Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  We take a break for tea at twelve, then lunch at two so we can sit in the cab and listen to the Archers. I peel open a tin of sardines and carve off chunks of bread with my Opinel. We sit munching and sipping, watching a pair of tree-creepers working an ash trunk for insects, wandering up or down the tree vertically with no apparent effort. The wood shows all the signs of its antiquity: hazel and ash with maple, hornbeam and oak standards here and there, floored with dog’s mercury and bluebells in spring. As we eat, Keith tells me its story, and how he came to be coppicing it. Twenty-five years earlier he approached the owner, an old gentleman who was happy to see him take over the coppicing for thatching spars and firewood, to keep the ash and hazel stools in good order. Come Christmas, Keith would always visit him, taking a bottle of whisky and his one pound annual rent for the coppice rights.

  Recently the son inherited the estate, a young fellow in the City who brought in a managing agent from Norwich to oversee it. The agent met Keith in the wood and asked him to suggest a commercial rent for it. Keith pointed out that he had always paid in kind, so the agent said, ‘All right, make us some sheep hurdles. Let me know how many you think you can make us each year.’ Hurdles are a lot of work, so Keith declined the proposition, as he did another that he should supply the firewood to the estate as rent. The agent has now stipulated that Keith can take only hazel poles, and no firewood of a thickness greater than his arm. He must cut down the firewood and leave it for the estate to carry out and sell.

  As the late-afternoon sun slants through the brown wood, it turns it to purple with an underglow of crimson. We finish loading the truck, lash down the great springy bundle of rods, swig the last of our tea and head home.

  Towards the end of March, Keith had finished the year’s coppicing and cut the loose rods of hazel into bundles of twenty ready to be split into brorches. He had also cut six-foot bundles for liggers, the riven wands he uses to secure the ridge capping of the thatch in a distinctive pattern, leaving his signature on the roof much as a baker might decorate a loaf. All the new hazel was stored neatly under cover in the barn.

  Keith’s yard was almost walled by tall canvas-covered stacks of thatching reed bundles laid in a geometrical criss-cross like a reed mudhif guest house of the all-but-extinct Iraqi Marsh Arabs on the Euphrates. A pair of gypsy wagons shrouded in tarpaulins stood beside the reed stacks. Across the garden was a third, its stainless-steel stove-pipe glinting in the sun, and its front doors ajar to let in the air and spring sunshine. In other corners of the yard, old trailers, a threshing machine and a blue Fordson tractor, all sheltered under yet more faded green or blue canvas, so the effect was of being in an encampment.

  Zeka appeared from behind the barn and came bounding towards me, sniffing my corduroys with approval and wagging not just her tail but her whole body, making a hill of her back. The first time I met her four years earlier she had run so far away from home that she landed up two miles away in my fields. She rolled over when I approached her, and I led her into my kitchen, where she soon made herself at home before the Aga while I rang the number on her collar. To my surprise it turned out to be Keith’s. I found Keith and Canny drinking coffee at the open door of a little lean-to office at one end of their barn listening to news of the Iraq War on the BBC World Service. It was an odd scene: the Toyota Hiace parked outside with its cab doors wide open, its radio filling the Suffolk air with news of fresh disasters from the desert, sunshine pouring in through the open barn doors, lapping at the half-shadow where Keith now resumed work splitting hazel. The sweet-smelling wooden bundles were stacked almost to the crossbeams, the pale cut ends peering in their hundreds from out of the shadows. He sat in an old chair in the middle of the barn’s centre bay surrounded by the stacked bundles of hazel spar-gads, neatly sorted according to thickness and cut into twenty-eight-inch lengths. Once he had split and sharpened each brorch, Keith folded it in two with a twist to make a V-shaped sprung scissor that he would drive into the reed to peg it into the thatch.

