From the Forest (44 page)

Such thoughts engage me with amusement and hope as I drop down along the conjoined burn and cross it at an alarmingly deep ford. There has been more quad-bike traffic here. The CVCWT has been planting new trees – they are still inside their ugly but invaluable plastic sleeves which protect them from deer, squirrel and other depredations while they establish themselves and dig their roots in deep. We cannot go back to the beginning, but we can re-make woodland and create new woods where the old ones have been lost.

Just as I come down towards the gate I came into the wood through, a thin low sun breaks through the clouds, barely bright enough to cast decent shadows, but certainly enough to lighten and brighten the whole world. And suddenly I see a clump of crystal brain fungus (
Exidia nucleate
). Crystal brain fungus looks like what it is called: a brain-shaped, wrinkly convoluted jelly, almost transparent but with little white ‘crystals’ deep inside, which are actually accretions of calcium oxalate. It is not rare, but you can only see it in wet weather – it dehydrates quickly and shrivels into a hard, thin, barely visible membrane when it is dry. They are one payback for walking in wet woods. They are weird and unexpected, and the sun catches this one and makes it gleam. Before I identify it properly it looks like frogspawn. And then, woods being surprising, unexpected and magical, the very next pool, barely more than a puddle by the path, is full of real frogspawn. It is very like the crystal brain fungus actually, except that it is in the water as opposed to on a rotting branch, and the flecks in the middle of the jelly are black future tadpoles rather than white granules.

Frogspawn is bizarre: if you pick it up it has a strange texture, being both lumpy and slimy at the same time; each cell is quite distinct, but if you try and drip it through your fingers it moves as a single organism – the cells do not separate easily, and to a bare hand on a cold day, it seems curiously alive and eager. But today it is also a herald of the spring, an end to winter. A little way away from the puddle is a toad, squatting quietly and apparently looking at me. Frogspawn and toad spawn are supposed to be easily distinguishable: the books tell you that toads lay their eggs in lines and frogs in heaps, but I have never been certain I can tell the difference. I can, however, tell toads from frogs – toads are dry and warty, frogs are smooth and slimy; frogs hop and toads crawl, and this is a toad. It does not offer me any treasures, as toads so often do in fairy stories; it probably feels that I have had enough treasures today, and it is right.

Or perhaps it does offer a magic gift, because I suddenly start to notice other things. Hazel trees make their catkins in the autumn – all winter they hang small and tight under the branches, but now they are starting to stretch a little; looking closely, I see my very first neon-red female catkins, like tiny tufts of punk hair. There is a honeysuckle that has formed an unnaturally perfect spiral round a very straight hazel wand; and, halfway up and for no particular reason that I know of, is my first spring leaf, one, alone, just breaking green from its bud.

As I go back up the lane towards my car I see something that I should have seen on my way out, but did not. The lane that leads from the end of the tarmac road to the open plain where I started this chapter is itself rather wonderful and full of fairy-tale features. It starts beside an old mill and follows the mill race up to where it joins the river; it then runs, with a grassy ridge down its centre, through a little patch of wood and out between high hedges through fields. During the summer the ground under the hedges is a tangled mass of grass and wild flowers – in a week or so primroses will be flowering here. Tangling here and up into the hawthorn of the hedge are brambles and wild roses. And someone had, not more than a few days before, cut back the brambles. I went to look for springtime and for Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and someone had prepared my way for me, cutting back the briars which guarded her for a hundred years.

The wood is not dead, just sleeping; it is turning now, waking up, beginning again. The stories are safe while toads deliver gifts and someone cuts briars back on the paths towards the fairy-tale castles.

I find I am laughing aloud as I go on my way back to my car, happy ever after.

The Dreams of the Sleeping Beauty

Once upon a time there was a princess, as lovely as the dawn.

Once upon a time when she was sixteen she ran up a spiral staircase and came to a little solar high in a tower of her parents’ palace where she had never been before. And there in the warm sunshine there was a twirling, moving, dancing bobbin, and a little old woman with busy, busy fingers; the wheel hummed, and the flax danced and the light caught all the movements and spun them into diamonds, busy and playful and pretty. ‘Oh,’ cried the princess, enchanted and delighted, and she reached out to touch and she pricked her finger and fell down and down and down into the deep cold place where her dreams were waiting for her.

And for a hundred years she dreamed while the forest grew around her. Each dream took a whole year, and acorns became oaks trees while she dreamed.

1. She dreamed a great wall of ice that pushed across the first forest, scouring it down, killing all the trees. There was an unbroken silence for a long time.

2. She dreamed that it grew warmer and the ice melted slowly and there was the music of many waters.

3. She dreamed the witches’ tresses and the gold coins of lichen crawling out across the erratic boulders that the ice had left behind.

4. She dreamed mosses and ferns and horsetails and liverworts; and sharp-faced weasels who had survived the cold.

5. She dreamed soft breezes that wafted in birch pollen and trees that began to sprout.

6. She dreamed the spring when there were first wind-flowers and primroses.

7. She dreamed the first brave insects, buzzing and skittering on the dark bog pools of the new forests.

8. She dreamed the first swoop and song of birds; swallows from the far-away deserts and kites spreading their forked tails on the thermals above the scrub woods that were growing, growing, growing.

