Shifting Baselines #5 - Reg and the Weald

A coppice wood in the Weald of Kent

Mind that low branch as you come in, and give your eyes a minute to settle, for it is dark under here after the lane. There. Now you are in the wood proper. Sit you down on that stool, the old cut stump there, that is a hazel been cut and come again for three hundred year very like, and I will tell you what this wood was, for you have caught me at the right time of year to feel the want of it. It is May. And on a May evening this wood should be near enough shaking with sound, and you have noticed, I can see you have, though you are too polite to say, that it is quiet. Hold that quiet in your mind. We will come back to it.

I worked this wood the old way, all my life, the way my father did and his. Coppicing, they call it. You cut the underwood, the hazel and the chestnut, right down to the stool of a winter, and it springs up again from the stump, a great burst of straight new poles, and you leave it to grow its cycle, seven year, ten, a dozen for the chestnut, and then you cut it again. And you do not cut the whole wood at once, mind, you never did, you cut it in cants, a cant being a panel, a section, one each year, so a proper worked wood was a patchwork. This year's cant cut bare and open to the sky. Last year's springing up green and low. The one before thick as a hedge. And on up to the tall dark stuff near ready for the bill again. And over the top of the whole lot the standards, the big oaks left standing for their timber, one here, one there. That was a coppice wood. Not a wood like you think of a wood, all tall trees and shade. A wood of a dozen different heights all at the once, and light getting down into it, and thick low tangled cover you could hardly push through. And that, that low thick scrubby mess, that is the very thing the nightingale wants, and so we had them. Lord, we had them.

You will know the nightingale by name and I would lay money you have never heard one, for there are next to none left now in the whole of England outside a few corners of Kent and Sussex and Essex, and this was one of the corners. A plain little brown bird, browner than a robin and no more to look at than a sparrow, and out of that plain little throat comes the most sound you ever heard out of a living creature. It is not pretty, mind, not pretty the way a blackbird is pretty. It is too much for pretty. Great rich churrs and whistles and then a long low piping that swells right up, and then a silence, and then it lets fly again, and it goes on half the night, for it sings in the dark, that is the whole point of it, that is why the poets lost their heads over it. The male sings to fetch a mate down out of the night sky as she comes over on migration, so he sings loudest and longest before he is paired, all through May, and then when he has got his wife he hushes down to get on with the business, so the season of the full song is a short one, a few weeks, and if you do not go and stand in it in May you have missed it for the year. We had them singing out of every thick cant in this wood so a courting couple walking the ride of an evening could scarce hear themselves speak for the racket, and thought it the most romantic thing in the world, and so it was.

And that was not the half of it. On a summer afternoon, up above the nightingale, there was the turtle dove. Now there is a loss to break your heart, and I am not a man given to heartbreak. The turtle dove is a little dove, littler and prettier than the fat woodpigeons that clatter about the place, and it has a purr, a soft rolling purr, turr, turr, turr, drowsy and warm, and it was the very sound of an English summer, the sound of a hot still afternoon with the hay down. It is that old they put it in the Bible, the voice of the turtle heard in the land, and they meant this bird, this very bird, the turtle dove. And the cuckoo calling across from the far side, and out on the heathy edge where the wood thinned, come dusk, the churr of the nightjar, a sound like a little engine ticking over in the dark. That was a May and June in this wood when I was young. You could not have counted the voices in it.

So now. Now I will let you off holding that quiet. Go on and listen. What do you hear? I will tell you what you hear, for I stand here most evenings and I know it off by heart. You hear a robin. You hear a blackbird, and a fine bird he is, I will not say a word against the blackbird. And under the both of them you hear the road, the far-off hum of the road that is never off now, day nor night. And that is about the whole of it. The nightingale is all but finished in this county, gone from wood after wood where I heard them thick as anything as a boy, this very wood among them, near enough silent now where it used to ring. And the turtle dove. The turtle dove is as good as gone from the whole of Britain, better than nine in every ten of them lost, and not just lost slow, lost faster than any bird we have, the fastest-vanishing bird in the country they tell me, that soft summer purr going out of the land field by field and wood by wood while everyone looked the other way and mowed their verges. The cuckoo you are lucky to hear once in a spring where I heard three answering each other. The nightjar hangs on out on the heaths where folk have took trouble over it, I will give it that, but it is a near thing.

