DEAD WOOD

There’s a wood not far from where I live. It is hundreds of years old and has been preserved so that people can go and enjoy it. A camping site right next door offers somewhere to stay for those that aren’t local. A café, the “Broadleaf Tea Rooms” is where visitors can order a pot of tea and some scones or home made cakes. A small gift shop sells mementoes. Postcards and pencils, china mugs with stencils of trees on them, notepads to put by the telephone; that sort of thing. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to visit the place. It’s a good day out for the children, if the weather is kind, with an adventure play area and a woodland miniature railway. Father Christmas visits every December and mums and dads pay a little extra so that their excited children can climb aboard the “ Santa Express” and get a wrapped present from the old man with the badly fitting white beard.

I can walk there. It’s only about a mile away. I’m a “Friend of the Wood”. For £17 a year I can visit the wood as many times as I like. So I do. I’ve been there six or seven times over the summer and have become familiar with some of the walks through the wood. Once inside, through the main entrance and past the woman taking the money from the motorists, it is a different world. The trees make the difference. They change the light. Even on the brightest of summer’s days, the green canopy filters the sunlight so that everything melts. What had been vivid walking down the country lane to get there, becomes less so in the wood. The colours change, become muted, as though I have entered into an old leafy cathedral. Outside there was an horizon. Inside there is not. There is no real perspective, just a wall of dark green. A tree a few feet away could have been fifty yards off and one in the distance perhaps only an arms length away. Sudden clearings let the light fall in from the sky, so bright that it makes me blind. I stumble, trip over a tree root that must have become more obvious, more easily seen by those that can.

The temperature drops a degree or two. Defined paths are cut and worn through the trees where the earth is always damp and where the tree roots emerge and twist and wriggle their way breaking cover. They then dive back into the ground again. The roots try to trip up the walkers, but the paths are maintained, so the roots just lie there like petrified snakes. The smell is different too. There is the smell of death. Rotting things in the undergrowth. A dampness and a dry rot smell as well. Burst puffballs, leaf mould and fox pee. I can smell where “Charlie” has been. I remember an old gamekeeper telling me years ago, wrinkling his red-veined nose up as though the devil himself had urinated in that patch of bracken. The stillness in the wood is almost disturbing. The rustle of a grey squirrel and the squabbling of a jay cause alarm, make me jump.

At intervals there are new trees, individual young saplings, ring fenced with old timber and with little inscribed plaques. Each is dedicated to somebody. A name and a date with a few well chosen words. A tree has been planted in commemoration of someone who has died. What a nice idea I think. A permanent memorial to someone loved. I wouldn’t mind that when it comes to my turn.

When I leave the wood after my last visit I stop and ask the woman, the usual one taking the entrance money, how much it costs to plant a tree in memory of someone.

“What dear?” she says.

“Your memorial trees. The ones with the names of people on them. I think it’s such a good idea. How much do you charge for them?”

“Sorry dear,” says the woman. “We don’t have any trees like that in this wood.”