Long listed for the 2023 Urban Tree festival writing competition

Em Gray reads “Deirdre” by Lizzie Gwinnell

He could see the tree from the window of his prison cell.

“Betula pendula,” the teacher said when he drew it in art class. “Silver birch. It’s associated with love and new beginnings.”

He called the tree Deirdre after his grandmother. At night, her white bark glowed in
the security lights that shone down on barbed wire and metal gates, softening their
daytime retributions. There had only been one tree on the council estate where he
grew up and no one had cared about it. It had been set fire to, urinated on and
ignored. It wasn’t important. Drugs and cars and girls were important, not trees.

Now trees were important. Now when the perimeters of his world were reduced to a
prison cell, the silver birch had something he no longer had: freedom to bend with
the wind, freedom to feel the warmth of the sun, freedom to stretch roots deep into
the earth. He thought about the birds that sheltered inside her leafy canopy and the
bats and owls who visited at night. He thought about all the men she had seen come
and go whilst growing quietly in the grey grim grounds of His Majesty’s Prison.

Every time he looked at the tree he felt the sap of hope rise inside him. Every night
he said goodnight to her before he went to sleep. And as he slept, she watched over
him, whispering her secrets into the dark: love and new beginnings, love and new
beginnings.