Willow Talk

I shared nothing in common with my mother, so when she told me that I should not talk to the old man in the willow tree, that is exactly what I set out to do.

My mother was a pretty woman with ugly views, and her attitude towards the elderly at that time was that they were either contagious or were motivated by nefarious desires. The elderly women she was sometimes forced to mingle with were treated with loudly vocalised condescension, and old men were avoided entirely, on account of their obvious perversions.

At the bottom of our long garden was a small tributary of the Severn which always defied the weather and kept a steady but shallow flow, regardless of rain or drought. Spanning it was a short, wooden bridge which lead to a grazing meadow, and to the side of it, to my left as I walked towards it, was a tall and graceful willow. Not wanting to alarm the old man I said a cheery ‘Hello!’ which was met with an equally cheery response: ‘Halt! Who goes there?’

Parting the drooping branches was like opening curtains in reverse, going, as I did, from light to dappled gloom, and right at the centre of this ethereal space was an old man with a shock of white hair, who observed me from a deck chair. ‘Hasn’t your mother warned you against dirty old men?’ he said, ‘specifically in willow trees?’

‘Specifically she did,’ I replied. ‘That’s why I came.’

The old man found this amusing, and his laugh was louder than his frail body seemed able to accommodate. ‘Don’t you like your mother?’ he asked, gesturing with his arm that I should take the ground beside him.

When I replied that I did not, not particularly, he grew wistful and said what a shame that was. ‘I was very fond of mine,’ he eventually said. ‘I can still remember what she looked like in all of her decades, but I can never remember her voice. It is the one thing that no one ever does.’

I was too young to have experienced the phenomenon, but he went on to say that voices were forgettable, and that only by writing them down did they become history.

I asked him what we always ask strangers: what had he done for a living? He told me he had tried many things, mostly without success, but that the strangest leap from one thing to another was probably the time he gave up being a history teacher to become a tree surgeon. He explained that teaching history was not what he had hoped it would be. Rather than indulging his boyish desire for the blood, guts and thunder of it, he was constrained by the curriculum to focus on dull subjects like global economics and the minutiae of domestic foreign policy. ‘The trees were better company,’ he concluded.

We fell into an easy silence which was punctuated by the bellow of the cows in the meadow. It is hard to explain how I, then an eighteen-year-old girl, could have felt so comfortable in the presence of a man of ninety or so. The best I can offer is that I felt he was a member of my tribe, which was a welcome change from the persistent feeling that my mother was not.

‘An oak tree,’ he eventually said, ‘can live for a thousand years. That’s three hundred years of youth, three hundred years of primacy, and three or four hundred years of decline. They are very much like us humans in that regard. By contrast, the willow is a baby, rarely getting beyond fifty. A perpetual child.’

‘But very beautiful,’ I commented.

‘Oh, indeed! And I suppose you want to know why I’m sitting in one.’

‘The thought has crossed my mind.’

‘I am hiding,’ he said, a statement that was both grandiose and childish all at the same time. ‘I am kept like a domestic parrot whose wings must be regularly clipped. Right now I suspect they’re looking for me everywhere.'

From that, I assumed that he was in some kind of home for the elderly, but I was reluctant to press him on something he clearly did not wish to be reminded of.

He had a habit of jumping from one subject to another, like a hummingbird in a flowerbed. His next question was whether I liked history, and I told him that I liked it well enough, but that like him, I hated the way it was taught.

‘Never let that put you off,’ he said. ‘History is everything.’

He bent down to pick up a long stick which a child had probably dropped when tired of his war games, and he drew a line in the sandy earth. ‘We spend our lives walking a straight line, and each mile is a year. When we walk we often glance backwards, where we remember our recent journey, and we can also see a little way ahead, to a place we have not yet been but can clearly foresee. But if, like a bird, you could rise above that line, you would be able to see everything at once. That is what history is.’

His description of time prompted me to mention the fourth dimension and time slips, but he did not appear to have much time for the sciences. ‘We humans are not designed to understand the fourth dimension,’ he said. ‘And as for time slips, I suspect that people who experience them are probably having an ischaemic stroke and should get themselves off to hospital.’

‘So you don’t believe in that sort of thing?’

‘Certainly not! We humans are simply the outcome of a random chain of events, and are no more important than a crane fly. Religion, science, even love, are designed to fool us into thinking that our lives have purpose, when there is no evidence to suggest that they do.’

‘But we have to fill our time somehow,’ I mused. ‘You know, make the most of it.’

‘Of course, dear,’ he said, mollified, 'but history is so much more interesting than cubes within cubes, don’t you think? I mean, it shows us what chumps we all are, we humans, making the same mistakes and buying the same old lies, over and over again. And when you consider the line I talked of, sometimes it is decades or centuries later when we realise that all the things we believed to be true were not; and that the accepted version of events was rarely what it seemed. At such times, we become like the bird on the wing, all wise and all knowing, and then we start schlepping the line again. Stupidity on repeat.’

