Читать книгу Hollow Places - Christopher Hadley - Страница 23

To break a branch was deemed a sin,

A bad-luck job for neighbours,

For fire, sickness, or the like

Would mar their honest labours.

—from a ballad written after the illicit felling of a tree in 1824

Master Lawrence and the others were walking into a story when they stepped out of their doors that still winter morning. Imagine the carpenter’s yard as a tree’s graveyard, boards and off-cuts and shavings of timber memorialising particular oaks or elms taken from woodland and hedgerows. Imagine gates and window frames that Lawrence remembered as branches, and entire cruck-frames that had once grown in Hormead Park Wood. ‘The quality of a tree was remembered to the last fragment after the bulk of the log had been used,’ wrote Walter Rose in The Village Carpenter. ‘In any carpenter’s yard there are piles of oddments – small pieces left over from many trees – but though they are all mixed up, it is usually remembered from which tree each piece was cut.’

Soon there would be loppings of a yew in Lawrence’s yard.

At that hour, women would be fetching water in buckets hanging from yokes, carters were securing the traces to horses while young boys baited them. Old timers might already be warming themselves at the furnace in James Funston’s Smithy. A man could speak freely there without being held to his word.

The track to the tree led south, following the boundary between Church Hill Field and Broadley Shot. Small children with chilblains hobble along in hard boots – off to pick flints or clean turnips. From the northern edge of Chalky Field it was little more than half a mile south and then west to Patricks Wood, and beyond the hornbeams lay Great and Little Pepsells where the labourers could set down their stoneware jars and their shovels and axes.

The spot was oddly remote. It is the landscape of M. R. James’s ghost story ‘A Neighbour’s Landmark’ that is one minute picturesque, the next, with the changing of the light, bleak, frightening and vulnerable to supernature. Imagine this spot on a grey winter’s morning setting your axe to a village landmark and the only building in view is the tower of the church within whose walls an ancient legend sleeps. Marked by a small triangle where three fields meet, hemmed by three parish boundaries and two dark blocks of woodland, it was the kind of place where gallows once stood, or gibbets swung – places where suicides and strangers were buried. Yews are known to have been used as hanging trees. Such knowledge might well have worked upon the minds of those men that morning. W. B. Gerish is good on this, writing of an older time, of the medieval winter when ‘The spirit world was abroad, riding in every gale, hiding in the early and late darkness of evening among the shadows of the farmhouse, of the rickyard, of the misty meadows, of the dark-some wood. Ghosts – we talk about ghosts, but our ancestors lived with them from All Hallows to Candlemas.’

R. M. Healey in his Shell Guide to Hertfordshire is generous about the countryside thereabouts, finding in it Samuel Palmer’s elegiac landscape paintings, better Palmer’s dark etchings from his final years after he had grown angry at the plight of the agricultural labourer.

In the right weather, the wrong weather, the view belongs in the old nurse’s tale that troubled Jane Eyre’s imagination, making her think of Thomas Bewick’s engraving of a ‘black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows’. But so would many such views in England: the historian John Lowerson has written about the ‘popular sense of an eternal cosmic battle between good and evil that is being fought out in an essentially rural English context’. Our yew site is a place as good as any for such battles, for stories, for putting ideas in men’s heads about dragons and their slayers. Was it the place as much as the belief that a dragon once stalked those parts that would soon make them think they’d found a dragon’s lair?

Farm labourers worked from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the winter. Six shillings a week was a usual wage, but felling timber was paid by the load: one shilling for fifty cubic feet. You can do the working out. John Carrington’s oak we met in the last chapter would have earned them fifteen shillings. Was it blood money enough? Were they superstitious about their task that day? No doubt there were those who thought that chopping down a yew brought bad luck. Plant lore is thick with injunctions against bringing down trees. The folklorist Jeremy Harte, writing about the Isle of Man, tells of the seemingly lonely places where ‘locals know about the elder trees that should never be touched, not since the farmer hacked them back, and hanged himself in the barn that night’. But Harte is writing about fairies, and it is thorn trees and elders, not yews, that must be left alone. But a yew was also a sacred tree to many: ‘A bed in hell is prepared for him / Who cut the tree about thine ears.’ Did the men have sentiments similar to this final couplet from an old rhyme about the Yew Tree Well in Easter Ross, Scotland? A chill warning to those wielding an axe. The Yew of Ross in Ireland had to be prayed down by St Laserian because its wood was wanted, but no one dared fell it. Recall King Hywel Dda’s tenth-century prohibition on felling yews associated with saints. Do similar injunctions survive far and wide in the collective memory? When the Victorian archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers removed an old yew from a prehistoric burial mound in Dorset, the locals were not happy, even though Pitt-Rivers said the tree was dead: ‘I afterwards learned that the people of the neighbourhood attached some interest to it, and it has since been replaced.’

