Under the Tree

Under the Tree

Michael T. Ashgillian

Under the Tree

by

Michael T. Ashgillian

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Michael T. Ashgillian 2013

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This is a work of fiction. The characters, events and places are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used totally fictitiously.

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Front Cover image by ‘Michael’

Other images by Michael T. Ashgillian

To my wife, my two daughters and my son

without whom the Northland Tales may never have been told.

Chapter 1: The School Trip

‘Oh do come on, we’re going to be late for school!’, their mother called urgently.

Alexander and Fiona peered out unwillingly from the front door, like two young birds about to take their first flight from their cosy little nest, a nest that had always been their home; but they weren’t little chicks, nor was this their first venture into the big wide world.

It was quarter to nine on a cold, dreary, grey winter’s day. There was not a snowflake in sight. Quarter to nine.

‘Still, it is Friday,’ thought Alexander, ‘sweets and crisps from Dad tonight. Megamen would be on telly, too’. There was something to look forward to, after all.

‘Top Girls Rule! is on TV tonight,’ Fiona smiled to herself.

Brother and sister, so alike and yet so different.

‘Maybe I could arrange a sleep-over at John’s on Saturday, if I’m clever about it,’ pondered Alex.

‘I’ll ask Ellie to come around to play tomorrow,’ Fiona decided.

‘Oh do come on! Do come on!’, called mum, becoming increasingly exasperated with their reluctance to leave. ‘We’re going to be late for school! Again!’

She stared at them. ‘Have you got your packed lunches in your school bags? I put them on the kitchen top for you, next to the toaster’.

Alexander looked blankly at mum. ‘What?’ Until now he hadn’t heard a word of what she was saying.

‘O yes,’ said Fiona, ‘packed lunch. That’s right! I remember now, we’re going on a school trip today, to White Horse Hill’.

‘What?’, repeated Alex, now suddenly much happier. A school outing! That meant no lessons, great; but then he remembered that it would mean he was also going to miss his favourite school lunch. Friday was sausage-and-chips day. Not so good after all.

The bus was filled with chattering children waiting to leave, just as mummy’s car quickly pulled up outside the school gates. Miss Greentree was standing there at its door. The driver was leaning sideways from his seat, peering out at them impatiently.

‘Come on you two,’ she smiled, ‘jump on, then we can get going’.

Miss Greentree was a new teacher at the school. She was young, pretty, with a smiley face and a look in her eye that seemed to say to the children ‘I know what you’re thinking!’. It certainly wasn’t an unfriendly look, far from it, for she seemed happy all the time, even when she wasn’t smiling.

It was all in her eyes.

Miss Greentree was neither Fiona’s nor Alexander’s teacher. She usually took the youngest class in junior school, Class 1, but was coming along on the trip to help Mrs Bright who was Alex’s Class 6 teacher (Class 1 was on holiday that day).

Mrs Bright wasn’t at all like Miss Greentree, thought Alexander: bossy, strict, and always insisting that homework was done on time. ‘What was the point of homework anyhow?’, he wondered; it was just a boring waste of time. ‘No talking in class!’ was Mrs Bright’s favourite phrase, ‘haven’t you done your homework yet?’ was her second. Both phrases were often directed at him.

But soon they were on their way. White Horse Hill wasn’t actually very far from their village, only about thirty minutes by bus, but it was an outing all the same and the children were excited.

Alexander stared out of the window as the coach bumped along through potholes and swayed this way and that along the road. Occasionally he overheard Mrs Bright, who was standing up giving a history lesson from the front of the bus. She lurched from side to side every time the bus took a bend in the winding road:

‘White Horse Hill’.

‘A very old place of human habitation’.

‘Settled even before the Romans’.

‘A famous archaeological site’.

‘Fascinating history’.

‘Well, it wasn’t at all fascinating; history was just yuk,’ thought Alexander. He wasn’t really listening again. He glanced at Fiona who sat one seat in front, diagonally opposite. Her best friend sat quietly next to her. Fiona was sitting, hands in lap, listening intently (as ever) to Mrs Bright’s lecture. Alex turned and gazed out the window again, blocking her words out once more. He had wanted to sit at the back, not up at the front with all the girls, but that was the price for being late. All the best seats had been taken.

The bus pulled up inside the wooded car park set on the side of White Horse Hill and, one by one, Class 3 followed by Class 6, jumped down the steps and filed out from it.

‘Children, form up and stay together in twooooos’ announced Mrs Bright, her voice climbing ever more shrilly as she got to the word ‘twooooos’.

‘First we will look at the archaeological map over here,’ she continued, pointing at something mounted on a post, before briskly walking over towards it.

‘Playing Oxmore Under 10’s Sunday, should beat them,’ thought Alex, his mind drifting once more from another of Mrs Bright’s lectures. Absent-mindedly, he kicked a stone across the car park. ‘Beckham scores the winning goal for England!’, shouted the frenzied TV commentator in Alex’s head, ‘England have won the World Cup! They’ve dunnit!’

