From the Forest (45 page)

56. She dreamed roads and railways and airports cutting through the forest, breaking up the ancient patterns, and of pylons and cables and deer fences killing the bats and the birds.

57. She dreamed a war-weary people who clear-felled ancient forests, destroying the trees, leaving acres that looked like the battlefields of France, and to no useful purpose.

58. She dreamed
Scolytus scolytus
, the large elm bark beetle that carries the fungi that attack the great elm trees and leave them skeletal, then dead and gone.

59. She dreamed the years of the locusts, the vast march of foreign conifers invading the country, supported by the fifth column of tax concessions and destroying the natives.

60. And poor John Clare, lost and crazed in a landscape he could not recognise because the woods he loved had been stolen.

61. She dreamed the wind flowers,
Anemone nemorosa
, fairy white and gold, and all the sweet and lovely things that are only found in the forests.

62. She dreamed cow wheat, food for the heath fritillary butterfly, and herb paris, sanicle, wood sorrel, dog’s mercury, woodruff and yellow archangel.

63. She dreamed the sun-bright thick-ridged girolle mushrooms and the white clusters of angel’s wings and the mysterious rays of the earthstars in beech-leaf litter.

64. She dreamed the tiny red spoons of the carnivorous sundew along the drainage ditches and the wet places of the woods.

65. She dreamed toothwort and the ghost orchid that grow in the darkest shade and have no chlorophyll, no green, but are cream coloured and waxy and rare.

66. She dreamed pure mornings when the low sun caught the dew in spiders’ webs on dark gorse bushes and they danced like diamonds.

67. She dreamed the wet blue smoke of bluebells drifting away from sight and the sharp acrid scent of the ransom carpet.

68. She dreamed the climbing-twining, twining-climbing rich-smelling strangulation of honeysuckle and dog rose, tangling in her hair and between her breasts.

69. She dreamed the frothed extravagance of meadow sweet and the dark pink sweetness of wild strawberries, juice dripping from fingers and lips.

70. And of sweet violet and primroses and the stories of springtime they modestly whisper.

71. She dreamed two little children, Hansel and Gretel, lost in the forest, and cold and frightened and tired, nibbling at the sugary little house until the wicked witch came out to punish them

72. She dreamed the dark tanglewood where the wolf lurked waiting for Little Red Riding Hood to come trotting down the path on the way to her grandmother’s house.

73. She dreamed the Goosegirl-princess, duped on a road through the forest, whose horse was slaughtered and whose joy and love were stolen.

74. She dreamed the dark stories and then she dreamed Snow White running terrified through the forest but finding comfort and love in the home of the seven dwarves.

75. She dreamed the twelve naughty princesses who vanished at night through forests of gold and silver and jewels and danced their shoes to rags and laughed at all their suitors.

76. She dreamed a girl imprisoned in a high tower deep in the forest, who let down a strong rope of her own golden hair and hauled up a life of love and hope.

77. She dreamed an abused child who fell down a well into a lower forest where, through hard work and good manners, she earned an unending stream of gold.

78. She dreamed the faithful silent sister, sitting in a tree in the forest, sewing shirts for her swan brothers – pure and courageous and strong.

79. She dreamed all the young women who, frightened and abused, found safety in the forest and learned the language of the birds and the language of their own hearts.

80. And of a princess, who was herself, asleep in a green forest, waiting for springtime to wake up, preparing for love and joy.

81. She dreamed her mother’s breast, sweet and round, her nipple like a wild strawberry, juicy, sun-warmed.

82. She dreamed her father, the King, at the castle gate, holding up his lovely newborn daughter to the cheers of the populace.

83. She dreamed he planned a party, with dinner and dancing, with fireworks and feasting to celebrate her birth.

84. She dreamed that kings and commoners, princes and peasants came to the party, and twelve old women, gossips and friends, welcome for their wisdom.

85. She dreamed they gave her eleven gifts: intelligence, beauty, grace, laughter, kindness, health, green fingers, serenity, courage, courtesy, a voice like a singing bird . . .

86. She dreamed a dark presence; a thirteenth old women, bitter and jealous, whom her father, the King, had neglected or rejected, who had not been invited to the party and who was cold and mean.

87. She dreamed a shriek and a curse – before she became a woman she would prick her finger on a spindle and die, die, die.

88. She dreamed the twelfth old woman weeping; and then, swift as thought, changing her gift from wealth to redemption: she would not die but sleep and sleep and sleep until her beloved came.

89. She dreamed her long, golden, sheltered childhood and her father the King pushing her on a swing, higher and higher, his arms strong, his love embracing her.

90. But still she ran away, up a spiral staircase to a little solar high in a tower. 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, all busy and playful and pretty. ‘Oh,’ she cried, and 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.

91. She dreamed the dog roses twining over her, sweet smelling, sharp thorned, red and pink and white.

92. She dreamed the hazel catkins, which had passed the winter tucked under their twigs, began to swell and stretch, stiff and thick with pollen.

93. She dreamed a Swedish scientist with a wig and a Viennese doctor with a beard and glasses who both said it was all about sex and the hazel catkins giggled nervously.

94. She dreamed dark curling moss growing between her legs, soft and damp and luxuriant.

95. She dreamed the forest was stirring now, the days longer and the wind gentler, and the larches flushing rose pink.

96. She dreamed the swallows in the hot, dry desert gathering themselves, flickering the hot air, yearning for small flies over dancing little rivers and turning northwards for the long journey home.

97. She dreamed a hibernating hedgehog turning and grunting deep in the leaf litter under the hawthorn hedge, uncurling and rolling before sleeping again.

