Landmarks (11 page)

With Titus and Jasmin’s generous help, I began the process of working out what Roger had left behind. Digging through boxes; brushing away mouse droppings and spiders’ webs; scanning letters from friends and collaborators; putting letters from lovers and family to one side unread. Each box I opened held treasure or puzzles: early poems; first drafts of
Waterlog
; a copy of the screenplay for
My Beautiful Laundrette
sent to Roger by Hanif Kureishi; word-lists of place-language (
tufa
,
bole
,
burr
,
ghyll
); a folder entitled ‘Drowning (Coroners)’, which turned out not to be a record of coroners that Roger had drowned, but an account of his research into East Anglian deaths-by-water. It was hard not to get distracted, especially by his notebooks. Each was a small landscape through which it was possible to wander, and within which it was possible to get lost. One had a paragraph in which Roger imagined a possible structure for
Wildwood
: he compared it to a cabinet of wonders, a chest in which each drawer was made of a different timber and contained different remarkable objects and stories. The notebooks, taken together, represented an accidental epic poem of Roger’s life, or perhaps a dendrological cross-section of his mind. In their range and randomness, they reminded me that he was, as Les Murray once wrote,
‘only interested in everything’
.

~

The last three boxes of Roger’s archive were found in 2013, in the dusty corner of a dusty shed. Jasmin called to let me know that more
material had turned up; would I like to come and collect it? I drove over, had lunch, walked the fields with Titus and Jasmin and took the boxes home. That evening, kneeling on the floor of my study, I began to sort through the contents. There were files and notebooks from Roger’s schooldays, A4 notepads with scribbles and jottings, a new clutch of letters and pamphlets from the early years of Common Ground, and then, with a jolt of shock, I found a blue foolscap folder with a white label on the front, on which Roger had written ‘
ROBERT MACFARLANE
’.

I paused. I thought about throwing it away unopened. What if it held hurt for me? I opened it. It contained five letters. The letters weren’t about me – they were
from
me, to Roger, all written in 2002–3, when I was first coming to know him. Two were handwritten, two were typed, and one was the printout of an email. I had no memory of any of them, and for that reason I encountered my own voice almost as a stranger’s:

Tuesday 11 February 2003

It was great to get your letter, Roger, and to be transported out of my bunker-office in Cambridge, to the walnut woods of Kyrgyzstan. The word that really leaped out at me, oddly, from your description, was
‘holloway’
for the sunken lanes you saw. My wonderful editor is called Sara Holloway, and reading your letter, her name – which I have said often but never thought of as possessing an origin in the landscape – suddenly became rich with association and image. I could infer a meaning for it from your description, but wanted to know more, so went to my
Shorter Oxford Dictionary
. It wasn’t there, so I hauled out the complete
OED
, and discovered, buried in the small print of the ‘variants’ of meaning No. 7, the following: ‘hollow-way, a way,
road or path, through a defile or cutting, also extended, as quot. in 1882)’. That was all, but it was enough. I wonder where you picked the term up from? What a word it is! It made me think of the description of a holloway – though he does not call it such – in Gilbert White’s
Natural History of Selborne
. A friend and I are fascinated by ways, paths, ancient roads, ley-lines, dumbles, cuttings and – I now know – by holloways. So: thank you for the gift of the word.

Roger’s gift of that word would set further ripples of influence ringing outwards. Two years later he and I would travel together to the ‘holloways’ of south Dorset, in search of the hideout of the hero of Geoffrey Household’s cult 1939 novel,
Rogue Male
, who goes to ground in a sandstone-sided sunken lane in the Chideock Valley. Seven years after that I would return to Chideock with the artist Stanley Donwood and the writer Dan Richards, with whom I subsequently co-wrote a small book called
Holloway
– though by then I had fully forgotten the work’s true origin in that letter from Roger to me about the walnut woods of Kyrgyzstan and their deep-trodden lanes.

