Page 27 of The Wishing Tree Beside the Shor
‘I remember. And your mother before you. I’ve never forgotten watching her pass the magic on to you as well.’
I bite my lip to stop myself tearing up. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your wife. Ryan told me your story. I think we could use it to save the land.’
I tell him everything I’ve just said to Ry and he thinks about it for so long that I’m almost certain he’s going to say no. He keeps to himself, and although he’s out here, he’s staying away from the board games and “Guess the Gadget” players. ‘I’d like that. I think Henrietta would like that too. Anything we can do to stop this being built on. I blame myself …’
‘Why?’
‘It was mine, wasn’t it? When Henrietta first went downhill, I tried to carry on alone, but every day got harder. She had always been the heart behind our business, and without her …’ He trails off and shakes his head, unable to finish the sentence. ‘She had to move because this is an assisted living facility. The residents here have nothing more serious than regular pensioner niggles, but none of them require round-the-clock care. At first I’d vowed to keep the strawberry patch going in her honour, but my broken heart was no longer in it. The weeds crept in and my back gave out. The chap who owned Seaview Heights before Steffan was a good sort. He could see I was struggling and he offered to buy it as a garden area for the residents. A good price that allowed me to pay for Henrietta’s long-term care. It was good, in a way. Saying goodbye to the past to pay for the future she needed.’
I’m captivated as he talks. ‘Maybe everything happens for a reason …’
‘You’re just like Ryan.’ He pats my hand. ‘Always looking on the bright side and saying things like that.’
Why does that make me smile so much?
‘You two young folks just let me know what you need me to do.’
‘We need to get this online. We need to get people talking about it. A petition is one thing, but petitions are outdated now. We need a social media campaign – people from all around the world seeing our sycamore tree and sharing it and caring about it.’
We sit there in silence for a moment as he thinks about it. I’ve not seen anyone else sit by him, and I’m not sure if he’s glad of the company or surprised by my intrusion.
‘It was always flyers when we were running the strawberry patch … Every summer in the weeks before we opened, we’d get thousands printed out and pop one through every letterbox in Lemmon Cove and the surrounding areas. And the local shops all displayed them in their windows. Kids used to take a handful with a punnet of strawberries and distribute them.’
I go to tell him flyers are a bit outdated now, but I think about it for a moment. Flyers could be a good idea. Everything in this tiny village is outdated, and to find people connected to the tree, it’s the locals we need to target.
I thank him as I get up and walk back down to the group. ‘Godfrey’s suggested flyers, and I think that’s a brilliant idea. Sending something out into the community. Something tangible. No one carves trees anymore because we know it can introduce pathogens and kill them, so I’m guessing the people we need to target will be closer to your generation than ours.’ I gesture between the residents and me and Ryan. ‘They might not be up on technology and social media, so flyers might be a good way to go. Through every door around the area. If nothing else, it will let people know what’s going on. And we need to create social media accounts for the tree with a memorable username and a profile photo.’
‘Gno—’ Mr Barley starts to say.
‘No depraved gnomes,’ I add quickly.
I glance at the one he’s painting … Who knew gnomes could dothatwith a seed dibber? And who knew Boris Johnson could bend like that?
‘Just a nice photo of the tree, maybe with you lot standing underneath it. The tree can tweet about each carving and cross-post to its other accounts on Facebook and Instagram and wherever else young people are posting these days.’
‘Myspace!’ Mr Barley shouts. ‘Tinder!’
Tonya, clearly the only one of the group who knows what Tinder is, tries to muffle her giggles.
‘Er, Fee …’ Ryan says. ‘It might be alive, but I don’t think the tree isquitesentient enough to run its own social media accounts.’
I roll my eyes at him but I can’t help laughing. ‘We tweet on its behalf, obviously. One carving a day. We could take pictures and ask people to make up the stories behind them. Don’t you ever find messages written inside second-hand books and think about who wrote them and who they were intended for? I used to love coming here and imagining who all these people were and what the carvings meant. This is the sort of thing people would love if we shared it. Actually, imagination might be an even more important part. Something as big and old as this has had an unfathomable life. It’s living history. It bears traces of lives gone by. Tattoos of the thousands of moments it’s witnessed.’
‘This place was a hotbed for smugglers back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some of those marks could’ve been carved by pirates or bandits amidst all sorts of maritime mayhem. I remember learning about that in school and coming here on the way home and imagining all the people over the years who could’ve left a mark. Tweeting about stuff like this could get kids’ imaginations running wild.’ Ryan always had a way of making my ideas seem better than they are, and I’m grinning at him and he’s grinning back at me, and no one’s said anything for a good few minutes.
‘You’ve already got the right idea.’ I tear my eyes away from Ryan and turn back to the residents. ‘You’re sharing daily photos and trying to entertain people and get people interacting on your Facebook page, but we need to shift the focus to the tree and away from handmade gnomes doing surprisingly supple and mildly concerning acts of nature.’
They all look forlorn, so I quickly add, ‘You can keep the gnomes as well, but maybe you could take photographs of them beside the tree to keep that at the forefront and not just showcase Mr Barley’s impressive talent with a paintbrush and the Kama Sutra of garden ornaments.’
‘Ooh, maybe I can expand my horizons into other garden decorations. We’ve got some concrete snails somewhere that would make excellent—’
‘Let’s turn this into capturing the imagination of local children and move away from where Mr Barley wants to put his snails,’ Ryan says.
The idea of children’s imagination sets me off thinking again. ‘Hey, you can draw.’
‘I haven’t for a long while.’
I cock my head to the side. Ryan was always creative and artistic. He loved working the soil of Sullivan’s Seeds, digging and growing and experimenting with new and unusual plants, and hated the bookkeeping and financial side of the job. ‘You could draw a sycamore leaf and we could print loads out …’
