When Alan used to get home from the woodyard, his wife, who passed away six years ago, was able to take one sniff of him and detect exactly which kinds of trees he’d been working with. ‘Douglas fir was always a dead giveaway,’ he said. When she worked in the office, she’d chuckle to herself watching Alan on the security camera as he wandered out into the woodyard and walked in circles, trying to recall what precisely he’d gone out there to do. His stocky smiliness and combination of being dozy yet very good with tools reminded me of my late wood-loving granddad Ted. Alan’s first tree jobs had been straight after school, when he worked for what he called ‘a hard, deaf bugger’. In those days there were no Kevlar-stuffed chainsaw trousers or gloves, and when the first helmets came into use in the trade his boss would call anyone he saw wearing one a ‘puff’. Despite his absent-mindedness, safety-scorning guru and lack of protective clothing, Alan, like Dave, has never been seriously injured, although his son suffered multiple fractures of the pelvis and a collapsed lung when working on a beech at Totnes Showground. Alan’s most dramatic tree experience was the time the branch of a fallen elm that had been wedged up against a concrete kerb twanged him dozens of feet through the air. ‘They told me that when I landed, my feet and nose were half-buried in the ground, but I can’t remember any of it,’ he said. He offered me a cup of tea. ‘I’ve saved you the clean mug,’ he said. ‘You don’t want this one,’ he added, showing me another mug, white but stained totally black inside with the remnants of a thousand dark drinks. ‘That’s what my boys drink out of. Never wash it. They don’t care.’
Alan told me I had to keep an eye on the time for him as he was scheduled to go what he called ‘rock ’n’ rolling’ that night in Newton Abbot. He said he was not good with time, did not let the concept of it trouble him much, an attitude which had historically made him a deficient capitalist but been beneficial to his stress levels. As he showed me around the yard he looked a little wobbly around the shoulders, but I sensed that if you ran at him from a great distance, he’d stay vertical on impact: solid, immovable. All these qualities, I thought, were very treelike. ‘You’re a tree,’ I told Alan. ‘I’m a tree,’ he confirmed. I’d witnessed a few of the modern biodynamic hippy farmers in the area chuckling in the village pub about Alan’s no-nonsense approach to felling, but he clearly cared deeply about his leafy patients. A few years ago a bloke from Torquay had asked him to come over and remove a walnut tree from his garden. Alan examined the walnut, which he found to be in rude health, and asked why the bloke wanted it removed. ‘It’s casting a shadow over my barbecue,’ he replied. Alan told him there was nothing wrong with the tree and refused to take it out. ‘A few months later I drove past the house and saw it was gone,’ said Alan. ‘Broke my heart, that did.’
The woodyard sits in a cool dell, and Alan loves the wildlife there, which proliferates but quietens down after heavy rainfall, when water gushes down the beacon and the area floods. ‘Lots of badgers and deer and rabbits and squirrels here,’ he said. He shook his head with a woodsman’s ruefulness. ‘Bloody squirrels. Tree’s worst enemies.’ We walked to the gate, and I admired a 1950s Airstream van with a few vital components missing from it. ‘That project’s been on hold for a while,’ said Alan. ‘Before my wife died I’d been meaning to sort it out, take it down to Portugal, see the proper old country there. Maybe I still will.’ I asked him what it was about that area that appealed to him.
‘The sawmills, I suppose,’ he said.
On the way back from Alan’s I passed the remains of the holm oak that had come down on my phone line. It had been so vast that although a fair portion of its stump still stood, its demise had changed the shape and angles of everything: the surrounding, smaller trees, the tall hills in the background, a formerly reticent allotment wall, now bolshie. Dave had told me that when a big tree like this comes down in a storm, it’s often not just the work of the wind. In this case there had been several other factors: the build-up of catkins at the top of the tree, several days of heavy rainfall leading to accumulated moisture and heaviness in the catkins. An hour or so after the holm oak fell, just as I was becoming cognizant of the fact that it had taken out all the modern forms of communication available to me, a policeman knocked on my front door to say a 999 call from my property had been recorded. I said that was impossible, as I had no working phone, but he asked to come in anyway, presumably just to check I didn’t have anyone tied up at gunpoint in my cellar. He seemed satisfied, especially after realising I don’t have a cellar. When he left, I walked to my garden gate, passing the spot on the concrete path where, earlier that morning, my cat Ralph had deposited some vomit which had since been eaten by a gull. I opened the gate and walked to the top of the hill past the tree and called BT from my mobile. What ensued was the following conversation.
ME:A tree’s come down on my phone line.
BT:OK. First we have to check if there’s a fault on the line.
ME:There is. It has a huge tree on it.
As can so often happen when you’re dealing with telephone
