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.

Climbing Trees

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’.

My Bedroom The Junkpile

“Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss”  - Joan Didion

When the old art college in Leamington got shut down and relocated I thought it’d be a nice idea to go and have a look around the place whilst there was nothing inside and no renovation work going on. The building had stood for a long time, and many years before it became an art college, it was the Leamington public library so it’s got plenty of history.

          So, on my way to a gig at the Well I stopped by the place to have a browse around. It looked much sadder than the last time I’d visited, maybe it was missing having people busy studying inside its walls, after all those years the walls would be longing for some sort of action. Anyway, I hopped the fence and walked down alongside the place, on the basement level and searched for a way in but it looked quite impossible without a crowbar. Everything was tight shut. No loss, I thought, I’ll just have a quick look in the huge 10ft high skip in the car park instead.

          So I did that, I climbed up the side and pulled myself over and into the skip. I couldn’t believe what I saw inside. It was half full of old Apple Macs, broken chairs, old art portfolios (what a waste), other assorted artwork and tons more bits and pieces. Straight off, the Apple Macs looked soaked through, I could only presume they were ruined but I did manage to bring a reel to reel tape player, some huge plastic sheets with orange and green swirls printed on them and also a whole ton of Letraset home with me. Where did I put it? In my room, of course, it just got added to my ever growing collection of things which I think have some importance or, as some would have it, junk.

          I’m getting low on space in my room amidst the collections of records, zines, postcards, flyers, badges, books and musical equipment. It’s not that I even intended for all these things to grow into fully-fledged collections, but it happens. You get a postcard from here, and another from there and you don’t want to throw them away because they have that tiny amount of sentimental value, not only to the person receiving the card but also the sender. Everything in my archives holds some form of sentimental value to me, even if no-one else can see that value. This is what holds me back from throwing anything at all out. Every single flyer I have holds a memory, maybe of receiving the flyer in the gutter outside the gig, maybe of being at the gig or maybe even the walk home from the gig. As my collections grow I find myself taking on some sort of position as keeper of all local punk ephemera, which not only holds memories for me but also the lives of my friends with whom I shared those times with that are trapped inside my archive.

          I am not only holding onto my archives because of their sentimental value and memories, I’m holding onto them for easy reference. I have all my books and zines within arms reach in my room because fairly often when I need to reference such and such a weird passage in an equally weird and obscure zine I can do it at ease. When friends come over they can’t believe that anyone held onto this crap and the extent of it, they can’t believe that it’s in order, some of it even alphabeticalised. They fumble through my box of flyers asking about bands, times, places. They ask questions about old zines that were never even printed in double figures and I rush around answering their questions and searching for more little bits and pieces that make up the rest of the story and I realise that I am deeply in my element.

          I haven’t hoarded all the pieces that make up my archive just for sentimental value, but because one was never enough and I would look through my Dads archive, made up of fairly similar bits and pieces, and just be absolutely fascinated just like my friends are when they dig through mine. It all makes me start to wonder. Was my Dad in his element when I prodded and asked him questions when I dug through his archives?