This is another of the pieces that I wrote when I was on a short course with Writers’ HQ. It’s funny: that was a very well put-together course with good exercises and a great vibe: so why did it leave me utterly exhausted, with my day job neglected and my head spinning? In the best possible way, it got under my skin.

So here’s…

by Nathan Delling. All rights reserved.

It was two days after Easter. I put the very last piece of my last egg onto my tongue and pressed it against the roof of my mouth. I tried to resist the urge to chew and swallow, keeping my madly salivating mouth awash with chocolate flavours for as long as I could.

All good things come to an end, though.

All good things.

He wasn’t exactly listening to the radio but dad always had it on while he washed the dishes. I went to help him. In the desolate regret that comes when you realise that you’ve gorged all the chocolate, you might as well dry dishes and put them away…

The Americans thought they had found the virus that caused AIDS. I tried to comment upon this, but dad was uninterested.

“Only queers get that,” he said, with a shrug.

More from the radio: the armed stand-off at the Libyan Embassy in London was still going on; India and Pakistan were properly at war, in Kashmir; two more Almaz space stations had been identified.

I dropped a teaspoon. I was thankful that I hadn’t been drying a plate, or the teapot.

The Almaz were armed space stations – and the Soviet Union was happy for everyone to know it. There were Russian military personnel in armed vessels passing overhead, all the time. For all his words, Ronald Reagan had been unable to respond. It was Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin all over again: no matter who you were, you slept under a communist sky.

Dad looked disappointed. He knew I was teetering on the brink of an anxiety attack.

He switched off the radio, took the teaspoon from me and washed it again. He gave me a sad smile as he handed it back.

When I didn’t resume drying and putting away, he steered me out of the kitchen and sat me down.

“If it happens, it’s not going to hurt,” he tried – not for the first time – to explain his philosophy of nuclear non-apprehension. “We won’t even have time to be afraid: the RAF site is one of the most important in the country. If they attack at all, we’ll be gone in a burst of light. And if it doesn’t happen then it’d be a shame to waste our lives, just waiting for it.”

I knew all this. It didn’t help.

For two years, a craze had swept Britain. Vandals would paint one word, always in red:

Checkmate.

The punks had been and gone, but something of their nihilism remained. What use was anything, if atomic death might be minutes away? The Russians, my brother had assured me, could drop bombs on us whenever they wanted. As easy as spitting: checkmate.

Younger kids often congregated on the Old Gloucester Road bridge, passing the time by spitting on the cars that passed below. Could it really be that easy? The cruise missiles at Greenham Common were mere toys in comparison.

Some people said that “Checkmate” was a reference to Anatoly Karpov, the Russian chess grandmaster and world champion. Some people were genuinely impressed by the Soviets: the last superpower, they called them. Some people said it was just funny to write “Checkmate” (or just a ‘C’ in a circle) because it really freaked out old people, like drawing a swastika on the war memorial. Some kids just did it for a dare, competing to scrawl “Checkmate” in the most audacious place.

In Boddington, on Church Road, you could still make out where it said “CHECKM” in letters that were twelve feet high. They hadn’t been caught: they’d simply run out of paint. Everyone at school knew which kids had done it.

The silence grew. Perhaps my dad decided he’d done enough damage for one day because he retreated to the kitchen, saying he’d make us a cup of tea.

I went out.

I went to the willow plantation.

Two years before, feeling wronged in some argument that I no longer remember, I’d wandered away down unfamiliar footpaths and bridleways. I remember toying with the notion that I was running away from home – but knowing that I wasn’t, really. Sooner or later, I’d turn back… but not for a while.

At the corner of a field there was an oak that looked like a good climber, so I gave it a go. Beyond, a couple that I recognised from the farmers’ market were pushing sticks into the ground at neat intervals. Since I was a runaway (perhaps) and didn’t want any witnesses as to which route I’d taken, I didn’t let them see me. Instead, I stayed quiet and watched. They trudged up and down for perhaps two hours, occasionally getting another bundle of sticks from a Land Rover. They paused for tea and a Kitkat, and I realised I was hungry.

