From the Forest Read online

  A great deal of scholarly and creative energy has been expended on fairy stories and on their improbably off-hand magic. They are wells of psychoanalytical wisdom, think Bettelheim (a Freudian) and Marie Louise von Franz (a Jungian). They are moral fables to inspire the young to be decent to the old, argues Marina Warner. They are the left-over traces of a more chthonic social mode in which animism ruled and the spirits of place were powerful and almost divine.16 They are the political upwelling of desire and aspiration, the containers of dissent and potential rebellion for the oppressed poor. They are the invented semi-fascistic expression of an arrogant nationalism by two bourgeois linguistic scholars. They are a coded cultural tool for sexism. They are pre-modern, pre-rational, pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment delusions suitable for the simple minded and superstitious, and therefore for children.

  The fairy stories may indeed represent all these things, but in Staverton I realised something else – something very simple and primal: their magic is the magic of the forest. Staverton itself is always there, a mediocre example of ‘W10: Quercus robur-Pteridium aquilinum-Rubus fructiosus woodland’. Today, now, we are walking in Staverton where none of us have ever been before and there are oaks of vast bulk and surrealist shape, giant hollies, giant birches, trees that are part oak, part holly and part birch, and a thousand years’ accumulation of dead wood. It is ‘a place of mystery and wonder; it has a peculiar effect on first-time visitors who have no foreknowledge that the world contains such places’.17 It is the magic.

  In the fairy stories, the usual providers of magical assistance are not in fact human at all – they are the natural inhabitants of the forest: most often birds and trees, but also flowers and other plants, fish, frogs and toads, animals, both wild and domesticated, and also the sun and the moon, streams and ponds. I began to feel that the fairy stories are like pollard oaks: they grow from natural seeds in the woodland; then they are attended to, both tended and managed, and used for all sorts of useful and lovely things, and they live for a very long time. They go back, bits die back, new bits branch off in crazy directions; they get mixed up, confused with other trees (‘part oak, part holly, and part birch’); they provide a rich habitat for all sorts of life forms with a wide diversity of purpose and plan.

  While we were in Staverton Thicks, along with all the other magical things that happened, we had an encounter with a witch. A nasty witch, not a little old wise woman. She emerged from a building on the other side of a river – it did not look quite like a house, more like a pavilion or stable or even possibly a gingerbread cottage. I have no idea what it was. She started to screech at us. We were to go away, at once. We had no business to be there. We were off the path. Seen through the trees, contorted with anger, gesticulating, wild, a real witch. And suddenly I could not remember the access codes and laws for England. In Scotland, of course, since this was not ‘domain land’ (someone’s house and garden) and there had been no posted signs telling us why we could not be there, we would have had clear rights. (Except we had the dogs off their leads, which the access law does not really allow.) The English law is more confused and confusing. Then she shouted a stupid thing: we weren’t allowed to be there because it was an SSSI – a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Of course it was; it should be – but SSSI status has nothing whatsoever to do with access law. More often people are confused in the other direction: they think that because a place has a public designation like this it must instantly be accessible (in the legal sense.) It is not.

  I do not know if this was aggressive landlordism and she simply did not want us in her private wood, even though we were clearly neither poaching nor stealing firewood. It was August – there were no ground-nesting birds to worry about. She may have been the local madwoman. She may have been right. It did not matter, in Staverton, in the thick bracken, with the ancient pollard oaks laughing at us, and the sun playing games with the green leaves and dark branches – she was a witch and added somehow to our gleeful mood. Like children we skipped away, pretending to go back to the path, but not really.

  Then we had a picnic, sitting on a huge fallen trunk under a huge ancient oak.

  In 1528, the Chronicler of Butley Abbey recorded that the monks had taken the Queen of France to the ‘Park of Staverton’ and there they had eaten a meal sub quercubus (‘under the oak trees’) cum Joco et Ludo (quite literally, ‘with fun and games’). The chronicler added that it was satis jucundis – ‘great fun’.

  Fairy stories grow out of woods like this, ancient, weird, unexpected, surviving against the odds, but also luxuriant, tricky, lovely – fun and games, great fun. Deeply, innocently magic.

  The Seven Swans’ Sister

  Once upon a time there was a young woman with a fierce integrity.

  She sat all day on the wide branch of an ancient oak tree. She had worn away the thick moss where she sat, making a rough bark saddle, but to either side of this bare patch it was green and soft, and the epiphyte polypodies sprang crisp and strong around her. She wore a linen slip and her bare feet dangled down, her slender ankles crossed and her toes relaxed but pointed, her head bent over her work and her long hair loose and stirring in the breeze. From below, looking upwards, a passing traveller could have seen that the soles of her feet were leathery, stained and cut from going barefoot through the forest. When evening came or her fingers were too chilled for sewing, she clambered down and slept in the soft dry cave that was the hollowed oak trunk, on a bed of soft leaf mould.

