This story may well be recorded better and more truthfully elsewhere and if so I can only apologise, on all counts. I have no wish to steal material but I have never come across it in written form. If I can do it justice this story is too good and certainly too rare to waste. Anyway the salient points are here.
Harvey Briggs, the farming journalist, was married to my Aunt Laura and they farmed at Ballakilmartin on Whitebridge Hill.
I was not a frequent visitor but I did keep in touch from time to time. On one particular day I arrived to discover a general air of suppressed levity. It turned out that the cause of this rueful, almost guilty amusement was a regular visitor who had just recently left.
Joe Kneen was retired, still fit and I believe liked a drink. Nothing excessive you understand just being sociable. Once a week, weather permitting, Joe would walk from Onchan down Cowin’s Hill and up through Bibaloe Glen for a cup of tea at the farm. Earlier that afternoon he had arrived on Ballakilmartin yard in a state of considerable agitation, confusion and distress.
As he had reached the head of the glen he noticed a large conifer tree which was lying flat on the ground. Then, entirely of its own volition, the tree heaved itself off the ground and stood upright. Not a phenomenon one encounters every day. No one was there, no ropes or blocks, and a glen can be an eerie, evocative place. I would be quite prepared to believe his assertion that the hackles rose on the back of his neck.
By the time Joe reached the farm he had been quite unable to decide whether he had experienced the onset of delirium tremens or witnessed an act of God.
(Which, in insurance speak, I suppose he had.)
There had been a wind storm the previous night which had blown the tree down. In the morning it lay across the wall at the end of Ballakilmartin road with the top out in the traffic lane. The top of the tree had then been cut back to the wall to clear the road.
Why the tree did not react immediately to having its top hamper removed is a question. The stored energy in the bent roots would not have increased in the meantime. Whatever the reason, it waited until the precise, propitious moment to present Joe with a somewhat alarming epiphany.
Well just put your self in his shoes for a moment, the experience must have given him a hell of a fright.
Harvey may well have chosen not to record this story out of sympathy, friendship and respect.
David Kelly
David Kelly | Poetry & Short Stories 