The Devastated Forest

I must have dozed off eventually as the next thing I heard was Mike shouting up the stairs. It was finally morning and thankfully the house still seemed to be in one piece. Mike said

“Take a look outside!”

Stepping outside, I gasped: where was the brick path which leads up to the house? We walked in wonderment down the hill climbing and dodging tree branches and broken stems and smashed garden pots. Everywhere, there  were trees heeled over and up rooted. When we approached the lane, it was just completely lost under mountains of debris. We realised we were hemmed in and cut off by road to the outside world. We also discovered back at home that the telephone wasn’t working. We were isolated, no internet then, no emails or What App’s etc. It was a weird feeling.

So what did we do? We had breakfast and spent time deciding what, if anything we could do?

Revitalised, by eggs and bacon and several cups of tea we made our way down the drive with Mike carrying the chain saw and me with various saws croppers and axes. We started to cut away the fallen hawthorn and the old apple tree that had fallen across the drive and gradually cleared a passage for the cars. Greendene Lane was a different proposition and there was no way we could clear that! It was fallen branches as far as we could see and it would take us weeks to clear it. It was eerily silent, no cars, no walkers, no cyclists as we clambered over the mass of chaos; an Armageddon, a John Martin apocalypse!

Up above, in the Sheepleas a whole mass of beech trees were uprooted, their roots like spiders gently swaying in the calmer wind now. Later, I went up to the pine wood to see my ‘Siegfried’s forest’.  This was where I had been painting, using the rich dark canopy as a theme for a painting of ‘Siegfried’s Forest’, based on Wagner’s Ring cycle. To my great despair and shock, the whole plantation was completely felled by the gale. None of them, apart from a few small ragged trunks near the edge of the area, were still standing. The trunks lay like broken pencils cut down and sprawling like massacred soldiers. It was a scene in a World War 1 film clip, a Paul Nash painting. My heart was broken and my eyes filled with tears, I had never experienced anything as powerful as that storm and was lost in mourning for my felled forest.