Deakin Roger - Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

ROGER DEAKIN

Edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker

HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

HAMISH HAMILTON

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2008
1

Text copyright Estate of Roger Deakin, 2008
Illustrations copyright David Holmes, 2008

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced
into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
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without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner
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978-0-14-190025-4

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 Rogers 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 Rogers words have been allowed to speak for themselves.

Alison Hastie
Terence Blacker
July 2008

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 shepherds 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 couldnt 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.