Deadwood.

A hard, busy morning, out in the wind and the sharp winter light, scavenging for firewood. There are no great stacks of seasoned logs to warm this spartan house, insufficient wealth, for the moment, to command deliveries of trailer loads someone else has had to cut and carry. But ten acres of hard-scrabble country is resource-rich, if you know where to look. Poverty, and the sometimes-bitter cold, have taught me.

Into the scattered stands of holm oaks, fringing the terraced fields, where badger setts are sometimes hidden, where hares or wild boar might shelter after heavy snow. We are all scavengers out here, looking for cold comforts; an abandoned warren isn’t empty for long, but is quickly reoccupied by another animal, and so my neighbours come and go. Rabbits, hares, foxes, badgers, genets, escaped and deranged hunting dogs, whelping in the thickets of underbrush, safe under the wild, self-seeded and barren quinces.

Look up to the sky and scout for the loss of leaves, for deadwood. Pull on a sickly-looking branch and see if it yields with a crunch. There is only one kind of firewood I prize more than the holm oak, which belts out a deep, throbbing, infra-red convection of cosy heat. Better still would be pitch or Scots pine, Pi roig as they call it here, but I don’t have the altitude for that, and even then, 100m higher up, where they once flourished, examples are now few and far between, and fiercely protected by law.

The pitch pine I might be lucky enough to burn comes from discarded building materials, from the ugly landfill sites hidden at the edge of the medieval towns; old furniture, old roof beams, once hauled down from the mountains to the east at some considerable expense, now tipped out of trucks like jackstraws or pick up sticks among tons of rubble as yet another crumbling town house, yet another ruined farmhouse, is snapped up and refurbished by the beautiful people lately following the money to this, the ‘Tuscany’ or the ‘Cotswolds’ of Spain

Though the rubbish dumps are often a decent place to find a haul of good wood, these beams might be studded with nails, half horseshoes, or hooks for crude and ancient farming implements skilfully pruned from the woods, whose use and whose names might already be forgotten. The hook where someone’s grandfather used to hang his black beret, is taken away in the Englishman’s shabby car and freshly annealed in a new fire. Its antique iron will not be kind to the chainsaw, however. One day, excited to find a great pile of long beams at the tip, sticky with gloriously flammable resin, I set about cutting them up and planned a long day of relays, ferrying an impressive weight of firewood back to the farm. But I stripped off the teeth from a brand-new and expensive tungsten-tipped chain in an instant when it hit a hidden horseshoe. Sometimes, the learning is hard.

The tired adage about firewood warming three times is true. I am glowing with the exertion of climbing up into the oaks, heaving at the dead branches, dragging and cutting and, if there is enough, stacking. An unmistakeable sweet vanilla-scented smoke curls from the chimney, I could be anywhere in some of the kinder recesses of memory, walking to school through the frosted Devon fields, stopping to talk with grazing ponies, or heaving great branches between two or three of us scruffy wastrels from a roaring waterfall in the Scottish Highlands. I will never forget the smell of that sweet oak, the wood that would never seem to dry.

It is with an almost poetic nostalgia that in winter I usually retreat after morning chores like gathering firewood, to write in an old caravan we hauled with us from England. It would serve as a tea-hut and possible accommodation, when we found somewhere to buy and renovate. With three young children, one of them still a baby, my partner’s terse “No” when I suggested setting ourselves up in a shanty town of yurts and this caravan on the land we eventually bought, was, I now realise, the very essence of an Irish mother’s wisdom. There was to be no homework done in a new and unfamiliar language by candlelight, in fingerless gloves.

Nevertheless, caravans have always held a kind of mystique for me, fond memories of childhood holidays, of jolly melamine plates, the faint smell of damp, matches and calor gas. Later, when I learned the traveller argot that taught me not to use the word caravan, but instead, ‘trailer’, they became something else, a pauper’s mobile equity, an essential component of my New Age Traveller’s rig.

It was a miracle this shabby thing ever made it here at all, we joked about arriving in Aragon after the long slog down from the ferry at Bilbao with nothing left but the ball hitch and a few wisps of mouldering fibreglass. I’ve rescued and repaired it many times; the sun long ago burned the plastic skylights to a brittle and powdery crisp, the heavy snow of big storms has bowed the roof and let the rain get in. If it were still in England it would long ago have dissolved, and its aluminium skin been recycled into a coke can, the body of an aeroplane or perhaps another, more salubrious caravan, but the infrequent rain and my many bodges have kept it bravely soldiering on. A car windscreen, held in place with a brick, has replaced one of the skylights, the once sagging roof is now tightly braced with beefy timbers, the deadly gas fire has been ripped out and replaced with a tiny woodstove, as we travellers used to do. Two pine cones and a clutch of sticks warms it in minutes. A solar panel keeps it ready with lights and power for my laptop.

