29 Failure

We worked out from our weather trends that we might get some chestnuts every 10 years, possibly enough for a bit of a party around a bonfire, participants roasting the nuts and themselves and pretending to enjoy it when they burnt their tongues. Decades into the future it would be something to tell their grandchildren accustomed only to high rise apartments and fast food.

What was it about trees and me? The Toona hadn’t even got into the ground to later wither up and die and the chestnuts promised but then retracted. Was this a progression of failure perhaps launched a long time before? When I was a mediocre and uninterested student at secondary school, the idea of trudging through a life tied to a desk from 9 to 5 was a vision of sheer pointlessness and gloom. I didn’t like inside, I only liked outside and the more apparent space that outside provided the better. I told my dad, I’m going to be a bulldozer driver. They earn heaps more than you and it’s outside work, sort of. He freaked. I guess he freaked because parents are supposed to sacrifice their lives so their children can move into higher quality air than they themselves breathed. A distinguished schoolmaster shouldn’t beget a bulldozer driver. He declared I must do one more year at school to get at least a few ‘O levels’ to my name and then I could do what I wanted. I couldn’t get a bulldozer driver’s licence anyway until I was 16.

This was serious because he normally didn’t bother me at all except once when I dated his school’s cleaner’s daughter who was very cute. I had to rethink my life. I was incredibly bored with school except for the sports things and the occasional interface with girls. So I decided to do science to fill the year; Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Zoology. And maybe I could then be a Forestry Officer, living and working outside and occasionally driving a bulldozer. It seemed to satisfy the future mirage. Of course I would continue with advanced music because only girls did that, and maybe a bit of art and woodwork which I liked.

To fill out the new maybe dream, I worked in forests during holidays with real forestry workers. Trees were magic. My holiday work the previous year being a D8 bulldozer driver’s mate was forgotten.

A couple of years passed and I now had an acceptable school record with both ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels. My dad was happy but didn’t crow by saying I told you so; he had a few hundred other kids to worry about. Scholastically I had now exceeded the Forestry Officer requirements and could contemplate aiming for an administrative job in Forestry, a desk job 9 to 5 inside, perhaps in Rhodesia or Kenya. Foreign parts at this stage were unknown so in my brain were classified as outside, thus acceptable. I applied to do a Forestry degree in a foreign country, the University of Wales. I was closing in on working with trees, outside with things I liked.

In those days it wasn’t just scores that got you into university courses, it was interviews. I headed off into this foreign land inhabited by small strange-speaking peoples for my interview. There were 15 places and 65 students short-listed. We think you should do Agriculture or Crop Science my interview panel said. You are not suitable for Forestry. Trees turned from mirage to miasma as distant as ever.