Country Mouse
The results of my health MOT, covering most of the so-called ‘diseases of civilisation’, will be back soon – but one of Mary’s contacts says we should have requested a more comprehensive screening.
‘You need to rule out vascular dementia,’ Sarah opined. ‘It’s where the sufferer is completely normal for about 88 per cent of the time and then bonkers for 12 per cent.’
Sarah, who lives in Sussex, was taken aback by the vehemence of my reaction to seeing an avenue of beech trees new neighbours have planted in front of her cottage.
It is bad enough that her glorious downland view has been screened off, but at least, you might think, with the onset of winter, the trees would have yielded their rustling golden leaves to the prevailing westerlies, once more revealing the view.
But you’d be wrong. The beech is a deciduous tree but it clings on to its leaves for ages; hence its popularity as a ‘privacy shield’ in suburbia, where it can be employed for screening purposes against prying eyes
Beeches look good in the right place – on Dartmoor or Exmoor, or in gnarled, witchy groves on the top of downland, eg Wittenham Clumps. But it is a forest or parkland tree.
Yet, Sarah insists, the new incumbents of the Big House, who have installed the beeches, are well-meaning. They have cascades of money from working in the finance ‘industry’ and, indeed, they have ‘done a lot’ for the village: employing swains, scullery maids and retired farmhands who can spend the day chopping kindling into pick-a-stick-sized bundles. In short, there are enough workers for a Downton- style Christmas staff photo.
Having understood trees’ crucial role in regulating the climate and in delivering biodiversity, they have made the mistake of thinking that All Green is Good. Now, where there was previously a humble lane with a few dead elms, some elder and thickets of ivy and bramble, this avenue of giant trees marching towards their Big House lends, I imagine they think, a theatrical tone to befit their status as Hedge Fund Squires.
Yet the Big House is not that big; it’s more of a hobby farm. It is just the biggest house in the village – and therefore an aggrandising, tree-lined avenue leading to it cannot be regarded as anything but pretentious.
Beech trees will get taller by six feet every year until Sarah’s cottage is cast into permanent darkness. ‘Goodbye, Blackberry Way’ was a line from my favourite pop song I listened to endlessly in the seventies, the decade in which I am ‘stuck’ according to Mary. Inevitably, no blackberries were evident this year; they, of course, cannot live under the dense shade of beech, which is why conservationists have grave reservations about this species. ‘But we shall look in vain for a carpet of herbage beneath their shade … though here and there a sickly holly has resisted the malignant influence of its drip,’ wrote the late naturalist Reverend C A Johns, in 1847.
But how could they be already so tall? An instant line of trees. It seems the impatient Hedge Fund Squires did not install them as saplings but rather they arrived as 12-foot-tall, young trees, complete with root balls wrapped in sackcloth. They had been grown in a specialist nursery, from which they were moved with the assistance of an engineer and a crane to Sarah’s village, where they were placed with all the precision of chess pieces.
As Mary, quoting Dorothy Parker, never tires of saying, ‘Just think what God could have done if he’d had the money.’
If All Green is Good, then what could signal a benefactor’s virtue more elegantly than the planting of giant rows of trees?
But why have they not noticed that the beeches, being planted between the village and its prospect of the Downs in general and the setting sun’s rays in particular, will remove these joys for the villagers? The long shadows will advance yearly as each growing season adds further sprays of pathological growth, contributing to the dying of the light. Yet the villagers, even though in summer they must turn on lights at midday to ‘alleviate’ the gloom, feel shy to complain. Neo-feudalism is at play and many are dependent, in one way or another, on the Big House.
I had some words of consolation for Sarah. Increasingly, planning laws are challenging the privileges of private landowners. In a woke world of housing shortages and soon-to-come legally binding commitments to house sub-saharan climate refugees, the unwoke concept of a pleasant view might soon become as quaint as two duchesses discussing over tea and cucumber sandwiches whether to install a ha-ha. People will compete to have bad views, since the Corbynistas plan to charge them extra Council Tax for the privilege of having a good one.
I have offered to tell the Hedge Fund Squires on Sarah’s behalf that what is needed to save the village from eternal gloom is swift and decisive action to pollard or coppice the beeches into a tall hedge, before they ‘get away’, back to an appropriate height for a farm lane. Or why not chop them up for firewood and replace them with a more appropriate species for a humble lane – hawthorn or whitebeam, for example – that will not grow at six feet a year and will produce a crop of blossom for bees and later berries for blackbirds and thrushes?
But both Sarah and Mary feel that, as a known troublemaker, I am not the one to act as ambassador.