From the Forest (46 page)

10
S. T. Coleridge, ‘The Picture or the Lover’s Resolution’, 1802.

11
R. Mabey,
Flora Britannica
(Chatto, 1996), p. 85.

12
J. C. Loudon, The Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs, 1842.

13
Unnamed correspondent in Mabey,
Flora Britannica
, p. 86.

14
This may be a little rhetorical. Just as it is difficult to ascertain what is genuinely ancient woodland, so it is difficult to address this kind of particular in fairy stories. When the stories move from place to place, as such stories do, translators have a problem: not only may the species in the original not be known to the new listeners, they may have rather different associations. A classic example of this is the name Rapunzel. She was called this because it was the plant her mother craved in pregnancy, and it was stealing it for her that led to Rapunzel’s father promising the baby to the witch. Unfortunately, the plant which is ‘rapunzel’ in German is, in fact, ‘rape’ in English; obviously you cannot have a fairy-story heroine called ‘Rape’. A more casual example can be found in hagiography (a rather similar form to fairy stories, both in genre and in distribution, and widely disseminated through oral retelling); even in modern printed texts I have read that St Anthony, to fight off (sexual) temptation, threw himself into a bed of ‘nettles’. This makes the hagiographer’s point very effectively, but in fact there are no nettles in the Sinai desert; a literal translation of Athanasius’ original would probably be ‘thorn scrub’.

15
Gilbert White, in 1789, in
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
, described the beech as ‘the most lovely of all the forest trees’.

16
Deuteronomy 32:8; Job 31:33. Clearly, though, the story was known – the name occurs five times in the New Testament – four of them show Paul trying to contrast Jesus with the ‘old’ sinful (fallen) humanity (Romans 5:14; 1 Corinthians 15:22, 45; 1 Timothy 2:13, 14; and Jude 1:14). The Eve references in the New Testament are both Pauline – 2 Corinthians 11:3, and 1 Timothy 2:13.

17
Corinne Saunders,
The Forest of Mediaeval Romance
(D. S. Brewer, 1993).

18
In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
As you Like It
(and you could make a good case for a number of other plays too) Shakespeare does seem to be playing the two off against each other – not just in the contrast between the ‘hero class’ and the rustics, but in more complex narrative ways as well.

19
Laurie Lee (1914-1997) wrote
Cider with Rosie
(published in 1959, and entitled
Edge of Day
in the USA) as an autobiographical account of his rural childhood in the Cotswolds. It is one of the most popular English books of the twentieth century. He lived in Slad, a small village nearby and purchased the field in 1972 to protect it from developers – and then gave it to the cricket club.

3 The New Forest

1
Robert Frost, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’,
New Hampshire
(1923).

2
It is frequently claimed that ‘bluebells’ in Scotland are a different plant, the high summer harebell – a very different and very lovely delicate little thing; but Robert Burns used ‘bluebell’ to describe the spring flowers, just as his English contemporaries did. (In fact, it was the Romantic poets who made the name popular; prior to that, what we now call bluebells seem mainly to have been called hyacinths.) If it’s Scots enough for Burns, it’s Scots enough for me. Indeed, Richard Mabey claims that it is almost always the English who make the distinction and tell the Scots what we mean by ‘blue bell’.

3
Don’t.

4
I say ‘almost’ because I was also influenced by having spent a very happy weekend here many years before in a little cottage deep in the woods, with my friends Sabine Butzlaff and Alan Green.

5
In the very earliest version of Robin Hood, he was not in fact a nobleman at all, but a ‘yeoman’. His steady elevation through the ranks of British culture for 600 years rather emphasises my point.

6
William Shakespeare,
Macbeth
, III. iv.

7
Indeed, in Sweden, for example, this remains the case, even today. All forest products remain ‘free’ regardless of who owns the forest. (Hazel nuts are the one exception; they belong to the owner of the tree.)

8
Thomas Hughes,
Tom Brown’s School Days
(1857).

9
As a nation we are becoming increasingly anti-bloodsports of all kinds, and undoubtedly this will end up affecting the way we see poachers, but it has not done so yet. Poachers (and curiously also pirates) have a romantic image that robbers most certainly do not. It is not imaginable that cabinet ministers robbing banks, breaking and entering, or pickpocketing, even in fiction, would be seen as amusing and courageous. This is similar to defining who is a ‘freedom fighter’ and who is a ‘terrorist’.

10
John Buchan,
John McNab
(Polygon, 2007 [1925]).

11
Zipes,
Brothers Grimm
, p. 80 (there are also 27 stories in which animals are the central characters).

12
Zipes,
Brothers Grimm
, p. 81.

13
Chartists supported the People’s Charter of 1838. It was one of the first organised workers’ reform movements in Europe. Comparing the demands of this Charter with those of the Magna Carta clarifies the difference between ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ demands. While the demands in Magna Carta were to restore older privileges, the People’s Charter demanded brand new rights – among them: (1) universal male suffrage; (2) a secret ballot; (3) no property qualification for members of Parliament; (4) pay for members of Parliament (so poor men could serve); (5) constituencies of equal size; (6) annual elections for Parliament. Chartism ‘began among skilled artisans, such as shoemakers, printers,
and tailors
’ (my emphasis) – precisely the heroes of eighteenth-century fairy stories.

14
And, of course, Americans, Australasians and Canadians. The enterprising poor made up a very large proportion of the emigrants of the nineteenth century.

4 Epping Forest

1
Particularly later on by Henry VIII and Elizabeth 1, for hunting in. Down at the southern end of the forest, nearest to London, there is still a handsome Tudor building called Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge – although in fact it was built by Henry VIII in 1543, and was originally called The Great Standing. The two upper storeys of this timber-framed construction were originally open-sided, creating a sort of raised pavilion with a panoramic view from which to observe the hunt on the open Chingford Plain below.

