The Major

By Helen Kent

HIGHLY COMMENDED in October 2026 Competition

I am surrounded by a metal fence. Chains and props cut into my body. They say these will protect me and for their sakes I pretend it’s true.

I have had many names but, if you remember me at all, it will be as The Major. A title that once belonged to a man – not a bad man, but a man nevertheless. Those trying to save me understand that my kind are always part-male and part-female, yet still they give me his name.

When I was young they were as inconsequential as the mist – while we grew in strength and number.

Then the raids began. The tallest and the strongest were taken away to make ships for their wars. Good neighbours disappeared and yet it wasn’t until he began his perambulations that I understood the extent of our losses.

He introduced himself as Major Hayman Rooke. He told me he was working on a warning for his people, to be published in the year of seventeen ninety-nine. A Sketch of Sherwood Forest would recognise us as hallowed, noble and majestic. It would lament that more than twenty-seven thousand of us had gone.

When he died we were around ten thousand strong. Now, we are fewer than a thousand. And, when spring comes, in this year of two thousand and twenty five, there will be one less. I know they see me as an emblem of their land and they will stand around my fence to mourn. I know they will marvel at everything The Major Oak must have experienced in the past millennium. But I do not know if they will look deep inside and ask what they could have done – what they still can do – to save themselves, and to protect us.

Judges’ Comments: The death of The Major shook many this year, with much written about it. And this piece brings us fully into the grief of this death from the tree’s perspective, not shying away from it but pulling us into the magnitude of the oak’s age, humankind’s exploitation of nature as ‘resource’, the subsequent devastating ecological loss we face and – most importantly – asking of us the question of what we’ll do in response.