Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

‘Roger Deakin was unique; he saw and felt the world like nobody else. Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is as remarkable and as affecting as anything John Muir wrote; in fact, I think it is this century’s Walden. It might even be the best of his books; or perhaps there is no need to rank them like this. It completes the triptych, begun with Waterlog and Wildwood, in the most wonderful way.’

Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places and literary executor of the Roger Deakin Estate

Praise for Waterlog

‘A simply wonderful book… A delightfully eccentric masterpiece’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

‘A delicious, cleansing, funny, wise and joyful book, so wonderfully full of energy and life. I love it’ Jane Gardam

‘A triumph of topographical and naturalist writing… to weave environmental and cultural concerns so deftly together in this enchanting and original travel book is a real achievement’ Independent

Praise for Wildwood

‘A masterpiece’ Guardian

‘Extraordinary… some of the finest naturalist writing for many years’ Independent

‘Enchanting, very funny, every page carries a fascinating nugget. Should serve to make us appreciate more keenly all that we have here on earth… one of the greatest of all Nature writers’ Mail on Sunday

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, shortly after completing the manuscript for Wildwood, was a writer, broadcaster and film-maker with a particular interest in nature and the environment. He lived for many years in Suffolk, where he swam regularly in his moat at Walnut Tree Farm, in the River Waveney and in the sea, in between travelling widely through the landscapes he writes about in his books, Waterlog and Wildwood, both of which have been acclaimed as classics of nature writing.

Foreword

For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept a record of his daily life, work, thoughts and memories. Forty-five lined exercise books were completed in his distinctive, bold handwriting. Each was numbered and paginated, with a table of contents carefully listed on the cover.

The entries themselves were altogether freer. Spontaneous, playful, impassioned and sometimes experimental, they were Roger’s everyday observations, and releected the events of his inner and outer life as they happened.

Some of the entries were research notes for Wildwood, the book he was writing at the time, or for one of his radio programmes, while others were written during his travels in Australia or Eastern Europe. Most of the contents, though, related to his life at Walnut Tree Farm, the extraordinary, much loved house in Suffolk where he lived for the last thirty years of his life. It is these entries which have provided the material for this book.

We have selected extracts from the notebooks, including dates when they were mentioned, and have arranged them month by month to form one composite year. Abbreviations have been expanded, but otherwise Roger’s words have been allowed to speak for themselves.

Alison Hastie
Terence Blacker
July 2008

January

1st January
I am lying full length on my belly on frozen snow and frosty tussocks in the railway wood blowing like a dragon into the wigwam of a fire at the core of a tangled blackthorn bonfire. I am clearing the blackthorn suckers that march out from the hedge like the army in Macbeth, the marching wood, threatening to overwhelm the whole wood in their dense, spiny thicket.

The technique is to get right down on the ground and go in with the triangular bow-saw at ground level, then grab the cut stems and drag the bushes away to the bonfire, which grows like a giant porcupine, bristling with spines that inleict a particular, unforgettable ache in the hands and thumbs of the woodman.

The bonfire just keeps working itself up to a sudden burst of wildly crackling, spitting leame, and burning a chimney up its centre. Then it dies down, frosting the twigs with fire but failing to ignite with any conviction because the wood is too fresh, too green and sappy. It is exhausting work, crawling at rabbit level through a blackthorn thicket and sawing through the tough little trunks. You realize why blackthorn was used defensively as a dead hedge by the Saxons; it is the true precursor of barbed wire.

I stumble back up the field for a tea-break to listen to myself on Home Planet on the radio and fall headlong in the snow by the shepherd’s hut. Tracks everywhere in the snow, mostly rabbit, and a single bee orchid standing up with dried seeds in the snowy field.

A mauve, misty penumbra across the fields under a duck-egg sky and the glow of sunset. Everything very still and quiet.

2nd January
Another brilliant, intensely cold morning. Trees and everything enamelled and frosted, sparkling and frilly with frost.

Hard to get the car started – cold diesel and frozen windscreens. Put more antifreeze in the tractor. Then a snow drive over icy roads to see Ronnie Blythe at Bottengoms.

