21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  All Souls Day, also known as the Day of the Dead, is now best known as a Christian ceremony, but its roots go back to European folklore and ancient customs of ancestor veneration. Ru and Claire also see it as an acknowledgement of the fading of the light, the ripeness around us turning into rot and the way the veil seems to thin at this time of year. In a way that felt universal, passionate and not a bit formulaic, Ru talked of the souls we were honouring and autumn’s reminder of nature’s ability to die over and over again. He also asked everyone gathered around the fire to spare a thought for the refugees who would not make it across the Mediterranean this winter, and whose bodies would never be honoured. Claire and the youngest member of the Green Funeral Company staff, Jennifer, spoke the names of everyone buried on the hillside, and among them I heard a familiar surname that made my chest stop: that of one of my favourite folk musicians. His son. Dead before him, far, far too young.

  People were asked to come forward if they wished and speak the name of someone they had lost then throw a pine cone into the fire in their memory. Naturally I had begun by this point to think of my nan. It was only now that I realised that it was once again the sort of anniversary of her death. I became aware that the moisture pouring out of my eyes was not solely the result of smoke and the unfortunate wind direction. I wanted to step forward and pick a cone from the box on the ground and add it to the fire and say something about her amazing kindness, how I’d admired her more every day since I’d lost her, about how she’d lived through war and extreme poverty, then, just as her life was improving, had the love of her life snatched away from her, but something stopped me. Most people were speaking the names of relatives and friends buried on this hillside or nearby. Some had died half a century ago, others, such as a twenty-one-year-old German man someone’s son had tried and failed to save from drowning in the sea, only last week. Perhaps it was the strength of these stories combined with a sense of geographical separation – my nan being from so far away and me only being a recent import – that made me hold back. As the ceremony wound down, I began to rue my reticence and found myself oddly reluctant to go home, although not just because of that or the prospect of deceased-rabbit afterstench. Others seemed the same, as if pinned and mesmerised by the flames. Here was the antithesis of LED light: a healthy, primal hypnosis. During a lull in the conversation I noticed two pine cones, one considerably larger than the other. I picked both up and placed them in the embers. Then, pre-emptively clutching my keys, I left.

  7

  FULL JACKDAW

  What you think will stay with you about a house you live in and love for a long time is often not what does stay with you about a house you live in and love for a long time; it is other feelings about the place, unique to it, which set in gradually over a period of several years, whose true uniqueness you will only notice long after you have left. When I think about the house in Norfolk where I lived between 2004 and 2013, which is the house I’ve got to know more intimately than any other in my adult life, I often think about parties – far more parties than the three or so per year I actually had there between 2009 and 2012, so many parties, an upstairs floor constantly filled with dancing and sleeping people – but what has stayed with me most about the house is a feeling of being in mid-air. Being indoors yet in the sky, sheltered yet right up in the weather, on the sofa or the carpet yet in the treetops.

  Suspension, I now realise, was the house’s predominant theme. It had been built in the early 1960s – not prettily but thoughtfully, with an upside-down layout – into the side of one of Norfolk’s rare steep slopes, overlooking an Ice Age mere which unverified local legend claimed to be bottomless. From the street the house was almost invisible: a single-storey slab of utility concrete with the nonsensical tiling choices of a mind in disarray. This invisibility proved a bonus on a main throughfare on the edge of a town synonymous with minor vandalism. Many other houses nearby regularly had their windows smashed on Friday nights. Around the corner ‘JONES MONGS’ had been scrawled on one building then scrubbed almost off, then scrawled again, carefully following the ghost lines of the original inscription. The lead flashing was stolen off the front of my house by thugs on speed, but its lone small window remained intact and ‘JONES MONGS’ was never scrawled on its wall, and for this I still often thank the gods of fortune. On the opposite side the building opened up in a manner many a passer-by would not have suspected: light streamed in from the water and sky through big faulty windows framed with chunky white PVC, and the house hugged the hill like three fat grey steps. On the middle step, where a person felt most suspended and at one with the surrounding foliage, disorientated wood pigeons periodically slammed into the windows, knocking themselves insensible with semi-metallic thuds that reverberated around the building. In the mere, beyond a jetty that rotted off into the water a little more each year, monster catfish – fish of a size mundane British market-town life does not teach us to expect – gorged on the abandoned food of the locality’s many fast-food outlets. When I sold the house, insurers had qualms about the building’s proximity to the water: qualms that were patently absurd, since the foundations remained seventy yards from the shoreline and dozens of feet above it even after the heaviest rainfall. It would have taken outright apocalypse for the mere to flood the building, and even then there was a feeling that you’d withstand Armageddon were you on the middle floor of the house, where the rooms bored back furthest into the sandy rock. Being in that portion of the house was like hiding in a modest, symmetrical cave – the lair of some very minor James Bond villain perhaps, whose main crime was that he tended to be a bit last minute getting his tax forms in.

