I had a strange encounter last Saturday, and it’s taken me until now to decide whether to write about it. I doubt the man involved will ever read this blog, but I do worry about upsetting people by what I make public.
I went to our community wood on Saturday to help plant the bulbs they were gifted by a charity, only to find that the session had been cancelled as the keenest volunteers had been driving to the site when a deer crossed the road without looking and put its hooves through their windscreen. They were unhurt but very shaken, and with a badly damaged car to sort out. The deer ran off unharmed. Val (the committee member who brought the bulbs up to store in the cabin) told me the news, and I said I’d stay and plant a few.
Then a man arrived from the direction of the wood. He was dressed in an old woolly jumper and a home-knit woolly scarf, though he spoke like a member of minor nobility. Val greeted him as Malcolm and took it as a matter of course that he had pitched his tent in the wood and was intending to stay the night there.
After Val left, I was alone with him. If she hadn’t been there to introduce him, I would have greeted him politely, made an excuse and left. As it was, I stood chatting to him in the chilly late afternoon. He knew the birds flying swirls above the wood, where they’d migrated from and what they fed on and spent as much time watching them through binoculars as he spent talking to me. I asked if he’d be cold in the tent and he said he was looking forward to it, waking to the early morning damp and the wildlife chuntering through the leaves. I told him where we were – four hundred yards away – and invited him to knock on the door if he needed anything, up to and including a hot meal and a bed for the night.
It was said in a moment of impulse and compassion for an elderly man in thin clothing on a cold night, followed by a moment of sheer O Shit as I wondered how to explain to Himself that he needed to make the pizza stretch to three people rather than two. Malcolm was startled, asked if I was sure, and after that it would have been rude to say “Actually, no, my husband will run round the kitchen quacking like a duck when I tell him”, so I said “Oh, of course, we’ll eat at seven – turn up any time.”
We stood chatting for another thirty minutes, then I went home to explain myself. By then, I had found out who I had invited to dinner. Malcolm was the son of the man who had donated ten acres of Essex woodland to his local community in his late wife’s memory, to be used for recreation and as a nature reserve. Malcolm had missed out on inheriting a share in a valuable piece of land, and he thoroughly approved of his father’s decision
He arrived just after seven with a bottle of very nice red wine as a guest-gift. His car had got stuck in the mud at the lower end of the wood, so he was doubly grateful for the offer of a meal – there was no chance of reaching the nearest pub or restaurant for a hot meal there. He’d walked to the Co-op for the wine and walked back to ours, a couple of miles in the freezing cold. He had mistaken next door’s mansion for our shabbier house, and ended up being accosted quite aggressively by our wealthier neighbour to the west (our lovely Glaswegian neighbours to the east of us would have sat him on their porch with a glass of whiskey and called us over to join them all). He settled at the table, thanked us both for the meal and we were away.
It’s the best evening we’ve had for a long time. He was well read, had thought out his opinions and was ready to discuss ours and his without hinting that he was right. Above all, he listened. It’s a rarer skill than you might realise. I have been interrupted, talked over and ignored for most of my adult life and to have someone sit quietly, listen and respond to what I have just said was a rare treat. He also talked. He dissed the Roman Empire, discussed the legends of which trees were supposedly inhabited by evil spirits and told us of the strong reaction to the pidgin version of Romeo and Juliet performed by his Cameroonian students (their parents stormed at him for teaching their kids to disobey their parents). We spent a long time listening to him. His life had never been conventional.
He enjoyed the plain veggie pizza and the warm mince pies but he wouldn’t be persuaded to sleep in our spare room. At the end of the evening he wound his scarf around his neck, slipped into his battered shoes and disappeared off into the night, thanking us again.
The following day he was there in the wood, surrounded by people who were happy to see him and keen to talk to him. He reminded me of his father, a man I had met just once. His father was sociable, cheerful, optimistic and driven to help others, and Malcolm is definitely his father’s son.
Malcolm has a standing invitation to drop by whenever he’s in the area, and I hope he takes us up on it. And the next time I’m in the community wood I will be thanking the whole family who have wanted this wood to belong to us all.
Julia Chalkley 