6 JULY 1985, Page 34

The Letter

I read your letter: then I took a knife and went into the garden. There was much that needed doing: everything in leaf and flower, grossly intertwined; each branch a mess of sappy green. I pruned the vine until the twitching stalks lay in a pile.

I pulled the red camellia blossoms down and ground them into fragments with my heel.

The fruit trees next; and how the ladder shook with my good work. The limbs were hard to burn — the buds curled up and shrivelled in the shock.

The willow's vulgar, semaphoring green was last. The stump shone pale above the earth, neat as a tooth set in a hungry mouth.

Connie Bensley