Sylvia's Tree

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22121, 17 June 1937, Page 8 (Supplement)

Sylvia's Tree

They were going to cut down Sylvia's tree. Sylvia was a little girl who lived with her granny in a cottage on the back shoulder of Stebbing Hill just where the road almost looks over the top at the sea, and then decides to turn inland • after all, and go down to the village of Long Stebbing instead. Sylvia's tree was not in her granny's garden, but in Farmer /(Wallace's spinney just over .the ilahe behind their cottage. It was ,i, f%, gnarled and twisted old willow •(iwith ever so many branches all in exactly the right places for climbtang. Sylvia had climbed it as long ■as she could remember. She had *»iavourite places in it of her own. -,1fl0n« she called Admiral's Lookout; l -* was a fork high up where she 'could sit and look right over the **ottage and over the hill, and see ,the silver line of the sea in the dis- ,; ttance. Then when the wind gently her she could imagine she "fwas an admiral in his ship sitting .iLpnu the. -cross-trees or wherever it "mas admirals sat, and looking out 4lo» the enemy. '( 'Then there was a long sloping .ibranch lower down, as thick as the trunk of a small tree itself, and ' along this she could walk without 'holding on till it came to the wall xit her granny's garden." This was per favourite way into the tree, and T»he railed it the gangway, i Then there was a comfortable {place like an armchair high enough ■tor the wind to rock her, but withlout much view of anything except {the branches and leaves of the old tree all round her, and here in the Jtrunk was a convenient hollow. Sylvia called this place the cuddy, <yWhich is a nice comfortable-sound-ing word. Sylvia had known the Jfree so long and spent so many >,',ltOurs in it, reading or climbing / ->Wbout or playing at admirals, that ..'. the old willow was like a living £erson to her. It was what, after er granny, she loved best in «the - .World. ,'-' And now they were going to cut ' lit down. It all started, Sylvia said, through i old farmer Wallace being ill., Farmer Wallace was her particular friend. When Sylvia was not in, her tree she was sure to Toe over at the farm. She would be feeding ihe chickens with Molly, who was • Mr Wallace's daughter; or watchteg Mr Penny feed the pigs. Mr Penny worked for Mr Wallace, and had been at the farm as long as she could remember. Now his ' hair and his beard were 1 «Uite white. His beard went Sound underneath his chin in a tunny way, and his upper lip and the front part of his chin were <lean shaven. Only his eyebrows had any colour left in them, and' they were quite surprisingly red tod very bristly. His eyes were <uke round brown nuts and his face crinkled everywhere. Mr Penny wed, to let Sylvia do anything she Mked on the farm, and had only once been angry with her. and that Was When his hat blew off into the stall where old Hercules, the big Hereford bull, was kept. Sylvia, Who was perched on top of one of pie stout end timbers of the stall, pad slipped off in a second, dropped . lightly on to the straw under Her- . \ cules's nose, and picked up Mr , Penny's hat. ,« Hercules had not minded. He had • fflust breathed rather hard on to tgje back of Sylvia's neck in an astonished way. She had even ■etched his old forehead for him •Tore Mr Penny arrived puffing J

(By R. C. E. Harding)

! and scolding to yank her out without ceremony. Mr Wallace had been angry, too but not very, for he had laughed afterwards and called her a "trimmer," whatever that was. Mr Wallace used to take her haymaking and let tier ride the big shire horses or sit high up in the load of hay with Jem, the stable boy, when they brought the waggons back to the stackyard. But now Mr Wallace was ill and had been away for ever so long, things were not the same over at the farm; for instead of Farmer Wallace there was Mr "Clever." It was Sylvia who called him that, but his real name was Dobson Henry Hale, and he was Mr Wallace's nephew. Sylvia could remember him quite well when he was only a large schoolboy, and everyone called him Dobbie. Then he had left school and gone away, and finally came back grown up and altered, and full of new ideas to take charge of the farm. , High-falutin' Mr Penny called him. Everything that for years and years had been done in a certain way now had to be done in a dif-