John Aubrey relates the fate of the men who felled an oak in 1657 and in passing recalls the wife and son of an earl who died after he had an oak grove removed. These tales linger and still give pause for thought today to the sensitive and cautious: Harte writes, ‘When we find that the N18 from Limerick to Ennis curves to go around a fairy thorn, we admire the knowledge of Eddie Lenihan, who campaigned to save the tree, as well as the prudence of the County Surveyor who knew of the risk involved in damaging it.’

Still, the Lawrences and the Skinners had their work to do, and so they savaged the roots of the great tree. Specifically the roots, I think. There is an engraving by Turner in his Liber Studiorum called ‘Hedging and Ditching’. Two men are in a ditch in the ground fetching down a tree, not neatly chopping it down, but seeming to lever it out of the ground with pickaxes. A woman in a bonnet with a shawl over her shoulder walks by looking on. This is no rural idyll. The drawing has something in common with First World War art, with the pencil lines that suggest mud and stones, the thin leafless trees in the hedge, shredded of the fullness of trees. Grubbing up is an evocative expression. It is an unpleasant image, total and annihilating: trees torn violently from the soil. I think of Ted Hughes’ Whale-Wort torn out by the roots and flung into the sea when he just wanted to sleep. It is the slow deliberate painstaking act of men with hand tools. Those in Turner’s sketch might be doing hard labour; they look a bad lot, like pirates or smugglers – Turner was on the coast at East Sussex, so maybe they were.

Forget a neat V-shaped wedge incised with an axe prior to sawing. Dynamite and perhaps club hammers would make more sense than a copybook felling. An ancient yew with its hollows and split trunks and the irregular sprawl of its weary branches mocks the surgical approach. H. Rider Haggard, the author of the adventure stories She and King Solomon’s Mines, gives the best and most plausible description of how the tree was felled in his A Farmer’s Year: Being His Commonplace Book for 1898. He writes that there are two ways of felling a tree:

one the careless and slovenly chopping off of the tree above the level of the ground, the other its scientific ‘rooting’. In rooting at timber, the soil is first removed from about the foot of the bole with any suitable instrument till the great roots are discovered branching this way and that. Then the woodsmen begin upon these with their mattocks, which sink with a dull thud into the soft and sappy fibre.

This was known as grub-felling in East Anglia and was the common method for bringing down timber trees in that part of the country.

By Wigram’s account, Lawrence and the other men had an uncommon amount of trouble with those roots. Perhaps their hearts were not in it, or something held back the full strength of their axe strokes. Did one of them stroke the scaly bark that yews can slough off to get rid of infections? Did it rattle under their fingers and the sap begin to run blood red? Fred Hageneder in his Yew: A History tells us that the yew is the only European tree that can bleed red sap. A feat that is scientifically unexplained, he says. The yew at Nevern in Wales is notorious for bleeding the blood of those buried in its churchyard. A bleeding tree might have given those men – any men – second thoughts. Or did the texture of its bark look like scales from a picture book dragon? In Ulverton, his extraordinary record of a fictional village across time, Adam Thorpe channels an old carpenter in an inn in 1803 regaling a visitor with his memories. He recalls the time the master carpenter chose an oak by smell, seasoned it for two years, then made a lid for the church font. ‘Atween you an’ I, though, I can spot a dragon in them patterns. I reckons as how there were a dragon in that tree. He’ll avenge hisself one day.’ Is this a brilliant bit of invention or does Thorpe know of a folk tradition among carpenters about dragons in trees?

They kept at it, but the tree would not yield. Yet is thy root sincere, sound as the rock, / A quarry of stout spurs and knotted fangs, / Which crook’d into a thousand whimsies, clasp / The stubborn soil, and hold thee still erect.