We have lunch in the Six Bells in Bures – cod and chips, and halves of Guinness – and set off to Ager Fen, where we walk through the ancient mixed woods of cherry, oak, fir, hazel, willow, poplar, ash. Ronnie says all country children were conceived in woods, because you couldn’t make love in the house: there were too many people in there – children, parents, etc., no privacy at all. So you went to the woods.

Ronnie lends me John Masefield’s thumb stick, carved by him and later, in Oxford, given to Dr ‘Bird’ Partridge – who in turn gave it to Ronnie.

Ronnie walks with a bird’s claw stick of blackthorn that belonged to John Nash. A bird’s foot clutches an egg of wood. Lovely.

There are warrens and dips where clay was quarried and then carted off for building – and there is a big wood bank running along the parish boundary.

Big ancient cherries with fungal bracelets.

Then on to Tiger Wood – so called because the tooth of a sabre-toothed tiger was once found there somewhere.

Ronnie says how much he loves the ruinousness of woods – of the dead trees fallen over each other. John Nash loved dead trees lying about, scattered. He didn’t like woods to be tidied up too much.

There’s a brick-maker’s cottage in Tiger Wood, one of only two houses in the wood, surrounded by old brick-clay burrowings and pits. Every spring they have a bluebell party in the cottage and toast the bluebells and listen to the nightingales. There are about six pairs of nightingales in this wood, resting in Ager Fen.

Driving back through the rolling country to Wormingford, Ronnie points out that this was once all the deer park of the Waldegrave family, who are buried in the chapel on the hill top.

The bonfire is still burning under the crack willow by the common, smouldering and gently glowing, melting the snow that tries to settle on it, smoking just faintly.

Immense numbers of tits, mainly blue, a few great, the occasional coal or marsh, on the three peanut cylinders. They are all over the damson tree, waiting their turn or digesting peanuts. All sorts of power groupings and petty struggles over who is king of the castle. Now here comes the spotted woodpecker, approaching cautiously through the damson branches. Sees a sudden movement of mine at the window, flees far across the meadow.

I cut a hazel-coppice pole out of my wood and used it as a curtain pole in my bedroom. It works well.

4th January
Walking up Stonebridge Lane with Jayne [Ivimey], I notice the width of the old stone bridge – twenty feet at least – I must dig it out and measure properly. As you walk the lane, you see how the farmers have all encroached and how the new middle-class squatters are claiming stakes on the lane, using it for horse jumps, etc. We walk on to the old ash pollard on Burgate Little Green, then on into Burgate Wood, passing a leaning chestnut pollard – a long, pendulous bough. Jayne remarks that trees are like people: you don’t have to talk to them, but you get to recognize them all.

As the light changes, we depend more on our feet, on feeling our way through the wood. Shapes of things loom up. A paleness in a covert seems at first to be water, a woodland pond, but turns out to be a fallen silver birch, a bold streak of white in the wood.

On the way out, on the lane to Burgate Hall, a metal paling has grown into the trunk of an ash. The iron bars of the fence pass straight through the middle of the trunk, like whirling dervishes in Kurdistan with knives through their bodies.

An old house may be built of the humblest, simplest materials, and, like a bird’s nest, be a thing of great beauty.

Or: like a bird’s nest, a house may be beautiful because of the way it combines the simple, ordinary natural materials of which it is built.

An early swim with Janine [Edge] and Helen Napper at Leiston Pool, then a big breakfast with porridge, sultanas and linseed soaked overnight in water (recipe by Helen Napper). Talk of a future walk in the woods with Madeleine [Wynn] and greyhounds and young chess-master Hugo. Then out to the sea to buy fish from a fisherman at a hut, a black-tarred pine hut with a radio inside wishing fishermen good fishing and giving the weather forecast. I bought a skate, a half pound of sprats and some cooked cod’s roe. Newspaper cuttings on the door about Alzheimer’s and fish-eating as a way to avoid it.

A walk along the beach to see Maggi Hambling’s new oyster-shell sculpture: ‘Hear those voices that will not be drowned.’ These were the fishermen I filmed at Aldeburgh in 1997.

Then up the road to the ruined slate-roofed cottage on the marsh, and the apple tree in the shingle beach. All-round circumference of 100 ft, 23 ft in diameter, 3–4 ft high, very squat and dense. Already almost in bud in its bunker.

