Curtains

Gone forever

In early January I wrote an exercise for my writers’ group, ‘Curtains’ (see ‘more’ below), regretting the felling of a curtain of black poplars on one of my favourite walks around Brussels. In today’s Guardian newspaper, there is an article about how David Hockney encountered a similar tragedy (see here). In his case it was worse because he had intended to paint a beautiful copse of beech trees in each of the four seasons. He managed ‘winter’ and ‘summer’ before they were felled. Like me, he recognises that the felling was a perfectly ordinary part of the economic cycle of the countryside (indeed, the article led to a ‘response’ and a series of letters and the news that the copse would soon be replanted) but, also like me, he regretted the sudden and brutal disappearance of a thing of great beauty.

Curtains

The bonus of having a big dog is the obligation to take it for a long walk, preferably every day. This pleasurable duty falls to me at weekends. I have my favourite walks. The dog knows them all off by heart and runs ahead from beginning to end, leaving me to breathe in the air, gaze at the countryside and the wildlife and to get on with my thoughts. One of my favourite walks is at Leefdael, near Berthem. I park the car beside an old brick shrine, a votive candle is always lit within it, and head off down through a copse to a broader path heading down a valley. The path is bordered by a mature wood on one side and by fields on the other. The crop is mostly beet, occasionally potato. About halfway down the valley the ground becomes too steep for crops and the fields are grassed for grazing. Right at the bottom there is a small, swampy pond with a few bulrushes. The field must be full of frogs and toads, for there is always at least one heron standing guard in the grass. The grazers are a group of muscular draught horses, with massive buttocks and fringes around their fettocks, as though they were wearing fashionable moon boots. They like company and will always come up to the fence when called. Beyond their field and the pond is a crossroads and there begins my favourite part of the walk, for somebody, probably in the 1930s, planted a long row of black poplars alongside the path, and these have now reached maturity, creating a green curtain, like some gigantic hedge, that can be seen from miles away. Behind the curtain lies the farm, a set of nondescript brick and whitewashed plaster buildings of no particular interest, but they don’t matter because everything is dwarfed, both physically and aesthetically, by that curtain of trees. There must be over fifty of them.

Just before Christmas I went on this favourite walk. As soon as I got to the first field I sensed that something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Everything seemed too light, too spacey, though I could not understand why – couldn’t, that is, until I reached the shire horses and realised that the beautiful curtain of black poplars had disappeared – all of it. All of the trees had been felled. I could see from the trunks that they had not been ill, so I suppose this must have been a straightforward economic operation – they had reached maturity and were ready for the market. But, oh!, how painful it was to see them like that, tumbled about on the sodden grass, shorn of their branches, brought low by some miserable whiney chain saw. The initial shock gradually gave way to a terrible realisation. I always drank in the scenery but I had come to take that leafy curtain for granted and now it was no more. If I had realised I would never see it again I would have stood before it and gazed upon it for a very long time but, no, the last time I had seen it I had simply walked past it – admiringly, admittedly, but simply walked past it. Now it was no more and would never be again. Even assuming that the farmer decided to re-plant immediately, the trees would take another seventy or eighty years to reach the same height and provide the same – or a similar – view. I felt terribly, terribly sad, and I realised the full import of the old saying that there are two things a man can never do in a single lifetime; build a cathedral, and plant an avenue of oaks.