The neighbours’ apple tree was already full grown when we moved in 32 years ago – its welcome shade passing sedately across the lawn on sunny days, dappling the swings, paddling pool, and brightly coloured garden scatterings of our growing children. With the coming of autumn, its buxom, rose-streaked harvest filled many a crumble, pie and flaky turnover, usually served with lashings of custard.

Mrs Taylor would bring them round by the hundredweight and for the better part of ten years we were never short of apple sauce – but when her husband died she moved away to be closer to family and we got new neighbours. The neatly bordered lawn that used to frame the apple tree’s sturdy trunk quickly went to seed and acquired an irregular mantle of brambles, dented metal, decomposing furniture and other landfill. A thick shroud of ivy swarmed unchecked over the smooth, leathery bark, and the annual bounty of plump fruit (aside from that which came down on our side of the wall) simply lay where it had fallen, reeking of uncontrolled fermentation and making scrapyard cider for wasps to get drunk on. 

The house fared no better. Paint was left to peel, window frames to rot, guttering to sag, roof tiles to slip until the whole building looked sick and decrepit, but neglect could not diminish the tree’s vigour. If anything it grew stronger, more fecund, its crowded branches filled with sound and movement from the well-fed little birds that nested there, generation after generation. Those sturdy boughs watched over the increasingly relaxed gatherings that attended our shared 40th, 50th and 60th birthday celebrations. I would have predicted with utter confidence that the beloved old tree would also preside over our 70th birthdays and beyond, but on the morning of Sunday the 21st of July, 2024 we returned from a two week holiday in France to find our garden looking disorientatingly naked.

The neighbours’ house had been sold at auction. The new owners were looking to do it up and sell it on for a quick profit. The tree had been deemed surplus to requirements. Gone.

That proud, permanent-seeming presence reduced, shockingly, to an ivy-choked stump. No soft rustle of leaves. No chatter of birdsong. No interest for the eye. Just grey clouds scudding from horizon to horizon, breaking occasionally to reveal a bare-bulb sun, glaring down from the newly empty sky.

Goodbye, old friend. I wish I had known that you were leaving before you went.