The Wood

By Christopher Dobson

This is the story of a year in the life of a Sussex wood which has seen Romans, Normans and a German bomber.

It is now rich in animal life, plants and dog walkers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley
• Release date: Feb 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370827077

Christopher Dobson

A former war correspondent, Christopher Dobson was twice the winner of the International Journalist of the Year award. He reported from the Middle East, the US, Russia and China for the Daily Telegraph, Daily Express and Daily Mail.

Book preview

Chapter 1

January: Janus, the two-faced god, who looks forward and back

New Year’s Day: An iron-cold day with a cloudless blue-white sky and a sun so pale it throws only the faintest of shadows, a day ideal for walking off last night’s excesses. Freezing mist fills the hollows, frost silvers the bare trees and etches the ribs of the fallen chestnut leaves. My stick rings on the ground, icicles hang by the wall and if Dick the shepherd were not in his heated tractor he would certainly be blowing his nail.

Bertie, chasing a pheasant which got up under our feet, hits a patch of ice and performs a triple toe-loop before crashing into a clump of heather. Bertie, I must explain, is a three-year-old yellow Labrador named after Bertie Wooster, with all the qualifications for becoming a fully paid up member of the Drones Club.

We have the wood to ourselves. Big Dave and Frank, who have been busy coppicing the chestnut trees since last October, have the day off. Rows of poles, precisely felled, mark their progress. Circles of ashes show where they have burnt the trimmings. Some of these still smoulder, their pungent smoke rising in grey-blue pillars. Dave is the fire-lighting expert. He does it in the simplest fashion, with a shovel-full of red hot embers carried from one fire to the next pile of trimmings. He is the modern equivalent of the stone-age man who carried fire with him in his ember pot wherever he went. Chestnut burns very hot, so hot that bakers used it in their ovens in the days when they made real bread. It throws out an excellent heat from an open fire but it spits ferociously and needs a close-meshed fireguard.

The rings of ashes in the wood look like the result of an artillery barrage but by mid-summer nature will have worked one of its small but happy miracles, and each ring will be surrounded by a circle of foxgloves whose seeds have lain dormant until they are activated by the heat of the fires and the light of the sun and burst into vivid flower. In a couple of years when the ashes are cold and the chestnuts’ new growth again shuts out the light the foxgloves will vanish.

Bertie and I work our way down to the badger sett; a woodcock rises like a rocket through the trees only to pitch down again about thirty yards away; a mixed party of tits, blue, great and coal probe the bark of an oak tree for grubs and spiders; wood pigeons, searching for acorns among the fallen leaves, clatter off through the branches as we approach. The music of the hunt comes clearly across the valley: hounds in full cry, the huntsmen’s horns, the hunt saboteurs’ angry shouts.

The sett is very old and has been the home of many generations of badgers. Its massive central redoubt is concealed under the roots of an oak surrounded by a thick screen of holly bushes. Its underground passages and chambers are spread out along the sandy bank of a rivulet, in a roughly rectangular pattern covering an area of about forty yards by seventy with at least thirty entrances and ventilation shafts dug deep in the sandy soil. It covers such a large area that some of the outlying holes may not be connected to the main chamber but are independent workings occupied by families which have left or been ejected from the redoubt.

Not all the holes are in use and a fox has its den in one of them. Like many human neighbours he and the badgers studiously ignore one another. It is a busy area, with huge mounds of soil thrown out of working holes as the sows prepare for the birth of their cubs later in the month. There is no sign of activity today, although the latrine area, carefully situated at the sett’s boundary, has been recently used. British badgers do not normally hibernate but on days like today they stay underground, huddled together, warm in their dry beds of foliage, safe from everything except man.

We walk on, down to the stream. A heron gets up as we leave the cover of the trees. I think he will go hungry today. The stream holds some tasty little brook trout but ice has edged out to cover the deeper ponds where they live and they will be safely tucked away under the bank. The cold is beginning to get to me. We turn for home past a clump of rhododendrons where a pair of goldcrests are busily hunting for insects. These tiny birds suffer badly in freezing weather and must feed constantly to maintain their body heat and stay alive. They will be lucky to survive.

It’s uphill and our breath hangs in the still, frozen air. The sun goes down, a pale golden orb pushed beneath the horizon by the deep blue darkness rushing in from the east. Mist rolls across the fields and settles between the hedgerows flanking the sunken lane. Everything is still. A tawny owl’s quavering Oo-oo-oo muffled by the mist, is followed by the eerie scream of a fox seeking a mate. No wonder that some of the locals swear that our house is haunted and refuse to go near it at night. I must admit it is a bit spooky when the mist comes down, the trees rustle together and the night creatures call.