I thought about we he had said and asked if he could provide an example.

‘I have hundreds,’ he claimed, ‘but as we are sitting in a willow tree, let me tell you about aspirin and how it relates to the fate of the Romanovs.’

I confessed to an interest in the Russian royal family because, as the old man had previously implied, it contained all the elements that combined to make the past interesting: opulence, revolution, abduction, bloody slaughter and the tantalising prospect of a traumatised survivor.

He assured me that the story would take no more than five minutes in the telling, after which he should probably return to the home, like the chastened parrot he was, and I should return to my mother.

‘The revolution, when it came, was not inevitable,’ he began. ‘But there were problems. The Tsar was not a bad man but he was certainly an idiot, a man without the wisdom or the talent to foresee the troubles ahead. The peasants despised his German wife and she despised them, but despite all of that, there was this golden child, the boy Alexei, born after a brood of girls. And as you will know, the poor child had haemophilia, an incurable disease which was gifted by genetic inheritance from Queen Victoria.’

‘They were in an impossible position,’ I commented. ‘The whole empire was resting on the Tsarevich’s shoulders and his parents had to keep schtum about his illness.’

The old man rose carefully from the deckchair and pressed both palms against the trunk of the willow. He was such a tiny dot of a man, an unlikely school teacher and an even less likely tree surgeon, but I did not doubt that version of his life.

‘Salicin,’ he said, patting the bark. ‘Used as a medicine for centuries, all over the world. They would chew it, pound it or boil it as a cure for physical pain and fever. Don’t you often wonder,’ he said, his eyes alight with curiosity, ‘who the first person was to walk past a willow and think, I know! I shall eat this bark!’

‘Like mushrooms and berries,’ I said. ‘Trial and error, I suppose.’

‘When it comes to it, that’s just what life is!’ he exclaimed, as if all his previous points had been encapsulated in that one phrase. ‘And this is where we follow that long road and come to the late nineteenth century, when the German Bayer Company developed a process of synthesising salicin into something that could be taken in tablet form. It has been called aspirin ever since.’

I asked him how all of that connected to the death of the Romanovs. I recall making an insensitive remark about how they were all shot, not given an overdose of aspirin. He lowered himself into the deckchair again and wiped the debris from the willow bark on his old man’s pinstripe trousers.

‘Enter Rasputin! This dishevelled and unclean Siberian peasant who’d been doing the rounds of the lower orders of nobility, abusing his charisma and titillating the ladies of the court with his alleged healing powers. Eventually, a relative perhaps, or a courtier, whispered in the Tsarina’s ear that this strange, self-proclaimed monk might be able to heal the Tsarevich, and by those means he got his filthy, sandalled feet in the door of the royal palace. The court doctors were outraged but silenced by the truth: the boy was getting worse and nothing they did, all their potions and tablets, were making any difference. He was deteriorating before their eyes. Rasputin’s first act was to throw all the tablets and potions away, and amongst those tablets was aspirin. After that, the boy’s condition improved immediately!’

‘Why?’

‘Because aspirin thins the blood and is the very worst thing you can give a haemophiliac! We know this now but they didn’t then. So completely inadvertently, the monk had pulled off a miracle and the Tsar and Tsarina became entirely dependant on him for the life of their son. Naturally all of that went to Rasputin's head, and the gossip broke out of the royal courts and infected the peasantry beyond the imperial walls, who were woefully unaware of the context. The slander passed from region to region by word of mouth, and each time the slander passed in this way, the details became more salacious. The sentiment was that if a low bednyak could seduce the monarchy, abuse the holy sanctity of the office, sleep with the Tsarina and walk their hallowed halls like a duke, then there was simply no point in having them. He was not the only reason, but he was a significant factor in their downfall. All regimes end with the smallest of things,’ he finished.

He folded up the deckchair and followed me out of the willow. ‘There is a shortcut through the meadow,’ he said, ‘but I don’t fancy being trampled by cows.’

He followed me across the bridge, using the deckchair as a walking aid. On the dry riverbank that led towards the village we parted ways.

‘Life is meaningless,’ he said before he left. ‘But that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it. In your idle moments think of all the people who went before you and comfort yourself in knowing that, however bad things may get, history is always the best company. You will never be the only moron in the room.’

I did not see the old man again, and there were times during that long summer before university where I wondered if he had been a illusory figment of my imagination, or a time lord who had slipped through a tear to remind me of life’s random nature and by consequence, its joyful pointlessness.

He, of course, would have accused me of suffering an ischaemic stroke and directed me towards the nearest hospital.