Trees and Men

by H. K. BATES

1

ON THE very first evening I came into Kent, more than twenty years ago, on a dark February night, I was struck by the intricate pattern of its deep lanes and, in one place, by the flashing length of a piece of oak fencing, half a mile or more long, about a park.

Today, after a quarter of a lifetime, the fence and the park, or at least thirty-five acres of it, belong to me. Spread out on a series of slopes and indentations that give it something of the appearance of a huge round and battered hat, this piece of land was once part of t he domain of a great house.

In 1929, in the great slump, disaster fell. In a series of sales that summer, farms and woodlands, cottages and orchards, the park and the great house itself, were split and sold. The familiar, modern destructive pattern spread out. Timber merchants arrived and, locust like, swarmed on the vast eighteenth-century design of oaks and beeches and sweet chestnuts. Trees were felled with the pointless and wanton abandon of an invading army. Trunks were tossed about the slopes of grass and left where they lay. Soon, and not surprisingly in an era of bankruptcy, a timber merchant here went out of business and another forgot the timber lying on a Kentish hill. Already, two years later, when I first knew it, time and nature were well at work. A group of twenty-five sweet chestnuts, tall as steeples, exposed by the felling of surrounding trees, had been bitterly withered by the terrible winter of 1929, so that their tender tops were now nothing but skeleton belfries for flocks of roosting starlings. Felled beeches, soft with fungus, were crumbling to orange pulp in the grass. Brambles were smothering dead slumps. A few beeches, exposed to wind by ruthless felling, had fallen naturally, yellow roots sticking up from watery craters. The fence, beautifully made of patterned cleft oak — an art now as dead as the painting of primitive pictures in caves— was falling down. Nettles were spreading everywhere under the remaining trees, and rabbits were settling down, in their ugly fashion, into vast warrens on the slopes of grass.

A second war for freedom had not then taught the English the high value of the land on which they live; and slowly, inevitably, desolately, thirtyfive acres of land began to decay into useless dereliction, into fungoid weedy ugliness, (he grave of a man of taste and ambition who had walked about it, no doubt with joy, two hundred years before. Here was a man who planted, nearly everywhere, trees of slow and sturdy growth. His selflessness could only have been in direct proportion to his courage, and his courage, I hope, to his happiness at the thought that in succeeding years whole generations of Englishmen would be able to extract the greatest joy from the things he had done. But Time, two centuries later, put up a dirty finger at him: and by 1940, when an antiaircraft battery stood camouflaged under the decaying bony chestnuts, his picture had nearly finished its long slide into decay.

It went on, in that way, for another seven or eight years. I watched it most of the time. War gave a long holiday to nettles and brambles, thistles and rabbits, docks and briars. Bright orange fungus, together with long blue-gray veins of delicate netting, the spores of a decay as beautiful as the veil of a woman’s hat, ate a crumbling pulpy way over fallen beech trunks. More trees fell down. The fences became hidden in vast prickly cushions of bramble, purple and white in early summer, black with fruit in August and September; and gradually, under the weight of them, the fences fell down.

On the south boundary were two little ponds, on one of which moor hens nested in clumps of sedge among white-eyed ferns of water ranunculus. Gradually more trees fell into the ponds. Then hot summers dried the ponds, revealing desolate basins of brown cracked mud littered with tin cans. The t wo gates fell down. A great arm of the most magnificent of all the beeches split off in a gale, and in the fissure caused in the trunk a blackberry took root and helped in the process of eating it away. The soil, impoverished, thinning like a balding head, under the poison of rabbits, gave every autumn its crop of elegant, brown-spotted fungus, gilled and hooded like things from a fairy tale. Above it all, the tall dead skeletons of the chestnut trees, ugly and infinitely desolate, stood like stag horns, to be seen for miles and miles about ihe countryside, gaunt trophies marking, as it were, the death of a great herd.

Not less amazing than this long unchecked decay were the reasons that caused it. The park, or that seventeen acres of it that 1 was to buy first, had belonged, astonishing though it may seem, to a lady who loved trees. Into her head had at some time penetrated the notion, never afterwards to be removed, that trees were untouchable things. In health, in decay, in age, in the air or on the ground, they were to be left, evidently, as God shaped them. The English countryside is heavily populated with an infinite number of old ladies, living alone or in pairs, whose lives are just such engaging contradictions of ugliness and love. Surrounded by hordes of cats, by hosts of tea-drinking dogs, by goats whose uselessness is only equaled by their incomparable astringent goatlike odor, they drape their fading lives about strange houses, in strange ways, and are an eternal and incontestable part of our sometimes queer and inexplicable rural background.