I left them to it. Back in Boddington it seemed that nobody had noticed when I ran away from home, so I moved back in with them.

When I wandered that way again a few months later, I was astonished to see how much the little sticks had grown! What had been a desolate grid of twigs on marshy earth was bursting with new life.

Trees that grow – even on a kid’s timescale. Wow.

I realised that these were willows, like the larger ones in the neighbouring field. I liked the willow: you could hide in it and nobody ever came along and told you to sod off.

I was devastated when I came, one winter’s day, to find that the largest willows had all been cut down. It was an energy crop, I was told.

Imagine being raised in Boddington, only to burn? I felt a kinship with the willow.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that the willow hadn’t been destroyed – merely harvested. The roots were left intact and come the spring, new growth was vigorous!

How the harvest had taken place, I had no idea. Perhaps there was some immense, tree-crunching combine harvester that went through in the dead of night? The machine must be a messy eater, though, as it had left a good number of willow wands behind. I gathered them up, and began to think…

Where else might willows grow?

I stole a forest.

As I’d watched the farmer and his wife do, I pushed my willow wands into the soft, wet earth beside a stream. Some flourished almost at once; others didn’t. In the Russian roulette of my secret plantation, only the wands that had been pushed in “buds up” survived. I had a lot of learning to do.

When the time came, cutting them down was a hard thing to do: it felt wrong… but through the school library I’d learned what needed to happen. Coppice the willow: it grows back more strongly.

Mine wasn’t an energy crop of course. When I harvested a willow wand, it was to replant it somewhere else. My willow would burn only when we all did – and in the meantime, well, we would see.

There: you’re all caught up. It’s April 24th, 1984 and I’ve been cultivating and harvesting willow in secret for two years.

Some people thought that it would be better to give ground to the Russians: accept their calls to “demilitarise and reunify Germany.” Others believed that a robust military response would call their bluff. Sweden was getting very skittish about the Kirov-class battlecruisers that had made the Baltic their own private playground. Sweden was walking a tightrope, looking to secure reassurances from NATO without provoking the Soviets. It was clear that it wasn’t just West Germany at stake in this latest round of a complicated game that I couldn’t claim to understand.

Instead, I cut my willow wands. It had been a very rainy spring and this gave me hope just as it dampened the spirits of others. I had been running out of damp places to plant willow, but a really wet spring might allow my trees to take root elsewhere.

This year, there was a lot of willow.

Dawn was the best time to plant, if you didn’t want anybody to see you doing it. In April, as long as you didn’t rub shoulders with farmers, nobody else was up and about.

I lost count somewhere around a thousand. Some people pulled up the willows that I had planted on their land, but when this happened I simply planted more, elsewhere. Many people didn’t notice them, or didn’t recognise them, or didn’t care.

I kept on planting. I’d learned that hammering them in with a croquet mallet was too noisy, but a single swing with a pickaxe made a lovely deep hole for a willow wand. All the while, it kept on raining. I was happy.

By the middle of May there were willows growing on every grass verge; at the boundary of every field. Lawns weren’t safe from me and neither was the playground. There were willows growing everywhere.

I couldn’t have told you why I did it.

There were willows planted all around St Mary’s – and hundreds more at No. 9 Signals Unit, RAF Boddington. Perhaps this was a mistake, but I think this must also have been what I had in mind all along. Of course, key military installations have sentries. Particularly jumpy sentries, when three decades of cold war looks like it could go hot at any moment. They weren’t going to let an unprovoked willow-planting incident go unremarked – so this was how I got to know the Ministry of Defence Police.

I hadn’t exactly done anything wrong. Maybe a little bit of vandalism, but guerrilla planting was something new: something to make those in authority scratch their heads and wonder if perhaps the whole thing might best be handled by the parents, or the school system. By somebody else.

