From the Forest (18 page)

At the bottom of Peckarman’s Wood there is a high hedge and a secret little gateway. We went through it and into the heart of Dulwich Wood. Here, judging from the old map, we were probably walking through a patch of the original Great North Wood. Certainly the experts tell us that some of Dulwich Wood (and a few other small outcrops elsewhere in the area) were never grubbed up or destroyed, but remain in tiny patches, and as new visitors, we found it impossible to tell. You have to have time to study woodland carefully and through the seasons to know square metre by square metre how close it might be to semi-natural forest. Obviously this does not apply to a neatly fenced couple of acres on top of a moor in Scotland – but here, we know there was wood before 1600 (ancient woodland); we know that much of it was grubbed out; we know that, with the gardens and the building work and all the other changes to the area, some of the trees here are certainly not original – but we also know that woods keep their secrets well. Later in the day, after lunch in a pub garden surrounded by tall trees, we walked alongside Farquar Road, where a community group are re-establishing the ‘old woods’, and it was rather lovely – wild and convincing looking, with little secret twisting paths. But neatly along the wood were the ruins of old basements – lines of brick up to half a dozen courses, with gaps marking out rooms and once-domesticated spaces. Between the old original wood and the new re-established ‘old wood’ there had been a street of Victorian homes, presumably with tidy gardens and neat gateways. The steep slope up from the present road had been cut back in places to accommodate the houses. Now grass and wild flowers and even trees were pushing through and breaking up old floors; there were white butterflies busy in the flourishing undergrowth barely ten metres from the modern street. When I was a child we played a game in the woods in which we marked the floor plan of a house in stones and sticks, leaving blanks for doorways and windows. Above the outline the details were filled in by the imagination, but sometimes even the fireplaces were carefully delineated. What we saw here were house plans like those, but they were solid and sturdy, though, helped by local humans, the woods were winning.

Will had been right – the wood was still here, but secret and baffling, hiding and disguising itself like the protagonists of the fairy stories.

One of the things that has always drawn me to fairy stories is their sense of secrecy. Many of the most resonant tales for me are about secrets and silences and hidden truths. It was this that first alerted me to the deep connection between the forests and the stories. Like the stories, the forests guard their secrets and hide their treasures; I believe the stories took the particular themes they did because their original tellers were living in the forests. In any thick wood you will be surprised; there is a sense of the hidden and the surprising because you cannot see what is coming. You cannot see the sky, or at least not the whole of it, which, I think, is why people are so frightened of getting lost in the woods; even if one does not consciously steer oneself by the sun and the horizon, the impossibility of holding them in one’s line of sight is disorientating. Under the canopy, even in a reasonably clear forest, one rather literally cannot see the wood for the trees: the solid vertical rise of tree trunks cut across any long view, ‘the view is truncated’. The tangled web of lower scrubby branches and undergrowth, especially in high summer, makes paths crooked and hides what is ahead. Fallen trees and sudden sodden patches force diversions, pushing you like Little Red Riding Hood off the proper path. You come across unexpected things – the lovely clearing, the little waterfall, the ruined wall, the magnificent ancient tree, the pied flycatcher skipping black and white on an oak branch, a cloud of butterflies feeding – and once, for me, the real treasure of globe flowers, the huge bright
troillius europeaeus
, seen as a brief flash of gold ahead of me and then, after a few moments’ pursuit of the invisible, there they were, huge, shining, vivid yellow, right at my feet. Or equally, of course, you stumble on the dead fox,
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the rubbish dump, the ancient wrecked car or the wicked grinning fungus – suddenly, at close quarters and as a surprise. Often when I am walking in the woods my dog will suddenly stop, sharply alert, head up, paw raised and staring fixedly into a dense thicket or patch of bracken – she knows there is something lurking, but I cannot see it. The sense of secrets, silences, surprises, good and bad, is fundamental to forests and informs their literature. In fairy stories this is sometimes quite simple and direct: Hansel and Gretel get lost in the woods, and then suddenly they come upon the gingerbread house. Snow White runs in terror through the forest and suddenly stumbles upon the dwarves’ cottage; characters spending scary nights in or under trees suddenly see a twinkling light – and they make their laborious way towards it without having any idea of what they will find when they arrive.

