I took the decision with a great deal of reluctance; it felt like I was letting myself down. I had always been blithely confident, believing that nothing could possibly go wrong. I would happily scamper about on my shaky woodpile, brandishing my chainsaw and wearing no protective clothing whatsoever, serenely certain that everything would be fine, everything would always be fine. Even though the farmer’s accident with the tractor many years before had proved conclusively that here we were beyond yelling distance of any assistance, I had always felt myself charmed, exempt. But everything had changed with my illness. I could no longer convince myself or others that nothing could go wrong; something had already gone wrong, and it was me.
It took a team of telephone engineers days to get me reconnected. The wire had broken in several places on its way down the hill, and overhanging trees had to be manicured and cut back to give the cable a free run. On the first day the team made the mistake of trying to get to me from the lane by my postbox by driving their Land Rover along the old cart track. It cost them as much to get the farmer to tow them out of the mud with his tractor as it would cost me to get my phone installed. On the second day they came better prepared; they brought two vehicles and drove up to me along the track from the farm, following my directions. One of them still managed to get bogged down in the thick mud of the rutted track in front of the cottage, but they had thought to bring a chain to use as a tow rope, and after much pushing and shoving and spinning of tyres in the churning mud they managed to save themselves the embarrassment of having to go cap in hand to the farmer for the second day running. I don’t know what they must have thought of the way I lived my life. Eventually the job was done and they were gone, leaving nothing but the mess they had made of my track, and my connection to the rest of the world in the shape of one thin wire.
I sat by my fire and tried not to keep glancing over at the phone in the window, the elephant in the room. It lurked on its windowsill, glowering at me reprovingly, ready to shatter the silence and remind me how I had surrendered my higher ideals. Of course I knew it didn’t really lurk, or glower, or reprove; it was only a phone, after all. It wasn’t even about to ring; I hadn’t plugged it in and had no intention of doing so. I would use it for outgoing calls only. But any difference it made to me practically was far outweighed by its psychological impact. My life felt less isolated now, less remote. It felt like the first step of my rehabilitation into the world of men.
As autumn turned to winter I retrenched, withdrew further inside myself. My recovery was slow, and my life became centred around the conservation of energy. Even the walk to the postbox felt like too much of an ordeal. My overcoat came off only when I slept. I felt ill and I felt tired, but I knew what was wrong with me now and I knew that I would recover — it was just a matter of patience. I could wait it out; the days would lengthen again, the sap would rise, and my strength would return. It was all a part of the same cycle, it was all good.
I had not planned to mark Christmas that year, but when I woke on Christmas Eve and looked out to see that several inches of snow had fallen overnight I relented. Of course I already knew there had been a snowfall without having to look out; I would always know from the moment I woke, before I had even opened my eyes. From the snow-light on my eyelids, from the muffled quality of the hush. Even the cold air on my skin was its own peculiar kind of cold. I wrapped up warm and took my bow saw from its hook on the woodshed wall. I would head up the back field to the pine wood at the hilltop ridge. At the northern edge of this wood was a handful of stunted spruces that would never amount to much in such an exposed position. There would be no harm in cutting one, and there was something appealing about marking the depths of winter by bringing a tree into your home. Not just the conifer, but the holly and ivy and mistletoe too, every plant in the woods that stayed green all winter long. It seemed an expression of hope that better days were coming, an act of defiance against the long dark nights.
The snow had not long stopped falling. It was pristine, an open book, an unmarked page. It felt festive: deep and crisp and even. I waded out into it and set off up the back field, in the perfect stillness, the perfect silence. About halfway up the field my foot kicked against a clod hidden beneath the snow. The clod burst into the air, showering me with snow, as if in a surprise snowball attack. It was a hare, the first I had seen since the hare on my back doorstep months before. Perhaps it was even the same animal, there was no way of telling. The hare raced away up the hillside at incredible speed, unhindered by the incline or the deep snow, its forelegs and its hind legs criss-crossing with each bound. I would be able to follow its trail all the way up the hill to the pine wood where I was headed. I looked down at the little impression in the snow where the animal had been sleeping; I squatted down, took off my glove, and felt the hare’s warmth still in the hollow of the grass. It must have settled there at the end of the day, in the middle of the open field. And in the night, when the snow had begun to fall, it had not gone to seek shelter, but had carried on sleeping regardless. As the snowflakes settled on its fur, as the inches of snow slowly banked up over it, it had just stayed right where it was.
Epilogue
Penlan Wood is long gone, and I had a hand in its demise. The estate supplied me with a brush cutter, and gave me a season to take out the understorey in preparation for the wood being sold for clear-felling the following year. Before the spruces grew up, the wood must have been an impenetrable thicket of rhododendrons, like the streamside thicket over the old bridge where I liked to sit of an evening. As the spruces had grown tall they had starved the rhododendrons of light, and all that remained of them in the dark heart of the wood were their brittle skeletons. But all around the wood’s fringes they had continued to flourish, and encircled it with a ten-foot-thick belt of tangled branches that was hard to breach. They overhung the wire fence all round the wood, and they overhung the gulley along my side of the plantation where the woodcocks sheltered under their leaves. Rhododendrons are not native, and they are invasive, so they receive a lot of criticism, but their flowers are glorious and they reminded me of the beautiful montane forests of the Himalayas, which is where they originate from, and that felt like a good place to be reminded of.
The next year the team moved in. The timber was shipped out from the bottom of the wood, so I never saw the foresters, and at no point did they need to come along my track. I think they got a good deal; as it had never been thinned they got a lot more timber than they had bargained for. On the day the chainsaws started, a big mixed flock of woodland birds emerged and spent all day milling around my cottage. Tits and finches, woodpeckers, treecreepers, nuthatches, wrens and robins and goldcrests: between fifty and a hundred birds in all. Who would have thought that those few acres of unappealing spruce would have been hiding such large numbers of small birds? The farmer asked the loggers to leave a line of trees at the top of the wood to act as a shelter belt for his sheep. They left rather a generous swathe of mature trees that included the sparrowhawks’ nesting site of at least the past three years, but the change was too much for the hawks and they elected to move elsewhere.
When the job was done, the hill looked bare and my cottage was exposed to the westerly wind. For the first time I could hear a cock crowing and a sheepdog barking from a farmhouse on the next hillside along. The logging team had been asked to leave any hardwoods and take just the spruce. There were a few standards, tall and strong, mostly around the edges of the wood where they had managed to get enough light, and a cluster of scrubby willows around a spring-fed boggy hollow in its middle. But the majority of the fifty or so trees, predominantly birch, that were scattered about the ruins of the plantation were spindly and frail, unnaturally tall and thin where they had raced for the light against the fast-growing conifers. They had no future; with the first strong wind most either snapped off or bowed right down so that their tops reached the ground and they bounced and swayed in the breeze. Birch is poor-quality firewood but is better than no firewood at all, so I took my own saw and logged most of them rather than letting them go to waste. All along the edge of the wood I lined up my woodpiles, which I would leave for a year or two to season and which would make the wrens happy, offering them both hunting grounds and secure places in which to nest.