From the Forest Page 4

  A week or so later, during their comfortable evening meal, her husband was gently bemoaning the inconvenience of a task he had to do. He was planning some coppicing deep in the forest. But if he took the wagon with him in the morning, what could he do with the horse all day? If he had to come home to get the wagon, he would waste half a day’s work. He could not think of anyone with the time to help him. There were lots of solutions really, and she knew he would think of one of them. She was about to offer to drive the cart up herself in the afternoon when Thumbling piped up:

  ‘I’ll drive the cart up, Father.’

  His father laughed. ‘Oh yes, little one, and how would you go about that? You could not manage the reins to start with, and you might get lost.’

  ‘You could tell me the way. And . . .’ She could see he was thinking fast. ‘. . . and if Mother put me in the horse’s ear I could tell it which way to go.’

  Before her husband could laugh again, she said, almost breathless in her haste, ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’

  Both father and son looked at her, amazed. Their surprise made her feel ashamed.

  So the next day, in the afternoon, she lifted her tiny son up and tucked him into the ear of their faithful horse. It was dark and velvety inside, warm and safe as her own lap, and she heard the high joy in his voice as he called out, ‘Giddy-up and through the gate.’ She watched the wagon, with no visible driver, cross the bridge and turn neatly up the track into the forest. It disappeared into the trees and she went back into her silent, empty house and cried a little.

  It was a desolate four hours before she heard the clip-clop of hooves and she ran out into the yard. Her husband was driving up from the bridge and she could see from his posture that something was wrong. She waited while he turned the wagon into the yard, but not until he climbed down.

  ‘Where is he? Where’s Thumbling? What’s happened?’ She could hear the shrillness in her own voice.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said slowly. He climbed down and led the horse into the barn while she stood there. Soon he came out again, carrying a heavy bag in one hand. He put his arm round her shoulder and led her into the warm kitchen.

  He dumped the bag on the table and she heard the clink of gold coins.

  He looked at her, questioning something, obviously thinking as he looked.

  ‘I sold him,’ he said.

  She could not speak; she could not even think. Loss. Rage. Shock. All of them at once. They struck her dumb.

  ‘He asked me to. Some idiots saw the horse driving itself and heard his instructions. They followed the wagon and saw me take him out of the horse’s ear. They were fascinated. You know what’s he’s like – he was showing off, full of himself; he made them laugh, dancing on my shoulder. They offered me a small fortune for him. They wanted to take him to the city and exhibit him. Of course I said no. So they offered me a large fortune for him. I was about to say no again, when he whispered in my ear that I should accept the offer and he’d go with them and then escape and come home and we could all be rich. So I said I would.’

  She wanted to hit him; she wanted to howl. She managed to say, ‘But what if . . .?’

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I do know. But he has been weeping in the night for his freedom.’

  She stared at him. After a sombre pause, he said heavily, ‘I had to let him try.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, almost in a whisper, ‘yes, you did.’

  He took her into his arms then and she wept and he comforted her as best he could.

  It took a terrible three days for Thumbling to get home. She was desperate.

  On the third night she could not sleep. Nor could he. They lay rigid beside each other in the bed, not daring to speak. Then they heard some extraordinary noises coming from the scullery. They shot out of bed, pressed through to the back of the cottage and peered through a slit in the door. There was a bloated wolf, struggling to fit back into the drain through which he had obviously entered. They felt giddy from sleeplessness and anxiety, and could make little sense of what they could clearly see.

  Then they heard a well-known, piercing little voice, somewhat muffled inevitably, but calling, ‘Get me out of here. Now.’

  The father whacked the wolf with an axe and the mother ran for the big meat knife and slit open the dead beast carefully. Inside its maw, somewhat bloody and in need of a good wash, was their son. He was laughing.