  She never spoke or laughed or sang. She never cried or shouted or swore. Sometimes in the cold of winter she sniffed or coughed or sneezed, but that was involuntary and did not count. She had aligned herself to the silence of the forest, the deep energetic silence of growing things, of seasons turning and of the soundless music of the stars. In spring it was lovely; in summer it was happy; in autumn it was fruitful; and in winter it was grim. Some would have called it clinical depression or ‘survivor’s guilt’ or even autism. She called it love.

  In the late spring months, from April through to June, she did not have much time for sleep: at night she would go out into the broken moonlight, which cut weakly through the thickening leaf canopy, and wander down the forest tracks gathering starwort.

  Starwort, which is also called greater stitchwort, Stellaria holo-stea , is a common plant of the woodlands, and affectionately known as Milkmaids, Wedding cakes, Star-of-Bethlehem, Poor-man’s buttonhole, Adder Mint and Poppers. The flowers are shining white and have five deeply lobed petals like narrow hearts, and golden stamens. It has brittle, straggly stalks and thin leaves, and supports itself on other plants. She kept great heaps of it in her tree cave and turned it carefully week by week through the rest of the year to keep it from rotting; as it dried it smelled sweet and sunny, like hay meadows, and its seed heads exploded sharply when ripe.

  At first she had thought that she needed to make her brothers’ shirts out of starwort petals, sewing together the silky hearts with tiny precise stitches, perhaps using strands of spider’s web. Soon, however, she realised that this was impossible. Like all the Stel-lari , like most wild flowers, the blooms drooped and faded as soon as they were picked; by morning they were gone. Instead, by careful experiment and clear-eyed observation, she discovered that she could strip off the thin leaves, dry the long hairless stalks, then steep them in the little pools of the stream that flowed through the forest, and weave them wet on a tiny loom made from a piece of curved bark. It was tiring, tricky, endless work, and she wished that in her childhood she had learned more useful skills, spinning like the spiders, working like the ants.

  Very occasionally, not more than a few times a year, usually at dawn or dusk on calm early autumn days, she would hear a deep throbbing music, the bell-beat of mute swans’ wings. She would run out of her shelter and look up to see them through the branches against the pale sky, orange beaks protruding, long necks stretched straight out and the huge wings thrumming the air. If there were a group of seven, flying as an arro
whead, a wedge of power, her heart would lift. But swans are short-sighted, and they never seemed to see her or turn from their magnificent passing. Tears would well in her dark eyes and a great loss and loneliness possess her; but she would steel herself, clear headed if soft hearted, and return to her weaving.

  Mostly, however, she enjoyed her own company, self-sufficient and contained, as many children brought up alone are, especially those like her who have grown up in a large, bare castle with a depressed mother and a father with too little self-control. She knew he loved her, fiercely and deeply, but she could never be confident, never assured or serene in his love. As a child, she did not know why. She was richly treated, given playthings, and later books and music and pictures and a garden. She had pretty clothes and warm clothes and the best of teachers. But she had no friends and no brothers to play with. No guests ever came to the castle; there were no feasts or hunts or music or games; there was no giggling in the rose bower nor dancing in the hall – and sometimes in the night she could hear her mother weeping.

  There were strange details, too, that she did not understand. Once, in a cupboard under some stairs, she found a muddy football, battered and deflated; once, in a little summer house out in the garden, she found a bag stuffed with straw and a strange pattern painted on it – a white circle inside a red circle and a back circle an inch or so across in the very centre. The bag was pierced by little holes, and wisps of straw poked through them. She did not know what it was, but when she asked her father he scowled heavily and the next time she went to the summer house the bag had disappeared. On the fell above the castle there was a herd of little wild ponies, pretty and sleek, but no one rode them or loved them; there were feral guinea pigs in the plantation around the castle, but she did not know how they came there.

  But it was a calm childhood, and she grew tall and beautiful and strong; her heart was as pure as a fountain, as a deep well, as a bubbling spring, and her will was toughened on solitude and quietness.

  And one day, just as she came to womanhood, she overheard some chatter. She was walking in the woods by the river and the azaleas were in flower, bright and flaunting. Down by the weir there were women washing, and the steady rhythm of scrubbing tends to loosen tongues.

  ‘It wasn’t her fault,’ one said, ‘it is him, the old master. He was stuck on a daughter. Most would be happy with seven sons. And they were lovely boys. But not him. I know his type.’

  ‘Say what you choose,’ said another crossly. ‘I don’t say it was her fault, but she was the cause. You weren’t here then, but I know. She was a wee spindly bairn; they never thought they’d raise her. He sent the boys for Holy Water and they dawdled, just messing about – so he cursed them, cursed them in a fit of wicked temper. I don’t say ‘her fault’ – I just say she caused it. And nothing has been the same since. The Lady all broken up and no fun and games to be had in these parts. And she’s a silent, dull thing, always mooning about.’

  ‘It’s him,’ said the first, ‘he was too set on her. It’s not right. Swans indeed – to turn your own boys into swans and let them fly off just because you got a baby girl. That’s not right.’

