The Forest (37 page)

Willie was waiting for him at the top of the street. Anxious to get well away before anyone stopped them, they went quickly along the lane that led through the fields and meadows of Old Lymington, crossed a stream by a small mill and within half an hour were passing the manor of Arnewood, that lay between the villages of Hordle and Sway.

It was a clear, bright morning, promising a warm day. The countryside west of Lymington was one of intimate little fields with hedgerows and small oaks in rolling dips and dells. The pale-green leaves were starting to break out on the bare branches; white blossom from the hedges was being scattered on the lane by the light breeze. They passed a ploughed field whose furrows were receiving a visit from a flapping mass of seagulls.

To anyone familiar with the inhabitants of Lymington, the two boys passing Arnewood manor would have been easy to identify, since each was a perfect miniature of his father: the serious face of the merchant on the one boy, the cheerful chinlessness of the mariner on the other, were
almost comical. Within an hour, however, they were leaving the world of Lymington well behind. They came to a wood through which there was a narrow track. And then, passing through a belt of stunted ash and birch, they emerged on to the wide open world of the Forest heath.

‘Do you think’, Willie asked nervously, ‘the dragon comes here?’

‘No,’ said Jonathan. ‘He doesn’t come over this way.’ He had never seen his friend hesitant before. He felt rather proud of himself.

It was a five-mile walk along the southern edge of the heath, but the going was easy on the close-cropped, peaty forest turf. The morning sun was behind them, catching the sparkling sheen of the dew on the grass. The great sweep of the heath was sprinkled with the sharp yellow stare of the gorse brakes. Here and there, on the little hillocks away on their right, small round clumps of holly trees could be seen. Holly holms the English had anciently called them. But more recently they had acquired another name. For since the deer and ponies ate their overhanging branches as far up as they could – to the browse line as it was termed – the trees had each acquired a mushroom shape and, taken together, a clump of holly trees on a hillock appeared to have a sort of hanging brim. Therefore the Forest folk nowadays referred to them as holly hats.

They walked for an hour and a half on the springy turf. They had walked nearly five miles along the edge of the heath when they came to the big rise known as Shirley Common. And then, as they reached the crest, they stopped.

The Avon valley lay below.

It was a richer world. First a small field, where bracken had been cut and heaped and some goats were now browsing; then groves of oak and beech and further fields swept gracefully down the slopes, until they reached the parkland and lush meadows along the wide banks of the
Avon, of whose silver waters, here and there through the trees, they caught a tantalizing glimpse. Then, beyond the valley, the low ridges of Dorset stretched into a bluish haze. You could see at once that this was a landscape fit for knights and ladies, and courtly love. And dragons.

To the north, however, two miles away across a broad sweep of brown and open heath, the wooded ridge rose up, behind which lay the dark forest village of Burley.

‘I think’, said Jonathan, ‘we might see the dragon now.’ He looked at Willie. ‘Are you afraid?’

‘Are you?’

‘No.’

‘Where does the dragon live?’ asked Willie.

‘There.’ Jonathan pointed to the long Burley ridge with its northern promontory of Castle Hill. The ridge at this time was known as Burley Beacon.

‘Oh.’ Willie looked at the place. ‘It’s quite close,’ he said.

It had probably been a solitary wild boar. There were not many left in England, now. They had all been hunted away. There were pigs that ran in the Forest, of course, in the mast season every autumn; and occasionally one of these might turn wild and be mistaken for a boar. But the real wild boar, with its grizzled hair, powerful shoulders and flashing tusks, was a terrible creature. Even the bravest Norman or Plantagenet noble, with his hounds and his huntsmen, might know fear when this huge ball of fury charged out of his cover towards him. It was the most exciting chase, though. All over Europe the boar hunt was the noblest aristocratic sport, after the joust. The boar’s head was the centrepiece of any great feast.

