A squirrel tore across my lawn, in flight from the racket.
In such a dry county the hillside in front of the mere was an unusually fertile area of ground. I have never lived anywhere where plants and trees grow nearly as quickly. Two years previously the alders from which the men with the chainsaws hung so balletically had not even been visible from my window, but since then they had shot up the way fourteen-year-old schoolboys do in the summer holidays, running riot in the garden of Deborah and David next door. Mostly invisible to each other due to the raging, fertile hedge line, David and I walked repeatedly in parallel lines from the top of the slope to our bonfires in constant attempts to de-jungle our surroundings from April to October every year. Time-lapse photography of the buddleia below my living-room window filmed merely over the course of an average May would have shown it rising in ominous megalomaniacal fashion towards the cave. Had I not intervened with the loppers, it would have inched in through the gaps in the draughty windows, creeped along my bookshelves and given the back wall of the cave an appealing paisley revamp. Its peers would have followed, and soon my home would have been like a smaller version of the disused Palace Theatre on Union Street in Plymouth, which had a tree growing out of one of its windows. ‘That must be the house where the heroin addicts live,’ people on the opposite side of the water would say, pointing.
I did not think about trees and shrubs a huge amount during my first couple of years living in the cave, mostly only in the sense that I rather liked them and believed that being kind to them meant not intervening with their whims, but when the pampas grass on one side of the garden had stretched its scratchy fronds in a big permanent yawn and the elders and giant philadelphus on the other side had expanded to the extent that all that remained was a three-yard tunnel of lawn leading to the water, I realised it was time to take action, and I barely stopped taking action for the following seven and a half years – for my sake but mostly for the sake of the potential buyers who would eventually come to look at the house when I was inevitably forced to sell it, who I figured would be less likely to purchase it if its garden looked like a prosaic south Norfolk answer to the Sinharaja Forest Reserve. Sometimes after a day out there my hair would smell so much of bonfire it smelled more strongly of bonfire than my actual bonfires did. One load of shampoo and conditioner was often not enough: the smoky aroma of deceased bark would remain. But that was OK. I liked the smell of bonfires and I had a strong instinct that people who recoiled violently at the smell of bonfire were not My People. In the swimming-pool changing room I often saw young men – and some not so young men – dousing themselves in Lynx deodorant, which never smelled good. ‘I think of it as the aroma of masked spunk,’ my friend Ellen once told me. I’d never met a female who liked it, yet all over Britain red-blooded heterosexual men in the prime of life continued to blast it flamboyantly into their various crevices. Maybe a bonfire aroma wasn’t the best smell to be carrying in a permanent invisible cloud around your person, but it was better than the whiff of Lynx. I liked the smell of bonfires so much that on country walks I’d often take detours to sniff those tended by strangers. Another favourite habit was to leave the curtains of the cave open at night and watch the light from David’s conflagrations gradually fade to a tiny orange bulb in an ocean of black. David’s bonfires tended to be more carefully arranged and marshalled than mine, but I did always perform the most crucial preliminary procedure before I put a match to the dry foliage: I checked for hedgehogs. I only ever found one, and it was already dead. It was possibly even a twentieth-century hedgehog, a hedgehog that might erroneously have been marketed as ‘vintage’ by a second-hand shop pushing their luck. A spiky economical bird’s nest with the ghost of a ghost of a face.
Bonfires are not permitted in my garden in Devon, but I have a fireplace and take a similar sort of satisfaction in the processes surrounding it. I often get my logs from my dad, who has an arrangement regarding loose wood with the farmer who owns most of the land near him. On other occasions I bulk-order from one of the many woodsmen who lurk on the edges of Dartmoor. My latest batch came from a man called Dan, who collects his wood from the leaf-dense valleys near the moorland village of Holne and is exactly the kind of soft-spoken bearded giant you hope to find working and living in a forest. His logs are a mixture of birch, beech and oak, and burn far, far better than any I’ve purchased before, especially the ones from my local petrol station, which give off as much efficient sustained warmth as a bag of fifteen lemon-drizzle cakes. This is nothing unique for petrol-station logs. There’s something almost impressive about how uniformly and monumentally terrible all firewood from petrol stations turns out to be, as if it goes beyond mere capitalism and is in fact the outcome of a Shit Petrol Station Firewood Constitution drawn up in the middle part of the last century.
After Dan had emptied his superior logs from his Land Rover onto the lane I spent a happy five hours hauling them up the hill to