  He was full of himself too. He told them of his adventures:

  He had escaped from the impresarios easily enough by hiding in a mouse hole. He had fallen in with a gang of thieves and got them all arrested. He had been swallowed by a cow, but shouted so loudly that the village priest thought the animal was demonically possessed and had had it killed. Still inside the cow’s third stomach, he had been gobbled down by the wolf. He had tricked the wolf into the scullery and then let it eat so much that it could not get out again. He obviously thought he had been pretty damned clever for a small chap. And actually he had.

  She cleaned him down by the kitchen fire, trying to be angry with both her men, but laughing and laughing at his ridiculous adventures and her own immense relief and joy.

  ‘Bedtime,’ she said firmly when he was all clean and sweet smelling and warm. She carried him to his tiny bed and popped him in. He calmed down suddenly and she tucked him up.

  ‘Can I have a wolf skin counterpane?’ he asked. But before she could answer, his eyes closed. Just before she straightened up, longing for her own bed, he murmured, ‘Actually, Mother, it was quite scary, some of it. But I coped and I made us a fortune.’ There was a short pause, and then he added slyly, ‘Better than a fancy princess, anyway. I think I’ll stay home from now on.’

  So he did and they all lived happily ever after.

  2

  April

  Saltridge Wood

  There is a freshness of green in beech woods in the late spring. Beech leaves open quite slowly; they break out of their pointed scaled buds and seem to dance, an extraordinary pellucid shade of green. Although the trunks and branches of beech trees look especially solid, the twigs that carry the leaves are delicate, feathery almost, and spread out, by and large, in horizontal fan shapes. It takes a beech tree quite a while to fill in its canopy solidly, and so in the spring and even in the early summer the sunlight breaks through, dappling the ground underneath them. It seems impossible to describe the green of early beech woods in sunshine: it is somehow a pure essence of green, to which other lesser greens can be compared to their detriment. In fact the first green of larch trees is very similar, and underappreciated, but larch needles do not move and bounce the light in delicate breezes the way beech leaves do. There is something in the dancing of beech leaves that adds to this greenness. Of course, beech green cannot be the ‘best’ green – that would be nonsense – but it still feels true, somehow, and lifts the spirits.

  It is not just the green that makes spring beech woods so pleasing. The trunks of beech trees are grey and smooth. It is into beech bark that lovers most satisfactorily carve their hearts and initials: the graffiti stand out clearly on the smooth surface, and the messages grow with the tree. The more gnarly trunks of oak, the long ridges of elm, or the scales of pine not only make for a less emphatic visual statement, they tend to grow back over any carving and obliterate it. Etymologists think that the word ‘book’ may be derived from the word ‘beech’ (boc is an old variant for both), and that in northern Europe the earliest books were perhaps written on thin slices of beech wood.

  These almost severe-looking trunks create a rich contrast to the delicate green leaves. Beeches tend to grow straight and then branch out horizontally higher up and carry their foliage above the branches; from the ground, looking up into the leaves, these dark spread-fingers of smooth wood resemble ribs, creating what has been often described as a cathedral effect; or perhaps, rather, the beeches inspired the cathedrals’ fan vaulting. A secondary consequence of this arrangement is that when beech trees get old and
less robust these heavy branches tend to peel off, leaving long rips like wounds. Oak trees, by contrast, tend to die from the tops, leaving dead wood like stags’ antlers protruding above their living leaves, somehow more grotesque than tragic. Since, relative to their height, beech trees have comparatively shallow roots, they tend to respond to high winds by being uprooted rather than broken off: the whole root plate is lifted out of the ground, leaving a hole, again like a wound. These various natural formations combine to give old beech woods a very moving atmosphere of religious awe and painful sorrow. It is compelling in its loveliness.