But in time even old ladies, like trees, drop down. So it happened at last t hat the first acres of parkland came into the market, and I became, in the most modest sort of way, and not too expensively, a landowner.

It was now April: cold and dry and unfriendly, without a leaf of green on the trees. Winter drought and hard spring wind had dried old grass into yellow tussocks tangled with drifting dead chestnut leaves. With the wind blowing easterly, away from the road, we set fire to the grass, letting it burn where it would. The fires rambled in blue and orange drifts, leaving black patterns, and while they burned we contemplated our assets, living and dead, on this piece of England.

We had, it seemed, something like this: twentyfive standing sweet chestnuts, very tall, all dead at the tips; eight standing beeches, of which one was a shaky and magnificent ruin, six dead beeches, and one fallen; three hornbeams and two ash trees and two elms, each gigantic and wonderful; six turkey oaks, all sound and three superb, and two maples, one shapely and delightful; an unspecified number of elderbushes and hawthorns, all old, crabbed and witchlike, and a still greater number of blackberries, briars, and seedling ashes. Of the dead beeches some stood like skeletons, some were crumbling fallen masts of orange and black and purple fungus. There were two ponds, half-filled with the junk of wartime, two broken gates, and about a mile of derelict fencing.

We brought fire, hawsers, tractors, and 1 rucks to the dead trees, which went up on a fine windy April evening in a hell-red exploding bonfire. It was shortly afterwards that I heard of Mr. Kimmins. Spring now began to warm slowly into what was to be an exquisite summer, and on a golden day of oak flowers and May blossom, with tender hand-dappling wind, Mr. Kimmins, a reticent, gentle-spoken Cockney of about fifty-five or sixty, came down from his native Wadsworth, filled with lifelong affection for and ripe knowledge of trees.

Mr. Kimmins and I had a cup of tea together and then I took him to the park. Mr. kimmins, patient and possessed, looked up at the impossible chest nuts. I, in fear, looked at Mr. Kimmins.

Mr. Kimmins, cont inning to look at the chest nuts, which were just leafing in the spring sun, did not speak. I, anxiously, began to say once again how I should like them topped; I explained that I knew how very high they were and how very difficult it all was. There had, I thought, been quite enough trees destroyed in England, and in Kent especially, of late years, and it seemed to me quite lime that a few were preserved. Cuckoos called in the quiet air while Mr. Kimmins cogitated these matters.

It is notable that ail your pet ideas, which in the homely warmth of your own brain seem so beautifully fresh, original, and practical, seem at once appallingly clumsy and stupid and impossible as soon as you bring them out for appraisal in the cold air of expert opinion. This is especially true in matters of gardening, carpentry, building, and architecture and had been so, as far as my experience went, in arboriculture. No timberman I had ever met knew anything more about trees than that they ought, as soon as possible, to be cut down. Nothing delights a certain type of male mind — women are entirely excluded from these remarks — more than the possession of saws, axes, ropes, and a good sound healthy tree in an awkward place.

2

As I stood under the chestnut trees with Mr. Kimmins, I was aware that an unconscionable and increasing amount of daylight had been let in, not only in my own village but all over England. Daylight was something we were not short of; trees, everywhere, were the price we were paying for it. The long and beautiful inheritance of English trees was being squandered, if that is not too harsh a word, by the two essentially destructive games at which modern man is so adept: war and taxation. Through them, by painful labor, we were now well on the road to the evolution of a type that had free false teeth but nothing to eat with them, supersonic planes but no fire on his hearth, and who might well end up, as a cabinet minister so aptly pointed out, sitting by a television set, starving.

I do not go quite so far as this; but it has long seemed to be an arguable proposition that if we go on translating trees into taxes and taxes into teeth, or into wooden legs or wooden heads or whatever it may be, we may well devise for ourselves a state in which man is state-protected, in sickness and in healt h, from the cradle to the grave, and will be forced at the same time to spend his days staring at a treeless landscape of petrol pumps and pylons. Impossible to deny that this is a fanciful exaggeration; impossible to deny, also, that in the last ten years England has lost, at the most random estimate, some millions of her trees.

