My father wore his depression like a grey cloak. I don’t know if the purpose of the cloak was to hide him from the world or to hide the world from him. In my mind it is a grey swirling cloak, like a magician’s. Then again, it could have been a long soldier’s great coat, like the Russian uniform. Whatever kind it was, it made the distance between me and him seem enormous and impassable, was like a grey, suffocating fog that I was afraid of. He used to wear a lumberjack’s padded jacket, made of wool, with a shaggy sheepskin type collar. When I was a teenager, I appropriated it and wore it on family walks. It smelt of earth and stale sweat and creosote and was too big for me. He used to get annoyed at seeing me wearing men’s clothing, so I wore it all the more.
The oldest pear tree in our garden is taller than the house and its bark is silver-grey with time and the pale lichen that encrusts it. There are large cracks between squares of bark and ants have made their home below it and scurry up and down the tracks between the bark squares all summer.
The pear stands proud; I am in my thirties now and it was there, tall as ever, when my parents moved in 1974, with me as a baby. There is a view of it from my old bedroom window. In fact, the window frames a view of the pear tree, which stands on a small hillock, to the left of the goose house (no geese have lived there for well over twenty years), in front of a large mature bed of shrubs. Beyond are tree tops and in the winter, between the trees, lies a view of fields. In summer it is all the greens of foliage and the Mendip hills far beyond. In winter the hills glow silvery, with a light covering of frost or snow. At least, in my mind, there is clear light and snow.
Pear trees are more elegant than apple trees. The leaf is more delicate, glossy silver-green. The form is umbral, the pears themselves, tear shaped – not at all like the robust apple with its buxom pink blossoms, endless leaf, heavy fruit. The old pear in our garden is a tree in a medieval fresco – each branch defined and curved, each leaf lovingly drawn. When it fruits, the pears are large, somewhat misshapen and often blighted with dark spots. They fall onto the grass below and give the wasps one of their last drunken feasts of the year. When I was young my mother would collect up the best of the windfalls and make pears in ginger – the pale green pears, peeled and cooked would magically turn to a tender pink blush, and the syrup so sweet yet spicy would catch the back of my throat, then warm my belly.
We have many other trees in our garden. My father was a great planter of trees. I assumed at the time that all fathers spent their entire weekend hunched in the garden, sweating and covered in sticky burrs, planting trees and mowing the lawn. He would come in to eat – those terrible, oppressive, irritable meal-times – after my mother had rung a bell to let him hear that food was served. She got sick of yelling. When we had friends over they used to want to ring the brass bell. They always laughed.
Now there is no bell. The pear tree is tended by a gardener who prunes it far better than my father ever did, if indeed, he did ever prune it. As a gardener, he planted, but his tending was erratic. Sometimes he left the ties on the trees for years and then they cut deep into the growing trunk. To prune was to lop off a limb and leave the plant lopsided – too much, too late. Lucky for him nature is a good doctor.
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