The other gift I received from Roger’s trip to Central Asia was an apple pip. He had travelled to the Talgar Valley in the mountains of Kazakhstan in search of the ur-apple – the wild apple,
Malus sieversus
, that was thought to have evolved into the domestic apple,
Malus domesticus
, and in that form found its way to Britain thanks to the Romans. On the northern slopes of the Tien Shan massif, Roger had filled three film canisters with wild-apple pips and damp cotton wool, and carried them home to Suffolk. He planted the pips in pots on his kitchen windowsill and there they had grown to seedlings. But then Roger died and the seedlings almost died with him, as the creepers on the outside of the farm grew untended over the kitchen window and shut out the sun. Potbound and light-hungry, each
seedling developed an obvious kink in its trunk from the months around Roger’s death, where they had leaned desperately sunwards.

Then Titus and Jasmin rescued them, re-potted them and gave them light. The seedlings flourished into saplings. When spring came, Titus planted out ten of the ur-apples in a field just behind the barn where Roger’s archive was kept, making an apple avenue. And Jasmin gave one of the saplings to me. I planted it in the chalky clay of my suburban garden, and to my surprise it flourished there.

It takes about twelve years for an apple tree to grow from pip to first fruiting. I write this in the spring of 2014, eleven years after Roger returned from Central Asia. My ur-apple flowers with white blossom, its leaves are a keen green, and it still has the sharp crook near the base of its trunk that remembers Roger’s death. Next year, all being well, it will fruit for the first time.

~

A life lived as variously as Roger’s, and evoked in writing as powerful as his, means that even after death his influence continues to flow outwards. Green Man-like, he appears in unexpected places, speaking in leaves. There is, of course, a tendency to hero-worship those who lived well and died too young, as Roger did. Laundry lists and emails become holy writ; hallowed places become sites of pilgrimage; admiration is expressed through ritual re-performance; and idealism threatens to occlude the actual. I know that Roger was no pure Poseidon or Herne: that he flew often and without apparent pangs to his conscience, that he could at times talk too much and at times too little, and that he was unrepeatably rude to any Jehovah’s Witnesses who made the long trudge down the track from Mellis
Common to the front door of Walnut Tree Farm. But his writing did show people how to live both eccentrically and responsibly, and by both dwelling well and travelling wisely, he resolved in some measure the tension between what Edward Thomas called the desire to
‘go on and on
over the earth’ and the desire ‘to settle for ever in one place’. Above all he embodied a spirit of childishness, in the best sense of the word: innocent of eye and at ease with wonder.

Though Roger is gone, many of his readers still feel a need to express their admiration for him, and the connection they felt with his work and world view, and so they still write letters, as if he might somehow read them. As I am Roger’s literary executor, and as our writings have become intertwined, many of these letters find their way to me. They come from all over the world, and from various kinds of people: a professional surfer from Australia, a Canadian academic, a woman from Exeter confined to her house due to mobility problems, a young man re-swimming the route of
Waterlog
, lake by lake and river by river, in an attempt to recover from depression. Titus and Jasmin have to cope with the scores of Deakinites who come on pilgrimage to Mellis each year, wanting to see the farm and its fields. Most are polite. Some expect it all to have been kept as a shrine or museum, and are offended by the changes they perceive. Some, inspired by Roger’s insouciant attitude towards trespass, wander the fields uninvited, or take unannounced dips in the moat.

But all of the pilgrims, and all the letter writers, are under Roger’s influence, and as I know that feeling well I do not begrudge them it. Among the letters I have received, one of the most heartfelt came from a Dutch-English reader, and this is how it began:

I am Hansje, born and bred
in the north Netherlands where I bathed from age one in lakes, rivers and cold-water outdoor pools. Here in Warwickshire, where I have lived for some thirty-three years, I am among other things a swimmer, and if you ever wish to swim in the beautiful Avon, then do tell me and I will show you to the best and secret places. I have never experienced the profound sense of loss of someone I have never met as when I learnt that Roger had died. Many sentences in each of his books are as if engraved in me, find a resting place, a recognition, they are magnifying glass, lens and microscope to the natural world, a watery surface through which I look to see the earth clarified.