Roger Deakin 1943 - 2006 It is with profound sadness that we announce the death of our co-founder Roger Deakin. In April this year he discovered he had a brain tumour, and had been undergoing treatment. Roger founded Common Ground with Sue Clifford and Angela King in 1982/3. We had met at different times working as we all had for Friends of the Earth through the 1970’s – Angela had been their first wildlife campaigner, Sue was on the board of directors and Roger had acted as consultant helping with promotional and fundraising events – one of the most memorable of which involved some of the Monty Python gang exhorting us to ‘Save the Krill’. Roger could turn his hands to anything. At last he found himself a writer, but he had taught English in school, been a copywriter, made films, organised local festivals, put on concerts for the Aldeburgh Foundation at Snape Maltings, made furniture, rebuilt timber house and barn and looked after his smallholding. He was a regular contributor to newspapers, magazines and radio and had been a director of Eastern Arts, Suffolk Dance and the Gogmagogs. He loved literature, music, swimming, cycling, walking, gardening, farming, cooking, watching wild life, travelling and giving time to his family and friends. His great forte was friendship and compassion – he loved people and they loved him. He also cared passionately about his patch in Suffolk, campaigning relentlessly to save Cow Pasture Lane and Mellis Common from harm. He managed his few fields and woodland in traditional ways, conserving plants and animals that were there, gently coaxing back some that had fled. Everything he took on was undertaken with enthusiasm, care and thoroughness. As an honorary trustee / director of Common Ground he gave generously of his time and thoughts; he introduced us to David Holmes our long time art director, they shared a belief in high quality visual as well as verbal communication. In 1989 working at our peak, Roger rolled up his sleeves to work breakneck alongside Pearce Marchbank in the production of our one off publication - Pulp! - a newspaper demanding “all arboreal life is here”. It was with the publication of ‘Waterlog - a swimmer’s journey through Britain’ that he found warm acclaim. The reviews it received were great – without exception. For example, Craig Brown wrote in The Mail on Sunday. “A simply wonderful book … the perfect union of a writer and a subject … a delightfully eccentric masterpiece, no poolside or riverbank should be without it.”. Roger has followed this with 'Wildwood - a journey through trees', which thankfully is complete following several years of research that has taken him around the world. Selfishly we mourn the loss of a dear friend, his company, and a future without his insights and thoughtful and imaginative advice. Our thoughts are with his son Rufus, Alison, and all the close family and friends that have been helping him during the last four months. An example of Roger’s writing follows from 1989 when we asked him to write the foreword to our small book ‘Orchards: A Guide to Local Conservation’ which launched our work on orchard conservation. FIRST FRUIT by Roger Deakin “I first encountered Newton in the company of Harvey, Cook, and Faraday, as one of the houses at my first school. No doubt the idea behind the naming was to inspire our young minds to new heights of inquiry and discovery. Each had what would nowadays be called a logo - a pylon-and-lightning for Faraday, a heart for Harvey, a galleon for Cook. Newton’s was equally original – a descending apple. Newton boys in their green ties always seemed most at home in the school playground – it was an orchard, with a patch of concrete at its centre. In summer, it was full of the birdsong of small boys punctuated by toots from the narrow-gauge steam railway that threaded its way between the trees, and was the headmaster’s passion. Boys were expected to keep the line free of windfalls, and there was a resident black manx cat who thought sleepers were for sleeping on, and whose favourite game was to leap clear at the last possible moment, causing us to speculate about its absent tail. This was my first experience of the orchard – as a place to dream about in lessons, a haven from toil, a playground. But as Isaac Newton bears witness, orchards are good places for thinking too, and I now do a good deal of mine under the healing branches of an ancient Dr Harvey, although not in September, as these wonderfully cumbersome apples can weigh a pound a piece. A Dr Harvey accelerating at 23 ft per second can seriously damage your health. And there are other ways Doc Harvey can lay you flat too. The cider we brew from a mixture of these and other windfalls once put a whole Scottish folk band, famed for their prowess with the tankard as well as the fiddle, firmly under the kitchen table. Just looking at one of these gnarled giants would be enough to give a supermarket manager apoplexy. The narrow, uniform range of apples and other orchard fruit now available in our shops expresses the visual as well as the commercial obsession of our age. Taste and texture are no longer the prime criteria for fruiterers or, perforce for shoppers. But the joy of orchard fruits is their non-conformity, the pleasure of experiencing the sheer number of variations on the theme of apple, plum, pear or cherry that gardeners , nature and history have between them invented. Yet try asking for a Lady Henniker or a Cornish Honeypin at the supermarket today. Here orchard fruit is concerned, we are subject to what G.K. Chesterton once called ‘the anonymous tyrranies of trade”. Yet there are signs of hope. Our local natural food shop has built up a roaring trade in unsprayed locally grown apples, pears and plums from a wide variety of orchard trees. And if supermarkets can sell organic vegetables successfully, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do the same with orchard fruit. Today, real ale, tomorrow real apples, plums, cherries, pears… How strange that of all trees the fruit tree should now be so threatened, and so bereft of official protection. None of the statutory conservation bodies has shown much interest in orchards during their steady decline since the war, perhaps on the grounds that they are neither truly wild places nor composed of wild trees. (Are old orchards really any less ‘wild’ than other man-made habitats like hedgerows or the Norfolk Broads?). Old orchards, with their ‘mossed cottage-trees’, can be important local havens for birds, wild flowers, lichens, bees – and for the hundreds of varieties of fruit trees that could face extinction unless we take action now. That old orchards and many apple varieties should be threatened is ironic because throughout Europe, the connection of the apple tree with immortality is an ancient and widespread. It is to the Vale of Avalon, the secret “island of apple-trees’, that Arthur goes to heal his ‘grievous wounde” in the closing pages of Malory’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’. And it is quite natural that our modern mythic heroes, the Beatles, should have chosen the apple as their insignia. In Arthur’s day, the apple was revered as the noblest and most generous of trees. Today its once-sacred name graces a computer. We live in tasteless times. But then, all these examples are homage to the universal popularity of apples and orchards and the potency of their presence in our culture. It is time to start valuing the real thing, not just its icon. If we could reverse the decline of our orchards in Britain, the uplifting effect on the quality of our lives – on our countryside, our towns, our restaurants, shops and market stalls - would be dramatic. And nobody would be more surprised than Newton to see the apple rising”. © Roger Deakin, for Common Ground, 1989.
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