Thence to Thorpeness, like a film set – phony half-timbers, and a concrete church, like a toy-town. The artificial mere, the country club, the huge village hall, sports and social club.

I keep puzzling about that apple tree, buried up to its neck in the shingle like a daddy at the seaside. It can’t quite see the sea. If it were to grow another ten feet, it could peep over the top of the long ridge of shingle that stretches from Aldeburgh to Thorpeness. It grows in the shelter of a bunker, a hollow in the dunes of shingle and sand that helps protect it from the wind. I suppose the sheer withering intensity of the wind must prune the budding twigs relentlessly so that the tree takes the only course of survival left open to it: to creep ever outwards, crouching low and close to the shingle, creating a pincushion of densely branched fruiting spurs.

I have seen people gathering apples from it in summer. Outside the seasons of flowers and fruit, most people would pass it by, mistaking it for a scrubby sallow bush. No doubt the salt spray of winter gales must provide the tree with an antifungal dusting that may well be helping to keep it healthy. It must be a relic of an ancient orchard, perhaps connected with the derelict cottage a hundred yards inland that looks across the marshes. Somewhere down there the roots are finding fresh water. But this still must count as one of the hardiest apple trees in Britain.

At Ubbeston I walked a green lane that has long beckoned to be explored. The coastal sunshine had given way to a uniform bleak grey, a cold wind and occasional bouts of rain. I trudged uphill on a wide grassy track between old hedges with the occasional oak pollard, tousle-mopped, no longer regularly cut. In contrast to the oaks nearer the coast, these trees were in healthy enough condition. All along the edge of the sandlings, where the heavier Suffolk claylands begin as you head inland, the parkland oaks in the fields were all dead or dying. Many had had the ground beneath their canopies ploughed up, with fatal results for the trees’ root systems and the complex ecology of fungi that feed and support them.

I reached the top of the hill and a gate into a meadow, and recognized an ancient place straight away. It was an odd shape, like a miniature green with funnels of hedged grassland leading off it in several directions, and with a maze of hedges and moats. The grass itself was grazed by cattle, and very uneven, with banks and hummocks and the line of an old earthwork running along one perimeter, close to a moated wood that was really still part of this same intriguing corner.

I had passed within two or three hundred yards of this place for years and never realized it was there.

Towards the middle was a moat-like pond around what may have once been an island but was now an inundated patch of reeds. The spinney was moated, and a variety of old pollard oaks and ashes presided over the hedges and two additional ponds at other corners of the meadow.

The lane issued from the far side of the little meadow and plunged steeply downhill in a grassy drift overhung by more old oaks. This, I have since discovered, has always been the favoured local tobogganing hill, drawing people from miles around, as good hills are hard to find in most of Suffolk.

Later, over an impromptu lunch with a local farmer friend, Dave Pratt, I discovered that this was indeed an interesting spot. It was a medieval farm and yard, and had been excavated a few years back by a local archaeologist, Ruth Downing. Dave said all the ponds around Ubbeston are on the tops of hills. The moated wood must have supplied coppice wood for the farm, and its moat would have helped keep out cattle and deer from grazing the young shoots.

As we sat in his kitchen, Dave spoke of the nature reserves near the coast where he rented the grazing for his cattle. He questioned some of the management of these wetlands. Why didn’t the RSPB control predators – the foxes and crows that stole the eggs and chicks of the plovers and other waders that nested out there?

A good many of the local farmers round Laxfield, Heveningham, Ubbeston and Dennington were keen on conservation and retained their hedges and smaller fields. I found large numbers of hedgerow pollard oaks around there, all doing well.

I stand in the little pightle, admiring one particular perfectly spherical, ideally shaped tree, a pollard oak in the hedge, and another, a pollard ash on the edge of the wood, its roots sunk to its knees in the moat water. The tree against a dark grey sky with charcoal lines of rain cloud approaching.

