For a year I travelled amphibiously about the country, swimming in the wild, literally immersing myself in the landscape and in the elements, in particular the primal element of water, in an attempt to discover for myself that 'thired thing' D. H. Lawrence puzzled about in the poem of that title. Water, he wrote, is something more than the sum of its parts, something more than two parts hydrogen and one of oxygen. In writing Waterlog, the account of my meanderings, swimming was a metaphor for what Keats called 'taking part in the existence of things.'
Now it seemed logical to plunge into what Edward Thomas called 'the fifth element': the element of wood. Swimming in the Helford River, where the oaks stretch out their branches level with the water to dip into it at high tide, or on Dartmoor, going against the current with the running salmon in the steeply wooded Dart, I realized the logic of Patrick Leigh Fermor's superb The Woods and the Water. In the woods, there is a strong sense of the immersion in the dancing shadow play of the leafy depths, and the rise and fall of the sap that proclaims the seasons is nothing less than a tide, and no less influenced by the moon.
It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it makes in the wind. If Waterlog was about the element of water, Wildwood is about the element of wood, as it exists in nature, in our souls, in our culture and in our lives.
To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we ourselves are transformed. It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go into the greenwood to grow, learn and change. It is where you travel to find yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. Merlin sends the future King Arthur as a boy into the greenwood to fend for himself in The Sword in the Stone. There, he falls asleep and dreams himself, like a chameleon, into the lives of the animals and the trees. In As You Like It, the banished Duke Senior goes to live in the Forest of Arden like Robin Hood, and in Midsummer Night's Dream the magical metamorphosis of the lovers takes place in a wood 'outside Athens' that is quite obviously an English wood, full of the faeries and Robin Goodfellows of our folklore.
Pinned on my study wall is a still from Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage. It shows Victor, the feral boy, clambering through the tangle of branches of the dense deciduous woods of the Aveyron. The film remains one of my touchstones for thinking aobut our relations with the natural world: a reminder that we are not so far away as we like to think from our cousins the gibbons, who swing like angels through the forest canopy, at such headlong speed that they almost fly like the tropical brids they envy amd emulate in the music of their marriage-songs at dawn in the treetops. To begin where I began, my mother's name was Wood. The thired of my father's three Christian names was Greenwood: Alvan Marshall Greenwood Deakin. My great-grandfather had the timber yard in Walsall: Wood's of Walsall. So I am one of the Wood tribe, and, although I have read Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders many times over, the story of Marty South, Giles Winterbourne and Grace Melbury always moves me more than anything else I know. I am a woodlander; I have sap in my veins. My great-uncle on my father's side was Joseph Deakin, framed and imprisoned at the age of twenty by Lord Salisbury's government in 1892 as one of the Walsall Anarchists. He became Librarian at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, where he continued his self-education with the help of William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other early socialists. He was a true defender of the greenwood spirit of democratic freedom, and I always think of him as belonging to the outlaw tradition of Robin Hood.