The house is late eighteenth century and apart from the customary Grey Lady attributed to many old houses, local legend has it that it is haunted by the ghost of a butler who did, indeed, hang himself from a fir tree that still stands, stark with old age, in the garden. One previous owner was so convinced the house was haunted she persuaded the Bishop of Chichester to perform the ceremony, of exorcism: Bell, Book and Candle, the whole works. Maybe there was no ghost or perhaps the ceremony worked. Certainly we have felt no alien presence at Edgewood in the thirty years we have lived here. Possibly the presence of four boisterous children and their friends has scared the butler away. My sons, however, have done their best to keep the story alive by standing at the side of the lane on misty evenings, Christopher completely covered in a sheet, Nicholas behind him with his head poked through Chris’s bent arm. Motorists have been known to arrive at the White Hart gibbering about headless ghosts.

January 4

The bright, cold weather persists. Dave and Frank are making good headway with their coppicing – they have to finish by April to avoid damaging the new growth. I stop to warm my hands at their fire and have a tin mug of tea laced with something even more warming thrust into them. Bertie is fed the crusts from Dave’s sandwiches – much to the annoyance of the magpies chattering in the treetops.

These cunning, handsome birds have started to gather in their mating-market flocks when up to a hundred gather to roost together. Groups form in ceremonial circles and individuals perform solo dances, displaying their conspicuous white feathers, raising their crests and opening and closing their tails like geisha girls clicking the fans. Once they have chosen their mates, the flocks disperse and they get down to the serious business of building a bulky domed nest – often rebuilding an old one – and raising a noisy family. They are among the most easily recognizable of birds with their pied colouring but, while they appear to be pure black and white, their wing feathers have a metallic green and deep violet sheen, rather like shot silk when they are seen close-up while their long tails are tinged with an iridescent bronze-green. They used to be kept in cages like parrots, taught to speak and to perform tricks.

They were also supposed to have occult powers and country people believed that to see one brought bad luck, but to see two brought joy. I like the Scottish version:

"One’s sorrow, two’s mirth,

Three’s a wedding, four’s a birth,

Five’s a christening. Six a death,

Seven’s heaven, eight is hell,

And nine’s the devil his ane sel."

However, for all their intelligence and arcane powers they are lumbering fliers - with their strong, hooked beaks they remind me of Whitley bombers in the early days of the war – and were almost wiped out by gamekeepers on shooting estates because of their liking for game-bird chicks.

Now, with fewer estates and consequently fewer gamekeepers anxious to show off their efficiency in killing vermin to hang on their gibbets, the Pies have greatly increased in number and boldness. There has been much written recently about the havoc they wreak among the eggs and chicks of garden birds. Their depredations have become the source of anguished debate among animal lovers: should they be allowed to carry on killing or should they be killed to protect the song birds? My feeling is that they should be left alone. They eat many harmful pests, and by their culling of the weaker garden birds ensure that the fittest survive to breed. Moreover, if one is shot it will simply be replaced by another unless a gamekeeper-style massacre is mounted, and I don’t believe anyone would like that. Nature will eventually level the balance as long as man does not interfere.

Dave throws down the shiny top of a milk bottle and immediately one of the pies drops from its branch, sidles up to the bottle top, seizes it and carries it away to decorate its nest in a fork in the upper branches of a tall alder. They keep the same nest for several years and festoon it with all sorts of shiny bits and pieces. They have been known to hop through bedroom windows to steal jewellery; hence Rossini’s, The Thieving Magpie.

Frank is doing the felling today using, using his chain-saw to drop the poles, some of them forty feet tall and a foot across, in precise rows. He trims them, then puts his measuring stick against the pole to cut it into required lengths. Only straight lengths are chosen, the rest burnt. Dave strips off the bark by drawing the poles through steel teeth mounted on a frame made from discarded poles. He smooths them with a curved two-handled blade and then splits them into two or four using wedges and a mallet made of chestnut, He trims the ends with an adze and the posts are made.

What marvellous wood this sweet chestnut is. It splits from top to bottom but is hard, resilient and virtually rot-proof. It is also a self-renewing crop, growing so that it can be harvested every twelve years. This growth cycle means that the wood is divided into twelve sections which are coppiced in turn. All this is done with tools which have not changed in the last two hundred years except for the chainsaw and the truck. When it is wet and the truck slips in the deep ruts made over the years by high-wheeled horse-carts, Dave swears he would rather have the horses back. Alas, those days are long gone.