9. She dreamed the huge dark eyes of deer and elk and hare.

10. And aurochs and lynx and bear and wolf; foxes and badgers and frogspawn and the dapple of fish in the clear streams.

11. She dreamed the small dark people, drifting northwards, following the deer.

12. She dreamed the fresh, bright red-gold of fire and of warmth and light in long chill nights.

13. She dreamed the stone-chipped arrowhead deep in the flank of the stag, and the dancing and laughter of the hunters.

14. She dreamed the sweet crunch of hazelnuts and the honouring of the trees that offered such treasure.

15. She dreamed the laborious wrestling and effort to raise the great stones and mark the rhythms of the years, and the singing of the songs for the gods.

16. She dreamed the sheep grazing under tall trees and the first sweet warm milk taken from an irritable cow.

17. She dreamed there were apples and blackberries and mushrooms from the generous forests, and later grain, carefully grown, gathered and ground.

18. She dreamed the piles of rocks to mark the homes of the dead, and the planting of trees for their comfort.

19. She dreamed a young woman stooping under a low doorway and raising her newborn child to see the dancing of sunlight under the canopy of leaves.

20. And, in the long northern night, the small dark people round the bright fire telling stories from the forests.

21. She dreamed the birch fingers, swaying, singing silently, holding the moonlight in their paper bark.

22. She dreamed the dark drift of the northern pines, scaled dragons with heavy limbs, tenacious in their grip on the rock face.

23. She dreamed the sallows and alders with their roots in the black bogs, their leaves whispering in harmony with the flow of the water.

24. She dreamed the dancing keys spiralling down, down from autumn ash trees.

25. She dreamed the deep cool shade under elm trees in wood pasture and the fat cattle that mourned their passing.

26. She dreamed the hazel coppices, bright with yellow catkins, and the detritus of red squirrels collecting winter stores.

27. She dreamed the cathedral ceilings and gothic columns of beech groves, gold green in springtime, and the bare red floors beneath them.

28. She dreamed the shining hollies, sharper than the spindle pin in the solar in the tower and their blood-red berries like the drop on her finger – the last thing she saw before she slept.

29. She dreamed the pollard oak, strangely contorted, abundantly welcoming, ancient, everlasting and magical.

30. And, greenest and brightest of all, the lovely lost limes, the woods that will never return.

31. She dreamed a king, like her father but French, coming with long ships and an army to subdue the people and claim the throne.

32. She dreamed that the king, like her father, loved hunting and afforested the woodlands: the New Forest, and Dean, Rockingham, Sherwood, Epping, Hatfield, Braden, Exmoor, Windsor, Savernake, the Wirral and more.

33. She dreamed the elegant fallow deer, hind and hart, dappled flanks like sunshine in the woods in high summer.

34. She dreamed a king, not like her father. Not first among equals, but an absolute monarch – powerful, brutal and sexy.

35. She dreamed herself awake and beautiful, mounted on a black palfrey, hunting the pure white hart along the green rides.

36. She dreamed a great wild boar, bristled shoulders and blooded snout, and the dogs that bring him down.

37. She dreamed the sad limping mastiff, pathetic and declawed, so that it should not kill her father’s deer.

38. She dreamed the handsome outlaw, hiding in the greenwood and laughing at the King, her father.

39. She dreamed the ancient forest rights – of pannage, per-presture, agisment, assart, estover and turbary – and the long, cold winters for the peasants without firewood.

40. And how, huddled in the dark, they sang the songs and told the tales of freedom.

41. She dreamed all the abused children lost or abandoned in the forest, crying from hunger or cold or fear, and all the dark and scary things they may encounter, and she was one of those children.

42. She dreamed cliffs and crags and caves and the sudden black bogs that will suck small children down.

43. She dreamed red-spotted fly algaric, pink mycena, slimy glaucous
Stroparia aeruginosa
, and the innocent-looking shining
Amanita phalloides
– the death cap toadstool.

44. She dreamed giants, smashing up the woods in their foolish wrath, and goblins and pixies and the Devil himself searching for his own.

45. She dreamed feral mink, cutting and slashing their way through the stream beds, killing without mercy.

46. She dreamed barons and landlords and government officers destroying the woodlands for profit.

47. She dreamed nettles, imported by the Roman legions, and briars and gorse and vicious barbed-wire fences.

48. She dreamed ruthless robbers in their dens and lairs, grinding bones for bread and swilling great cups of blood.

49. She dreamed witches and stepmothers, who are too often the same and who trick her with promises of sweetness and then eat her up, and gobble her down.

50. And wolves.

51. She dreamed the forests shrinking, retreating, enclosed by ditch and fence, the common land stolen from the trees and the plants and the animals and the insects and the people.

52. She dreamed the pain of trees grubbed out, the hacking of root and branch, of foxes hunted and badgers baited, and of the deep cut of metal plough destroying the woodruff and the bluebells.

53. She dreamed the brutal Black Act and the swinging gallows for the hanged poachers and the landowners who valued a human life less than a pheasant.

54. She dreamed the huge machines that demanded huge fields and tore up the hedgerows and cut down the wood pasture and killed the song birds and the fritillaries and the field mushrooms.

55. She dreamed the sulphur smoke from finger-pointed factory chimneys leaching out calcium, raising acidity and killing the forests.