Small pine tree on a forearm

The seedlings came up on the Tenby lorry on Tuesday, four hundred of them bundled in wet sacking, and the foreman counted them twice because he didn't believe the order. Nobody on the estate wants a line of firs on the north slope. Mr Harcourt says the sheep won't graze under them and the wool price is what it is. I told him the slope was bare as a bald man's crown and the first gale would take the topsoil down into the valley, and he said I could plant them myself if I liked, so I am.

I spent the afternoon with a dibber and a bucket, working up the hill from the stone wall. The ground is stiff with last year's bracken. Each tree wants a hole the length of your forearm and a fistful of peat, pressed in with the heel so it stands. By four my hands had no feeling left in them, but the little ones looked so thin and certain, all those short tiers stacked one above the other, pointing straight up as if someone had told them where to go.

Tom Ellery came up with his dog at dusk and leaned on the gate. He asked what I'd be doing with a forest nobody would live to cut. I said the forest was never meant for us, and he laughed, then went quiet, then said his father had planted the larches by the chapel in 1911, and his mother had walked under them every Sunday of her girlhood.

I'm writing this by the lamp with my boots drying by the range. Come up in spring, Ruth. I'll show you the rows. They won't look like much yet, so you'll have to take my word for them.