In the 20th century the number of children and adults climbing trees appears to have been declining down the generations. We already seem divorced from our grandparents, to whom exploring was an essential part of play. David Haffner, a climber from Coventry in his mid-seventies, sent me an account of his childhood escapades on the city’s outskirts. In this glorious 1950s tale of derring-do, a boy named Tom climbs a tall elm to reach a linnet’s nest high up in its branches. Thirty feet above the ground, egged on by his companions, Tom makes a desperate move, slips from a branch and comes crashing down into a thicket of elm saplings. Miraculously, he survives with no more than a few cuts and bruises. David’s story is one of many from an era when a ‘boys-will-be-boys’ mentality prevailed. For all its potential horror, the tale is a love letter to natural adventure and the antithesis of today’s risk-averse culture.
Another example of the generation gap is found in a curious American legal case brought to court in 1919. The lawsuit involved a power company forced to pay damages to the father of a boy killed while climbing a tree on common ground, through which electricity cables had been strung. The judgment concluded that the boy had broken no laws and that ‘courts further realise that children are apt to climb trees’. It’s hard to imagine a similar case today, when children and adults alike are more likely to be plugged into headphones and screens than found up in the branches. There are currently several laws against climbing trees in public spaces, and as recently as 2012 Enfield council attempted to ban the practice altogether in its parks and green spaces.
In spite of these societal shifts, it is hardly surprising that the impulse to climb trees remains strong; the art is lost but the memory lives on. Abandon a small child in the depths of a forest and, after much sobbing at their predicament, you might well find them up a tree. Walk through a city park on a summer’s day and observe groups of toddlers crowded around the base of tall oaks, desperately trying to reach the branches. Their parents, each some distance apart, will probably be playing on their phones. We are less cut off from our deep history than from our own childhood.
How then do we stop ourselves devolving from climbing children to earthbound adults? Happily, the damage done is only superficial and it is easier to discard the short years of our nurture than the fundamental draw of our nature. Climbing, we regress back beyond our industrial present, rejoining the scramblers of the past and retracing our ancestral tree into its shrouded pre-history. The hard surfaces of the city’s streets yield to an older kingdom, where tunnels of webbed branch and briar superimpose themselves on the human-built environment. Tomorrow, you can step out of your front door and into a tree, reclaiming a forgotten birthright; it only takes a moment to return over the threshold of the first branch.
My own journey back to the trees began on a day shadowed by storm cloud, the end of summer with a fierce wind funnelling through central London and sweeping all before it. I was working in an office housed on the top floor of an old terrace. The building faced Regent’s Park but a brick parapet blocked the window view, built to hide the old servant’s quarters from the high society of the day. Although we could glimpse a slice of sky, the park remained invisible. Our only other reminder of the world outside was a London plane that grew to the full height of the building, the tips of its highest branches scratching at the window panes.
That morning the weather had caused chaos in the artificial order of our office. Torrential rain had opened a hidden sluice gate in the building’s plasterwork and a river of water descended, channelled by the carpet between the desks into a great indoor delta. The building’s caretaker had bravely opened a skylight in search of the flood’s source but returned unenlightened. Foolishly, he left the ladder and the key to the roof behind him. When the office emptied out at lunch I seized my chance to finally see the view.
Stepping out onto the lead roof, I was nearly blown clean over the edge by the wind. I latched on to the skylight’s surround like a limpet and gazed in awe at the panorama beyond the gutter. Regent’s Park stretched across my entire field of vision, the summer canopy conjoined into a single roiling green sea, the tree tops looking like another world hanging over London. Everywhere, thick foliage performed a furious dance, the willow’s long locks thrashing against the oak’s Afro, the whole scene bursting with a life far removed from my own. In contrast, my desk was locked in a desensitised world, a static realm where the only movements were the twitching of plastic mice. It was a rare awakening.
In one of life’s happy coincidences I had recently begun reading the adventures of Cosimo, a little-known hero sprung from the imagination of Italo Calvino. In his 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees, the author describes a mythical Italian valley where the forest grows so thick that each tree interlaces with the next. Into this wooded wonderland the figure of Cosimo is released, a kind of 18th-century Tarzan. Climbing out of his father’s dining-room window in protest at being forced to eat snails, Cosimo disappears into the canopy and refuses to return. His regular aerial pastimes include reading and hunting, then later, seducing women and starting revolutions. He lives out the rest of his days far from the circumscribed routine of his former life. Over the course of the novel he acquires ‘bandy legs and long monkey-like arms’, returning to the physiognomy of his ape ancestors while cultivating a tree-top philosophy all of his own. He never again sets foot on the ground, not even in death.
Under the thick summer verdure of Regent’s Park, Cosimo’s ‘Republic of Arborea’, a land where roaming the canopy was as easy as crossing the street, did not seem so distant. I imagined opening the office window, five floors off the ground, climbing over the parapet and leaping onto the outstretched arm of the plane tree. By a series of bridges and ladders I’d make my way down and out across the street, dropping from the final branch into the elusive Eden on the far side. In reality I took the lift.
Five minutes later I found myself walking across the windswept park lawns. Here and there the branches of separate trees linked overhead, and I pictured Cosimo skipping across the divides. Although careful planting schemes displaced the natural wilderness in my head, the violent weather made rose beds and box hedges look as wild as an untamed wood. Before long the rain returned and I ran for the shelter of a pine.
Under the canopy the sound of the storm intensified, a waterfall now ringing the tree’s perimeter. Placing a hand on the lowest branch level with my chest, I looked up into the pine’s conical interior. Stretching far above, the crown seemed like a safe haven even as its uppermost branches swayed out of sight. Cautiously, I stepped over the first rung and out onto the next, the tree’s thick arms offering a fixed ladder. My confidence soon began to grow, and before long I was high above the park and sitting on a wide crossbar. Looking down on a blustery London from this new habitat, I felt strangely protected. To the south, the city rolled out beyond the borders of the park and, although less than ten minutes’ walk from my office, I already felt a world apart.
Returning to work, sodden and with sap-covered hands, I struggled to settle back into my daily routine. The material pleasures of city life paled in comparison with my experience of climbing the tree. Sitting in the storm-tossed pine, my whole body cradled by the branches, had awoken a dormant escapist. The four walls of my office were no longer protection against the weather but an insentient cage.
Weeks later I was still dwelling on that same five minutes spent perched in the tree, and every lunch break I strayed back into the park, searching for a new tower to climb. These brief interludes between hours of phone calls, emails and spreadsheets became more protracted, and my colleagues’ suspicions deepened. I would return to work with a head full of curling branches and feathered skylines, and when there was no alternative but to sit at my desk I searched online for traces of other climbers in the city. But I found none. The only men and women who seemed to scale the trees were, like Cosimo, the figments of others’ imaginations.
The history of climbing trees is composed as much from myth as recorded deed. Our memories of an older, entangled world, a life lived in the forests, express themselves across the full scope of our fiction and fairy tale.
Alongside Cosimo are other heroes who cast aside the everyday and returned to the trees. Memorable among these are Robin, John and Harold in the wildwood classic Brendon Chase, a band of brothers who escape the guardianship of their ‘iron-grey’ aunt