I started writing this 2 months ago while walking the Olvidado in Spain . I was trailing behind on the path which wound through a chestnut plantation . I looked ahead : two figures in front of me consulting the wikiloc to check directions, partly obscured by a huge chestnut tree. I stood in the shade and the words of the rhyme just kept repeating in my head .

Do you remember the rhyme? My grandmother loved chanting nursery rhymes with a clear moral, my mother French songs and ditties . But it was my father who performed all the action rhymes. Ride a Cockhorse, This Little Pig Went to Market, and the other pig one where the little pig “ ran to save his bacon “ as the lightening flashed and the thunder roared.

Most of those rhymes ended with tails chopped off, being boiled alive or captured. So the Chestnut one was a favourite with the actions : chest / nut /tree and then the romance of the baby on his/ her knee. In those days sure as eggs the baby was on a her knee.

Only now walking under this chestnut on a path in Northern Spain do I think of the ramifications of the song and the possible people that could sit on that knee. Or who might have sat on mine through the years, or whose knees I could have been on !

The spreading tree of my childhood, the tree of the rhyme, provided shelter and certainty. Now of course I sense an intimation of possession and control . Also, I’m reading Orwell’s 1984 again, with the voice from the telescreen singing about selling each other : ‘ There lie they, and here lie we/Under the spreading chestnut tree’. Betrayal again. But that is now, not then. Ambiguity, and subtext did not figure in my childhood .

Far from that childhood of laughter and straightforward meanings, I walk along the narrow, shaded path under the chestnut , looking at the other chestnuts spread across the immediate landscape and wonder about narrow escapes . I can’t be specific here but there are brief flashes in my mind of an Irishman with piercing blue eyes and a beautiful voice (and a drinker), the Spaniard during Franco’s time who took me to cell meetings ( so exciting to a 22yr old) , the English guy so kind ( boring) , the rugby hero at University who took me to the ball ( and dropped me because I wore my silly heart in a sleeve and in those days was not witty enough ) … I could go on with the list but you get the idea .

But dragging my heels now and walking slowly again . He’s waiting for me, underneath a chestnut tree on the path ahead . So I did find someone under that metaphorical Chestnut tree of my childhood rhyme . Someone who stuck around . Or rather , we both stuck around.

The rhyme ends:

There she said she’d marry me

And we’re as happy as can be

Underneath the spreading chest nut tree

Underneath the spreading chest nut tree

Shelter,longetivity, shade

As much certainty as one can hope for, The older me is aware of the dead and chopped trees here too .

But I’m walking under the sturdy one .