Nat the Nut's Prophetic Vision

No one seemed to take much note at first. Old-timers on park benches passed a comment or two, Somebody wrote a letter to the local rag, but no one (who mattered, that is) really seemed to mind. Of course, you will always have your bellyachers and woolly romantics with nothing better to do than whine about the way things are going, - the loss of bird life, the silenced dawn chorus, the vanishing English hedgerow, you know the sort of thing. The leaves began falling long before autumn. "Funny," they said, "curious," "that's one for the book." This was all very interesting for botanists, environmentalists, chemists and the like. Such words as "pollution," "soil erosion" and "deprivation" were bandied about, but no one was much the wiser though the experts were agreed on one point. "Photosynthesis provides the basis of all life." This was interesting but nothing like as interesting as the favourite for Ascot, the football results, the Top of the Pops, the late night thriller or the FT index. All that changed. Foresters and timber merchants became concerned about the decaying cores of many trees. The government became concerned, too, (not so much about the fate of the trees as such as about the effect the scarcity of wood was having on the paper industry and inflation). Then the doom-watchers caught the scent and there was talk of an imminent ecological collapse, but the man in the street still passed it all off as the usual load of rot. Then Kew Gardens, Epping Forest, Central Park, the Everglades and the Bois de Boulogne went the way of all wood. A tramp, locally known as Nat the Nut, was found in the village cemetery gibbering, Before being bundled into an ambulance, he was heard to say: "With these very ears I heard 'em groan, and this is what one of 'em said: 'Tonight we are dying, yew and I, and the morrow sees us dead.' And the willows wept in the valleys and the trees on the hills pined away." When the harvest failed, the church bells tolled for a woe no man could gainsay, for none doubted then the trees were lost or held it was only they.