  There was an astonishing feeling of security in that cave, a quiet walled-off-from-the-world sensation almost unheard of in a building on the edge of a busy East Anglian town. This was in welcome contrast to the lack of security associated on a daily basis with my ownership of the place. The house had been a stretch for me to buy as half of a couple, a bigger stretch for us to renovate, then had continued to be a stretch for me to maintain, alone, at a time when my job security was crumbling. I remember no interim phase between the excitement of being permitted to take out a mortgage on such a captivating and unusual home and the dread of the inevitable day when I would be forced to abandon it. I would walk out of the cave’s rear and into the sheltered sky, and feel rapturously suspended, right up in the trees that surrounded the hillside, but simultaneously less pleasantly suspended, floating uncertainly, never able to relax and feel the house was mine or that I could make it fully what it should be. For all the fun I squeezed out of the place, which in the last few years of living there was plenty, much of my residence there had the anxious character of a drawn-out goodbye.

  One summer morning during the beginning of the final decisive part of this goodbye I drew back forty-year-old curtains which matched the colour of the sky and saw three men flying through the air thirty yards in front of me at eye level. I had lived in the sky long enough to know that doing so altered a few fundamental laws of gravity, but I was still suprised to see these men bobbing about. Their flight did not appear especially purposeful. It was more like the lazy backstroke you might choose to perform in a roomy swimming pool on a day containing a dearth of pressing appointments. Because it was early in the morning and my eyes had only 70 per cent opened and the sun was shining directly into them, I did not at first notice the ropes attached to the men’s waists, nor the chainsaws they held, none of which were yet operational, but I did hear the classical music coming from a neighbour’s kitchen window, and all this added to the sensation that I was watching a rare form of aerial ballet. I have had a fear of heights most of my life, but it’s a fear with various clauses and contradictory small print written into it. I view planes as an affront to nature and if you plonk me anywhere beyond halfway up the Eiffel Tower I’ll be your worst jelly-legged nightmare, but I can dangle my feet off the edge of the tallest cliffs in the UK and not experience a fragment of nerves, and a larg
e part of my childhood involved getting as far as was feasible up any tree I came across. Observing the flying men, I felt envious of their situation in the branches high above my next-door neighbour’s garden, and when their chainsaws started up the envy did not ebb away.

  A squirrel tore across my lawn, in flight from the racket.

  In such a dry county the hillside in front of the mere was an unusually fertile area of ground. I have never lived anywhere where plants and trees grow nearly as quickly. Two years previously the alders from which the men with the chainsaws hung so balletically had not even been visible from my window, but since then they had shot up the way fourteen-year-old schoolboys do in the summer holidays, running riot in the garden of Deborah and David next door. Mostly invisible to each other due to the raging, fertile hedge line, David and I walked repeatedly in parallel lines from the top of the slope to our bonfires in constant attempts to de-jungle our surroundings from April to October every year. Time-lapse photography of the buddleia below my living-room window filmed merely over the course of an average May would have shown it rising in ominous megalomaniacal fashion towards the cave. Had I not intervened with the loppers, it would have inched in through the gaps in the draughty windows, creeped along my bookshelves and given the back wall of the cave an appealing paisley revamp. Its peers would have followed, and soon my home would have been like a smaller version of the disused Palace Theatre on Union Street in Plymouth, which had a tree growing out of one of its windows. ‘That must be the house where the heroin addicts live,’ people on the opposite side of the water would say, pointing.

