Wildwood Read online

  Having personally shaped or repaired every single one, I have ended up on terms of the greatest intimacy with all the beams, posts and pegged joints in the place. I have perhaps also earned some kinship with the people who, twenty years or so before Shakespeare was born, originally built the house and probably dug out the moat. Uncovering the carpenters’ coded inscriptions on the rafters and floor beams was like finding a lost manuscript. They were carved when the oak or sweet chestnut was still green and the house under prefabricated construction in a kind of kit form at the carpenters’ shop, ready to be carted to the site and raised, whole walls at a time, by the combined muscle of dozens of villagers. The proportions of everything, measured in feet and inches, impressed on me the organic nature of the entire structure. The proportions of each room, and of the house as a whole, were predicated on the natural proportions of the trees available. Suffolk houses like mine tend to be about eighteen feet wide, because that is about the average limit of the straight run of the trunk of a youngish oak suitable in girth for making a major crossbeam of eight inches by seven. The bigger barns tend to twenty-one feet wide, with slightly bigger timbers. Uprights too are of tree height, the idea being to select trees or coppice poles of about the right cross-section, so they can be squared with an adze with the minimum of work.

  This is the beam count in my house. Kitchen: 44. Sitting room: 50. Study: 32. Upstairs landing, bathroom and study: 22. Small bedroom: 23. Big bedroom: 72. Total: 243. If I add all 30 hidden beams in the kitchen, as well as 50-odd rafters, the total is 323 beams. So some 300 trees were felled to build this house: a small wood. The bark is still on many of these timbers after 400 years, and so is the sapwood here and there. The timber was always worked in its green, unseasoned condition, when it is easiest to cut, drill or shape into joints. Once assembled into the hardwood frame, the timbers would gradually season in situ, often twisting or curving as they did so and creating the graceful undulations so characteristic of old houses. One of the saddest things to witness in Suffolk today is the number of fine old timber houses that have been straightened out by builders. The last generation of Suffolk builders understood the old houses well, approaching them as structures that are engineered as much as built. Evolved rather than designed, the timber frame is intended to sit lightly on the sea of shifting Suffolk clay like an upturned boat and ride the earth’s constant movement.

  The House-sheds: Camping

  I have a weakness for sheds or huts of all kinds, no doubt inherited from the bothy my father built for me and my animal familiars at the end of the garden when I was about six. Thoreau would have approved of the name we gave it: ‘Cosy Cabin’, emblazoned on a tin sign above the door. I used to spend hours in there conversing with the lodgers: an assortment of beetles or woodlice in matchboxes, rabbits, guinea pigs, white mice and toads, all grateful to have a roof over their heads. In summer I was allowed to sleep up there too. No wonder we called it cosy. Later a crow moved in, even a few homely pigeons. My father, who had his own shed on the allotment, was fond of quoting William Cobbett on the pigeons: ‘Very interesting in their manners; they are an object to delight children and to give them the early habit of fondness for animals and of setting a value on them, which, as I have often had to observe, is a very great thing.’

  These days, my cosy cabin is a shepherd’s hut in the lee of a south-facing Suffolk hedge and a big ash tree a field away from the house. Perched on iron wheels, it is lined with close-grained pine boards stained a deep honey-amber by years of woodsmoke seeping from the stove. There’s a simple chair and table where I often work, oil lamps and candles, sun-faded curtains, and a wooden bed with a space underneath where sheepdogs and orphan lambs would once have curled up, gently warming the slumbering shepherd above. The hut has a barrelled tin roof and wooden ceiling, so when it rains the whole vessel resounds to the tattoo. Sleep through that, and you could still be woken early by magpies clattering along the corrugated rooftop like Cajun washboard-players, or an ill-bred bluetit noisily investigating the eaves. Across the field is the cabin I built for my son. I like to think it will always be like this: future cities of unofficial shanties stretching away across the country, down the generations.

