From the Forest

by Sara Maitland

  Just as I come down towards the gate I came into the wood through, a thin low sun breaks through the clouds, barely bright enough to cast decent shadows, but certainly enough to lighten and brighten the whole world. And suddenly I see a clump of crystal brain fungus (Exidia nucleate). Crystal brain fungus looks like what it is called: a brain-shaped, wrinkly convoluted jelly, almost transparent but with little white ‘crystals’ deep inside, which are actually accretions of calcium oxalate. It is not rare, but you can only see it in wet weather – it dehydrates quickly and shrivels into a hard, thin, barely visible membrane when it is dry. They are one payback for walking in wet woods. They are weird and unexpected, and the sun catches this one and makes it gleam. Before I identify it properly it looks like frogspawn. And then, woods being surprising, unexpected and magical, the very next pool, barely more than a puddle by the path, is full of real frogspawn. It is very like the crystal brain fungus actually, except that it is in the water as opposed to on a rotting branch, and the flecks in the middle of the jelly are black future tadpoles rather than white granules.

  Frogspawn is bizarre: if you pick it up it has a strange texture, being both lumpy and slimy at the same time; each cell is quite distinct, but if you try and drip it through your fingers it moves as a single organism – the cells do not separate easily, and to a bare hand on a cold day, it seems curiously alive and eager. But today it is also a herald of the spring, an end to winter. A little way away from the puddle is a toad, squatting quietly and apparently looking at me. Frogspawn and toad spawn are supposed to be easily distinguishable: the books tell you that toads lay their eggs in lines and frogs in heaps, but I have never been certain I can tell the difference. I can, however, tell toads from frogs – toads are dry and warty, frogs are smooth and slimy; frogs hop and toads crawl, and this is a toad. It does not offer me any treasures, as toads so often do in fairy stories; it probably feels that I have had enough treasures today, and it is right.

  Or perhaps it does offer a magic gift, because I suddenly start to notice other things. Hazel trees make their catkins in the autumn – all winter they hang small and tight under the branches, but now they are starting to stretch a little; looking closely, I see my very first neon-red female catkins, like tiny tufts of punk hair. There is a honeysuckle that has formed an unnaturally perfect spiral round a very straight hazel wand; and, halfway up and for no particular reason that I know of, is my first spring leaf, one, alone, just breaking green from its bud.

  As I go back up the lane towards my car I see something that I should have seen on my way out, but did not. The lane that leads from the end of the tarmac road to the open plain where I started this chapter is itself rather wonderful and full of fairy-tale features. It starts beside an old mill and follows the mill race up to where it joins the river; it then runs, with a grassy ridge down its centre, through a little patch of wood and out between high hedges through fields. During the summer the ground under the hedges is a tangled mass of grass and wild flowers – in a week or so primroses will be flowering here. Tangling here and up into the hawthorn of the hedge are brambles and wild roses. And someone had, not more than a few days before, cut back the brambles. I went to look for springtime and for Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and someone had prepared my way for me, cutting back the briars which guarded her for a hundred years.

  The wood is not dead, just sleeping; it is turning now, waking up, beginning again. The stories are safe while toads deliver gifts and someone cuts briars back on the paths towards the fairy-tale castles.

  I find I am laughing aloud as I go on my way back to my car, happy ever after.

  The Dreams of the Sleeping Beauty

  Once upon a time there was a princess, as lovely as the dawn.

  Once upon a time when she was sixteen she ran up a spiral staircase and came to a little solar high in a tower of her parents’ palace where she had never been before. And there in the warm sunshine there was a twirling, moving, dancing bobbin, and a little old woman with busy, busy fingers; the wheel hummed, and the flax danced and the light caught all the movements and spun them into diamonds, busy and playful and pretty. ‘Oh,’ cried the princess, enchanted and delighted, and she reached out to touch and she pricked her finger and fell down and down and down into the deep cold place where her dreams were waiting for her.

  And for a hundred years she dreamed while the forest grew around her. Each dream took a whole year, and acorns became oaks trees while she dreamed.

  1. She dreamed a great wall of ice that pushed across the first forest, scouring it down, killing all the trees. There was an unbroken silence for a long time.