Eventually, they took a break. ‘It was very hard work to get it down. The men had been at work all the morning, and went away to dinner,’ wrote Wigram. In one of his later letters he put the story into the mouth of a local: ‘They do say Sir, that the men could not get that yew Tree down. And at last they all went away to breakfast.’

It was an ’umbuggin job to remove such a tree. Why take so much effort to bring her down? Maybe someone wanted the timber. John Aubrey recalls the churchyard yew of his childhood in the 1630s, ‘a fair and spreading ewe-tree … The clarke lop’t it to make money of it to some bowyer or fletcher’. The lopping killed it.

Walter Rose gives us clues as to what would be going through a carpenter’s mind as he stood in front of the tree, writing that when his father looked at trees he saw what could be made of them: ‘In a stumpy butt, with large branches spreading off not far from the base, he would see four large gate posts, the spread of the branches to form the portion that would go into the ground.’ Another would be large enough to split down the centre and quarter-up for coffin boards, or for rails or the slats of a field gate. He might have been calculating how much useful timber was in the Pelham yew. How much marquetry. How many writing slopes or clock cases were latent in the bole. More likely, Lawrence was counting how many poles could be sold to bodgers for the bows and hoops of the Windsor chairs made in vast quantities back then, with the very best given backs of yew.

‘A post of yew will outlast a post of iron,’ noted one naturalist in the 1830s. The Furneux Pelham Smock mill was modernised in those years, perhaps the year the tree came down, after James Seabrook the Younger bought the mill from his father and paid off the mortgage on it. Yew was excellent wood for cogs and pins, and its branches would yield fine barrel hoops for the fledgling brewing enterprise at Furneux Pelham Hall. The wood’s waterproof qualities made it a favourite for buckets and palings. It had other uses besides, known to country folk: lengths of it were traditionally used for dowsing. It was also said that if you held a switch of yew in your hand while cursing your enemy they would not hear you.

No doubt some wanted the old tree down not because they valued its timber but simply because they did not want it in the landscape. They wanted it down, just as the doctor wanted rid of the elm in Hardy’s The Woodlanders, because it oppressed Marty South’s father as he lay on his deathbed. It is finally felled – by dead of night, but ‘Little good it did poor old South, who was dead the next day from the shock of the tree’s disappearance.’

The agricultural improvers detested the space taken up, and even the shadows cast, by hedgerow trees. Surprisingly to us, even those who loved the landscape may have wanted the old yew gone. Pollards, which often marked the boundaries of fields, were seen as ugly and had been under attack since the late eighteenth century – an old yew might be viewed with similar disdain by some. ‘Not only were outgrown hedges tamed and excess trees removed. In many places hedges were grubbed out altogether … The grubbing of hedges was especially common in the high farming period after c.1830,’ writes the historian of the East Anglian landscape Tom Williamson. Our tree was probably in the way of planting, or blocked a new drainage ditch. The Ancient Tree Forum publish a pamphlet for farmers on how to care for ancient and veteran trees. It contains a terrible map showing all the hedgerow trees that have disappeared from a single fifty-acre parcel in North Yorkshire since the middle of the nineteenth century, each standing tree a little green icon representing a surviving pollard or standard ash, beech, oak or sycamore. There are some fifty of them, but they are outnumbered nearly three to one by a mass of red ‘X’s in a circle representing a lost tree.

Little Pepsells was listed as pasture in 1837, and while it is unlikely that an old yew would ever drop enough leaves to poison stock, horses tied to yews have been known to die from grazing on them. Might the squire or his tenant farmer have taken a disliking to the tree for some such reason, or did they just need to invent winter work for men sent to them under the old Poor Laws? Remember that according to the Hammonds, ‘degrading and repulsive work was invented for those whom the farmer would not or could not employ’.

What we do know is that this was not the only yew that disappeared from the landscape in the early nineteenth century.

In 1848 one archaeological journal lamented that yews were ‘so reduced in number as to seem like the last of a once flourishing and noble race, mourning in their own decay over the magnificence of the past, and the desolation of the present’. In 1539, John Leland had counted thirty-nine yews at Strata Florida in Wales; they are the only ones he mentions in his famous itinerary around the British Isles. Three hundred years later, only three of the famous yews were still standing. There is an engraving and article from Gardener’s Chronicle in May 1874 with a description of the largest tree that is not unlike that of the Pelham yew in Wigram’s letter: it ‘was divided into two parts, leaving a passage through it, this was 22 ft in girth’. Beneath one of the three survivors was the traditional resting place of the fourteenth-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It too disappeared after 1874, possibly during an archaeological dig of the Cistercian abbey at the end of the nineteenth century.

