A Bit of Earth by Rebecca Smith

woods that ended abruptly in a fence and the gardens of the road where Erica lived.
    You could follow one of two steep paths up the terrace, and whichever you took, you would find yourself at a wire mesh fence and a gate into the car park of the university doctors’ surgery. The gate was never locked (it should have been) but almost nobody knew about it. The fence was covered by a climbing, rambling plant, which in lateautumn revealed itself to be a Chinese gooseberry. The fruits were almost as round as apples, and as hard as stones, but were, none the less, kiwis.
    Guy wasn’t actually in charge of the garden, and he had no dealings with the committee that was. The grounds staff came in occasionally to cut the grass of what had once been the lawn. The garden was so tucked away, and invisible from the university buildings, that hardly anybody went there. Why waste resources on something of no commercial use or public relations value?
    Now that he was seven and in the Juniors, Felix went straight to the garden after school, knowing that his dad would be there. Each day he hoped to meet Snowy, who was very friendly. Felix would climb a tree, or just sit still until he and Guy spotted each other, or sometimes he would walk around, tapping things with a bamboo stick. It looked as though he were practising for a future as a blind person. He wasn’t the sort of child to slash at things.
    â€˜Dad; we could make one of those bamboo forest things, like in France. One of those mazes. Do you remember that one, Dad? It’s in the photos …’
    Yes, he did remember. It had been Susannah’s birthday and she’d chosen, as her birthday trip, to visit a chateau with fantastic, innovative gardens. There had been pairs of giant wooden legs, as tall as the trees themselves, hidden in the forest, a herd of golden deer made from twisted wire, a potager of giant vegetables, the biggest pumpkins in the world; so many wonders now preserved in Susannah’s neatly catalogued albums.
    Guy couldn’t imagine that those things were all still there, that he and Felix might be able to go there again. They had been the only people at the café (how he admired the French nonchalance when it came to tourist attractions). They had eaten sorbets – peach for Susannah, cassis for him and raspberry for Felix – and he remembered how one of the boules had tumbled from Felix’s cornet and landed with a splat in the gravel. Felix had wanted to fit it back onto the cone and attempt to eat it, dust, gravel and all. The waitress, who had seemed haughty when they sat down, immediately brought him another. Perhaps, he thought, people shouldn’t be so kind to children nowadays, perhaps it would be best for children to learn early on that all will come to dust, even framboise ices.
    Then he thought of Felix in his stripy T-shirts and legionnaire’s hat with Tintin on the back and thought, no, let it all melt away slowly.
    The bamboo maze was one of their favourite bits. Making one would be quite simple really. But much easier to start from scratch and do it with neat planting, rather than attempt to hack into an established bamboo thicket like those that were growing up on some of the slopes in the garden. Guy considered that he would need a serious machete for that. He didn’t have one good enough in the tool shed. Perhaps the grounds staff would have one, but they probably wouldn’t let him borrow it.
    The floor of the French bamboo maze had been soft. Yes, it had almost certainly been planned, and done by clever planting. Perhaps one day they might …

    A place where Felix often sat and waited was the huge tree stump that they called the Badger House. The tree had fallen during the 1987 hurricane, and been dragged away by a hired tractor, but the badger’s sett beneath it had survived. In fact it had been there for many hundreds of years. Felix had never seen the badgers, but Guy had promised that