Billhooks, away at sea, and the snowy peaks of Alaska
With Eowyn Ivey, Richard Negus and Iqbal Hussain
There’s a strange phenomenon I discussed with a friend recently, where we dissected why we seem to regress back to being grumpy teenagers whenever we go back to our family homes. I’m here now in fact, working from my childhood bedroom with my Tate Modern postcards and decade-old concert tickets still tacked up on the wall. Last night, I argued with my 20-year-old brother over the uneven sharing of a brownie.
Maybe it’s being surrounded by the relics of a past that wasn’t so long ago but feels like a different life or the fear of bumping into someone I went to school with, but being here makes me feel both like an old version of myself and, antithetically, a tourist in a place I once called my only home. It’s a feeling that author Eowyn Ivey shares in today’s Boundless, too, writing about the nostalgia she feels walking down the main street in her home town of Palmer, Alaska.
A staple of a trip back to Coventry is a visit to the city centre, partly because it’s the only thing to do here. But it feels like every time I go another shop has closed, with no signs of any phoenixes planning to rise from the ashes. There’s one independent coffee shop I try to pop into, and last time I visited they’d had their front window smashed through for the third or fourth time that year. The biggest thing to happen in recent memory is a Sports Direct moving into the huge space once occupied by a BHS, and the much-mourned departure of the Debenhams.
Eowyn writes about missing the ‘scrappy little place’ her main street once was; I feel a sadness for the hub that the city centre used to be, a real-time view of the death of the UK high street. But I’m not quite ready to give up; it might get a little more disappointing each time, but I’ll keep my traditional city centre visit up and hope that one day there’ll be a spark of life in one of those many shuttered windows. At the very least, there’s now a Søstrene Grene to browse in the meantime.
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
The long and short of it, all at sea
On the Boundless podcast this week, Editor-at-Large Erica Wagner and Editor Patrick Galbraith discuss Erica’s latest piece on why we’re increasingly listening to lengthy podcasts while popular books seem to get shorter and shorter.
Listen on Apple Podcasts / Spotify
Snowy peaks in Alaska
Eowyn Ivey returns to the scenes of her youth to find surprising new charm
The main street in Palmer, Alaska, is much prettier than it once was. The snowy peaks of the Chugach mountains have always dominated the horizon, but for most of my childhood the street itself was run-down. The side roads were unpaved, and in the summer the dusty air made it feel like a frontier town. During economic recessions, many businesses shut down — the pharmacy with its soda counter, the two-story general store, and the florist. Boom or bust, however, the bars were always the most popular establishments. The street felt like a dead end, and I recall as a teenager thinking, ‘I can’t wait to get out of here.’
While I was away at university in the 1990s, though, the street became the centre of a sort of renaissance. The city planted lawns and apple trees. New business moved in and renovated the storefronts, and even the bars cleaned up their acts, putting out flowerpots and sidewalk tables. Vagabond Blues, an artsy coffee shop, opened with espresso, live music, and poetry readings. On the next block, a vacant building was eventually transformed into the town’s first independent bookstore, Fireside Books.
To my surprise, Palmer’s main street has become a charming tourist attraction, but when I walk to the bookstore with a latte in my hand, I encounter a lot of old memories.
Black Woods Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey is out now, published by Tinder Press
Eowyn is reading Jane Austen's Bookshelf: The Women Writers who Shaped a Legend by Rebecca Romney (Ithaka)
Primitive felicity
Richard Negus on the history and beauty of rustic hand-crafted tools
The Hebrew word ma·ʽatsadhʹ translates as ‘a metal implement used for shaping and cutting wood’. It first appears in the book of Isaiah, written sometime around 800 BC. Examples of this tool, predating the Old Testament by at least four centuries, have been unearthed in Egypt. Archaeologists now agree the very earliest ma·ʽatsadhʹ, or as we know them, ‘billhooks’, were Assyrian, and were used in the fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which is said to be the site of the original Garden of Eden.
Some 3,000 years have passed since the billhook first appeared, yet most days I still rely on one to help me pay the mortgage. The English billhook is an indispensable tool for professional hedgelayers like me. It is true that much of our cutting and clearing, when laying modern hedges, is carried out with a chainsaw. Yet, the billhook, used with an expert hand, provides a cleaner cut than any tearing petrol or battery-powered saw ever will.
There are still a few smiths making beautifully hand-crafted tools, frequently using recycled farriers’ rasps or old ship-steel. It is said that billhook blades made prior to 1945 are of a superior quality to those produced later. This is because of postwar radionuclide air contamination, which weakens steel; remarkably the majority of this pollution still stems from the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It is possible to buy modern mass produced billhooks, but their blades refuse to take a truly honed edge and are of insufficient quality for professional use. Therefore, most of us rely on vintage tools.
My shed is filled with old billhooks, all stored and wrapped in oily hessian potato sacks, each differing slightly in style and weight. The collection has grown over the years, accrued either as gifts from old countrymen or purchased from farm auctions and antique fairs, often for not very much money at all. I have repeatedly trialled this collection of aged steel, eventually selecting the trio for my first team.
The youngest, a single edged Southern style hook, was made in 1941. A crow’s foot symbol, indicating that it was made for the British Army, is stamped into the metal near the wooden pistol grip handle. It is nose-heavy and a touch too weighty for all-day use. However, it is perfect for brutally bludgeoning through hefty hawthorn or hazel stools, which are knotted by age and a lack of management. The next was made by the pre-war Black Country toolmaker, ‘Brades’. This is, in truth, a spar hook and looks a bit like a scaled-down sickle. It was designed and forged to half, quarter, and point-up rods of hazel into thatching spars, which are used to fix the ridge on a thatched roof. Finally, my favourite billhook, which I use daily, dates back to the 1920s and was crafted by an unknown Leicestershire blacksmith. Michael Dixon, the man who taught me to lay hedges, gave it to me over 30 years ago. I love it, as much as a man can love sharpened steel.
What I Was Doing When I Should Have Been Writing
Iqbal Hussain, author of Northern Boy
I tackle the Sisyphean task of organising my book shelves. I’m still working with words, I tell myself, even if I’m not writing them.
As a child, I’d sort my books in strict alphabetical order. As an adult, I’ve got too many books and not enough shelves. Plus, grown-up books, annoyingly, come in all sizes, and don’t slot neatly on the shelves. Instead of fitted shelves, we have standalone antique book cases – pretty, with their Arts and Crafts pierced hearts, but not designed for today’s hefty tomes.
Best-laid plans come unstuck before I even reach the B’s. I try something different. Maybe the tall, thin book case can take the small Armada paperbacks from my childhood. And the biggest case is the hardbacks and coffee table books. Leaving the rest to be alphabetised. Hours are spent investigating and refining my tactics. Success at last!
But I keep buying more books, ignoring my own one-in-one-out rule. Already-straining shelves refuse to yield space. Books end up stacked on top of books. TBR piles sway each time I walk past them. It’s enough to send me back to the computer and my blank page.
Iqbal Hussain is the author of Northern Boy, which was published by Unbound in June 2024