A favourite pastime of mine when I was younger, back when the summer days seemed so joyous and endless that they would last forever, was to pass the time climbing trees with my friends. It was a real hobby, which seems so far off now in this new century filled with computers and technology and gadgets and pressure, that constant weight. I haven’t climbed a tree in a few years, but I know I still could if I wanted to, I’m flexible enough. But it’s no longer a pastime of mine like it was during childhood. I do different things now; I’m a completely different person to the old jetty-kid in me who used to play cricket in the alleyway every night.
The children now don’t seem at all interested in going to the park to run around or exploring the environment they where live, or even climbing trees. They are hopelessly passive, fed what they believe they want. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone build a den in a tree, or bushes, or anywhere, since I was building my own what now seems like a whole lifetime ago. We’d once built our own human-sized bird’s nest on top of a patch of trees near the old bomb shelter. It was made up of a million little branches weaving in and out of each other, but just dense enough to hold us up. You could get a great view along the railway from the top of that tree.
Climbing trees is what we did. Although young, we were professionals. My friend Jo was the best tree climber by far; he always managed to get right to the very top. We were both short for our age, and very nimble. This is really what helped us along in our tree climbing careers. It was what we lived for in those days. I probably spent around a third of my childhood in bed, a third at school, and a third out and about, or up in trees, with or without friends. Finding trees you could fit more than two people in were in high demand. We eventually did find one, in the graveyard, where we could easily have five or six people sitting inside, quite comfortably, on different branches. No-one ever noticed us in that tree because the foliage was so thick, but once you had climbed up into it the centre was almost hollow.
Cows had even surrounded us once, and cornered us up in a tree. We were out in the fields picking conkers and, being the curious animals they are, they gathered round the bottom of the trunk to see what we were doing. Before we knew it there was no way of getting past them. Both Jo and I were scared for a moment, but we quickly realised there was nothing to do except stay still and wait for them to get bored, leave and eat more grass.
It’s true; not much can actually be achieved by climbing trees all afternoon, but that is not the point. Not much is achieved by sitting in front of a television for hours on end. The difference between the two is that when climbing trees you are outside, breathing the clear air and exploring the world around you. Explorer – the word seems to sum up my childhood in Rugby, when I was even more eager to walk every street, to play in every park or field and to find every single secret secluded spot I could.
One such spot, which seemed so secluded at the time, was at Draycote Water, a nature reserve and reservoir on the outskirts of our town. On the very edge of the field, sitting alongside a thick hedgerow marking the border of the reserve, was a small patch of trees. In reality, not very secluded at all, anyone picnicking that day could easily see us climbing the trees. Predominantly horse-chestnuts, we’d ride our bikes out to them when the time of year came round again to play conkers on the playground. See, we were young and naïve and we thought that the most solid conkers, and therefore the ones you were mostly likely to win with, were only to be found on the very far reaches of the town. Soaking the conker in vinegar, cooking it in the oven, leaving it in the fridge; we’d tried them all but to no avail. Ours kept on breaking.
Although the conkers we pulled from this tree did break, we thought that the ones from this particular tree had more staying power in a match than most of the others we had picked before. They seemed worn in already somehow, like the conker itself was ready to meet its true youthful destiny, dangling proudly at the end of a piece of string. A solid brown lump, hanging humble and patient, ready to be smashed into smithereens.
The memory, even now, burns vivid in the depths of my mind. We’d developed a new technique to get the conkers from the ‘super-tree’ at Draycote over that season. One person would climb up the tree and, because these were quite small horse-chestnut trees, would hold onto the trunk for dear life and shake the tree as violently as possible. The whole thing would sway a little, branches jerking with each shake. This would cause the conkers to shower down in a heavy, spiky green rain. Between shakes, everybody on the ground would scurry around picking up all the prizes, hoarding them together in makeshift satchels using the fronts of their t-shirts.
On this particular afternoon, I was up in the tree, watching everyone gather the treasures beneath me. I looked around the tree and spotted the ultimate prize: the biggest, most rich green spiky casing. Surely, it held the king of all conkers inside its protective shell. ‘I must have this one, I’ll be champion for years’, was my first thought. And so I walked out on the branches, holding onto two in my hands and standing on another two, easing myself out onto the edges of the canopy. Very slow and cautious, inch by inch, I moved further away from the tree trunk until the branches beneath me started bending.
Further and further I cautiously crept out, when all of a sudden: snap! The branch under my left foot cracked and I began to fall down and down. Branches snapped beneath me as I fell. The fall seemed to last forever. I was slapped in the face by spiky conkers as leaves smeared against my clothes. I landed on the floor, still standing perfectly upright with a pile of snapped branches between my legs. I dropped the two broken branches in my hands and took a step away from the pile. All my friends burst out laughing. I had managed to fall about 20ft from the tree, taking a third of its poor branches with me. I walked away un-hurt, without scratches even, but the tree came off much worse, almost destroyed. We kept on gathering our conkers. We would laugh and occasionally repeat the story for another quick laugh. Sometimes stories only increase in humorous value the more you tell them.
Even now, almost a decade later, I occasionally go to look at the tree I fell from; to see its form and how the branches are recovering. It still produces conkers but the branches that I snapped in the fall still show obvious battle wounds. They are growing back, slowly, but I still feel a bit guilty about the fall and the damage I caused. Talking to trees sounds like crusty hippy business but I talk to this tree out of guilt. And although I’m not really an animist, I tell it the same thing I tell it every time; ‘I’m really sorry about that’.