And very often this sense of the unexpected, this ‘suddenly’, is transferred to the narrative itself. The classic fairy-story plots frequently depend on secrets, on things being hidden and needing to be found. One of the things that is most regularly disguised is the true identity of a character; in this sense (though not in others), fairy stories have a very modern understanding of personality, of individual identity: inside each of us is a core ‘real’ self. Your social role, public appearance, background, how people regard you, even your class do not affect this – they are just ‘false conditioning’, and in the end the truth will out, the secrets of the heart will come to light. Many of the stories are about this untangling of the inner self from the webs and weavings of secrets and deceit. The protagonists themselves may not know the truth, or they do know it but cannot reveal what they know, often because they are bound into preposterous promises which they dare not break.

At one level these secrets are simply a plot device to spin out the tale. During a journey through a forest, the heroine of ‘The Little Goosegirl’
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has her identity stolen from her by her evil maid, who takes away all her possessions, including the prince she was en route to marry, and then binds the real princess to a promise not to tell anyone. Obviously, if the princess had arrived at the prince’s palace and simply announced the truth – ‘I am really the princess, and this wicked maid frightened me into pretending I wasn’t. You can send messengers to my mother to check this out’ – there would have been no story. As it is, the teller is able to spin a long and rich tale of virtue oppressed involving a complex plot which enables the truth to emerge without the princess having to break her oath. This serves the double end of making a good story and proving the honour and merits of the princess. (She is lucky, of course, in having the unusual assistance of not simply a talking horse, but one that can go on talking even after it has been beheaded.)

Similarly, the sister in ‘The Seven Swans’
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is bound to silence for seven years in order to save her brothers from enchantment. Without this condition there would be no second half to the story – she would get on with her complicated sewing task (she has to make each of them a shirt out of starwort – a forest flower interestingly also known as stitchwort), liberate her brothers, and nothing much else would have happened. Unable to speak, however, she becomes involved in a long and rather horrible ‘adventure’ in which she sacrifices her own children for her brothers’ redemption and which ends with her on the witch’s pyre. Her brothers rescue her at the last moment – the silence and secrecy has allowed seven years to pass, her sewing is finished (almost: one of the most touching things about this story, perhaps my very favourite of the Grimms’ tales, is that she does not quite complete one sleeve of one shirt, so her youngest brother has to go through life with a trailing swan’s wing instead of an arm), and everyone can live happily ever after – even her children are restored to her.

These stories run alarmingly parallel to the more modern narrative of childhood sexual abuse – especially in the tragic mixture of fear and guilt which is used to keep the victim silenced. The maid in ‘The Goosegirl’ is obviously female, but otherwise fits sinisterly into the role of abuser – a trusted person (the princess’s mother is not negligent) known to the princess changes abruptly when the child is in her care alone; she bullies the girl into a promise of silence. Moreover, in the original version of the story the ‘good’ mother gives her daughter a strange parting gift – a white cloth with three drops of her own blood on it. This protects the true princess until she accidentally loses it. There is no explanation of this gift in the tale, and it is never restored or found – it is a secret within the secrecy of the story, but it is very hard not to read some symbol of virginity or menstruation into it; later on in this story, there is a peculiar, superficially pointless passage about the girl’s terror over the sexual advances of a perfectly innocent young man.

The brothers in ‘The Seven Swans’ are banished and turned into swans explicitly because their father wants the daughter for himself. Is he banishing witnesses, natural protectors or potential competition? We do not know, but later the girl withdraws into the forest herself and will not speak. There is one story – ‘All Fur’ (or, in older translations,
Allerleirauh
) – that is explicitly about father-daughter sexual abuse; here the daughter is so horrified at her father’s proposal that she runs away and hides in the forest wearing a cloak made from the fur of every kind of wild animal. She is found there, asleep in a hollow tree, by a king out hunting, and carried back to the castle – where she is put to work in the kitchens. Of course she is eventually revealed as a princess and marries the king, but her evasions and determination to keep her true identity hidden are extreme. She seems to be experiencing a powerful conflict between shame and her desire for restoration. Stories like ‘All Fur’ and other more oblique secrecy tales raise dark questions about all this silencing of young women that is treated as an oddly normal plot device.

