For his seventy-fifth birthday, his daughter presented Jake with an English oak tree, quercus robur, about four years old. It came in a medium-sized flowerpot in which the potting mix was pretty well dried–out. Not a very big oak tree, no more than sixty centimetres in height and surprisingly spindly. In fact, the stem was malformed, splayed half-way up, which made it very vulnerable to snapping in a stiff breeze. The leaves too were mottled with a more luminescent paler green or light yellowish brown on their lobes.
‘Don’t spray with anti-fungals,’ Shirl warned, when he meekly pointed out these stains on his tree. ‘The nursery man said, otherwise you’ll kill the spoor.’
She was speaking more loudly these days because he was hard of hearing, particularly slow to catch the first syllables of words. Occasionally, she would even shout, as if he were stone deaf, impatient at having to repeat whole sentences, all because ‘words’ might transmute into ‘birds’ and fly off to convolute meaning.
Shirl also gave him a half wine-barrel that still smelled of alcohol, which caused both of them some anxiety, for it was essential to have the soil prepared just right. As advised by his daughter through the nurseryman, Jake bought four 30-litre bags of premium potting mix and a gauge for measuring the levels of moisture and alkalinity, the pH. But after emptying three bags of potting mix into the more capacious half-barrel with its three silver-coloured buckles round the wooden staves, the task of carefully removing the tree from its tight-fitting pot was tricky. Having scooped out a hollow in the mix and dunked the pot in water to soak, his easing the stem proved to be a messy job for arthritic fingers. The hollow wasn’t deep enough, so the stem sat up too high in the mix, and holding it while trying to scoop beneath roots that he couldn’t see, the original crust of mix broke, exposing the root ball itself. Already he was feeling anxious and inadequate, trying to hollow out a deeper hole with one hand and holding the forlorn sapling cross-wise in the other, palming over a hasty covering of more mix.
Still the hole wasn’t deep enough. Again he gingerly felt below the roots to scrape, only to realise his worst fears – one of the roots had torn away. How many others had his clumsiness detached?
His second mistake was to position the cask beneath some broken guttering to catch the run-off, but failed to catch the afternoon sun and left a small puddle ringing the stem. The dial on the gauge that he poked down read Wet instead of Moist.
For these winter and autumn rains had offered the most bounty for some twenty years, so that the garden had burgeoned out of control. The rose bushes and silver beets had shot up well above head-high, till the tallest branches of the roses weighed down by several soakings had bent their mops of petals to brush the lawn, whilst the crests of beets had crinkled up into seed heads and in wilting would catch round the ankles, almost tripping him on the slippery earth, so unsteady was he on his arthritic pins these days.
Dismayed at his ineptitude and disgust at his capacity for tarnishing delicate objects, Jake gradually felt better once he had topped up the cask with half the fourth bag of mix, tamped down composted pine bark and coir pith, and added a generous sprinkling of lime to bring the pH reading up to the required 7.5. After Shirl, primarily, along with his own token effort, had heaved the cask on its axis round the back patio towards a water butt and nodding kangaroo paw to gain a more exposed position, the fresh arrangement looked a proper treat there in the sunshine, the potting mix a dark chocolate colour, with flecks of emerald slow-release crystals of water, smoothly tapering down from the base of the stem to the staves of the barrel.
The gift of an oak tree had indeed proved a delightful surprise, in spite of the responsibilities. No ‘green fingers’, Jake liked to while away many hours pottering about his garden domain. He would enjoy strolling out to the vegie patch and cutting off a dark green zucchini that overwhelmed the taste of shop-soiled vegies, or seeing how an asparagus or three had broken through the crust of topsoil overnight, or the Tom Thumb tomatoes had ripened like berries and tasted like little fruits, all of which were succulent enough to eat raw. Not that he was a foodie by any stretch, for he had no idea what such a prized gastronomic delicacy as a truffle would taste like.
Somehow it was its nickname that added to the attraction: black gold. The very oxymoron delighted him as much as the bizarre paradox of a fungus being worth a fortune in the market-place. He didn’t care a hoot about the financial gain, but the image evoked, even the sound and shape of a word, fascinated him. Names like Xanadu or Shangri-la or even Treasure Island conjured a romantic atmosphere far away in distance and time and stark reality.
And truffles breathed the Dordogne.
‘I thought it would bring back some familiar memories of your home land,’ Shirl had said, ‘Hearts of oak and all that.’