9th January
A wild, windy night and a bright, clear windy day. I walk out along Cowpasture Lane and up the hill to the pollard hornbeam, definitely a trasmocho tree with its unusually wide bolling. On the way I stand leaning on the little wooden bridge over the stream at the ford, watching the running water. Then a long trudge into the wind to reach the badger sett, still very active and well trodden, with claw marks in the mud everywhere. The wood is creaking, and a sound like a squeaky hinge sings out where two birches are rubbing against each other. From the mud hill-fort of the badger sett, beaten paths radiate into the wood and out across a plank bridge into the weedy set-aside field beyond the wood. In the long shadows of the late white sun it is easy to make them out and to follow one over the field to a ditch crossing and all the way to a gap in the wire fence of the railway embankment, where the badgers scratch themselves against the wire and leave little clumps of their shaving-brush hair on the grass. I walk to the lane in the shadow and shelter of the tall embankment and scuttle home, glad of the shelter of the lane’s hedges.

Dartmoor. Little waterspouts at the side of the road at Ashburton. Ferny, high banks, holly hedges and hazel, built up atop the stone walls, and gnarled weather-beaten beeches, the trunks crusted with lichen and quilted with moss. Sheep penned in small stone-walled fields. Clumps of John/Paul Nash beeches on the hilltops, leaning, brushed into shape by the wind like a woman’s hair when she leans one way to shake it out and brush it. Trees all tend towards the east, brushed by the west wind and laid down. Crouching, flat-topped hedges – beech.

Swollen streams and rivers – the Beck and Brook. Hard to see which is snaking road and which river. Then up through a gate and across a cattle grid and you’re on the moor. Three-foot pillars of granite, forming a hut circle beside the road. Low clumped gorse. Pony dung, sheep droppings, the great jagged Hound Tor. Clitters of stones and rocks.

Otters trotting, the swishing of fish. Wistman’s Wood – a tangle of slender spidery tree trunks, hirsute with lichen.

Below Ashburton, the Dart careers down in straight cascades. You climb up to the moor through woods of tall spindly oak/ash/holly, ivy clambering up them all. Long houses hunker down into the hills/hollows, beauty in the undulations of their slated and thatched roofs, their eaves, their windows.

The great thing about walking is that it gives you complete licence to get into fancy dress and eat junk food.

At the lower Cherry Brook, near Manaton – a children’s swimming hole and a rope in an oak bough and a rubber tyre. I swing out over the little river.

Walking back from the Devonport Leat, the bright lights of the Two Bridges Hotel suddenly visible. A fox bounds across the moor in the headlights and melts into the hedge.

It was wintertime on the northern flanks of Dartmoor, and I was following the River Teign along the Two Moors Way when I noticed a pair of mallards swimming against the stream, edging upstream close to the bank, deftly following the eddy current against the powerful main current of a river swollen with winter rain.

They seemed to personify a great deal about Dartmoor – about the determined spirit of resistance to hardship and difficulty. Everything has to contend with difficulties of one kind or another. The toughness that underlies the beauty gives it a specially enduring quality.

Dartmoor is both intensely liberating and a prison. Sam North’s recent novel The Lie of the Land describes the sheer shackling grind of a working farm struggling to survive on the moor.

It is not a wilderness in the American sense – far from a trackless waste, it is full of the signs of human and animal life. People have swarmed all over this moor, and still do, in search of riches of one kind or another, or refuge, or recreation.

Everywhere are the signs of alchemy – the tinner’s delvings into the body of the moor. Someone far back in the pre-Phoenician days had discovered that tin ore, cassiterite, will smelt into tin at about 1,100°C. The tinner’s blowing houses were thatched and the thatch stripped and burnt every so often, to capture the particles of tin lodged there.

There is water everywhere on Dartmoor, tumbling in every direction. And it is by water that you may find your way in what is an otherwise trackless wilderness. It is one of the last great wild places in England, one of the fifty royal forests that still retains its integrity, one of the few places in England where you can stand alone and remote, and quite out of earshot of any road. The towns and villages that surround the moor are twinkling so far off you feel you’re in a different time as well as place.

You take the familiar silhouette for granted in winter, but you would miss it if it wasn’t there.

Fire: nothing gives me more comfort or more anxiety than fire.

Look up Cobbett on the laying of fires – talk about bread ovens and faggots of furze for bread-making.

The fireplace has been subsumed by the TV, pushed out of the nest as by a cuckoo. People now contemplate the TV, not the fire.

