Five, six, pick up sticks

Like a squirrel or a jay caching nuts, John Lewis-Stempel wanders the woods collecting fallen boughs for the fire, an exercise in freedom and self-reliance unchanged since the Stone Age

- Illustration by Michael Frith

I WENT up to the wood in the mid afternoon, towing a trailer in order to collect kindling and some convenient fallen boughs, which, in the crank of a chainsaw, could be converted into logs for the fire. On my daily trips through the wood, whether promenading the dogs or taking 'deery' short cuts to check the sheep, I make piles of small sticks or haul branches to convenient pickup spots; a little like a squirrel or a jay caching nuts (and, a little like a squirrel or a jay, I sometimes forget where I've stashed the haul).

In the gathering of firewood, I find myself in connection with my peasant self or an even older iteration of humanity. The gratis of the gathered wood is a satisfaction beyond the obvious thrift. Pick up sticks for the fire, rather than purchasing a sack of nylon-netted kindling from the service-station forecourt, and you are a little less the slave of the consumer society.

The liberation politics of scrumping firewood are older still. The peasants of medieval England were generally banned from cutting down trees for the hovel fire. Indeed, in my native Hereford, John Gilbert, the bishop, excommunicated in 1383 any persons who cut down live trees from a local wood. Peasants were primarily permitted only dead wood for the home fire and then only that which they could retrieve with a shepherd's crook or a weeding hook—hence the expression 'by hook or by crook'. The foraging of firewood, nonetheless, enabled the peasants to be a little less dependent on their manorial lords.