Beautiful Star & Other Stories by A.D. Swanston

Author:A.D. Swanston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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This account I shall place in a wooden box under my bed in the hope that it will not be found until after my death.

The Tree

1651

John had climbed taller trees, but this one was his favourite. It stood alone on the edge of the wood, at the top of a rise in the ground above fields and hedgerows which stretched as far as he could see. The tree had long ago been pollarded so that new branches had grown strong from the trunk, creating a dense blanket of foliage behind which he could hide.

When the tree was in leaf, he spent hours sitting in a fork halfway up the trunk, watching the shepherd and his dog at work with their flock, listening to the distant chatter of the milkmaids who came every day to milk the cows, and whittling sticks into figures. He had a good knife, made for him by his father, which he sharpened on the grinding stone outside the forge. He kept the figures in a hole in the trunk, where they would be safe. He never took them home.

If he was in the tree early enough in the morning he might see deer emerging from the wood to graze, and, in the evening, a fox creeping along a hedgerow. In the fields there were rabbits and hares, pheasants and pigeons. Sitting silent and unseen in the fork, looking out at the world from his hiding place, he was happy and safe. In his tree, he was never told to go and do something he did not want to do, like cleaning out the hen house, or slapped for not doing it properly, he was never hit by his sister, and he never had to listen to his mother and father shouting at each other.

When there was nothing much to watch, and he had tired of whittling, he pulled small pieces of bark off the tree. Underneath the bark, he found beetles and ants, centipedes and spiders, and other insects which he did not recognise. In the spring he watched birds building their nests, and in the autumn squirrels collecting acorns. Once he had climbed along a branch to a blackbird’s nest. He had stolen an egg from the nest and taken it home. He had put it under one of the hens to see if it would hatch, but when it was still in the nesting box a week later, he had thrown it on to the dung heap.

It took John about ten minutes to get home from the tree. He had to make his way around the wood and over the low stone wall that enclosed the Boscobel Estate, before walking along the lane to the village. He took care not to be seen inside the wall. He would get into trouble if he were.

He always hoped his father would be too busy in the forge to notice him coming home. If he were seen, he would be questioned about where he had been, whether he had done his chores, or if he had been in any trouble.

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