The Forest (116 page)

‘And I suppose it’s foolish,’ said George, ‘but I was always so pleased he told me that.’

Sunday morning. Dottie Pride had only arrived at the Albion Park Hotel the evening before, but already she felt the familiar flutter of nerves. There was a whole week to go – a week in which to work out what the story was and find the angle. Plenty of time. But this was the stage at which she always began to panic.

She decided to visit Beaulieu first. She would be going there on Saturday to set up the shoot, but she wanted to have a private look around the place in advance. Perhaps it would give her some ideas. It was only a ten-minute drive, even at the forty-mile-an-hour speed limit which was in force to protect the ponies and the deer.

She was impressed. If the stately homes of Britain needed tourists to pay for their upkeep, the present Lord Montagu had shown considerable flair. Taking his father’s interest in the first motor cars as his starting point, he had built up the Motor Museum at Beaulieu into a huge national institution. Dottie wasn’t particularly interested in mechanical things, but she spent a fascinating half-hour gazing at Victorian Daimlers, Edwardian Rolls-Royces, and even the later cars of the fifties. As she left the museum and walked the short distance into the abbey itself, however, the mechanical age seemed discreetly to vanish, and she entered the quiet peace of the medieval world.

It was all very well done. After the house, she walked through an exhibition of monastic life in the huge
domus
where the lay brothers had lived when they were not out at
the granges. And when she went out into the ruined cloisters, she could almost see the Cistercian monks, moving quietly about their business amongst the old grey stones. In one of the carrels where they used to sit, she noticed with disapproval that some vandal had carved a little letter ‘A’.

Beaulieu would open the documentary and the timing was perfect. Lord Montagu had chosen the twenty-fourth of April, Easter Sunday, to mark the nine-hundredth anniversary of the killing of King William Rufus in the New Forest. He had organized a large archery competition at Beaulieu with the actor Robert Hardy, who happened also to be a world authority on the longbow, opening the proceedings. Lord Montagu was to act – this was the medieval term for the patron of such an event – as Lord Paramount of the day. A colourful day, full of pageantry. Excellent television material.

With an historical surprise. A prominent local historian, Mr Arthur Lloyd, had shown beyond much doubt that the killing of Rufus had been recorded at the time as taking place at Througham, on the coastal stretch below Beaulieu. The famous Rufus stone, one of England’s best-known tourist sites, was actually in the wrong place.

And then? She spent the rest of the day driving round the Forest. First she went down to Buckler’s Hard. There was a maritime museum by its grassy banks now. There was a model of the shipyard as it would have been during the building of one of Nelson’s ships, the
Swiftsure
, which caught her eye. She noted that sections of the great Mulberry Harbours used for the D-Day landings in World War II had also been built on the Beaulieu River. Interesting stuff, certainly.

East of Beaulieu lay Exbury Gardens and Lepe County Park. Along the edge of the Forest on the Southampton side were a nature centre and a model farm. A little further north she found a leisure park with children’s rides. The message
was clear. The modern New Forest had equipped itself in a very professional way to attract large numbers of visitors. Nor was this only a matter for the larger operators. When Dottie drove across to the dark little enclave of Burley in the afternoon, she found that the village was busily trading on its reputation for witchcraft with at least three shops selling witch’s trinkets of every kind. Tourism and recreation: was that the future of the king’s old hunting ground?

Monday morning was bright. Dottie was quite excited as she made her way up the steep curve of Lyndhurst’s main street. On her left, the high Victorian tower of the church soared into a pale blue spring sky.

When she had telephoned the New Forest Museum, she had not only been told she should go to this morning’s meeting, but they had offered to have someone there to meet her. ‘Don’t worry,’ the voice on the telephone had laughed. ‘We’ll find you.’

As she came to the top of the street, she saw why. The Queen’s House, the ancient royal lodge and manor, was a handsome old red-brick building. Outside a door to the side of it, a group of about twenty people had already gathered to wait. It was obvious from the way they were talking that they all knew each other. She was the only stranger. She looked around.

‘Would you be Dottie Pride?’ a voice asked behind her.

‘Yes.’ She turned. A hand was held out. A nod. A smile. Did he say his name? If so, she did not catch it.

All she knew was that she was looking at the most beautiful man she had ever seen in her life. He was tall and slim, Celtic-looking. He might have been Irish. His hair fell in dark ringlets to his shoulders. With his pale, sensitive face, he looked like the pictures of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His brown eyes were soft, wonderfully intelligent. He was wearing a brown leather jacket.

‘We can go in now,’ he said pleasantly. ‘The door’s opening.’

The Verderers’ Hall was a large rectangular chamber. At the far end a raised dais ran the width of the room like a magistrate’s bench, with the royal coat of arms on the bare wall behind it. Round the walls were deers’ heads and antlers and glass-fronted showcases. In a place of honour, the ancient stirrup was displayed through which dogs had to pass unless they were to be lawed. The floor was taken up with wooden benches except for the space at the front where there was a table and a witness stand. Old oak beams crossed the ceiling. Dottie, somewhat dazed, sat at the back, trying not to stare at her companion.

‘The Verderers’ Court meets on the third Monday of the month, ten months a year,’ he murmured. ‘The Official Verderer’s appointed; a few represent official bodies; the rest are elected. They have to have commoning rights to stand.’

‘This is the court set up in 1877 to replace the old medieval court?’ She’d done her homework. She wondered if it impressed him.

‘Modified once or twice, but basically, yes. Here they come.’ The verderers were filing in. He gave her quick sketches of them as they appeared. Two had published books on the New Forest. The Official Verderer was a prominent landowner. Most of them had roots in the Forest that went back centuries. There were eight present on the dais that morning. In front, in green uniforms, stood the two agisters. The Head Agister, by the witness stand, called out:

‘Oyez, oyez, oyez. All manner of persons who have any presentments to make, or matter or things to do at this Court of Verderer. Let them come forward and they shall be heard.’ She was back, Dottie thought, in the Middle Ages.

