The Day Gone By Read Online Free PDF Page A

– so you could climb to the top and then sit on a kind of flat throne, surrounded by upward-slanting boughs - a bower, in fact. I loved the smell of the Spanish chestnut and delighted in its lanceolate, alternate leaves with their saw-edged ‘teeth’. The round, green, softly-prickly husks of the fruit were pleasant to handle, too: but you couldn’t eat the nuts, whatever people said. They never really filled out and ripened. They don’t, much, in England.
    What a child wants in a tree is breadth; and pliant boughs near the ground, so that he can readily get up into it. There was one tree – a blossoming tree on the western edge of the Wild Wood – which I now know to have been an amelanchier (probably
lamarckii,
for it was a fair size – not by any means a shrub). The modest spring blossom was near-white and the foliage tinged with red. It had horizontal boughs, springy but entirely reliable. I could be down that tree in seconds, hang-and-drop, hang-and-drop and onto the ground. I used to sit up in it and watch my elders playing tennis, for it almost overhung one end of the court. One summer, using dust-sheets, I made a tree-house in the topmost boughs; but soon dismantled it. It was frowsty: the dust-sheets grew damp and smelly, while on the one hand you couldn’t look out properly and on the other, everyone could see it and know you were there. I called this tree The Thinking Tree. You could sit up there, rocking gently on a pliant branch, and think out your problems – such as they ever were.
    Ah, but the oaks! For the child tree-climber the oak is the acme, the
ne plus ultra.
The real problem is to get up into it, for a decent oak has a round, branchless trunk going up eight or ten feet. I had to grow older before I could tackle the great oaks along the paddock-hedges. To start with, I had to be big enough to be able to carry a step-ladder down there. (I couldn’t ask someone else to do that.) The only alternative was to try a flying leap at the far end of a lateral branch, but they weren’t low enough for a small child.
    Once up into the fork, what a prospect opened! The tree appeared vast, a world in itself. You could not only climb to the top; you could explore out along each of about five great, lateral branches, as far as they would bear you. That took a whole afternoon. One tree overhung the lane, and you could pelt passers-by with acorns. They took it good-humouredly enough. ‘’Ullo, young doctor; still up to tricks, then?’ ‘You wants come down out o’ that; I’ll give you what-for.’
    If I were put up into any common tree today, blindfold, I think I could identify it by touch and smell.
    My greatest friend at this time was the little girl across the road, Jean Leggatt, whose father was also a doctor. Jean was just two months younger than I, and as babies we had been pushed out in our prams together; she by her dear nursemaid Minnie, and I by my no less dear nursemaid Constance. Constance was a Cripps. Like the Starkadders at Cold Comfort, there have always been Crippses at Wash Common. There were probably some on the touchline at the first battle of Newbury in 1643, and there are some now. I loved Constance dearly, even though she did address me as ‘Baby’: I knew it was from affection. (It certainly wasn’t American: this was before the days of talking pictures.) I loved Jean dearly, too, and had vague ideas that one day I would marry her. We have remained friends all our lives and she lives not far away now.
    One June afternoon Jean and I were playing in the paddock, when she suggested that we should strip buttercup petals and the little red flowers of the sorrel, and mix them together. It became clear that Jean had done this before: she was purposeful; we soon had quite a nice little heap, which she regarded with satisfaction.
    â€˜What do you do with it?’ I asked.
    â€˜You throw it at people,’ answered