The Forbidden Tree by Riki Erihi It was the biggest fruit tree in the whole district, the largest we children had ever seen. Boy, you should have seen the peaches from it. Yet to one and all, this richly desirable tree with its sweet, firm, succulent flesh was beyond reach; forbidden. Every year we would watch the peach tree as it blossomed into a floral pink umbrella Overnight it would burst forth, its hundreds of fragile flowers heralding the spring. Later we would gasp in wonderment as the tiny green bundles of bitterness turned to mouth-watering maturity. We youngsters would stare at it longingly, straining hard against the fence with bulging eyes and hands that were kept from temptation only by the unseen frightening fear of the tapu. Yes there it stood, like the tree of forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Many were the stories that told how it came to be where it was. Some even said that when the clothes of one of my cousins were returned from France after he had been killed in the First War, a peach-stone had been found in a pocket. As was the custom, these articles were buried in the family plot, and from the stone there sprang this unknown variety of peach. Anyway, nature had reared this solitary specimen in the midst of an old private family