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John Fowles

The Tree

The first trees I knew well were the apples and pears in the garden of my childhood home. This may sound rural and bucolic, but it was not, for the house was a semi-detached in a 1920's suburb at the mouth of the Thames, some forty miles from London. The back garden was tiny, less than a tenth of an acre, but my father had crammed one end and a side-fence with grid-iron espaliers and cordons. Even the minute lawn had five orchard apple trees, kept manageable only by constant debranching and pruning. It was an anomaly among our neighbours’ more conventional patches, even a touch absurd, as if it were trying to be a fragment of the kitchen-garden of some great country house. No one in fact thought of it as a folly, because of the fruit those trees yielded.

The names of apples and pears are rather like the names of wines — no sure guide in themselves to quality. Two labels may read the same; but the two trees that wear them may yield fruit as different as a middling and a great vineyard from the same slope. Even the same tree can vary from year to year. As with the vine, the essential things are soil, situation, annual climate; but after those chance factors, human care. My father’s trees, already happy in the alluvial clay of the area, must have been among the most closely pruned, cosseted and prayed for in the whole of England, and regularly won him prizes at local shows. They were certainly the linest-flavoured of their arieties — many increasingly rare, these supermarket days, because of their commercial disadvantages, such as tender flesh or the mysterious need to be 'eaten from the tree’—that I have ever tasted. Memories of them, of their names and flavours, Charles Ross and Lady Sudeley, Peasgood's Nonsuch and King of the Pippins, haunt me still.

Even the more popular kinds he grew, such as the Comice, or the Mozart and Beethoven of English pomology, James Grieve and Cox's Orange, acquired on his cunningly stunted trees a richness and subtlety I have rarely met since. This may have been partly because he knew exactly when they should be eaten. A Comice pear may take many weeks to ripen in store, but it is at its peak for only a day. Perfection in the Grieve is almost as transient.

These trees had a far greater influence on our lives than I ever realized when I was young. I took them as my father presented them to the world, as merely his hobby; as unexceptional, or inevitable, as his constant financial worries, his disappearing every day to London, his duodenal ulcer — or on a happier side his week-end golf, his tennis, his fondness for watching county cricket. But they were already more than trees, their names and habits and characters on an emotional parity with those of family.

There was already one clear difference between my father and myself, but the child I was did not recognize it, or saw it only as a matter of taste, perhaps of age, mere choice of hobby again. The difference was in any case encouraged and in my eyes sanctified by various relatives. I had an uncle who was a keen entomologist and who took me on occasional expeditions into the country — netting, sugaring, caterpillar-hunting and all the rest of it — and taught me the delicate art of ‘setting' what we caught.