From the Forest (20 page)

‘You know, sir, that horse that came with the Princess – lovely white thing. We were all that upset when she said to cut its head off.’

‘The Princess said to cut the head off her horse? Why?’

‘I don’t know, sir. No one knew really, but the girl, the goosegirl, she asked the groom who chopped it to nail the head up in the archway and she talks to it every morning as we go out and every evening as we come in. And it always sighs and says back to her,

“Oh, if your mother knew

Her heart would break in two.”

I don’t know why, but I think it’s weird and I don’t like it.’

‘I can see that, Conrad. Now you run along and I’ll have a word with her later today and then we’ll see.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘No. Thank you.’

The King felt terribly, terribly weary. He wanted to go up his room and snuggle his head into the Queen’s soft neck and have the world go away. But he sent for the girl.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her. ‘Who are you?’

She looked frightened. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she said. ‘It’s a secret.’ After a pause she added, ‘I promised, I swore it under the open sky.’

‘Well,’ said the King gently, ‘it is good to keep promises, but it is not always sensible to make them in the first place. I think this was a foolish promise.’

But the goosegirl only shook her head and stayed mute. The King saw the tears in her eyes. He reached out a hand to comfort her and felt, as Conrad had felt, the ice cold wind of terror that came off her and chilled him to the heart.

‘I think,’ said the King, withdrawing his hand, ‘I think we should both go and talk to your horse.’

‘His name is Falada,’ she said in a whisper, and then she smiled, like spring sunshine. He knew at once who it was she had reminded him of. Her smile was the living mirror of a small girl, his old friend, a childhood playmate and distant relative on the distaff side. He knew. He exclaimed:

‘Oh, if your mother knew

Her heart would break in two.’

‘That’s what Falada says too.’ She looked more confident suddenly, and happier.

‘I believe we can always trust animals who condescend to talk to us,’ said the King.

So the two of them walked out and stood under the mossy archway where the horse’s head hung. Falada sighed and muttered again,

‘Oh, if your mother knew

Her heart would break in two.’

‘Falada,’ said the King solemnly, ‘I believe this sweet child is the true bride. Because she is a natural princess she cannot break a promise she made, an oath she took, however foolishly, under the open sky. You, however, are not a princess, you are a dead horse, albeit a magical one, and I, as a king, first among equals, charge you to tell me what happened on the road through the forest.’

So Falada’s head told the nasty tale of how the false bride stole the true bride’s gold cup and her silk dress and her talking horse. And the other more important things too: her identity, her childhood, the pure white cloth with the three drops of blood on it that her mother had given her on parting to keep her safe, and all the things we do not speak about under the open sky.

And when the story was told the King said, ‘Thank you. We must right this wrong.’

Falada replied,

‘When her mother hears this thing

She will laugh and she will sing.’

The girl was smiling now, but the King remained serious.

He said gently, ‘You are a sweet child. You are innocent, whatever happened, and you will be vindicated. You do not have to marry the Prince, though I hope you will want to one day. But no one will touch you until you ask them to. And no one in my kingdom, peasant or princess, will ever again have to marry a stranger. In your honour and always, women will marry if they choose, when they choose and where their hearts and their intelligence lead them. I promise.’

And he kept that promise.

6

August

Staverton Thicks

T
he oak woods at Staverton are the forests of childhood, the forests of dreams. Here perhaps more than anywhere else I have ever been, the forest of the imagination materialises, becomes actual; here perhaps more than anywhere else I have ever been, a smallish piece of ancient deciduous woodland opens into the world of magic, the place of fairy story that we inhabited as children and lost, I had thought, for ever.

Staverton Thicks and Staverton Park are two contiguous woods in eastern Suffolk; in fact it is difficult for a new visitor to distinguish between the two, although technically the Park is more ‘open’, its canopy never fully filled in by the leaves of the ancient trees, while in the Thicks, as the name suggests, the trees are close enough together to form a continuous green roof overhead.

Staverton contains over 4,000 ancient oak pollards, some certainly at least four hundred years old. Many of the trees are ‘stag headed’, reaching out gnarled naked limbs above their green crowns. These ‘antlers’ are signs of age, but not of disease or decay: ‘stag head is a normal process of retrenchment by which a tree reduces its commitments and grows a new smaller crown’
¹
(just as many very old people get smaller, wizened, but without losing health or energy). Many of the oaks at Staverton, still in good health, are hollow, or have huge branches drooping to the ground and re-rooting themselves in the damp leaf mould. Close around the oaks, and even growing inside their hollowed trunks, there are holly trees which seem to be both hugging and strangling their hosts. Some of these hollies are among the largest in Britain, up to 70 feet (20 metres) high, and there are unusually huge rowans and birches too. Between the trees are the fallen and decayed branches and boles of other ancient trees, now rotting silently away. Staverton is famously rich in lichens and invertebrates, and in high summer the ground is thickly covered in bracken with intermittent clear grassy spaces.

The magic here is very deep, because the mystery is very real. Even at the level of natural history, Staverton poses riddling questions: Why do hollies, notoriously drought sensitive and so more likely to flourish in the wetter west, do so spectacularly well in what is the driest corner of England? What causes the strange melding of the different tree species, almost unknown elsewhere? What circumstances have made this ground so friendly to trees, but so comparatively poor in ancient woodland flowers? Why is Staverton Thicks here at all?