Though I went more-or-less unpunished (other than the sentence that mum and dad handed down, as was their right) I did suffer the loss of my anonymity. In my small village, everybody now knew that I was the reason there was willow sprouting up like weeds, everywhere.

“Oi, freak!”

Because children can be… well, you know what? I would have done the same. You see somebody who’s down and you give them a kick. That’s growing up: sometimes you’ve got to be cruel to be cool. So: twenty versions of the same question. What were you doing?

I tried to voice my nascent explanation, though it wasn’t yet clear in my own mind: that it was somehow tied in with despair and checkmate, but pushing back – an act of rebellion.

My questioner nodded sympathetically. “So… what you’re saying… is that you’re a fucking head-case,” he summarised.

“If you like,” I said.

Never ever let them see they’ve upset you, or it never ends. We all know the rules in that game – instinctively.

You don’t often have to play it at odds of fifty-to-one, though.

“Head-case”, it seemed, had become my official nickname by playtime.

I decided to make it interesting, at least, so each time somebody challenged me about the willows that I had planted in their nan’s garden, the school flowerbeds, the churchyard… I came up with a different story. Instead of planting trees, now I planted rumours.

“I’m just one player: it was a competition to see who could plant the most. You should see what they’ve done down in Cornwall!”

“It’s an art project. I call it ’a splash of green’. I got a grant from the Arts Council to buy the willow wands. Do you like it?”

“It’s designed to soak up nuclear fallout. You’ll thank me, one day.”

“It’s designed to be visible from space, to signal the aliens that we’re ready to join them.”

“It’s for nightingales. They always roost in willow.”

“It’s a flood defence thing to deflect tidal waves. Let them grow, for the good of the village.”

“I did it for sound absorption.”

“Didn’t you know? You can smoke young willow leaves.”

“I just really like that shade of green.”

“We’re going to need them for fuel. A new ice age is coming.”

“I did it so we can make charcoal. Boddington used to be the capital of charcoal manufacture, back in the middle ages.”

“It’s our Christian duty to plant willow. It says so, in the scriptures.”

“They’re an important habitat for tree otters. You don’t want the Boddington otter to die out, do you?”

+++

The council pulled a lot of my willow up. This was a little awkward, because dad worked for the council. Wherever they found ‘unofficial’ willow, they pulled it up. The previous year’s growth – the stuff I had coppiced – was safely hidden from them, below soil level. It made me smile to think that it would come back, next year.

A few people allowed their new willow tree to remain, where I had planted it. Not many, but a few.
To most, I was a freak. I was a head-case. I had nothing to lose, though, and there would be more willow, next year.

If we were still alive next spring, I would plant again. If we weren’t, I wouldn’t. But something happened: an intervention.

Unlike the Church Street “CHECKM” sign, I have no idea who was responsible, this time. One morning, dawn revealed a school playing field that had been defiled.

Upon what was normally a soccer pitch there were some three hundred willow wands in place: each at the centre of a red c-in-a-circle.

Checkmate. The perpetrators had used red gloss paint, and nothing would shift it without killing yet more grass. The school caretaker plucked the willow wands out and threw them on a very smoky bonfire. The “checkmate” signs remained.

“Head-case, what have you done?” our class bully demanded.

“That’s… actually kind of awesome,” said Gary Brown. He’d been one of those responsible for the Church Street thing and he knew just how much effort was involved.

“Wasn’t me,” I protested, though nobody seemed to care.

I tried to concentrate on my lessons, waiting for the summons to the Head’s office, to “explain myself.” It never came, though. Questions had been asked of my parents but I had a watertight alibi: I was still grounded at that point.

This was just the first of many such acts of vandalism. To my eye, they were inexpertly done: the willow wands were just as likely to be installed wrong-way-up and would thus never grow. Nobody else seemed to care.

A new phrase entered our school lexicon: “willow-bombing.”

A popular target was The Cherry Orchard, a cul-de-sac of rather snooty people, in my opinion: not a single one of the willows that I had installed there had been left in place. Now they were replaced with new plantings by marauders who were less secretive; more likely to daub a “checkmate” to accompany their handiwork.

