A wild slim alien

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I am a tree – Lime

Lime

Three closed stands of trunks, each high-crowned with a spread of fresh green heart-shaped leaves from which dropped the sticky summer honeydew of aphids onto any car mistakenly seeking shelter beneath them.  These were the trees that I could see from my new bedroom.  I remember the wind in their leaves; and that on still midsummer days, they stayed alive with the sound of honeybees.

The limes divided our garden from a horse stud and oversaw my burgeoning freedom.  My bedroom – aged sixteen, the first I had all to myself – was on the ground floor, next to the kitchen; what in the time before refrigeration and fitted cupboards had been the pantry.  Now records, books and fanzines began to line its shelves.  Between the shelves on two sides and the walls in which window and door were set, there was just about room for a bed.  In it one summer’s day I lost my virginity to a girl as innocent as me.  Afterwards she confessed her need to tell someone, anyone who wasn’t me, since obviously I knew already, having very much been there, having not been entirely detached from my body throughout the experience, rather indeed having been more or less wholly – if inexpertly – engaged in it.  And it turned out that the person she told might have been the person who might similarly have confided in her, for I’d gone out for a drink with that friend earlier in the year but as she and I settled into talking, we were latched onto by a male friend of mine who couldn’t or wouldn’t read my signals and the moment, if it was one, passed.  Such is the random nature of teenage attraction.

Garden Cottage.  That was its idyllic name.  It was another tied cottage – perhaps once a head gardener’s, for it was set into one of the redbrick walls of the orchard and vegetable beds of a Georgian mansion owned by the family which gave their name to one half of a well-known pickle-making concern.  Through the kitchen window we could see the Victorian greenhouse and the pear and apple trees.  Our cottage’s own garden made use of the other side of the wall.  Hard by it a large plum tree grew, until the great storm in 1987 snapped its trunk, though even after that it made efforts to resurrect itself.  There is a photo of my grandfather holding a set of wooden steps by this very tree, not long before it and he were felled.  We were collecting fruit from the higher branches.  The sun cuts pleasing shadows out of the steps of the ladder, and my grandfather, white hair contrasting with the black frame of his glasses, and wearing a striped shirt and a pale tie, is pointing at the camera and trying to resist the grin which is forming on his face.

The sun always shone on Garden Cottage and the sun always shone on my birthday, but not the day I turned eighteen.  Instead, the rain came down.  We persisted with a barbeque, setting up the black hemisphere on legs in the shelter and lee of the limes.  There is another photo, of me tending the sausages, somewhat incongruously dressed in blacks and greys, my flat-top hair rather rain-affected and bedraggled.  I had a copy of Meat is murder but I didn’t turn vegetarian until six months after that barbeque.  Would my world have been different if Johnny Marr hadn’t sought out Morrissey and the Smiths had never existed?  Would my life have been more red-blooded if I’d carried on eating steak?  Or regardless of what we might generously call those intellectual and emotional influences, would I still find myself more or less where I am today?

I can’t help but keeping asking those kinds of questions, and trying to answer them.

Photo of common lime by Dane Larsen via Flickr.


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I am a tree – Elder

Elder

The house in which I did most of my growing was a rented cottage whose garden backed onto the arable farm on which I worked every holiday from the age of thirteen.  Next to this mini-terrace of three simple homes for labourers stood an apple orchard that wasn’t ours but whose fruit went unclaimed by the farm.  That has changed, like so much in this story of trees as the story of a life; but this time, perhaps, for the good.  Those apples now make the short trip to plates of salad and bowls of pudding served up in the restaurant housed in the barn in which my brother and I used to play.  Creosoted on the outside, powder dry timbers on the in, it was dark and dusty then, both qualities pierced by shafts of sunlight through cracks and holes where the timber had rotted.  A place of hide and seek, and later, of refuge.  Of wishing for a kiss there from the daughter of the housekeeper who worked for the Tory MP to whom the farm belonged.  We first met when my mother and I were put up in the MP’s Tudor house one snowy night.  One year older than me, the housekeeper’s daughter had sparkling eyes of Irish descent and full lips that before long she was painting bright red.  It was a boyish form of love at first sight.  We played Operation together by candlelight and in memory the moment is made up of her welcoming smile and eyes and the flames from the fire which burned in the hearth; a living room full of magical warmth on the coldest kind of night.

I never got to kiss those lips.

