Could be three or four hundred years, he said. There used to be another big oak like this, he said, in the field, but it fell in a storm and when his father had it cut up they counted the rings in the stump and it was three hundred and fifty years old. So, it was all right to be here, with her. After so many years. Then, enough time had passed. He remembered how huge that other tree was on the ground, fallen in an autumn storm with still its weight of leaves on it that must have caught the wind; the excitement of climbing over and under and through a jungle of branches that had once stood high above them; the vastness of the exhumed roots and the fear of looking into the pit they had torn out of the ground; how deep it was, how it had already begun to fill with thick clayey water. The boys were told to stand back when their father went out with the men to clear the tree, cutting and pulling the branches that were heavy and green with leaf and like trees in themselves, trimming and stacking the big ones and piling the rest for burning, the trunk so wide that he had to bring other men with a saw powered by a tractor to slice it through. They found a fragment of lead wedged deep in the wood, he told her, so close to the heart of the tree that his father thought that it dated from the time of the Civil War. He had felt a kind of awe at that, as a seven-year-old, that there might have been a battle here. He tried to explain this, hearing himself as he spoke, speaking so calmly here in this place about these other things, at the same time hearing his father’s voice in his mind, seeing his father’s fingers, the roughened hand of a farmer, tracing the rings on the stump. There was fighting here, in the Civil War, his father had said, telling them about Roundheads and Cavaliers, he following Richard’s lead and favouring the Cavaliers though he learnt when he was older that the Roundheads were meant to be better.