Tree speaks.

It’s her turn.

Cover their faces

Mine eyes dazzle

she died young.

Tree speaks of her sorrows.

       She has lost children, 

           little saplings,

            torn from her limbs – 

            Mr. Sturgess digging about with his spade –

        what does he know of the roots of trees,

             how sensitive they are?

            Her bleak wailing as her branches

                  lop and fall --

                   he’s tone deaf, 

                   the silly bugger. 

(From The Green Lady, a work in progress, by Sally Bayley)

This is me speaking, through Tree, a character who erupted suddenly upon the screen/page just a few weeks ago. Barged right in as my mother would say, because she had something to say about the foolish humans left in charge. Tree lives at the bottom of the alleyway, or the twitten, as you say in Sussex, the place where many a twit has been seen roaming.

My character is Tree and she is full of sorrow. Tree has been undone by a strong wind, the Great Storm of October 1987; but before that by the vicious and insensitive spade of Mr. Sturgess, our next door neighbour. We blamed his wife for his senseless digging about; everyone always blames the wife.

I’m not sure if this counts as a sentence, but more of a stickle-brick or lego building exercise. I was thinking of children's stories and fairytales built around trees: The Magic Faraway Tree (where everyone surely was taking psychedelics); and then Jack and the Giant Beanstalk, which isn’t a tree, but a huge green growth, perhaps a bean tree, and in the Ladybird book I had as a child resembled a great big shrub spiralling giddily up through the vaporous clouds. I was thinking of that drawing, and then the shape of a garland in the tradition of Jack-in-the-Green. That Jack appears in English folklore on May Day — the day chimney sweeps were given off - in the guise of a man dressed as a mischievous shrub. So my sentence is a sort of garland-wreath reaching back to Jack.

At the top of my garland-sentence, Tree is a ‘she’. By the time we get to the bottom of the garland, she has turned into a man: Mr. Sturgess who is tangled up in her roots and branches. In the midst of all this bludgeoning, Tree speaks a line spoken by the character of Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi (1623), that great Jacobean tragedy of female entrapment by vicious and corrupt men. Ferdinand is her twin brother and he’s a guilty as the rest in calling her a whore when he finds her pregnant. 'Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.’ This is the original quotation, easy-to-say words that slip off the tongue and hold us there: in the sad and chilly pauses between each set of three words. In those long pauses we hear the sound of murder: the pitiful cries of the Duchess and her husband and her two younger children.

It is easy to mistake these words for the words of the Duchess herself speaking. It sounds as though they should be her words ghosting her from the grave. But they are her guilty brother’s words, broken into three tiny shards that cut through his conscience like sharp jewels glaring at him as he looks down upon her dead body. He is dazzled by his own guilty spirit reflected in her stone-cold face. These are words that stick, but that’s the point. They find what Lady Macbeth calls “the sticking place” in our memory, and so function as a form of literary conscience. We remember these words, and of course they are much quoted, most famously perhaps by Agatha Christie in her 1976 mystery, Sleeping Murder where the heroine finds herself haunted by the brutal scene of murder.

I read The Duchess of Malfi as a student and found it to be a beautifully sickening play. The language of pregnancy and swelling bellies and apricots - the pregnant Duchess craves plump apricots - spoke to a 20-year-old struggling to reconcile herself to a late and traumatic physical development; and perhaps I also felt clotted by guilt (hormones produce all sorts of strange sensations) during a time of spiritual searching through many a branch of Christian churches, all governed by men, some very nice, who had me in for tea to discuss the state of my faith. But still I suffered pangs of guilt, as does the Duchess, who is eventually murdered by her cowardly brothers (like true aristocrats they hire assassins) for marrying beneath her.

My Tree is not a duchess — she lives down an insalubrious alleyway lodged tight against a crumbling wall - but she was a spiritual advisor of sorts during much of my childhood. Tree was always there, until the night of The Great Storm. She survived all the brutal hackings from next door, all the indignities of drunken men pissing on her, all the smells and pongs of our homemade burial ground —we buried dead mice and birds in her roots and you can blame the cat for that. But that night, the night of October 15-16, 1987, she was mutilated, lopped and felled, by a vicious unforeseen wind. Tree speaks here, as the Duchess does, from her narrow grave.