My brother and I had little except a bike each and the liberty of the endless expanse of fields stretching away in every direction.  That was ample, like the apples which grew in the orchard over which we had dominion, like the elderberries rooted in the same soil as the beams which kept the barns upright.  While the fruiting of the elders marked the end of summer, their flowering signalled the start of warmer weather, so longed for through the frost-hard winters when the windows of the unheated bedroom my brother and I shared would often ice over on the inside.  There were no valleys, no sheltered microclimates to soften the harshness of this flat farmland.

So the corymbs of flowers seemed little miracles when they appeared, miniature galaxies of white light; and at summer’s end the heavy black hanging clusters of tiny berries abundant reward for those who waited for and wanted them.  We’d taste their sour tartness, and talk of making them into cordial, or even wine.  And one year we did just that and spent a long time – but not so much in the way of winemaker’s art – creating our concoction.  Left in plastic Robinson’s barley water bottles for two weeks to ferment,  my mother poured the elderberry wine down the drain before the day of reckoning, more I think in fear that we would poison ourselves than get drunk at too tender an age.  I can’t remember being especially angry; I suppose I realised there was nothing to be done.  And perhaps the fact that the stuff looked poisonous made us less concerned at its loss.

Since then I’ve often wondered what that elderberry fizz would have tasted like.  We never tried again, having found easier ways to procure alcohol – like walking into the village shop aged fourteen and coming out with whatever we fancied, unchallenged.  That we fancied Cinzano Bianco is another story, one which puts any objections to the underage drinking choices of subsequent generations on very shaky ground.

Photo of common elder by Ian Cunliffe via Geograph.


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Seismologist

Peter Mullan

The orange cable looped and danced all along the side of the country road, lying low, snaking over branches, crossing driveways under ridged protective rubber.  I marvelled at how it could be made so long, miles and miles of it unbroken, sheathed in its coat of flex.  I thought of the cables running alongside trains in the Underground.  Perhaps high-speed broadband was finally coming to my neck of the woods.

Before long I ran into a ‘ROAD CLOSED’ sign.  A man in a hi-vis jacket stood by it.  I stopped and wound down the window.  Actually, I pressed a button and the window wound itself down, or at least the car’s electrics caused it to be wound down, but the fluidity of the tale demands that it was I who wound down the window.  I stopped and wound down the window.  ‘Can I ask what you’re doing?’ I enquired of the man in the hi-vis jacket.  ‘Seismic survey,’ he said.  He looked like the Scottish actor Peter Mullan, the very man who might play just such a road worker stationed at a roadblock in a Ken Loach film about road workers.  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said, though I didn’t, and set off down the diversion.

Ten seconds later – well, perhaps it was a minute or two – I laughed.  Hampshire is not known for its unstable geology.  ‘Bastard was pulling my leg,’ I said, to no-one in particular.


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I am a tree – Cedar of Lebanon

Cedar of Lebanon

There are no oaks or horse chestnuts in this dendrochronological listing of biographical trees but like any child who grew up in the English countryside, they are forever there, in the background, acorns and conkers strewn about them.  Each is a magnificent tree; the wiry curlicues of the oak in winter and the fresh-leafed and flowering horse chestnut in spring especially.  But neither have the year-round grandeur of the Cedar of Lebanon.  These are trees that demand space, a park in which they can be set, a house of similar reach and substance against which they can play foil.  For a time I was boarded in such a house; played cricket and tennis and kick the can in plain view of the tree that stood before its playing field vista.

I was a lucky child kept on at a school after my parents could no longer afford to pay, although I sometimes wonder if it would have been better for me ultimately if I hadn’t been.  I think it meant I got used to living life in a bubble, and by the time I started to think about why there were such gaping differences between my family life and those of my peers, and even between my life and my brother’s, it was almost too late.  I had been alienated; had become alien.  At least I saw both sides and got my eyes opened.  But perhaps lots of kids do, at some point in their young lives.  It only takes a single striking difference on one particular day to change how you see the world, after all.

In those endless, innocent days, trees seemed eternal, and none more so than that cedar of Lebanon.  In my mind it is linked with the fountain which also stood before the house.  Its now forgotten mythical figure and fount was activated only on rare days in summer; otherwise its water was sufficiently undisturbed that newts could be found in and fished from it.  To the side of the playing fields were woods in which we were allowed to light fires and cook sausages on Sunday evenings in summer.  Woods into which I took my illicitly held transistor radio to listen to the rundown of the new Top 40 on Tuesdays.  Woods through which I ran when I was older to escape from the school into town for a coupe of hours.