A fire only really comes into its own when it is genuinely needed – when the weather is so cold that you come in shivering, preferably red of nose, blue of cheek and perhaps white of toenail.

Our immediate ancestors bathed before the fire in slipper baths – hot water came from the copper. Life revolved around the fire and the kitchen range, and the coal cellar or woodshed. Think what we miss when we press buttons or flick switches or adjust thermostats – a whole world of mystery and delight.

Fire is by no means silent; it crackles, wheezes, whistles. There are few sights more beautiful than wood smoke hovering over a copse in autumn/February, when the coppicers are at work.

At the party last night people talked about walking in the hills, or the countryside, but they always had to prefix ‘walking’ with ‘dog’. As though walking were not a sufficient end in itself. Going walking is eccentric; going ‘dog-walking’ is a practical necessity, and the dog is perceived as a connection with nature, whereas in fact the opposite is true.

A dog cuts you off from much of the wildlife you might otherwise encounter by disturbing and alarming things. In the larger picture, dogs are a serious disturbance to, for example, ground-nesting birds and hares. They have successfully chased away both of these from our common over recent years, when there has been a rise in the population of the village and in particular of newcomers developing and building what were once farmyards and barns into new homes. Almost all of them appear to own dogs, in some cases as many as six, and many ignore the injunctions of the Suffolk Wildlife Trust to exercise their animals on a lead.

I keep uncovering more and more evidence for a Murphy’s Law of publishing: that if a book is truly wonderful, it is certain to be out of print. Last week I tried to buy a copy of T. H. White’s The Goshawk for a friend and found it unobtainable. This week I’ve been on the trail of Richard Jefferies’s Bevis, also out of print, and number one million-something in the Amazon.com sales ratings. I eventually discovered twenty-nine copies available, all but one in America. Richard Jefferies deserves better than this, and he is getting it from Green Books with this essential collection of his later writings, at a time in his life when he had become more mature and thoughtful – his prose better than ever.

Yesterday, I began cutting and reshaping the overgrown ash arch from one end. I laid the branches, half cutting through them at an angle, then bending them down as I stood on the ladder or step-ladder, and weaving them into the arch to hold them down, or securing them with string.

Later, at dusk, I went out and planted a few maples and hawthorns on the common outside the house by the big willow. I bought them from Eddie Krutysza this morning in Metfield, and I bought a red-flowering may tree too, and planted it in the corner of the garden.

Something pale in the darkness caught my eye, a pale ghost gliding silently about the common – a barn owl hunting six feet above the grass, dropping almost petulantly now and again, only to rise empty-clawed almost on the instant.

I kept on digging and planting, digging and planting, well into darkness until I could see nothing.

The barn owl was there again this afternoon about three o’clock, its wingspan huge and its lightness palpable in its floating mode of flight. I know how frail and fragile owls really are when you lift them, and worry each time a car or lorry comes belting far too fast along the common. The owl likes to fly along the verge, perilously close to the traffic, with no apparent fears for its safety.

I worked on the ash arch for three and a half hours yesterday afternoon. It feels like a chess game, or giant pick-a-stick, circling the arch, trying to decide which branch to bend next, and in which direction.

The branches of the ash arch are now laid like a hedge and folded into each other, ready to bud and thrust into new life in spring as soon as the sap rushes back up the trees’ veins and seeps through the hinges of grisly bent wood that connect trunk and bent bough.

I love the creasing and wrinkling of the tree’s skin at the points where branches have been bent over and then healed, like the bending of an elephant’s trunk. Woodmen call these ‘elbows’, and I have often found, in Welsh or Cumbrian hedges especially, that the laid branches of hazel or ash will pleach themselves together, two or three different trees fusing into one in a series of swollen, gnarled elbows.

23rd January
The first wood pigeon cooing in a tree by the house. I open the curtain and there is a squirrel. We all know how a squirrel moves, yet my heart leaps at the sight of its sudden rushes in the grass around the base of the mulberry, seeking out peanuts that have dropped out of my improvised feeder – a recycled orange-bag from the supermarket filled with peanuts. His sleekness and perfect fur; waves of fur as he moves. Then he suddenly takes fright as he makes sense of my shape at the window desk, and runs off.

