The Tree on its Own (A Story)

I wrote this very quickly, and submitted it unsuccessfully to a couple of literary journals. Unsurprising, for it's sentimental, without much depth. It was meant to capture a particular patch of arable land around Suffolk, where I grew up. I've always been curious about what it might have looked like before the hedges were grubbed out and the fields made larger.  

‘Birdseyes,’ Grandma says. ‘Not fishfingers – the flowers I mean.’

She wades through long, dry grass and laughs a dry, long laugh. Looking for their little blue heads at the edge, where they used to be by the old compost heap.

The garden is wild now, but poorer for it. Nothing but bramble piled on top of itself, making the air beneath it dark and lifeless. A single crooked path leads to the end, and what little green grass there is shines with the weight of her footsteps. Four walks a day, sometimes five if her pin isn’t playing up.

Beside her, Peter seems lost. She pulls on his hand. ‘You know what I’m talking about?’

Peter shakes his head. Picks at the dry, red patches on his fingers.

Thorns snag at her pleated dress, tear her stockings. Her feet are melting.

At the foot of the compost bin, where her daughter puts all the grass cuttings after she has mown, there is a tangle of green not-yet-flowers. Once, she knew the shape of their leaves, and how it could tell you the name of the flower.

‘Smothered,’ Grandma says. Peter watches as she kicks away the clods of heavy grass that his mother left on the ground. The wooden frame, once white, is now dark and peeling. The bin has not been emptied for months, and he knows that there will be worms and other creatures at the bottom of it.

He points at something blue, a single dot against the ground, but it is just a fragment from a milk carton lid.

Grandma coughs like a crow. She keeps her eyes on the ground. She says, ‘Gone. Ever so dainty, they were. Birdseyes.’

At the very bottom of the garden is a narrow gap which leads onto the field.

‘Tell me about daisies,’ Peter says. Grandma is quiet too often, and needs reminding of her voice.

‘Oh, daisies. Yes, we always used to make daisy chains. Daisies – you know that comes from “day’s eye”, don’t you? Because they open in the morning and close at night, just like eyes.’

At the edge of the field is a puddle, with something blue floating in it. Peter bends down to see that it’s a tiny butterfly. He slides his finger beneath it, watches mud swirl around it, and lifts the butterfly out.

Grandma shakes her head. ‘Gone, that, too.’

On his finger the butterfly looks even more dead, so Peter puts it back in the puddle. It looks proper there, somehow.

‘Common blue,’ Grandma says. Little lines appear on her top lip as she says ‘blue’. ‘Do you know that one? S’pect they don’t teach you any of that, now.’

She wants to tell him about the birds. She can hear them in the hedge, dunnocks and sparrows mostly, and blue tits making their way along it to the bigger trees. Robins stick to the gardens. She used to tend the garden, before her back started troubling her, and the robins would wait on the fence or the elder tree, flitting down to find worms when they thought she wasn’t looking. Somehow, though, the words get mixed up in her throat before she can speak.

‘There are three things,’ Grandma says. ‘I s’pose that’s the first.’

They walk across the field, and she tells Peter what it was like before the hedges were grubbed out.

Thick, green, smelling of may and hay, sweet, almost too sweet. So many leaves. And on the ground: ragged robin, lady’s smock, all the other ladies (bedstraw, lords and).

‘What happened then?’ Peter asks.

‘The combines came,’ she says. She scuffles her feet on the corn, ripping out as much as she can as she walks. ‘They said we needed more crops.’

Yellowhammers sing about bread and cheese. Great tits sing about teacher.

Teacher knew all the names, not just some. All the names and all the uses of plants – plants that would cure headaches and nettle stings, plants that could calm you or alleviate sadness.

‘She tried, all the same. She did try. But you see we didn’t have the nature reserves back then, so there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t try and make it into one.’

Before the stile that crosses onto the church path is a dry, cracked edge. All fields have edges, but not all edges are forgotten like this one.

‘There,’ she points. A small sea of flowers, almost purple. ‘Birdseyes.’

Peter kneels, but there is no scent. He runs his hand over them, through them, reaching down to the parched ground beneath. Next to them are some horseshoe prints. The horse that made them was probably dead by now. It is a lonely place, and Peter wants to leave.

‘That’s the second thing.’

‘What’s the third?’

‘The tree on its own,’ says Grandma. She is suddenly afraid. She hasn’t walked so far in a long time, four years at least. The pin in her leg is aching, and field dust sticks to her arms. But it is important to show him.

They turn left, and walk along the footpath. The land to either side is flat and wide, with scattered oaks and lonely hummocks of bramble and blackthorn. ‘Dropped by birds.’ The sky is open, the clouds vast. On one side is the wheat, and the wind ripples it like the sea, makes it seem like there are many small animals running or swimming through it. 

The path isn’t really a path. It is just the narrow band of grass between the fields, and bordered by ditches. It leads to nowhere except the tree.

Grandma stops, and Peter looks up. There are trees all over the place, but this one is special. It is huge, black against the sun. It has no leaves. It reaches out, and in its shade is another bare patch, like a beach, cutting into the field.

‘Is it dead?’ he asks.

‘No,’ Grandma says. ‘It’s there.’

She wants to tell him about the machines, and how they seemed to eat the hedges. How she worried, cried herself to sleep for the birds, their nests and their eggs. How she skipped work at the hall to look for survivors, and how there was nothing but jagged roots and earth.

And yet the tree on its own was left, as if the machines could not bring themselves to remove it. Perhaps it had just been forgotten. Perhaps, not being green, it did not matter.