  28 May

  Lying in bed in the shepherd’s hut is an out-of-body experience in which you are suspended six feet above the bottom of a wooden boat, gazing into its wooden hull and along the line of its keel. Everything is upside down, of course, but it is such another world in there that anything is possible. You gaze out of the open door at a wake of bubbling cow-parsley and the green depths of a hedge in May. Lift your face up to a porthole and you can survey the green waters of Cowpasture Meadow coming up to meet you as you voyage across doldrums of Sargasso buttercups in lazy pools, or navigate towards the beacon of a solitary green-winged orchid.

  13 June

  I slept in the shepherd’s hut last night after an evening swim in the moat, now beginning to weed up, under an almost-full moon. It was so bright, you could hardly call it proper darkness at all. At ten to four I was awoken by a blackcap hopping along the tin roof, then striking up the most exquisite warbling, at first utterly solo in the half-light, soon joined by other birds. It sang its heart out, moving about the roof now and then between phrases or cadenzas to a new vantage point, eventually ascending into the ash tree that overhangs the hut and the pond beside it. You hear everything in the hut: the foxes barking down the lane, even the rabbits thumping their hind legs on the ground sometimes. Easing myself up on one elbow about twenty past four, I inched back the curtain and surveyed the meadow. Yellow pools of buttercup, and here and there a pyramidal orchid, or a lush, intensely purple patch of the southern marsh orchid, the huge flowers stacked and layered like wedding cakes. A crow was flying in big circles above the pasture, climbing steeply, then gliding down for pure pleasure.

  I dozed back to sleep, but was awoken by a most violent rumbling and shaking of the whole hut, then a sound of loud scratching. For a moment I thought a cat must have leapt in, somehow, through an open window and on to my bed. Then, looking out of the window in some alarm, I realized what it was: a roe-deer rubbing herself against one corner of the hut, inches away from my pillow. A clamour of hooves as she and two others bounced off through the standing hay. The birdsong was by now too loud for sleep, so I adjourned to the house across the dew for breakfast.

  10 August

  I’m lying in the shepherd’s hut on a wooden bed under a boarded roof like a pine tent, between walls panelled with pine, tongued and grooved horizontally. Each time a nail has pierced the deep amber wood it has bled a black rusty stain that has crept along the grain and blurred, as though the wood or the wagon itself were travelling at speed. A woodpecker shrieks across the field. A wasp worries the windowpane, then zigzags above the bed and eventually blunders into the outer air. The open door frames a wall of green: the hawthorn, maple, blackthorn hedge, the dipping wands of an ash, nettles, graceful flowers of grasses. All stir in the hot breeze. Dust motes flicker and drift in the window-light. In the far corner, the stainless-steel stove-pipe rises like a new stem from the rusty little stove. On the other side of the doorway is the pine corner-cupboard I bodged out of skip-wood containing spare blankets and Bushmills for cold nights. Across the common, cows have been lowing all night. Perhaps the weather will change. I sleep coffined in pine.

  Why do I sleep outdoors? Because of the sound of the random dripping of rain off the maples or ash trees over the roof of the railway wagon, or the hopping of a bird on the wet felt of the roof, or the percussion of a twig against the steel stove-chimney. Out there, I hear the yawn of the wind in the trees along Cowpasture Lane. I feel in touch with the elements in a way I never do indoors.

  Sleeping one time in Burgate Wood on the moated island of the old hall, I put my cheek against the loam and the cool ground ivy. When I closed my eyes I saw the iceberg depths of the wood’s root-world. Walking there, picking my way through the trees, I had thought of it as perpendicula
r until I lay down and entered the ground-world. This is the part of a wood that only reveals itself occasionally after a big storm, when the trees have keeled over and the roots are thrown suddenly upright, clutching earth and stones. How deep do roots go?

  I also have a railway wagon, which I hauled into one of my fields years ago. Working or sleeping in my railway wagon is like embarking on a journey. An ash tree growing just behind it strokes the roof and plays tunes on the stove-pipe chimney with its branches whenever the wind blows. Wind rattles the heavy wooden sliding door and seeps in through small gaps between the boards. The entire structure is of wood: an oak frame strengthened by bolted iron straps and brackets, and by double walls of sturdy pine boards, all secured by screws, running horizontally inside and vertically outside to shed rain better. The roof is barrel-vaulted with oak, boarded above, with thick tarred roofing felt on top. When I bought the wagon it had no floor, so I made a wooden one, insulated beneath and damp-proofed by building paper.

