One Point Four Tonnes

The chipper went up the marsh track at four minutes past seven and it did not come down again until twenty to three, because between eight and ten past two that track was under a foot and a half of water, and a chipper is twelve hundred kilos of machinery with an air filter.

“That’s the whole day decided,” Elias said, at ten past seven, chocking the trailer on the flat bit by the churchyard wall. “Everything we’re taking off that tree today gets chipped today. Nothing goes down the hill till the water’s off.”

“And if we’re not finished?”

“Then it sits on the grass and Jean Pettifer has a stroke.” He looked up into the crown. “We’ll be finished.”

We were finished at four minutes past three, and it was the best working day I have had in a decade, and I am aware of how that sounds.

Here is what taking a third off a fourteen-metre limb actually involves, because people think it involves a chainsaw and it mostly involves rope.

You cannot cut a piece off a tree over a churchyard and let it fall. Everything comes off on a line. So the first two hours are entirely preparation: I went up and put a rigging point in the main stem above the fork — a sling and a block, the block being a lump of aluminium the size of a grapefruit that costs more than my first car — and Elias set the lowering device at the base, which is a bollard with a rope wrapped round it enough times that a man can hold four hundred kilos with one hand and let it down at walking pace.

Then you work backwards from the end of the limb. Tip first. Small bits.

Piece one came off at ten past nine, about eighty kilos of it, and swung out and down in a long slow arc with Elias letting the tail out and stopping it three feet above the wall, and Tomasz took it off the hook and fed it into the chipper, and the chipper made the noise chippers make, which is the noise of a large animal being pleased.

Nine pieces. Nine.

“Ready.”

“Ready.”

“Rope’s tight?”

“Rope’s tight.”

“Cutting.”

That is nearly all we said for six hours, and it was completely enough. He could not see my hands for most of it, and I could not see his face, and the entire conversation happened through about nineteen metres of hollow-braid polyester: the small firm pull he gives when he has taken the weight, the two quick tugs that mean hold, the slack I feel come into the line at exactly the right moment because he has read a cut he cannot see.

At about eleven o’clock I stopped, thirteen metres up, sitting back in the harness with the saw hanging off my hip, and looked at the whole thing — the marsh gone silver and full, Scolt a long grey line beyond it, the water coming up the track below us at walking pace, Tomasz in ear defenders arguing with a machine, Dev in a borrowed hard hat and a jumper with a reindeer on it dragging brash with enormous seriousness — and thought, clearly and without any hedging at all: I would like more days like this. I would like a great many more days like this.

I did not follow the thought anywhere. I went back to work. But I had had it, and ten minutes later I noticed I had had it, and by lunch it had put roots down.

Dev, at half eleven, with a bramble in his sleeve: “Can I ask a question that will annoy you?”

“Go on.”

“Why is it easier to lower a heavy thing than a light thing?”

“It isn’t.”

“It looks easier. That eighty-kilo one went down like a lift. The little one at ten o’clock nearly took Tomasz’s head off.”

“Because the little one had leaves on it and no mass,” I said, “so it sails. It’s all drag and no inertia. The heavy one goes where the rope says. The light one goes where the wind says.”

Dev thought about this for the rest of the morning and said, at lunch, “That’s marriage,” and Cleo, who had arrived, threw a roll at him.

Cleo had come up at twelve with a car boot full of jam jars and no intention of going anywhere. She sat on the churchyard wall for four hours in a coat, doing nothing whatsoever.

“I’ve got a florist at two.”

“Then go and see your florist.”

“I’m watching my tree get sorted out by my mate,” said Cleo, “and my florist can wait on a wall the same as I can.” She tipped her head back. “How high up is she?”

“Thirteen metres.”

“Is that high?”

“It’s a four-storey building.”

“Right,” said Cleo, and did not look away for another twenty minutes.

Three things I did on Thursday that I am not going to leave out.

At twenty past eight I said: “Elias, can you come up and look at this with me? I can’t see the back of the union from here and I don’t want to guess.”

At half twelve I said: “Can you take the tip cuts? My right arm’s finished and I’d rather say so than drop something.”

And at ten past two I said: “Will you stay on for the brace? It’ll take us to four and I know you’ve got the Deepdale gauges to do.”

Three times. Three sentences with can you and will you in them, out loud, to a man who could have said no.

He said yes, yes, and “Course,” and I climbed back into the tree the third time with my ears hot, and I thought: thirty-two years old, and that was hard.

I have thought since about how small those three sentences were. Nobody in that field noticed one of them. Tomasz was in ear defenders, Cleo was on a wall, Dev was in a hedge. There is no version of Thursday in which anything visible happened at twenty past eight, half twelve or ten past two.

