Hours passed swiftly, each man an automaton planting his allotted area. George walked between low furrows, ‘dreels’ in the forestry argot, and reached a shallow trench containing nursery plants bound in bundles of one hundred. Fact was, each bundle professed to contain one hundred but actual counts by members of the squad revealed that the average was one hundred and twenty five, and that they were being systematically cheated out of their true bonus earnings based on the weekly total planted. The Commission hierarchy, in the prim persona of Regional Forester Munro, insisted that each bundle contained precisely one hundred plants despite many random audits which disproved this.
Using the blade of his planting spade, George quickly sliced through the strings around a couple of bundles and scooped the plants into a planting bag looped over one shoulder to hang at his waist. He could feel his back hot in the sun.
“Not stopping for a bite to eat?”
George looked around. Louis was green in each metaphorical use of the word. Some confused notion of redressing the loss of vital chlorophyll caused by logging and burning of rain forests in the Amazon basin and Indonesia had induced him to leave middle class suburbia. Should have been christened Rowan or something suitably arboreal, George thought.
“Not yet, I’ll put in another couple of bundles first,” George responded, reflecting that he would rather connect his privates to the national grid than spend time conversing with this ridiculously perspiring idealist.
Louis was Home Counties produce, daddy a minor civil servant who had realised early his offspring would not scholarship to Oxford from his cut-rate private school. Louis had shown himself to be neither prodigy nor late developer. Reluctant at rugger, an embarrassment on the school cricket strip either batting or bowling and entirely undistinguished in academia or any form of athletics, he had followed a parental path to the service of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. What latent rebelliousness had brought him to worship photosynthesis and Lochaber was still being pondered by his family.
The young man had hoped to break a morning of mindless toil and ease his complaining back. Sweat trickled down both smooth flanks.
“Absolutely,” he said and watched George stride off. His cherished ideal of helping create cathedrals of chlorophyll had wooed him from the Civil Service and the familial nest but the unexpected drudgery of creation was already pressing for a return to softly suburban Surrey. Louis unslung his planting bag beside the trench and sat gloomily contemplating bundles of young pine and spruce waiting to be transplanted into a forestry dreel.
George arrived at his designated area, churned-up three years previously by a mechanical plough. Similarly mechanical, he advanced two lengthy paces beyond the last sprig of pine and continued to extend his planting along the furrow.
Back at the trench, Louis saw two distant figures appear over a rise and gradually approach over the broken moor; one tall, a gazelle on the hoof, the other stocky and hurried. Sunlight sparked on shouldered spades.
Louis recognised them immediately – Roland bounding, Guy pounding beside – Londoners, and eighteen month veterans of the current squad.
“It’s the lovely Louis”, Roland struck his practised spade into the turf, “how is your day going, darling?”
“Fair, I think,” Louis said slowly. “Wish I had better ground though. I’ve only put in four hundred so far, you think that’s ok?”
“We can put in a bundle each for you, dear boy,” Roland said, “We’ve finished early on the hill over there.”
“We’ll eat first,” Guy said shortly. “Seen any of the others?”
“Only George, he’s beasting away somewhere,” eyes peered out of the plump face hoping for a reaction. “Said he would eat later.”
“That George,” Roland said, “he’s so competitive.”
Louis gazed at the pair who had exchanged a trendily glamorous life in homophilic London for the wilds of Lochaber. He felt a vague sense of admiration for the compact Guy and the graceful Roland, both of whom paid him court as a fellow adventurer, he had no doubt. That they would plant two hundred spruce on his behalf was proof of a deepening bond.
Roland and Guy subsided beside Louis and the three sat with sandwiches and thermos flasks. They watched a pair of buzzards wheel high above. A stray ball of cloud passed over the sun chased by a puff of cooler air, and a shadow ran over the moor, only its occasional hillocks unturned by the Commission plough.
“I‘ve had a rather dull life,” Louis said brightly, “unlike all of you working here.” He looked in expectation at Roland. No reply was forthcoming. Louis persisted. “Nothing was ever going to change. That’s really why I …”
“Please don’t, Louis,” Roland spoke softly. “We don’t talk previous existence here. Nobody does, apart from the locals. We don’t look back.”
Louis shone pinkly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …”
“That’s all right,” Roland interrupted. “You weren’t to know.”
“But what do we talk about?” Louis was reddening. “You can’t have a conversation about planting trees. What about … what about politics?”
Roland raised both hands in theatrical dismay and turned towards Guy.
“No politics,” Guy said softly. “Politics are out.”
And there the matter rested. Louis sulked in silence.
After a time, Guy pushed himself to his feet and Roland sprang upright beside him. Louis arose stiffly, hands on hips, and spades were grasped.
“Where do you want us to put these bundles in?” Guy grunted.
“I’ll show you,” Louis blew out his cheeks.
Elsewhere, scattered about the undulating moor, seven other members of the squad continued to work, bending and straightening rhythmically as they planted along the dreels.