  As with all the old crafts, each county has its own variations on every detail, and Keith’s Suffolk ‘brorches’ would be ‘sprays’ in the Chilterns, ‘buckles’ in Worcestershire, ‘spars’ from Dorset to Devon and ‘spekes’ or ‘spicks’ in Wiltshire. In Worcestershire they would be of willow, more flexible than hazel, but not so long-lasting. And not so long ago, when thatchers still had apprentices, the splitting of these pegs would have been part of their work. In The Woodlanders it is Marty South who sits up late at her fireside making thatching spars for Mr Melbury in her attempt to earn enough from the piecework to escape having to sell her long hair to Mr Percombe, the barber, who looks in at her cottage:

  In the room from which this cheerful blaze proceeded he beheld a girl seated on a willow chair, and busily working by the light of the fire, which was ample and of wood. With a billhook in one hand and a leather glove much too large for her on the other, she was making spars, such as are used by thatchers, with great rapidity. She wore a leather apron for this purpose, which was also much too large for her figure. On her left lay a bundle of the straight, smooth hazel rods called spar-gads – the raw material of her manufacture; on her right a heap of chips and ends – the refuse – with which the fire was maintained; in front a pile of the finished articles. To produce them she took up each gad, looked critically at it from end to end, cut it to length, split it in four, and sharpened each of the quarters with dexterous blows, which brought it to a triangular point precisely resembling that of a bayonet.

  In Hardy’s time, all sorts of journeymen were on hand to supply or assist the thatcher, whereas the modern craftsman has become increasingly isolated and has to do everything himself. The isolation had already set in by the 1930s, when H. J. Massingham writes of his local thatcher ‘taking upon his own shoulders donkey work that in the old days was done by the thatcher’s boy or apprentice’. Later on in The Woodlanders, Hardy describes the manufacture of spars in Mr Melbury’s timber and copse-ware yard: ‘Winterbourne thereupon crossed over to the spar-house where some journeymen were already at work, two of them being travelling spar-makers from Stagfoot Lane, who, when the fall of the leaf began, made their appearance regularly, and when winter was over disappeared in silence till the season came again.’ In Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, Ernie Bowers, the thatcher, describes how he and his father would thatch up to 600 ricks of straw a year for the Suffolk farmers after harvest. ‘Every parish’, he says, ‘had its own thatcher in the 1920s. But in the 1930s things changed. Most of the good thatchers were getting on the old side and beginning to drop out. I can remember five or six great thatchers of the old school dying then. Nobody replaced them. They were men of the old time – of the old life.’

  Later in the day, Keith turned to splitting liggers. Splitting a length of the hazel with a small, sharp billhook reveals the white sapwood inside, the tree’s innards, and doubles it into a pair of liggers. The pile of curly shavings and offcuts accumulating on the floor was the kindling Keith and Canny used to light their fires. Keith leant each pole on a leather pad strapped to his knee and drew the old Parkes billhook towards him, guiding it on its journey, subtly twisting it to right or left as it travelled up the grain to keep the two halves exactly equal. I tried it myself and worried that the billhook might travel up my groin. I sat in Keith’s old kitchen chair facing the sunlit open doorway of the barn, got the billhook started into the end grain of a pole and drew it unsteadily up the grain. The first foot went well, but then the blade seemed to veer off with a will of its own, like a gramophone needle jumping out of its groove. My attempt was relegated ignominiously to the firewood pile, and so were two more. There’s nothing like trying something yourself for swelling your respect for a craftsman who really knows what he’s doing. ‘Keith made it look so easy’ is the standard way to say this, but he really did, and for him, he assured me, it really was.

  Always working with the same billhook, Keith bevelled off the ends of each ligger to make a join. The secret
of the splitting, he said, is all about feeling for the grain as the blade slides along it. Drawing a new bundle of twenty wands from several stacked to his left against an old pram, he said he could split a bundle an hour, so he will do eight a day at most, each hazel pole yielding seven or eight brorches. Working over the winter, Keith makes 20,000 to 30,000 brorches and liggers a year. Of course, he could buy them ready-made by someone else, or imported from Central Europe, as many thatchers do, but Keith enjoys the seasonal nature of his work, and its varied rhythms from month to month. He even sells his own brorches when he has some to spare. In The Woodlanders, Mr Percombe asks Marty how much she gets for her spar-making:

  ‘Eighteenpence a thousand,’ she said reluctantly.

  ‘Who are you making them for?’

  ‘Mr Melbury, the timber-dealer, just below here.’

  ‘And how many can you make in a day?’

