DEFEAT, THEN VICTORY

The final part (probably) of a three-part story.

I remember it like it was yesterday, thought Alison Dickens as she sat in her armchair waiting for her favourite television programme Pointless to start.

It had been a mixed affair, back in the sixties, with their treasure tree needing, it seemed, round the clock protection.

We were visited by a man from the council in his smart suit, and when he saw me I could see the way he undressed me with his eyes, and there wasn’t much for those eyes to tear off me! But he told us just how important it was for the patch of wasteland we were guarding to be cleared of rubbish so that a nice new church could be built there, and then we would be able to say our prayers and make gifts to God in comfort and peace…

Back in the present, her clock struck 5.15 and the familiar host of the progarmme she’d been waiting for appeared, introducing contestants who had to concentrate on obscurity if they were going to have any chance at all of winning the prize.

But her mind was long ago and almost lost in the remnants of the copse. Days had passed in a sort of impasse, like a lull before a storm, and then the police had arrived.

What was it the Inspector had said. Yes, they’d sent an important Inspector! No constable fresh from college to coerce the three tree huggers! But a real live Inspector with his badges and air of importance.

“I’d be standing there with you if it was a genuinely old tree,” he had said, “but it’s a nothing sapling, an offshoot that ought never have sprouted…”

And she had defended that tree. “The roots it grew from were old as the hills,” she had said, defiantly, and the two men, Bobby and James, had applauded her with coarse cheers. “You’d know if you’d been with me as I went to it all weathers and carefully chipped away at an old tree stump and so helped our treasure tree to grow,” she added, “I came here, winter and summer alike in my school uniform, and nursed the tree to life, and look at it now!”

When I mentioned my school uniform I saw his dirty eyes light up, and they had! His overactive imagination was stripping me of my summer frock and wrapping me in a grey pleated skirt and blouse, and he loved it… But I was going to take no notice and he could tell, so he waved one hand in a superior way, and a group of officers, waiting for their orders, came to lead us away. They even had a police woman for me so that I wouldn’t have cause to complain about the brutal sexism of the local police force, but that woman was worse than the men.

“Now come on then, missie,” said the policewoman, her breath resonant of the air that blows out of the Codger’s Arms mid afternoon when the old men are being told to go to their homes, the cry of have you no homes to go to filling the air with a strange beer-and-smoke tainted humour? And they’d sweep out, laughing maybe, or grumbling, and it would be just like that police woman’s breath as she blew it into my face.

And she was strong. Like an ox! She twisted one of my arms behind me until I could have wept at the pain, but didn’t, and forced me along to where a police van was waiting to cart us off to the police station.

“We did our best,” muttered Bobby when we were finally released and sent home, with orders to go nowhere near the copse ever again, and certainly not to interfere with the men there, who had a job to do.

“A very poor best,” I whispered, “I could have done more… my tree, our tree, is being swept away and we should have saved it.” Tears prickled my eyes as I spoke, I felt so strongly about the injustice or replacing our wonderful treasure tree with a church of all things. It the deity they were going to worship there got to hear of it, would he approve

“There’ll be other trees,” murmured James vaguely, and for him there were. It became a war to be fought by him, against developers, against authority, against everyone who had anything to do with the clearing of nature and replacing it with bricks and mortar.

But I had my own way of fighting for nature.

That autumn I went down Seeker’s Lane where small boys were collecting horse chestnuts so they could play conkers in the school playground, and I picked half a dozen freshly fallen from the biggest of three trees half way down the lane.

“What you goin’ to do, misses?” asked one small boy, “soak ‘em in vinegar, put ‘em in the over, make ‘em tough?”

I shook my head and smiled at his eager little face.

“No,” I told him, “I’m going to let them grow.”

He looked at me as if I was mad. “But they’re only conkers,” he said, “they’re made for games…”

Which left me with a huge question in my head, one that pondered on the point of education if small boys who love playing with horse chestnuts hanging from a piece of string in the school yard don’t know what they really are. They’re made for games...what was that all about?

But I did take those horse chestnuts home, I did plant them in a wooden tray filled with soil from my garden. And a year later I had three, not six but I wasn’t surprised, tiny saplings growing in my tray.

It was after that I called on James. I’d liked James when we’d been tree huggers together. We’d even found moments for a little intimate closeness, unsuspected, we hoped, by Bobby. We were adults, both single, and it had seemed all right.

He was into the environment in a big way even though it was still only the nineteen sixties and not yet fashionable to be holed up in dens protecting ancient pieces of woodland like it was a few years later. But not even James spent all of his life like that. He had a job, he was a library assistant of all things, not despising the books he was dealing with because they were made of trees… He also treasured learning, and to his mind if a tree was going to die it’s timber might as well go to a constructive cause.

“I’ve got some trees,” I told him after he’d kissed me a little too warmly, and I had responded in kind.

“Tell me,” he invited me as he led me into his kitchen and found some lemonade in an antiquated fridge.

“Horse chestnuts,” I told him, and I explained how I’d rescued the best nuts from the grasping hands of small boys in school shorts and set them to grow in soil from my garden.

“They’re only small yet,” I said, “but I want to plant them somewhere they’ll grow safely. Would you like a tree in your garden?”

And that’s what happened. In a kind of ceremony that almost had religious undertones about a year later we set one of my tiny saplings at the bottom of his garden. We did the same in mine and Bobby’s gardens, distributing the three baby plants where we hoped they grow tall and proud.

“What we ought to do,” said James when all three saplings were safely bedded into good soil and we were back at my home enjoying a glass of cool beer, “if you don’t mind, that is, but what you and I ought to do is get married…”

It was a proposal that I loved.

© Peter Rogerson 16.04.22

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