Country Matters on Booksquawk
by Roger Deakin
416 pages, Penguin
Review
by Pat Black
The
blossom’s out, the sap is high, and so am I. It’s time to don the tweed, slip
on the thigh-high wellingtons, keep the Savlon handy and tiptoe through the
cider bottles with some great British nature writing.
A
couple of years ago, I fell helplessly in love with Roger Deakin. His wild
swimming masterpiece, Waterlog, was a
charming, engaging book - an exercise in fraternity, nature, literature and
English dottiness. I was held fast in its current. It was my favourite read of
2015, and if the Folio Society was to bring out a ruinously expensive
illustrated hardback edition and slipcase, I’d dive right in.
Adding
to the charm is the man himself – an affable dreamer, seemingly unconcerned by the
world of commerce and brute competition, a lover
of newts – so cruelly stolen from us by cancer only a few years after
making a splash in the literary world. Like watching Bowie videos on YouTube,
he is as close as we get to a real ghost – thrillingly present in his art, chillingly
absent in reality.
Even
Walnut Tree Farm, the arboreal idyll in which he so happily shared bed and
board with mother nature, is gone now – sold up, redeveloped, and possibly
unrecognisable (understandably so – sorry mate, but f*** having a flock of
birds in yer loft).
As
well as being a compelling writer, Waterlog’s
author had a compelling existence. He
lived a wizardly life, swimming in his own moat every morning, then poring over
ancient maps and scrolls for remote ponds to dunk in. He might have been the
first human to ever swim in some of those plashy glades. You expect him to sit
down to tea on giant toadstools; you imagine trees sprouting from the floor in
his front room, talking rooks cawing at him from the branches. You expect him
to write on parchment with a quill. You picture him high-fiving squirrels and
supping pints alongside centaurs down the local pub - surely called The Green Dragon, and run by an ogre and
his wife. He might ride a gryphon there and back. Well, I imagine all this, anyway.
Seldom
if ever have I wanted to go back to the start of a book and start reading again
after the final page was turned, as I did with Waterlog.
The
same was true of Wildwood – but for
different reasons.
This
is a difficult thing to write. Wildwood
bored me. Some of it was like watching trees grow.
This
wasn’t the case right away. I had a wee holiday last year in the middle of a
forest. Wildwood had joined my
to-be-read pile the Christmas before; the circumstances were irresistible. I
got through the first 90 or so pages on one blessed morning in the rarity of
absolute solitude, sat outside the cabin in the early May sunshine. Pheasants
padded through the trees, safe for the moment from being blasted to oblivion by
shotgun or car grille.
I
took my time, savouring the book, and I needed to do so. It was quite heavy
going, but not unpleasant – a challenge, not a slog, like approaching the
summit of a mountain. It was scholarly rather than brisk. But I was in the
right setting, and the right frame of mind.
I
came back from holiday. I set it on the bedside table, the bookmark lodged at
page 90.
Wildwood book
barely moved from its berth for nearly a year. When I shifted it for a house
move, I made a clean spot. Once we’d moved, I put it back in the same place. I
forced myself to get back into it in March of this year. One full ring grew
inside the trees before the last page was turned.
I
felt a sense of grief when I towelled myself off after Waterlog; but I felt only exhaustion at the end of Wildwood. I rarely get a chance to sit
down with a book these days, and others nudged ahead of it, brash, insistent
pupils sucking up the teacher’s attention. I literally dusted off the book more
than once. I could barely get through a chapter before turning the light off.
Something had gone wrong.
It’s
billed as a journey through trees, and I suppose it is. But it’s unstructured,
and it focuses too much on using wood to build, or create art from. Some of it
is like reading a real-time description of a guy building a table and chairs. I’d
liken it to a garden allowed to grow wild, but that at least can be interesting.
Untidy things usually arrest the attention. Wildwood
frequently doesn’t. I found large parts of it a painful struggle, like
cramming for a long-dreaded exam.
Much
of this book is dull. Like the sound my head might make upon contact with a
two-by-four of solid oak.
This
is my failing, as a reader, as a person, and maybe, as a man. Writing too dense
in detail can turn me off. But I’m also a hugely impractical guy. You get a
certain type of person whose soul stirs when they contemplate building sheds,
redecorating rooms, stripping down engines, and watching James May build Airfix
Spitfires. The sort of person who might take time to stop and appreciate a
bridge, and know who built it, or how many rivets were used in its construction.
The kind of person who, in hearing the car roar when they floor the pedal,
doesn’t focus so much on the rapidly unfurling road and the wind shrieking in
chorus with the music, but what’s going on inside the engine, the churning
axle, the pressing plates and spinning cogs, all laid out before them in
explosive 3D, their own internal Haynes Manual.
I
am not one of those sorts of people. They might absolutely love Wildwood.
Practical
matters annoy me. In this, I’m a familial aberration. My dad and my two brothers
worked on the tools – oily hands, calluses you could take a blowtorch to, able
to tell the calibre of fittings down to the millimetre by sight, possessed of
the ability to have copper wiring twined, latticed and hung as if by
telekinesis, and dexterity with screwdrivers and spanners to rival that freak
at school who could finish a Rubik’s cube in 10 seconds. It isn’t me. To this
day, screws slither out from between my sausage fingers and laugh as they roll under
the furniture. In my frustration at an angle not sitting right, or a nail
splitting the edge of the wood, I go beyond simple swearing and start to speak
in tongues. Neighbours knock the door and ask if everything’s okay.