January 10

The wind has backed to the south-west. The frost has gone and the rain is lashing down. The paths in the wood are quagmires. Dave’s battered old lorry sinks up to its axles and has to be winched out. I slip and go base over apex. As I lie, winded in the mud, Bertie, always ready for a new game, jumps on top of me.

I fight him off, lever myself out of the mud and cut myself a sturdy thumb stick from one of the hazel bushes which had been planted at the same time as the chestnuts. Hazels have been coppiced since prehistoric times to provide pliable straight rods for a variety of purposes. They were woven into panels for wattle and daub houses and are still used to make hurdles for sheep pens, bean poles, and basket weaving. I use them as handles for the witches brooms I make for sweeping out the yard but commercial demand has dropped away, most brooms are now made of plastic and there is little profit in commercial coppicing. So the hazel plantation is left to provide nuts for the wood’s squirrels, mice and voles. Nuthatches, pigeons, pheasants and jays join in the feast and so do I. A dish of sweet, crunchy hazel nuts with a glass of sloe gin is no bad way of sending your dinner guests home happy.

My thumb stick provides me with a stabilising third leg as I slide downhill through the mud. The stream is brown, roaring through the culvert bridge. Bertie foregoes his usual swim. Rain trickles down my neck. We take cover under a thick holly tree and wait for it to ease. Bertie, fed-up, settles quietly at my feet. We are out of the wind. I suddenly realise we are not alone. A bright black eye is watching us from a branch just above my head. It’s a robin, quite content to allow us to share his shelter. There is movement on the path, a bedraggled little vixen appears, walking delicately, shaking the water off her feet just like a cat. She and her cubs must be hungry for her to be out in such foul weather. We are downwind of her and she is unaware of us until Bertie stirs. Startled, she seeks us out with nose and eyes, registers danger and, as the policemen say, had it away on her toes.

This little incident reinforced my belief that the secret to watching wildlife is stillness, that quality which, more than any other, seems to be missing from modern life.

People often complain to me that despite walking for hours through woods and fields they have seen only the departing tails of animals and birds. Well, it is not surprising when they go crashing around in bright anoraks, talking loudly, with yapping dogs running all over the countryside. They remind me of the US Army trying to find Vietcong guerrillas who have melted silently into the countryside.

There are simple rules to follow if you really want to see birds and animals going about their business: Walk quietly to a clearing in a wood, preferably close to water then sit down under a bush, keep still and wait. Wear quiet clothes, a hat to break up the outline of your head and, if you are really serious, a face mask made of netting which has the added advantage of keeping the insects away. If you must take your dog make sure it is well enough trained to sit quietly. Never, ever wear after shave lotion or perfume; you will be smelt out from miles away, not only by animals who hate it but by gnats who love it. You will be astonished at the wildlife which will appear in an area which at first seems barren. It is movement and noise and strange smells which send animals scurrying for cover. Stay still and they will come to you.

January 13

The day started grey but quiet. Then, at lunchtime, the wind began to build from the south-west, sending white horses galloping down the Channel. I took Bertie out early but the bare branches were already clashing and banging and I kept an eye on trees left leaning by the great storm of 1987. Everything had taken cover. The badgers and foxes were safe enough, tucked up underground and the squirrels were safe enough in their substantial dreys of interwoven twigs. If their host tree survived so would they. A blackbird scuffled for food in the layer of leaves at the sheltered hedge bottom and a flight of gulls, riding the wind, sailed past at tree-top height. No other creatures moved except for Bertie who had the wind up his tail and was chasing the whirling leaves but the whole of the wood seemed to be in motion, dancing to the wind’s commands. I headed for home and a glass of something warming.

By five o’clock the wind was howling through the trees, roaring down the chimney and the roof was creaking and groaning. A tile skittered down to smash in the yard. Dustbins rolled around. The wisteria tapped at the window. It was all very noisy. We turned up the sound on the television and put some apple logs on the fire. Bertie twitched, no doubt chasing rabbits in his sleep.

Gradually the tumult died. I took Bertie out for a last-chance walk at eleven and everything had changed. It was quiet, there was no wind and the sky had been blown clear of clouds. A badger lolloped up the lane in the light of my torch. No doubt he was hoping to find something tasty in the overturned dustbins.

The stars were brilliant. Orion the Hunter stalked the heavens; the Plough endlessly circled the Pole Star, pointing the way to navigators. The heavens were full of activity with showers of meteorites burning up as they flashed through the earth’s atmosphere in a display of celestial fireworks. Man and his works were up there too. An airliner rumbled north-west flashing red, green and white lights. Not too long ago, its crew would have been delighted to see the Plough; now the pilot pushes a button and a piece of electronic wizardry tells him where he is, where he has been and where he is going. It is indeed a miracle of modern science, but it