Something about

Something about . . . oh shit

Indigo

This way . . . come on

Something about . . . oak tree

I don’t know like the fallen oak tree. . . sought of . . . the elder . . . that’s respected

[whistling]

Come on

Ahh and that memory of coming back from Canada

[dog barking]

Indigo come . . . come on

Oak trees

walk out the back gate and across a sort of boggy marsh,

littered with pony poop that make sort of lumpy bumps in the grass,

Islands that one might hop across to keep toes dry,

past some barking dogs, through a small forest, well, more like a shelter of trees.

Over the style, ahead a short bridge

above a stream and then

a narrow path through long grass across a field,

through a corridor of firs and another field,

Past a house, through a gate - make sure to shut - and over a road,

hop a brook, across crunchy leaf and bark under-foot,

into a green expanse unfolding to the right,

broken-up by an archipelago of bracken

and spiky thistle-leafed clumps.

the long bodies of wild ponies punctuate the landscape, whites, browns, and blacks, drifting like spectres. I suppose their grazing helps keep this land fairly sparse, like great, smooth warm-blooded lawn mowers. To the right, it's mostly open, open, but up the slight incline to the left is a small, isolated group of oaks, outriders for the forest behind, some of which are very large, and very old.

After the breakup when I moved back from Canada, I had the strongest desire to see some oak trees. Where I had been living on the West coast, the trees grew very straight and very tall, slender giants, up and up like arrows shooting into sky.

Oaks don’t grow particularly straight. They seem to grow outwards as much as upwards, taking their time. Lumbering. Gnarled and stooping, great bows bending down into earth like a wise and kindly elder leaning over a cane.

The three or four giants in this group must be a few hundred years old. So large and arching that the very ground changes beneath them. The air changes. Stepping over an invisible threshold, the space feels cavernous overhead, like stepping into a bubble of bark, carpeted by leaf and acorn crunch.

A friend told me that the older trees protect the young saplings and divert some of their nutrients to the baby roots, sheltering them, nurturing, and encouraging them. The trees sense each-other and feel each-other. Even grieve one another. Their lined, thick trunks make me think of the feet of elephant, pressed firmly into the ground. Elephants are known to walk hundreds of miles to their predetermined grave sites. I wonder if an ancient tree knows how to fall? How does a tree grieve? Supposedly there’s a shark in Greenland that’s over 500-years-old. I wonder if it’s called Sharkspeare?

One leviathan has fallen, in an earth-shuddering heap. It feels sad, something so large, what I imagine it might be like to approach a beached whale, to be dwarfed by another body, stuck. But from this sideways tree new growth emerges, perpendicular shoots upwards. Toadstools and wedges of yellow fungus, like slabs of cheese grow in the shade of the trunk. Dead and broken branches are a feast of termites, and as they break down, food for worms. New life emerging from death. As I bend down to look closer at a trail of ants stretched along one of the branches, I think about something I’d read about ‘whale-fall’, in which, when a whale dies in the ocean, its carcass will initially float on the surface, providing sustenance to hungry scavengers. And as its mass decreases, eventually the body will sink to the bottom, where the leviathan cadaver can become home to entirely new ecosystems. New life emerging from death.

After the breakup when I moved back from Canada, I had the strongest desire to see some oak trees. Something affirming. A solid point of reference after upheaval maybe. Five years later I still visit them. Back then I took my old boy Zen, now I take Indigo. I don’t think the yearning was from a place of nostalgic homeliness - I grew up in London - in many ways the English countryside still feels alien to me. I guess I just like trees.

Dad’s earliest memories

Transcript not available. Audio Credit: Hayden Griffin and Liz Wright.

The green parakeet

I’m going to finish with a story, as it happens a true story.

In the not-too-distant past: A Saturday morning, not quite early but not yet late. A boy in bed, sleeping-in

The boy is shaken awake by a mother. He rubs his eyes and looks at her with curiosity. Her eyes are a picture of concern, brow furrowed, her tone urgent.

‘I think there’s something in the chimney - I could hear scratching now and then throughout the night.’

The house is one of those Victorian red brick London terraces, in which each room, however small, has its own fireplace. Made obsolete by the invention of domestic central heating systems, these fireplaces are sometimes covered up, or filled in. In this particular establishment they had been left, perhaps for decorative purposes. In fact, the design of the interior of the house had that sort of under-stated, minimal beauty, in which the characteristics and furnishings of the building, vestiges of its period past, were respectfully left alone or simply painted off-white in keeping with the rest of the house.

The building being old, things were known to on occasion fall off. Over time, brick crumbles. Each day the walls shudder as the local bus passes over the speed bump outside. Whilst it was entirely possible, most likely even, that the noises from the chimney were caused by pieces of falling mortar within the chute, the mother’s concern triggered a memory of the story the father had told them years before, about the raven that fell down the chimney. The father had been startled by loud cawing coming from the spare room and was even more surprised to find a confused and distressed raven lying in a soot-covered mess. He had managed to open the window and guide the bird out, the black dust flying as it beat its outstretched wings.

The chimney in question, in the mother’s room, had been blocked years earlier by the father in order to stop any drafts. If anything living was in there, then its escape would be blocked by the rudimentary plug, carefully constructed from repurposed cardboard packaging boxes. The boy was fearful to dislodge the construction. He thought of the hands that made it…the container of old jumpers in the attic, the box of old scribbled on post-it notes that he kept in his room. Treasured footprints.

A flash of green and yellow suddenly appeared outside the window. The boy and the mother looked on in amazement at the green parakeet flapping there, suspended for a moment before disappearing again. The mother remarked that not once in 20 years had a green parakeet been seen outside the window.

They looked at each other in understanding and concern and hurriedly un-plugged the fireplace.

The boy fetched a torch from the cupboard under the stairs and ran back upstairs.

It was difficult to look inside but the boy was still small enough and craning his neck he managed to look up and shine his light into the inky blackness. The torchlight illuminated the crust of soot and carbon that lined the chute, dark grey, near black, and there, perched on a ledge, its eyes blinking against the sudden brightness, A vivid green, tropical parakeet against the black Victorian chimney soot.

Spoken by Joseph Bateman

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