Читать книгу The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise - Antony Woodward - Страница 11

The Home Handyman’s advice on smoking chimneys…did have one unusual suggestion to make: ‘Perhaps you have troublesome wind currents in your location. Find out if your neighbours have trouble, and if so, how they tackle the problem.’ What a good idea! We went at once to see what information we could gain. Our neighbours were sympathetic. Yes—they too had troublesome parlour flues. How did they get over the problem? Easy. They never used the parlour.

ELIZABETH WEST, Hovel in the Hills, 1977

Had you gone down to the woods—technically, the arboretum—of Hawarden Castle, six miles west of Chester, in Flintshire, North Wales, on any number of afternoons during the second half of the nineteenth century, you might have encountered a diverting sight: Her Majesty, Queen Victoria’s sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer, latterly Prime Minister of England, complete with fine set of greying mutton-chop whiskers, in shabby tweeds, ‘without a coat—without a waistcoat—with braces thrown back from off the shoulders and hanging down behind’, setting to work with an axe. William Ewart Gladstone, aka ‘The Grand Old Man’, aka Liberal statesman, four-times Prime Minister, and bête noire of Benjamin Disraeli, the same man whom Churchill called his role model and whom Queen Victoria accused of always addressing her as if she were a public meeting, had an eccentric hobby. He was simply potty about wood-chopping, in particular, chopping down trees.

‘No exercise is taken in the morning, save the daily walk to morning service,’ recorded Gladstone’s son, William, in the Hawarden Visitors’ Handbook. ‘But between 3 and 4 in the afternoon he sallies forth, axe on shoulder…The scene of action reached, there is no pottering; the work begins at once, and is carried on with unflagging energy. Blow follows blow.’ He seems to have possessed more enthusiasm than aptitude for his hobby. One Christmas he almost blinded himself when a splinter flew into his eye. On another occasion he almost killed his son Harry, when a tree Gladstone was cutting fell with the boy in it.

His tree-felling was achieved only by four or five hours of unremitting exertion, and much is made in descriptions of the terrific energies he expended, the way the perspiration poured from his face and through the back of his shirt; something that, according to his supporters (and, they claimed, the vox populi), emphasised his vital, heroic nature. His opponents did not agree. ‘The forest laments,’ remarked Lord Randolph Churchill, Conservative politician and later Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘in order that Mr. Gladstone may perspire.’ Wood-cutting even turned political when Disraeli spotted an opportunity to undermine his old foe. ‘To see Lovett, my head-woodman, fell a tree is a work of art,’ he declared smoothly in 1860. ‘No bustle, no exertion, apparently not the slightest exercise of strength. He tickles it with the axe; and then it falls exactly where he desires it.’

Gladstone took up his tree-chopping in 1852, aged forty-two, and continued with inextinguishable ardour until he was eighty-five, after which, he noted meticulously in his diary, he contented himself with mere ‘axe-work’ rather than ‘tree-felling’.

I mention Gladstone merely because, although he’s possibly the most celebrated British example, in my experience most men find at least the idea of chopping wood appealing. In America the axe is an emblem of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. It’s the great symbol of the settler, the outback, of rural survival, self-reliance and the frontier spirit. Seven Presidents of the United States were born in log cabins.^* Possibly this explains the axe’s curious romance. All I knew was that if my idealised rural existence had to be summed up in a single image, that image would be me either snoozing by the fire, or splitting logs on a frosty morning. Either way, the two elements were indispensable: a fire and logs to go on it.

Now, obviously lots of people like open fires. It’s tempting to say everyone, were not my reason for bringing up the subject that the two most influential figures in my life emphatically didn’t. My childhood was fireless. In the Woodward household, fires were one of the few subjects about which my parents were in complete agreement. They put their case peremptorily. Open fires were a chore. They had to be made, fed, poked and raked out. They were dirty. Their smoke ruined books. They were inefficient: everyone knew the heat went straight up the chimney, sucking draughts in its wake. They were dangerous, in a timber-framed, timber-clad house. None of these was the real reason for their antipathy, of course, which was that fires were yesterday’s way.

To understand their viewpoint, it’s necessary to remember the era. This was the 1960s and ’70s: the nuclear age, the space race, motorways, comprehensive redevelopment, Concorde, and Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’. My parents were academic scientists: Da a research chemist,^* Ma a botanical geneticist. Science, to my parents, was the way forwards. My mother was feeding us limitless quantities of instant food. My father was experimenting with disposable paper underwear. In our house there would be no ugly radiators or visible heat sources (at least not to start with). The future was electric: clean, silent, odourless and available at off-peak rates. Arguments (during one of my brother’s and my periodic campaigns) that fires were cosy were ignored. The cottage chimney was bricked up.

