The wall came tumbling down was penned over ten minutes at a writing workshop – don’t judge me!
It was hardly Humpty Dumpty. Nothing childish or fun about it at all. Irene stared at the pile of rubble which – as short a time ago as yesterday evening – had been an ancient stone wall, overgrown with moss and ferns, dividing her garden from the woods beyond.
She shifted her gaze and scowled. Yes, the new gap had allowed the fruit, flower and veg predators in. And they had had a wild time.
What had once been a patch of neat lines of greening haulms was now a muddy churn, tiny potatoes – the survivors – scattered through out. Anything growing up poles had been nibbled to the base, the poles then discarded at broken angles on the trampled grass.
Flowering plants had been similarly gnawed or, if not to the predators’ taste, ripped from their beds and flung about like confetti at a wedding. Hoops of protective cloth – from the frost not four-legged beasties – lay torn, muddy and tangled, the tiny shoots beneath, simply gone.
The garden was a write-off.
Irene bit her lip, gulped back tears of horror and rage. ‘Blasted animals,’ she muttered. How dare they destroy in one night her months of planning, digging, building raised beds, mulching, sowing, watering ….
‘I didn’t do all that as a feast to you lot,’ she screamed at the trees through the tumbled gap.
A gust of wind caught the high branches which soughed a Don’t give a FF response.
But what had happened to the wall? No animal could have caused this damage. Irene clambered over the rubble, skinning her knees and hands, hauling the smaller stones out of the way until she could reach the cavernous gap, which resembled a bite taken by a massive stone-munching beast.
The ground beyond told the tale. Deep, wide, wheel tracks in the soft earth, right up to the wall. Overlaid by zig-zagging tracks which went back into the trees.
Poachers, chasing deer or boar, not seeing the wall until it was too late. How on earth had she slept through the din of metal against the wall, of the falling stones, the revving engine?
Irony. One of the reasons she’d retreated to the Forest and taken up her outdoor pursuits was to try to sleep better. And it had worked, her insomnia a thing of the city-past.
Or perhaps, she considered, as she climbed back over the stones and made her dispirited way to the kitchen for a needed coffee, a thing to come again in the city-future.
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