From the Forest Read online

  We have compounded the problem by replacing ‘nature studies’ – a hands-on knowledge of what is actually happening that until recently began in primary school with ‘the nature table’ – with ‘ecology’, which too often is something that happens in books and on TV, far away on polar ice-caps and in equatorial jungles. Too often this approach presents nature as something fragile, threatened and best left alone. Children can end up thinking they ‘love’ wild animals – but never any wild animals they have actually encountered: pandas, not rats; tarantulas, not bees.

  Love without knowledge is a dangerous thing. In an article in the Daily Mail in February 2011, during the furore about the Cameron government’s consultation paper on the Forestry Commission Estate, Max Hastings wrote an article in which he said of commercial forestry:Although many of its dreary plantations are indeed the much-discussed ‘havens for wildlife’, they are the wrong sort. Vermin and predators prosper in their dark depths, and take a heavy toll on songbirds and small mammals.

  The concept of a ‘wrong sort’ of wildlife shows dangerous love coupled with ignorance.8 What form of wildlife is not ‘predatory’? What is the right sort? Many songbirds are ‘predatory’ in as much as they eat insects; badgers are predatory – in Spain, their principal food is rabbits, and in Britain they devour Hastings’ ‘small mammals’ as well as earth worms, frogs and other reptiles. Are weasels ‘right’ small mammals or ‘wrong’ predators? (The derivation of the word ‘weasel’ is probably from the Anglo-Saxon weatsop, meaning ‘a vicious bloodthirsty animal’.) Spiders are predatory. And obviously birds of prey are predatory. Meanwhile, ‘vermin’, according to the OED, is an entirely social category, properly applied to species that take preserved game, or that are believed to do so. The idea of a ‘wrong sort’ of wild life is patently ridiculous and a symptom of a very ‘wrong sort’ of androcentric sentimentality, which is good neither for ‘nature’ nor for the individual who feels it.9

  In consequence of both child-raising and educational approaches, I seriously fear that we are failing to nourish the beautiful and precious quality of resilience in our children. I mean the simple honest awareness that horrible and dangerous things do happen, but that you can cope; with a modest application of good sense you can not only survive, you can gain from the experience.10

  I see both forests and fairy stories as a specific antidote to this. Forests because, oddly enough, they are relatively safe terrains for exploration. This is partly because there are no lethal animals lurking in them. No one has died of an adder bite in Britain since 1974. There are few cliffs to fall off and small chance of drowning. They present challenges but not, on the whole, serious danger. But it is also because in fact you do not have to go very far into woodland to feel that excitement of aloneness and secrecy, as Robert Macfarlane and I discovered. You can hide in a wood within earshot of your grown-ups, in a way that you cannot usually on a mountainside or beach. Moreover, forests offer an extraordinary range of free things to do – adventurous things and contemplative things. Forests offer infinite possibilities for creative play – especially, I think, because they often provide a choice of physical levels; climbing up a tree is different from hiding inside one. A long view through or over woodland is radically other from hiding behind or within a thicket. And, where the stories are still told, everyone knows that forests are magical.

  The fairy stories themselves are also training grounds for resilience. Terrible, terrible dangers threaten the children in fairy stories – from cruel and abusive parents to giants, wolves and witches. But in every single case, not through special skills or miraculous interventions, but through the application of good sense (and, interestingly, good manners), the children do not merely survive, they return home wiser, richer and happier.

  In the Grimms’ collection there are, in fact, surprisingly few stories that are about children, rather than adolescents or young adults. It can be a little hard to work this out – Snow White, for example, is called ‘Little’ in the original title itself, and the story says explicitly that she becomes ‘more beautiful than the Queen herself ’ when she is only seven. However, after she eats the apple and falls into her coma we are told that although she lay ‘a long, long time in the glass coffin’, ‘she did not change but looked as though she were asleep’. Nonetheless, when she recovers she is old enough to get married more or less instantly. The Little Goosegirl, despite the soubriquet, is clearly an adult, or very nearly so, because the story begins with her setting out to her own wedding; and the apparently very young princess who plays with a ball in the garden, is lectured by her father, and throws the poor frog across her bedroom in a tantrum in ‘The Frog Prince’ is also old enough to marry him when he is restored to his human form. The line between adult and child is more blurred in the stories.