2
Arthur Young,
General View of the Agriculture of the County of Essex
, vol. 2 (Board of Agriculture, 1813).

3
So successful, indeed, that the corporation bought up other woods around London, such as Burnham Beeches, for the same purpose. But because of its accessibility from the East End, Epping was particularly associated with impoverished Cockney communities.

4
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’, in
Poems
, 1918.

5
Robert Macfarlane, personal communication.

6
‘Swarming’ trees (that is, climbing straight up a relatively slender trunk that is narrow enough to get your arms round) is apparently one of the lost arts. In fact, I only know about it from classic children’s fiction, but in (for example)
Tom Brown’s School Days
there is a detailed and practical description of how to go about it. Tom and his friends (with convincing difficulty) climb a tall fir tree by this method. Interestingly, they go out with ‘spikes’ – obviously something like mountaineers’ crampons – well prepared for this activity. I do not know of any teenager who swarms trees now.

7
Richard Louv,
Last Child in the Woods
(UK edition: Atlantic Books, 2010). This book is very American – Louv’s concept of ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ are rather different from a European one – so it needs to be read carefully (especially in his leap to psychological pathology). Nonetheless, it should be read.

8
A possible exception might be feral American mink, but they have no particular connection with the ‘dark depths’ of ‘dreary’ forestry plantations; being semi-aquatic, they prefer waterside habitats.

9
Of course I believe that children should learn about the larger world – and ecology is part of this – but I believe such learning should be more grounded in real, concrete contact and observation – in experience. This is, in other fields, an educational truism.

10
I developed my ideas (and indeed adopted the word ‘resilience’ to describe them) through a conversation with Peter Powell, a consultant pediatrician now at the West Suffolk Hospital. I thank him.

11
This is one of the few stories that actually spells out its moral: ‘The grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine which Red-Cap had brought, and revived,
but
Red-Cap thought to herself; “as long as I live I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the woods, when my mother has forbidden me to do so”.’ The Grimms’ version of this story also has, uniquely, an epilogue in which the readers see Red-Cap, after she has profited from the lesson, repeating her mission obediently and thereby outwitting the wolf and drowning him in a water trough. Then ‘Red-Cap went joyously home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again.’

12
This last one is a very weird story; one of its peculiarities is that the children are
not
brother and sister. Marlinchen is the daughter of the wicked stepmother, but nonetheless she is entirely on her stepbrother’s side against the evil machinations of her own mother.

13
Thumbling stories follow a slightly different pattern. He is well loved and not abused, and he leaves home because of an assortment of accidents related to his small stature. However, he has a ‘physical disability’ instead, inflicted upon him by his parents’ foolish wishing.

14
‘A little brother took his little sister by the hand and said, “Since our mother died we’ve not had one moment of happiness. Our stepmother beats us every day and when we come near her, she kicks us away with her foot. We get nothing but hard crusts of bread, just leftovers for food, and the dog under the table is better off . . . come let us go off together into the wide world”’ (Opening paragraph of ‘Brother and Sister’).

15
I have heard it proposed that this a pre-historical memory, hardwired into us during the aeons on the savannah, but, like the terror of snakes that I discussed in the previous chapter, it seems a rather bizarrely selective process. Why would consumption by other animals be a more useful ‘memory’ than ‘don’t eat fungi or unidentified berries’, something that children will regularly do?

16
Brendan Chase
is in fact set in the woods of Kent – and BB is a careful observer, especially in his detailed descriptions of English wildlife.

17
‘A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’, in
Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and its Meanings
, ed. Di Robson and Gareth Evans, 2010, p. 116.

5 Great North Wood

1
Quoted in J. Corbet Anderson, The Great North Wood with a Geological, Topographical & Historical Description of Upper West and South Norwood in the County of Surrey (printed for subscribers, 1898), p. 66.

2
‘Fairings’ are things bought at fairs – modern fairings would be candyfloss and goldfish in little plastic bags, but more traditionally they were ribbons, laces and scarves. (The word ‘tawdry’ to describe tacky goods of this kind derives from St Audrey’s Fair in Ely, where the laces were considered particularly shoddy and garish.)

3
Thomas Frost, Reminiscences of a Country Journalist, 1886, p. 4.

4
Anderson, The Great North Wood.

5
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘collier’ applied equally to charcoal burners and mineral coal miners.

6
In the first half of the twentieth century the Forestry Commission was convinced that you could grow trees anywhere – and the disastrous attempts to plant forests in peat bogs (as in Ranoch Moor, for example) demonstrate the obverse of what is happening in South London.

7
Actually, you tend not to see as much death in the woods as you might expect – nature is very efficient: there might be a puddle of feathers where a fox has killed a pigeon or pheasant, but the body is gone; carrion is taken and bones are swiftly cleaned and dispersed. Road kill, unless humans remove the corpse, lingers longer.

8
This is an interesting story because it is one of the few where the heroine actually does start out as a real princess and ends up marrying a real prince. As I’ve pointed out, this is not as common as we tend to think: like other actual princesses, she ‘loses’ this status and has to reestablish it.

9
The Grimms have two stories involving brothers who are turned into birds and subsequently rescued by their little sister. In many subsequent collections of fairy stories, these two have been combined into a single story using elements from each. Many people have the two confused in their minds, although originally they are very different (even the number of brothers varies between 6 and 7). In one story the enchantment is brought on by the wicked stepmother (whom the King only marries because he is so scared at being lost in the forest); in the other, it is caused by the King’s careless stupidity rather than by any malice.

10
All these years later I cannot remember the name of the writer – if she recognises herself, she should get in touch; I would love to thank her for this tale which has lived with me for over fifteen years, and give her the acknowledgement she richly deserves.