The Treehouse

Kyle’s little brother, Connor, was telling us about his treehouse, which he was building with a couple of friends. The whole estate had gone from green fields to modern houses with winding roads within five years, so there were always scraps of wood around, left behind by the builders. As long as the estate had been being built there had been kids taking the wood for various projects: go-karts, treehouses. For a small enough estate the amount of robbery was quite high straight from the word go, from the building site anyway. Connor had explained where his treehouse was to us and I suddenly realised he must have started building his in the exact same tree that my friends and I had built one before, not that many years ago.

Being half my height and age Connor’s estimate of both distance and time was completely different to mine. He told us it would take ten minutes to get there, but really it only took five. ‘Big ditches’ were nothing more than a small leap for us, whereas he had to scramble over log by log, mound by mound. He lead us across a familiar long grassy field, then along a line of trees and bushes at the very edge of the field. The path was well-worn but the rain had turned it all into a thick mud and treading soon became a great effort. A barbed wire fence, a few trees and an embankment were all that kept us from the railway track.

Connor took back onto the grass and ran on ahead. Kyle and I lagged behind a little. “I think it’s the same treehouse as the old one” he told me.

“That’s what I’m thinking” I replied, “it’ll be so fucking weird to see it again”. Just as I spoke Connor came to a stop on the crest of the hill, waving and pointing back at us. “It is” I said, looking sideways at Kyle, both of us grinning because we’re about to get a blast from the past and we’re both in our elements; out in the open.

We trod the last few steps onto the hill, paused and took a few steps back to get a good look at the poor old tree. I shook my head, ‘so different’ I thought ‘but still familiar’. Kyle recounted and old story about the treehouse, something about the building site and it all came flooding back. Memory and a real love of nostalgia can sometimes hit you like that.

I was around 17 at the time, pretty old to be building treehouses really but I still did it because it was so much fun to put things together. I hadn’t actually been in on the original project at the tree, no that was a small crew from the Grammar School who all lived on the estate while it was still being built. I think there was only four of them: Mike S, Butlin, Bloomy and Becky. The funny thing about the Grammar School kids in our town is that they are more degenerate than anyone else I ever knew, and twice as hippie as Woodstock ’69.

It was obvious why they had chosen that one tree as the spot for their big project: it was fairly secluded, on the edge of the field, home wasn’t far for the tools and the building site was inbetween the two. Being hippies they didn’t want to hurt the tree at all. Which was nice of them. So, armed with a few scrap planks, nails, rope and a hammer, they constructed their first main platform, except they didn’t nail into the tree at all. They would rest planks onto the tree and then tie them down onto a branch, instead of nailing them down.

The very first time I visited them up there the whole project took me totally by surprise; I was amazed at how well it had been made, and the sheer size of the thing.

“It’s resting on branches?” I remember asking Mike S when he first told me about it. I thought it to be terribly unstable but it really wasn’t, it was built better than the whole fuckin’ estate.

They had constructed a single platform, stretched across two big branches that was about 7ft high on one side and 15ft high on the other, because it was built over a downward hill on that side. Made entirely of stolen and scrap pieces of wood and pallets, with tools borrowed from parents and not actually nailed to the tree, the original platform was a work to really admire. Grammar School had truly paid off for this small and dedicated crew of treehousers. The state school kids all came and admired the impressive work and decided to get involved. This is when it all went downhill really, and I admit: I helped ruin it, by helping build it with the rest of the idiots.

Originally the treehouse was just one level, about 6ft square, enough space to sit and stretch out if you wanted. It was such a good treehouse that everyone who saw it wanted to help work on it, and following the Grammar kids method of gathering materials, we would all wait until dark and then run across to the building site.

All those nights of secret building site gathering missions must have cost someone, and that’s why the builders would come and take back any planks that weren’t nailed down. We had to work very fast to build the treehouse, before our materials were stolen back from us. It was always dark by the time we set off to gather materials; the cover of night was all we mischievous juvenile youth needed. There would be anywhere between 5 to 20 of us on these midnight missions. We’d creep around the estate looking for anything left unlocked that we could use on the treehouse. Usually: planks, pallets, boards and nails. Sometimes we would have to go into the building site to get materials. It was never hard to lift the fence out of its base and walk on in. I didn’t mind stealing from these sites because I just felt that they were stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from people by selling these terrible houses. That was my motive to take from them a little of what they’d taken; and plus we were using the things we stole for a genuine creative goal: to educate ourselves about building treehouses.

Creeping around on a building site, late at night, and usually stoned, one would expect to get paranoid, and it was me who tended to keep an eye out for anyone about to bust us. While everyone else climbed over the half-built houses, looking for materials as much as having a good time, I stood on piles of bricks, or rubble, shaking my head and wondering when we were leaving. When everyone got drunk in the woods for Mike S’ leaving party we somehow ended up on the building site at 4am. Everyone scaled a half-built house, like usual, but following Mike S’ lead they all took it in turns to jump into the netting strung between the walls instead of floors. I couldn’t watch, way too sketchy for me, I walked home instead, leaving the party in full swing without me.

The next night was quite successful on the materials gathering front. Bloomy had found a valderall on the other side of the estate and suggested we go get it for materials. A valderall is what they use to transport long lengths of pipe; they look like a giant cotton reel. Ours was about 12ft high and we all stood round it that night, debating whether to wheel it all the way across the estate. We decided to try it, however long it took and set off under the cover of night.