If truth be told, he hadn’t given those half-buried memories much thought. Oh yes, snatches of his earliest conscious moments cut back at odd moments, such as being carried into the broom cupboard under the stairs when the air-raid siren sounded, but nowadays he couldn’t be sure whether that was his mother’s memory, not his. But the landscapes cherished in his youth he had long repressed; in any case had probably disappeared or changed irrevocably in contemporary time. In those initial years of migration it was too painful to dream them into being again. Since buying a house in Australia, he had purposefully set about planting exotic trees that in England you might discover only in a hothouse in Kew Gardens or some hidden valley in Devon – loquat, macadamia, avocado, feijoa, and fig, baboca, even though there was Buckley and Nunn of some species producing fruit or nuts so far south in non-tropical Melbourne.
Jake would always remember oak trees, of course, for they had invariably loomed as central motif in his natïve landscape, so much so that he took them for granted, spreading out along downland tracks and reaching far up into the sky with thick boughs stretching into a canopy of dense foliage or a stand of oaks on a distant knoll, under which a herd of fallow deer would be grazing, marking the destination of a delightful hour or two’s saunter from a country house. They were plentiful enough in Australia too. At the same time, he regretted that he could no longer recall the difference between the elm and the larch or the ash and the sycamore with its whirly ‘helicopter’ seeds, a recognition he had gained from Nature Study at primary school backed up by a short-lived enthusiasm for ‘I-Spy Trees’ that cost sixpence. So much of that homespun lore had been overlaid by his new-found fascination with the huge variety of eucalypts that shed leaves the year round, the varied textures of their bark and their quirky manner of stripping it away.
And yet he’d spent his early childhood on a council estate knocked up by German prisoners-of-war, cheap, leaky, flat-roofed, one-floor prefabrications with built-in metal cupboards in a yellowish wash, where the street names did possess the ring of recitation, still: Laurel Crescent, Broom Road, Larch Tree Close, Fir Tree Avenue, Links View, Copse Avenue, Bridle Way and his very own Myrtle Road, which curved round a one-tree island into a wider, staidly respectable Oak Avenue, with its well-to-do, two-storey, gabled houses with garages and treed gardens established before the war.
A little saddened, he rued the fact that he had never bothered to find out what a myrtle tree looked like.
With the mellowing of time, however, one particular image would break in on Jake’s thoughts with gathering frequency, an image which held the stuff of dream. He must have been about nine or ten when taken by his friend’s parents to a bird sanctuary, but these neighbours no longer played a part in that sequence of memory. He would always find himself on the threshold of a large, rectangular, grassy field enclosed on all sides by high-banking coppice and huge trees, many of which were sturdy ancient oaks that barred the outside world. The only sound he could hear on that still warm summer’s day was the perpetual cawing rasp of the high-flying black shapes wheeling overhead hither and thither, squadrons of rooks. Whenever he returned over the years to Surrey, he could never discover the whereabouts of that sanctuary. Until it eventually dawned that this once-visited secluded space set amid impenetrable woodland had been obliterated by a spanking orange-brick housing estate. Why it had taken on the role of a magical place he never fathomed.
Vaguely, he remembered Oak-apple Day, but not as the anniversary of Prince Charles hiding in the oak tree to avoid capture by Cromwell’s men, but rather that squirming self-consciousness that had been the bane of his youth. It was still the done thing at prep school on this particular day in May to adorn oneself with oak leaves, so his grandmother ran up an old brown curtain with cut-out green crepe paper leaves pinned on that he feared would prick him to death if he so much as breathed. Behind and across the aisle, little Jake sensed his mother’s eyes fixated upon him, whereas he could only sink his gaze into the floor boards. Then was mortified when chosen to pick a long coloured ribbon and dance round the maypole when he couldn’t even skip.
Now suddenly, after school it was, he and some boys in his own top primary class were running the gauntlet of a hail of acorns and conkers and stones up a darkly rooted rivulet, pursued by the other, much wilder class eleven. At nine o’clock assembly next morning the dour headmaster, Mr Telford, he of hunched shoulders, withering stare and sarcastic tongue, castigated the ‘fatheads’ - his favourite expletive rolled around and spat out with contempt - who risked being blinded for life or would have it on their conscience for ever, having put another boy’s eye out. Oh, the shame of having to stand out in front of the entire school as one of the ring-leaders of a dangerous and despicable gang.
Shirl was growing concerned that the wind was agitating the stem of his little oak tree and suggested, quite forcefully, that it needed more support. Jake wasn’t interested, especially when asked if there were any pieces of old material she might use to secure the stem. Just like Peg, interfering. From his broom cupboard, he produced an old candy-striped sheet. She stifled a laugh at his kitchen scissors that were so blunt they couldn’t cut, but she tore along the selvedge cleanly, then made a figure eight twice round that she secured to two in-bending plastic rods at the base of the stem, thereby steering clear, he hoped, of any transformative process occurring a few centimetres beneath the roots. At the cross-over point of the two loops, there was some leeway for the stem to give.
