Nearby, however, just inside the neighbouring wood, a different oak, only two centuries old, had grown up in close company with other oaks and beech trees, tall and straight. Its canopy was therefore very much smaller; its roots smaller in like measure.

And so it was, in the great turning and wrenching of the howling wind, that suddenly, dragged clean out of the ground by nature's blind forces, this tall oak crashed down through its neighbours and smashed, a falling giant, to the Forest floor.

It is an awesome thing when an oak tree is torn down, but also beneficial. For the broken sections of the tree's canopy, its great network of branches, lie like so many protective cages upon the ground. Within these cages for a year or two a new shoot may grow because the deer and other creatures that prey upon saplings cannot reach it.

Two cages of this kind fell upon that stormy night. And in the coming acorn fall, after so many years in which its children all had been wasted, two acorns from the miraculous tree would lie in the leaf mould within these oaken cages and take root, and grow.

ALICE

1635

What's a life? Not a continuum, certainly. A collection of memories, perhaps; only a few.

She could just recollect old Clement Albion. She had been only four when he died, but she still remembered her grandfather. Not a face, exactly, but a quiet, benign presence in a Tudor house with big timber-framed gables. That must have been the old Albion House, she realized; not her Albion House.

Her Albion House began on a summer day.

It was very warm. It must have been late morning; perhaps it was a Saturday. She did not know. But they had walked down, just the two of them, from the old church at Boldre - just she and her father. She was eight at the time. They walked along the lane on the east side of the river and turned down the track into the wood. There were a number of young beech trees, saplings mostly, mixed with the oak and ash. The sun was slanting through the light-green lattice of the canopy; the saplings spread their leaves like trails of vapour through the underwood; birds were singing. She was so pleased that she had started to skip; her father was holding her hand.

They saw the house when they came round the bend in the track. The red-brick walls were nearly up. One of the two gables had already been refaced; the old oak roof timbers exposed their bare framework to the blue sky. The dusty site looked peaceful in the warm sun. A few men were quietly working on the upper storey; the clink of bricks being tapped into place was the only sound that disturbed the quiet.