Country Mouse Giles Wood
It reads like one of Sir Iain Duncan Smith’s ‘mission statements’, but this quote from Richard Jefferies has a particular resonance for me during these testing times.
‘Human beings must be kept taut or, like a rope, they will slacken.’
There may be reasons, but no excuses, for rising at 10am and retiring at 2am. The reason is that, with no grown-up to turn off the telly, I drift mindlessly past midnight into programmes like Aussie Gold Hunters that have me glued to the screen while the village snores.
My father had the same tendency for finding almost anything on TV in the small hours to be absolutely fascinating. In later life, he stayed in bed until 2pm each day. Thus, in evolutionary terms, I am a superior specimen since I have four extra hours of potential productivity per day.
Only potential productivity, mind. Whatever else my side of the family has achieved, according to Mary, we are ‘certainly very well rested’.
Gold played a significant part in my father’s life. He tormented his stockbroker at Schroders by buying and selling tiny quantities of yen and Thorn Electrical shares. But he also bought Krugerrands.
Gold has exerted a mesmeric power over men since the dawn of civilisation. What glued me to Aussie Gold Hunters was one old prospector. He was down on his luck and about to admit financial defeat when his wonky old detector bleeped and he started to wrestle a gold nugget the size of an ostrich egg out of the unyielding, red clay, whereupon he called his long-suffering Sheila on his mobile to share with her his finding of what he called a ‘retirement nugget’. Television gold. But this morning, well before ten, I leapt out of bed with all the motivation I can usually summon only when catching an early flight to the Mediterranean.
What galvanised me was the sound of arboricide. The same hellish machine whine that will, according to experts, inevitably turn the Amazon to scrubland by 2065 was being wielded further down the row by the landlord who, as he swung his chainsaw like a Texan, was revelling with one of our neighbours in the forthcoming destruction of a spectacular example of a rogue Leyland cypress that had, in local dialect, ‘got away’.
Eavesdropping is my favoured method of finding out what’s happening in the village, since direct communication rarely delivers results.
How many times have I tried to find common ground amongst the indigeni, only to be contradicted, even on uncontroversial subjects such as the weather.
I therefore hesitated to come forward to defend this most unlikely of lost causes for me – the preservation of an alien tree species. Coming as I do from what my psychoanalyst unhelpfully described as ‘withering stock’, I cannot help but admire the Leyland’s luscious, green ‘hybrid vigour’.
Then again I may simply have been suffering from an extreme case of biophilia. The word, coined by E O Wilson and unlikely to gain traction in this country, describes the innate tendency in humans to respect other life forms.
There is another factor, which is overlooked by trigger-happy chainsaw operatives: time itself. It would take only three hours to dismantle with a chainsaw an organism that has taken 30 years to grow. It seemed to me that a stay of execution was in order.
We cannot really spare this hybrid evergreen. In the absence of other life forms, the ecological niches and the dry, intricate hidden world within created by this plasticky, evergreen and stillgrowing freak of nature would not easily be replaced. In the absence of any better perches, birds resort to it in numbers – notably pigeons, doves, wrens, goldcrests and pied wagtails.
And yet, by eavesdropping on rather than joining in the conversation, I have unwittingly disqualified myself from the debate – if debate is the right word: if there’s one thing I have learnt in this, my adopted county, it is that Wiltshire villagers on the whole do not actually like trees.
Trees harbour pigeons and rooks which attack seedlings and vegetables. Trees are a pest species. They are competition. Therefore I just skulked and stayed silent as I eavesdropped on some other neighbours chortling, ‘It’s going,’ which is local parlance for ‘It’s getting the chop.’
Later, Mary confirmed with the cottager, in whose garden it has been expanding over 20 years, that she feels no attachment, sentimental or otherwise, to the tree for the following reasons. One: ‘No grass will grow near its roots.’ And two: ‘I don’t like pigeon poo.’
If there’s one other thing I have learnt as an outsider in this close-knit village, it’s that locals detest outsiders lecturing them on how to run their affairs. Only last year, I asked a local gardener what he would do if a visiting heron started to nest in the willow tree by the village pond – an event I devoutly wished for.
Without a second thought, he said, ‘I’d cut it down.’ And he wasn’t joking.
‘Eavesdropping is my favoured method of finding out what’s happening’