Now here is where you will expect me to curse somebody, and I am going to disappoint you, because it is not that simple and I have never had any patience with folk who make it simple. I am not a sentimental man. I know a wood is a living thing and it changes, and I will be the first to tell you that a good part of what quieted this wood was us stopping the very work I am stood here mourning. When the markets went, the coppicing went. Nobody wanted the hazel hurdles once they had wire fencing. Nobody wanted the chestnut hop poles once the hop gardens shrank away to nothing. The bavins and the faggots that fired the ovens, the besoms, the wattle, the paling, all of it, the whole trade the underwood was cut for, it died in my own lifetime, and I watched it die, and when the cutting stops the wood does what a wood wants to do, which is grow up tall and dark and shut the light out and let that thick low tangle die away underneath. And a nightingale cannot nest in a high dark wood. It wants the mess. It wants the young springing cant. So part of this, a good part, is that we walked away from the wood, and I will not stand here and pretend the wood should have stayed a factory for a trade nobody wanted, for that is a foolishness too.

But it is more than that, and here is where I will let a little blame back in, for it is earned. The deer. When I was a boy there were hardly a deer in this wood. Now they are everywhere, the fallow and worse than them the muntjac, a little foreign deer the size of a dog that got loose out of a park up country and has spread over the whole of the south, and what a deer does is eat the low growth. Eats it out. You cut a cant now and hope for that thick spring of cover and the deer are into it and they graze it off to nothing, so even where a man does the old work right the birds get no benefit of it. And more than that again, it is bigger than any one wood. The turtle dove never starved in the wood, it starved in the fields, for it lived off the little seeds of the weeds that used to grow in and around the corn, and we have sprayed the fields so clean now there is not a weed seed left for it to eat, so the birds that did come back could not raise their young. And then the little that survive all that must fly the whole way to Africa and back twice a year, and get shot in their thousands over France and Spain and Malta as they go, for the sport of it, and find the very edge of the desert they winter on drier and harder every year. You see? It is not one wicked man you can point at. It is the wood going dark, and the deer, and the sprayed fields, and the guns on the flyway, and the drying of a desert two thousand mile from here, all of it landing on the one little bird at the once. That is why it is so hard to fight. There is no one thing to fight.

What there is, is a wood full of dog-walkers of an evening who think it lovely. And it is lovely, I will not say it is not. But I hear them say it, peaceful, isn't it peaceful, and it catches me every time, for it is the wrong word and they do not know it is the wrong word. It is not peaceful. It is emptied. There is a world of difference between the two and it is the difference between a room where the party is over and a room where there was never any party at all. A young lad walks his dog here and hears a robin and the road and thinks that is a full wood, thinks that is what a wood in May is meant to sound like, because it is all he has ever heard, and I cannot give him my ears. I cannot make him hear the silence, because to him it is not a silence, it is just the ordinary sound of an ordinary wood. And that is the thing that gnaws at me worse than the losing ever did. Not that the birds went. That they went so quiet, and left so few behind that knew them, that a man can stand in an emptied wood and call it peaceful and mean it kindly.

So I talk. To you, to anybody who will come and sit on a stool in the dark and hear an old coppicer out. And I will finish with the useful part, for I am a practical man and I would not have you leave with nothing in your hands. This is a loss you can actually do something about, which is more than can be said for some. The nightingale is quick to forgive. Cut a cant, keep the deer off it with a bit of fence, let it grow thick and low and untidy, and give it a few years, and they will find it, they truly will, they come back to good work faster than you would credit. And the turtle dove has had a bit of luck at last, for they have stopped the shooting of it along the road through Spain and France these last few years, thrown it a line, and up and down the country now there are farmers leaving rough weedy corners and sowing the very seed it likes, on purpose, to feed it up when it comes. So it is not hopeless. Nothing here is hopeless. It only wants us to do the opposite of what we have got into the way of doing. Stop tidying. Leave the mess. Cut the wood and fence the deer and let the weeds seed and let a corner go rough and thick and low. The nightingale wants a mess, and a mess is the one thing we are all well able to make. Go on home now, and if ever you are near a thick young coppice in the south country of a May night, you go and stand in it in the dark and you wait, and God willing you will hear the thing I have been talking about, and then you will understand why an old man sits out here in an emptied wood and will not stop going on about it.