  Nonetheless, there are actual children in these tales. Red Riding Hood is described as ‘a dear little girl’, and is perceived and treated as a child who has to learn a lesson about caution and obedience. 11

  Hansel and Gretel are definitely quite small children, as are the less well-known pair in ‘Brother and Sister’ and Marlinchen and her stepbrother in ‘The Juniper Tree’.12 Above all, there are the various Thumbling (Tom Thumb) stories in which the hero is not just a child but a very tiny one.

  Curiously, the stories about actual children are very often much darker and less playful than the ones about adults. Truly horrendous things happen to these children. They are the victims of abusive households.13 They (sensibly) run away14 or are deliberately abandoned in the forest. Here appalling things occur – surprisingly often the danger is about being eaten. The Wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood; the witch in her gingerbread house plans to eat Hansel; in ‘The Juniper Tree’ the father is tricked by the wicked stepmother into eating his own son, served up as a tasty stew; in ‘Brother and Sister’ the boy is enchanted into the form of a fawn and hunted within an inch of his life; Thumbling is swallowed by a cow. This is rather strange because it is not a very probable danger, compared with, say, the dangers of fire, eating something toxic or drowning. Within the historic period there have been very few animals in northern Europe likely to eat anyone; it feels to me a symbolic peril, perhaps arising more out of a real fear of hunger: ‘be careful because the hungry are dangerous’.15

  But – and this is the point – every single fairy story ends happily. The children demonstrate excellent coping strategies. They are highly competent and are rewarded for this. In as much as these stories have a pedagogical or ethical thrust, it is not, ‘Don’t go into the forest’, or, ‘Stay at home and be safe.’ It is, ‘Go into the forest, but go cannily.’ Some strangers are dangerous; some, however, are very helpful – you cannot tell which by appearances (beautiful, young or smooth-spoken are not reliable indicators of virtue; but ugliness, age and strange appearance are not evidence of malevolence), so learn to discriminate. Be polite, caring of your environment, and hard working. Above all, keep your wits about you.

  Hansel and Gretel are imperilled. They are taken into the forest to be abandoned. Hansel thwarts their parents’ first attempt by laying a trail of pebbles which allows them to find their way home: this is sensible. The second time, however, he tries to lay a trail of breadcrumbs: this is a wrong move and they get lost in the forest. Eventually they find the gingerbread house – but they are greedy and try and eat the house, so they are captured by the witch. In a series of cunning ways – Hansel sticks a chicken bone through the bars of his cage so the witch thinks he is too skinny to eat; Gretel lures the witch into her own oven – they outwit their enemy. They become very rich and go home in triumph.

  Little Sister and Little Brother are abused at home. They run away into the forest. Despite his sister’s explicit warnings, the boy is self-indulgent – first drinking from an enchanted stream, so that he is turned into a deer, and then wanting to go out even though there is a hunt going on. The sister, however, keeps her head, makes careful plans, correctly nurses his wounds and eventuall
y negotiates a successful settlement with a king which leaves her as queen and her brother freed from the spell. (There is a sub-theme in those stories that are about actual children: ‘Trust your big sister. Girls are more likely to be intelligent and self controlled than boys.’ This theme is entirely absent from stories about adolescents and adults. It makes me wonder who was telling these particular tales, given how frequently the care of smaller children fell to the oldest girl in any rural family.)

  Marlinchen and her stepbrother, in ‘The Juniper Tree’, are also abused. In fact, her mother murders the boy and tries to cast the blame on her own daughter. She feeds the dead child to her husband (who finds him delicious). But Marlinchen keeps her cool and gathers up the bones, listens to advice from the birds, and brings about her brother’s full recovery.

