The Wishing Tree

The house I grew up in backed onto the local park and, as kids, my chums and I were intimately familiar with all its nooks and crannies. I’m talking about the nooks and crannies of the park, of course; although I was also familiar with the nooks and crannies of the house I grew up in. In the park there was a tree that stood on its own; it was a hawthorn tree and split into two trunks immediately after it emerged from the ground. The legend that had been handed down to us was that if you stepped through the fork of the tree you could make a wish, and, presumably, it would come true. I seem to remember that we all frequently stepped through the fork but I can neither remember any wishes that I made nor whether any of them came true.

One day, having become bored with continually stepping through the split in the tree, one of our number, Steve, decided to take things a stage further and climb it. The rest of us stood on the ground watching as Steve shinned his way up one of the trunks and disappeared into the thick canopy above. After a period of time when something should have happened but didn’t, we started shouting up to Steve, but answer came there none. We must have hung around the bottom of that tree for a good hour or so shouting and throwing sticks up into it. Why we threw sticks I don’t know; I imagine we thought we could dislodge Steve if we were lucky enough to hit him with one. Anyway, we eventually got bored and wandered off.

Later, we decided to go round to Steve’s house to see if he had gone home yet. We knocked on the door and it was opened by his mother. We knew it was his mother because we had all knocked on that same door countless times before and asked “ is your Steve in”, and been met with the response “yes, I’ll tell him you’re here”. But this time we were met with a blank stare and the question, “who is Steve”? She didn’t even show any sign of recognising any of us. At school it was just the same; no one seemed to have any knowledge of Steve and there was absolutely no sign of him ever having been there.

We did return to the tree in the autumn when the leaves had fallen but there was still no sign of Steve. We even rummaged through the pile of dead leaves at the base of the tree but found nothing resembling the remains of him. We continued going into the park but we never again went anywhere near the Wishing Tree.


In fond memory of our friend, Steve.