Bear and the Tree - part 1

Rag Tree

What comes from the wood is secret and beautiful. When you’re carving it, you can feel the form of what might appear out of the grain and you work to reveal this. I’ve been carving wood for fifty five years of my eighty and I know how to coax out what the wood holds. What can be discovered in its shape and lustre if you look closely enough.

I live by myself, although it’s not always been so. My wife, Peggy, died two years ago and I still live in what was our house in Dark Lane, close to my daughter and my grandson.  I don’t feel lonely as I see them quite often and besides, I have our little dog, Bear.  He’s with me constantly, although he’s aging too and he won’t be with me forever.

Every morning, I start the day by walking the dog. I used to do this with Peggy and when she’d gone, old habits died hard.  And it’s what Bear expects. Huffing and wheezing on these cold mornings, his little legs creak along with mine.  Up the hill from my house, across the road, over the stile into the field, then diagonal across it into Saint Kenelm’s churchyard.

I’ve not been in the church for many years, but there’s not a day passes that I don’t walk round the churchyard.  It’s messy and overgrown in parts and the graves go back centuries.  Sometimes, I look at the names on the headstones and I wonder about who the people were.  I think too about how close I am to going back to the earth and the ghost to be inside me stretches and yawns in anticipation.

Bear marks the grass and various graves with his doggy routine.  In our great old age, what creatures of habit we become.  I walk down the steps and stop by Saint Kenelm’s Well in the hollow at the bottom.  The spot where Kenelm the would be king was murdered by his sister’s lover.  Only a child, the poor little bastard.  The well head rises in ugly, mossy stone, but the rivulet from it flows into a fast moving stream.  The water gleams whatever the weather, quicksilver moving through the green ground cover; the mythical start of the river Stour.

Water bursts through wherever it can in this countryside.  The land seems a thin skin in parts, barely able to cover the great water that moves underneath.  Splitting open the Lickey and Clent Hills.

Above us the trees sway and they are the trees of the graveyard.  Sullen yews waiting to be guides to the land of shadows.  And wych elms, or widow makers, as my grandmother would call them.  I remember listening to her stories as a wide eyed child, of the great boughs that can fall off wych elms at any time and any season, their wood good for coffins.  She’d repeat an old saying she said her grandmother had told her, “Elm hateth man and waiteth” and she’d look into my eyes with complete seriousness.

And then there’s the rag tree.  It’s a scraggy hazel tree, at the far side of Saint Kenelm’s well.  At this time of the year, it’s beginning to lose its leaves, but it won’t get cold in the winter as it’s covered in ribbons and ripped up pieces of cloth.  People come and add these to the tree to make a wish for something or someone to get better.  Maybe to make themselves better.  A wishing tree.  In the old words of my grandmother, a clootie tree.

I’ve never believed in any of that ancient nonsense, yet every day when I walk Bear, I bring a piece of ribbon from the big spool I have at home and I tie it to the rag tree.

***

What hides in the Wood

The trunk of a tree contains the whole world.  You see every part of what the tree was, its identity.  Whether it’s hardwood or softwood, the layers are common.

In the centre is the pith that develops in the tree’s first year.  It’s what makes the tree what it is, but it also stores its deposits and impurities.  Like children, it’s shaped early - for good or bad.  As the tree grows, its growth rings increase; one for every year reflecting its development and age.  The size and quality of the growth rings are completely influenced by the year the tree has experienced.

The medullary rays pass sugar and food throughout the tree, vertical lines that run from the pith to the bark, linking the tree’s beginning to its now.  The cambium layer lies between the outer and inner bark of the tree.  It produces new cells; the tree’s growth, like our experiences and passage through life produce our growth.

But what always interests me is the bark.  It’s the layer that offers protection from the outside and it also keeps things inside the tree. But what serves this purpose for us?  Our fragile, thin skin manages to keeps things in, but what keeps things out?  What really protects us from what hurts us?  We talk about growing a thick skin, but we don’t grow bark.

In my work as a restorer of wood in churches and sometimes old houses, there’s little I haven’t carved.  From architectural to figurative.  Almost a lifetime carving corbels, cornices and angels.  And everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned by watching and doing.  Working the wood. The unlikely beginning of this was the mending of carousel horses that I got into accidently when I was a young man working on the fairs.

There’s rhythm to working with wood that comforts me.  The concentration and repetition leave no room in my head for demons.

You always start by selecting a chunk of wood that is the approximate size of what you want to carve.  Then you begin to shape the wood with different chisels, bevels and a mallet.  You must always work with the grain or across the grain of the wood, never against it.  Details in the carving are created with various tools such as a veiner or a fluter.  After completing the necessary detail, you begin work on the finish of the wood’s surface.  My favourite is the texture left by shallow gouges, because the roughness keeps the life of the wood and gives this same life to whatever you’ve carved.  You end by sealing, protecting and polishing.

Our memories are shaped like wood.  We decide what we’ll keep and what we’ll carve and change.  Sometimes these things aren’t our choice.  Like the shape of things in the wood, some memories are revealed to us and some stay hidden because it’s better that way.  It’s our brains that work to protect us.  Like bark.

***

Crab Apple

My brother was a wild one.   Two years older than me, handsome as the devil and as mad as the wind.  His name was Arthur, or Artie, and he couldn’t settle to anything.  We’d grown up with our mom and little sister in a little house in Oldbury.  My dad had gone off to war and had never come back, so it was just the four of us.

We made our money piecemeal and by 1953, when I was eighteen and Artie was twenty, we’d both had our fill of casual work on farms, or in the city, wherever we could get it.  We’d both managed to dodge national service – me with my poor eyesight and Artie with his twisted foot, caused by a steel bar falling on his foot at a foundry in Brummagem.  Sometimes, though, I wondered if a spell in the armed forces would have been the making of us.  Some necessary discipline in the shiftless pattern of our ducking and diving lives.