The brace went in between four and ten to five, and it is the part of the job I love most, and nobody ever wants to watch it.

It is two slings and a rope. That’s it. You take a length of hollow-braid polyester with an energy-absorbing section in it, and you put a big loose sling round each stem above the fork — loose, so the tree can go on thickening under it — and you join them, and you set it at a length that does nothing at all in ordinary weather.

That is the design. Ninety-nine days in a hundred, that rope hangs slack and does no work whatsoever. The tree is holding itself. Then, one night in February, a gust gets under the crown and the fork tries to open, and about two hundred millimetres of movement happens, and the brace comes tight and takes the last of it, and lets it back down.

“So it’s a seatbelt,” said Dev.

“It’s a seatbelt.”

“Does it fix it?”

“No.” I was tying off the tail. “Nothing fixes it. That crack is two hundred years old and it will be there on the day the tree comes down, whenever that is. This doesn’t heal anything. It holds. It takes the worst of it so that the rest of it can carry on.”

I came down at five past five and Cleo was sitting on the churchyard wall with a flask and a cardboard box with eighty-four orders of service in it, looking up.

I saw her face before she knew I was looking.

She had got up onto the wall to see it properly from the seaward side, where you get the whole tree against the water. And with a third of the south-west limb gone, the crown is — I will be honest — lopsided, and will be for about six years until it balances itself. It is not prettier. It is a two-hundred-year-old tree with a big new wound on one side, three hundred and ninety millimetres across, weeping slightly, and a rope in the top of it.

“Oh, look at her,” said Cleo.

“She’s a bit uneven.”

“She’s stood up straighter.” Cleo wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, twice, briskly, the way she does everything. “No, she has. Look at her. Look at the top. She’s stood up.”

And she had. That is the thing nobody believes until they see it: take a tonne and a half off one side of a tree that has been leaning into it for forty years, and it comes back. Not all the way. Enough to see.

“Do you want the honest version or the nice version?” I said.

“Honest.”

“She’ll drop that big scaffold branch on the north side within ten years, the wound I’ve made today will take fifteen years to close and might not, and if it’s a wet autumn the fungus will fruit again in November and you’ll all panic and ring me.”

“And?”

“And on Saturday, at half past three, eighty-four people can stand on that rise and look at this tree, and I will stand there with them, and I’ve signed it.”

Cleo put her forehead on my shoulder.

“You’re my favourite,” she said. “Don’t tell Dev.”

“Dev has a reindeer on.”

“Dev has a reindeer on,” she agreed, “and he has been dragging sticks for nine hours for a tree he has met twice, and I’m going to marry him in forty-two hours and I can’t feel my face.”

My mother arrived at twenty-five to six in a Yaris.

She got out, looked at the tree for about four seconds, said, “That’s better,” to nobody, and then hugged me for a long time in a field in front of five people, which she does not do, and which meant she had thought about it in the car.

“You’ve got resin in your hair,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Hello, Elias.”

“Hello, Susannah.”

“You look tired.”

“I am tired.”

“Good,” said my mother, and went to find Bea Nudd, because she had brought three jars of chutney and was not leaving until somebody had taken them off her.

We ate on the tailgate of the truck at six o’clock. Bea had sent up a foil tray of something and a bag of rolls. Tomasz had a Thermos of coffee he would not share on principle. Dev found four chips in his hood. The light went long and orange the way it does here in the last week of September, and came in low under the crown, and the chip pile steamed, and a barn owl came up the dyke and went along the marsh edge quartering, and nobody said anything about it for about ninety seconds, which is the correct response to a barn owl.

I had a mug of tea. I drank it down to about an inch and set it on the tailgate.

And then, without looking at him, because I could not have done it looking at him, I pushed it four inches along the metal towards Elias.

He looked at it.

He did not say anything. There is no version of this where either of us said anything, because Tomasz was there and my mother was thirty feet away and Cleo had eyes.

He picked it up and drank it and put it down.

That was it. That was the whole event.

I sat on the tailgate of a truck on a hill in Norfolk with my forearms shaking and my boots full of woodchip, and below us the water went out of the creek and left the mud shining, and the owl went up the dyke and came back down it, and Dev asked Tomasz a question about the chipper, and Tomasz answered it at length and with feeling, and my mother laughed at something Bea said two hundred feet away, and the tree stood there behind us with a rope in the top of it, holding on to itself, lopsided, and considerably more upright than it had been that morning.

Nobody said one single important thing.

It was, I think, the happiest hour of the last five years of my life.