From the Forest
Page 28
The highroads from merchant towns to other merchant towns [must] be widened wherever there are woods or hedges where a man may lurk to do evil near the road, by two hundred feet on [both sides]; but this statute extend not to oaks or to great trees, if they be clear underneath. And if by default of the Lord who may not want to level earthwork, underwood or bushes as provided above and robberies be done, the Lord is responsible. And if there be murder, let the Lord be fined at the King’s will.4
Curiously, clearing the sides of tracks through the forest, as proposed by this law, would produce an almost identical effect to the cleared areas between track and trees in the Purgatory Wood, and elsewhere, which the forestry developers have now made for other reasons. Moreover, although no ditches as such are mentioned in the legislation, these clearings were called ‘trenches’, bringing to mind the drainage channels either side of me as I walked. I was sensible to be a bit frightened.
But the real point about fairy stories is that they laugh at the powerful and the frightening. They diminish and belittle the danger by mocking it, and simultaneously they encourage cunning and trickery as a way of achieving the security that is every protagonist’s desire and right. Kings are mean-minded and foolish; robbers are cowardly and boorish – both deserve to be outwitted exploited and to provide the fortune that the heroes and heroines need.
In this sense, the robbers are closely related to giants, who also appear regularly in the stories. Although my own fears that afternoon focused directly on robbers, and I would have been startled in a very different way if a giant had emerged from the forest, the two perform almost identical functions in the fairy stories. They share a good deal in common too: although always fierce and threatening, and thus provoking great fear in mediocre individuals, they are stupid and easily outwitted by those who overcome their fear. Like robbers, giants have disgusting domestic habits, often living out in the open air or in dens rather than houses – and they enjoy heavily carnivorous diets. They also have hoards of loot or ‘treasure’, which the hero can access legitimately; in this particular, they are very like the dragons of medieval romance and hagiography. It is always heroic to kill giants because they deserve it, just because they are giants – they are too big. There seems to be something almost amounting to a rule here – the smaller the main character in a fairy story, the larger his opponent. I cannot find a story in which a prince kills or outwits a robber – that is the task of the poor but brave and cunning hero who tackles robbers with humour and insouciance. But the diminutive hero – the Little Tailor or the succession of Tom Thumbs and Thumblings, the physically weak, disempowered or vulnerable – performs the same task with giants.
In fact I probably misunderstood my own fear in the Purgatory Wood: the person who shot the rifle was the hero – I was the robber.
The Four Comrades
Once upon a time in a winter so cold and hungry that mothers cut and ground silverweed to make flour to feed their children, a farmer decided that he could not keep his donkey any longer. The donkey had served him well and faithfully for many years, but now it was weak, its knees knocking inwards like spindleshanks and its coat matted and patchy. It stumbled at the plough, was too scrawny to ride and unable to carry firewood in from the forest.
The old man decided to send it to the knackers. That’s gratitude for you. ‘No, no,’ said his children piteously, and possibly nervously, for they knew from the old stories that kindness to animals made you rich. But it did no good. Hard frosts make hard hearts.
The donkey was not having any of that. In the night it slipped its halter and set off along the road through the forest, planning to go to the nearest city and join the circus – or even try a little street busking if nothing better came up.
As the icy dawn broke the donkey met a dog – a poor, sad, mangy thing, its claws pulled to stop it hunting and its back quarters stiff with age. It was pretty much toothless and but a weary shadow of its youthful self. It lay beside the roadside, the very portrait of dejection.
‘What ho?’ said the donkey, full of bravado now it had made its break from slavery. ‘Smile, mate, it may never happen.’
‘It has happened,’ said the dog gloomily. ‘Years of faithful service, all-round good and devoted canine, competent pointer, cunning retriever, energetic house guard, a bit of herding and gentle with children. And what do I get for it? Rendered redundant, no pension, no dinner and an overheard threat of murder. All the children said “No, no” most piteously, but I didn’t see them feeding me any scraps. That’s gratitude for you. Didn’t have any options but to slip my leash and make a getaway. Hard frosts make hard hearts.’
‘Well,’ said the donkey, ‘let’s join forces. United we stand, you know. I’m off to the town – and could use a partner. Can you do any tricks?’
‘I can do quite a stylish begging thing, and can die for my country. The kids like that.’
‘Patriotism is not enough,’ said the donkey.
So together they went on along the track through the forest and before long they met a cat.
‘Bugger,’ said the dog. ‘Now I suppose I’ll have to chase it.’
‘New occasions make new duties,’ said the donkey; ‘time makes ancient good uncouth. Defence is the best form of defence, if you ask me. Give it a try.’ In his imagination he refigured himself as a Robin Hood type wearing a Che Guevara-style beret, though it fitted oddly because of his ears.
It transpired that the cat had a similar story to tell: despite a lifetime’s employment in efficient rodent management and letting the babies pull her fur, the cat had – that very morning – learned that she was going to be put in a sack and drowned in the mill pond. ‘That’s gratitude for you,’ she said,. ‘The children said “No, no” piteously of course, but they drank every drop of milk in the house and never offered me so much as a lick. Felinism is worse than sexism. I know how it is. Hard frosts make hard hearts.’