  I did not think about trees and shrubs a huge amount during my first couple of years living in the cave, mostly only in the sense that I rather liked them and believed that being kind to them meant not intervening with their whims, but when the pampas grass on one side of the garden had stretched its scratchy fronds in a big permanent yawn and the elders and giant philadelphus on the other side had expanded to the extent that all that remained was a three-yard tunnel of lawn leading to the water, I realised it was time to take action, and I barely stopped taking action for the following seven and a half years – for my sake but mostly for the sake of the potential buyers who would eventually come to look at the house when I was inevitably forced to sell it, who I figured would be less likely to purchase it if its garden looked like a prosaic south Norfolk answer to the Sinharaja Forest Reserve. Sometimes after a day out there my hair would smell so much of bonfire it smelled more strongly of bonfire than my actual bonfires did. One load of shampoo and conditioner was often not enough: the smoky aroma of deceased bark would remain. But that was OK. I liked the smell of bonfires and I had a strong instinct that people who recoiled violently at the smell of bonfire were not My People. In the swimming-pool changing room I often saw young men – and some not so young men – dousing themselves in Lynx deodorant, which never smelled good. ‘I think of it as the aroma of masked spunk,’ my friend Ellen once told me. I’d never met a female who liked it, yet all over Britain red-blooded heterosexual men in the prime of life continued to blast it flamboyantly into their various crevices. Maybe a bonfire aroma wasn’t the best smell to be carrying in a permanent invisible cloud around your person, but it was better than the whiff of Lynx. I liked the smell of bonfires so much that on country walks I’d often take detours to sniff those tended by strangers. Another favourite habit was to leave the curtains of the cave open at night and watch the light from David’s conflagrations gradually fade to a tiny orange bulb in an ocean of black. David’s bonfires tended to be more carefully arranged and marshalled than mine, but I did always perform the most crucial preliminary procedure before I put a match to the dry foliage: I checked for hedgehogs. I only ever found one, and it was already dead. It was possibly even a twentieth-century hedgehog, a hedgehog that might erroneously have been marketed as ‘vintage’ by a second-hand shop pushing their luck. A spiky economical bird’s nest with the ghost of a ghost of a face.

  Bonfires are not permitted in my garden in Devon, but I have a fireplace and take a similar sort of satisfaction in the processes surrounding it. I often get my logs from my dad, who has an arrangement regarding loose wood with the farmer who owns most of the land near him. On other occasions I bulk-order from one of the many woodsmen who lurk on the edges of Dartmoor. My latest batch came from a man called Dan, who collects his wood from the leaf-dense valleys near the moorland village of Holne and is exactly the kind of soft-spoken bearded giant you hope to find working and living in a forest. His logs are a mixture of birch, beech and oak, and burn far, far better than any I’ve purchased before, especially the ones from my local petrol station, which give off as much efficient sustained warmth as a bag of fifteen lemon-drizzle cakes. This is nothing unique for petrol-station logs. There’s something almost impressive about how uniformly and monumentally terrible all firewood from petrol stations turns out to be, as if it goes beyond mere capitalism and is in fact the outcome of a Shit Petrol Station Firewood Constitution drawn up in the middle part of the last century.

