I love it in the shed

‘I love it in the shed . . . I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.’ This is Roger Deakin, author and environmentalist who died 20 years ago today, writing in a notebook he kept during the last years of his life. 

Deakin was born in Watford in 1943 in Watford, Hertfordshire, the only child of railway clerk Cyril Deakin and his wife Doris. His father died when he was 17. Deakin was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s School and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read English. After graduating, he worked as a teacher and then in advertising, while also making films and radio programmes. In 1968 he bought Walnut Tree Farm at Mellis in Suffolk, a timber-framed farmhouse surrounded by meadows and a moat, which he restored and where he lived for the rest of his life.

Deakin became closely involved in environmental campaigning and was one of the founders, in 1983, of Common Ground, an organisation concerned with local landscape, culture and environmental distinctiveness. He continued to work in advertising, broadcasting and documentary production, making programmes for the BBC and other organisations. His first book, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, appeared in 1999, following a journey inspired by John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer. Deakin travelled around Britain swimming in rivers, lakes, canals, lidos, the sea and other stretches of open water.

After Waterlog, Deakin began travelling and researching a book about trees and wood, visiting places including France, Greece, Australia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as well as many parts of Britain. He completed Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees shortly before his death. Diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2006, he died at Walnut Tree Farm on 19 August that year, aged 63. Wikipedia, The Outdoor Swimming Society, The Guardian, and University of East Anglia. 

During the last six years of his life, Deakin also kept a detailed record of his daily life, work, thoughts and memories. He filled 45 lined exercise books in his distinctive handwriting, numbering and paginating each one and putting a table of contents on its cover. The entries included observations of the countryside around Walnut Tree Farm, accounts of everyday activities and encounters, memories, travel notes and material gathered for his books and radio programmes.

After his death, extracts from the notebooks were edited by his partner Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker and published by Hamish Hamilton in 2008 as Notes from Walnut Tree Farm (which can be sampled at Googlebooks).. Rather than reproducing the notebooks chronologically, the editors selected entries from different years and arranged them month by month to create a single composite year. Abbreviations were expanded, but otherwise the published extracts retained Deakin’s words. The following three entries are taken from that volume (though none can be dated to a particular year).

9 January

‘A wild, windy night and a bright, clear windy day. I walk out along Cowpasture Lane and up the hill to the pollard hornbeam, definitely a trasmocho tree with its unusually wide bolling. On the way I stand leaning on the little wooden bridge over the stream at the ford, watching the running water. Then a long trudge into the wind to reach the badger sett, still very active and well trodden, with claw marks in the mud everywhere. The wood is creaking, and a sound like a squeaky hinge sings out where two birches are rubbing against each other. From the mud hill-fort of the badger sett, beaten paths radiate into the wood and out across a plank bridge into the weedy set-aside field beyond the wood. In the long shadows of the late white sun it is easy to make them out and to follow one over the field to a ditch crossing and all the way to a gap in the wire fence of the railway embankment, where the badgers scratch themselves against the wire and leave little clumps of their shaving-brush hair on the grass. I walk to the lane in the shadow and shelter of the tall embankment and scuttle home, glad of the shelter of the lane’s hedges.’

15 February

Saturday morning I wake up in London and walk over to the Festival Hall after a hearty bacon and mushroom breakfast. Over Waterloo Bridge, and see a long queue of people eddying and dropping down the narrow well of stairs to the Embankment below like water going down a bath plug.

Amazing forest of placards on pine sticks provided by the Mirror. I found myself marching behind banners I couldn’t read held by a bunch of women, with one reading, as I later discovered after being photographed by the press, ‘Cunt-lovers Against the War’.

There were quite a few dogs on leads, ‘Dogs of War’, as one placard called them, and several poodles, including one led by a priest in full cassock with a banner behind it that read ‘Poodle, Bite your Master’s Leg’.

There were also several beautifully made huge swans, which flapped their diaphanous wings and seemed to fly above the crowd, a striking image in the park. Mike [Hodges] and I spoke up for the daffodils in Hyde Park that were getting trodden down and crushed, and a man climbed up into a plane tree in St James’s Park to watch the march.

There were placards like ‘Pagan Queers for Peace’ and ‘Cold? Wrap Yourself Up in a Woolly Liberal’. Richard discovered long-lost friends like the Berkhamsted CND and the Woodcraft Folk.

Mike, Sarah Martin and Carol [Law] escaped from the park, meeting Caroline Soper and Hanif Kureishi on the way, picked up a free bottle or two of Mecca Cola, and squeezed through a narrow iron gateway with thousands of others to reach Marble Arch and the warmth of a café, then adjourned later to Cigala for a dinner of Caldeirada and rabbit paella, washed down with several bottles of an excellent Ribera del Duero wine called Martin Berdugo. Sarah Martin says she knows of a cork oak forest, where black pigs graze in the woods in the west of Andalusia near Murcia; and the hotel is owned by some people called Chesterton.

Drove home at 1 a.m., arriving at Mellis at 3 a.m., e-mails to Australia (big 500,000 march in Sydney), bed at 4 a.m.’

18 February

‘I had to fiddle about putting the car on the battery charger, then went up the field to rummage about in one of my sheds looking for an architrave. I love it in the shed. Half the tin roof has rusted through and caved in, but, instead of mending it, which would have meant cutting down some brambles to get round the back, I simply moved all the wooden architraves and mouldings into another part of the shed away from the drips.

The whole floor of the shed is under attack from the rabbits whose warren it is, so all the contents are constantly subsiding into the earth. It is a shed with subsidence.

I tiptoed my way in, past a couple of big sash windows from a skip and a fine semicircular stained-glass window, and eased along to the far end. A legless Windsor smoker’s bow chair: a lovely thing but in need of a set of legs. Another project for my nineties.

Removing several sections of stove pipe, I came across the canvas bed that would have been used to convey the grain and chaff to the threshing drum. I moved this and uncovered the pile of architraves and mouldings. All beautiful but all too short, and not a single one matching. I never knew it was possible to plane wood in so many different ways.

None of the pieces was right. A man called David Bill at Shepperton Studios had given them to me years ago, leftovers from commercial sets. Mock-dado rails. Spoof Edwardiana. And now here they were, a palace for spiders, a dust museum, a nuisance for the rabbits. In the end I drove to Diss and bought a new architrave from Jewson’s.’