‘You’d better come along with us,’ said the donkey. ‘Workers of the world unite; we have nothing to lose but our chains.’
‘No one chains me,’ said the cat haughtily. But noticing that the donkey looked peevish, she quickly added, ‘Great rhetoric though.’
So the three of them together went on along the track through the forest, and before long they met a cockerel. He was far from shabby and run down; his comb was scarlet and his feathers fine and his voice loud enough to wake the dead.
‘Damn,’ said the cat, ‘Now I suppose I’ll have to hunt it. No rest for the wicked, eh.’
‘Au contraire,’ said the donkey. ‘Give peace a chance.’
(The others were beginning to find his sententious quotations rather irritating, but live and let live was their motto.)
The cockerel’s tale was a sorry one. Although he crowed piercingly each morning, so the children got to school on time and the milch-cow knew when to let down her milk and the hens when to lay their eggs, his owner had unfortunately discovered that he was gay and therefore unable, or at least unwilling, to service the flock, and had decided instead to wring his neck and boil him into soup.
‘There’s gratitude for you,’ said the others, ‘but hard frosts make hard hearts, they say.’
‘It is not about ingratitude,’ said the cockerel indignantly, ‘it’s about homophobia and sexual exploitation.’
Nonetheless, he liked the idea of being in a troupe in the city a good deal more than he liked the idea of being in a pot in the oven, so he went along with them.
So the four of them together went on along the track through the forest. They passed a pleasant enough day exploring their ideological differences and exchanging competitive stories of their personal suffering and oppression. But towards evening it became clear that they would have to pass a night in the forest, which appeared to be endless.
‘Ah well,’ said the donkey dramatically,
‘Fair this long road, these hoary woods are grand
But we are exiles from our fathers’ land.’
Nonetheless, there was nothing to be done so they had to make the best of it, and they settled in, under, on and up a great granny of a Scots pine whose branches offered some small shelter from the rising wind. Separate now in their chosen beds, they turned inwards each to sleep in his or her own way.
‘Tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep,’
murmured the donkey,
‘that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.’
But before any of them could find true contentment in what the donkey might well have called ‘the tender embrace of Morpheus’, the cockerel, who was furthest up the tree, suddenly let out a surprised squawk. Through the thick woods and the thick darkness he could see the cheerful light of a fire. His comrades were less keen than he might have hoped.
‘Typical,’ said the dog. ‘Now we have to get up and plod through the trees until we come to a little house or cave and it will be a witch’s cottage, or worse, because it bloody well always is.’
‘Or a robbers’ den,’ sighed the cat.
Nevertheless, the requirements of the narrative obliged them to make their way towards the light.
The cat was right. It was a robbers’ den, and peering through the window, they could see the robbers looking fierce and wicked, all gobbling down an enormous and tasty dinner.
But these four were not stupid human beings who – at this point – always go in and ask for succour and get into trouble and the story runs on for another six pages. They were intelligent animals nearly at their wits’ end. So the donkey stood at the window and the dog jumped onto his back and braced himself against the horror of letting a cat scramble onto his head. She did, nonetheless, and the cockerel fluttered onto hers, and at the word of command they began their concert:
The donkey brayed.
The dog barked.
The cat yowled.
And the cock shouted, ‘Cockadoodledoo, doodledo, doo do.’
A hideous cacophony, enough to scare any robbers out of their minds, and these ones rushed out of the house and, as they passed the four comrades, the donkey kicked them and the dog bit them and the cat scratched them and the cockerel pecked their faces, and they ran away through the forest and never dared to come back again.
So the donkey and the dog and the cat and the cockerel decided not to go to the city, but to settle down in this handsome retirement home, grow fat on the robbers’ ill-gotten gains, and live happily ever after, because:All animals except humans know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it and they do enjoy it.
There are lots of morals to this little fable about gratitude and friendship and making the best of things. I will leave you to work them out for yourself, but remember: The darker the night the brighter the song; the colder the winter the sillier the story, so they say.
11
January
Glenlee
A wet, raw January, when the dark pounces before 3.30 in the afternoon, does not feel like the time of year for stomping off to walk in the wild woods. It feels more like the time of year for curling up in front of a log fire, watching the flames and slightly dreamily reading fairy stories.
It is also the time of year when I, like all gardeners, occupy myself planning next year’s garden; imagining schemes and ordering plants. So I find myself spending time thinking not so much about forests as about gardens. And thinking about fairy stories and gardens together turns my mind to the nineteenth-century romantic aesthetic in gardening which led to the development of ornamental forests and woods, artificial, but not in the sense that commercial plantation forests are artificial; to the creation of woods of the imagination, the forests of artists and of fairy stories. And I am struck afresh by the synchronicity between the rise of woodland gardens and the re-emergence of fairy stories; this new type of garden emerged, in both Germany and Britain, at almost precisely the same time as the Grimm brothers – speedily followed by other collectors – were first publishing their fairy stories. Indeed, I would argue that they came out of the same cultural movement and influenced each other profoundly. Throughout the nineteenth century people were creating new woods suitable for fairies to live in. They were woods that were meant to look like ancient woods – or, more precisely, like people imagined old woods had looked.