  ‘In a day and half the night, three bundles – that’s a thousand and a half.’

  ‘Two and threepence.’ Her visitor paused.

  Canny said that she has been a Wood several times over. Her surname was Shaw, meaning a wood, and she originally married a man called Wood. Now she lived with Keith, who was a Dunthorne, and quite plainly one of nature’s woodlanders. Working with him that February day, a master craftsman who still went into the woods with only his dog, and the Archers, for company, I remembered H. J. Massingham, writing about his own thatcher in the 1930s: ‘He lacks the townsman’s favours, but owns a fortune in his inward peace.’

  As I was about to leave, Keith disappeared into the shadows of the barn and returned with a hazel staff, more of a magician’s wand than a walking stick, and presented it to me. I could not imagine a more beautiful gift: even in the tree’s fingertips, in the branched wand of the water diviner, there is a special magic in all hazel. It has come from the wood, of course. From bottom to tapering top, the rod had grown naturally fluted and spiralled by the strangling effect of the honeysuckle stem that still encircled it like an asp, the tourniquet causing the freckled hazel bark to fatten along its line in a continuous swelling like a banister rail, a helter-skelter of sap-engorged bark perfectly matched to the human grip. The wooden vortex that grew along the woodbine ligature asserted the tree’s will to live. Keith took the Parkes billhook to it and bevelled off the top. My four-foot-six Jack-and-the-beanstalk Merlin-staff was a masterpiece of nature, the voluptuous embrace of the honeysuckle exciting the hazel into a wild frenzy of cell division. Waving it, I felt, might turn a toad into a princess.

  Tools and Workshops

  On the wall behind the lathe in my workshop is a newspaper photograph of David Pye, the late Professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art. Dressed in navy boiler suit and scarf, he is entering his workshop from a garden through half-open French doors. Light from the anglepoise lamp over his lathe reflects off his round spectacles. He looks serious and thoughtful. Two of his trademark hand-carved, fluted wooden dishes stand on a bench in the foreground beside a Golden Virginia tobacco tin and a clutch of wood-handled gouges. A massive baulk of timber, anchored to the lathe on steel brackets, is obviously his homemade tool rest for turning outsized bowls. Rows of chisels and callipers are slotted into a rack on the wall behind a second workbench cluttered with wood shavings, tins of Brasso, oil cans and a blade-sharpening grinder. Above them hang more tools: a collection of adzes, axes and hand saws. Two more side axes are stuck into a chopping block. Framing the scene very close to the lens in soft focus are the graceful wooden handles of three planes.

  Probably most workshops come to look something like this. Mine certainly has: the heavy workbenches standing like oxen, the wood floor pimpled with spilt glue and odd lighting contraptions in every corner. Pye’s workshop has high white plaster walls and elegant moulded ceilings. It is evidently within his house. My workshop is illuminated by a set of stage lights and tells of a lifetime’s accumulation of tools. I went to farm auctions and bought impossibly long wooden stack ladders nobody needed or wanted any more for a few pounds. I bought a 1948 Fordson Major tractor with a useful little six-cylinder Perkins diesel engine in perfect working order. It had been used just after the war for towing bombers about on the American airfields round here. I also equipped myself with a full armoury of trailers, ploughs, harrows, cultivators and hay-cutters to go with it. At the farm sales, it was impossible not to rescue machines with names like the Nicolson swathe-turner and such things as enormous hay rakes originally designed to be drawn by horses, wooden bullock carts, or the kind of miniature tipping trailer known as a tumbril, one of the most useful things any farm could possess.

  I never met David Pye. He lives on the wall as a mentor. His book The Nature and Art of Workmanship, published in 1968, taught me to think about wood, and whatever I make of it, in a new light. Pye didn’t just write or teach about the making of things: he was a maker himself. He originally trained to be an architect of wooden buildings, then served with the navy during the war and afterwards taught for twenty-six years at the Royal College. He inevitably pondered the problematical word ‘craft’, and thought about the ideas of William Morris and John Ruskin on the crafts and workmanship. Pye wrote a passionate critique of some of Ruskin’s ideas in ‘The Nature of Gothic’.

