THE SYCAMORE TREE

3 August

Been sitting here for over an hour now. Just doing nothing but emptying my mind. Moving so little I might become part of the deck chair. The air is still. Nothing is moving. Can’t see a soul. Not even aware of the pigeons, and the swifts seem to be elsewhere. The only other thing I can see is the ginger tomcat in his usual place perched high up on the gable end of the factory. No idea what goes on in there. The evening is warm, the sky a dark turquoise. I suppose the sunset must be visible at the other side of the building but from my vantage up here on the ledge it is the eastern half of the sky that I can see.

Even the sounds of the city seem more distant. Not one siren, no sounds of children playing in the streets.

Just realised I was wrong about something. It is not just the ginger tom and me. There is a great big huge sycamore tree that stands some 30 yards away from me. It grows in the neighbours’ garden but its intense presence fills almost half the space in front of me. So it’s the tomcat, the tree and me. All three of us motionless, taking in the evening. Man, cat, tree: all three of us masters of all we survey. Or at least for the moment.

I have a complicated relationship with sycamores. If this were an oak or a beech in front of me, I would have nothing but respect for it: oaks for all the obvious reasons, it’s the ultimate male tree, strong and tough and lasts for hundreds of years; beeches because there is nothing like their elegant feminine trunk, the smooth grain of its timber and its sweet green leaves in spring. But sycamores are feral. You can’t trust them. They get everywhere. Always growing where you don’t want them. Make a crack in a pavement and you will have a sycamore seedling coming up through it by next spring. On every rail embankment or bit of wasteland you’ll get sycamore sneaking in with the brambles and nettles like so much unwanted second-rate graffiti. And the timber is no good for anything that I rate. It’s also a Johnny-come-lately. Only been on these islands for the last couple of thousand years and now it’s everywhere. But I can’t deny this particular one is a fine handsome specimen of a tree.

And while I’m thinking all these thoughts and wishing I didn’t anthropomorphise anything and everything so easily, and worrying that people might read a sort of racist subtext to what I’ve just written, something starts to happen. The leaves on the sycamore start to rustle. The rustle starts to grow and grow. But from where I am sitting I have no sense of there being even a gentle breeze. Within 30 seconds the rustle has grown into what can only be described as a roar. But still I am unaware of any wind.

The logic of what is happening is this: where I am sitting is completely sheltered from the wind. Nothing is stirring on the ledge. But the sycamore is completely exposed to this sudden wind. Usually when there is a wind the loudest thing you can hear is the wind rushing past your ears. The sound of that masks – or at least goes some way to deaden – all other sounds. But that is not happening right now. All I can hear is this sycamore roaring at me and the world. And I can’t stop myself from doing the anthropomorphising thing again. The intensity of the effect that the sound the tree is having on my senses is overpowering. It’s as if I’m some Old Testament prophet witnessing the presence of God, right here, right now. I cannot move. I refuse to give whatever this is any symbolic meaning, although I sense there are dozens of symbolic meanings clamouring to get in.

After a minute or so the roar starts to fade and within seconds we are back to the still calm evening of only a couple of minutes earlier. And so far I’ve steadfastly resisted giving shape to any of those clamouring symbolic meanings.

I know I will never hear anything like that again in my life. Well, I may hear it but it will not have the effect on me that it had this evening. Like that spring in 1971 when I can pinpoint a particular moment on the top deck of the 254 bus going into Kettering, looking out at the trees and the hedgerows, as the moment in my life when colour had its most potent effect on my senses, in the past few minutes a sound from the natural world collided with my heightened senses in a way that will never happen again. There may be bird song that affects me, but that triggers a different part of my emotions. This was something else altogether.

Time to climb back through the window and put the kettle on. As I do, I notice the big ginger tom is no longer at his post. The sycamore keeps its counsel.