  After Dan had emptied his superior logs from his Land Rover onto the lane I spent a happy five hours hauling them up the hill to my house and stacking them in a curved formation complimenting the shape of the windows in my porch. The final result probably stands as my life’s grandest sculpture, and over the winter I felt a noticeable melancholy as I subtracted from it, ameliorated by the pleasure of watching the blaze in the hole in my living-room wall, not least the timeless thrill of the moment when a burned log fractures and falls, reigniting the wood beneath it: the twist in the plot of a primetime drama on an ancient screenless TV that you know is coming but not quite when. It’s hard to imagine a time before electricity, but just how dark must the night world have been for Homo erectus before the invention of fire? That’s a whole other realm of dark: a dark that makes your brain ache when you try to picture it, like the end of outer space or the concept of no longer being alive. ‘What is the most significant moment in human history so far?’ Chris Salisbury asked on a forest skills course which I attended in autumn 2014 a few miles from my house in the dense woodland of the Dartington Estate. ‘The invention of the wheel?’ said one pupil. ‘The printing press?’ guessed another. ‘No, it was the invention of fire,’ said Chris. A protégé of Ray Mears, Chris wears a belt of knives and has the aura of a man who birds will listen to. One of his many good qualities as a teacher is that he has a meditative aura that’s just intimidating enough in its strange calmness to make you eager to impress him, which makes you ultimately more likely to remember the wisdom he passes on. Even if you’ve only spent a day within it, the smoky, somewhat primal universe he presides over is one that you find yourself carrying with you long after you’ve left, shoehorning terms you’ve learned such as ‘blood bubble’ and ‘farmer’s paint’ into regular conversation to the consternation of those closest to you. I did not learn how to fell a tree from Chris but did learn how to coppice, whittle a stick into a sharp rounded point – being careful to keep a wide blood bubble around me, naturally – start a sustainable fire using one match and foraged kindling in blustery conditions on sodden ground, and build a shelter using minimal tools.

  An unusually large amount of people depend on trees for their living in this area, and among those I have met I have noticed a recurring theme: a radiant but non-smug contentment in their own work, often bordering on addiction. ‘I get paid for climbing trees,’ my tree surgeon friend Dave told me. ‘What could be better than that?’ As a boy Dave shinned up the oaks in Dartington’s North Wood near his childhood home, and now, in his early fifties, he does exactly the same. Sometimes, on my walks, I will look above me and see him dangling from a branch by a rope and feel the same sort of envy I felt at the flying men near my old house in Norfolk. Before he worked here, Dave lived in Australia and Long Island, New York, coppicing and removing trees in the gardens of Jack Nicholson and Billy Joel, among others. He’s never been within thirty yards of a gym but hasn’
t got an ounce of fat on him and looks a decade younger than he is. Often he’s up there alone, wielding a chainsaw with one hand, hanging from a limb with the other, yet in the three decades since he received his arboreal qualification he has never come close to being seriously injured. That said, he did once almost render his boss two dimensional when felling a turkey oak that had sheared down the middle of its trunk. On the same occasion, with the force of its descent the turkey oak’s trunk managed to take out the hallowed 1930s art deco donkey sculpture in the gardens of Dartington Hall. Dave found the donkey removed from its perch but cradled gently in the fallen oak’s branches, almost as if the oak, selfless in its own demise, had wanted to protect it. Trees have not had the easiest run of it at Dartington in recent times. In late 2013 Dave watched from the estate’s tiltyard as a train of wind – a rigorously organised wind, a wind with a plan – tore up the river, sending ashes and oaks crashing into the water. Many of these can still be seen in the places they fell. Their sleeping half-submerged torsos look especially enchanting at dawn, smoked by mist, a classic example of the difference between nature making a mess and humans making a mess, which is that in the end nature will always make its mess look attractive. The following summer the two-century-old Monterey pine on the terraces above Dartington’s Great Lawn keeled over from old age, leaving a spectacular Jurassic-looking corpse that was subsequently rolled several hundred yards to the tiltyard, chopped up and used by local craftsfolk to make dining tables, lecterns, sculptures and musical instruments.