Wildwood Page 4
On the morning of 14 September 1956, a boy called John Rose, out wandering in Gentian Valley, saw the first adder at Beaulieu Road. We often saw grass snakes, particularly in the alder woods along the Matley Stream or on the railway embankment when we went to fetch water from the spring, but the Tomes only list adders as ‘occasional’. Common lizards scuttled about everywhere in the dunes of gravel-diggings by the camp and on the heaths. Slow-worms, on the other hand, are recorded as ‘rarely seen’.
The relatively low snake count, at least in the adder department, came as something of a surprise after all the stories of ‘Brusher’ Mills, the legendary New Forest snake-catcher of the late nineteenth century, who lived in the woods in a charcoal-burner’s turf-roofed lean-to of sticks and drank in the old Railway Inn at Brockenhurst. There were photographs of him in there in his pudding-bowl hat, bearded, with a forked stick, the tool of his trade, dangling a snake by its tail, standing proudly before the entrance of his bothy. He was an object of some fascination to us. We noticed he wore tall boots, at least two leather waistcoats under his jacket and sturdy corduroys, possibly several pairs. He was said to have caught many thousands of live snakes in his lifetime and put most of them on the London train to the Zoo, where they were fed to the birds of prey. There were also local rumours of a roaring trade in homoeopathic unguents, somehow based on essence of adder. There were times when we wondered if old Brusher might, perhaps, have caught all the snakes in the New Forest.
Two days into my first camp, on 26 April 1959, we heard the first cuckoo and entered it in the Tomes. Under the strong influence of Robert Frost, I was moved to write a beginner’s poem about it, later published in the school magazine, a lament for the ousted fledglings, ‘Who’ll never fidget, squeak or yawn/Beneath the breast that is your pawn’. I remember feeling whining poetry was somehow subversive of the objective, scientific approach Goater encouraged us to adopt. Yet he himself was always so full of enthusiasm and passion for nature he could never hide his own strong emotional attachment to Beaulieu Road and its natural history. Later more of my Beaulieu scribblings appeared in the magazine, a Wordsworthian effort occasioned by my first encounter with a marsh gentian in the eponymous valley. Not one of us was immune to the poetry of the place. One boy, Greystoke, who had only ever stayed in luxury hotels before, took to camping with all the zeal of the new convert and never missed an opportunity to rediscover his inner backwoodsman at Beaulieu. It was only much later that I realized the whole point about Beaulieu was that in teaching me to make connections, it was revealing the intimate kinship of ecology and poetry.
A comma lands on my pencil-jar and flexes its wings in the morning sun. Butterflies keep drifting in and out at the open door. They fly right through the study and out into the deeper green of the mulberry tree on the other side of the house. Four thousand mulberry leaves, green windows to the filtered sun, pale green and lovely. A big blue anax dragonfly hangs vertically from a twig. Dead still, it must be sleeping, although it can never close the 25,000 eyes in the clear bubble of its head. A tetchy squirrel squawks and rasps in the hedge on the other side of the moat. I reach for a pencil and start a list: things that have changed around here. Things there are more of. Things there are less of. Two columns. Things there are more of. Women speed-walking alone along the common. Dog-walkers. Dogs, on or off leads. The electric whine of strimmers at weekends, even Sundays. Four-wheel-drives. Orange security lights drowning out the stars.
Things there are less of. Stars. Walking for its own sake. Lapwings on the common. Skylarks on the common. Snipe drumming in springtime. Cuckoo flowers. Old boys or girls on bicycles. Allotments. Goats. Geese in the yard. Farm sales. Hedges. Signal boxes. Glowworms along the railway.
Now and again you discover the perfect pen and carry it everywhere until one day you lose it. But nothing is so universally dependable, or comes so naturally to hand as a pencil. What could be simpler? For much of my life, I have lived with one behind my ear: either to mark out saw cuts or mortices for carpentry or to scribble marginalia or underlines when reading. I often write with a pencil. It suits my tentative nature. It allows me literally to sketch out ideas before proceeding to the greater definition of ink. It was the first tool I used to write or to draw, and still suggests the close relationship between the two activities. I know I shall never outgrow pencils. They are my first, most natural means of expression on paper. It is comforting and liberating to know that you can always rub out what is pencilled. It is the other end of the spectrum from carving in stone. The pencil whispers across the page and is never dogmatic.