  Thumbling is so small that in one tale he is carried away on the steam from the cooking pot. But he faces a series of extreme dangers, both from the natural world and from ‘bad’ people. What is fascinating here, as he hides in mouse holes, wriggles into buildings, outwits robbers and cows and fish, makes a substantial fortune and returns home safely in the end, is that he does this precisely by exploiting his apparent disadvantage – all his triumphs occur because, with great ingenuity and cunning, he uses his tiny stature to his own profitable ends. He is resilient, and resilience leads not just to survival but to triumph.

  At the moment, there is an odd sense culturally that we do not want children to feel competent and able in the world; we do not want them to roam freely and make swings for themselves – we prefer, rather, to keep them in the house, to choose and organise their activities for them (and to pay for this with our money and our time, which keeps them further under our control), never to let them be alone or ‘mooching around’ doing ‘nothing’.

  We do not just keep young people away from the woods – and, of course, from other wild places. We bowdlerise the fairy stories, saying – even believing – that they are ‘too cruel’. It is interesting that most of the cruelty comes in the form of punishment of bad parents by their children – are we sub-consciously afraid of something? Nowadays, wicked stepmothers even in these non-realistic stories are never made to dance in red-hot iron shoes, shoved in spiked barrels to be drowned or burned at stakes. Children are allowed no comeback. But what is lost along with the savagery in this more self-regarding approach is the chance for children to learn that they can cope, they can survive, they can overcome fear and horror.

  Interestingly, we have also abandoned another genre of literature, one which encouraged children to see themselves as capable on their own in the wild. There is a sort of novel for younger readers that was immensely popular up until the last quarter of the twentieth century and that has now well-nigh disappeared: stories of adventures in which children are on their own and deal with problems under a veneer of realism; novels like Swallows and Amazons or The Famous Five or, to take a forest example, Brendon Chase by BB (the naturalist and artist D. J. Watkins-Pitchford, who was also his own illustrator).16 In Brendan Chase three children run away and live for a year in the wood, camping in the base of a hollow oak tree and ‘living off the land’; they have to evade adults, but also find supportive friends. What is interesting is that they do this not to escape a terrible home life, nor from terror about their boarding schools, but more or less for the fun of it, acting with a healthy but callous indifference to their adults’ anxiety.

  Another change is that when they are finally caught, their perfectly loving parents respond with punitive sternness. No contemporary children’s story would end ‘I will not describe the just punishments and penances which they had to undergo before they had fully expiated their sins.’ But nor would any modern story allow children the fun, freedom and self-sufficiency that the three boys have in the forest. Robin, John and Harold have little need for grown-ups, but an intimate knowledge of and joy in the woods and the seasons.

  In his foreword to the Jane Nissen Books 2000 edition of Brendon Chase, Philip Pullman wrote:This is the sort of book that will never be written again . . . the slaughter is endless. Not only do they kill; they steal wild birds’ eggs and catch butterflies. To a modern sensibility this is worse than advocating the compulsory use of hard drugs. Why should anyone want to read it? Firstly to learn some valuable lessons about nature . . . Brendon Chase shows how it’s possible to take pleasure in shooting and killing and simultaneously to love natural things with a passion that approaches ecstasy. And out of that love comes knowledge.

  We have kept the magical element of fairy stories in modern books for young people; fantasy worlds are now the location of adventures and moral combat. But we have abandoned the immensely reassuring realist element of these old tales: the forests are dangerous but you can survive; use your own intelligence and courage and you will come back safely.

  We do not only keep children physically out of the forests – just as seriously, we are depriving them of the language of the woods. It is nearly impossible to understand, or even to see, things you do not have a name for. In 2008, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary – designed for children aged between 7 and 9 – decided that the modern English primary school child had no use for a remarkable range of fairly basic ‘nature words’, including:• catkin;

  • brook;

  • acorn;

  • buttercup;

  • blackberry;

  • conker;

  • holly;

  • ivy;

  • mistletoe.