  Not right. She knew that this was true.

  That night she asked her father. She rode out his wrath because it was right to do so. She endured his maudlin tears and wheedling because it was right to do so. She sunk into the silence of her own heart and waited there until the storm had passed over her head. She ignored his apologies, his commands and his despairing conviction that nothing could be done.

  Before sunrise the next morning she left home and went out into the wide world to find her brothers and rescue them from their enchantment. Eventually, and after many miles, she learned from the swallows and the spiders and the long-legged, white-furred hare what she must do. For seven years, one for each brother, she must not speak or laugh or sing. She must not cry or shout or swear. She must sit all day in an ancient oak tree and sew seven little shirts of starwort, one for each brother.

  So that is what she did. She aligned herself to the silence of the forest. It was not truly soundless in the woods – there was bird song, the dancing music of living water, the insistent hammering of woodpeckers, the whispers and howls of the wind, the roaring coughs of the stag rut and the night screams of fox prey. But all the noises floated over the deep energetic silence of growing things, of seasons turning and of the silent music of the stars, of new shoots pushing through the ground, of new leaves pushing through their buds, of fungus – overnight and suddenly – pushing out of dead wood and of badger cubs growing in their underground setts. And that huge silence absorbed the sounds and mutterings of the forest where she sat and sewed. The deep silence wound itself into her heart until there was nothing left but purity of purpose and the sweetness of love.

  In spring it was lovely; in summer it was happy; in autumn it was fruitful; and in winter it was grim.

  And after she had been sitting there and weaving her starwort cloth for three years she had a pile of handkerchief-sized pieces of cloth, unbleached and sweet smelling. Not enough yet for seven shirts, but enough to make her think about scissors and sharp needles and sewing thread. Then one day a king came hunting in her forest. He was a young king, both handsome and kind, although he had a mother nearly as obsessive and possessive as her father. Pausing in an open glade of oak trees, he looked up and saw first her lovely ankles and her wounded feet. Then he raised his head and saw her looking down. They each smiled at the other.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked. She smiled.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. She smiled.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked. She had lived in silence and industry for three years, so she knew her own heart. It was easier for her than for him. She jumped down in one graceful leap and he caught her in his arms and wrapped her in his cloak and took her home to his palace and married her.

  Nothing changed. She never spoke or laughed or sang. She never cried or shouted or swore. Now she did not even cough and sneeze in the winter, because there was a fire in her room to keep her warm. She did not nod or point or write because she was uncertain as to the rules governing such silent speech and it seemed not worth the risk. Her mother-in-law hated her, but she could not explain or console the old woman – she could only smile and go out at night, into the broken moonlight and wander down the forest tracks gathering starwort and sit in her room by day stitching her brothers’ shirts and counting the seasons, the months and the days until she should have served her time.

  The sweet smiles of the Young Queen, and the hard commitment within her, the depths of the silence of her heart, and the Young King’s unswerving love baffled and infuriated the Old Queen. She grew spiteful and dark. She wanted to make the Young Queen speak. She set her will against the Young Queen’s will. But she could not break her.

  In the end she stole the Young Queen’s babies. She smeared the Young Queen’s closed lips with goat’s blood and told the people the Young Queen was a witch who consorted with the Devil at night and who ate her own children. But the Young Queen remained faithful to her brothers and her calling. As her father had sacrificed his sons for her, it seemed right that she should sacrifice her sons for her brothers.

  The Old Queen succeeded in getting her convicted. The right to silence and to the presumption of innocence is never secure. She was condemned to be burned.

  The night before she was to die she went one last time out into the moonlit forest and gathered seven perfect starflowers. As she came silently back to the palace she heard in the silence of the night the distant deep throbbing music, the bell-beat of mute swans’ wings. She smiled.

  When they came for her she was sewing the seven white flowers onto the neck openings of the seven starwort shirts. One sadly still lacked a sleeve, but there was nothing she could do. She had run out of time, although not of integrity. She folded the shirts carefully and draped them over one forearm. She walked out into the morning and up onto the waiting bonfi
re. She turned to face the silent crowd, smiled at the Young King one last time, and closed her eyes.

  Sometimes virtue is indeed rewarded. There was a deep throbbing sound, a great wedge of white power, of energy and wind, the music of wings, the arrowhead of long white necks, a moment of confusion and hissing. She opened her eyes; her laughter rang out like a bell above the hissing, drumming rhythm of the swans coming in fast against the rising sun. She tossed the seven shirts high into the air and without breaking their forward flight or their perfect triangular formation, the swans caught them in their strong orange beaks. The spell was broken. The enchantment was over. The Young Queen was free and laughing, after seven long years of silence.

  No one is perfect. She had not finished her task, and the seventh brother, the one whose shirt lacked a sleeve, had to limp through life trailing a white swan’s wing where his second arm should have been. But even he knew that she had done her very best.