For all the same reasons, I like a soft pencil better than a hard one. It is gentler on the paper, as a soft voice is easier on the ear. Its low definition draws in the reader’s eye, which must sometimes peer through the graphite mist of a smudge where the page of an old notebook has been thumbed. Rub your finger long enough on a soft-pencilled phrase and it will evaporate into a pale-grey cloud. In this way, pencil is close to watercolour painting.
A pencil is an intimate, elemental conjunction of graphite and wood, like a grey-marrowed bone. The graphite is mined from deep inside a Cumbrian hillside in Borrowdale, eight miles south of Keswick. Fired in a kiln to 1,000°C to make the slender pencil cores, ranging in hardness from H to 9H and in softness from B to 9B, it is laid in a groove in one of the split halves of the wooden casing which are then glued together invisibly, clasping the lead tightly. But examine the cross-section of grain at one end, and you will notice it runs two different ways. In Tasmania there are trees they call pencil pines, but only because of the way they look. The fine-grained, slow-grown mother of all pencils is incense cedar from the forests of Oregon, where a single tree may grow 140 feet high, with a trunk five feet across, enough cedar wood to make 150,000 pencils. It is the incense cedar that infuses pencils with the nutty aroma I remember as I opened my pencil-box. In a scooped-out hollow in my Oregon pine work table in front of me lies a smooth, round pebble from the Hebrides. It sits snugly in the wood, like the pencil between finger and thumb, and like the hidden vein of graphite, poised inside the cedar to spin itself into words like gossamer from the spider.
A fragment of the Newland oak stands on the windowsill before my desk. I rescued it out of a cowpat in the meadow at Spout Farm in the Forest of Dean where the great tree, forty-four feet eight inches in girth, stood until it fell in a storm one night in May 1955. Weighing just two and a half ounces, my relic is roughly triangular and measures three and a quarter inches on two sides by an inch and a half thick. It is shaped like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, with the streaming, full head of hair such a goddess or ancient Celtic queen would proudly wear. It always seems feminine to me and has a powerful presence. Sometimes I decide it is Diana in full cry with her hounds at her heels, racing after the quarry, her graceful arm drawing the bow, golden tresses blowing in the slipstream. The flowing lines I see as hair are the complicated, liquid, playful contours of the grain. What I have here is part of the surface of the trunk, however tiny by comparison with the immense full hide of the tree. I have stood in its ruins and do not doubt the measurement, or Alan Mitchell’s estimate that it was 750 years old when it fell. Now it is no more than a stubborn atoll of dead wood, a nuisance to the farmer, a nest of nettles, a rubbing post for cattle, assailed by the elements, an extinct volcano sinking into the grass.
The grain of my figurine is intricately wrinkled, full of little waves like the kinks in my mother’s hair where the Kirby grips pinned it. The surface is polished perfectly smooth where the cattle have rubbed against it, and crazed or minutely fissured where the sun has dried or shrunk it. It is lighter in colour than a chestnut and a little darker than a donkey but with the same dun-brown softness. Yet tannin and iron salts have reacted together over time to harden the wood into something approaching rock: the inside surface has the look and feel of it, and is even still raw from being broken off. Turning the piece over in my hand, I notice for the first time that two flecks of cow
dung still cling to the wood, and there’s even a single gleaming splint of straw no longer than an ant embedded in the grain, like quartz or a hint of gold. Towards the base, the wood is of a darker hue, with a microscopic bird’s-eye pattern you might expect to find on the veneer of a harpsichord. But the uneven surface of the whole – its sutures, pingoes, potholes and tiny tumuli – throws a hundred miniature shadows across it. The longer I gaze at it, the more interesting this toenail clipping of a giant becomes. It is an exquisite thing in shape and texture and in the infinite complexity and refinement of its grain.
On the web outside my window this morning, sixty concentric threads, just strong enough to catch a fly and entangle it. The morning sun catches the silk and backlights each thread in burning white. A spider’s web follows the same pattern as a tree-trunk. Each concentric ring represents a patient circuit by the engineer, and the radial threads represent the medullary rays of wood, along which a trunk will sometimes split as it dries.