Coppicing is like making waves. You cut down a wave of vegetation, then another comes a few years later. Wave upon wave, making a wood’s history, and evident in the rippling waves of the annual rings.

Music is like the decorative, symphonic possibilities of a wood: endless combinations of notes or twigs, leaves and wind, branch shapes against the sky.

‘The lost score of a jig’–fighting back beyond the oblivion of last night’s sleep to the thought I was too sleepy to write down.

Richard [Mabey] and I talked about the upsurge of religion in America. Why is this? Perhaps because of a need for history, a hunger for the history they lack. The bible supplies a kind of instant history for them. Its simple presence in their homes gives them a rooted feeling in history.

Others have turned to the land for their sense of history: to nature and the millennia of evolutionary and geological history. These are the deep ecologists.

We talked about America and I said I would like to go in search of Robert Frost land –the land I inhabited through my adolescence reading Frost, the New England of ‘The Road Not Taken’–and I said I hoped there wouldn’t be an interpretation board at the bisection of the two roads – a sign pointing at ‘The Road Not Taken’.

We talked about interpretation in Tasmania and America – how there are different zones or grades of land –National Park, Nature Reserve and, in America, State Forest, National Nature Reserve, National Park, etc.

In Tasmania, when I followed certain ‘walking tracks’, I would reach some wild eminence and encounter a sort of viewing platform with a wooden banister rail and a plaque inscribed with a line or two of a poem telling you what to think and feel, and which way to look.

I talked about Colin Ward’s new book, and his idea that houses should not be built fast, on seven-month schedules, but organically, by slow accretions, over many years of habitation and out of the natural needs and requirements that arise.

Richard told me about a woodworker who made something out of a piece of the Selborne yew. He said yew cracked too much to turn. I went and fetched Matt Marchbank’s beautiful yew bowl, turned a few Christmases ago, to show him. ‘Must have been a young tree,’ he said.

24th January
In the early sunshine, I strip to the waist, sit outside on the kitchen doorstep before a mirror propped up in a cane chair and cut my hair. It feels good, even rejuvenating, to strip off the professor-like abundance of locks and to feel the sun on my skin.

25th January
I am at Mellis in drenching fine rain with a deep grey pall of sky, a wide skirt of it overhanging the common.

Aconites, a little yellow clump by the moat, are just beginning to come up. I scare two mallard drakes parked up, as it were, on the moat. The moat is a kind of holding bay for drakes, where they hang about waiting for the rare moments of sudden sexual frenzy when a duck appears and there’s a gang-bang. Mallards seem incapable of ordinary, fonder bird-love. With them, it has to be a violent chase, wild pursuit, followed by an unceremonious ducking of the object of desire and a gang-bang, with a lot of ruffian quacking.

The tower room. Towers have a reputation as refuges for writers. Yeats had one at Thoor Ballylee, Montaigne had one in Bordeaux, and Keats and Cyril Connolly were always imagining them. There was a tower at the gamekeeper’s cottage near Beccles where my London flatmates and I used to escape at weekends in the 1960s. You couldn’t reach it from the house, but had to go in from the garden and up a spiral staircase to a little upstairs room with bare walls and just a table and chair. You sat looking out into the woods, or stared out of the window, sharpened pencils, etc., and wrote. Or at least that was the idea.

Previous occupants of the table had made contributions to an informal anthology of graffiti, variously inspiring or depressing. ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our lives.’ And the whole of Robert Graves’s poem about the young bird-catcher on his way through the woods. Other contributions included the lines from Yeats about ‘marriage with a fool’, and an original couple of lines by Tony Barrell about Magritte and kittiwakes.

Water had to be pumped out of a well, and an old Lister petrol engine inside a box in the garden had to be hand-cranked. The crank had a nasty habit of kicking back or running away with you, and bandaged wrists were one of the regular features of life at the cottage. Bandaged ankles were another, thanks to the deep ruts everywhere. The place was sequestered in the woods far from any public road and was generally reached by train from London to Beccles, where we kept an Austin Champ, a kind of four-miles-to-the-gallon military jeep, in the car park. A sign of the times was that we always left the keys in the ignition. You drove as far as the Little David petrol station at Stockton, then turned off along a muddy track across the fields and through the woods.

