I can see everything from here.

The top of the tree swayed just so little beneath his weight. He could see clear in every direction. He was like a hawk on a telegraph pole, looking down. Sharp as a hawk, watching for movement below. There was his mother talking to Billy who was getting the lawnmower out. There was Mrs T coming on her bicycle up the drive. There was Jackson’s little grey tractor out in their fields where he was topping the field edges before harvest. The fields were still their fields though Jackson worked them. Now Billy was pulling at the cord of the mower. The mower was starting with a puff of blue smoke. His mother was walking towards the tree across the lawn. Mum. Look, Mum. See where I am. She didn’t hear him over the sound of the mower.

Later he took his father’s old binoculars and put a string on them and climbed up there again, on his own this time, and tied the binoculars to a small branch so that they would be there whenever he went to his perch.

I’m like a hawk, he said to his mother. I climb high up the tree.

She didn’t know how high he meant.

I see everything. I watch you from high up. I see Billy. I see Jackson. I see Jackson’s men. I see the people who come to visit. I see you talking to them, wherever you are.

He thought a lot about hawks. There were sparrowhawks along the roads and kestrels, and sometimes bigger birds, buzzards, and once he saw what he thought was a harrier off the marshes, identifying it later from a book. He watched them through the binoculars. He saw how still they could be, holding as still sometimes in the sky as on a pole. How quickly they swooped when they saw whatever it was they saw moving on the ground. How ruthless they were.

When Jackson’s men brought the combine out, he swooped down.

Mum, can we go and see?

Yes, if the men’ll have you.

But sometimes still he did not like to see Jackson on the fields. And nothing that Jackson did went on without his seeing, at least when he was home. Once he came home and saw that Jackson had changed the fields. He did not like it when Jackson did such things.

It was in the autumn and the winter that that sort of thing happened, when the fields were bare. It must have been when they came home for one autumn half-term or the Christmas holiday. The first thing that went wrong was that Billy had removed the rope. He found Billy working in the shed. He shouted at Billy. Billy, you shouldn’t have done that. An eleven- or maybe twelve-year-old scolding a man in his sixties; he would be in trouble for that later. Billy said that the rope was rotten, he took it away because it was dangerous. But you can’t do that, Billy. Daddy put it there.