From the Forest Read online

  The deep connection between the forests and the core stories has been lost; fairy stories and forests have been moved into different categories and, isolated, both are at risk of disappearing, misunderstood and culturally undervalued, ‘useless’ in the sense of ‘financially unprofitable’.

  So that is what this book is about: it is an attempt to bring them back together, so that they can illuminate and draw renewed strength from each other.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Adam, after hearing an edited version of all this. ‘You talk about British woods, British history and being specific and all that. But the Grimms were German, not British, and these are all German stories. How are you going to plonk them down in British woods?’

  This was pretty smart of him and I was not unimpressed, but I argued stoutly, ‘No, they are not German stories; they are Germanic stories. The British are Germanic people from the northern European forests, and I believe we had the same stories. Well, not just the same stories, because we also have Celtic fairy stories and some Viking fairy stories, but they are really different.’

  ‘You’re just guessing.’

  I admitted that I was a bit. And I told him that it will always be hard to tell with oral stories, because they are always changing and shifting and we just cannot know. But there is some evidence. The oldest printed fairytale we have in English is ‘Tom Thumb’, from 1621. It is nearly identical to the Grimms’ version – not simply the same type of story (there are midget hero stories in all sorts of cultures), many of the episodes and details are the same too. It must have been widely known because Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810 – 1891), the American circus impresario, gave Charles Stratton, his famous performing dwarf, the stage name of ‘General Tom Thumb’ in the early 1840s – only twenty years after the Grimms’ stories were first translated. There are lots of little clues like that. And the Grimms’ stories became popular in English very quickly. Even during the Second World War, W. H. Auden praised the collection as ‘as one of the founding works of Western culture’. But I told Adam he was right in a way – I am guessing. It is a deep guess though, from how the stories fit into our forests and how our forests fit into the stories. It is a guess that works.

  By this point in our conversation, Adam and I had long finished with the baked beans and had crawled into our sleeping bags in the tent. I last slept in a tent forty years ago, and Adam slept in this one a few months ago high up above the snow line of the southern Andes. It was cosy but a little strange to be snuggled up so close together, although the dog thought it was heaven and wriggled around our feet ecstatically. Occasionally she jumped up, rigid, attentive, aware of something outside in the wood even though we could not hear it, and then turned round and round, stirring herself into the sleeping bags as her ancestors must have stirred themselves into grassy nests in long-vanished forests.

  ‘So, how do we go about it?’ he asked.

  ‘We walk in some woods,’ I said.

  We would walk and talk about fairy stories and forests. We would talk to contemporary forest people – people who still live or work in the forest. I want the forests in the book to be real – real walks, real people, and real ‘nature’. I want the book to be specific, not general. And then I want to match up what is in the forests with fairy stories, see how the themes of the fairy stories grow out of the reality of the forest, and the other way round too – show how people see the forests in a particular way because of the fairy stories. So then I hope I can retell some of the Grimms’ stories so that the connection gets made again and maybe both fairy stories and ancient woodland get protected, valued, seen for what they are: our roots, our origins. And it will be fun.

  It felt adventurous. I snuggled down with some satisfaction. Then he said, ‘Mum, do you know about mycorrhiza?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, trees need their own fungi. They’ve only worked this out quite recently; but it turns out that trees – well, most plants actually – have a sort of double or twin life. They are partnered with fungi called mycorrhiza, and they cannot live without them – or even germinate. I don’t mean aggressive, parasite fungi; I mean they make a team, you can’t have one without the other.’

  (The next day, back at home, I looked up mycorrhiza:Most land plants are dual organisms. Attached to their roots is a fungus whose hyphae are thinner and more richly branched than the root itself; they invade more soil than is directly accessible to the roots. The host plant supplies the fungus with the carbon needed to make its hyphae. The fungus does much of the job that schoolchildren used to be taught was done by the root hairs. It supplies the plant with nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients, and sometimes water too; it can even defend its host against competition from non-mycorrhizal neighbours. Neither functions well without the other; seedlings use their seed reserves to make contact with the fungus, and die if they fail to find a partner.)10

  ‘So maybe that’s what the book is: forests and fairy stories are like trees and their mycorrhiza.’ After a pause, he added, ‘Well, I suppose the forests don’t need the fairy stories.’

  But I love this image and wanted to run with it. ‘Yes they do,’ I said firmly.