My father was ahead of his time. Our new extension, complete with electric underfloor heating, was in place just in time for the 1973 oil crisis. The price of electricity shot up faster than heat up a chimney. The next six years (when, aged 10–16, my powers of recall were sharpest and my temperament most vindictive) saw strike after strike, power cut after power cut, culminating in the Three Day Week and the Winter of Discontent. Now, the all-electric house, without electricity, has a chilly comfortlessness that’s all its own. With heating under the floor, there are no radiators to hug. I remember long, cold, dark evenings spent hunched round a Valor paraffin heater, as we tried to conserve our torch batteries. I left home fixated with radiators, Agas and roaring pot-bellied stoves; but most of all with dear, friendly, filthy, high-maintenance, chronically inefficient, open fires.

As it transpired, my mother, as she got older, softened in this area, getting me to draw the curtains close on miserable days, wrapping herself in blankets and hugging the electric fire. ‘Granny-bugging’, she called it. And even my father had the temerity recently to declare that he likes open fires—‘in other people’s houses’.^*

So, a fire and logs to go on it. With Tair-Ffynnon the archetypal lonely mountain cottage, a near-perfect enactment of almost every literary evocation of the granny-bugging fantasy, it clearly centred around an open fire, but for one small hitch. It didn’t have one. It was patently meant to have one. There was a big stone chimney breast rising out of the sitting room. But the traditional cottage grate and bread oven were long gone, replaced by a tinny metal water heater connected by pipes to the hot water tank.

One of the first tasks with which the ‘tidy’ builders we’d engaged were charged was to remove this excrescence and ‘open up’ the fireplace. With it gone, I waited with mounting impatience for my big moment: an open fire of my own. In preparation, we’d bought an old iron fireback in a salvage yard. This, with due solemnity, was placed in the hearth. I laid a fire, spreading the kindling into a neat pyramid, and struck a match. Almost immediately the room filled with smoke. It curled thickly out under the beam so it was clear none at all was going up the chimney. We endured it as long as we could until, eyes streaming, gasping for air, we had to stagger outside. Once the fire was doused and the smoke cleared, we peered up the chimney. We could see nothing. It was plainly blocked.

The following afternoon Frank the Sweep appeared with brushes and vacuum cleaners. The chimney was swept. No, he said, it wasn’t blocked, but it was a bit tarry, which could have made a difference. Anyway, it was all clear now. As his van departed, we tried again. Precisely the same happened as before. I rang round for advice. It was freely available and readily dispensed: almost certainly the wood was damp and the chimney cold. It just needed warming through: all we had to do was light a really good blaze, keep it going for at least an hour and the problem would be solved.

As it had been raining we didn’t have much in the way of dry wood, so we broke up some of the furniture that had been left behind by the previous owners. Pressing damp tea towels to our noses and mouths, we took turns to stoke the flames until they roared up the chimney so far sparks flew from the chimney pot. With such intensity of flame, it was true there was less smoke. But when we tried to light the fire the following time, it was just the same. More advice was solicited. ‘Screen the chimney breast,’ our experts said confidently. That was the standard procedure. So screen it we did. But however low we brought the screen (and we lowered it almost to the hearth itself), tendrils of smoke snaked determinedly under it into the room. ‘The opening should be more or less square,’ we were told, ‘with neither width nor height less than seventy-five per cent of the depth.’ I measured the fireplace and found this was already the case. ‘Raise the hearth: fires need air, for goodness sake.’ So we splurged £300 on a fine wrought iron grate and fire dogs to go with the fireback. And with like result. ‘Raise it further,’ we were briskly advised, as the smoke billowed forth no less prodigiously. So higher and higher we perched the iron basket, until it looked eccentric, then comic, then ludicrous and, finally, proving our advisers right, the fire no longer smoked. But that was only because it was out of sight up the chimney.

