we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far away from them.

  I know a river and a steep valley of dense chestnut woods in the South of France within the golden circle Cyril Connolly described as his ideal habitat, his paradise on earth, roughly encompassing the wooded hills and valleys of the Dordogne, the Lot and the Aveyron rivers.

  My particular river and valley, owned purely by right of familiarity and deep affection, are downstream of the little hill town of Souseyrac, high above Saint-Céré, in an almost alpine land of chestnut woods, walnut orchards, hillside beehives and farmyard guinea fowl.

  I know a place, down a lane beyond a kink by a half-derelict watermill on an upland road that meanders up to nowhere in particular, where there’s a level place at the top of the chestnut wood just wide enough to nudge in the car and make a camp.

  Rising up through the trees day and night is a sound that might be a freshening breeze in the leaves, but is the rushing water of what the local people call a ‘torrent’. ‘Torrent’ neatly sidesteps the difficulty of describing in English a gentle enough summer stream that turns into a river the moment there’sa thunderstorm in the higher hills or mountains, or into a raging cataract in the spring when the snows are melting.

  For several summers I would return to this place in the old Citroën DS Safari I half lived in for July and August, nosing its frog-mouth bonnet into the little clearing amongst the chestnuts, and setting up camp under the shade of an airforce surplus silk parachute that undulated like a swimming stingray at the slightest summer breeze.

  Each morning, after a leisurely campfire breakfast, I would descend the steep valley wall through the trees, holding on to saplings and low branches like Robert Frost’s ‘swinger of birches’ until the stream came into view and I could drop down on to the soft leaf mould of the sandy bed of a tiny flood meadow, pooled in warmth as the sun rose up over the treetops.

  The moment the meadow lit up, it also filled with insects: delicate blue and green damselflies with barred wings, big emperor dragonflies, flying iridescent shield beetles and wasp-mimicking flies of all kinds, busy in the big white or yellow flowers of the aniseed umbellifers, which filled the place with their Bassett’s Allsorts liquorice scent.

  This tiny meadow, perhaps thirty or forty yards by twenty, was really a sandy, pebbly island formed by the force of the stream at times of flood, which carried down stones and sandy particles
from higher up the valley. The stream swung round it in a wide arc, with rock pools and miniature bays and beaches that immediately aroused all my latent boyhood desires to emulate the water in its playfulness.

  For us as children, water, and its close relations mud and sand, always invited play. It turned us all into natural engineers and sculptors. On the beach, we dug canals and channelled the frothing rising tide into our moated sandcastles. Even in the field ditch at the bottom of our garden, we dammed its muddy autumn streams or raced our pooh sticks down its mighty nine-inch flood, clearing the oak leaves and brambles that impeded their progress as diligently as any river engineers.

  Here beside the Souseyrac stream, the rising August heat of the morning was an added stimulus to water engineering, and I would set about the construction of a bathing pool, tugging the stones that lay about the island into a natural neck between two rocks, damming it to raise the water level in the pool above so it was deep enough to swim against the stream, making no headway in the powerful current but not falling back either, as trout often do, with so little effort they hardly seem to flex a fin or tail.

  Thus, wallowing in my aquatic version of an exercise bike, I could swim for miles, or rather I could chill my blood and clear my hot and bothered head, then clamber out again on to a rock and back into my book. Reading beside the dancing water of a stream, and cooling yourself in it from time to time, must be the summertime equivalent of reading beside a fire in winter, warming yourself by its playful flames, adding a log to stimulate the flow of warmth.

  Nobody ever came to this place: the only disturbance was a pair of buzzards mewing overhead, or the occasional raucousness of a woodpecker. In autumn there would be the gatherers of chestnuts and mushrooms edging along the contours of the narrow woodland paths; and in winter, the hunters whose red ‘Chasse Privée’ notices adorned the tree trunks here and there. But in high summer you could be utterly alone beside this pool, glinting with golden flecks of mica, flickering with damselflies. Then, as the sun shifted over the treetops on the western side of the valley, you could climb up to the camp, relight the fire, drink tea and think about supper.