Like Roger Deakin’s shepherd’s hut, as appendage to his Suffolk homestead at Walnut Tree Farm, my caravan is an unnecessary but low-impact indulgence. I could write anywhere in my large house, but down here in the field, with the sound of redstarts and ravens, of one dog licking his balls in the winter sun, the other snoring just outside the door, I feel I’ve earned this much at least. I often remember when I bought it, an instructive experience that confirmed my desire to leave Britain once and for all.

En route back from a party in East Devon, someone’s 40^th, I think, and accompanied by my handy friend Tom, catching a lift home with his exhaustive knowledge of, and hatred for, caravans, there happened to be one listed on Ebay, just around the corner, so we went to have a look. With very little cash and almost no time, I snapped it up, despite Tom pointing out its many, very obvious, shortcomings and we hitched it behind the car. I’d drop it off at his farm in the New Forest on the way back to London.

We were near my parents’ house, and it would have been rude and obtuse not to say hello, so we swung into the large car park in their small village, parked up in such a way so as to bother no one and went to say hi. We chatted with my mum, who was pleased by the surprise visit and made us tea and ham sandwiches. We were there for maybe an hour and a half, but when we returned to the carpark, there was a committee of curtain-twitchers hopping on their heels, waiting for us.

A strident older woman’s voice immediately asked us, with no hint of a greeting or even the most basic manners, what exactly we thought we were doing. We took a moment to take in the scene, a little gathering of the indignant. There was a man with a clipboard and a reflective gilet, suggestive of some sort of office. He barked out something about neighbourhood watch, asked if the vehicles were ours, if the car was taxed (it was) and said that it was no good, that we were taking up too much space in the car park, and must leave at once. I looked at the three cars and two dozen empty spaces, my 4x4 and caravan parked at the far end, considerately, so as not to obstruct or obtrude. There was a quiver in his voice, a mixture of fear, anger, of righteous indignation. These people, perhaps there were ten of them, had been waiting for a confrontation and would clearly not be satisfied without one. Tom, a Quaker farmer and business owner with 150 acres to his name, laughed at them in mildly hungover disbelief.

The lady who had first spoken up, let’s call her Karen, plucked nervously at her ‘nifty’ short hair and reiterated that we should “just go”. I looked at my rig; the beefy 4x4 and the long, twin-axle caravan. They must have thought we were Romani or Irish travellers, and had rustled up this overexcited little village pogrom in response. We told them we were leaving immediately, that there was no cause for whatever alarm they might have imagined. “Good”, said Karen. The man with the clipboard snorted with delight. He was a David or a Geoffrey from the social club, a golf-bore, the fury of the Daily Mail pumping hard through his sclerotic veins, reddening his shapeless, swollen, jowly face.

Of course, as a former New Age Traveller, I was no stranger to being run off, to the late-night sound of a car, full of vigilantes, sometimes with half bricks or even petrol bombs, or the knock of the police at 3am, perhaps an aggressive and impromptu search. One time in Scotland, my friends were told by the police that if they didn’t leave the layby where they were minding their own business, arrangements would be made with Social services to see that their children were swiftly taken into care. But it was my time as a traveller, in that chaotic, peripatetic university of resilience that was living ‘on the road’, that gave me the know-nothing ballsy confidence to rebuild a farmhouse with no idea how, or indeed taught me where to scrounge up a bit of firewood, to find useable building materials at the rubbish dump, how to live reasonably, as I do now, on scant resources.

I could make all kinds of assumptions about the people who harried us needlessly out of my parents’ village, and indeed I will. They were rude, intolerant, ignorant and far too invested in other people’s business. Later they would become known as ‘gammons’ for their anachronistic and unhealthy diet and the ready ire reddening their bitter, ugly faces. A friend, another former traveller, faced down a similar cohort of the rural righteous, who still clutter southern England like canker sores around the mouth of the nation. In his case they were mustering their barely concealed prejudice in opposition to his modest planning application in Somerset, and he said he wondered whether it was something to do with the war, a dreamlike fondness for some myth of the quiet 1950s, a fearful desire for nothing to happen anywhere, ever.

These charmless people, let’s not forget, didn’t actually fight the Second World War, but not to be gulled by the myths Britain has for so long believed about itself, their kind would have quickly formed the stiff backbone of a collaborationist administration, had the Nazis crossed the channel. Later on, they no doubt headed out to the local primary school to vote in the infamous referendum on leaving the European Union, and were pleased at the result.

One part of the referendum’s cascade of consequences and catastrophes was the stripping away of my very international sons’ rights to travel, work, live and love across the continent where they were very intentionally brought up to feel at home. Ten years before that vote, in a tiny village car park, the compacted fear and spite of little England was already coiled like a snake, ready to lash out with its venom at any threat, real or imagined, and ultimately bring a slow, suffocating ruin to the country these people no doubt professed to love, but whose prosperity they would so ignorantly and treasonously betray. I imagine the ground they are now surely buried in is a cold as were their frozen, frightened hearts. The Brexit vote was still a decade away, but this was England, with all its great weight of hidden dead wood, and it was definitely time to leave.