But the island kingdom of England, though graced with many forests, lacked the vast empty tracts of France or the German lands. If a wild boar lived, his presence would be known and noblemen would hunt him. Four centuries after the Norman Conqueror came, few English boars remained
in the south. Now and then, however, one would appear. For some reason it might not be caught. And over the years, perhaps living in isolation, it could grow to a huge size.

It seems likely that this is what occurred in the Avon valley some time around 1460.

The manor of Bisterne lay in a beautiful setting on the broad valley floor, on the forest side of the Avon a little way north of Tyrrell’s Ford. Bede’s Thorn it had been called in Saxon times, which had evolved in stages to Bisterne. Kept by its Saxon owner after the Conquest, it had passed by inheritance to the noble family of Berkeley from the western county of Gloucestershire; and it was Sir Maurice Berkeley, married to the niece of no less a personage than mighty Warwick the Kingmaker, who, just before the start of the Wars of the Roses, had often delighted to stay at his Bisterne manor and hunt in the Avon valley with his hounds.

The boar, it seems, had a lair somewhere up on Burley Beacon, overlooking the valley, and had been known to raid the farms there. Some time around Martinmass, when most of the livestock were slaughtered, it had come down to Bisterne, following the streams that led down from Castle Hill, until, near the manor house, it had come to Bunny Brook. By the manor farm it had found milk pails cooling in the stream, taken the milk, and then killed one of the farm’s remaining cows.

Its appearance at this time would have been terrifying indeed. It was not only the black beast’s blazing eyes, frothing mouth and tusks. If thwarted, the wild boar has a hideous scream; its breath in the cold November air would have steamed; boars also move across the ground with the strangest silence. As it ran across the Bisterne fields by the pale light of dawn it would have seemed an unearthly creature.

And no wonder, one cold November night, the brave Sir Maurice Berkeley went out to fight the monster. The
encounter took place in the valley and it was bloody. The knight’s two favourite hounds died in the mêlée and Sir Maurice, having killed the beast himself, received wounds that became infected. By Christmas he was dead.

Some legends are invented later, from half-forgotten events; others spring to life at once. Within a year, the whole county knew of Sir Maurice Berkeley’s battle with the Bisterne dragon. They knew the dragon flew over the fields from Burley Beacon. They knew the knight had killed him single-handed and died of the dragon’s poison. And if the wider world was soon distracted by the knightly dramas of the Wars of the Roses, in the New Forest and the Avon valley, as the years passed, men remembered: ‘We had a dragon not so long ago.’

It was another two miles from the crest of Shirley Common to Bisterne manor, and the boys took their time descending. Sometimes they could see the spur of Burley Beacon, at others it was hidden; but they kept an eye out in that direction in case the dragon should take wing from its hill and come flying towards them.

‘What’ll we do if we see it coming?’ asked Willie.

‘Hide,’ said Jonathan.

On the lower part of the slope the track led through woodland. The slanting morning sunshine made a pale-green light in the undergrowth. Mosses gathered by the bases of the trees, ivy on the trunks. They heard a pigeon cooing. The path veered left out of the trees and led down the side of the wood. A grey hen scuttled across in front of them from the long grass. And they had only descended another hundred yards when suddenly on their right there was a flapping sound and, in a flash of dark metallic blue, a blackcock with his lyre tail, disturbed by something, burst over their heads out of the trees.

‘That made you jump, Willie,’ said Jonathan.

‘So did you.’

Soon after this they came down on to the open valley
floor and saw at once that they had entered a world where a dragon might appear at any time.

The world of Bisterne was very flat. Its large fields stretched over two miles westwards to the Avon’s silver waters which, as they often did in spring, had spread out over the lush water-meadows in a magical, liquid sheen. The manor house – it was more of a hunting lodge for the Berkeley knights, really – was a single timber-and-plaster hall with a stable yard attached, standing by itself in the middle of open parkland where cattle grazed and rabbits in an enclosed warren bobbed on the close-cropped grass. Away in the distance were the slopes behind which Burley Beacon lay; and dotting the landscape from hedgerow and field, single oaks or elms were holding out their bare arms as though expecting the winged monster to fly down from the Beacon and perch upon them.