“Why is all this happening?” I asked one my classmates.

“You ought to know, head-case,” David Freer told me, knocking on my temples as if attempting to produce a hollow sound. “It’s to protect against the atom bombs!”

I tried again, with others.

“We need more oxygen – it’s all being used up by jet engines,” Pam told me.

“Having lots of willows around prevents insanity,” Helen said.

It became impossible for anybody below twenty-five to buy red paint anywhere within twenty miles of Boddington. The willow plantation where I had originally stolen the forest was raided almost daily. Hugh and Caroline, the owners, appealed to the young people of Boddington to simply ask if they wanted some willow, and not trample the whole place in search of it.

It became known that some of my classmates were raiding the council tip and re-planting willow wands that had already been uprooted – perhaps several times.

The kids in neighbouring villages were starting their own willow-bombing campaigns. With red paint in short supply, people started tying a piece of red wool around each willow wand.

The officer commanding No. 9 Signals Unit, RAF Boddington, came to the school and appealed to us to stop. It was defeatist, he said. And the red paint thing made us look like a communist fifth column.

Gary Brown raised a hand, seeking permission to speak. When this was granted, he said:
“I’d like to assure the gentleman that in the case of nuclear attack, these willow trees will burn just as well whether draped with wool, daubed with paint or as naked nature intended – as will we all!”

Pandemonium. Our visitor left, scowling.

On our way home one night we found that there was a newcomer in the village: an outside broadcast van from the BBC.

There was also a contingent from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, keen to play a part in the broadcast. Some of us were ushered into the village hall and I was included because (as everybody knew) I was the original willow-planting protester – though I felt that events had overtaken me completely. If I had ever known quite what I wanted when this began, this wasn’t it – or not quite. But like life, it was what we had.

I slipped outside for some peace and a chance to think. The sun would be going down soon: for once it had been a sunny day and would likely give way to a starry night. I wondered how many Almaz I would see on the walk home. I wondered if it was possible to see the bombs detach from a space station, with a powerful enough telescope. But since everybody said that a nuclear winter would be far worse than the instant death you could expect from a Russian “bucket of sunshine”… what was the use of an early warning network?

When I went back inside it seemed that Harriet Barnes, impossibly elegant sixth former, had appointed herself spokesperson for the Willow Movement. She was distinctly unimpressed with the CND people.

“Hippies,” she said, dismissively.

“We’re stronger together!” the newcomer insisted.

I imagine that’s what NATO are telling Sweden right now,” Harriet smirked.

“You silly little kid! What are you trying to do here? This is too important to be spoiled by some silly power games!”

“…says the person who turned up here hoping to ride our coat-tails,” Harriet snarled.

“Wait,” the producer from the BBC got involved. “Are you saying this lady isn’t with you?”

“I’ve never seen her before in my life,” Harriet drawled, “or any of those ones. They don’t live here.”

The BBC and the Parish Council people showed the group from CND out, despite loud objections.

Gary Brown was there at the door as they trooped outside.

“Boom,” he said. “Checkmate.”

I decided to leave as well.

– ENDS

I was born in the early 1970s, so I saw the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s second surge. I was very disturbed by the threat of nuclear destruction – though I kept my anxieties all tightly bottled up and never talked about them, in strict accordance with the standards of my upbringing. As it happens, we all survived. Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ initiative finally broke the Soviet bank and the Berlin Wall came down, et cetera. The cold war fizzled out.

I Stole a Forest imagines that the Space Race played out differently, with the Russians gaining in confidence and putting up numerous armed space stations. There really were Almaz space stations – Salyut 2, 3 and 5 were secret military missions and weapon firing tests were conducted – but in my alternative history of the 1980s they launched a whole fleet of the things.

The comment on the AIDS virus, “only queers get that” was something I heard: from the teacher responsible for ‘Health Education’ (euphemism for sex education) at my school. Nice going, Mr Grant!

It really was another age.