From the Forest (14 page)

Then we found the swing.

In one of the more isolated parts of our walk, we came into an open glade, the ground smooth and red-gold under a massive beech tree. The wide canopy roofed the whole space so that we were sheltered within a green tent. And there someone had managed to tie a rope to a branch at least thirty feet above the clearing, although it was one of the lowest solid branches of the tree; the rope hung down straight into the middle of the green chamber. This was impressive, and it was hard to work out how it had been accomplished. The tree trunk was too smooth to climb and too fat to swarm.
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I like to think that whoever created the swing did it by shooting an arrow from a home-made bow, with a light lead cord attached, and then used that to haul up and secure the thicker rope, but I am guessing. The seat of the swing was a stout piece of straight dead wood, attached to the bottom of the rope. In any event, it was a skilled, complex task obviously requiring planning, knowledge and creative imagination. The swing was sturdy; we both swung on it and it supported our adult weight through long arcs of freedom. But nonetheless, there was an innocent, amateurish feel to it; it came from another world than the Health-and-Safety-controlled playgrounds or even the ‘adventure’ jungle swings offered to visitors in well-regulated ‘family-friendly’ parks.

For me there was a great joy in finding the swing. Apart from the pure physical delight of swinging on such a long rope, it felt like a sign that there are still children in the forests. The makers of this particular swing must have been fairly big children – constructing it was clearly a task beyond a pre-teenager. But there must have been young people who came to this secret space with the equipment and skills to complete a difficult engineering task with great competence. They must have had practice and training in using serious tools and been allowed to take them out of some careful workshop and into the woods: this is something very different from strewn beer cans and used condoms – although both of these would themselves represent very traditional uses of the hidden places in the woods.

I worry that not many more generations of children will be allowed this kind or level of independent personal success – this genuine achievement of combined creative imagination, thoughtful problem solving and physical skill. Wandering off into the woods and being alone and unsupervised anywhere is discouraged now and frequently treated as dangerous.

We are doing something very alarming to our children – and, making it worse perhaps, we have fooled ourselves that we are doing it for their sake, for their safety. The amount of unsupervised time outside the home that young people get to enjoy is being reduced year on year (the average child has lost a whole hour a day already this century). It starts at birth – babies are no longer put out in prams to enjoy fresh air, clouds overhead, people passing, and, if they are lucky enough, green leaves and dappled shadows, and, above all, to enjoy themselves, their freedom and self-sufficiency. We all know there is something wrong with this, because the well-intentioned parent then buys them mobiles and electronic moving objects which hang over their cots as an artificial substitute. And as they get older the situation gets worse. In the face of both consistent anecdote and good research which tell us that mooching about, alone or with your peers, wandering around, especially in natural environments, and being allowed to choose for yourself how you will spend some of your time is good for physical health, educational achievement and imagination, self-awareness and a sense of security, we wantonly deprive children of this space. We say it is for their safety, but this is nonsense. The number of children murdered by strangers per year has not increased since the Second World War (with the exception of 1996 – the year of the Dunblane shooting, where the children died not because they were alone in the woods but, rather, precisely because they were not: they were well supervised and ‘safe’). Far more children are abused in the home or by adults they know than by strangers. Serious accidents in the home are more common than those on the roads. Obesity, unarguably related to lack of exercise, is more likely to shorten our children’s lives than anything that may happen to them out on the street or in the countryside.

We adults are selfishly letting our fairly imaginary fears deprive our children of opportunities to enjoy something that adults continually report as one of the most pleasurable memories of our youth – times of being outside, alone or with our siblings or friends. The fact that these small-scale wilderness experiences are closely linked to creativity, good mental health and enhanced well being is secondary – the primary gain is delight and freedom. In his intriguing book
Last Child in the Woods
,
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Richard Louv argues passionately that we must allow our children, for their own sake, more space and opportunity to go alone into what he insists on calling ‘nature’. He then boasts that he gives his teenagers this permission
so long as they take a mobile phone with them.
This is simply long-distance supervision; they are
not
allowed to be alone, they are not trusted to look after themselves, they are, in effect, not judged competent.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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They (sensibly) run away
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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’.
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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 eventually 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.)