The Forest (111 page)

‘Exactly. What does the public know of the Forest? What they can see from the train. Its beauty, its wildness, its untouched nature. They don’t understand Pride grazing his
cows, though I dare say they like the look of it. But they do understand if you say that Pride and the heritage he represents are being taken away from them. Because the Forest belongs to them, you see. The Forest belongs to the public.’

If, during the beginning of this speech, Albion had seen a glimmer of interest, this final statement snuffed it out at once. ‘No it does
not
belong to the public!’ He glowered at Minimus, then with an effort at self-control: ‘To be precise, it belongs to the Crown and the commoners.’

‘But the public comes here, don’t you see? It’s not only the gentlemen who take the train down here to go shooting. Ordinary people are starting to move about. Shopkeepers from Southampton or London; even working men, skilled labourers and their families. They’re starting to visit the Forest for the day.’

Colonel Albion had noticed this trickle of folk coming from Brockenhurst station, wandering out across the big open spaces of Balmer Lawn, and paddling in the gravelly streams. He wasn’t sure what he felt about them. He knew that he and Pride loved the Forest and walked about it with pleasure every day. If some child from the grey streets of London came to play in the stream as any Forest child had always done, he could hardly blame them. He supposed it did no harm, so long as there weren’t too many of them.

‘These people are public opinion?’ he growled, dubiously.

‘They have votes, many of them. They receive ideas from the leaders of public opinion.’

As far as Albion was concerned, down in the Forest, he was a leader of public opinion, but he didn’t think that was what Furzey meant. ‘And who are these leaders?’ he enquired grimly.

‘Writers, artists, lecturers, scientists,’ said Minimus. ‘People who write in newspapers.’

‘People like you?’ asked Albion, in even deeper gloom.

‘Exactly,’ said Minimus happily. ‘What you need is a petition, letters to the press from artists. The new plantations are ruining the landscape. Then there are the naturalists. They will tell you that the Forest is unique. There are all kinds of species here found almost nowhere else. We could make an outcry in the press, the universities. The political men are frightened of such things. Anyway,’ he concluded, ‘if you want to save the Forest, you take my advice. I could help. I’m on your side,’ he added encouragingly.

The thought of having Minimus on his side did not seem to bring Colonel Albion much happiness. ‘Thank you for your advice,’ he said drily. Then, remembering the pleadings of his wife, he took a very deep breath and addressed his son-in-law as kindly as he could. ‘There is another matter, Minimus,’ he forced himself to say the name, ‘that I think we should discuss. It is the question of money.’

‘Really? I haven’t any, you know,’ said Minimus.

‘I know,’ said Colonel Albion.

‘We get by. I sold some paintings last year. I’m writing a book. That might bring in something.’

‘A book. On what subject?’

‘Beetles.’

The Colonel breathed deeply. ‘Were you to die,’ he asked hopefully, ‘have you made any provision for Beatrice? Do you know what would become of her?’

‘She can have my pictures and my collections. She’d have to go back to you I should think. You’d take her back wouldn’t you?’

‘Have you considered how you would live if you had children?’

‘Children? Beatrice wants them, you know.’ He smiled vaguely. ‘I suppose they just run around, don’t they?’

‘They also have to be paid for. There are expenses.’

‘Perhaps,’ Minimus said dubiously, ‘I could ask my father. I don’t know if he’d help, though. He thinks I should be employed.’

Colonel Albion had never met Mr Furzey the solicitor, but he felt for him. How was it possible, he wondered, that this irresponsible young man had dared to tell him how to organize the affairs of the Forest?

‘How would you educate them?’

‘Oh, that I do know. Beatrice and I want to educate them at home.’

‘Sons?’ Daughters of course could be educated at home but sons were another matter. Some aristocratic families still engaged tutors, but that was hardly possible here.

‘Well, we certainly wouldn’t send them to any of these new boarding schools,’ said Minimus.

