The Lonely Poplar

A Willerby Story

“I think Old Bert’s given up,” said David, hanging his coat on the peg by the front door and blowing on his hands to warm them.

“Oh?” Mauve said, putting the kettle on, “What makes you say that?”

“He’s thrown a load of limbs in the river – I saw them under the bridge.”

“You are sure they’re his?”

David looked pointedly at his wife. “I know my trees better than you,” he said. “They were Black Poplar and he’s the only one for miles around.”

Mauve waited for the water to boil and then made tea.

“Sad,” she said as she handed David a mug. “But who would blame him? There’s no female for miles. At least this way he goes on, and there’s a chance one of him will find a wife.”

David grunted and opened the laptop on the kitchen table. He tapped at it for a few minutes, the steam from his tea misting his glasses.

“Seven thousand in England,” he said, gloomily, “and of those only six hundred females. That aint great odds and those’ll get worse as more of the lads do what Bert’s doing – more boys looking for the same number of girls.”

“Such a shame,” said Mauve. “Bert’s such a gentleman – he deserves the chance of meeting someone. You should go and talk to him about it.”

“Or you could,” said David.

Mauve laughed. “Not a chance,” she said, “this is boy talk if anything is. Spare my blushes and go up for lunch– I’ll make you up a flask of soup if you like.”

David grumbled but out of habit more than anything else, and not for long; a blowy walk down to the drained meadow and an outdoor meal under old Bert’s goldening leaves was no chore.

Bert stood in a nice spot right by the river where once he’d been just one of many Black Poplars, male and female.

But then the Victorians came, puffed up with self-confidence and industry, always developing and improving, uncaring of what they destroyed as they remade the world to their liking.

The culling of the ladies - for nothing but the white fluffy hair that so irritated men who could only see beauty in control and order - must have been a horror.

As David hopped the last stile, he thought of them screaming and the males like Bert shouting soundlessly at the workmen to stop as they went cheerfully about their work.

He couldn’t shake the image, and it was not just the October cold that made him shudder as he skirted the shallow wide meander and the stepping stones that led over the river and to the door of the Green Man.

David knew dryads – especially those as old as Bert - could not be rushed and had the foresight to bring a cushion and a book.

There was no sign for more than an hour but David - while glad of his thick coat and scarf - did not mind; he had a paperback detective novel from Beckworth library and the pleasantly melancholic thoughts of passing time and out-of-reach landscapes that come amid the falling leaves of autumn.

“David,” said Bert, after a while, in a deep voice of roots and earth as he stepped from behind his thickly gnarled and crossed trunk to stand over him. “It’s good to see you.”

David looked up from his book, momentarily startled, but quickly managed a warm smile. “Yes, Bert, far too long,” he replied, tucking his book into his coat pocket and rising to his feet.

Bert shrugged at that – his conception of time too different to David’s for “too long” to have any shared meaning. He settled down, turning his toes to roots as he pushed them beneath the soil, delighting in the tickle of earthworms, blending his tree-trunk legs into his bare human-shaped torso which glistened in the soft drizzle.

“How are you?” David asked.

Bert considered the question for a moment then stretched, shifting his arms into branches, twigs and leaves as he reached up to the sky until he was all tree and his creased wooden face his only gesture at humanity.

“Well,” he said. “Strong.”

David looked up at him, struggling with the words that would mean what he meant them to a tree.

Speaking to the secret commonwealth through metaphor and analogy was fraught with difficulty and potential misunderstanding so he decided to be direct was best.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, “I was wondering how you are in yourself - if you are lonely here. I saw you been throwing down branches and that looked to me like it might be the end of hope of havin’ your babies the old way.”

For a moment Bert just stared down at him, his moss beard moving in the breeze. Then, in a series of quiet creaks and groans shrank and tumbled in on himself until he was man-shaped and man-sized again.

“What would you know of what it means to be lonely?”, he asked, sadly, without rancour, “You of a kind who are never alone.”

“I’m alone now, aren’t I?” David said.

