The coppice is not to be confused with the pollard – the latter term’s link to woodland labour means that it too is a noun and a verb, but “pollard” refers to the tree itself, while the woodland treated in this way is “pollarded” woodland. While the coppicer cuts juvenile trees almost to the ground, the pollarder cuts the branches to encourage lateral growth. The uses of pollarded limbs are numerous.
Laura Beatty’s recently published novel Pollard (Chatto &Windus 2008, details here) brings together notions of living with nature, the working natural space and the harsh realities of a life spent outdoors. Beatty skilfully mixes the story of an outsider, who on a personal level fits oddly with the rest of the world, with fascinating details of camp craft as she makes a dwelling in the woods near her family home. The changing fate of the wood as housing developments encroach and the place becomes regulated, signposted, paved and protected for public use is woven into this tale. Beatty’s skill is in centring her narrative upon the imaginative world of Anne, the central protagonist, so that we see the wood through her eyes. This means that the story does not descend into a hymn to the British countryside – Anne does not even know the names of many of the creatures she sees, until a new friend enlightens her, and her life over the first couple of winters is almost unbearably hard. Changes to the wood are observed only as they relate to Anne’s own changing circumstances. The wood itself is far from a pastoral idyll – it is a heavily used recreational space, home to glue-sniffing youths from the local housing estate, bordered by a stinking chicken farm, near an abattoir, featuring a car park full of doggers. It is a strange triumph, for which I cannot think of parallel examples, to offer an ancient story of how much a wood means, even though it is a resolutely modern, dirty and over-used space.
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