The house itself was less idyllic, a mysterious warren of corridors and dormitories and stairways and creaking floorboards and rooms that were Out of Bounds, presided over by a former naval commander who was a mixture of ancient seafaring toughness and landlocked abstraction.  The night I arrived, it was the dead of winter, and there had been a power cut that had lasted days.  The boys were starting to stink.  So they had all been instructed to take a cold shower, except me.  I was considered exempt, either on the grounds that I lacked any visible kind of seafaring toughness, or because I was a freshly laundered new boy, or, most likely, both.

Of course trees are not eternal.  The great storm of October 1987 was tough on cedars; many of their lost limbs date from then.  They are susceptible to encroachment and neglect.  Even the great cedar forests around the Mediterranean have been lost over the centuries; but in certain countries they are now being re-established.

In Britain, cedars of Lebanon are an emblem of privilege.  What stately home of England is complete without its stately cedar?  Queen Victoria bankrolled the building of a high stone wall to protect the Forest of the Cedars of God from the hungry mouths of goats.  And in Highgate cemetery, one stands at the centre of a circle of family vaults.  It’s tempting to imagine that its roots find cracks in their walls, and that those roots then weave themselves around tibias and fibulas and femurs and through rib cages and eye sockets.  Life invading death, rather than growing out of it.

But cedars being an emblem of privilege doesn’t make them any less magnificent as trees.  If a public park is big enough to take them, they ought to stand there too, for all to see.  And so they do, in places.

When I was near to finishing this, I dug out the photographs of my school days, looking for an image of the tree that I could use to illustrate the words.  But there is no cedar of Lebanon to be seen.  Where we played kick the can, there are several yews; and the tree beyond the cricket pitch, dominating the vista, is a tall and ancient oak.

And it is only now that I remember the wide tree stump, cut low to the ground, by which the can was habitually placed.  My cedar is a ghost.

Photo of cedars on Hardwick Heath, Bury St. Edmunds by David Swales via Geograph.


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I am a tree – Yew

Yew

For a time following the rupture in our young lives we lived in a thatched house named Yew Cottage, on account of the five yews stationed along its front, their foliage almost as tightly woven as the thatch.  Yews have their association with church yards and therefore with death but these stood watch over a pair of divorces and – drawn together by those shared circumstances – an unusual family of two women and their children.  When we went on fatherless holidays together, our mothers were taken – mistaken – for lesbians.  Unwittingly for a time they pioneered a new family structure ten or twenty odd years before British society more or less condescended to acknowledge the viability of its existence.

On one such holiday, at a camp on the coast, we had our first explicit exposure to sex.  Throughout the week, the raised-up swimming pool with see-thru sides had exerted a strong fascination; all the more so when one of us spotted the couple who had slipped off their costumes for a hasty underwater fuck.

My mother’s friend ran a nursery out of an outbuilding which had been converted to a white-painted playroom.  The well in the garden was filled in, but still it drew us children to the thick wood which had been set in its mouth.  A well is both a place of wishes and of fairy tale darkness – and we had each in our lives.  The wild freedom of Suffolk’s landscape and its skies; against them, a fracture that often bled us of happiness.

From the gate between two of the yews I set out one afternoon for the fancy dress competition at the school fete – costumed as an apple tree, with my pseudo-step brother as Adam and my sister as Eve.  Apples were hung from my umbrella canopy, a serpent belt coiled about my trunk, and fig leaves and skin-toned underwear were literally all that covered brave Adam and Eve’s modesty.  That day, I really was a tree.  We won first prize.

It seems that for every tree I settle upon, another stands in dialogue with it.  Silver birch and magnolia; yew and apple.  Bark and blossom; poisonous and forbidden fruit.  Like Cosimo, the Baron in the trees, I leap from one tree to the other.  Garden becomes copse becomes wood becomes forest becomes wood becomes orchard becomes garden.  I scrump an apple, climb away and take a bite.

Photo by Simon Garbutt via Wikimedia Commons.


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I am a tree – Silver birch

Silver birch

If I mapped the course of my life through the trees which stood along the wayside, how would it read?  I imagine the rings of a forested tree stump, and these words written around the years of growth to which they apply.

