G133: What Have We Done (21 page)

The stump of my grandfather’s arm where his hand had been amputated looked exactly the same as a tree looks when it heals after a limb has been sawn off. The bark grows together around and over the wound, and it flows towards the centre and meets like water. Grandpa reacted the same way as a tree to the trauma of amputation: he grew up faster and he grew in stature and strength. Plus: he put his roots down deeper. His arm,
sans
hand, looked like a cigar stub.

One of my greatest pleasures in life is to turn my compost heap. There’s a touch of archaeology about it as you peel off successive layers of half-rotted weeds, and something of the quiet satisfaction of counting banknotes. I have my own gang of tiny alchemists, millions of them, all busy turning the dross of old banana skins, potato peel and grass cuttings into the golden, delicious fragrance that will feast this year’s salad crop and increase the roses. In winter, you might be stoking a fire, so much steam billows out of the heap, and you can warm your frozen fingers in it. As a vegetable power station, the compost heap is a shanty town for the occasional rat or mouse family, or anything else that likes to keep warm and sheltered. Other people get slow-worms or snakes, but I haven’t been so lucky, although I did get a fat, orange-bottomed bumblebee this summer, nesting in the cliff face left by my spade where I quarried.

‘Vicious’ is the word that springs to mind to describe blackthorn. Call me a masochist or perverse, but I still love these sea urchins of our hedgerows, spiny foot soldiers that will prick you like a wasp or puncture a tractor tyre swifter than a thought. The entire bush is armoured with batteries of hypodermic syringes.

Whenever I’ve wanted to express what I feel about a particular
wood or tree, I have simply gone out and begun some hard physical work with that species, and the wood has never failed to speak to me, to give up its secrets as if they had been withheld to all but the supplicant willing to devote an hour or two of hard labour and expend some effort, even sustain some pain, in the pursuit of the truth about that particular tree. You have to commune with the wood, and to do that you have to work.

Sometimes when I wake up, I see a window or a wall, and wonder, ‘Where am I, whose house is this? Which country am I in? Is this a hotel or the bedroom of a friend? A lover?’

Then slowly I remember I am in my own house, and it is just another bedroom. I sleep around, you see, moving from one bedroom to the other, alternating vacant bedrooms or visiting the satellite dens in the fields.

Outside my windows, I hear industrious tapping, like a gardener at work. Is he banging home a fencing post, or mending a gate? It sounds like hammering, and is the vigorous percussion of a thrush’s beak and a snail. This thrush is constantly at work at certain particular anvils around the house. One by the pile of peg tiles next to the ash arch, one by the woodshed close to a young walnut tree.

The first thing I see in my window when I wake up is woods. Twelve in one, sixteen in the other – subdivisions of the window. Each frames trees, a lattice of branches, and beyond, a Suffolk sky. Sun just beginning to show from the clouds.

Ash trees kissing and plaiting (maples too) like lovers on the sides of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. ‘For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’ A frozen kiss. The embrace of ivy lianas in the ash leaves an impression, a dent, in the bark. The word is ‘ingrained’.

The meandering of a river and the sinuous curving branches of an old coppiced ash are one and the same. They express and map the constant fluctuations in the forces in the world. If an ash tree grows
first this way and then that, it is responding to changing conditions of light around it.

I remember studying the leaf and the details of the stomata, cutting delicate sections of leaf with a barber’s cut-throat razor, honed on a leather strop at the front of the laboratory classroom. The wonder of stomata. The central political act which our whole future hinges on is that of the exchange of carbon dioxide into and out of the atmosphere, and the release of that element D.H. Lawrence pondered, the very essence of our continued survival: oxygen.

To see each tree as an oxygen factory, and as a trap and reservoir of carbon. So that the best way we can possibly contain and immobilise carbon is to lock it into a tree and utilise that tree as timber and make from it something of lasting beauty.

S
tanley Donwood is the pen name of Dan Rickwood, an English artist who has collaborated extensively with Radiohead and whose work has featured on all the band’s albums. But to associate Donwood exclusively with Radiohead is to do him – and the breadth and scope of his artistic range – a disservice. In addition to his partnership with Radiohead, Donwood has created artwork for the covers of J.G. Ballard novels and for the Glastonbury festival. He has written and illustrated a number of books and exhibited his work around the world, most recently in Sydney, where a major retrospective was staged in May 2015.

Hurt Hill
is taken from a series that was exhibited under the title
Far Away is Close at Hand in Images of Elsewhere.
Other pictures had titles like
Soken Fen, Nether
and
Winterfold;
all culled from Ordnance Survey maps. I’d become interested in what I loosely termed ‘the Northern European imagination’ and the formulation of fevered myths, legends and folk tales of the dark forests in which we spent so many aeons of ancestral time.

I took myself off to the woods, the fragments of the great forests that once spread over our continent. As dusk creeps through the trees it’s easy – very easy – to imagine every ghoul, sprite, elf or pixie that has ever haunted the Northern European mind. Our love of nature, and of all things natural, intensified with industrialisation and the depletion of what we now call ‘natural resources’. But it’s difficult to feel that love when you are lost as night is falling, walking faster and faster through the forest. My loudest thoughts passing through my mind as I stumbled around in the dark were: ‘What’s that? What’s that? What was that?’

Stanley Donwood