the fig tree

the short burst of warmth in late april succeeded in seducing the fruits into life. green swellings fattened as they sucked their life from the parent branches and, as merciless fledglings, elbowed their scrawny siblings to the ground.

this year a crop seemed likely. previous autumns' progeny had clung on, teasing with the promise of bounty to come, only to abort as the year progressed to be replaced by late season offerings which snuck to ripeness as the year's shutters came down.

perhaps their scarcity made them so desirable. they didn't taste particularly good. or bad. or really of anything. their colour and softness testified to their edibility, so they must have been ripe.

it was really more what they stood for. they were the exotic in a cold land. they told a tale of bedouin and pyramids, sand and armies, life and oblivion. they were a direct route to poetry and romance, to the world of solomen ibn daoud and the butterfly that stamped and as such they were priceless.





each leathery bulb became a ticket to a shared and lost other life. to a soldier on a naked desert strafed by a stuka pilot. the soldier said later, before he realised how much the words would expose, that the war had damaged him.

then the firing stopped. and the plane headed away. perhaps the ammunition was exhausted. perhaps the guns had jammed. or no fuel. perhaps the soldier's quiet determination to keep trying despite his futility in the sandy expanse spoke to the pilot, one warrior to another. man to man, an act of compassion? a gesture of peace in the midst of mayhem.

his khaki family took hold of him after that and sent him to india. this was a quieter war of training, social clubs and regimental hockey. patronage by the brigadier and the inevitable romance with the colonel's daughter before, ultimately, back to civvy street.

thirty years later the fig tree was planted. a cutting from an aquaintance in the pub, it was positioned in a poor piece of ground in the angle between two boundary walls. with quiet determination it got its feet in and grew.

it grew for two decades before it first showed serious intent to bearing fruit. an old man, called in to cut the grass, had hacked off a few lower branches. this seemed to remind the tree of its mortality and the requirement to preserve the species.

during that season satisfying pendulous fruits formed. ripening, some fell but most were picked to be eaten fresh at breakfast time straight or added to savoury evening stews. in fact such was the bounty that several had to be frozen.

that had been the soldier's last summer. his uneqivocal determination, combined with that of his wife and children, to resist the grim reaper's most determined advances had kept him alive for nearly three years following a series of serious medical challenges.

his condition worsened as the fruits ripened. by october it became doubtful that he would survive until the next christmas. he didn't.

© Patrick Ellis