Content area
Full Text
As I am walking home from the shops, I pass a young girl hitting a tree. I should say she is about ten years old. She's using a stout stick, quite possibly a broom handle, and she is methodically and repeatedly whacking the trunk, as if it is a job she has to do. There is a boy who stands and watches her. The tree is Prunus subhirtella, flowering cherry, growing in the strip of grass that separates the pavement from the dual carriageway.
I know that when I speculate about such things, I am on treacherous ground. But as I look at her I do have a flicker, like the quick opening of a camera shutter, of Henry crouched on the bonnet of the old green Ford, bashing it with a rock. We were at the farm then, so he must have been nine. The flicker is not so much of what he did (because of course I remember the incident perfectly well) as of my own furious older-sister indignation.
Watching the girl today I feel simply puzzled. So many things are puzzling. The only thing that is certain is that I cannot trust myself to get it right. That flicker of indignant fury runs through my veins like a shot of cognac. Wonderful. I can walk on with a spring in my step. Hitting trees with sticks makes me think of the way they sometimes feed remains of animals to the same species - pigs, for example. Hitting the poor tree with wood, making it beat itself. It is against nature, it adds insult to injury. But maybe I am missing something.
When I come to unlock the front door, I can't find my keys. I find a set of keys in my bag but they aren't mine. Mine have two shiny wooden balls like conkers attached to the key fob: boxwood and yew, golden and blood red. I've had them for years. They came from trees that were uprooted in the great gale. There is no fob at all with these keys; they are simply attached to a cheap metal ring. I search carefully through my coat pockets and the compartments of my bag. I check in my purse. My own keys...