THE SHEPHERD OF THE TREES

It's funny the ideas we humans can get. Have you ever read the Lord of the Rings?

THE SHEPHERD OF THE TREES

It’s funny how a really good book can influence a man’s life. That thought crossed Martin Rogers’ mind when he reached the ending of this little saga, as you will see.

When he was twenty-two Martin celebrated his birthday by opening a book he’d received as a gift from Auntie Hattie who hadn’t known what to buy him for his birthday but thought she ought to give him something. After all, the lad would only be twenty-two this once and the occasion ought to be marked by her.

So Martin opened the book, a great long thing in three volumes about fairy-tale creatures, and got hooked. You may well have guessed that he spent the first few days of his precious twenty-second year ploughing through The lord of the Rings, and it wasn’t until he reached the bit about the Ents that the poison that was his imagination played its most loathsome trick on him. You see, Ents, the book proposed, are the shepherds of the trees, which implied that trees actually need shepherding, which to him gave them a sort of sentience not usually attributed to plant life, not even trees.

In a near-religious conversion he saw trees as man’s equal, but bright and intelligent members of the vegetable world rather than bipedal animals. And after a great deal of thought (brought on by an excess of good beer in fine establishments called pubs) he evolved a sort of religion that made the harming of anything living and wooden a mortal sin.

Which made his new job hard to justify because he’d been to university and qualified as an architect, which meant he had to both use a pencil and, horror of horrors, sharpen it when it required sharpening. And pencils wielded by those who use them to draw a host of lines need sharpening quite often. And when they’re sharpened he was pretty sure he could hear them squeal out in tiny voices about the pain of it all.

Now, I don’t know whether you’ve worked this out yet, but Martin’s twenty second birthday occurred quite a long time ago. The main talking point back then was what the next Beatles song was going to sound like and how dared the girls wear such short frocks and minuscule skirts. It was, in fact, the nineteen sixties, and Martin, after spending an hour or two in tears as a consequence of having just sharpened an HB pencil, went to his local hostelry, ill-named bearing in mind Martin’s mental peculiarity as the Axe and Blade, and met Janice Glory.

Janice was a lovely girl. She would have been considered special had she lived in any age, but it was the sixties, her legs were long, her bosom pronounced yet unfettered by awkward underwear, and her smile radiant.

And for some reason she looked at Martin for a brief moment and fell head over heels in love with him. It was an instant crush much the same way as a blink is a pretty instant eye manoevre. Then he looked at her, feeling the warmth radiating from her eyes as it bathed him with its passionate glow, and thought to himself eh up here youth, this bird is summat special…

You see, he might have been a sophisticated architect, but his vocabulary was council estate pure and simple.

To cut a long story short, she took him home, led him to her fancy middle-class boudoir and undressed in front of him, revealing so much of her flesh that his heart gurgled inside him and his own clothes, mysteriously, fell into a fabric pool on the floor. And from that moment he was smitten in just about every way and mentally likened her to a magnificently feminine oak tree, complete with acorns and oak apples.

His imagination ran riot, but with considerably less effectiveness than his loins did because by next morning he was completely exhausted but she wasn’t, and instead found her love for him diminishing every time he mentioned autumn and falling leaves drifting to the cold Earth before the snows came. And he did that more than once. It was a thing with him, to attribute seasonal qualities to her underwear, which was usually midway between on and off her gorgeous flesh..

So the liaison was short lived. She told him she was looking for a real man and not a shepherd of weeds, and he never saw her again. But that was all right. It was the sixties and love was in the air and he fell in love again the very next week because her name was Laurel and some trees were called that. All would have been well, but when she took him home to her middle-class home he was dismayed when he discovered that the toilet seat in her en-suite was made of a lovely dark wood, and he couldn’t bring himself to sit on it.

“Would it be terrible naughty of me to buy you a plastic seat for your loo?” he asked her just as she was sliding her nightdress (mini, thin and almost non-existent) onto her curvaceous body.

“Never!” she almost exploded, “my uncle Sebastian bought me that lovely wooden as funeral gift when we sent mum to the crematorium when I was thirty two and recovering at home after my own operation!”

She never did explain what the operation had been about and why she was thirty two when he thought her no older than nineteen (he didn’t know it, but he liked his ladies young), and next morning he bade her adieu for the last time. She might have been called Laurel, but she liked sitting on a wooden toilet seat, and that would never do for him.

The seventies came along and he bought a steel propelling pencil that contained not one molecule of timber, but was badly shaken when his boss made him redundant because there was a new kid on the block, the embryonic computer with a screen that showed even the most deliciously fine lines.

So he decided to drown his sorrows, still in the same hostelry, the Axe and Blade, because he was a creature of habit, and he met Ashley, fifty if she was a day, but he didn’t care because there was a fine old English tree in her name, and the obsession generated by reading a fantasy novel almost two decades earlier, was still a dominant part of who he was.

Ashley was a free spirit and accompanied him on long walks into the country and even into a patch of obviously virgin woodland, the air of which, to Martin, was rich with the age of things.

It was then by the edge of a woodland path that he came upon Mr Briggs, a renowned tree surgeon, with his array of surgical tools for dismantling trees, and Martin was horrified. So horrified, in fact, that, when Ahley’s back was turned, he managed to make Mr Briggs cut himself rather badly on his chain saw.

“He’ll bleed to death!” wailed Ashley when she saw how her new boyfriend was trying to help the tree surgeon by deepening his wounds.

“He cuts trees, so I cut him,” Martin told her briefly.

“And to think I wanted to love you!” she wailed.

“You’re too old for me anyway,” replied Martin, cuttingly.

“You mean, you’re too young for me!” she snapped.

He might have told her that time had passed and he was actually not so far behind her, but didn’t.

Mr Briggs died before help could come. His wounds, suitably enlarged by Martin, were a roaring conduit through which most of his blood flowed onto the woodland floor and soaked into the rich loam that lay everywhere.

“To feed the trees,” whispered martin, but to nobody: Ashley had stormed off, not wanting to be associated with a homicidal maniac (her words), and the police came and arrested him.

That night, in a police cell that was anything but sterile and lovely, Martin’s life slipped away courtesy of a rusty razor blade that someone had probably inadvertently concealed in the thin mattress they gave him to sleep on. And as his eyes closed for one last time he found himself thinking how funny it was that he had read one particular book in his early twenties and a dozen times since then just to make sure..

And that would be the end of his story, and bizarre it is too, but for the simple fact that when all the arguments and blame were over his last mortal remains were taken to a cheap undertaker who provided him with a coffin he would have been proud to be associated with.

It was made of plastic and only looked like wood.

Meanwhile, Frodo Baggins found Mount Doom, where he lost a finger for his pains. But that was in the book that had doomed silly dead Martin Rogers. RIP.

© Peter Rogerson 31.03.22

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