As the weeks passed our advisers’ confidence never slackened. ‘Try a hinged metal “damper” to block out cold air and rain.’ It made no difference. ‘It’ll smoke when the wind’s from the east,’ said someone else. ‘A lot of fires smoke when the wind’s from the east.’ And they were right, it did smoke when the wind was from the east. But as it came round, we were able to determine that the fire also smoked when the wind was from the west, and the south and the north. It even smoked when there was no wind at all. And on it went.^*

We transferred our attentions from hearth to chimney. The chimney had been more messed about than the fireplace. The original, sturdy stone stack, when the house was enlarged, had been given mean, spindly brick extensions. But rebuilding the whole chimney was too expensive. Besides, fresh advice informed us that this was not the fundamental problem, which was almost certainly one of downdraught, caused by the position of the house relative to the rise of the hill and the prevailing wind. Just as we were about to despair, one day in the builders’ merchants a leaflet caught my eye. It advertised chimney cowls. And there, amongst the chimney cappers and birdguards, the lobster-back cowls and ‘H’ cowls, the flue outlets and ‘aspirotors’, was the very item for which we’d been searching:

In constant production for thirty years, the Aerodyne Cowl has abundantly proven its worth in curing downdraught, showing clearly that the laws of aerodynamics don’t change with the times. As wind from any direction passes through the cowl the unique venturi-shaped surfaces cause a drop in air pressure which draws smoke and fumes up the chimney for dispersal. The Aerodyne Cowl is offered with our money-back guarantee. If it fails to stop downdraught simply return it with receipt to your supplier for a full refund.

Why had no one suggested this? An ‘Aerodyne Cowl’ was duly ordered. It took three weeks to arrive, two more to be fitted, but at last we were ready once more. All I can say is it was lucky about that money-back guarantee. If anything, the fire smoked more than before.

So we gave in. We ordered a wood-burning stove. By this stage I had my doubts that even this would work, but the man in the stove shop guaranteed it. And it did. The fire roared and crackled: it just did so behind glass. And thus, at last, we had an authentic need for logs. Which is how, by the convoluted way of these things, I came by my first tractor.

Amongst the chattels that came with Tair-Ffynnon (which included two mossy Opel Kadetts, a collapsed Marina van, numerous bathtubs and an assortment of broken and rusting bedsteads, trailers, ploughs, cultivators, rollers and diesel tanks) was an iron saw-bench. A farm saw-bench is a heavy cast-iron table with, protruding through a slit in the top, a big circular blade with scarily large teeth. They date from the time when farmers cut their own planks, gateposts and firewood. Many old farms have one somewhere, superannuated, rusting away in a corner. The moment I saw ours, I wanted that saw-bench back in action. It spoke of self-sufficiency and self-reliance, of replenished wood stores and cold winter months. It was, to an almost baleful degree, a renegade of the pre-health and safety era. Like most of the older ones, ours was worked by a pulley belt, which connected the bench to a parked tractor. Modern tractors ditched pulley wheels decades ago, but a couple of the older makes, Fordsons and Fergies, still had them. All I needed to get the saw-bench into action was one of those.

The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that an old tractor was just what Tair-Ffynnon was missing. Now the requirement for firewood spelt it out. Jonny’s remark came back to me: ‘Looks as if you’d better get yourself a tractor.’

‘Why?’ said Vez.

It was one of those typically female questions that, on the spot, it’s surprisingly difficult to answer. Arguments that a tractor was self-evidently a Good Thing to have, that it would lend tone to the place, in our straitened financial circumstances, lacked weight. ‘For towing and mowing and pulling stuff. For cutting logs…everything.’ My answer was necessarily vague, as I wasn’t absolutely sure myself of all the myriad uses to which an old tractor might be put.

‘You can buy a lot of logs for the price of a tractor,’ said Vez. ‘How much does a tractor cost?’

‘Well, you could probably get an old Fergie or a Fordson for about £1,000, but I should think…’

‘A grand! A grand! Are you out of your mind? When we haven’t even got a dry place to store anything. And Maya needs shoes.’

There’s no arguing such a case. Even I could appreciate that an inclination to see an old saw-bench back in harness, coupled with the knowledge that we could cut our own logs, sounded a little thin when ready-cut firewood was available for £40 a load.

All this I had only half worked through in my mind when I arrived on a Saturday in mid-July at the annual East Wales and Borders Vintage Auction, held, conveniently, in a field at the bottom of our hill. Over the last few days the field had been cut for silage and a tented village had sprung up so that now, although it was windless and grey, the white canvas and bunting presented a cheerful scene. Vintage auctions being the sole recreation my brother and I shared, he and my nephew Thomas had come over for the day, taking the opportunity to see us all, as had my father from Somerset. Jonny had arrived early for his usual forensic examination of the lots and announced that, amongst the collections of old railway sleepers, feed bins, mangles, chaff-cutters and nameless implements and agricultural bits and bobs, there was ‘a very nice Fergie’. And sure enough, there amongst the junkyard tractors, Lot 571, was a peach of a machine.