It was quiet. Occasionally, they heard the lowing of cattle; once, the sawing sound of swans’ wings, beating over the distant water. And now and then a hoarse cawing and sudden flapping would come from the crows in the trees. But most of the time Bisterne lay in silence, as though all nature were awaiting a visitation.

Not many folk were about in the fields. A few hundred yards south of the manor hall lay a small thatched farmhouse with a slip of ash trees by the brook nearby. Coming down the cattle drove beside it they met a cowherd who, when they asked him politely where the dragon had been slain, smiled and pointed to a field behind the farm. ‘That’s Dragon’s Field,’ he told them. ‘By Bunny Brook.’

They wandered about for an hour or more along the paths and down to the river. They could see by the sun that it must be noon when Willie announced that he was hungry.

Just down river, at the old cattle crossing of Tyrrell’s Ford, there were some cottages and an old forge. Saying they had come from nearby Ringwood, so as not to draw any suspicion on to themselves, Jonathan begged some bread
and cheese, which a woman in one of the cottages gave them readily enough. He asked her also about the dragon.

‘Twenty years or more since he was killed,’ she said.

‘Yes. But what about the new one?’

‘I haven’t seen that myself,’ she said, with a smile.

‘Perhaps it isn’t there,’ said Willie to Jonathan, as they ate their bread and cheese by the river.

‘She only said she hadn’t seen it,’ Jonathan replied.

After they had eaten they slept for a while in the warm sun.

It was past mid-afternoon when they went back up the drove by the farmhouse. If they felt daunted by the long walk home, they tried not to show it. They knew they needed to step out now to be safely back at dusk.

They were halfway up the drove when they encountered the cows, about half a dozen of them, being driven to the farmhouse by a boy. He was older than they were, perhaps twelve, and eyed them curiously. ‘Where d’you come from?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Want a fight?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I got to drive these cows anyway. What’re you doing here?’

‘Came to see the dragon.’

‘Dragon’s Field’s over there.’

‘We know. They told us there was another dragon now, but there isn’t.’

The boy looked at them thoughtfully. His eyes narrowed. ‘Yes there is. That’s why I have to get these cows in.’ He paused and nodded. ‘Comes over every evening, just like the last one did. From Burley Beacon.’

‘Really?’ Jonathan searched his face. ‘You’re making it up. Nobody’d stay here.’

‘No, it’s true. Honest. Sometimes he don’t do much. But he’s killed dogs and calves. You can see him flying at sunset.
Breathes fire, too. Horrible-looking thing, really.’

‘Where does he go?’

‘Always the same place. Down into Dragon’s Field. So we stay away from there, that’s all.’

He turned away then, tapping the nearest cow with his stick, while the two boys went on. They didn’t speak for a moment or two.

‘I think he was lying,’ said Willie.

‘Maybe.’

Now they were returning, it did not seem to take long to get back up to the crest of Shirley Common. Although the sun was not yet sinking in the afternoon sky, there was just a hint of chill in the April breeze and a tinge of orange in the golden haze to the west. Once again the whole valley from the Avon river up to the ridge of Burley Beacon was stretched out before them in a panorama.

‘We’d get a good view from here,’ said Jonathan.

‘We’ll get back late,’ said Willie.

‘Depends when it comes. It might come now.’

Willie didn’t reply.

Jonathan knew his companion hadn’t been as keen to go as he was. Willie had done it for friendship’s sake. Not that he was afraid – or no more afraid than he was, anyway. In most of their games, especially playing by the river or anything to do with water, it was Willie with his funny chinless face who was the dare-devil and Jonathan who was cautious. And he knew that he wouldn’t have dared to come there alone. But as the long day wore on Jonathan had also discovered something else in himself that he hadn’t known about before: a quiet, driving determination rather different from his friend’s free nature.