I didn’t know if it would still be here. It’s been 34 years. Gary, the school caretaker, meets me at the gates. We walk across a car park and a hard court for tennis and basketball; there’s a little artificial football pitch on the other side, and up ahead of us is a row of allotments. Beyond that, there’s a fence to mark the start of the wood. I really do remember when all this was fields.
“Which one’s yours?” Gary asks.
“Not sure.”
I was in my third year of junior school when I planted it. Everyone in our class planted one: a birch, a cherry, a lime, a sycamore, an ash, up at the top of the big playing field, when there was nothing here but grass and a running track.
We go into the little wood. It’s five or six trees deep, eight or nine across. It’s not much, but we made it, our class made it. I don’t remember much about the planting. I remember we were shown what to do with the little 2ft sapling, the hole, the soil. I remember mine had a length of blue tape around it, so I’d know which was mine.
It’s a rich, mixed wood, no tree the same as its neighbour. On an overcast day like today, the midsummer warmth sitting heavy, the wood feels gloomy, bosky, bigger than it is. It’s busy with midges. A chiffchaff is chiffchaffing somewhere up there. I pick my way along the front rank of trees. They’re all grown up now, thick-waisted, deep-rooted. I picture the little piece of blue tape at some point giving way to the tree’s growth, like the Hulk’s T-shirt.
I slap the trunk of a cherry tree, partway along. “I’ll claim this one,” I say. “This one’s mine.”
On the way out, Gary points to a few felled trunks, already grown over by understorey plants. They’re ash, he says. The council cut them down. Dieback. I pause by one of the cut trunks. There’s a scattering of smashed snail shells in the leaf litter around one side. A song thrush has been using it as an anvil.
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