Cautionary Tales Read Free Page B

small volunteer mulberry tree that grew by our driveway. Probably a bird dropped the seed, randomly. The location wasn’t ideal, as the soil was mostly gravel, but it was gamely trying, with its intriguingly curvaceous leaves and brightly orange roots. Picture the Ace of Clubs: the leaves were roughly like that. Picture a fresh carrot: the root color. It was about six feet tall, rather thin and rangy. But then trucks were running over it, pushing it flat, breaking off branches, including the main stem, about four feet off the ground. So I rescued it by transplanting it to a safer site near our house. But I had to cut back the reaching roots to do it. I gave it fresh soil and plenty of water, but the loss of some branches and roots was hard on it. For a week the poor little tree wilted and shed its leaves, suffering, and I feared it would not survive. Then I found one single smallest leaf that remained, and buds along the trunk and branches for other leaves. It was making it! Since then, two years, it has branched and leafed splendidly. One day it will make a fine tree. I hope it understands that I damaged it in the clumsy transplanting in order to save it.
    But what about root pruning a person? That is, stripping back the intellectual and emotional basis and transplanting him elsewhere? I believe I understand, because it happened to me. I was born in England in 1934. My parents were active in the British Friends Service Committee, feeding starving children during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. It was too dangerous for their own children, so we remained mostly in England until 1938, with our maternal grandparents, cared for by a nanny. Then when I was four we rejoined our parents in Spain. In 1940 my father was arrested by the dictatorship, without a basis, and rescued only by dint of a smuggled-out post card and the threat of withdrawal of significant British aid. So they let him out, but on condition he leave the country. Thus we came to America in August 1940, on the last passenger ship out, as World War Two raged in Europe. I had my sixth birthday on the ship, with a cake made of sawdust, because the war made pastries scarce. I have been in America ever since.
    So what does this have to do with root pruning? That is the subtext. My technical history is only a shadow of my emotional history, as is the case with every human being. You see, the beginning of my memory is not with my parents, but with the nanny who cared for us. She was the one who was with us, who took us to the park, who did everything for us. When my parents returned to pick us up and take us to Spain, they were on the verge of being strangers, just two identities on my horizon. The nanny was the prime nurturing figure of my life. When I lost her, I lost my heart. The damage didn’t show, because it wasn’t physical, but I had been emotionally orphaned. I had been root pruned.
    My sister and I survived in Spain, getting to know our parents, cared for by other nannies, and we started to learn Spanish. Then came my father’s expulsion, and we came to America. Again we had to start over, with a half-new language and a whole new country. Then my parents’ marriage strained and foundered, and I was in that limbo of severed attachment. I took three years and five schools to make it through first grade. I wet my bed at night for several years, and developed assorted nervous tics, such as jerking my hands or tossing my head every few seconds. I stopped growing, and in 9 th grade was the smallest member of my class, male or female. I never lived more than two years in any one place until I went to boarding school, 9 th through 12 th grades. It was another root pruning. I used to daydream of waking up and discovering that it was all a bad dream, and I would be back home and happy in England with the nanny. It never happened, and finally I came to terms with America. I separated myself emotionally from my fracturing family and forged my own