In stillness and storm

 A childhood running barefoot through fields and climbing trees meant that my elderly neighbours had a respect for the natural world, rather than seeing it as something to be stripped bare for money, or as the Edenic exhibit of so many environmentalists. “Growing up surrounded by trees coloured our lives,” she said. “My father was a planter of trees and gave nature free rein ... [he] instilled a deep respect for trees in us, telling us that it takes a tree many, many years to grow, but a fool can cut it down in five minutes. He also believed that a person who planted a tree was far less likely to chop one down.”

When a tree needed to be cut, Marrie Walsh remembered, “we would tell the tree the reason for cutting it down. Then we would run around to the other trees and tell them not to cry. My father and brothers would
mark the first cut with the hatchet, then rub soap on the cross-cut blade and start sawing. We would watch from a distance to see which way the tree would fall.” When her father  fastened the horse to the tree and set off dragging it home for wood, she said, “some of us perched in the branches, swaying hither and thither as we tried to balance ... by this time we would have collected several children from houses along the way, all wanting a ride on our tree.”

Like all children until yesterday, they spent their formative years in the world and not seeing it out a window or through a screen. Just as Angela or Patty Bolger watched the birds’ nests, so Tony Carr fished the rivers, Taylor and her siblings watched the swallows come every spring to nest in the barns, and Rose Smith and her friends dammed the streams to create temporary swimming pools.

Walsh remembered watching with fascination as the summer sun dried the bog and exposed the skeletons of ancient trees buried in its depths, “like sentries with their jagged stumps bleached white and ghostly, as if trying to reveal the glory that was once theirs before they were indiscriminately burned down. Their roots resembled long, bony fingers reaching out to touch and console each other in remembrance of their majestic past. In the moonlight they looked like shrouded spectres rising from the bog, trying to convey their former greatness, when they covered the land and held in their arms the birds of the air and harboured the many wild animals which roamed without hindrance through the Ireland of old.”

City children might seem far removed from Nature, but in Ireland, at least, even inner cities had parks, woods, gardens and cow pastures, and every school and hospital used to be surrounded by gardens . Ellen Miller, who grew up in Dublin in an area now covered with motorways and high-rise buildings, remembered it was then only a short walk to fields where they gathered cowslips.  

In Belfast, “… many streams still oozed from the floor of the forest ... where we spent many summers climbing trees, making woodland dens and decking them with the bluebells, violets, primroses, forget-me-nots and sweet-smelling delicately pink wild roses that grew in abundance in the early summer,” Marianne Elliott recalled. “It made for a magical dell-like landscape ... ponds full of tadpoles and wild irises; rivulets to be bridged with driftwood and stones, marking out imaginary territories.”

Woods allow children places to create their own dens, tree-houses and forts, where they collect their own treasures and form secret societies. We’re all Stone  Age tribes under the surface, and something in us needs to live that way for a while as children. The most meagre “vacant” real estate can for children become a secret and dangerous place full of old gods and buried treasure, of canyons to be leapt across, a place to smell a campfire, feel a ladybird on one’s arm, feel the freezing water of a winter creek and a breeze ripple the green barley. Time can stand still for a child, and the primal moments we feel in stillness and storm are what stay with us when our bodies are old and everything else has faded.