This Is All (10 page)

‘You want to do it professionally?’

He laughed. ‘Not just tree climbing. Forest management. Tree ecology.’

‘Tree ecology?’

‘Study of trees – history of, biology of, conservation of, that sort of thing. What is probably the oldest living thing in Britain?’

‘A tree, I have no doubt.’

‘Yes. And also a coppice stool.’

‘Again?’

‘Coppicing?’

‘No.’

‘A kind of tree farming. Since Neolithic times. About six thousand years. Longer more than likely. Young trees, six, seven years old, are cut down from just above the ground. The wood is used for all sorts of things, fuel, house-building, fences, tools, all sorts. The tree sprouts shoots from the stump, called spring. After six or eight or ten years, depending on the kind of tree, the new growth is about two metres high, nice straight sticks. They’re cut and used. And the process starts again. The cut wood is called underwood. The stumps are called a stool. And some of the oldest rings of stools are more than five and a half metres across and are at least four thousand years old, which makes them some of the oldest living things in Britain.’

‘Really!’

‘You know how to tell how old a tree is?’

‘By counting the rings?’

‘But you have to cut it down to do that and then you don’t have a tree any more.’

‘So how?’

‘You measure round the trunk about two metres from the ground. If it’s a tree that’s standing on its own you reckon two and a half centimetres of its girth for every year of its age. If it’s in a wood, you reckon about one and a third centimetres for every year. So you measure the girth and divide by two-point-five or one-point-three.’

‘So a tree that’s a metre round is …’

‘About—’

‘I can do it! I’m just a bit slow with maths … Forty.’

‘Right. About forty years old. So suppose you were a tree, what’s your girth?’

‘Mind your own business!’

‘No, come on.’

‘Depends where you’re measuring, idiot! I’m not the same all the way down like some spindly tree.’

‘Eighty-eight, thirty-eight, ninety-two?’

I slapped his arm. ‘Horror! Thirty-two, twenty-four, thirty-four, if you
must
know.’

‘Can’t be!’

‘I am!’

‘You’re more than thirty-four centimetres round your hips.’

‘Idiot! I’m talking inches.’

‘No one talks inches these days.’

‘Well you do when talking women’s vital stats.’

‘Okay, then we have to do some conversion. Let’s take your hips. Thirty-four did you say? Multiply by two-point-five. That’s … eighty-five centimetres.’

‘And what did you just say? Ninety-two did you say?
Really!
’

‘Just a quick guess, honest.’

‘I could start to hate you.’

‘So eighty-five, and very nice too. Which in tree terms makes you the same age as you are round the hips. About thirty-four.’

‘So you might as well say a tree is the same age as it is in inches round its trunk.’

‘Well done! But I’m glad you’re not.’

‘Not what?’

‘The same age as you are round the hips. I’m not into older women.’

‘You’re not into me either, yet.’

‘True. But I live in hope.’

That made me wobble again.

‘But you like trees because they’re old,’ I said to keep the subject off sex.

‘And because they’re beautiful and useful – we’d all be dead if we didn’t have them. And because they are totally different
from people. There’s almost no living thing more different from people than trees. I think they’re fascinating, and I love them and want to live with them.’

He stopped, his head went down in the funny shy way I was beginning to know, and he started finger-fiddling again.

I wanted to ask him more. I wanted to tell him how I envied him, knowing so clearly what he wanted to do with his life. And how all I wanted to do was write poems, which at that time didn’t seem the same, not as useful as looking after trees.

And anyway, it began to rain, a soft early autumn misty drizzle, no more, but enough to wet me through as we scootered back home. I asked him to come in, had fantasised on the way back about us stripping off each other’s wet clothes, showering together, making love afterwards. But no, he ought to get home, he said, and drove away with himself shut off as if by a prison door.

That evening he sent an email attachment labelled 4
YR EYES ONLY.
The first of his love letters. Though, being Will, his love letters were never like any other love letters I’ve ever read.