We seemed to spend a great deal of our time servicing the house. The rule was that you saved up and collected at least as much firewood as you burnt. There was no electricity, so fires, candles and paraffin were all the more vital. There was a stove in the kitchen over which we spent much time huddled. It took ages to get into its stride and was usually just about going nicely when it was time to leave.

There was always the pub, of course: the Wherry at Geldeston was not far away. There were beds everywhere, upstairs and down, and several layers of the rags and carpets you could pick up for next to nothing at auctions (bare feet being one of the orders of the day).

Star favourites in the paperback library under the stairs were the novels of Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male in particular. Barrell derived the verb ‘to quive’ from this book (Major Quive-Smith is the gentlemanly villain of the piece) to describe wriggling along a leafy ditch bottom, flat on your chest in pursuit of, or flight from, whatever or whoever you didn’t want to see you. The whole of Rogue Male may be said to be one long quive from beginning to end. Barrell and I used to write blurbs for Oliver Caldecott, then the Penguin fiction editor (I did Rogue Male, A Rough Shoot and Watcher in the Shadows).

We wore corduroy in those days: Barrell wore navy, Chapman wore black, I wore dark brown. I also went in for brown herringbone tweed jackets or overcoats. The jacket was very expensive, bought from Jaeger after working with Ken Russell, who wore the full works: brown herringbone trousers, jacket and matching cap. I couldn’t even afford the jacket, but bought one anyway.

I now realize that all these English country-gentleman outfits were designed to make you look as much like a ploughed field as possible.

The modest scale of the cottage, the large number of us and the informal proximity of beds and copious intoxicants created a dormitory atmosphere, and there was much talking after lights-out. Barrell invented an organic breakfast cereal to be called ‘Dobbin’. I think it was dried cow-pats, flaked and mixed with a few raisins. Now and again there were mushrooms. And in that era there were still plenty of authentic Suffolk bumpkins to be met, or seen stumping about Beccles.

Stockton Wood was well supplied with pheasants, and we all learnt to appreciate them as individual characters. Our affection for them probably led to their downfall, by making them far too trusting. The boy at the Little David garage kept tame magpies and jays in an aviary. They were very clever, and no doubt well fed, but we felt sorry for them all the same. There were good second-hand bookshops all over Suffolk then, and we rarely returned to London empty-handed.

One of our main preoccupations was photography. Barrell, in particular, took it very seriously and toted a Pentax or a Nikon around the woods and hedgerows. We made weekly expeditions to Bungay, to the fish café for lunch and some covert portraiture with the telephoto lens. Elizabeth Smart lived a few miles outside Bungay, deep in the Flixton estate at the end of a very long lane in a place called ‘The Dell’. And that is exactly what it was: a cottage built on the site of what once was a sand quarry. Elizabeth had made a beautiful garden that shaded off into the wilderness of the surrounding thickets and woodland. It was full of ramshackle sheds and summerhouses where visitors could sleep, carpets slung over the earth floor. There was even the old estate gas house with boiler and brick chimney, home of the bar whenever Elizabeth had one of her parties.

I turned up there once with a friend one evening, long before there were mobile phones. We had been canoeing down the River Waveney and had beached our craft close by, when a sudden thunderstorm caught us. We found Elizabeth and George Barker in the full swing of a wake for their late friend Patrick Kavanagh, and joined them for an evening of strenuous whiskey-drinking.

I missed my friends as I missed my trees when I was away in Australia. I missed Ronnie and preferred to think of him at home in Suffolk like an oak.

There are many of us for whom the shed is a natural habitat. Mine is full of woodworking tools: a classic Myford ML8 lathe, band-saw, circular-saw and various drills, Skil-saws, planes. A whole wall of screwdrivers, chisels and gauges, and little drawers full of screws and fixings. Shelves of varnish, oils, stains and paints, and more drawers with drill bits, seeds, cramps, vices, an adze and several wedges for splitting wood. Hand-saws, jigsaws.

The big workbench once belonged to the communal farm Middleton Murry founded at Thelnetham when he lived there. It is tough and scarred, pitted and ingrained with the marks and grime of eighty years of hard work.