There had been boarding schools in England since the Middle Ages. A few, like Eton and Winchester, had even been patronized since the eighteenth century by the aristocracy. But the passion of the richer classes for sending their sons away to such institutions was a recent phenomenon, and these establishments were springing up everywhere.

‘They’re the most terrible places,’ Minimus continued. ‘They blunt the intellect, destroy the sensibility. Do you know they flog the boys and make them play games? Did you go to a place like that?’

Colonel Albion looked at him in stupefaction. ‘I went to Eton,’ he said coldly.

‘There you are, then,’ said Minimus.

‘This is not the manner,’ said Albion, with rising anger, ‘in which I wish to see my daughter living, Sir.’

Minimus stared at him in genuine surprise. ‘Of course it isn’t,’ he said. ‘But if she married me,’ he glanced around the room at the volumes of genealogy and the Colonel’s hunting coat, ‘I suppose she must have wanted to get away from all this. Don’t you think?’

That this observation was probably true did not improve Albion’s temper in the least. He ignored it. ‘When you enticed,’ he gave the word an insulting emphasis, ‘my
daughter into marriage, did it ever occur to you to consider her welfare?’

Even Minimus noticed that he was being insulted now. ‘It was she who wanted to marry, actually,’ he said. ‘She’s quite old enough to know what she wants, you know. After all,’ he added, ‘she could have just come to live with me. I suggested that.’

‘You are telling me, Sir,’ the Colonel was starting to go very red, ‘that you intended to seduce my daughter and persuade her to live with you in sin?’

‘But I married her,’ said Minimus plaintively. ‘There’s no need to get so shirty.’ He shook his head. ‘Several people I know live with their mistresses.’

‘People?’ Albion’s voice was rising to a new plateau. ‘People like you, Sir.
Artists
.’ He might have said lepers. ‘And do such people have children, too?’

‘Of course they do,’ Minimus cried. ‘I always told Beatrice, she didn’t have to marry me to have children.’

It was too much. Colonel Albion was now the same colour as his riding coat. He gasped. ‘You villain!’ he shouted, ‘you …’ he began to search for a word, ‘you absolute …’ he searched, and it came at last: ‘you
bounder
!’

George Pride was devoted to his inclosures. There were three of them under his charge.

The job of woodman was a pleasant one. He had to keep up the inclosure fences and maintain the drains. That was easy enough. More interesting was the management of the woods themselves, supervising the felling, replanting and thinning of the timber. He was also in charge of assigning the lops and tops of trees to the commoners with rights of Estovers, and to the cutting of turves from the peat bogs and bracken from the area.

Each woodman also received fifteen shillings a week, and a cottage with a paddock where he could keep a pony. He had the right to graze a cow on the Forest all year round, an allowance of fern for bedding as well as turves for his fire.

There were twelve woodmen in the Forest now. George Pride’s inclosures all lay on the high ground, about three miles east of Fordingbridge. It was a beautiful, deserted area. Two miles to the east, perched on a wooded rise, in the middle of nowhere, was the hamlet of Fritham. The old Free Traders used to come up there from the Smugglers’ Road, according to the old folk. But the coastguard service had pretty much killed off that fine old trade before George was born, and Fritham was quite a law-abiding place now. Apart from this, wherever you looked was lovely open wilderness.

George Pride’s inclosures were delightful. The conifer plantations, of course, were fairly lifeless, but the mixed inclosures of oak, beech and chestnut were pretty places. With the grazing animals fenced out, they were carpeted with bluebells in May. Columbine, violets and primroses grew there. In one spot George even had wild lily-of-the-valley.

George was particularly proud of his fences – both those of the inclosures and around his cottage. He had wanted the best and so he had gone to Burley and employed Berty Puckle.

Berty Puckle’s fences weren’t like anyone else’s. For a start, he made the planks the proper way.

‘There are people,’ Puckle would say, ‘who get their planks from timber yards, where they’ve been sawed.’ This last word, his personal version of ‘sawn’, was said in tones of the deepest disgust. The way to make a plank, he would explain, was to take a length of wood and split it carefully with a wedge and a hammer. Working his way gently down, following the grain of the wood, the skilful carpenter could produce wafer-thin planks, getting far more from the wood
than any clumsy fellow with a saw ever could. Yet they would last for ever. ‘Natural is best,’ he’d say. ‘Takes longer, lasts longer.’