Bert shook his head, the leaves on his head and round his ears rustling, “No. You have many; those you think of, those who think of you too.”

David thought for a long moment, then nodded.

“No,” he said, “when you put it like that, I’m never alone.”

There was a long silence as the dryad and the man looked at each other.

Then, somewhere in the distance, a rook called, breaking the moment.

“If I could, I’d help”, David said.

“You can’t, but if you did,” Bert said, “I’d be grateful.”

The man and the dryad talked for a while longer, sharing news and stories as old friends do.

“It’s been good to talk,” Bert said after an hour or so, “but it’s late in the year and I’m getting tired.”

Then he stepped back around his tree and was gone, leaving David alone in a melancholy that didn’t feel as pleasantly romantic now it wasn’t abstract.

He drank his tomato soup straight from the flask and went home, thinking of all the people he’d known that were now gone and what it would be like if those memories were all he had.

…

When he got back David found Mauve dancing with Sally, Dan and Sammy to an Alexa Halloween playlist by the aga.

“You’re back!” Mauve called, taking his coat and shoving him into the kitchen, “Sammy’s got us all movin’ like zombies! Show him, Sam!”

Sammy rolled his eyes wildly and threw his arms out in front of him. “Brains!” He shouted high and clear. “Give me brains!”

It didn’t take long for the weight on David’s shoulders to lift and soon he was breathless and happy in the life all around him.

After the dancing was over Mauve found some old episodes of the original Addams Family on YouTube, which the five of them watched while eating stew from bowls with thick slices of bread and margarine, enjoying the patter of rain against the windows and the way the wind howled in the chimney above the roaring fire.

It was a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but after Sally, Dan and Sammy had gone home David found himself downhearted again, thinking of Old Bert standing alone in the drained meadow by the river, year after year, alone in a way he’d been right to say nobody else could really understand.

He carried that heaviness to bed where it wouldn’t let him sleep.

After a couple of hours of tossing and turning under it, he gave up and in his dressing gown and slippers padded downstairs to the warm kitchen where he opened the laptop again and began googling.

…

Mauve woke to find him gone – a note propped up against the kettle.

“I think there might be a way to help Old Bert,” it said in a careful boyish script she knew even better than her own hand, “Off to Suffolk - won’t be gone longer than day or two.”

Mauve smiled to herself as she flicked on the kettle.

“Attaboy,” she whispered to herself. “And good luck, whatever it is you’re up to.”

…

He arrived back mid-morning the next day, honking the horn of their old Defender van as he pulled into the drive.

Mauve was in the back garden tidying the greenhouse for the winter.

By the time she got to him he was out of the car and at the front door.

“Come see!” He said, his words coming all at once and tripping over themselves in his rush to get the whole story out, “At first, they were suspicious about it but I’d a photo on my phone from last summer when we were there for a picnic, and when they saw that and where Old Bert is living, they were almost as excited as I was. They said shame about the meadow being drained but as there’s lots of space by the river that don’t make too much of a difference. Said it’s a great place for..”

Mauve wiped her hands on her apron and held them up palms out to stop him.

She laughed despite herself, delighted at seeing her husband so excited.

“Whoa, love,” she said, grabbing his arms. “You need to slow down and start at the beginning – what have you done?”

“I got to searching on the internet,” David said, “and found this place down Suffolk way, they’re trying to save the Black Poplar’s all over the country and..” be broke off for a moment, out of breath, “just come look, she’s in the back.”

Mauve opened the back double doors and peered inside.

“Oh goodness, sorry!” She shouted, jumping back and slamming the doors closed again.

“What is it? Is something wrong?” David asked, hopping around behind her.

Mauve leant back on the Defender. “Go ask Sally for some jeans and a top or something – a dressing gown at least,” she said. “You got a nymph back there and she’s starkers. Please don’t tell me you’ve had her in there all night with all the crap there and you in a nice clean hotel?”

