Zero tolerance of arboreal presence

It couldn’t have been less like a war zone. It was last Sunday, I was planting five fruit trees on the Village Trust land above the mill pond. There’d been reasoned debate - our side - and shouting and waving of fists - the other side - and the Trust had democratically decided on a management plan for the bit of land to the North of the pond.
The “other side” - of the disagreement, not the pond - are broadly the natives. They do not wholly appreciate that England has become a country with laws and stuff related to the public good. They would like it to be more like the warlords of Afghanistan and the North West Frontier, owning everything, their word the law, their word death.
They want to get rid of what they call, with angry distaste, Nature.
Animus against nature has a reason round here. It’s the most built rural environment in the world. It’s a stony zone. There are dry stone walls everywhere, often along the sides of streams, and mill dams and leats and steps, as well as the mills themselves, all fine masonry.
The enemy of masonry is trees. Trees lift stones, topple walls, alder roots make dams leak, divert goits from mill wheels; and trees start by being saplings. So you have to exterminate trees. Zero tolerance of arboreal presence.
The natives, who still hold this as a chthonic and unquestionable duty, want to cut everything down. Have grass. Or bracken’s all right. They point to the unmanaged scrub down our end of the pond, ash, hawthorn, bramble, oak, alder, willow, twenty different sorts of birds; they gesture and grimace with genuine revulsion.
“Our side” are the offcomers. We like nature. True, some of us offcomers are offensive idiots. One neighbour is a Southerner who considers himself, on what grounds are never clear, to be posh and the natives to be lower than vermin. He has some sort of ADD problem and a moronic laugh. (He also stands around his garden in a tee-shirt in the kind of weather I need to put on a vest, two sweaters, a fleece and thermal hat before I open the back door. This is really annoying).
The offcomers mostly seem to live up this end of the pond, and the natives live down the other end. It was agreed that the other end could cut down all the beech trees and try to turn them back into the beech hedge they had once been. In the middle section where the bracken is we should plant fruit trees, gorse and broom. And our end we should cut down the Leylandii which had been put in about twenty years ago, add more native trees and shrubs, but otherwise leave it as it is.
So I had just put a few plum and apple trees over the wall above the middle section, the bracken, and walked down with my spade to dig the first hole, when one of the fishermen the other side of the pond starts shouting at me.
These are not fishermen in the sense of fishermen from the village I come from. These arrive at the weekend dressed in camouflage gear, they put up a couple of cowshit coloured tents, they rig up two £1500 rods apiece and leave them on stands with electronic bite detectors, they attach a TV aerial to a tree and then they all go inside the tents and do whatever it is men decked in combat gear do together at the weekend in very small tents.
(In summer you get very different sorts of fisherpeople, sitting in the sun, whole families sometimes, they catch fish and throw them back merrily - you are not allowed to keep them. But I’ve never seen these winter men catch a fish. When they are not in the tent they stand and drink beer. I think maybe they are the advance guard a Countryside Alliance coup.
“What the fuck are you fucking doing?” enquires this particular fisherman.
I explain I’m planting fruit trees. To further queries from him I explain that I know it’s not my fucking land, I explain about the Village Trust in my polite and reasoning voice, I piss him off. He enquires whether I could not plant the trees at a time when he and his colleagues were not fishing.
I explain that I couldn’t.
I start to dig my first hole.
A face pops over the wall above to ask me what I’m fucking doing. This is one of the natives.
I explain - the democratic process and all
But this guy is a victim. His house is at the boundary between natives and offcomers. He wants the middle bit, in front of him, which is to be fruit trees gorse and broom, to remain in its present monoculture of bracken. I explain again about democracy. He explains about warlords and seigniorial rights. I explain it’s only fruit trees and they aren’t really going to cut off the light of the sun from his house twenty metres above and make him die of rickets. He brightens. He says, “Oh fruit trees. That’s all right then, we can prune them, and have lots of fruit.”
It seemed a perfect solution. The other grouse of the natives was that this land had at some time in living memory - living memory goes back thee hundred years round here - been allotments, and they wanted to continue where the Enclosure Acts had failed and procure the land for themselves. So his answer meant, if only symbolically, “I can both cut these trees and own their produce”.
A good resolution. He retired.
Unfortunately at that moment another native, a hot-headed lad, drove up and went into the first native’s house with him. They obviously spoke together of their victimhood, because the first native came back more angry than ever - not so much about the fruit trees now, but about the process that had decided that they should be planted.
At this point my neighbour, the wally snob with ADD, turned up to “help” me and add fuel to the ancient seigniorial anger. And a group of camouflaged fisherman had gathered on the far bank and were eyeing us silently.
Luckily just then the tree planting expert turned up, a genuinely pleasant person, the first nice person on site that morning, in jeans and a rain jacket with a woolly hat pulled down to the eyebrows.
This expert had two advantages. The first and greatest was that she was a young woman. My wally ADD neighbour explained to her how the local scum (names? natives don’t have names) were kicking up a fuss, and how the hotheaded native lad would find himself with an asbo or inside if he wasn’t careful.
The expert then revealed her second great advantage. She too was a native, born and bred and resident not a mile away, and indeed had grown up with the hotheaded lad. And indeed rather liked him.
At last we could get on with the tree planting.