His particular speciality was his gates. ‘I think I got the idea when I was a child,’ he once told George. ‘Down at Buckler’s Hard. My grandfather was still working down there, although my dad had moved back to Burley. He was an old man then. We used to go and see him, and I remember seeing the oak knees they used in the ships, like wall brackets, to support the decks. They’re so strong, you see, you can’t ever break them. That’s what gave me the idea, I reckon.’

For his gates Berty Puckle would take a tree fork to form the upright and the diagonal. Then he’d fit other pieces of wood, dovetailing, and nailing with wooden or iron pegs until the resulting gate seemed more like a natural growth than any man-made object. Sometimes he would even take some complex knotted growth and work round that. You could spot one of Berty Puckle’s Forest gates at a hundred yards. George Pride had fifteen of them.

Yet it was also the inclosures, their fences and gates that provided George with his only serious worry. For that was the other part of the woodman’s job: he had to guard them.

And they were likely to be attacked.

After the setback in the House of Lords, the Forest had had one piece of luck. A Member of Parliament named Professor Fawcett who had taken an interest in the area had passed a Resolution that halted all further inclosures or felling of ancient trees until new legislation for the Forest could be framed. The government was led by the liberal Mr Gladstone now, who hesitated to attack the commoners. So the Forest was granted a breathing space. But no one knew for how long. And if men like Colonel Albion and Lord Henry were preparing for the next battle in Parliament, the Forest people indicated their feelings.

They set fire to the inclosures and stole the fences.

In these years of uncertainty, with the hated Office of Woods temporarily checked, it was hardly surprising if the Forest folk had been having quite a few very satisfactory little fires. Cumberbatch had even employed some extra men as constables – not, of course, that it had the slightest effect.

‘We haven’t been up your way have we, George?’ a Forest man remarked to Pride cheerfully in Lyndhurst one day. He was a large, burly fellow, not the sort of man you’d want to get into a fight with.

‘No. And please don’t,’ said George.

‘I wouldn’t worry about that, George, not if I was you,’ the other replied. ‘You just sleep sound at nights.’

‘I really don’t know what I’ll do if they come,’ George confessed to his wife. ‘But I’m not letting them destroy my inclosures.’

Apart from these worries, however, they had been happy years. His family was growing. Gilbert, his eldest son, was ten years old now. When he watched the boy come back happily after catching rabbits, or go running down by one of the Forest brooks, he relived his own childhood, and it gave him a deep satisfaction.

He had four children now, but it was the two eldest, Gilbert and Dorothy that he usually took with him on his rambles. Sometimes they would go down by the amber streams, and walk along the greens where the ponies came to avoid the flies – to shade as the Forest people called it. They would watch a kingfisher flash by or observe the tiny Forest trout and he would teach them all that he knew about the Forest lore.

If he saw himself in Gilbert, he could not quite pinpoint who Dorothy was like. She had the same features as his wife, but her wiry body seemed more like the tall Prides. Her eyes were such a dark blue they were almost purple. As he watched her helping her mother about the house, baking dough cakes and bread, or making apple jelly in the autumn,
he would smile to himself at what a good wife she would make some lucky man one day. Yet she could also run like a deer. Gilbert couldn’t catch her yet. George was prouder of her than he knew.

It was one day in summer, when she was nine, that he made a small discovery about his feelings that made him feel ashamed.

A deer had somehow got into one of the inclosures and, as he was allowed to do, he had shot it. After he and his wife had skinned it and cut it up, he had taken the haunches across to Fritham where the landlord of the Royal Oak – the only inn for miles around in that part of the Forest – had agreed to smoke it for him. Once smoked, the venison would be wrapped in muslin by his wife and hung in the broad chimney of the cottage where the flies wouldn’t get at it.