  There’s so much room inside, you could happily live in the wagon. It is fifteen feet by eight, with an airy ceiling nine feet high. At each end, a tiny foot-square window in a corner opens by sliding up a wooden shutter and propping it with a stick. The wagon is sunk so deep in the massive hedge that the light seeping in is pure green. The interior is painted cream, and the sliding front door faces south. This will open to a width of six feet, so plenty of light comes in, reflected off the blond, drying hay of the meadow. Opposite the entrance is a cast-iron Tortoise stove with a stainless-steel chimney pipe that runs up inside the wagon and heats it in winter. When the stove is going full tilt, the hot metal sometimes glows red in the dark, and it is burnished rainbow blues and reds from the passage and oxidation of the hot gases. Outside on the roof, the chimney is topped with a jaunty steel Chinaman’s hat to keep the rain off. Most of one end of the wagon is occupied by a wooden bed whose ends I rescued in a damaged state from the auction sheds at Diss and repaired. When I light the candles in the three Moroccan lanterns, I think of something the artist Roger Ackling said to me, quoting Thoreau: ‘Electricity kills darkness, candlelight illuminates it.’

  In the warm embrace of the wagon’s wood, I always sleep like a cat for eight hours at a time. It is almost as if I were actually being rocked and lulled by the rhythm of its wheels on a nocturnal Night Mail journey. What is it about being enclosed by wood that is so comforting? Is this some kind of Reichian orgone box? Or is it simply a matter of feng shui: that the bed is oriented in the right way for deep sleep? I think it more likely that it is the symbolic act of leaving worldly things behind in the house, walking a hundred-yard winding path through a hay meadow and climbing aboard the uncluttered wagon, sunk deep into the leaf-purified air of an unruly Suffolk hedgerow that calms me down and encourages the dreams. It is a version of the wild, and always a return: every cabin is a version of all other cabins, dens, treehouses and nests. I leave the door open, with just a swaying curtain to keep the moths away from the lanterns.

  19 August

  Sleeping in the railway wagon. ‘Have you got your ticket?’ said A, as I went off over the field. There is plenty of wind, bashing the ash branches against the stove-pipe chimney, playing a tune on it. Wind creates a soothing sound I’m quite accustomed to, like the creaking of ship’s timbers, so it actually sends me to sleep. Going out into the dark meadow at night, it would be easy to mistake the outlines of the young walnut trees for deer.

  29 August

  In the railway wagon I hang a pale cotton curtain at the open door, and the sun filters through it. In the mornings I lie in bed watching the shadow puppet show of insects. Last night owls sounded their cool oboe-notes along the hedges. Theirs is such a soothing note for such murderous birds. Owls and the moon work hand in hand; accomplices in the killing of voles and shrews. I lay listening to the nightly shrewicides in the meadow and along the lane.

  Sleeping north–south does seem to improve the quality of my slumbers. ‘They had been denied the hospitality of sound sleep,’ says Saint-Exupéry in Terre des Hommes. The beds in the house are all east–west, but the beds in the railway wagon and the shepherd’s hut are both north–south. But to sleep half a field away from the house, tucked into a hedge, with an open door facing south into the meadow and plenty of cool night air, must surely add very much to the chances of sleep. The closing of the door on all the daytime stuff in the house, and so little in the shed to encumber the thoughts: just a few rugs, a stove, a bed, a table and chair.

  There’s more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don’t need permission for them. There’s more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we’re just passing through.