The house in which I grew up was called Windon Birches, after the copse of silver-barked trees which shimmered in the sunshine and the breeze at the foot of the garden.  It’s a name for a house that makes me laugh now, like Dun Roamin or Cirrhosis-by-the-Sea.  But I don’t really remember the sound of wind through those trees.  Just the parched grass and cracked earth of the hot, still summer of 1976.  Those were days of innocence, before the family fell, symbolised by the magnolia that stood over the front drive, by which my brother and I were photographed when the tree was in bloom.  Yet even in this time of innocence, we are already divided, set on opposing paths – I am in blue, he is in red.  Of course, the differences or the beauty of blooms meant little to me then; but I do remember peeling fragments of bark from the birches, a tactile fascination as great as the tentative, exploratory lifting of a scab from elbow or knee.

The house has been knocked down now, and the magnolia and birches felled, to make way for a redevelopment of houses with what must be treeless, postage stamp gardens.  The part of Windon Birches that my grandfather built – a garage and the bedroom above it which his two grandsons shared – is gone.  So too the granny annexe, which housed the wife from whom he was separated and then divorced, unusually for the time following the Second World War.  What constituted the breakdown I have never really established, so proper and private a person was my grandfather.  I do know that my grandmother tried to rescue a man who needed rescuing, from mental illness, from alcohol.  And I remember her feeding me and my brother banana and sugar sandwiches.

Increasingly I have come to understand that I am seeded with the genes of all four of my grandparents.  To greater and lesser extents, their natures run on in me.

Photo by Jerzy Opioła via Wikimedia Commons.


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The trick is to keep writing

Sometimes I have to trick myself into writing.  I don’t feel like it – I’m tired, or the sun is beckoning me outside, or I am being distracted by the words of others – but I know I should, I know I have to.  I know I have to make it count, this time I’ve been gifted – and it is a gift, in many more ways than one.  I have to get it out, how I see the world, how I see myself in relation to the world.  I have to tell myself how I see it.  And I want to tell you too, in case it may mean something to you.  I don’t much mind if it doesn’t, but I’ll be glad if it does.

I trick myself into writing in one of two ways.

Either: I wait until a phrase or sentence hooks itself in my head – like ‘Sometimes I have to trick myself into writing’.  And then I tap it out on the keyboard and see where it leads.  Sometimes it goes nowhere, and the trick loosens nothing more than a shrug of well-shrugged shoulders, a scratch of a well-scratched head.  Sometimes it leads to a fragment, which might eventually find itself joined to other fragments and so mosaic-like eventually become part of a whole.  And just occasionally I’ll find I’ve tricked myself into an unstoppable flow, resulting in a more or less complete piece of writing, and it’s almost as though it has been summoned out of nowhere, or at least, from the mysterious place in the mind which sifts and blends a lifetime’s doing and being done to, a lifetime’s thoughts and imaginings, madly circling like a plump dog curling to chase – trying to catch and bite – its strangely wiry tail.

Or: I trick myself into writing by heading to my wirebound, polypropylene notebook, in which the latest of my penned scribblings are contained.  Laboriously I transcribe these, and in the act of transcription hope that a phrase or a paragraph sparks a further flow, a gathering of words about a core, like candy floss about a stick or a ball of snow about a compacted snowball; or perhaps something less edible, more permanent.  Something in any case that might be presented on a stick, or have arms and buttons fitted to it, or be cast in seemingly everlasting bronze.  The original core may ultimately prove to be nothing more than a fringe thought; it may completely disappear, for new words to slip in and take or fill its place.  Or it may remain a hollow, a subtracted element, another mystery; a wild slim alien, escaping from the earth.


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Kerplunk! – [Yacht]

 Yacht

Your cycle limps out of Le Havre.  The back tyre was flat this morning, and the hotel proprietor brought you out a bowl of water.  Too busy repairing the puncture, it is only at the top of the climb out of the town that that you realise the escalating groans of protest can no longer be ignored.  The diagnosis is not good; the wheel is buckled and spokes snapped – serious therapy will be required.  The choice is to descend back into Le Havre, or press on the 20 km to Etretat, and hope to find a cycle shop there.  It’s a big hill you’d have to climb again, so you gamble on going forward.