It is loathsome to think that our tree was felled indifferently, because it was in the way, or to give unemployed labourers something to do to earn their gallon loaf, but whatever their reason, it had to come down. On their return from breakfast, the sight that greeted them must have been something of a surprise. Was their approach a cautious one? Where they had wrestled with the tree half an hour before, there was now a large hole, a cavern even, and the tree had fallen into it. ‘When they came back, that yew Tree had fallen down of itself; and when they looked, there was a girt hole right underneath it, underneath its roots, a girt cave like.’ This in the words of the rustic voice Wigram used in his final account to W. B. Gerish. His 1888 letter to the Hertfordshire Observer is less picturesque but more dramatic: ‘On his return [he] found that the old tree had fallen, collapsing into a large cavity underneath its roots.’

Until I read about grub felling, I simply could not understand how a half-felled tree had fallen into a hole, but if most of the roots had been severed and there was a cavity under the yew, it would have been suspended by a few stubborn roots that eventually surrendered their charge to the hollow in the earth. After visiting several ancient yews, I could believe that one might collapse in on itself. The weight distribution is uneven as the heart rots away leaving heavy outer trunks and branches, twisted and over-balanced as the branches trail along the ground. The roots, severed and weakened as they would have been by the men’s exertions, must have given way while they were at breakfast. At least that’s the explanation needed to understand the 1888 version in which the tree falls into a large hole. The later version could be interpreted differently: the tree simply fell over and left a large cavity where the roots had been, but surely these countrymen were used to the holes left by trees that came down in this way, and would not need a supernatural explanation for the cavity.

‘It’s not unknown for voids to develop under very old trees,’ wrote Wigram. It is certainly true that a cavern, or at least a hole, could have formed in the chalk under the shallow clay where the tree grew – it is not unusual for sink holes to form from erosion where the bedrock is limestone – and the weight of a tree no longer held steady by its roots could have brought in the ceiling of the cavity. It is not the only Pelham story of a cavity opening up in the chalk. Less than a mile to the east, on the other side of the Ash Valley, there is a tale recorded in the 1930s that the first church in the Pelhams was destroyed by Vikings or Pharisees (the local word for fairies) or, more prosaically, it collapsed into a hole that opened up beneath it.

She was down. ‘It is done,’ wrote Rider Haggard of another tree in another place.

A change has come over the landscape; the space that for generations has been filled with leafy branches is now white and empty air. I know of no more melancholy sight – indeed, to this day I detest seeing a tree felled; it always reminds me of the sudden and violent death of a man. I fancy it must be the age of timbers that inspires us with this respect and sympathy, which we do not feel for a sapling or a flower.

Ancient trees have personalities and attract stories; it is hard not to think that this was an event in the life of the village. A crowd must have gathered that morning, if not to watch the iniquitous act, then to see the cavity. We know the Skinner family kept loppings, which hints at the value of the highly prized wood. No doubt, other villagers kept pieces as well if they could – to make spoons and knife handles. Peter Kalm, an eighteenth-century Scandinavian traveller, left an account of a tree he saw chopped down in Hertfordshire, describing the surprising number of people on the scene, wanting the leaves and roots and twigs for fuel or to make baskets. I imagine a host of villagers turning up that day. Nothing of that prized wood would be wasted. John Aubrey’s fair and spreading ewe-tree furnished him and the other schoolboys with nutt-crackers and scoopes to pull the flesh out of their apples. These would make fine souvenirs from a dragon’s lair.

I have often wondered what was made of the yew. If anything has survived. I have started to keep an eye on the local antique auctions, hoping to find a Windsor chair from the right period. I know what I am looking for. The wood mustn’t be too dark. The seat needs to be elm and shaped like the flagstones of a castle staircase, as if worn by years of use. And it has to be a stick back, no splat, with two hoops of yew, one for the back and one for the elbows, burnished to a rich honey, the tight grain bewitching and warm, taken from a tree with a dragon in its story. I’ll know it when I see it.