  There is an additional pleasure in walking in beech woods: very little undergrowth flourishes there, so the ground is clean and firm. In autumn, beech leaves turn a very uniform golden-brown-red colour and, since there is little growing through to break up the carpet of fallen leaves, it lies there right through the year, so that beneath the bright green ceiling is a smooth red floor. Beech roots spread out on the surface around the base of the tree like mossy buttresses, but away from the immediate vicinity of the trunk there is little to disturb either one’s feet or one’s view through the forest. The exceptions to this tend to be spring flowers like bluebells and ransoms flowering before the dense canopy fills in. (Sanicle, a white, summer-flowering umbellifer, is a famous exception to this – it grows happily under beech trees on chalky soil.) Fallen beech leaves, however, are rich in potash, and because they decompose readily, they enrich the soil, so outside the immediate shaded circles of the beech trees themselves – for example, along the sides of tracks through beech woods – there is often a rich botanic array. Since new beech trees germinate in the shade of their parent tree – though not much else does – beeches tend to be strongly gregarious; where there is one beech tree, there will be more.1 And because beech is shade bearing, there are often thickets of saplings waiting for the death of the trees above them in order to grow into the space they have left. Stands of beech trees and nothing else are quite common.

  In late April,2 I went with two old friends – and Solly, their enchanting miniature wire-haired dachshund puppy – to walk in Saltridge Wood, a typical beech wood just north of Stroud in the Cotswolds. The Cotswolds, ‘the most English and the least spoiled of all our countrysides’,3 are made up of a long lift of limestone hills and constitute the largest Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in England (790 square miles). The whole area is famous for its gentle green hillsides, called wolds; its rich farmland with deep valleys, old hedgerows and water meadows; its historic market towns and villages; the beauty of its natural stone – pale gold in the north and creamier south towards Bath; its atmosphere of gentle, old-fashioned prosperity;4 and its ancient beech woods. The Cotswolds have come to represent a sort of apogee of rural ‘Englishness’.

  Because beech trees hate to be waterlogged they are often found growing higher along steep-sided valleys; Saltridge Wood is perched on a long ridge between the picturesque villages of Cranham and Sheepscombe. It was a gratuitously pretty day, the weather designed for the walk – warm for late April and brightly sunny, with some charming little cumulus clouds overhead and sweetly golden green in the wood. Saltridge belongs to the National Trust, so the tracks are well made up and waymarked and access is straightforward. We climbed up from Cranham’s ancient grassy common, where I saw my first house martins of the year swooping and floating on the sunny air, across small green fields enclosed in sturdy hedgerows just coming into full leaf. From the track through the wood we looked down over wide views of arable land dotted with lambs and cows, cottages, farms and larger houses with orderly gardens and mown lawns; there were sheets of cowslips in the fields, with ponies apparently grazing them. Inside the wood there were bluebells and the ransoms had set their buds, white wet swellings above the dark green leaves, although it was too early for their damp, sharp, oniony scent to have permeated the air. There were primroses under the forest wall and patches of sweet woodruff showing their refined chalk-white flowers above the elegant little six-leaved ‘ruffs’ or whorls that decorate their stems, and probably give them their name. Woodruff does not take on its rich hay-and-almonds scent, which made it such a popular domestic deodorant in the Tudor period, until it is cut and dried, but, standing in the shade along the path-side, it offered a visual promise of its future olfactory refinement. And the wood was radiant with birdsong; at the end of March and beginning of April the woodland birds that have wintered south of the Mediterranean arrive back to mate and raise their broods; they join the winter resident species, and the range of songs, calls and chatter continues throughout the summer in a remarkably rich chorus.

  Perhaps partly because they grow so finely here in what is seen as the iconic English landscape, beech trees in Britain are held in very high regard. In particular they are seen as somehow a quintessential female tree, in elegant but delicate contrast to the sturdy, manly oaks. Fine ancient beeches are called ‘queens’ (while similarly ancient Scots pines are called ‘grannies’). Based on no real evidence beyond anecdote, I believe that the beech is the species that people are most likely to be able to identify on sight, and the one which is most often named as their ‘favourite’ tree. Even more than the oak tree nowadays, the beech is valued, even loved, as having a kind of national status.