We took it in turns to push and steer as we scrambled it over rubble, on the roads, across people’s front lawns, hills and fields, all the way to the treehouse. Had we have been caught we would obviously have run and left it wherever it was. Imagine looking out your window in the middle of the night and seeing a dozen punks, coughing and stumbling along, pushing a huge wooden reel. You’d probably think you were tripping. The whole mission took a good four hours, slow and pain staking. By the time we’d pushed it over the long grass we were all shattered. We left it by the treehouse and went home to sleep, “we’ll sort it out tomorrow” we’d all said, but we didn’t.

Within two weeks, and several late night salvage missions later the tree house had almost tripled in size. There was always people hanging out there, working or not, and it just seemed to grow out of control. The platform had now grown to twice its original size, we had a fireman’s pole and one side, tied to a branch, a ladder up through the hatch and even two smaller ‘personal’ levels higher up. What upset the Grammar School lot was that it was now being built into the tree, instead of onto the tree. We were all nailing it wherever we could, building it as fast as possible for the hell of it, not carefully planning and building like they did. It was still surprisingly sturdy with two dozen people on it sitting around or working. A couple of days later everyone had installed a wall to protect themselves from the closing in elements a little bit more. The Grammar kids who built the thing in the first place were so furious that their project had so many people working on it that they ditched the whole thing and weren’t seen working on it again. They did come back, but only to criticise our efforts.

I must mention the view we had atop the treehouse. The railway embankment was on one side of the treehouse, lined with trees, but on the far side of that you could get a great view of green rolling fields and an old farmhouse just visible on the horizon, where the field sloped down. Even this field has been ripped up now, and made into a stupid bypass road. Looking the other way from the treehouse was, in the foreground, a huge long grassy field, which was quite subtly un-even. On the left hand side of the view, behind the field, was the building site. On the right had side in the distance was the new estate, in all its stinking suburban glory, with as many problems as a run-down ghetto already, but to get there you had to pass the stagnant pond first.

I was about the most senior builder on the project by now and the reason I stopped helping out is a story itself. The valderall never even got used for anything on the treehouse, it sat there in the field, and the grass grew and grew around it. Sometimes people would wheel it around a little, but they always brought the damn thing back. That was a good thing in the end, as I might have been shot if it weren’t for the giant cotton reel.

No-one was doing any work that day, and there was about 10 of us just milling around and wasting time at the treehouse. We were all sat around chatting when out of nowhere a can on the branch next to me went ping and fell off. At first we carried on talking, presuming it was the wind, but then we heard it again. A gunshot. We looked at the bullet hole in the tree, a tiny pellet was deep inside the bark. Enough to kill someone if it went into the wrong part of the body. We realised we were being shot at from somewhere and began to panic. Everyone hit the deck and plotted their way down from the tree. “I’m taking the fireman’s pole”, “I’m just gonna jump”. We waited for another shot to be fired, and then it came, the third bullet and dug into another part of the tree. Everyone jumped up and scrambled down the tree, as the snipers reloaded. We all ran to hide behind the valderall and as I joined them all we heard one more final shot dig into a plank.

10 of us, petrified, shaking, clinging onto a valderall as a shield from getting shot. We were scared, worrying where exactly the shots were being fired from. I thought we were going to actually get shot, and die, and I was vocal about it. As we looked around the field for the sniper we spotted a group of four people lying down in the long grass. “There they are! That’s who’s shooting at us. They’re hiding, look!”

We kept hiding behind the valderall, not really knowing what our next move should be. We kept our eyes on the people out in the grass as they got nearer and nearer. We all tried to hide behind one side of the wheel as they came right up to us. We closed our eyes and hoped for it to not be a military style execution. When they came in front of us we all sighed, out of pure relief. We knew them all, it was the Grammar kids, “out and about taking shrooms in the grass” they said “thought we’d come by”. Butlin chased away after a non-existent cow, running straight into a wire fence and going face-first into a bush. They didn’t have an air rifle with them, that’s just a bad idea on mushrooms, so the question of where the bullets came from was still unanswered. We decided to leave and walked across the grass, downhill, with the people tripping. Everyone rolled around in the grass but, paranoid of snakes, I laughed at them all and stood standing.

That was the last time I went to the treehouse. I mean, getting shot at would be enough to scare anyone off. No-one ever heard any rumour, no matter how vague, about who it was doing the shooting, but we stayed away just in case there was a second time.

Kyle’s little brother scrambled up a dodgy little ladder and onto what used to be the main platform, now just a couple of burnt-out planks, dead looking. Even Connor and his friends, quite obviously, only had half the work ethic, or time, as we did. Kyle and I walked up to the tree. Only about 3 planks remaining now, hanging on as reminders, but mostly the whole thing was gone. I found about a third of its bits and pieces down the steep embankment, lying broken and burnt under a stolen scooter. I climbed up onto the few planks that were left and Connor handed me a little plank followed by a nail and a hammer. I lay the plank out over two branches and butted it up to another one. I rested the nail on the wood above the branch and took the hammer in my hand. One test hit, like old times, and then I drove the nail into the wood, bit by bit, over and over until it disappeared. It all felt wrong: why am I bothering getting involved in someone else’s project here? My work had been done on a different treehouse, which just happened to be in the same tree. Nothing will ever come close to our old treehouse in the tree again, and that’s why we should let the memory fizzle on the back burner instead of even trying to relive it.

Going back and seeing it trashed and all burnt out was closure for me. Closure of the whole time I’d spent there. I realised then that making a treehouse would probably never be the same again, and I forced myself to accept it, for it is a sad thing when a man realises he shouldn’t ever build a treehouse again. But I couldn’t help telling myself that I really should have expected a trashed, shell of a platform, and not a ‘mansion-in-a-tree’ as Mike S described it the first time he told me about the whole thing.