Three weeks ago by night, I steered a sailing boat out of the Solent and into the Beaulieu, following the narrow channel by lining up certain houses and trees on shore with the port and starboard posts and lights that stood eerily out of the high tide. We moored up at Buckler’s Hard for the night. Sitting on deck, listening to the curlews, I resolved to return to the New Forest, the source of the Beaulieu and of my own understanding of nature. In the pine top of my work table, the dark knots are boulders standing up in the river of grain, sending eddies and ripples spinning downstream, delivering the driftwood thought of a new journey to be taken, through trees.
Part Two
SAPWOOD
The Bluebell Picnic
I drive south across the county to the valley of the Stour on the borders of Essex where my friend Ronald Blythe lives in the old farmhouse he inherited from his friends John and Christine Nash. He has invited me to join him and a group of friends at their bluebell picnic. Each year, on the last Sunday in April, they gather in Tiger Wood, a mile or two up the valley, to raise teacups and glasses to spring, as announced by bluebells.
Few people think of Suffolk as rolling country, but here I am, floating along a ridge high above the Stour Valley, turning off the road and diving along Ronald’s familiar bumpy track down a green tunnel of hazel in the deep holloway that follows the contours of a hill to the farmhouse, first down, then up and round past a sprinting rabbit or two, then down again and around one final twist to arrive beneath a row of oaks by an old boarded garage-cum-garden-shed that hasn’t actually housed a motor car for decades. The doors, twin compasses on their sinking hinges, have etched a pair of arcs in the ground, where layers of autumn leaves, ploughed in by earthworms, have raised it to meet them over the years. The undulating holloway, which has itself sunk through the steady erosion of cartwheels and hooves up to fifteen feet beneath the hillside, translates you from the present into an earlier era when John Nash carved out his woodcuts in English boxwood at the kitchen table under a single lamp-bulb and cultivated the half-wild garden. Like his friend Cedric Morris further down the valley, Nash called himself an artist plantsman, and both men put the creation of their gardens on a par with their art. The tall horsetails Nash liked so much waltz up the track to greet me: chimney brushes on gartered stems. In the deep shade of the arching hazels on the track, I have a brief premonition of bluebells and the pink blush of red campions.
A brick path wanders through the garden to the front door, past Japanese knotweed and gunnera, an English jungle John Nash introduced around the margins to spice up the poplar, oak and hazel. Nash’s stagecraft was to float little glades of lawn here and there among the long grass, rose beds, old orchard trees and wild trees, so garden and woodland are all one. The inspiring sound of water trickles through the open door: the springs in the hillside, which also supply the house, send a little stream running under a path and splashing past a ferny brick wall that leans precariously like the tangled crack willows on the way down to the horse pond where Nash would sometimes bathe.
Ronald is always busy about the garden, scything, filling a barrow with plums, pegging out washing on a line between orchard trees. He has taken on the mantle of the artist plantsman from Nash. A couple of years ago, he was the only other man I knew in Suffolk without central heating, until his friends at last persuaded him to relent. But a stack of oak logs, neatly split by his maul, still fills a recess to one side of the hearth, and there’s always a winter fire. He has just had his study painted out in white and is working downstairs at his typewriter on John Nash’s paints table.
In Tiger Wood we are welcomed by Veronica and Rosemary, the sisters who look after what is now a nature reserve of some thirty-four acres. The wood itself covers about twelve acres, and takes its name from the sabre-toothed tiger whose curved canine was unearthed there like a murder weapon some years ago. Our hostesses’ mother, Dr Grace Griffiths, cared for the consumptives at a sanatorium on the hillside founded by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She was the local GP, liked and respected by everyone, and her six children were Ronnie’s childhood friends. He thinks she probably delivered him into the world. She could never remember names, he says, so in every household people were ‘mother’ or ‘father’, and the children were all ‘dear ones’. But Dr Grace knew all the names of the flowers and birds and taught them to Ronald and his friends. She also became deeply attached to the woods, retreating into them to escape the pressures of the sanatorium on the hill. Eventually, she began buying the woods and the surrounding meadows bit by bit as a way of preserving them in their wild state, and had an elegant wooden shed from Boulton & Paul’s joinery in Norwich erected next door to the brickmaker’s cottage where Veronica and Rosemary now come to stay. It is still there, painted green, with a cool cream interior.
