Leamington Spa - Northumberland Road
I am
not on the property game board in the purple space. I have been dying for years
now. When my peers sprouted green this spring in drought I am left grey brown.
The post drought rains and wet summer have not revived me. Now time is even too
late for any fantasy genetic cloning. No children will enjoy playing with my
conkers anymore. Given someone to understand me I could have told a long story
of all I have seen here since 1878. Now all these memories will turn to ash.
My children each side planted years ago died first; the
brown trunk staining an early warning. The tree surgeons came for them last
Monday. Watching one’s children cut down to earth is so bad; one does not
expect one’s children to go first. Their young branches and twigs shredded,
leaving ugly stumps and roots. I recall them being planted all so small. Ideally,
if they knew I had any thought or feelings, they would have taken me down and
chipped me first.
Morning rush over at 9.15am today, they come for me two
months before my 132nd birthday. A bright-red lorry with a dazzling flashing
light, hydraulic arm and a chain-saw man in its yellow bucket. As he comes close I smell hot breath and
his bright-orange jacket hurts my kind of tree sight. He saws off my dead twigs
and branches.
“I feel little. Hell the noise! No earmuffs for me.”
I sense the other trees wince as each branch falls, all
their tree nerves on edge. Human time 11.00am. I am now left as a lonely ‘Y’
catapult shape sticking upwards into the blue sky. Below they saw up my severed
branches into logs and shred my twigs. Lunch break 12.00 noon. They leave me naked, limbs cut
off, too late for a miracle cure. Surgeons would never do this to a human or an
animal.
A pensioner walks slowly by, his head bent forward
similar to the elderly couple on the road sign up the street. He is a regular
daily visitor, also past his prime waiting for the chop, coming by back from
the newspaper shop. He pauses, removes his hat in respect, a tear in his eye,
I think for me. He stoops and takes a few pieces of me as mementos, turns off
home with his paper under his arm for another day’s bad news reading. I hear
him thinking about writing this story. Old William, a popular and regular sitter
on the seat opposite must be away again in cold and wet Wales. He too will miss me.
Maybe my friends and other local tree families, the surviving
Chestnuts, will outlast the Ashes in the gardens. We thought the Ash families were
safe behind fences, away from crashing cars, until the Black Death die back
arrived from Poland.
When Grandfather Ash across the road went last year I overheard the tree
surgeons say to the pensioner.
“We would all be gone in twenty years.”
I
know the pensioner, William and the tree surgeons all share sad feelings about us
when we are felled, the giant trees in Northumberland Road.
Trees do talk to each other. Fact or
fiction?
Notes
- Another giant and a child are felled today 11 June 2013. Fortunately, finance permitting, the Town Council and the County Council plan to replant a new tree for everyone one felled.
- Good news February 2014 - several new trees planted, including one where the felled tree stood. Well done to those who have the long term vision to plant now for the future as the trees planted will take 30 to 40 years at least to have some scale.
- This story published September 2013 in Ywnwab! - "You will never write a book." An Autumn Story-book
Open http://www.amazon.co.uk and search on Ywnwab! to find Kindle and paperback versions for sale.