So as I stood with Mr. Kimmins in the park my anxiety was that not a tree of my own should, if possible, be cut down.

“1 know how difficult it is,” I said to Mr. Kimmins again. “I know they say people might get killed. But if — ”

“Killed?” Mr. Kimmins said. “Difficult? That — up there?”

“Yes, but isn’t it?”

“Good gracious me,” Mr. Kimmins said, “we come from London. We’re doing it every day. Difficult? In London we have to take down trees a yard at a time —bit by bit, every bit slung on a pulley. Difficult?” Mr. Kimmins laughed. “Bless me, I fink this a nice straightforward little job.”

“You mean it, can be done?”

“Yus,” Mr. Kimmins said. “It can be done.”

It now seemed to me t hat Mr. Kimmins was filled with sudden warmth and affection for the trees. Walking about, pointing, explaining, he became enthusiastically eloquent.

“Now I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll have ‘em all orf darn to the green wood. Yus: that’s what we’ll do. Have ‘em orf nice an’ clean darn to the green wood. Then they’ll make new heads, see? In two-free years you won’t know they bin cut orf.” Now and then Mr. Kimmins paused to lay a large, friendly, expert hand on that peculiarly twisted pleasant bark that is characteristic of the Spanish chestnut in maturity. “Very nice trees they are. Very nice. Be a fahrsand pities to let ‘em go. Now there’s a tree there. Take ‘im. He’s wurf saving, He don’t look much. But we’ll have a limb orf there an’ another limb orf there and another bit orf ‘is top an’ in a couple o’ years you won’t know ‘im.”

Mr. Kimmins, genial, friendly, and infinitely intelligent, warmed my heart. Steadily, with care and affection, we diagnosed the troubles and needs of sixty trees. The chestnuts needed deep surgical operations at the tops; here and there a beech, far gone with fungus, would have to come down; there would be a few loppings of ash and elm. We even attended to a stag-headed maple and an ancient hawthorn. Trees I had considered hopeless, loo far gone with split and water-rotten trunks, were put down in Mr. Kimmins’s casebook as patients that could still be saved.

But before I said good-by to Mr. Kimmins in that first interview there was something else 1 wanted to ask him. I was still troubled by the chestnuts; I wanted to know exactly how that lofty surgical operation, sixty or seventy feet from the ground, was done: whether there would be fire escapes or cradles or pulleys or steam saws, or what peculiar paraphernalia and devices these experts from the city, faced with country projects, would employ. “How do you get up there?” I said.

“We climbs up,” Mr. Kimmins said.

“Yes, but what with?”

“Ladders.”

“What sort of ladders? Special ones? Fire escapes?”

“Just ladders.”

“And then the sawing part,” I said. “How is that done? ”

“Wiv saws.”

“Yes — but what sort of saws?”

“Ordinary saws.”

“Crosscut ?”

“Panel,” Mr. Kimmins said.

Humbled and silenced, I gave up. Later I was to be further humbled; but that day, as I said good-by to the modest, friendly, tree-loving, and knowledgeable Mr. Kimmins, I was reminded of the truth that not all countrymen live in the country. And the thought of Mr. Kimmins, Cockney-born and Cockney to the heart, about to perform a countryman’s job in a way countrymen had thought impossible, was something that gave me a special kind of pleasure.

“When will you start?” I said.

“In a fortnight or free weeks,” Mr. Kimmins said. “The wevver should be nice by then.”

3

DULY, in a red truck piled with ladders, ropes, saws, and suitcases, Mr. Kimmins and his men arrived. There were four of them, and they looked rather like the committee of a Working Men’s Club out for a day in the country. Neatly efficient, cheerful, and in some curious way taut and confident, they lacked all rural gaucheness of hearing and attitude. Beside the surrounding countrymen, slack and slovenly and with that plummy rolling gait that work on the land so often gives, they had a look of being really emancipated, of politely and simply not caring a damn.

This, as it turned out, proved to he entirely correct. Time, in the sense of clocking in at a doorway at eight in the morning and clocking out. at live in the evening, did not exist for them. They were, in the best sense, manual artists, and as artists they worked: not to time or to rule, with eyes on the clock or the timetable, but entirely according to the physical demand of the job. On Mondays they did not appear much before lunchtime and on Fridays they left by early afternoon; it was a short week, but within its limits they performed what I thought were exceptionally interest ing wonders.