Several years ago I led a creative writing residential weekend exploring modern approaches to fairy stories. One of the women on the course wrote a version of ‘Snow White’. In her darkly resonant tale, the ‘magic mirror’ that truthfully revealed which woman was ‘the fairest of all’ was the King’s eyes: looking into them, the ‘wicked’ Queen could always tell whether the King desired her or his own daughter. The stepmother’s complex responses of jealousy and protectiveness become the motivation that drives the story.
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In many of the tales, however, the secrets are lighter hearted. In ‘Rumplestiltskin’ it is the heroine who has to find out the secret name of the ‘ridiculous little man’ (he is only that in the original – neither a gnome nor a devil) in order to keep her child safe. The morality of this particular story is extremely odd: the young woman is in a tricky situation because her father ‘in order to make himself seem important’ has told the King his daughter can spin straw into gold. The King only marries her because he is greedy:

‘You must spin all this straw into gold tonight. If you succeed you shall become my wife.’ To himself he thought, ‘Even though she’s just a miller’s daughter I’ll never find a richer woman anywhere in the world.’

And, uniquely, the woman is let off a vow she took freely and does in fact get her child back, and the little man is punished – one might think rather unfairly. But at the heart of the story is the secret identity of the little man, which has to be uncovered.

Or, in ‘The Twelve Huntsmen’, a dozen young women disguise themselves as men in order to win back the love of a prince, who has forgotten his promises to one of them. He is warned that they are female, but they outwit the traps he lays for them (stamping firmly on some dried peas so they are crushed instead of rolling about, and remembering not even to glance at some unusually attractive spinning wheels he lays out for them). Nonetheless, he finds himself more and more attracted to the chief huntsman – until one day, while he is out hunting in the forest, a messenger announces that the ‘false bride’ is approaching. The girl lover faints, and attempting to revive her, the prince pulls off her glove and sees his own ring on her finger. He immediately falls back in love with her and all ends happily. But although there is nothing at all sinister in this story, the disguise that seems so central is in fact rather pointless – she could just have arrived in her real persona and, if necessary, shown him the ring. The unwinding of the secret is the real purpose of the story.

So profound a narrative device does this secrecy become that in some of the stories there is absolutely no logical reason whatsoever for it, but it is there simply to hold the plot together. ‘Cinderella’ is a fascinating case in point. It is one of the stories that has become most distorted in its popular development, while at the same time it is probably the most successful and widely known of all the tales. But the version we know has surprisingly little in common even with the last Grimms’ redacted tale, and the changes are instructive. In the first place, the ‘ugly’ stepsisters are not ugly, as I explained earlier – they are ‘beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart’; their true natures are hidden by their pretty faces. More importantly, there is no Fairy Godmother. Instead, the plot develops somewhat differently: one day, the father is going to the fair and asks his daughters what they would like him to bring them back. ‘Beautiful dresses, pearls and jewels,’ say the stepsisters. ‘The first branch which knocks against your hat on your way home,’ says Cinderella – a passing reference to the fact that he will travel through a wood on his journey. Unusually for a father in a fairy story, he does not forget or blunder and comes home with the promised goods. Cinderella takes the hazel branch and plants it on her birth mother’s grave. It grows into a ‘handsome tree’ and Cinderella visits it three times a day. A little white bird lives in the tree and ‘if Cinderella expressed a wish, the bird threw down to her what she had wished for’. When the Prince’s ball is announced, Cinderella wants to go and her stepmother sets her the impossible challenge of sorting lentils from ashes to see if she is worthy. Cinderella calls on some birds, though not apparently the bird of her tree, to help her and is thus successful. However, her stepmother reneges on her promise and she and the stepsisters go off the ball. Cinderella’s response is prompt – no sitting by the fire and weeping in this earlier version. She goes ‘at once’ to the tree and gets a pretty frock which she puts on ‘with all speed’ and hastens to the party. Now everything proceeds as in the version we know, except, of course, that it is Cinderella’s free choice – rather than a restriction imposed upon her by the Fairy Godmother – to leave the ball and keep her identity secret. She repeats this sequence for the traditional three evenings, but far from being so stupid as to drop her slipper, it transpires that the Prince has cunningly covered the staircase with pitch so that the slipper sticks to it; she cannot stop to pick it up because he is pursuing her – and she has to hide in the dovecot.