Will mail

ck about this after. liked being with u. hope u with me. the bookmark u gave me – thanx – says i do not show aggression. true. do not usually show any big feelings as matter of fact. maybe cos my family do funerals but do not do big feelings. want to explain so u understand y i sometimes clam up, like this after about trees. 1 reason i like music. the music says wot i feel. also y i love trees. 1 reason anyway. do not know how to put this, but to me trees are like living feelings, like living sculptures of feelings, like feelings made of wood and branches and leaves and flowers and seeds. the shape of trees. like music in living wood. said i wanted to show u a different kind of woodwind. that’s wot i meant. u understand? i do want u to understand.

this is rubbish I am writing. i can only do it as science. but i want u to know how i started to love trees and why i want to study them. so i have written u a kind of essay, which i am attaching. it is just 4 u. please do NOT show it to anyone else. i know i am a secretive kind of person, about myself i mean. i do not know y, i just am, and i do not know y i want to tell u these things, i just do.

ATTACHMENT

Why I want to study the ecology of trees

William Blacklin
for
Cordelia Kenn

When I was about eleven, our teachers took a group of us to camp near Tortworth in Gloucestershire. In the village, we were shown a chestnut tree which we were told could be 1,100 years old. It was gnarled and knotted, and looked half-ruined but was still flourishing. We were allowed to climb it. I was so amazed by this ancient living thing that I couldn’t get my mind off it after we went back to camp. Couldn’t sleep that night for thinking about it. So about two in the morning, I crept out of my tent and walked the half mile or so to the tree and climbed up to the top of the trunk, which looked like it had been sliced and chopped and split a long time ago probably by lightning. Branches spread out from the top of the trunk like arms with big muscles. I lay down in the elbow of one of them. I was so excited to be there, all by myself, in the night, the stars bright, the full moon shining through the branches, and me held in the arms of this ancient living being that had stood there since before William the Conqueror brought my name to England. I wasn’t afraid because I felt protected by the tree and also felt completely at home, almost as if I was
meant
to be there. I didn’t sleep. Not a wink. Didn’t feel tired. Just lay there, listening to the tree as if listening to it breathing, listening to its thoughts. I
stayed until first light, then ran back to camp and was in my sleeping bag before anyone found out I’d left it.

Next morning I felt I’d been born properly, born that night. I know this sounds weird but don’t know how else to express it.

After that I had a craze for old trees. Made my father take me to see every one I heard about. The yew at Much Marcle, Gloucestershire, which is hollow for the first two or three metres and has a seat inside. The Fredville Oak in Kent, which is so tall and stately it’s called ‘Majesty’, and the Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire, which is stumpy and contorted and so hollow inside it’s like a cave, where twenty people once sat down to dinner. The ‘Wordsworth’ yews at Borrowdale in the Lake District. (Because yews are poisonous to cattle, they were mainly planted in churchyards, and were looked after because their branches were used to make bows for the English long bowmen who fought at battles like the Battle of Agincourt, which you will know about because of Old Shakes. That’s why yews are some of the oldest trees.) Many more. I photographed them, and read about them, and wrote about them in my ‘Tree File’.

This craze – only for old trees, not for all trees – went on until my thirteenth birthday, when as a present my father fixed up a special tour of Westonbirt arboretum for me and Dad only. The man who took us round was a student from tree college on work experience. I expected he would show me only the oldest trees in the collection, but he was so keen on some of the others that he insisted on showing them to us as well and telling us about them. And the way he talked about them, as if they were individual people, and the things he told us of their particular personal habits and their history and what they were useful for, their wood and their seeds and their leaves and the hundreds, even sometimes thousands of insects and birds and animals and micro-organisms that lived in them, and the plants that grew on them and around them,
none of which could exist without the tree, made me from that day on look at all trees differently. Each tree is a world in itself. He would go up to his favourite trees and touch them as if he were greeting special friends, lovers almost. My dad said, You treat them as if they know you. And he said, They do. I’m sure they do.

