Barbara Erskine - Sands of Time

‘It belongs to no one. It’s on a public right of way. It has to be removed just as it would be if it was a nettle or a bramble.’ He had his own secateurs for just such purposes. They always went with him on his walks. ‘No, Mo, I’m sorry. You are being sentimental. There is no place for sentiment in this campaign. None at all.’ And he set his jaw in a way she knew well. There would be no diverting him.

The argument on this particular tree lasted longer than most so far. People spoke about tree preservation orders; they contacted the tree warden, the Woodland Trust, the RSPB and Greenpeace; even the local druids, who promised to send someone to sit in the tree until they realised it was a holly, after which they felt a magic circle around it might be more helpful. Joe would not relent and eventually the council sent a truck laden with chainsaws and two men in hard hats. The van bounced up the footpath towards the tree and stopped. The holly was at its most glorious; laden with berries, a beacon in the dead winter landscape. The two men climbed out and stood staring at it. One took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Seems a shame.’

The other shook his head. ‘I’m not touching that. Not a holly. Bad luck that.’

They nodded in unison, climbed into the truck and drove away.

A week later the council rang Ted Ames. ‘If one of your farm workers could take down that holly we’d much appreciate it.’ There was a loud sigh the other end of the line. ‘It’s got to be done. We’ll pay, of course. We’ll never have any peace if we don’t get it sorted.’

But none of the farm workers would touch it.

Two lots of contracting tree surgeons from neighbouring towns found themselves too busy to do it before the spring at the earliest. The odd job man from Dyson Drive turned down two hundred quid. ‘Unlucky to chop down a holly, mate,’ he told a by now almost incandescent Joe.

In the village people were beginning to smile to themselves quietly.

No one had actually turned their backs on Maureen. Most were sorry for her. But still, people stopped talking when she went into the shop. They stood back and let her go first and waited until she had closed the door behind her before they resumed their conversations. It was on one such an occasion, after she had gone and the long silence was suddenly broken, that Colonel Wright’s wife heard from Julie Ames about Doreen’s heartbreak. ‘Why didn’t anyone tell us that she couldn’t afford a new fence?’ she asked, horrified. ‘That’s awful.’

The other women in the shop shrugged. How could they explain? The colonel and his wife were part of the village, but not of the inner cadres. Their large house and their money and their posh accents set them apart.

Two days later however the village watched with deep approval as a lorry arrived at Doreen’s cottage with new fence timbers to erect a smart fence on the correct line along the footpath. This gesture was followed by the colonel’s own gardener laden with young rose bushes and a mandate to restore Doreen’s garden. From then on the colonel and his wife became part of the village at last – a village where their ancestors had lived for two hundred years!

It was from the gardener that Doreen heard about the stand-off over the holly. She smiled, by now almost restored to her former benign self. ‘Silly man. After all he has done, doesn’t he realise to cut down a self-sown holly is to court bad luck for the rest of his life?’

The gardener shrugged. ‘He’s a townie, Dor. He doesn’t care.’ He shook his head. ‘And I don’t think he’s going to give up.’

He didn’t. Hiring a chainsaw from the tool hire company, with all the protective gear to go with it – goggles, hat, gloves, trousers – Joe took the holly down himself four days before Christmas. He sawed up the tree and carted loads of berried branches in his car boot back to Dyson Drive where he proceeded to sell them to all his neighbours who did not realise where they came from.

The village waited with bated breath. The footpath was now clear over its entire route. Not a branch, not a weed, not a blade of overlong grass obstructed it. A drift of arrows pointed the walker from one end to the other, finger posts announced the start and the finish and it lay across the countryside like an unhealed scar. No walkers came of course from the town in winter, not even the committee. They spent the cold wet months planning next year’s onslaughts and had no intention of actually setting foot in the countryside if they could help it until the spring; and they wouldn’t be returning to Winchmoor anyway. They had no interest in the place now they had done their bit. The locals didn’t walk it either. Not as it was now. It had lost its charm; and the muddy tracks across the open fields, without the shelter of the hedges which made the winter walks tolerable, were universally shunned. They followed the paths they always had and ignored the neatened corners, the dead straight miles. Who wanted their dog to walk over poisoned ground anyway? So footpath 29 lay for the most part unvisited – except by Joe.

Thus it was that he was quite alone when he strode the path two months after Christmas on a clear bright day after a week of violent February gales. He walked slowly along the muddy track alongside the nature reserve, admiring its neatness, the straight clean edges of the ditch where someone after his own heart had trimmed the dead wood back neatly and removed the unsaleable remains of the holly which Joe had tossed over the ditch into the wood to make sure that the path was unencumbered. Standing under the overhanging branches of an ancient oak, safely rooted on the far side of the ditch, he did not look up to admire its grace and stature and thus did not see the huge bough, detached by the gales, hanging precariously over his head. That it chose just that exact moment to fall was of course complete coincidence.

Maureen was visiting the kids that weekend so there was no one to miss him. He came round once or twice, lying on the path, gazing up at the beauty of the huge tree under which he lay. It swam in a mist, from time to time seeming to dance slowly in a graceful pirouette, and from time to time he thought he saw faces peering at him from among the branches. It grew dark early at that time of year and as the hazy sun set below the rim of the field the temperature began to drop sharply. With a smile he closed his eyes. In the morning he would have to see to it that the fallen bough was sawn and the path tidied otherwise someone might trip over and hurt themselves.

It was three days before they found him. The village was sorry for Maureen of course. One by one they called to see if they could help and almost immediately she found herself at the centre of conversations in the post office. Once she began to get over the shock she mourned Joe, of course. But the man she mourned was the man she had married before the obsessions set in. She was, she had to admit, secretly glad to be free of him. And suddenly she felt for the first time at home in her own house. She began to feel as though she had lived in the village forever and at last she was confident that she could ask people home. When they came for coffee or tea there was no sign of any Ordnance Survey maps; no flags or pins or fluorescent pens. Around the lawn she had planted a holly hedge and that spring, out on the fields, nature began to grow back. The tree stump in the middle of the path near the nature reserve had already thrown out one or two small green shoots. No one would ever cut it back again. It’s unlucky to cut down a holly.