David’s eyes widened. “No, course not,” he paused. “At least I don’t think so. She wasn’t there last night when I checked in on her, or this morning before I set off. I thought we might get something like this once she got to Willerby, but I didn’t know she’d, well, be quite so… natural.” He scratched the back of his neck, sheepish. “They told me she’d need somewhere calm and a bit of warmth, that’s all. I took some rugs and rags to wrap her roots in. Didn’t think of clothes.”

Mauve smiled again. “She might not care either way,” she said, “Old Bert’s never wearing anything, and it don’t seem to bother him much. But we don’t want her to give you a heart attack. I’ll wait here – you go.”

…

Her name – which she took a while to remember – was Merewina.

She looked at the younger end of middle-age – early to mid-forties her mossy brown skin raised in the knots and lumps characterising healthy fully mature poplars of her kind.

“I don’t understand it,” she said, warm in Sally’s warmest dressing gown, “one minute I was a tree, hardly thinking about much at all, the next I was this,” she pointed at herself, “too – but I’m still the tree – I can feel my roots and my leaves.”

“It’ll all make enough sense to you soon enough, I expect,” Mauve said, fascinated at how the nymph’s white halo of soft, fluffy down moved as if there was a breeze.

She turned to her husband.

“David – you’ve no idea where you were when she appeared do you?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, no. She was in the back, and I didn’t even know she was here until you opened the doors.”

“Shame,” Mauve said, “it’d have been interesting to see exactly where Willerby begins working its magic. Still – can’t be helped and it probably makes no difference to anything anyway.”

She turned back to Merewina, who was looking around the kitchen. “You thirsty again?”

The nymph grinned and nodded and drained a pint of water from the pond in one the moment David handed it to her.

“Can I have another one, when you have a minute?” She asked.

“Goodness,” said Mauve. “Of course, but after that we better get you up to the river before you drink us dry.”

…

Bert was still and silent when they arrived at his meadow and David wondered whether he might have gone to sleep for the winter already.

It made no difference either way – Merewina couldn’t spend the next few months with them and needed to be planted out.

If he was asleep then what a surprise spring would bring.

On the walk up she’d been full of questions about the village, where it was, the river that ran through it, who lived there, and especially about Old Bert.

For a creature so newly born she seemed to know a lot already about how the world worked – just how much she seemed to be remembering surprised her as much as it did David and Maude.

She was quieter and more subdued when they reached the spot.

“I hope I’ll like him,” she said to Mauve, while David dug her hole, “and I hope he likes me. What if he doesn’t?”

Mauve looked at her. “He’s decent,” she said. “I think chances are you’ll get on and if not in that way to begin with you’ll be company for each other anyway. Don’t rush things, that’s my advice. You’ve both got hundreds of years.”

David finished digging and carefully settled her roots into the earth, carefully and tenderly patting in the soil around her.

The air seemed to hold its breath as he stepped back, giving her space to settle in.

Mauve offered a gentle smile, standing by as a quiet reassurance.

“Will you come back and see me?” Merewina asked.

“Course we will,” David said. “Even while you’re asleep we’ll be watching over you. We’ll make sure you’re safe.”

She nodded and then, to her own surprise, gave a great yawn.

“We should leave you,” said Mauve, “you’ve got a bit of settling in to do before you can go to sleep yourself and we shouldn’t tire you.”

Merewina looked around, the soft fluffy down around her head wild in the freshening autumn breeze. It was mild and peaceful in the meadow, the only sounds the rustle of wind in drying leaves and the gentle play of the shallow river on its banks.

She smiled and nodded.

“See you soon then,” she said, then stepped into herself and disappeared, leaving just her sapling in its place by the water.

“She seemed nice,” Mauve said to David as they made their way back down the path towards tea and crumpets. “She was older than I’d have expected though – given how small her sapling was.”

“Ah,” said David. “That’s the thing. This place that makes ‘em – they clone ‘em – there’s more seasons in her than you’d guess looking at the tree part of her.”

Mauve reached out and took her husband’s hand.

“You did good,” she said, squeezing it.