Over Christmas Cathy Agnew, the wife of a very old friend of mine, told me how her husband had taken his small nieces into the wood behind their home, Glenlee, and persuaded them that fairies lived in it and played under a beech tree. So, on a slightly less grim day than many have been recently, I found myself driving over the hill road to Glenlee to explore its wood that is still, at least in the imagination, home to fairies.
Glenlee is a substantial country house built in 1823. It was designed by Robert Lugar, a fashionable and successful architect of the time, who was a leading proponent of the Gothic revival, particularly in Scotland and Wales. Howard Colvin, the architectural historian, comments of Lugar that he ‘was a skilful practitioner of the picturesque, exploiting the fashion for cottages ornes and castellated Gothic mansions . . . he was among the first to introduce the picturesque formula into Scotland’.1 For Lugar, as he himself made clear, the fundamental attraction at Glenlee was its location:The situation is most agreeably retired, and partakes much of the character of an English park, abounding in well-grown forest-trees, which seclude it, by their density, from the mountain scenery which surrounds it.
The walks up the glen are highly picturesque, and present many beautiful and interesting views, connecting the rich park scene and fertile valley with the distant mountains.2
‘Agreeably retired’ remains true: Glenlee is a few miles north of New Galloway, a small village at the head of Loch Ken, in the Valley of the Dee. The whole area, known as the Glenkens, is unusually lovely, and ecologically very rich; it is a Ramsar site;3 the green fertile valley is hemmed in by true ‘wilderness’ – the Galloway Hills to the north and east, and the muscular bulk of Cairnsmore of Carsphairn in the Scaur Hills to the west. The valleys of the Dee and Water of Ken and the long twist of Loch Ken itself create a green corridor between Ayr and Kirkcudbright. Additionally, the Glenkens have extremely romantic associations – most famously, when Young Lochinvar ‘rode out of the west’, he rode down from his home here, to kidnap his bride across the border in northern England.4 Walter Scott’s poem about him was published in 18085 to almost instant acclaim. The area was also much admired by Robert Burns (1759-1796), whose friend John Syme wrote: ‘I can scarcely conceive a scene more terribly romantic . . . Burns thinks so highly of it, that he meditates a description of it in poetry.’6 So when Lugar came to design Glenlee, its romantic associations were well in place and cannot have failed to inspire his architectural concept.
Although every imaginable approach to Glenlee brings the traveller through wonderful countryside, I probably have the very best of it arriving from the west, along the Queen’s Way – the road through the hills from Newton Stewart. This savagely harsh landscape is where Richard Hannay had his Scottish adventure in The Thirty-Nine Steps after he ‘fixed on Galloway as the best place to go’.7 It is too heavily planted with forestry now, but in places there are great rough sheets of granite so near the surface that even the most optimistic forester never tried to plant there, and there are good views of the Galloway Hills, gaunt and lowering, with the pale winter sunlight catching the remaining snow up on the heights. The wild goats have come down beside the road: they are ‘feral goats’ really, the now wild descendants of the goats that preceded sheep as the common domestic animal of the poor on the high farms in extreme wild places in Scotland. They inhabit the Galloway Hills, like ghosts of a lost way of life.
I find myself thinking about the goats which feature in the fairy stories. There are a good number of them, and they more frequently speak in human language than any other animal exc
ept birds. Although adult goats are often tricky and mean tempered and get the protagonists of the fairy stories into trouble of various kinds, baby goats, properly called kids, are always both vulnerable and charming in character. During the nineteenth century the word ‘kid’, which had previously been used to describe a young pugilist or thief, began to be used more generally (though the OED still lists it as ‘slang’)8 to describe human children, usually affectionately. I wonder if that shift in meaning – from pugilist to child, from thief to innocent – was influenced by the very positive role baby goats play in the fairy stories. It is unusual for a word to ‘improve’ its standing; it is much more common – as we have already seen with ‘gossip’ and ‘villain’ – for a word to collect negative rather than positive connotations and associations. But ‘kid’ became affectionate and less critical over exactly the same period that the fairy stories became better known within literate society.9
Beyond Clatteringshaws Loch, I leave the main road for a very narrow little lane that winds down to the broad valley of the Dee, bypassing New Galloway. The landscape changes abruptly here, the land dropping steeply, although the big hills are still visible to the north. Suddenly it is pastoral; the forestry stops and is replaced by older deciduous woodland of oak, ash and rowan, all bare-branched now, with willow scrub marking the courses of the tumbling burns. This is the Garroch Glen, and it has a secret wild enchantment enhanced by its contrast with the fierce hill country.10 Here on the steep side of the valley, tucked under the hills above it, is Glenlee. In fact the lane runs behind the house and its park, so I was looking down, through the trees, over the valley. It is still, nearly two hundred years later, very much as Lugar described it: ‘highly picturesque’, with ‘many beautiful and interesting views, connecting the rich park scene and fertile valley with the distant mountains’.