  The fairy stories teach us how to see the forests, and how to love them too. They are spooky but special in our imaginations. Woods are part of our fantasy of childhood because of the fairy stories. That love protects our woodlands. An astonishing number of people who had voted Conservative and seemed happy to cut benefits for the disabled, make students pay for their degrees, risk massive unemployment, and all the other cuts, were suddenly up in arms about a perceived threat to the forests – and that was only a consultation document. Our almost hidden and often bizarrely ignorant love for wildwood comes from the fairy stories and keeps the forests safe. If you have got a decent chunk of ancient woodland near you, you will be safe from development or wind farms or whatever. People do not love fen or moor or arable farmland or even mountains in that way; the people who live in them may love them, but the protest about making the forests more commercially viable came from a far wider constituency. I believe the relationship between forests and fairytales is mutual, symbiotic.

  In this book I want to see forests and fairy stories like this – partners necessary to one another and at risk if either fails or cannot find and connect with the other. The relationship is specific; there are different mycorrhiza for different species of plant, so the forests of this book are not generalised. In each chapter I will go and seek out a different and particular forest. Luckily, there are lots of different kinds of forest in Britain – very distinct both as to the species that flourish there and as to the history that has led to their survival (or in some cases introduction). Between them, I sense that they can give access and depth to the central themes of the northern European fairy stories. Simultaneously, the stories can make us see and know the forests afresh.

  I turned over, almost ready to sleep, pleased with things so far.

  Then Adam said, ‘OK, then. Tell me a story.’

  ‘I don’t tell them, I write them. I’m a writer. Telling-aloud story-telling is something special; I don’t have those skills. I fake them.’

  ‘Well, give it a go now to get me in the mood and then you can write it up properly later.’

  I searched for a story that would make all these points, and could not find one. Then I looked for a story that is about mothers and sons. Oddly, there are not that many of these – mostly the fairy stories are about fathers-and-sons or mothers-and-daughters. (Not that this should matter too much: when he was eight and I read him The Lord of the Rings, Adam was – to this feminist mother’s great pride – so offended by the masculinity of all the characters in the Fellowship that I had to read the whole text re-grammaring one of the hobbits – we chose Merry because it seemed the easiest name to do it with – as female throughout.) Then I thought about being frightened of imaginary forests and snug in this real one.

  ‘OK,’ I said into the dark.

  Thumbling
r />   Once upon a time there was a woman who wanted a baby.

  She had a husband – a decent man, if a little dull. He was hard working and kind, which is a good start, and although he did not much like to chat, and never about the things she wanted to talk about, they lived together with a steady affection in their little cottage in a village on the edge of the forest.

  They were well regarded in their community – he was quiet and well tempered and she kept their home clean and bright. Her butter churned into milk; her dough rose into bread, and whenever she went out and about her fingers were busy with her spindle and her tongue with the concerns of her community. And certainly they did with sufficient frequency and pleasure those things which should lead to the making of babies. But no baby came.

  The woman wanted a baby. Sometimes her wanting soured her and she was not always as tender and gentle as she should have been. Her man wanted a baby too, and perhaps his wanting made him less playful and open than he should have been. Too many evenings they sat by the fire in a dull silence, which was gloomy rather than harsh. Eventually her boredom would make her say something, and his expression would deepen from dullness to irritation.

  One evening, her hands still busy with her spindle, she broke one more sombre pause.

  ‘Other people’s houses are livelier than this,’ she said. ‘I do wish we had a child.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘so do I.’ His surprising effort to respond, as his parish priest had urged him, made him sound cross and accusatory.

  She was stung.

  ‘Even if it was as small as your thumb,’ she said.

  He flushed suddenly, his hands moving down to cover his crotch, his legs crossing themselves awkwardly. They both knew what she had said.

  ‘Well, there you go,’ he said gruffly. To be honest, there was not much else he could say.

  And there it went. As so often happens when people who are not communicating too well with each other make wishes, they got what she asked for. Nine months later she had a baby, and it was as small as his thumb.

  Her midwife had an easy time of it. She sat cracking jokes and relaying local news, until she reached down and cupped the tiny baby in one hand. Although startled, she could see at once that the boy was not deformed in any way, and opened his mouth to yell lustily. She sensibly abandoned the string she had had prepared and instead pulled a fine thread from the spool below the spindle to tie the pulsing cord. Her gossip was less certain. The midwife handed her the baby and she looked at him in amazement. It seemed too improbable a thing to live and too fragile a thing to rush down the street to the priest’s house. But it was definitely healthy and breathing well. She was only meant to baptise the babies who might be dead before the priest could come.