  Thinking about beech woods, I realised we have several layers of complicated history: the actual history of our woodlands and the actual history of our fairy stories, neither of which we fully understand. But more to the point, at the level of our emotions and imagination these two histories have both fostered each other, and at the same time confused us all. We end up believing that because we love forests we also we know everything about them – that beech trees are peculiarly British, for instance, and that ‘once upon a time’ the forest was continuous and dense across the whole country. (There are other examples that will emerge elsewhere in this book.) We act as though the forests of fairy story, of the imagination, are entirely real, and anyone who challenges our slightly sentimental account of the woods is behaving like a wicked witch, out to destroy small children. Oliver Rackham, with justified irritation, has drawn attention to our collective fantasy about woodland. No matter how much biologists and historians research and write about what is actually happening, we prefer our own fairy stories and legends. Rackham writes:The anthropology of woodland has come to be a fascinating subject in itself. Why does the public believe a complete pseudo-history that is at variance with the real history? Why is there . . . ‘a hunger for false information’? Why does pseudo-history grow to accommodate new events that ought to explode it?5

  I suggest that it is not a ‘pseudo-history’ in the sense he experiences it, but a profound confusion between two histories that do not know themselves or each other. Our deep but unconscious desires have created stories about forests and fairy stories that make walking in the spring sunshine in Saltridge Forest feel so rooted in fairy-tales that we cannot see the trees for the wood.

  This is quite odd. There is nothing particularly British about beech trees. In fact, beech spreads all across western, central and southern Europe – from the south-east of England and the north of Spain to the western shores of the Black Sea, and from southern Norway to Sicily. Across mainland Europe it is the principal tree of broadleaf woodland in upland areas, which means it was the dominant large tree in central and southern German forests where the Grimm brothers collected their stories. In France it is used extensively in commercial forestry, as it never is in Britain. England is at the very northern limit of its natural range – the geographical areas where it will germinate and mature spontaneously. Ancient beech wood is fairly restricted in Britain, confined to Epping Forest, the Chilterns, the Cotswolds, north Norfolk, the lower end of the Severn valley, the New Forest, and sporadically along the south coast as far west as Dorset.6

  Even within its natural range in the south, the beech is a bit of a Johnny-come-lately. Indeed, until well into the twentieth century there was an ongoing debate as to whether it was a n
ative species at all. ‘Native’ trees are deemed to be those that were growing in Britain before it was cut off from mainland Europe. Any species that arrived later must almost certainly have been imported and deliberately planted. Sweet chestnut, for example, is not native; it was introduced by the Romans, along with rabbits, nettles and ground elder.

  About 10,000 years ago, when trees began to crawl north following the retreating ice cap, the first pioneers were birch and then pine. These were followed by hazel – although, mysteriously, this seems to have spread southwards from north-west Scotland. Oak, alder and lime (at one point the dominant tree over much of England) came next, then elm and ash. Finally, holly, maple, hornbeam and, it is now generally agreed, beech made it into southern Britain in about 7,000 BCE, just before the land link between Britain and the rest of the European continent was flooded by the rising sea levels.

  The history of trees and woodland is tortuous, and parts of it still contested. Many people know we can tell the age of individual trees by counting their ‘rings’, the dark circles on a cleanly cut trunk, as a new ring is laid down for each year of growth. However, not all trees make clear rings – holly, for example, does not – and until recently this technique could obviously only be used by cutting down the tree, although it is now possible to take a ‘core’ out of a living tree without destroying it. With living trees, size and general health are not very reliable as trees mature at different rates depending on very local (and even individual) conditions – although where the tree has been coppiced regularly, the size of its bole is helpful in determining its age.

  Establishing the age of a wood, rather than a tree, is even trickier, because in a healthy wood the age of any particular tree is not relevant: the wood might have grown up around an older free-standing tree, or the wood might be a great deal older than any of the trees in it. The term ‘ancient woodland’ (or, more technically, ‘ancient semi-natural woodland’) describes woods that are known to have existed before 1600 in England and Wales, and before 1750 in Scotland.7