Alexander smiled to himself. ‘Wait till I’m older and I don’t need to go to school!’, he said to himself, ‘then I’ll win the World Cup for real!’

Fiona was standing quietly with the other girls from Class 3, listening carefully to Mrs Bright’s talk about the history of early humans that once lived on the hill and the large White Horse cut-out from chalk into the side of it. Alexander looked up at it and tilted his head to one side, studying it for a moment. The horse seemed to be leaping over something, he thought.

Classes 3 and 6 walked and stumbled after Mrs Bright in twos and sometimes threes, up along the path that led towards the top of the hill. Sometimes the path was gentle and walking was easy, but at other times it became steep and muddy and the children even had to use their hands, slipping and stumbling like four-legged animals. Mrs Bright never walked slowly, she was always in a hurry to get to somewhere and didn’t even notice the difficulties that the pursuing children were having in trying to keep up with her. It didn’t help that she had insisted that her Class 6 wore school uniforms.

‘We must uphold the image of the school at all times!’, had been her uncompromising response when she had announced the school uniform policy to the disappointed class just the day before.

‘Image? What for? There’s no one here to see us! Home clothes and trainers would have made more sense,’ grumbled Alex. ‘Not so bright, old Mrs Bright!’, he whispered disapprovingly under his breath.

He made it to the summit of the round hill some five minutes later. Mrs Bright continued to stride on ahead as usual, oblivious to the struggling children behind her, but Miss Greentree followed at the rear of the ever lengthening line, with an eager word of support or helping hand to allow the younger children to keep up. Fiona was towards the back with her, but Alex was at the head of the column as usual. It wasn’t that he had any desire to hear Mrs Bright’s warbling voice, he just wanted to be first up the hill. Alex wanted to be first at everything (except bath-time and bed-time of course).

It was a drab winter’s day indeed. There was not a breath of wind, the clouds were low and grey. If they had have been in Scotland, it would have been called a ‘dreich’ day. Sticky, cream coloured mud from the weathered chalk stuck to and caked the children’s’ shoes. Their hands and fingers were white and numb with cold.

The odd bird twittered in the distance and, at one point, a kestrel or (was it a falcon?) hovered over the far side of the hill, hanging on a single breath of wind that danced around the hilltop. Alexander studied the bird awhile. Every so often, the bird would swoop down low, almost touching the grass with its wingtips, before effortlessly rising up again with just one flap of its wings. He watched the bird in fascination but when it at last drifted off into the distance his mind cleared and he looked up around him.

Class 3 and Class 6 were gone! He peered around but they were nowhere to be seen. ‘Uh-oh! I must have been standing here for ages,’ he decided, ‘and now they’ve moved on without me and I’ve lost them. They must have gone down the other side of the hill.’

Alex trotted quickly across the top of the hill to the other side. There he peered down from over the grass-covered dyke that ringed the hilltop. They were nowhere to be seen. ‘That’s funny,’ he thought, ‘where have they all gone?’

And Alex was right, it did seem strange indeed that thirty-odd schoolchildren and two teachers could disappear so easily when there was no cover to be had anywhere. It must have been a trick in the lie of the land. A gentle fold here or there, a ridge with a ditch behind could hide a lot. Reading the land was something he would learn about, in time.

He listened for Mrs Bright’s shrill voice but it was not to be heard anywhere. The air instead was deathly quiet. The birds had stopped twittering too and he felt only the slightest breath of wind brush across his face. He stared blankly to the grey horizon. ‘I’m for it now!’, he thought to himself, suddenly feeling quite alone; alone and very slightly worried.

He started to slide slowly, feet first, down the side of the steep, grassy earth dyke, putting his hand out on the slimy wet grass under him to steady himself and to stop himself from slipping as he went. He knew that if he were to get his trousers covered in mud he would be in real trouble with Mum. And it would all be Mrs Bright’s fault, not that she would get any blame for it though!

The hill certainly wasn’t as high on this side as the one they had climbed up from the car park, but it was much steeper. It didn’t take him long to slide down the first part but then it got steeper still. At the base of the dyke, the ground levelled off but here and there were densely packed, prickly gorse bushes. In an instant, he lost control and careered down the rest of the slope and into them, scratching his legs up to his thighs. The sharp thorns even touched through the thick cloth of his grey school trousers. ’Hardly ‘School Garb’s’ finest,’ he thought miserably (that was the shop Mum had bought them from).

‘Ouch,’ he whispered to himself, ‘ouch, ouch, ouch!’

He tried to ignore the thorns as he got up and continued onward, trying to avoid the bushes as best as he could until, at last, the torment subsided as the prickly gorse gave way to a small wood. He stopped and looked about him. The trees weren’t particularly high. The dead leaves that littered the ground had all been cast and stripped off their small, delicate branches by the autumn gales; for now it was mid-winter and the broad-leafed trees were all fast asleep, waiting only for the warm spring sun which would reawaken them once more.

Alexander continued to wander on, now thinking about that storm that had done so much damage throughout Oxfordshire back in November. Pictures of the destruction had been posted all over the newspapers and even shown on TV.

The trees were