High-falutin', Mr Penny called it ferent way to suit Mr Clever. Sylvia was no longer allowed to see the baby pigs for fear of upsetting his prize sows. "Why, they know me as well as they know Mr Penny," she protested, indignantly. "Which," said the latter, "is as well as they know one o' their own litter." Mr Clever's next crime was to have Harkaway shot. Harkaway was an old hunter of Mr Wallace's who had been pensioned off for years in the paddock next the apple orchard. Sylvia used to ride him very slowly round the paddock, and give him lumps of sugar. But he had very nearly died from a bee sting the autumn before, and he was going blind. So Mr Clever said he must be shot, and shot he was, though Sylvia fled to her tree and cried for half the day. And then he had started felling timber all over th™ farm. It seemed that in Australia or wherever it was Mr Clever had been while he was away, they rather fancied themselves with an axe. Anyhow, Mr Clever had taken his' over his shoulder and gone round marking a tree here and a tree there, until from Admiral's Lookout Sylvia could see many a gap in hedgerow and copse where old favourites had once stood,'

All the same it was rather thrilling to see them felled, and she had to admit that Mr Clever knew how to set about it. And it was exciting to watch the horse teams being hitched on to the great stripped trunk to haul it out of the dirt and mess of branches to where the timber tug could be manoeuvred 4nto position to pick it up. Sylvia remembered with a sense of guilt that she had often ridden the great logs down the hill to the new sawmill at Long Stebbing, in which, it was said, Mr Wallace's nephew had an interest. For now it was her tree, her willow tree, i that would be cut down and stripped of its branches and hauled away to be cut ignominiously into firewood. And it was Mr Clever's doing. She hated him. She was sure he meant to spite her. He was always stopping her from doing the things she liked: talking to bab*y pigs or sitting on the edge of Hercules' stall or riding the timber tug. And now it was climbing her tree. He had tried to stop her doing that. She had been sitting in the tree one morning early when along came Mr Clever by the lane beneath, and, naturally, she had to drop twigs on his head. When he saw who it was he had been really quite unnecessarily furious about it, Sylvia said. "Sylvia, come down at once. That tree is not safe. I won't have you climbing that tree." Everyone else at the farm called her "Miss Sylvia," even though she was only 10 last birthday, so she said very composedly, "Certainly, Mr Hale, but I have your uncle's permission to climb this tree, and he never stops me." Of course she did not mean to obey him and the moment he was out of sight she was back again, and there had he caught her, as meanly as possible, by sneaking quietly round the back of the Spinney. "I thought so," he cried. "Now, understand me; that tree is unsafe, it's rotten to the core, and you are on no account to climb it again." "Very well, then," he went on when he saw that Sylvia was going to defy him, safe in the ancient rights granted her by Farmer Wallace. "Out it will come. In any case I cannot risk willow disease in my new plantation," and with this dark threat he had gone. Sylvia appealed to ■Mr Penny. "Yes, Miss Sylvia, 'e be goan to cut 'un down, long o' her being sick o' disease, and 'im a'feard for them saplings.'' "Him and his old cricket bats!" cried Sylvia, wrathfully. Mr Clever had planted all the low levels down by the river with cricket bat willows. It had to be admitted that, for every tree he cut out he planted many more. The bare slopes of Top Stebbing, and High Halter, the hill against whose lower slope nestled the cottage where Sylvia and her granny lived, were already showing a flush of green where rows of birch and darker rows of pine had been planted the year before. When she knew the worst! Sylvia hung round the woodpile until Mr Penny was busy elsewhere, then she seized the ancient axe used for splitting firewood, and hurried to the well. She glanced hastily round, and then hung for a moment over the coping. Far below the smooth, dark mirror broke into fragments and these echoed back a hollow splash. "That's one," said Sylvia, who didn't believe in half measures, and she retired defiantly to the "cuddy" to plan her campaign. It was a week before the next move came, and for Sylvia it was a week of ceaseless watching from her tree. She could see the farm ayite easily and when at last one morning early, she saw her enemy .

coming out of the yard and turn in her direction she only needed the flash of sun on the axe blade on his shoulder to tell her that her time for action had come. do be continued)