The essence of a first-class woodman engaged in the business of high tree-lopping is that he shall be able to climb. Il is essential also that he should begin young. Once he learns to climb, acquiring something of t he poise and confidence of a steeplejack at the same time, his art consists to a great degree in what he learns about trees. They have peculiarities which can kill him if he is a fool. Much of what he has to do with trees is concerned with weight, and intelligent assessment of weight has everything to do with a job that afterwards, in good hands, seems simpler than pruning a rose.

Sam, Mr. kimmins’s foreman, a smallish, compact, dark-haired Londoner, was a man who had learned to climb expertly as a boy and had been climbing ever since. His methods looked peculiarly simple, almost amateurish and offhand. His procedure was simply to climb halfway up the tree by ladder, and then up to the top of the tree, exactly like a boy birds’-nesting, by hand, He took a rope with him. This rope was presently lowered so that his saw, an ordinary carpenters panel saw, could be sent up to him. It was lowered again for a second rope, and this second rope was tied to the top of the tree.

All this looked so ridiculously simple that it was some days before I noticed a highly important thing. Sam, who climbed the tree in two minutes, often spent nearly an hour looking at it. Walking round and round it, assessing and cogitating, he went into the problems of weight with the expert’s care. Only when he was satisfied with that would he begin to climb.

Thereafter, as Mr. kimmins had so rightly seemed to declare, the thing was child’s play. Sam, alone and unhurried, sat in the tree and sawed, He sawed for perhaps twenty minutes: first through t he tree trunk one way and then for twenty minutes, according to the size of the tree, the other. W hen the trunk hung by no more than a couple of inches of its center Sam sal back, directed his mates down below on the end of the rope, and gave the order to pull. The treetop, partly carried by distribution of weight, described a long and graceful are that took it quite clear of both tree and Sam, and the whole thing, with a bouncing crash of bony timber, was suddenly all over.

In that way Sam dealt with about twenty sweet chestnuts and three turkey oaks, two of which were eighty feet high, and only twice, when extra poundage was needed on the end of the rope, did he trouble to come down lo earth when the treetop was felled. Small, confident, calmer than any bird, he sat half hidden by rapidly leafing branches and watched each tree shed its gaunt antlers in safety.

No local countryman had ever seen such amazing curious acts in trees, and the whole procedure remained, for three weeks, a springtime wonder. In their true slow kenlish fashion, intensely cautious, partly dubious, half suspicious, filled wit h consistent unadventurousness, they sat back to marvel greatly. This marveling included me. Writers of books being in any ease not quite of the sanity of other people, il was, perhaps, not altogether surprising that I was trying to preserve trees instead of cutting them down and chopping ihem up, as any sensible person would, for firewood, But to have tree’s lopped, at the tops, by men from London, and no doubt at great expense, was something hard to understand. To this patent proof of the natural insanity of writers was added, as always, with unfailing consistency, the wails of the ever-present old ladies for whom, in the country, it is so difficult ever to do the right thing. “Oh! but we shall miss the old tops. We loved them, they’d been there so long. They were such a landmark.”

4

MAY flowed warmly into June. Large and thick and shining, the leaves of t he sweet chestnuts unfurled to full pattern, hiding the pruned treelops, so that the trees, in their new neatness, were pyramids of brilliant green. Vast piles of cordwood had accumulated. Two trunks, one of which had lain for t wenty years or more in beds of bramble and nettle, bad been sent off to the sawmill and now came back in the form of an almost orangecolored, still sappy timber. Wreck and ruin were everywhere being cleared away; the splendidly beautiful shape of the remaining beeches, deprived now of dead boughs and general muck, was fully revealed, and to me, at any rate, no trees had ever looked more lovely or more worth possessing. Mr. kimmins and Sam did a last roundup, stopping holes, painting cut limbs, cementing gullies, and, in Sam’s case, catching a last rabbit for the missus among the brambles. Mr. kimmins, sound and knowledgeable and pleasant as ever, declared once again, perhaps for the fortieth lime, that in “twofree years you won’t, see where them tops is bin cut,”and today his words of modest prophecy are coming true.