One Sunday in September of that year, Artie came bursting through the door into the kitchen.  “Come on you.  Get your things packed”, he said.  “We’re running off with the fair.”

Artie’s pal, Joe had found an opening for us at the travelling fair owned by the Alesi Brothers.  The fair travelled through the Midlands, following the seasons and trailing the old fairs that had criss-crossed the country for hundreds of years.  We were going to be responsible for the putting up and dismantling of the rides like the big wheel and the carousel.  It was going to be hard work, we knew, but it would allow us to move around a bit and the money would be constant, at least between the beginning of March and the end of October.

There was something very satisfying about the unpacking of the rides.  The space the fair would occupy on old greens or long ago legislated sites in the middle of towns, was defined by the huge rides that sprung up.   Seemingly appearing from nowhere, like the products of magic tricks.  They brought glamour, sparkle and a little bit of danger to the industrial Midlands.  And where the fairs went, so did the girls.

They followed Artie of course.  I could see why; I would have followed him anywhere too.  He was a beautiful man, all golden coloured through his hair and his skin.  He was strong as well, hiding his twisted foot by always taking long strides that you would only notice dragged a little on the left side if you really looked .  I loved Artie, not just because he was my big brother, but because he had goodness in him.  Despite, his whirlwind plans and his hurricane notions that you could become entirely caught up in, there was a basic decency about him that shone through whatever he did.

 It wasn’t that the girls that came to the fair didn’t notice me too, but I never shone like Artie.  I was more of a pale negative of his magnificent photograph.  Me with my piggy little eyes, magnified by my jam jar glasses.  I’d tried to cultivate a quiff to compete with Artie’s Brylcreemed perfection, but to no avail.  I couldn’t compete with him on any level, but my love for him stopped me feeling lasting bitterness at this.

After we’d worked on the fairs for a few weeks, it became clear that I wasn’t really physically up to the hauling of the rides’ component parts.  I could do it for a while, but not with the tenacity and strength that Artie and the others could.  I needed longer rests and I didn’t like the way the boss, Ronnie, looked at me when I’d sit for a few minutes, catching my breath on the steps up to the carousel.  Or when, I’d come out of the trailer in the mornings ten minutes later than Artie and the other two men we shared it with.  I knew I had to become indispensable in other ways, or my time on the fairs with Artie would be drawing to a close.

 My chance came by accident really.  Efisio, the old man who travelled with the fair, mending and painting the smaller parts of the rides, was ill with flu and hadn’t left his trailer for a couple of days.  Efisio was never involved with the bigger mechanics of the rides.  His area was the crafting and repairing of the cars on the rides or the painted horses on the carousel.

When it became clear on setting up that the tail had been knocked off one of the horses and part of the mane off another, Ronnie called me to get Efisio out of his trailer.  But I didn’t obey.  Instead, I mended the tail and the mane myself.  Gluing and smoothing over the joins, finding Efisio’s paints in the back of one of the trucks and making the mended wood glow again with fiery oranges and midnight blues.  A few days later, when Efisio was back on his feet, he saw the work I’d done and he smiled.  After that, I became something like his apprentice, watching him and practising what he could do.  As his hands became shakier, mine became more dextrous.  And so my working with wood began.

Of all the things we worked on, I loved the carousel horses in particular.  I loved the daftness and romance of them.  Always beautifully carved and decorated on the outside row, where the punters could see them and a little worn and plain on the inside row where they couldn’t.  There were the prancers and the jumpers and the standers, named because of how many feet they had on the carousel’s standing board.  My favourite horse, though, was the stargazer.  Head up, nose pointing skywards, looking towards the skies.

Is anything as we really remember it?  Do we by simply remembering something alter the truth of it?  I look at old photos of things and they never look like the people and places I hold in my memory.  I have no photos left of Artie and I never would have had any photos of what happened.  This made my eyes the camera and my head the photograph album.  The photograph album, or the shrine.

Late in the autumn of 1954, we were at our second day’s stay at a fairground just outside Telford.  Once we’d set up, part of our daily routine was to check the safety of the rides.  The previous night, the big wheel had been making an uncharacteristic creaking sound and Ronnie wanted it tested before the gate opened for the night’s punters.

It was a cool, but sunny afternoon and most work had already been done.   I remember there was a strong smell of wood smoke coming from one of the braziers that the men were sitting round as they quietly chatted.  When Ronnie said he needed someone to go up in one of the big wheel’s cars to check it while it was running, Artie volunteered immediately.  He said he wanted to see what the sun looked like as it set over the top of the Wrekin and he’d be able to see it better at the top of the big wheel.

As it started its first rotation, the big wheel began creaking and groaning.  I got up from the carousel steps to look at what might be the problem, but I saw Artie looking relaxed and unconcerned as his car went upwards. Then, I noticed a young girl watching his progress.  She was around twenty and dark haired, slight and shivering in the chilly air.  She was watching my brother with wide green eyes, not noticing me watching her.  I was mesmerised by her being mesmerised by him.  The sun behind Artie was framing his golden hair, streaming out, radial, behind him and the girl was smiling up at the sight.  I remember passingly thinking of Icarus flying up to the sun.  I thought of Icarus more when I saw the car Artie was in plummet to the floor and heard the screams of the girl and the fairground workers.

I didn’t move.  I stayed where I was, still and silent.  I watched only, as Artie’s blood and flesh mingled on the ground with the discarded toffee apples and the crab apples the naughty local boys had thrown over the fair’s barriers the night before.

***

http://www.abctales.com/story/philipsidneynoo/bear-and-tree-part-2