Von Stauffenberg's apple tree
I need to be a bit more careful about the kind of audio books I listen to in the garden.
On my daily 45-minute commute into work on the bike, I listen to audio books. Trust me, this is not as hazardous as it sounds . The human priority of attention is definitely devoted to safety. Never am I clanking along the Hammersmith Road, so engrossed in a Terry Pratchett that I fail to see the 45-ton lorry. It’s always the other way round, the moment something potentially dangerous is picked up on the radar, the novel dissolves into the background, a bit like RDS on your car radio, where they interrupt whatever you’re listening to give you traffic news of places you’ve never heard of.
Pounding the same old route day after day, the narrative of the book doesn’t attach itself to any of the landscape. I can often remember exact places on car journeys where we talked about a certain subject; the location and the conversation become inextricably entwined.
Having rattled along Kensington High Street listening to the Patrick Leigh-Fermor trilogy (brilliant), SPQR by Mary Beard (dominated by the phrase “BCE”), White Bicycles by Joe Boyd (full of tales of the 1960s rock scene in London), Us by David Nicholls (not as good as One Day), the Bernard Hinault story (perfect if you like the Tour de France), or David Mitchell’s Autobiography (as funny as you’d expect, and touching, too) the narrative of the books hasn’t stuck with any of the places.
However…
I made the mistake of going out to prune the apple tree while listening to the tail end of Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler*. Normally I stick on the i-Pod touch and range though The Ultimate Bee Gees, as I’m sure Monty Don does. But the Hitler audio book was going on for so long and I wanted to finish it and get on to Danny Baker’s Going to Sea in a Sieve.
The big apple tree in our garden remains there under sufferance. As I may have mentioned before, it’s a show pony. It produces beautiful, big bright red apples that people admire from a distance. “What a marvellous apple tree” they say. To which we respond, “try eating one”. At which point they will get a mouthful of flowery pap. That’s if they haven’t already got a mouthful of codling moth larvae, which regard the tree as a bit of a fun park.
Apart from not being able to eat them, they deposit themselves on the grass each day for about a month in the autumn, necessitating their removal on a constant basis before the grass goes yellow. The only good thing to say about the tree is that it holds a nice set of fairy lights.
I was going to chop it down this winter, but if you’ve read a few of these blogs you’ll know by now that intention is one thing in the grumpy garden and resolution another. It needed pruning anyway, so instead of giving it the medium trim, I went for the very short back and sides. After wielding the chainsaw I would review what it looked like in its abbreviated form.
So I set about it with the anvil loppers and the electric chainsaw, whilst listening to the unfolding events of July 1944 and the von Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler in the Wolf’s Lair. It took about three hours to lop the branches, saw them up into firewood, prune off all the twiggery and collect and pile them up in a bonfire. All the while the dreadful events unfolded in Berlin after Claus failed to set the second bomb which would have made certain.
Now the two events are inextricably linked. When I look at the cut limbs of the tree all I can think about is Goebbels not having his telephone line cut and instead of being known as ‘that apple tree’ it is known as Claus.
Next time I prune anything I’ll stick to listening to the Bee Gees Greatest Hits (Volumes 1 and 2), which does include the theme tune to my garden, Stayin' Alive (although Gloria Gaynor might have sung something even more appropriate…)
*Please note, this is the only WWII book in the collection, I haven't got stacks of Nazi biographies waiting to be read - Joseph Goebells' - The Cappuccino Years, or Albert Speer's Pop Up Third Reich.