Rosemary, who is a considerable botanist, has just returned from North Carolina, where one of her sisters lives in a self-built cabin in woods of giant dogwood, all in full spring blossom. We join a dozen of Rosemary and Veronica’s old friends, mostly botanists from Cambridge, round the picnic rugs on the brick-cottage lawn looking down into the intense mauve-blue haze of bluebells in the wood. Rosemary says they thrive here because the bracken is always being beaten down by the many badgers that emerge after dark from two different setts in the wood. The browsing and grazing of deer, muntjac and rabbits also help to keep the woodland floor open.
In the upper wood, Rosemary leads us down narrow paths through the dense blue seabed to a 500-year-old oak, pronounced dead by Oliver Rackham [the renowned biological historian] after a prolonged drought two years earlier. However, a new spring has just appeared a few dozen yards away, and Rosemary thinks it likely the tree died simply because its water supply had moved in the London clay beneath the valley. The clay suits the unusual Tiger Wood variety of pale-pink dead nettle, and there are stinging nettles and small-leaved limes the sisters have planted at Dr Rackham’s suggestion. Higher up the sides of the valley the ground changes to sandy gravel; the entire wood was once a medieval warren. Further along the path, the giant trunk of an oak lies where it was felled in 1936, now grooved and furrowed by time like the flank of a blue whale. A timber merchant was let loose in the wood by the Assington Estate that year to take whatever he wanted, and left the debris where it still lies.
Since then the wood has recovered and reshaped itself through a succession of crises spanning the lives of Dr Grace’s daughters. Each of the trees we encounter has its own story to tell. An unexpected horse chestnut among the oak and hazel is the ‘myxomatosis tree’, because it dates from 1953, the year the plague really struck, so the sudden absence of rabbits allowed the sapling to thrive. The cherry plum creeping away from just outside the cottage garden grew from some delicious fruit whose stones ended up in the compost and sprouted from wherever it was spread. A greengage and a pair of walnuts have all been planted by Dr Grace, but ‘too close to the house’, says Rosemary. Walnuts grow canopies thirty feet across or more, so need plenty of space. The abandoned trunks and l
imbs of oak all date from 1936, the year the timber merchant felled them. The drought year 1975 was when the elms succumbed to disease and began to die, and a good many of the ‘victims’ of the 1987 storm now thrive as horizontal trees like candelabra. Now the elms have suckered up from their wandering roots in circular thickets where the nightingales sing. Blackthorns and sallows have been left alone to grow into groves of graceful, sinuous trunks: trees in their own right, no longer to be insulted as ‘scrub’. ‘We could be walking in the eighteenth century,’ says Ronald, who thinks the bluebells ‘jazzy, in a way’: too blue and intense for his taste. He and Rosemary remember how, in less botanically correct times, people regarded it as almost a duty to pick as many as you could. I remember the trail of trodden, slippery stalks that used to litter the paths back to suburban Watford through Cassiobury Park from the wild Whippendell Woods each spring.
How does a moth experience the swooning scent of so many bluebells? In the soft light of the wood they glow like phosphorescent waters, casting a misty blue penumbra like the moon’s at a change in the weather. It blurs the blue meniscus lapping at the trees, obscuring the ground, floating them. Geoffrey Grigson thinks that the loveliness of the bluebell is not so much an individual beauty but the striking impression of many plants growing together, splashing a big area with their own uniform colour. Poppies can also be spectacular in this way. During the 1880s so many people crowded on to trains from London to see the hotly blushing hilltops above the cliffs from Cromer to Overstrand that the resort was successfully promoted as ‘Poppyland’. Snowdrops, wood anemones, primroses, foxgloves and ramsons can all infuse woods with colour through sheer force of numbers. Yet the individual flower of the bluebell has a special pre-Raphaelite beauty, hanging upside down from the stem, bending it into a shepherd’s crook.