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you get poisoned, just eating stuff by the road?” I said.
    “No, but you’ve got to eat the black ones.”
    I put one in my mouth. It was really sour.
    “We haven’t had enough sun,” Roger said, screwing up his face. “Maybe in another week or so.”
    As I spat out the blackberry, I saw something small and pale moving on an enormous, ugly old tree far away on the wild edge of the churchyard, beyond the gravestones. Leafy branches grew out of the massive trunk, but no farther up than halfway. The tree had no crown. Instead, a huge, bare white branch towered high above the cluster of branches lower down, ending in a gigantic hook split into two.
    Roger followed my gaze. “We don’t like that tree, Pete and me,” he said. “Most of it’s dead. It’s most probably a gypsy tree.”
    “What’s a gypsy tree, then?”
    “Well, if you give a gypsy some money or buy some pegs or something, then they’ll hang a rag from a tree near your house so the next gypsy who comes along knows you’ll give them something as well.”
    “But there ain’t no houses here. Why do you think it’s a gypsy tree?”
    “Because there’s things on it,” said Pete, “and when there’s things on a tree, it’s a gypsy tree.”
    “It’s like it’s got a dead heart,” I said.
    A little way down the road was a wide iron gate, opening onto the dirt path that led to the small church, its warm stone walls flickering in the swaying shadows of the fat overhanging trees.
    We cut across in front of the tower, weaving our way around the weathered, ivy-choked crosses and tombstones and trying not to trip over the tops of the ancient graves hidden in the long grass. As we drew nearer to the far boundary of the churchyard, I felt my shoes and socks becoming sodden. The ground was growing spongier, and the small rounded hummocks of moss began to give way under our feet so that we were trailing through shallow water. We came close to the tree at last. I saw that the great thick roots facing us were rising up out of a boggy pool, ringed with reeds and bulrushes. There was higher ground at the back where the ground seemed to be dry, and on that side the tree appeared to be well rooted in the shaded earth.
    Odd things hung from the branches — dirty rags, shredded by the wind, all faded to the same shade of greyish white, fastened on with rusty wire so long ago that the bark of the tree had grown around it; the remains of children’s shoes; an old leather sole; a small buckle. Nailed to the trunk was a little, rough square of wood, covered with faint scratches that might once have been writing; other rusty nails stuck out with nothing on them at all, as if the things had long blown away and rotted in the soil or had fallen off to be lost in the green stagnant water.
    I looked up. A face with one eye stared down at me. It was the broken head of an old doll tied onto a branch by its long dirty hair.

    A pile of brown, rotting flowers was stacked up against the wall on the dark side of the church.
    “They’re from people’s funerals,” I told Cora as she picked up some soggy little cards in cellophane covers. “Old Mr. Hibbert comes down and tidies up the newer graves and chucks the old wreaths on this heap. He’s done it for years. Once, Pete and I had to hide for two hours while he was pottering about. If he’d seen us, he would have sneaked on us to Mum.”
    “You know, some of these flowers are still all right,” Cora said. “They’ve got little wires coming out of them.” She held up the rusting frame of a square wreath. “Look, we could make new wreaths with flowers that ain’t mouldy yet and put them on them poor old graves from hundreds of years ago where nobody visits.”
    My first thought was that Gary Webb in my class would probably beat me up or something if he found out I’d been playing with flowers. I’d had a lot of trouble one way and another with Gary Webb. I saw his mum at the Confirmations and she’d got the same