There is other furniture too, of a kind: an old table with drawers where all the chucks and spindles for the lathe live, with the long-handled chisels and gauges in a rack above it, and the electric grinder to one side for sharpening them. On the wall beside the chisels is a photograph torn from a newspaper of the woodworker David Pye, and his obituary. DP was the great champion of diversity, in his own work, and in all made things, as the tonic our souls require.

The shed is lit by a collection of theatrical floodlights slung from the ceiling beams, and a pair of anglepoise lamps that can be focused on the lathe.

A variety of hunks of oak, cherry, sycamore, ash, hazel, hornbeam and walnut sit about in various corners or help weigh down the lathe and other electrical machinery. Stabilizing the lathe is crucial to woodturning. This is the reason woodturners often covet the big old machines like the Harrison Graduate, a bowl-turning lathe whose sheer weight in steel will ensure that it never moves or so much as vibrates. The slightest vibration can cause the chisel to jump on the spinning wood and split or tear into it.

Books are like seeds: they come to life when you read them, and grow spines and leaves. I need trees around me as I need books around me, so building bookshelves is something like planting trees.

Strong winds rattling the willow tops against each other. Constant rasping and clicking of twigs – rain driving across the common. I go out to prune the lavatera and the buddleia, cutting it back hard. Then I set to work pollarding the small willow by the gate. It has fourteen poles about twenty feet long, and I cut nine of them by hand, stripping off the side shoots with the billhook and stacking the twigs and small branches on the dead hedge along the north-western boundary of this garden. I stack the poles against the big crack willow with the ash poles Rufus [Deakin, Roger’s son] and I cut down before Christmas.

I finish work at dark, and a moon comes up, pale and windswept. The cats can’t wait to come in the house and curl up straight away in their favourite places, Millie behind the Aga, Alf on a sofa.

A big full moon low in the sky at 7 a.m., windy, clear, puddles all the way up the common, moon sitting on the horizon, rooks flying and tumbling west with the wind. Pigeons too, all birds have come out to play in the seductive wind.

February

The squirrel is the English cosimo, running along in the trees, quite as happy diving headlong down a slender tree trunk as climbing up it. They remind me of the Big Brother system of brass cylinders that used to shoot along a system of pneumatic tubes held aloft on the ceilings of Harrods, where I once worked in the blanket-packing department.

3rd February
Filming a pilot for Channel 4 all day with Mike [Dibb]. We begin with pollards: the two willows by the moat and the pollard cherry woven into a basket, and the little oak tree by the doorway of the green woodshed.

Then we move on to the coppiced hazel, and the ash bower, and I mention David Nash and how this is the beginning of the Gothic arch in architecture. Then we look at the ash spiral, and the relation of wood to water, and the pleasure of seeing the architecture of trees in winter, when they are bare of leaves.

After lunch, we move on to the common and I talk about the big oak tree, free-standing, free-growing and wild because no forester has interfered with it or lopped its branches to create a straighter trunk with fewer knots. Instead, this oak has done exactly as it pleases, and attained an entirely natural shape, not having been jostled for space and light by other trees, as a woodland oak would be. It has grown under optimum conditions, in good soil undisturbed by the plough, manured by generations of cows congregating beneath it for shade, with all its vital mycorhizal fungi undisturbed and functioning. A profoundly contented and healthy tree.

I talk about the architecture of a tree, about its essential cone shape, with the branches cantilevered from the central tower of the trunk, tubular structures being the strongest. I stand beneath the branches and say there are thirty-five of them, and that their combined weight must be several tons. I love the horizontality of oak. Of all trees, it has the strength to float its outstretched branches out at ninety degrees to the trunk. These horizontal branches exert enormous forces at the cantilevered joint, which must be immensely strong. That is why the joint pieces are so sought after by carpenters and shipwrights. They are the ‘knees’ of ships, binding the ribbed frame together, joining the horizontal keel to the upright stern and bow.

By contrast with the old aspen that stands beside it on the common, the oak has retained all of its thirty-five branches. The aspen has only five left, the rest having been broken off by the wind. This tells you why oak is so greatly valued in this country.