Pemberton itself was a let-down after the country that surrounded it. Knowing that timber was its beginning and its end, I expected a charming shaded town of simple shacks and sylvan prospects. I got the shack part right, and maybe even the simple, but I saw no charm. The wooden dwellings were all uniform in design and built in straight lines like state or factory housing. The timber had everywhere weathered to a drab unpainted grey. Perhaps you could have too much of trees.

But a tree was what we had come to see – the Gloucester Tree, a 300-year-old, 61-metre giant, ‘the tallest fire look-out in the world’ – and we dutifully followed the signs out of Pemberton to it. The Gloucester Tree no longer functioned as a look-out. Spotter-planes could now do that job more effectively. But an observation deck had been constructed for visitors who wanted to climb the tree, no more than four at a time, provided that they weren’t put off by the message on a warning board: ‘If you are unfit or have a heart condition you are advised to stay on the ground.’

‘Since we’re a bit pushed for time,’ I said, ‘I think we might stay on the ground.’

We watched a little girl called Tara shin expertly to the top. Natural bravery took her half-way, the screams of her younger brother stranded in fear at the bottom did the rest. ‘You did well,’ his mother told the boy, ‘you climbed ten rungs.’

Several hundred rungs further up the minuscule red flash that was his sister called down, ‘It’s easy. It’s really easy.’

The boy howled and stamped his feet. The mother made it worse by insisting on the achievement of those miserable ten rungs. And finally, to save the good name of his sex, the father had to begin the steepling climb himself. Long after he had become invisible we could hear his heavy breathing.

The mother – a chubby blonde in a pink and grey track-suit – held the hand of her virility-violated boy and craned her neck heavenwards. Up and around the trunk of the Gloucester Tree the whole pre-ordained domestic drama of her life unfolded inexorably. It was like watching Ibsen in an open-air performance.

‘Dad there yet, Tara?’ we heard her shouting as we left.

Since there was no point in hanging around Pemberton we set off for Northcliffe where, if we’d remembered right, Fred Luff had said he was going to take over an ailing pub. The minute we arrived in Northcliffe I wished we’d stayed in Pemberton. The light was fading. There seemed to be no activity in the corrugated iron shacks that lined the road. A backwoodsman wearing a denim suit cut across us on his motorbike. At the garage a frazzled-looking woman in a flowered frock and anorak served me petrol.

‘You’re a long way from home,’ she said.

‘You too,’ I noticed.