  ‘Oh, do it,’ said the other two women laughing now.

  So she dipped her finger in the bowl of water and said, ‘What shall I call him?’

  ‘Thumbling,’ said his mother, giggling. Whatever this was, it was not dull.

  So he was christened Thumbling, wrapped in a tiny scrap of lamb’s wool and, after a few ingenious experiments, fed on his mother’s milk expressed onto the eye of a fat needle. And later, when her husband came in and was shown the tiny baby, he was moved to both tenderness and merriment; he stroked the little head with one finger, beamed with pride, and quite spontaneously kissed his wife and told her she was wonderful. They were both very, very happy.

  He never got any bigger, but in every other way Thumbling grew quite normally. He learned as quickly as anyone else’s baby to control his head, to crawl across the tabletop, to yell when he was hungry and to sleep when he was tired. The only difficulties he had were practical, and his parents had creative amusement and great joy in finding practical solutions. As he began to toddle, it turned out that even his father’s smallest finger was too large for the little one to cling on to, so the man whittled and smoothed a tiny stick to help his baby. Later he made a game of football they could play on the table, his breath against his son’s little feet. The woman learned to spin wool finer than had ever been done before and to knit his little garments on pins. This fairylike work was much admired and she began to get commissions, even from the Lord of the Manor, to make up cloth as fine as spiders’ webs to adorn full-sized human beings. Everyone in the village loved Thumbling. He was enchanting, magical, charming. He grew nimble in brain and body, full of tricks and funny little ways. The villagers were proud of him and felt he was a credit to them. They came to visit his mother to see him, and filled her house with chatter and laughter. She had no time to be bored and no need to nag her man for conversation any more; and it is easier to talk about your feelings when you are overflowing with joyful pride than when you know that you do not make your beloved happy and feel guilty about it. The couple were too contented and too loving to exploit Thumbling. His father resisted all pleas to bring him to the inn to dance and caper for drunks; his mother quietly declined invitations to show her women friends what he looked like naked. And they loved him too much even to feel tempted by the generous cash offers that passing salesmen made them – to take him away and show him in the big cities.

  They adored their son both despite and because of his oddity, and all the more as it became clear that she was not going to conceive again even though there was now both more frequency and more pleasure for them both in doing those things which should lead to the making of babies. They spoiled him of course, but it was hard to see why that might matter in the long run.

  As Thumbling got older his mother got ever happier. As her friends’ and neighbours’ boys grew, they grew away from their mothers. They went off on their own to explore, or they went off with their fathers to work, or they got in fights and annoyed the neighbours – but Thumbling was always too small to do any of this. He stayed with his mother. When he wanted to go off into the forest to play his own games and have his own adventures, she could throw a fine net over her potato patch and it was a forest for him. He could explore all day and build himself nests and dens and climb high, high into his potato trees and fight with fierce beetles, but her net held him safe and he could not get away.

  As her friends’ and neighbours’ boys grew, they made friends of their own and encouraged each other in obstinacy and sullenness and dumb insolence. They had secrets. Their very glances hurt their mothers’ feelings. They had gangs and girls they thought more beautiful than their mothers and things to do they did not wish to talk about. But Thumbling did not have friends like that; he would never leave her for a pretty little sweetheart, or a heartless trollop unworthy of his blithe beauty and his quick wit. She was lucky; her son would always be at home as coddled as a baby and as safe as an old man. He would always love his mother best. He would always sit on the rim of her mixing bowl and chat as she stirred in the raisins for the pudding; he would always and forever curl up in peace in the hollow of her clavicle, warm against her neck, drowsy with the rhythm of her spindle. And her man would always come home from field or wood, weary from a long day’s work, but light in the pleasure of his home, and they would all three sit at, or on, the table and talk together and laugh because Thumbling was so funny and sweet and innocent and he was theirs for ever.

  Then one night she woke suddenly and from the warmth of her man’s arms she could hear her son weeping. And she knew at once that he was weeping for the friends he would never have, for the work he would never do, for the woman he would never kiss and for the child he would never father. He was weeping for the great dark forest through which he would never walk; for the long slope of the road between the great green trees that he would never come down to the new places where his fortune might be waiting. He was weeping for his freedom.

  Love and happiness had made her courageous, with a far nobler bravery than the bored endurance which she had imagined was fortitude in the time before he came to her. Courage made her generous. She wept too. And then she started planning.