We acquired, about this time, quite by accident, in a casual way, the services of another admirable character, no less pleasant and sound than Mr. kimmins and the wonderfully efficient Sam. Hecame to us originally for the simple purpose of putting up a gate: a man of medium height and age, roundish and yet in some way square, pleasant, droll, cryptic, slow, and given to occasional hursts of bright invective, all t he more devastating because they were, generally, monosyllabic, Saxon, and exceedingly short. William was a carpenter utterly removed from the rest of his tribe by the fact that he never grizzled, never blamed the tools or the absence of them, never criticized any of the limber — in this case mostly the despised chestnut —we had to offer. Soundly, complaint lessly, in his own time and way, William set about the business of repairing what was to prove, eventually, about a mile of cleft fencing. Some long and hopeless seel ions of our broken-down fencing had been so long hidden by brambles that we had given them up completely as irreparable and losl. Here and t here sections were flat on the ground. Posts were, or appeared to be, quite rotten. But the durability of oak, and especially of cleft oak, was such that when we set about the business of removing whole sections for replacement we found it entirely unnecessary, a situation summed up with grim and final brevity by William, who Said: —

“Lumme, if them soddin’ posts ain’t arf in there.”

William continued to come to us from then onwards with what I can best describe as consistent irregularity. Time, hours, instructions, orders were things lhal did not come between us. He came, went, and worked in his own peculiar time and way. Timber and fence being there, close together, it was only necessary to marry them, restoring order and decency — a task for which William was admirably gifted, with his unhurried skill and temperament, without interference from me. Only now and then would he deliver to me, in cryptic and crushing terms, a lecture on the necessity of remembering that, after all, material things do sometimes matter: —

“If yon want your bloody fence mendin’ you better git them nails.”

“I know. I’m sorry — I forgot.”

“You keep on forgittin’. You goo orf to bloody London and you forgit.”

“I’ve been terribly busy.”

“Well, you don’ wanna be so busy. You wanna remember them nails.”

“All right. I’ll get them tomorrow. Now what sizes and how many?”

“I writ it all down for you on a bit o’ paper and now you bin orf to bloody London again and forgot it, ainyer?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Got ‘eads like bloody sieves, some people.”

All this, profoundly true as it was, I could not deny. It was delivered also with a drollery, a sort of dry richness, not wit hout a certain sadness, 1 hat was quite without offense. And how true it was, in a Sense, that gooin’ orf to bloody London was not to be compared with the sensible and necessary business of getting the nails without which even the most good-natured and accommodating carpenters cannot work. I will not deny, either, that there were occasions when I forgot on purpose, solely for the pleasure of hearing that droll, wit hering, yet tolerant voice tell me: —

“If you don’ want that bloody timber o’ yourn to goo rot and warp all over the soddin’ place you better k’l me git il seen to and turned over.”

“All right, you see to it.”

So, through the long, hot, almost unblemished summer, William helped to restore final decency and material soundness to the park. Not the least of his many virtues was adaptability. He made us, in our modest way, self-supporting. We spoke, on one occasion, of buying gates.

“Gales? Buying gates? You got the damn timber here, ainyer? What th’ ‘ell’s the damn timber for? Buy gates? Good God!”

A good part of my life having been spent in apologizing to workmen, both young and old, for the primitive nature of I he materials I have to offer them, I had hardly dared to suggest to William that he should make gates.

“You jis tell me what sort a gate you want and I’ll git it made for you. Drop gate? ‘Anging gate? Then I. can git the furniture made at the forge.”

So William, repairing fences to their old lost pattern, a pattern that will never be seen again, making gates for us in a few hours on a Sunday morning, turning his hand to any job we cared to name or that he liked to suggest that we, in our appalling London-wise ignorance, had forgotten, became for us, and indeed still remains, a sterling example of what we think a countryman should he and so rarely is. He seems to us a character, from the bone of his blue-eyed head down to his efficient adaptable hands, purely and wonderfully English. Dry, forthright, droll, decent, warm, immensely resourceful, respectful but never servile, he belongs, in spite of an ability to drive a tractor about the Countryside like any modern mechanized god, to any century of our rural history.

To call him complintless is not quite correct. Once, and once only, I heard him complain wilh cryptic forthrightness, offering his brief comment on our strange world of false teeth, low diet, high politics, and theoretical securities — the world of whose future pattern we have already had a glimpse in the picture of men sitting by their television sets, starving to death, and no doubt illiterate too: —

“I don’ git enough in my belly. And when I don’t git enough in my belly I carn’t bloody work. And when I carn’t bloody work it ain’ so well.”