I wasn’t a bad tree climber meself in my boyhood.

Same calibre as mystic Meg.

The house I grew up in was right next to the local park. As kids, we spent hours playing there. Back then, there was a team of keepers looking after the park, whose watchful eyes we learned the skill of eluding. Not that we usually got up to anything particularly destructive, but there were certain things not allowed, and certain places out of bounds.

We probably wouldn’t have done the things not allowed, had they been permitted, nor ventured into the places out of bounds, had they been freely accessible. Had there not been rules to break, I suspect we wouldn’t have found the park nearly so interesting. Not that everything we did was in pursuit of breaking the rules; we would still have walked across the grass had there not been little cast iron plaques all over the place telling us to “Please Keep Off” it.

I loved climbing trees; I almost had a passion for it. Climbing trees was quite high up on the forbidden list, which only encouraged my enthusiasm. There was one tree, however, that I never even thought about climbing. This was the Wishing Tree, and I imagine my self-restraint was due to some sort of reverence for it. The Wishing Tree was a hawthorn with two trunks that diverged at ground level. It was said, but not necessarily believed, that if you stepped through the gap between the trunks and made a wish, it would be granted. We were always stepping through the gap -despite the act having no prohibition placed upon it- but I don’t remember our bothering much with wishes.

Although it never occurred to me to climb the Wishing Tree, it did occur to little Steve Charlesworth, who, strangely enough, never had a reputation for climbing trees. We were aimlessly hanging around the tree one day when he suddenly said he was going to climb up it. And he did. One trunk was slightly narrower and less vertical than the other, and that was the route by which he went. He shinned and clawed his way up the tree and disappeared into the canopy.

He never came back down. We shouted to him for a while, and even threw sticks up into the tree; I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was some sort of attempt to locate him, or it could even have been an attempt to dislodge him. We neither located nor dislodged him, and we never saw him again.

The Wishing Tree is still there, and it looks much the same as it did back then, over fifty years ago; although fifty years isn’t all that long to a tree. I was there a couple of years ago; it was the first time I’d been back to the park since I was a kid. It’s completely different now. There are no park keepers, no carefully tended flower beds, and no rose garden with a fountain in the middle. The band stand has been demolished and so has the pavilion that looked onto the meticulously kept bowling greens.

I doubt that I’ll go back there again; it’s saddening to see the place now, knowing what it used to be like. I would rather remember it how it was when we were kids. I still think about little Steve from time to time, and wonder what became of him.

The house I grew up in was right next to the local park. As kids, we spent hours playing there. Back then, there was a team of keepers looking after the park, whose watchful eyes we learned the skill of eluding. Not that we usually got up to anything particularly destructive, but there were certain things not allowed, and certain places out of bounds.

We probably wouldn’t have done the things not allowed, had they been permitted, nor ventured into the places out of bounds, had they been freely accessible. Had there not been rules to break, I suspect we wouldn’t have found the park nearly so interesting. Not that everything we did was in pursuit of breaking the rules; we would still have walked across the grass had there not been little cast iron plaques all over the place telling us to “Please Keep Off” it.

I loved climbing trees; I almost had a passion for it. Climbing trees was quite high up on the forbidden list, which only encouraged my enthusiasm. There was one tree, however, that I never even thought about climbing. This was the Wishing Tree, and I imagine my self-restraint was due to some sort of reverence for it. The Wishing Tree was a hawthorn with two trunks that diverged at ground level. It was said, but not necessarily believed, that if you stepped through the gap between the trunks and made a wish, it would be granted. We were always stepping through the gap -despite the act having no prohibition placed upon it- but I don’t remember our bothering much with wishes.

Although it never occurred to me to climb the Wishing Tree, it did occur to little Steve Charlesworth, who, strangely enough, never had a reputation for climbing trees. We were aimlessly hanging around the tree one day when he suddenly said he was going to climb up it. And he did. One trunk was slightly narrower and less vertical than the other, and that was the route by which he went. He shinned and clawed his way up the tree and disappeared into the canopy.

He never came back down. We shouted to him for a while, and even threw sticks up into the tree; I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was some sort of attempt to locate him, or it could even have been an attempt to dislodge him. We neither located nor dislodged him, and we never saw him again.

The Wishing Tree is still there, and it looks much the same as it did back then, over fifty years ago; although fifty years isn’t all that long to a tree. I was there a couple of years ago; it was the first time I’d been back to the park since I was a kid. It’s completely different now. There are no park keepers, no carefully tended flower beds, and no rose garden with a fountain in the middle. The band stand has been demolished and so has the pavilion that looked onto the meticulously kept bowling greens.

I doubt that I’ll go back there again; it’s saddening to see the place now, knowing what it used to be like. I would rather remember it how it was when we were kids. I still think about little Steve from time to time, and wonder what became of him.