  Study

  I swear there’s a singing newt in my study. It generally bursts into song around ten at night and seems to live somewhere near the wood-stove, possibly behind the mantelpiece. Its song is a high-pitched squeak like a piece of clockwork machinery in need of a spot of oil. I have heard it before rising out of the bottoms of drains, or the rainwater traps at the bottoms of drainpipes. In one instance I tracked down a plaintive newt-song I kept hearing in the garden to the flooded depths of a pipe sunk in the lawn with a water stopcock at the bottom. I lay down and plunged in my arm as far as I could and actually succeeded in capturing the tiny songster, a common newt, and liberated it in the vegetable garden. A few nights later, however, it was back again in its damp atelier, practising scales. The song of the newt must count as the most subtle, and the least known, in nature, coming close to the ideal of some of the modern schools of composition: utter silence.

  Working in the study and regularly pausing to feed the stove another log is like working on the footplate of a steam locomotive. I am the fireman, teamed with my other self, the driver. This is the pleasure of wood: that it warms you so many times over. First when you fell it, then when you cart it back to the woodpile and again when you saw it into logs. Then it warms you again as you cart it and stack the woodshed to the roof with willow and ash, and again as you barrow it to the hearth. Then, at last, the final warming in front of the fire, the climax and finale of the whole exercise, the sum of so much work, so many hours lost in thought.

  Building the new desk under the window in the study, looking south across the garden to the moat. Perfectionism kicks in and all the same self-critical criteria that go into a piece of writing. I make a yew bracket to peg to the oak wall post and support the top, a slab of fine-grained Oregon pine, and a careful wooden sub-frame or chassis. I fill some open cracks in the grain with plaster, smooth it down and carefully stain it pale blue using a delicate watercolour brush. I hollow out one of the old bolt-holes in the top to accommodate a smooth, round flattened pebble from the Hebrides, like a tiny curling stone. It is a sort of worry-bead.

  At one end of my desk sits the laminated hub of an early wooden aeroplane propeller. It is a massive thing, with the two linen-skinned blades amputated at their stems. It has been constructed beautifully from ten planks of walnut a foot wide and three-quarters of an inch thick, originally glued and clamped together. I came across it years ago at a Norfolk country auction and was immediately reminded of the Venus de Milo by the deliberate incompleteness of its form, by the way the sawn-off, imaginary arms turned it into something sculptural. I wasn’t the only one thus smitten by its mystery that day, and remember holding on tight as the price went into a steep climb. Four lines of coded capitals were carved into the wood where it swept into the convex cleavage between the two blades. I made a brass-rubbing of them on a sheet of typing paper with a 4B pencil and read:

  LUCIFER

  DRG P3153

  DIA 7–9

  PIT 5–5

  Decoded, this means that the propeller was designed for one of Bristol Aircr
aft’s Lucifer aero engines, and therefore made around 1925 or soon after. DRG stands for the drawing number of the original propeller design and DIA is the diameter of the propeller: seven feet nine inches. PIT is its pitch, the number of degrees through which the blades have been twisted out of direct alignment.

  I use the muscular propeller-hub on my desk as a bookend. It contains stories I shall never know. It belongs to the era of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, when every flight was an adventure, and, in its long sleep, it probably relives the spinning elation of an aerial life, like a cat dreaming of chasing its tail.

  I sit at my desk on the elm seat of a Windsor smoker’s bow chair. It is nineteen and a half inches square, cut from a single inch-and-a-quarter plank, elegantly rounded at the corners and tough enough to anchor the beech legs as well as eight hand-turned chair backs that support the bowed arm and backrest. It is probably not far off a hundred years old, and the seat, originally adzed and spokeshaved into shape, has been subtly worn, polished and rendered even more comfortable by generations of shifting bottoms. Its design is entirely traditional, yet the infinite variations of every handmade component give each chair its individuality and a kind of intimate informality that could never be achieved by the techniques of modern mass production. Its beech components were most likely turned by bodgers working out of doors on foot-treadle pole-lathes in the steep hangars of the Chilterns above High Wycombe. As with the elm hub of a cart wheel, or the elm keel of a wooden ship, it is the elm seat that holds together the chair. Elm always seems to be the axis of things. When bells ring out from the church tower, they swing on massive timber stocks of elm.