98. She dreamed her belly swelling with new life.

99. She dreams that the dream time is coming to an end.

100. And that when she is ready, when the spring comes sweetly and the primroses flower, a prince will cut his way through the protective undergrowth and kiss her awake.

And this will not be a dream; she will wake up and love him and they will live happily ever after in her beloved and lovely forest.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some of the walks in this book I did on my own, but for several I had companions and I would like to thank them all:

I walked in the Saltridge beech wood with Peter Daly and Ed Brammel (and Solly, their dachshund); in the Great North Wood with Will Anderson; in Epping Forest with Rob Macfarlane; in the forest at Mar Lodge with Liz Holden; in Staverton Thicks with Maggie and Lottie Lawrence; in Kielder Forest with Max McLaughlin; down the Hopewell Mine in the Forest of Dean with Dan Morgan and John Daniels, Free Miners; in the Glenlee Ravine with Cathy Agnew.

I also walked in Glenknapp Forest with Janet Batsleer and Margaret Beetham; in the Blean with Ruth Matthews; in Wightham Wood with Jo Garcia.

And in some of these and many others with Adam Lee, a great walking companion, a great photographer and a great son.

I thank them all.

I have also shared many of my walks in the last few years with Zoe, my enthusiastic border terrier, and I thank Hugh Poward for giving her to me, at, I fear, some cost to himself.

I could not have written the book without the work of Oliver Rackham, historian of British woodland, and Jack Zipes, Grimm expert and translator, nor without the help and knowledge and kindness of Rob Soutar, Forestry Commission Scotland’s regional manager for South West Scotland. I was generously supported by the Wingate Foundation (a fairy-story funder in the best sense of the word) and by the Scottish Arts Council.

I thank Jenny Brown, the sort of agent other writers complain does not exist any more; Sara Holloway, my editor; and everyone at Granta.

Finally, I thank my father Adam Maitland, who, over half a century ago, introduced me to both forests and fairy stories. I like to hope I may finally have written a book he might have enjoyed.

NOTES

1 Airyolland Wood

1
The old proverb says of tree leafing: ‘If the oak before the ash, we will only have a splash; if the ash before the oak, we will surely have a soak.’ Each spring I try to notice if this is true, but have not come to any definite conclusions.

2
Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (Palgrave, 2002).

3
Julius Caesar,
De Bello Gallico
, verse 21.

4
Zipes, Brothers Grimm.

5
I note with considerable joy that
Our Island’s Story
by H. E. Marshall (Galore Park Publishing, 2005), first published in 1905, is back in print. That is what I mean by ‘history stories’.

6
Not much more suitable really, because Rapunzel still manages to have twins without ever getting married – but hopefully the mid-nineteenth-century child would not put two and two together here.

7
The first collection was published in 1812, and added to with a second volume in 1815. These contained 87 tales. The brothers (but increasingly Wilhelm) continued both to edit and to add to their collection. The final edition was published in 1857, and contained 210 stories (which include 10 that were called ‘legends’ and are more explicitly pious than the 200 tales). Zipes (and others) have expanded this to 268 stories, by including some that were so heavily edited as to constitute new or different tales and others that for one reason or another were not included in any of the editions that the Grimm brothers edited (although some were published elsewhere). In his 2002 edition, Zipes also includes 11 tales which were found in letters in the Grimm archive but that were never edited by them.

8
Padraic Colum,
The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales
(RKP, 1975), Introduction.

9
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
, by Mark Kurlansky (Vintage, 1999), always seems to me to be a perfect example of this latter phenomenon.

10
Oliver Rackham,
Woodlands
(Collins, New Naturalist Library No. 100, 2006), p. 34.

2 Saltridge Wood

1
Tree species vary in their gregariousness. Obviously trees that propagate clonally appear in clumps near each other, but hornbeam, lime and beech, for example, are gregarious; ash and maple are random in their preference in this respect. Crab apple is anti-gregarious (it is highly unlikely that the tree next to a crab apple will be another crab apple) – a habit it shares, perhaps surprisingly, with many tropical rain forest trees.

2
The spring of 2011 came exceptionally early (probably because the extreme cold of the previous winter also occurred early, with the spectacularly low temperatures and heavy snow falls all over before Christmas). The wood was probably more May- than April-like when I was there.

3
J. B. Priestley.

4
It looks gentle, in fact the area is ferociously rich – one of only two areas outside London and the South East that makes it onto the list of the 20 richest locations in the UK, with a median household income of over £60,000 a year. This certainly helps the aesthetics.

5
Oliver Rackham,
Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape
(Dent, 1990), Preface to the revised edition, p. xviii.

6
Trees seldom behave as they should. Rackham cites a pre-plantation beech as far north as Durham, and they flourished in more of East Anglia, and also in Lancashire, in prehistoric times.

7
Before these dates, planting woodland was very unusual, so woods growing by that time were very likely to have developed naturally. However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became common practice to replant new trees within ancient woodland. Such woods are called ‘planted on ancient woodland sites’. (There are a few sites, especially from the 1920s, where ancient woods were clear felled, but then never replanted: here you have relatively young trees growing on ancient rootstock – but since the land will have been exposed to more light after the felling, they do not have the sort of flora that a genuine ancient wood has.)

8
Paul Nash,
Outline: An Autobiograph (The Lively Arts)
(3rd ed., Columbus Books, 1988), p. 73.

9
‘To a birch tree cut down and set up for a Maypole’ (Gruffydd ap Dafydd,
c.
1340-70).