The finer (and indeed the broader) points of tractor mechanics meant nothing to me, but I could see this was something special. For a start, unlike the other tractors on sale, it was complete. It had four wheels, two matching mudguards, and so on. no one had attempted to spruce it up; it had a couple of dents, a buckled number plate, but still a fair amount of original grey paint. Headlamps either side of its radiator grille gave it a friendly, if slightly melancholic air. Here was one of those gems, it was clear, one might never forgive oneself for missing. Befitting its exalted status, it was one of the final lots, but the auctioneer and his throng were already working their way steadily down the rows towards it. Jonny, who knew about old Fergie prices, said not to go a penny over £1,200. By the time the brown-coated auctioneer approached, he had established himself as a waggish figure whose skilful manipulations of his bidders was drawing a larger-than-average crowd. The auctioneer hoiked his foot onto the front wheel and, as his sidekick clambered into the seat, made a whirling motion with his hand. ‘Start ’er up, Jack.’ The sidekick pressed a button and the Fergie clattered cheerfully into life with a cloud of black smoke and diesel fumes, settling down to a homely chugging rattle.

There was no shortage of interest. The bidding flicked rapidly upwards. Soon it narrowed down to me and a small, sharp-eyed, fox-faced man with a peaked cap pulled well down over his eyes. By the rubber overalls under his shapeless tweed coat, I was pleased to note he was a hill farmer rather than a restoration enthusiast, so presumably wouldn’t have absurd amounts of money to spend. £1,160…£1,180…£1,200…I could feel my pulse quickening. My adversary looked shrewd, informed, sure of himself. If he wanted the Fergie, it was plainly a good buy so it would be doubly foolish to miss out. £1,220…£1,240…My opponent’s face was a mask. He communicated his bids by tiny, almost imperceptible nods, hardly more than twitches. £1,360…£1,380…£1,400…Would the man never give up? How much did these hill farmers have tucked away? The auctioneer sensed my wavering. ‘Go on, Sir, you’ve come all this way’—(where did he get that idea?)—‘Not going to lose her for a couple of quid, are you?’

‘£1,500,’ I said crisply.

He turned to my adversary. ‘He’s way over his limit, Sir. I think you’ve got him.’

Another expressionless twitch. The auctioneer turned back to me. ‘Come on, Sir. You know it’s got your name on it.’ The crowd was loving it. Well, suffice to say, I got her. In the adrenaline rush it seems I also bought Lots 572, 573 and 574, the all-important pulley wheel, assorted bars and links that Jonny had announced went with the Fergie, and a complicated-looking hay mower with scissor blades that looked like a big hedge trimmer. As the crowd moved on, and the Fergie was again deserted, I sat on its front wheel in a daze of mixed emotions: happy fulfilment (I owned a tractor!), guilt (the purchase was indefensible), trepidation (what was I going to tell Vez? How did the thing work?). My father looked nonplussed. ‘How much was it?’ he said. ‘What ever will you do with it?’

Jonny climbed onto the Fergie and pressed the starter. Nothing happened. ‘Notoriously bad starters, Fergies,’ he said. He fiddled with various switches and levers and tried again. Again, nothing. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. He ordered me into the driving seat, while he tinkered in the engine. I was instructed to press a button in with my right ankle, while pressing the gear lever forwards. ‘Are you sure this is what you do? It doesn’t sound very likely.’ I was told I knew nothing and just to do as I was asked. It made no difference.

‘It started a minute ago. There must be something you’re not doing.’

But there wasn’t. Or there didn’t seem to be. The crowd had moved well away by this time. Did I catch a frisson, a lightning backwards glance towards us, from my foxy friend in the low peaked cap?

An hour passed. People started arriving in pick-ups with trailers to collect and load their lots. We buttonholed any likely looking person who wandered past. They leant under the raised bonnet. They pored over the engine. They prodded and poked. They said Fergies were notoriously bad starters. But everyone agreed, it all looked fine. The field began to empty. My father went home. As I drove back to Tair-Ffynnon to look for tools for Jonny to start dismantling the engine, the full idiocy of what I’d done sank in. It had never occurred to me that the tractor might not work. In the excitement of the auction I hadn’t given a thought to any practicalities. I knew not the first thing about tractors. I was amechanical. What was I to do next time she wouldn’t start? Call the AA?

A couple more hours passed while Jonny dismantled and reassembled the engine. It made no difference. At length, he puffed out his cheeks. ‘Well, I don’t know what’s wrong. Everything works fine. It should start.’ By this time, the field was almost empty and a steady drizzle was falling. We were saved by an old boy wandering by. He told us to check a tiny lever hidden out of sight on one side of the engine. Somehow it had mysteriously moved from ‘ON’ to ‘OFF’. ‘I think someone’s played a joke on you,’ he said.