  Conker! Blackberry! And where I live, the former now lie on the road until the cars squash them, and the latter rot in the hedges until the frost takes them; presumably even rural children do not know what either are, let alone what to do with them.

  Of course, the words that have replaced them – like database, export, curriculum, vandalism, negotiate, committee, compulsory, bullet point, voicemail, citizenship, dyslexic and celebrity – are useful words to have, but I was walking in Epping Forest with Robert Macfarlane, a master of enchantment, who sums it up in his wonderful essay, ‘A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’:A basic language-literacy of nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with nature and landscape.17

  The editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary defend these omissions by arguing that their selection of words reflects the fact that Britain is now a multicultural modern country; but I cannot understand how it makes something more multicultural to eliminate a whole culture. The child of the Oxford Junior Dictionary is an urban, deracinated technocrat, not so much multicultural as de-cultured: a child deprived of magic.

  It is obvious that playing in a forest for which you have no responsibility, in which you never have to labour, in which you have no investment, and to which you have been mechanically conveyed by an adult is not the same thing as playing in the forest which is both your home and your workplace and whose well-being is your well-being. Our robust and lovely fairy stories come out of that older forest, they reunite us with our cultural roots there, and children should have access to them particularly as it gets harder to access the real thing; these stories teach them both that the forest is magical and generous and also that it is dark and terrible. The stories could remind children about something they are being taught to forget: that intelligence and knowledge and love allow a person to overcome the worst disasters and be better off for it.

  It seems sad that the paternalistic nineteenth-century Corporation of the City of London was prepared to make an investment for its subordinates more generous in spirit than we are willing to make for our children. They need the freedom of the forests and their stories.

  Hansel and Gretel

  Once upon a time there were two little children, gaunt with hunger, glazed with grief, lost in the forest. They walked hand in hand through tanglewood and terror until they came to a house made of gingerbread.
A wicked witch lived there.

  This was a long time ago. Now they are grown up; grounded and prosperous. They have never forgotten what they had learned in the woods. They used the witch’s treasure trove wisely, investing first in healthy food and then in education. They continue to love and cherish each other. They always treat the world with respect and the world repays them with safety and joy.

  Now Hansel is head forester to the King. He goes daily and with authority into the greenwood, walking under the trees and along small paths with knowledge and pleasure. He looks after the trees, coppice, pollard and maiden alike. He decides what can be cut and what should be cut. He interprets the Forest Laws as generously as possible, always seeking a balance between the needs of the villagers and the well-being of the trees. Some people think he lets the grazing swine back into the cut thickets a little too early, but others find his interpretation of dead wood somewhat too restrictive. He takes on young men and trains them carefully. He is well respected by his seniors and unusually popular within his community. He married a good-hearted woman, the daughter of a miller, and they have five children, and now, since this Lammastide, a first grandchild – a little girl whom they have called Gretel after his sister. He has built his house of stone, not sweetmeats; it has glass windows and stands solid again the wind and rain. It is a welcoming house of hospitality and laughter, although it is often rather untidy because he is an indulgent father. When people call him a ‘warm man’ it is sometimes unclear whether they mean ‘rich’ or ‘kindly’. He is both.

  With Gretel it is different. She lives alone in the forest. She is quiet, almost silent, solitary by choice. If you pass her way you will often find her in her garden. Plants – vegetables and herbs and flowers – grow well for her. Her garden is a place of colour and sweetness. She usually stands up, easing her back with her hands, and calls out a low but cheerful greeting. Once, when she was younger, she set off along the road through the forest to join the Holy Sisters in the convent at Waltham. But after a few years she came quietly home again. ‘I couldn’t live with enclosure,’ she says calmly, if asked. Her house is built of wood with a thatched roof, but it too is sturdy and cosy. It looks rather more like a gingerbread house than Hansel’s does, because it is painted in bright pale colours, and because under the eaves and around the windows are filigree strips of carved wood, which most people think are pretty but frivolous, and beside her little twisty iron gate at the bottom of her garden path there is always a bowl of sugar plums which local children know are put out for them.