When he said that, my mind went back to the night I sat in the branches of the Tortworth chestnut, and I knew he was right, because I knew I had felt this too. And something clicked inside me, and I knew I wanted to know everything there is to know about trees, and to find out more than is known, and to spend my life among them, working with them and working for them, and helping preserve and conserve them, because they are one of the most precious and strange and wonderful living organisms on our planet. Our planet would not be what it is, and people could not exist without them.

Before we left the arboretum that day my father bought me a book at the shop, which our guide had suggested.
Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape: The Complete History of Britain’s Trees, Woods, and Hedgerows
by Oliver Rackham. I started reading it as soon as I got home. For me, it was like a novel. I couldn’t understand all of it or take it all in straight away, being only thirteen, but I couldn’t put it down. From it I learned how fascinating is the history of trees and our countryside. Though I have read all the books I can find about trees since then and everything I can find by Oliver Rackham, this is still my favourite and my bible.

I suppose trees are my religion. I think I do worship them. And I do want to devote my life to them. I feel like this is what I am
meant
to do. Does this seem weird to you?

My creed

This is my reply, sent in the middle of the night because it took me hours to write.

*

Will: Thanks for telling me your secret. I feel honoured.

I want to tell you my secret that’s like your secret.

I want to be a poet. That’s the only thing I really want.

I want to find my own way of writing, my own style.

I know I haven’t yet. But I am striving to do so.

How shall I put it? It’s very hard to explain.

I want to write in a way that the writing is me – is myself.

I want to write so that what I write and the way I write is
me
, because of the choice of words and the arrangement of the words, the way I combine them, group them together, orchestrate them. For me, words are music as well as – as much as - they are meanings.

Also, writing is different from talk. When people listen to talk they hear the speaker’s tone of voice. They look at the speaker’s eyes. They observe the movements of the speaker’s face and hands, which helps them to understand what the speaker means. The listener can question and reply and interrupt. The speaker can change her mind and say so, she can stop and start and huff and puff. And all this helps to make the meaning.

But in writing there is no voice to listen to, no eyes to exchange looks, no movements of the face and hands and body to assist the words. No interruptions are possible, no questions can be answered. There are only these strange shapes as old as Eve and as new as tomorrow’s baby, and to me they are beautiful and glorious.

I love the appearance of words on a page. I love their shape and the patterns they make. I feel them like pebbles in my mouth, I hear them like music in my head. When I write, they are sculptures in my hand.

I think poetry most of all is like this. To me, poetry must be written for reading, and it is the most written of all writing.

There is nothing like words. I want to live with them, I want to live through them, I want to live because of them.
I want to live in them. Really
in
them. And I want to procreate with them. I want to make and remake the world with them.

I have thought about this a lot.

If I have a creed, this is it:

My god is language, written and read.

And there is no other god but this.

My father and shorts

My father, your grandfather. What are we to make of him? His behaviour certainly doesn’t improve with age. By the time you’re sixteen heaven knows what we’ll have to put up with.

He knows I try to write poetry, which he pretends to regard as a useless activity. So he sometimes sends me a verse he’s written of a kind intended to annoy me. Of course, we both know it’s only meant as a joke, and I have to admit he can be funny, though usually in a vulgar fashion, but I always try to please him by pretending to be disgusted.

Today he sent me one by email. Here’s why. It’s so hot I’m wearing shorts, no matter that you are bulging out of them like an escaping balloon. I don’t usually display myself to the public gaze in this fashion, for the sight of others doing so when in my condition always puts me off my food. I know I’m supposed to think it charming and coo about their fecundity and anyway it’s only natural isn’t it, but I don’t. Not that pregnant women in shorts are as bad as the sight of old men in shorts. Or old women either. But even they aren’t so ghastly as the sight of very fat people in Bermuda shorts. That is THE worst.