Something
went wrong. It is a failing. If the apocalypse comes I’ll need to develop other
skills in double-time or we’ll all die. I wish I was a bit more practical, but
I’ve probably lived more than half my life now and I must admit I’m not, and
maybe never will be. It’s a source of disappointment.
A
bit like calculus, it isn’t that I don’t grasp it, or can’t do it - it’s just
that I’d rather not. Ask me to put up a fence, and I can (and in fact I have).
I’d just rather be doing other stuff. In considering building flat-pack
furniture, I do it, but only after a lot of sighing. Anything more complex than
fitting slot A into B is more often done badly than not.
If
I ever want to make my missus laugh, I tell her the truth of the matter: I’m
not a builder, baby. I’m not a farmer either.
I’m a killer.
Show
me a castle and I imagine a siege, boiling oil, clashing swords, and perhaps
dragons. Show Roger Deakin a castle, and I suspect he’d wonder how he could
construct battlements and a drawbridge along the edge of his moat; or if he
could perhaps steal some of the loose stonework and use it to build a sauna
with an ergonomically pristine wood-fired boiler requiring no gas or
electricity.
Roger
does actually consider making this contraption in the course of Wildwood.
Perhaps
fuelled by my desire to propel the book to its conclusion, like shoving a
length of timber into a sawblade, I picked up the pace near the end. I was
rewarded; Wildwood takes off, right
after Roger does, away from England’s sleepy hollows in search of the
motherlode of apple trees in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and one or two
other places in need of an emergency aid drop of vowels. This provided the kind
of action and adventure which drenched
Waterlog, and whose absence leaves us pawing along the desert in Wildwood.
Here
was my dearest Roger again – off-road, meeting people living simple rustic
lives, marvelling at the simplicity of their lives, lived in harmony with
nature instead of destroying it. Roger is very much at home in this peaceable,
Zen state. He speaks of a moment of communion with a beekeeper out in the
middle of nowhere, a guy who speaks not a word of English, and yet Roger knows
he has met something of a soul-mate, someone he could form a lifelong
friendship with. He is left with a deep sadness when he says goodbye, knowing
their paths will never cross again.
I
was reminded of a similar meeting during a trip to Peru years ago, an author
and local character I had an uproariously boozy afternoon with during a guided
tour. “I shall not forget you, my friend!” he told me. The feeling was mutual.
But
this section is all too brief. Back on Ent Time with Treebeard, there’s lots of
splicing, coppicing and grafting, and appreciations of humanity’s interaction
with wood – how it became a vital part of building civilisation, and how it
remains a labour of love to this day, a compact between structure, Euclidian
geometry and wild nature.
Roger
turns things out in his workshop and even considers the sawdust as he blows it
away. I sorta get that. I’ve always been fascinated by timber warehouses;
something to do with the epic space, the smell of the wood. He wonders about
the trees and bushes encircling his property, at some length (in both senses). And
he speaks to artists who work with wood, from the UK to Australia and back. They
turn living trees into monuments, they collect and reshape driftwood from the
beach, they get busy with planes and chisels and hammers and whatnot, and there
we go, another day done, lights out, zzz.
More
than once I confronted an ugly truth: these are people with lots and lots of
money, and lots and lots of spare time. There’s a big chink in the armour of
the English eccentric and the sweet art they make, a petty point, but one worth
making: it takes serious money to be a gentleman itinerant. Like it or not, you
have to buy yourself out of the rat race.
As
well as outlining my lack of practical skills, Wildwood also exposes a gap in my education. I love nature, I love
looking at it, I love being in it, I love interacting with it, I love writing
about it, and I love reading about it. But if you sent me a link to one of
those clickbait quizzes identifying trees and their leaves, I’d score about
21/100 (matching my Higher Maths prelim percentage, December 1992). Botanical
ignorance is a grave disadvantage when you read this book. Roger blithely
witters on about walnut this, oak that, and for pages at a time he might as
well have been talking about cycads, krynoids, the Thing From Another World, Audrey
II from Little Shop of Horrors, whatever.
What
this book repeatedly nailed down – angrily, burying the metal into the
trembling pine, and at a f****** angle – was that I am ignorant, and I need to
educate myself, about trees for a start. One is waving at me out the window as
I type, and I couldn’t tell you anything about it except that it’s green. Pine…
willow… sycamore… birch… yeah, I could spot those. After that, I’m chapping. You
better knock, on wood. I hear John Cleese saying, “The larch,” and see a slide
flipping over, but I do not laugh. It’s a terrible irony that I love British
nature writing yet know so little about it, like Jesus earning a living as a
carpenter before being nailed to some shoddy woodwork. My next book on this
subject will be the Collins Guide To
British Trees. I’m going to sit down with it, I’m going to study it, and
damn it, I’m going to learn it.
I’ll
go back to Wildwood. I’ve failed, not
Roger. I want to say sorry to him. It’s a beautifully-written book by a lovely
bloke, who was cleverer than I will ever be. I feel a bit like I’ve been
invited to tea by that nice quiet boy in class, and he’s showed me his
collection of acorns, and I’ve sniggered. Maybe I’ve even given him heat for
it, back in class, among the wolves.
One
day I hope to be sat before a log fire, cracking open my ancient copy of Wildwood, and starting again at the
proper pace in the proper setting, in the old age Roger was so unfairly denied.
For
now, I’ll struggle on, at many things. We can’t all be craftsmen, more’s the
pity.
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