8/4/2023 0 Comments Roger deakins overheads"An amazing thunderstorm last night as I lay listening. He once emailed me happily about having been out in the wagon with the rain whacking on the roof. Over the years he had established in his meadows a variety of outlying structures, including two shepherd's huts, an old wooden caravan with a cracked window and a railway wagon that he had painted Pullman-purple. Thinking my way through his house now, I can count at least five different desks, between which he would migrate according to his different moods. "All that needs is a new engine, and we could drive it to France," he said, hopefully, as we passed one of these.ĭeakin wrote as idiosyncratically as he did everything. Walking the fields with him, you would come across old Citroëns with their frog-eye headlights, peeping from the brambles. Deakin had a habit of driving his cars until they were about to give out, then backing them into a particularly deep area of hedge and abandoning them, to be grown through by the briars and nested in by birds. The land was separated into fields by a mile of massive old hedgerow, in places five metres high and five wide. Sparrow-hawks busked for custom overhead, deer picked their way through the hornbeam wood and tawny owls hooted from big ash trees. The fields, well tended but unfarmed, were also busy with life. As I sat with Deakin, 10 days before his death, a brown cricket with long spindly antennae clicked along the edge of an old biscuit tin. Spiders slung swags and trusses of silk in every corner. Swallows flew to and from their nest in the main chimney. Leaves gusted in through one door and out of another. He kept the doors and the windows open, in order to let air and animals circulate. When big easterlies blow, its timbers creak and groan "like a ship in a storm", as Deakin put it, "or a whale on the move". It is as close to a living thing as a building can be. Walnut Tree Farm, the house he eventually completed, and in which he died a month ago, is made largely of wood. So Roger put a sleeping-bag down in the fireplace, and lived there while he rebuilt the house around himself. Little survived of the original 16th-century dwelling except its spring-fed moat, overhung by hazels, and its vast inglenook fireplace. In 1968, Roger Deakin bought the ruined remains of an Elizabethan house, and 12 acres of surrounding meadow, on the edge of Mellis Common in Suffolk.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |