From the Forest (15 page)

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.

The sturdy stone house and the pretty wooden house, which are neither of them like the other houses of the village, stand about two miles apart – an awkward distance: too long for a stroll, but not far enough for an expedition – so that Hansel and Gretel do not in fact meet very frequently. Sometimes if he is returning from work at Gretel’s end of the forest Hansel will take a slightly longer path and pass along the hedge that runs across the bottom of her garden; and sometimes he will go in through the back gate and stand chatting while she weeds her flower beds, or go through her doorway and sit at her kitchen table and share a drink with her in the early evening. Or if there is a heavy fall of snow or a wild storm, Hansel will deliberately walk over to check that no harm has come to Gretel. Sometimes, though not often, some business of her own will bring Gretel to the village, and before going back under the trees she will stop by Hansel’s house; he is usually out at work on these visits, but she passes neighbourly time with her sister-in-law and they like each other.

And just occasionally, for no reason that anyone can discern, often towards the end of a long summer Sunday afternoon, but sometimes at far odder hours, his wife can see that Hansel is restless. Eventually he will stand up and stretch hugely and say, as though completely by chance, ‘I think I might wander over and see Gretel.’ Or, ‘Have you any messages for Gretel? I’m just going to pop across and see how she’s doing.’ And his wife will simulate a mild surprise because that is what he seems to expect and she is a good-hearted woman.

She accepts, although she does not understand, that it is like this for twins; they have a need and a sense of each other that is different from other people. She knows that his going off to visit his sister takes nothing from her and gives something to him. She knows too that, even more than other twins, Hansel and Gretel are bound together because of what happened to them when they were very young. Although she did not grow up in this village, she has heard the story. Their mother died in childbirth. Their father and his new wife tried to kill them. They ran away into . . . they were abandoned in . . . they disappeared into . . . they were lost in the forest. For four months no one saw hair nor hide of them. The detail is uncertain, slippery with telling. But certainly, as suddenly as they had vanished, they came home – laden with treasure and brittle with fear.