  Here is a very modest example of the workmanship of risk. I spent from three o’clock this afternoon until the light ran out at half past five making what David Nash calls a ‘cut-and-warp column’ out of a length of green cherry for my friend Terence Blacker’s birthday. The column is three feet tall, and I had to put in thirty incisions of my chainsaw all round it, using the machine as delicately as a paintbrush. The idea was to saw almost right through the wood cutting in towards its centre, leaving only a slender central column supporting leaves of cherry three eighths of an inch thick. Each circular cut involved rotating the log four times to present the best angle to the saw, so you could say there are 120 saw cuts altogether. It was punishing work, and the sweat flowed freely. I worked outside at an improvised anvil of hefty two-foot oak and willow logs, cross-sections of tree-trunks heavy enough to take a firm hold of the workpiece. First, I squared off the four sides of the bark to make a straight-sided column that tapered a little towards the apex.

  A cut-and-warp column is a good example of David Pye’s ‘workmanship of risk’ because at any moment things could go wrong. Tip the whizzing blade of the chainsaw a half-inch too far into the centre, and you could undo all your painstaking work by cutting short the column. You walk a tightrope from beginning to end of what feels more and more like a performance as you go on. Your glasses steam up in the cold air. You enter a trance of concentration, and the sweat runs down your back or springs itchily into your scalp inside the safety helmet and streams down your forehead behind the gauze visor. Your eyes begin to water in the frosty air. After the first few incisions you get into a rhythm and instinctively feel how deep to plunge the saw blade into the wood. By making a series of circular incisions no more than a quarter of an inch apart, you are left with a column of wooden leaves apparently suspended in air, in fact cantilevered on the slender central column of continuous heartwood. The bar of your chainsaw is three eighths of an inch thick, so with each cut you remove as much wood as you leave standing in the column, and introduce a new element, air, into the wood. Thus you begin to open the tree to the air, allowing the sap to evaporate, breathing it in yourself as you do so.

  With each new incision, the piece grows more fragile, and the potential for disaster, if you were to make a mistake, that much greater. As time goes by and the piece gets more interesting, your investment in it as well as your anxiety both increase. The trick, of course, is not to allow anxiety to creep in at all but to maintain a kind of Zen composure, complete confidence, and the poise and instinctive skill that result. That, at any rate, is the theory. At last you make the final cut and carry the column into the house for the first time, cradling it like a baby. You set it down on a table and scrutinize it from every angle, f
rom close up and from the other side of the room. It is nothing like as beautiful as anything David Nash might make, but it still feels good, and it will feel even better when you present it to your friend.

  Clive’s workshop is a little shed up a concrete farm track opposite the cowsheds at Crabb’s Farm. There’s a tall cylindrical stove in one corner that burns his wood shavings. He refuels it by poking a length of two-inch pole inside from the top before filling it with shavings and packing them down tightly all round, so that when he gently removes the pole there’s a natural chimney, and a draft, up the centre of the stove. Wood shavings burn with intense heat.

  Clive is packing up his tools today, leaving the workshop, his craft and his partner for a new life in Oxford as a forester. The tools are housed neatly in old leather-clad wooden chests that look as if they’re designed for going to sea. The chisels lie in neat rows, the set squares fit snugly under brass clips, and the morticing tools nest in their niches. The big electric machines are ranged around the walls: a morticing machine, a pillar drill, a circular saw, a bandsaw and a plane. Standing in the middle of it all is the Art Deco armoire Clive has just finished making in English oak. It will be his last piece of furniture, and he must deliver it to Framlingham after lunch. The doors of the top half, the wardrobe part, mirror each other in the cat’s-paw burrs that figure the wood.

  A chubby extractor fan tube snakes out of the wall. I cast an inquiring eye on a set of clamps hanging up beside it. Clamps are what all joiners collect: you can never have too many. But Clive has promised them to his friend Caspar to use while he’s away. I have the kind of weakness for wood other people have for puppies or chocolates. Outside in the farmyard is Clive’s stash of timber: planks of oak, beech, sycamore, cherry and elm. He even has several lengths of London plane, an underrated wood with its deep blush of salmon. Inside the workshop are a few precious lengths of English holly, pure grained, smooth, white and heavy. It is all for sale, says Clive.