Trees
1.
These were silent walks, desperate walks, pursued without planning or discussion. We’d just seem to know – all three of us – that it was
time to set off yet again. To head east towards the River Lea across Springfield Park, where our favourite tree, a voluminous yet delicately feathered green cloud of a walnut, was to be found; or south into Clissold and the chestnut avenue of Queen Elizabeth Walk; or round in a labyrinthine, rambling journey through baking and subdued streets, starting out westward and almost improbably – for it often felt as if we must have wandered by accident into new and other lives on those unfamiliar streets – winding our way back.
Silent, the three of us, a spooky little group.
Uncanny.
Stood at a crossing, say.
Waiting. Obviously waiting.
3
2.
It took us the best part of an hour to reach the valley floor with its gurgling stream and its woodland path that continually switched
We’d rented a black beamed dolls’ house with lead-latticed oriole windows, a warren of a house that creaked and groaned like a sailing
ship, a house with low ceilings and leaning rooms, with twists and turns, hidden steps and half-landings, split levels, a house whose front door gave out onto a shingled courtyard right beside the village tearooms and whose back door led, through a porch large enough to be called a sun room, to a garden whose three ascending terraces cut broad strips of lawn and flowerbed into the first gentle slopes of the valley’s side. At the far end of the garden there was an impossibly well-composed bit of biscuit tin scenery. Not too far off, a lone pine – a tall, rugged beanstalk of a tree, its bare trunk rising plain and true for what seemed like hundreds of feet before cutting into the stratified green clouds of its own needles – and beyond, a cliff line sinking jaggedly at an angle into the sea. A stunning simplicity of sea, tree, cliff.
banks, threading back and forth on a series of slatted bridges – because obviously we again had to carry Charlie and the buggy most of the way, this time slip-sliding on muddy, mossy slopes fretted with exposed tree roots.
We felt increasingly foolish and furtive, constantly anxious that someone might see us in all our ridiculousness, trying to manoeuvre a buggy heavy with child over an assault course. And maybe also this furtiveness was engendered by the hushed quality of the sound and the dank green quality of the light as we descended deeper. It was as if we were spiriting something away. A changeling, perhaps. We hushed our voices and held our collective breath and everything seemed muffled, a smokiness somehow hanging in the air. The spirit of the woods smelled mouldy but fresh too. Toadstools. Mud and nettles. And yes, if someone then had come to us and held forth about the spirit of the woods we would have listened deeply because we were part way to being spooked.
So here we were at last, down on the valley floor, about half a mile upstream from the village we reckoned, the worst of it over because we knew the woodland track came out not a million miles from our house. We rested up, me and Beth sitting with our backs against the broad trunk of a tree, Charlie glad to be sitting quietly in her buggy now it wasn’t being borne headlong on a white water ride.
And it was at this point that we were properly spooked.
A stomach-swooping thrill of fear as we became aware of something. A noise. A noise gaining on us. An energy, a raw force; and we were terribly unprepared. We’d already been blown away. We’d nothing left. And yet here came this thing. There was an uncanny mischievousness in its animation, in its very vitality. Suddenly it was around us on all sides. Or no – above us.
A high rustling.
I laughed. Beth’s eyes widened, perhaps at the hubris in this laugh. We had been living so long at the edge of the apocalypse.
“What? What is it?”
“It’s only gone and started raining.”
And sometimes it was like that. Apparently. Someone told us that the deeper combes have their own weather; and perhaps it’s true.