In the opening chapter I suggested that many students of fairy story and folk lore have spent their time looking for the similarities between stories from different cultures and have therefore too easily missed the specific details of difference and particularity. Oliver Rackham argues that the same thing happens with students of ancient woodland, and uses Staverton as an example:

Research and understanding include looking for resemblances, but conservation is about protecting differences. It is important to keep an open mind and be prepared for unexpected categories. Staverton Park, to the
National Vegetation Classification
, is a specimen of W10:
Quercus robur-Pteridium aquilinum-Rubus fructiosus
woodland, of which there are thousands of other examples, and a rather poor specimen with few species of herbs. True but trivial: the point of Staverton is that it is one of the biggest collections of ancient trees in Europe: oaks of vast bulk and surrealist shape, giant hollies, giant birches, trees that are part oak, part holly and part birch, and a hundred years’ accumulation of dead wood. Besides its unique qualities as a habitat, Staverton is a place of mystery and wonder; it has a peculiar effect on first-time visitors who have no foreknowledge that the world contains such places.
²

Staverton has this profound effect on almost everyone who goes there. George Peterken, one of our most eminent woodland experts, considers it as near to primal woodland as anything else in the country.
³

I went to Staverton in August, which is the right month to go, because it is the month of childhood – the month of the long summer holidays, when adventures beckon and the days feel endless and carefree. The bright gold-green leaves of early summer have deepened into a rich heavy green, the canopy is dense and the shadows deep and cool. My sister has lived less than thirty miles away for over quarter a century and is the sort of old-fashioned mother who takes her children places, makes them play outside and believes in adventures, but she too had never been in Staverton, nor even knew it was there to go to. Part of the mysteriousness of this place seems to be that although it is easily accessible and ought to be famous and much visited, it guards its secrecy, like any fairy world. I have met surprisingly few people who have even heard of it.

So on a hot summer morning, she and I and one of her five children, with Useless and Rubbish, their two dogs, set out to find the wood and have a picnic there. From the outset it was a somehow childlike, fairy-tale day. To start with, in a fit of more-than-usual incompetence, I did not have and she could not find the relevant Ordnance Survey map, so we had to look
for
the wood before we could go in and look
at
the wood. We had only the vaguest idea where it was, but did know that Staverton Thicks are near Butley, out on the sandy dry plain between Ipswich and Aldeburgh, and that they stood somewhere within Rendlesham Forest, an extensive coniferous plantation. East of Woodbridge, with the forestry on one side of the road, we could see, across pleasant green fields, the darker green bulk of deciduous woodland. We pulled the car into a lay-by, under warm pine trees dappled with sunshine, and plunged into the rough wood on the other side of the road, heading, we hoped, for the Thicks.

Then there they were, the first magical thing to happen that day. In fact there is a perfectly good track, with a gate and an interpretation board, into and through Staverton Thicks, and if we had had a proper map or had even driven another 100 metres further along the road we could not have failed to find it. As it was, we re-enacted one of the most curious and deeply evocative tropes of fairy stories. In fairy stories the characters get lost going into the forest. For three days Hansel and Gretel ‘kept going deeper and deeper into the forest. If help did not arrive soon they were bound to perish of hunger and exhaustion.’ But when they have triumphed over the wicked witch and are ready to go home they find the path perfectly easily; ‘when they had walked for a few hours the forest became more and more familiar to them and finally they caught sight of their father’s house’. Over and over again this happens – in ‘The Seven Swans’ the younger sister wanders through the world looking for her brothers and gets lost in a vast dark forest before she finds their cottage. But later, when the Prince discovers her sitting in her tree making the shirts that will free her brothers from their enchanted swan-shapes, he takes her to his palace quickly and easily. Snow White flees, terrified, from the servant who is supposed to kill her, through a tangled confusing forest full of thorns and wild beasts, completely lost; however, once she is safe with the dwarves, the forest turns out to be positively social – full of paths, inhabitants and hunting parties. Carrying her coffin to the prince’s palace presents no problems at all. It is when you are going out into the forest, not when you are trying to return home from it, that you get lost, that the forest is at its densest and most frightening.

This is unexpected because, on the whole, it is not what normally happens in real life. I have, luckily, never got seriously lost in a forest, although I know people who have, and very scary it sounds. But whenever I have felt or feared that I might be lost it has been when I realised that I was not sure of the way back again. I walk in boldly, and only when I decide that it is time to go home do I start worrying about where I am and whether I know the way back. In the fairy stories this process is reversed; and so it was for us that sunny August day in Staverton. We went in doubtfully, through some rough and tangled wood, and did not know quite where we were or what we were looking for or whether we would find it. Hours later we came out on a pleasant well-made track and arrived on the road within sight of the car.

In the meantime, we were in fairyland. Old pollards inspire a strange sense of awe. Pollarding is a woodland management technique, basically not dissimilar to coppicing; but with a coppice the original trunk of the tree is cut down to ground level and the tree then regenerates, throwing up new shoots from around the old stump; these new stems, close to each other and in natural competition for the light, grow upwards, thin and straight. When they reach the size you want them to be, which depends on what you are going to use them for – poles or charcoal or winter feed or house building, for example – you cut them back again. Gradually, as the new stems are cut back and themselves produce further new growth, the base extends into what is called a coppice stool – a huge (in very old woodland they can be well over two metres across) base which is in fact a single tree. At the same time, coppicing, by removing the shade creating branches and leaf canopy, opens up the ground to increased sunlight, which in turn allows the growth of new trees and encourages biodiversity. It was usual to coppice all the trees in a quite large area at the same time, so that immediately afterwards the space would look a bit like modern clear-felling. However, coniferous trees, with the exception of yew, do not regenerate in this way – a clear-felled area of coniferous woodland will eventually grow brand-new trees, but coppiced deciduous trees grow afresh on the old root stock. Within a well-managed wood, different areas would be cut in rotation, so that there was new timber available every year, and also there would be varying levels of sun and shade throughout the wood, allowing for movement and diversity in which different species of flora and fauna could flourish.