Halfway at midday, you turn off the D road to lunch as close as you can to the sea.  The basic, uncoloured roads on your map run out well before the blue, though you feel sure there will be a path down to the water.  You find such a path but increasingly you gain the impression of being high up, so that you are not surprised to see the way end suddenly in a cliff edge, and beyond it, the sea.  Unlike the night before, this is welcome isolation in which to eat a meal, the kind that’s thrilling, that depends upon being alone, the paradoxical danger and attraction of your insignificance mixed with an acute sense of being the one who is alone, the one who is there at the centre of the universe.

If this were the view from your high-rise in London, would you swap that sea of city, for this stretch of chameleon aquamarine, which today is deep blue with a hundred thousand eyebrows of white?  Peering over the edge, as over the balcony down to the toy houses, people and cars floating in the noisy swell below, a blast of wind rises up from the drop, buffeting you.  Stepping back with a shiver, the cliff edge shields you, and the wind is balmy where fifteen floors up the tower block, it howled and whistled unceasingly, the eerie sound mixed in with the ceaseless cooing of the pigeons who colonised the block’s refuse shoot.

You’re a world away from that now.  You eat with a relish that the food served up by last night’s restaurant could never give you, sitting among untroublesome insects, wasps and butterflies, wild flowers and grass.  And come the end of September, the blackberries growing here would have made it an even fatter lunch.

A toy yacht sails around the Port pétrolier that juts out into the sea to the north, and tacks into the coast.  You wave as it passes beneath you, and see a glint of watching glass in return.  Your eyes dance along with the yacht a while, till it is lost beneath the cliff face, to the south.


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Kerplunk! – [Hexagon]

Hexagon

Though the British Isles is a witch, or a policeman beating Ireland with a truncheon, and Italy a boot with a ball at its foot, all that can be made of France is a hexagon.  This is the shape that your geography teacher used as the easiest representation of the country you are now fleshing out for yourself, circling out from Trouville along longer radii and in wider arcs.  France is a pond, and you are a dropped stone sending out ripples to find the limits of its reach.  Eventually, thrown in from the north bank, you will ripple out south and west, and find the shores or mountains of four or five sides of the hexagon.

Sidestepping a return to the château, you decide on a tour of the natural curve of coast from Le Havre to Fécamp.  The day on which you set out is not optimal for cycling any distance, but you gain from the sun in terms of attitude what you lose to heat.  It bakes your hair, tans your face, browns your arms and legs as you cycle through the harvest colours, past proud lines of trees, past a calvary cleaned to a porcelain white, shining and tortured and at odds with the cool interiors you can see through the open doors of houses in the village to which it belongs.  You even have a greeting for a carload of holidaying Brits picnicking by the wayside.

After a straight descent past industrial and high-rise estates, the town seems promising and large, a city and a port, a resort with more than the usual façade for the sea to dance before.  The hotel you hit upon is being decorated, but the workmen try some standard schoolboy English on you, and the proprietor is kind, with dark eyes that speak half of weariness, half of joy.  When you refuse breakfast, she says you are to take it anyway, and you feel a scrooge in the face of such generosity.  Her mother and a curly-haired child of three look on, each possessing the eyes of a dreamer.  Your room is family-sized, dark, dusty and orange.

Le Havre.  You like its chameleon name, that changes as grammar demands: au Havre when you are going there; du Havre when you are coming from it, or apportioning an object or person to it; Le Havre, its stately overall title.  Fitting that the Seine should have at its head the Harbour, and typical that the Thames has Canvey Island and Southend-on-Sea.

In your roaming search for the restaurant – you have the time and a tendency to be fussy – you cross an arched and asymmetrical bridge which allows larger boats to pass into a rectangular basin of the harbour and right into the city.  You find one to your taste and pocket in rue de la Crique.  It is only after you’ve made your decision and are about to push open the door that you notice the one word, the same in French or English, scrawled in big white letters on a nearby wall –

SOLITUDE


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Ten reasons for growing a beard

1. To more easily imagine that you are Captain Haddock in The adventures of Tintin.
2. To have something to stroke sagely when the hair is gone from on top.
3. To catch dribbles of ale and other liquids.  The benefits of this increase with age.
4. To advertise your affection for small mammals.
5. To become more august and presidential, at least in a nineteenth century sense.
6. As a musician, to more convincingly pull off your move towards Americana.
7. To blend and knit together facial hair and woolly hat into unbeatable protection against winter.
8. Obviously, to hide a weak chin.
9. Conversely, to hide a chin the size of Jimmy Hill’s.
10. For the ultimate pleasure of shaving the bloody thing off.