A Tree on Fire by Alan Sillitoe

poppy-sellers. I’ll call in this afternoon when I’m back from the pub. Maybe you’ll have better news.’
    â€˜Father, there’s just one thing. Adam and I found a beautiful old printing-press in Louth. We can get it for fifteen pounds, then go ahead with the magazine. It’ll cost fifty pounds an issue if we set it up ourselves.’
    He thought for a moment. They’ll be the ruin of me, if I’m not too stingy with them. And the same if I am. ‘Win that civil war to my satisfaction, and I’ll do it.’
    â€˜That’ll take weeks. We could print some subversive leaflets in the meantime. I know a way to get them handed round factories in Nottingham. Also at Scunthorpe.’
    He took half a dozen ten-pound notes from his pocket and, in mint-condition, they swallowed down onto the Thames valley. ‘Get the press, then, and we’ll see how it goes.’ Richard stood back to consider the overall situation. Handley’s head showed in again. ‘Shove the poetry out of your mind for a bit – do you hear me? – and get them fucking Welshmen up from the valleys.’
    â€˜Yes, father.’
    He walked aimlessly around the garden. Furrows underfoot were muddy, ridges of salt-loam beaten in by sea-wind, this part of the garden scarred by miniature craters where cabbages had been ripped out from mother earth. It smelt good, felt soft and rich, tender to his elastic-sided boots hardly meant for the treading of such intense soil. The fruit-trees – apple, plum, pear – were empty and withered. He felt dead, snuffed out by too much winter and isolation, as if his soul were drifting and he was unable to pull it back under control. Let it drift, he thought, let me go, idle and blind, stricken and numb. I don’t mind floating like a brainless fool: the quicker I get to the end and die, the sooner I’m born again. I don’t believe in death, at least not in life, not for me. But oblivion is breathing close unless something happens.
    Hoping to throw off such thoughts, he went in for dinner. Enid put veal and salad before him. ‘That journalist didn’t seem in a very good mood when he left. Walked down the hill as if he had an eagle on his back. He didn’t even talk to Mandy, and that’s rare.’
    He cut up his meat, appetite good. ‘I gave him what for. He wanted to draw me out, so I let him overdraw me. That’s the only way.’
    â€˜Is it?’ she said, setting her own plate down. They’d fallen in love when she was seventeen and he nineteen, in those far–off days on the Lincolnshire coast, and Enid was well pregnant at the marriage, soft-faced and big-bellied, earnestly looking at him, and he shy with a wide-open smile at being dragged into something that made him the butt of his mates’ jokes while also marking him down for some special unspoken respect. She had a slim straight nose, small chin, full mouth. Her light-blue eyes had a slight slant, upper and lower lids never far apart, Tartar almost in shape, one of those rare English faces that looked as if they had come from central Asia, then full smooth cheeks and fair hair, a face on which the troubles of life do not fall too hard, though Enid had been familiar with every one. Loving Handley, she wasn’t even aware of having ‘put up’ with him, which may have contributed to Handley’s youthfulness, while hers was certainly rooted in it. Her long bound-up hair was as pale as when they’d met, and her skin had an unchanging attractive pallor, in spite of bitter Lincolnshire winters and the never-ending work of seven children. Handley loved her also, and in some way they had never stopped being afraid of each other, but during their quarrels they loathed each other so profoundly that it couldn’t even be said that they were in love any more.
    â€˜Why go out of your way to make enemies?’ she said. ‘If you try not to make