| EACH near-dawn, tea in hand, cat on the make, I sit watching the great hazel filter in the day. Its companion was coppiced two years ago, but, remembering how this tree let in the light with a gradualness that suited me, I stayed my hand. What petty power, I now think. It shames me to write it down. But there it is, the 40-foot hazel with its frothing catkins and fanning boughs, and the small man coming to.
At first — it is 6.30 and still January — it does not more than shift darkness. But by seven it is a mutation of sumptuous verticals of colour. Then the sun fires it, and the uncurtained window is too blazing to contemplate.
Yesterday, something very odd occurred. Forty or so men trotted over the hill and into the valley. Backpacked, not chattering like the crocodiles of ramblers, they were soldiers getting up steam — maybe for Afghanistan. Easy on their feet, they passed through the hazel screen so quickly that I might have imagined them.
Later this morning, I listen to Thomas Tallis’s mighty motet for 40 voices. It is a music that overrides religious division and paltry argument. What price bank scares, what price anything that leaves out the eternal? Like the radio presenter, I heard it in Blythburgh Church ages ago, the 40 voices waving and weaving their way to the painted angels, and out over the marshes. Having begun, they cannot end, at least in one’s head, in one’s devotions. How do the singers keep their places in this articulated glory?
Afterwards, dizzy with voices, I pick up fallen wood for the stove, and all the trees join in — although I am not so heavenly “sent” not to see what needs lopping. Wild daffodils, those that Dorothy Wordsworth noted, are in bud under the plum.
During the debate about having judges or kings, Jotham tells a delightful tale about the trees’ arguing over who should be their monarch. It is in Judges 9. “The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said unto the olive tree [and to the fig, vine, and bramble], Reign thou over us.” And, being wise, as all trees are, they made their leafy excuses. No fear! Trees have better things to do than to reign over each other. And so had many of the Shechemites, it seems. After telling his tale, “Jotham ran away,” which is just like an author.
A noticeable thing, if I may say so, is how un-Bible-read the worshippers are these days. On Sunday, I preach on Barack Obama’s namesake, that Hebrew hero who saved his nation and whom the writer of Hebrews links with David. “Arise, Barak, and lead” (Judges 5). Isn’t this what they will have cried on Super Tuesday? He and a woman, Deborah, would rescue their country. So nothing is new.
Why do not so many of us read scripture for pleasure, or as a last resort on our desert island? Its stories are infinite; its poetry is enchanting. In it, the trees are enthroned and crowned as only nature can make them, and as they are in my old garden at this moment as the latest sap anoints them.
My lovely hazel (Corylus avellana) has high standing in the Christian universe; for did it not provide Dame Julian with her divine nut? A cock pheasant scuffles beneath it, kicking up black mould. “You need to coppice that tree,” advises a passer-by. Do I?
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