at least, probably more. But I suppose… some of the family could have remembered… as I just have.’
Yale, who had followed me to listen, said, ‘Remember what?’
‘There used to be four or five great old willow trees down by the stream, across the field.’ I pointed. ‘Those you can see now are only twenty years old or so. They grow very fast… they were planted after they took the old trees down. They were splendid old trees, huge, magnificent.’
Yale made hurrying-up motions with his hands, as if to say the state of long-gone willows, however patrician, was immaterial.
‘They were at the end of their lives,’ I said. ‘If there was a gale, huge branches would crack off. Old Fred, who was the gardener for years here before Arthur, told my father they weren’t safe and they’d have to come down, so he got some foresters to come and fell them. It was dreadful seeing them come down …’ I didn’t think I’d tell Yale that half the family had been in tears. The trees had been friends, playground, climbing frames, deepest purple imaginary rain forests: and, afterwards, there was too much daylight and the dead bodies being sawn up for firewood and burned on bonfires. The stream hadn’t looked the same when open to bright sunshine; rather ordinary, not running through dappled mysterious shade.
‘Go on,’ Yale said with half-stifled impatience. ‘What’s all this about trees?’
‘The stumps,’ I said. ‘The tree men sawed the trees off close to the ground but left the stumps, and no one could get them out. A tractor came from a nearby farm and tried …’ We’d had a great time then, having rides all day. ‘Anyway, it failed. Nothing else would move the stumps, and Fred didn’t want to leave them there to rot, so he decided to blow them up… with black powder.’
‘Ah,’ Yale said.
Black powder had sounded, somehow, as if it ought to belong to pirates. We’d been most impressed. Fred had got his powder and he’d dug a hole down below the stubborn roots of the first stump, and filled it and set off one enormous explosion. It was just as well he’d cleared us out of the field first because the blast had knocked Fred himself flat although he’d been about a hundred feet away. The first tree stump had come popping out of the ground looking like a cross between an elephant and an octopus, but Malcolm, who came running in great alarm to see what had happened, forbade Fred to blow up the others. As I told the gist of this to Yale and Smith, the second reel of the film was already unrolling in my mind, and I stopped fairly abruptly when I realised what I was remembering.
‘Fred,’ I said, ‘carried the box of black powder back to the tool shed and told us never to touch it. We were pretty foolish but not that crazy. We left it strictly alone. And there the box stayed until it got covered over with other junk and we didn’t notice it or think of it any more …’ I paused, then said, ‘Wouldn’t any explosive be useless after all this time?’
‘Dynamite wouldn’t last much more than a year in a tool shed,’ Smith said. ‘One hot summer would ruin it. But black powder -cordite - is very stable, and twenty years is immaterial.’
‘What are we waiting for?’ Yale said, and walked towards the tool shed which lay behind the garage on the near side of the kitchen garden.
The tool shed was a place I hadn’t thought of looking into the day before: but even if 1 had, I doubted if I would have remembered the black powder. Its memory had been too deep.
‘Where is this box?’ Yale asked.
I looked at the contents of the tool shed in perplexity. 1 hadn’t been in there for years, and in that time it had passed from Fred to Arthur. Fred had had an upturned orange box to sit on while he waited through heavy showers: Arthur had an old fireside chair. Fred had had a tray with a cracked mug and a box of sugar cubes and had come indoors to fetch his tea: Arthur had an electric kettle. Fred had tended old tools lovingly: Arthur had shiny new ones with paint still on the handles.
Beyond the tools and the chair, in the centre section of the spacious shed, were things like mowers, chainsaws and hedgeciippers and, at the furthest shadowy end, the