It was months before we finally got the saw-bench rigged. After a rudimentary course of tractor-driving instruction, Jonny departed, leaving me to make jerky, undignified forays up and down the track, trying to master the clutch. This tended, however gently it was engaged, to snatch, catapulting the machine forwards in ungainly kangaroo bounds. Vez, presented with my sly fait accompli, was magnificent, even agreeing the tractor looked just so, and made us appear less like urbanites (an accommodation assisted, unquestionably, by an envelope from my father which arrived a few days after the auction containing a cheque for the price of the Fergie and a fairytale about finding more money in an account than he’d expected).

From a company Jonny told me about (‘A & C Belting’), I ordered a rubberized canvas belt and the next time he visited, we heaved the eye-poppingly heavy bench into position, pegging it into the dirt floor of the barn with eighteen-inch iron pegs.^* Then Jonny oiled and greased the blade shaft and pulley wheel spindles. With much to-ing and fro-ing, we positioned the tractor. We chocked the wheels and connected up the pulley belt between the tractor and the saw-bench. We engaged the tractor’s pulley wheel, setting the belt turning. Then I pulled the iron lever on the saw, which slid the belt across to drive the blade. The saw cranked into life.

It was simply terrifying. I’d never been so close to a machine that was so blatantly lethal. The belt flapped and slapped between the pulley wheels, hungry to snag any loose clothing or inquisitive passing child. The blade whirred and squeaked like a giant bacon slicer, though the sound was quaintly soothing and almost musical: the rattling rhythm of the Fergie’s engine, the regular ting-ting of the staples in the belt as they passed over the iron pulley wheels. I found some small branches and pushed them towards the blade to warm it up (something the man from A & C Belting had advised). The saw scarcely noticed. After a few of these I pushed a thick old stump forwards with a stick. The blade screamed as it bit into the wood, and the tractor engine chugged harder, reverting to its gentle clatter as the cutting finished, the blade ringing as the severed timber thudded onto the ground. The smell of sawn wood filled the air. It was sensational.

Wood was strewn all over the place at Tair-Ffynnon: shambolic heaps of logs and stumps, hedging offcuts, old fence posts, sections of telegraph poles and sleepers, as if a giant had been playing Pick-Up Sticks before being called away mid-game. To at last be clearing it was satisfying work. Some timber cut more easily than others. Yew and old oak were so hard their sawdust was as fine as flour. Sappy larch and fir released a delicious piny smell, but the resin gummed the blade, making the belt slip. As my confidence increased I discarded my stick, pushing the logs forwards by hand. Occasionally, with the scrap wood, the saw would hit a nail or a staple, screeching and sending out showers of sparks. Soon the iron table top shone and the feet of the bench were lost in deepening heaps of sawdust that dusted every surface like snow.

True, I couldn’t quite banish the image of a gross-out, splatter-movie death. A momentary lapse of concentration, a trip from catching my foot on something buried beneath the sawdust, and—the wood chipper scene from Fargo or Johnny Cash’s brother in Walking the Line. My hand, or arm (or head) in the log pile. But the tangle of timber was transmogrifying into a neat pile of logs for splitting. And all that fear worked up a prodigious appetite.

Maybe stockpiling wood is in our genes as hunter-gatherers. Stacked wood bespeaks security, cosiness, preparedness for winter. Perhaps it’s because it’s exercise with a purpose, or a way of clearing one’s head. ‘I chop wood,’ Gladstone told the journalist William T. Stead, ‘because I find that it is the only occupation in the world that drives all thought from my mind.’^*

Maybe it’s all the associations that come with an axe: the forest clearance, the ancient oaks of England on which a navy and an empire were built. Or the perfection of its form. If an hour’s wood-chopping is soothing work, it must be because quite so much hopping around, swearing, trying to extricate the wedged head has taken place over the 1.2 million years of steady R&D devoted to this, the prototypical tool. Though in fact it’s not a tool, it’s a simple machine, using leverage to ramp up the force at the cutting edge, and dual-inclined planes to enhance the splitting action. That head is drop-forged from medium carbon steel (the flaring cheeks averaging twenty-nine degrees): hard enough to hold an edge, yet not so brittle it shatters. The shaft (of ash or hickory so it won’t splinter or split from the strain) is kinked for easy swinging by anyone of average height. And it’s a philosopher’s axe—not a rake or broom—over which we puzzle: is it still our grandfather’s if our father replaced the head and we the shaft? The Director of the British Museum recently called the axe ‘the most successful piece of human technology in history’.

Not bad for twelve quid from Homebase.