Jake, though, remained unconvinced. If you were going to have a supporting structure, surely the strips of sheet should be higher, above the deformity? Otherwise the stem would snap anyway at its weakest point of resistance.
‘What’s the matter?’ she quizzed, as he looked sulkily at her arboreal first-aid.
‘No, no,’ he shrugged, lamenting the loss of aesthetic appeal of the little stalwart all bandaged up
‘Remember, you are growing truffles, not trees, Dad.’ But she knew with an inward sigh he would dismast the tree as soon as she drove off home.
During his last eye test, Jake’s optometrist had told him that he had blind spots in both eyes and it might not be long before he noticed this degeneration, not unusual at his age. Nothing to worry about. An operation to remove cataracts was a straightforward procedure, quite painless. Jake accepted the inevitable with a shrug and a nod. Funny, though, for when his eyesight was at its sharpest, over half a century ago, he saw nothing, nothing in really close detail, even on those far-away woodland walks where he loved the solitude of nature but mulled over his own thoughts, re-enacted bygone conversations ad nauseam, listened to the music of light classics played inside his head. Yet now, thanks to countless dog-walking forays, he could slow down, observe the detail in a leaf, feel the texture of bark, drink in the perfume of honeysuckle or a pink rose straggling over a fence. So that within six weeks of re-potting his oak tree, he espied the first minuscule shootings of new growth, feathers of pale green leaves that slowly began turning an orangey-brown.
Then back from those misty views of his past plodded the stout-hearted Gabriel Oak, the shepherd of Wessex downlands and water-meadows, paragon of long-suffering faithfulness, who in spite of being dealt the devil’s own hand of an over-zealous sheepdog that drove his prized Dorset Horns over a cliff . . . well, there’s Hardy for you . . . he finally gets to claim his treasure, the skittish Bathsheba Everdene.
Four of his own animals he had buried in the back garden. No, five. How could he have forgotten his foundling budgerigar? Bronte, he named her, but where did he bury her? And he had all but forgotten where he’d lain the cumbersome, stiff body of his collie, when he was appalled at digging up at the corner of his vegie patch the long, slender skull, with its dark hollows for eyes and still attached upper jaw, though the lower jaw of rotten teeth abraded had divided into two halves, and the nodalities at the back of the cranium. Which soon became an ivory palace for earwigs when he left it outside on a side wall to clean up later.
The passing of his late wife, Peg, would have been ten years ago. He was more bemused than bereft by the loss. It was the suddenness of it all and the scan, that repulsive scan, which showed a tumour on her brain about the size of the plum-shaped Health Kick tomato ripening on the window-ledge in the kitchen. At first it was the odd headache, then bouts of uncharacteristic irritability, then a slurring of words that alarmed and alerted him. How long had this sinister growth been eating away at her brain? It didn’t bear thinking about, though back than he was wont to disappear secretively into the second bedroom with the scan to contemplate the tumour and shed tears. They scarcely had time or understanding to say a proper goodbye, the shock was so great.
Now pondering more frequently on his own death, he became strangely excited when he first heard about the trend slowly emerging in England of being buried upright. It appeared to be generated by the growing problem of finding space in crowded graveyards and establishing new ones. Also the unfeeling businesslike efficiency of certain funeral parlours, their growing costs and the more natural appeal of being buried at least sixty centimetres below the surface standing up in some quiet woodland retreat beneath the trees, the birds and skies void of pollutants, as if poised to take off for a leisurely Sunday stroll. Sentimental he might be, but the notion of physically decomposing in the earth was so much more comforting than being dissected or cremated, a casket of ashes. Surely, there had to be some peaceful glade in his adopted country that he naturally gravitated to?
With the lapse of another four years, Jake could still be found pottering about the garden, more slowly now with swelling joints on his fingers and arthritic knees that he was reluctant to get down upon, even with a cushion of old carpet. But every time he shuffled out the back door his blurry eyes would alight upon the oak tree first of all. Patiently he had waited, for he believed that within three or four winters he should detect a rich-ripe, distinctive odour hanging about the tree, the smell of truffles. This prospect had given an edge to fondness for his little dwarf, but his long-time patience had blunted all expectation, especially when reminded of that clumsy mashing of the roots. What’s more, who could know what diseases or deformities were lurking beneath the surface? Perhaps he might be fortunate and claim a two-centimetre globule of truffle rather than a lump the size of a grapefruit. It no longer seemed to matter quite so much.
Undeterred, he continued each morning to press the two prongs of the probe down to root level in the mix, read the gauge to check the levels of moisture and pH, then smooth any ruffles on the surface with rough, unsteady hand..
Michael Small
December 25, 2010 – December 30, 2010
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