My Yew Tree Sanctuary - Lucy Bland
When I turned nine, I came back from my first holiday abroad (I had gone with my parents to stay with friends in France) and was faced with two devastating announcements: my beloved 4-year-old cat, Humphrey, had died of some mysterious illness while we were away, and I was to be sent to a girl’s boarding school. My father, a law lecturer, had been for six months in New Orleans when I was three; they had not taken me with them as they were told it would worsen my asthma. I stayed behind with my grandmother – my father’s mother disliked by both my parents. (My asthma in fact got much worse.) My father was now saying that he was keen to get back to lecturing in the States.
I well remember my first day of school. A ‘big’ girl (aged about twelve) confronted me with the words: ‘Do you know, you are the thinnest girl in the whole school?!’ I was mortified. But in the school grounds I saw something that offered a retreat: an ancient giant yew tree. I learned that while we were allowed to climb the lower branches, higher up was strictly out of bounds. No-one else seemed at all interested in climbing higher but I have (irrationally) no fear of heights and decided to keep ascending. I had climbed trees before, but never one so tall. Climbing came naturally and easily to me, I loved it, unlike the ball games that I was hopeless at and avoided like the plague. At the top of the yew I had a wonderful view but was myself hidden from sight in its thick embracing foliage. Yews are said to be omens of doom and indeed their leaves are poisonous, but for me the tree became a refuge on a regular basis.
Since then I have climbed rocks far more than trees. (I have however many times climbed the plane tree in Oakfield Road that we have been trying to save from felling, but that was via a rope so not quite the same. Lovely to be up in a tree again though.) Last year, returning with friends from a climbing trip to Portland, Dorset (a site of impressive limestone cliffs) we were forced to take a diversion and suddenly found ourselves in Blandford, the small town near my former school. The school was still there, but given it was the holidays, it was deserted. I decided it would be wonderful to climb ‘my’ yew once again. I brazenly walked around the grounds but there was no sign of the tree, not even the remains of a stump. Why it had gone I have no idea, but its disappearance was upsetting and unsettling. My one-time childhood sanctuary had gone, and with it part of my history had been erased.
Lucy Bland is a member of the Haringey Tree Protectors and lives in Finsbury Park, North London. She is a Professor of History at Anglia Ruskin University and teaches, researches and writes on C19th and C20th century British history, especially on gender, feminism and race.