A brief report was read out. Then came the list of ponies knocked down by cars: a melancholy record at every
meeting. When the meeting was opened to the floor, a succession of people came up to the witness stand to make their depositions, known as presentments. Each time, her companion would murmur a word of explanation in her ear. One man, with a broad face and fair hair, came to complain of litter from a nearby campsite. ‘That’s Reg Furzey. Smallholder.’ Another man, with a curious gnarled face that seemed to her to have been carved out of oak came to complain of a new property whose fence was encroaching upon the Forest. ‘Ron Puckle. Sells wooden garden furniture in Burley.’ The young man smiled. ‘It’s funny, when you come to think of it,’ he whispered. ‘For centuries the old Forest families spent their time making encroachments on the Forest; now they spend their lives making sure nobody else does!’ At the end of each presentment, the Official Verderer would politely rise, thank the person concerned and promise to consider their point. Some of the issues raised concerning Forestry Commission activities on local bye-laws were too technical for Dottie to follow. But the sense of the meeting was very clear: this was the ancient heart of the Forest. And the commoners with their verderers, were determined to protect its ancient character.

It was still before noon when they emerged from the court. Her next appointment was in the museum early that afternoon, and it seemed that her companion was now preparing to leave. She wondered how she could keep him with her.

‘I’ve got to go to see Grockleton’s Inclosure,’ she said. ‘Could you show me where it is?’

‘Oh. All right.’ He looked surprised. ‘I suppose so. You’ll have to walk a bit.’

‘That’ll be fine. By the way, what did you say your name was?’

‘Peter. Peter Pride.’

‘Pride?’

She had never walked that fast before. She wondered, if she stopped, whether he would just continue on his way, and didn’t dare find out. Fortunately, however, he did pause frequently to show her some lichen, or a strange beetle under a log, or some small plant which, to the trained naturalist, made this ancient area such an ecological paradise. At one point, as they came out onto some open heath, she had noticed that the holly trees on a nearby ridge had a curious profile against the sky.

‘They’re flat underneath, like mushrooms,’ she remarked.

‘That’s the browse line,’ he explained. ‘The ponies and deer eat the leaves up as far as they can reach.’ And she realized that most of the trees she could see exhibited this feature. In the distance, it gave them a magical, floating effect.

And so the lessons went on. If she couldn’t always follow the scientific information with which he constantly plied her, she could at least get a sense of the subject. And then she could watch his tall, athletic form striding ahead of her again.

He was an ecologist by training, but a Forest historian too. And knowledgeable. Impressively so. She wondered how old he was. Early twenties, twenty-five perhaps. Maybe a year or two younger than she was, but not more. She wondered if he was attached.

He was amused by her name. ‘I’m just one of them,’ he explained. ‘But there are Prides all over the Forest. Are you sure you don’t come from here?’

Her father had told her when she was a girl that she reminded him of his grandmother Dorothy, and indeed she’d been named after her. She had also discovered from him, more recently, that his grandmother had never been married. ‘She led a bit of a life, actually,’ her father had said. ‘Lived with an art professor for years. Then another one. She seemed to have a talent for attracting artists. The first
one left her a lot of pictures, which turned out to be quite valuable. Who his father was, my own father was never quite sure. But he took her name anyway, which was Pride.’

‘My great-grandmother was born Dorothy Pride,’ she said. ‘But she came from London.’

He nodded quickly, but said no more on the subject.

He was curious about why she wanted to see Grockleton’s Inclosure. When she explained that her boss, John Grockleton was connected with the Forest, he seemed to think it very funny. ‘Grockleton was a Commissioner of the hated Office of Woods,’ he explained. ‘Built a railway line where several people were injured. Not a popular name here.’

‘Oh.’ She would have to think of something else to tell him.

‘Here we are,’ he said cheerfully, a few minutes later. ‘Grockleton’s Inclosure.’

The plantation, though it had been harvested several times, was much as it had been a century before. The lines of conifer seemed endless. Beneath the trees, in what little space there was, all was dark, silent, dead.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

They were a few minutes early at the New Forest Museum back in Lyndhurst, so they took a quick turn round the exhibits. Every facet of Forest life, from a recent famous snake-catcher to a detailed diagram of how to build a charcoal fire, was covered. By the time they went upstairs to the library she was longing to ask some questions.

The figure who rose from the big central table proved to be a short, white-bearded man with a kindly face and twinkling, observant blue eyes. Peter Pride had already explained that, although the older man’s manner was quiet, he was the discreet force behind much of what went on in the Forest museum.

He was immediately welcoming to Dottie, introduced
her to several friendly people working there, explaining that the place was also manned on a daily basis by a team of volunteers.

‘This is Mrs Totton,’ he indicated a rather distinguished-looking lady, who must have been a stunning blonde in her youth. ‘She’s on duty today.’ He gave Dottie an encouraging smile.

‘What would you like to know?’

Dottie had prepared carefully for this meeting, and it proved informative. Was the Forest facing a crisis, she asked?

‘The challenges of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are new; but they grow out of the past as you’d expect,’ the careful historian answered. ‘The reason for the protests and fires is simple enough. The commoners aren’t only having a hard time as farmers, with terrible prices for cattle, pigs and ponies. The newcomers, from outside, are paying such high prices for their pony paddocks that the price of land is being driven beyond the farmers’ reach. Above all, they feel that the modern world – Forestry Commission, local government, central government – just despises them. And yet they really are the Forest, you know.

‘Then you have the degrading of the ancient Forest environment: careless campers and tourists generally.’