  2. She dreamed that it grew warmer and the ice melted slowly and there was the music of many waters.

  3. She dreamed the witches’ tresses and the gold coins of lichen crawling out across the erratic boulders that the ice had left behind.

  4. She dreamed mosses and ferns and horsetails and liverworts; and sharp-faced weasels who had survived the cold.

  5. She dreamed soft breezes that wafted in birch pollen and trees that began to sprout.

  6. She dreamed the spring when there were first wind-flowers and primroses.

  7. She dreamed the first brave insects, buzzing and skittering on the dark bog pools of the new forests.

  8. She dreamed the first swoop and song of birds; swallows from the far-away deserts and kites spreading their forked tails on the thermals above the scrub woods that were growing, growing, growing.

  9. She dreamed the huge dark eyes of deer and elk and hare.

  10. And aurochs and lynx and bear and wolf; foxes and badgers and frogspawn and the dapple of fish in the clear streams.

  11. She dreamed the small dark people, drifting northwards, following the deer.

  12. She dreamed the fresh, bright red-gold of fire and of warmth and light in long chill nights.

  13. She dreamed the stone-chipped arrowhead deep in the flank of the stag, and the dancing and laughter of the hunters.

  14. She dreamed the sweet crunch of hazelnuts and the honouring of the trees that offered such treasure.

  15. She dreamed the laborious wrestling and effort to raise the great stones and mark the rhythms of the years, and the singing of the songs for the gods.

  16. She dreamed the sheep grazing under tall trees and the first sweet warm milk taken from an irritable cow.

  17. She dreamed there were apples and blackberries and mushrooms from the generous forests, and later grain, carefully grown, gathered and ground.

  18. She dreamed the piles of rocks to mark the homes of the dead, and the planting of trees for their comfort.

  19. She dreamed a young woman stooping under a low doorway and raising her newborn child to see the dancing of sunlight under the canopy of leaves.

  20. And, in the long northern night, the small dark people round the bright fire telling stories from the forests.

  21. She dreamed the birch fingers, swaying, singing silently, holding the moonlight in their paper bark.

  22. She dreamed the dark drift of the northern pines, scaled dragons with heavy limbs, tenacious in their grip on the rock face.

  23. She dreamed the sallows and alders with their roots in the black bogs, their leaves whispering in harmony with the flow of the water.

  24. She dreamed the dancing keys spiralling down, down from autumn ash trees.

  25. She dreamed the deep cool shade under elm trees in wood pasture and the fat cattle that mourned their passing.

  26. She dreamed the hazel coppices, bright with yellow catkins, and the detritus of red squirrels collecting winter stores.

  27. She dreamed the cathedral ceilings and gothic columns of beech groves, gold green in springtime, and the bare red floors beneath them.

  28. She dreamed the shining hollies, sharper than the spindle pin in the solar in the tower and their blood-red berries like the drop on her finger – the last thing she saw before she slept.

  29. She dreamed the pollard oak, strangely co
ntorted, abundantly welcoming, ancient, everlasting and magical.

  30. And, greenest and brightest of all, the lovely lost limes, the woods that will never return.

  31. She dreamed a king, like her father but French, coming with long ships and an army to subdue the people and claim the throne.

  32. She dreamed that the king, like her father, loved hunting and afforested the woodlands: the New Forest, and Dean, Rockingham, Sherwood, Epping, Hatfield, Braden, Exmoor, Windsor, Savernake, the Wirral and more.

  33. She dreamed the elegant fallow deer, hind and hart, dappled flanks like sunshine in the woods in high summer.

  34. She dreamed a king, not like her father. Not first among equals, but an absolute monarch – powerful, brutal and sexy.

  35. She dreamed herself awake and beautiful, mounted on a black palfrey, hunting the pure white hart along the green rides.

  36. She dreamed a great wild boar, bristled shoulders and blooded snout, and the dogs that bring him down.

  37. She dreamed the sad limping mastiff, pathetic and declawed, so that it should not kill her father’s deer.

  38. She dreamed the handsome outlaw, hiding in the greenwood and laughing at the King, her father.

  39. She dreamed the ancient forest rights – of pannage, per-presture, agisment, assart, estover and turbary – and the long, cold winters for the peasants without firewood.

  40. And how, huddled in the dark, they sang the songs and told the tales of freedom.

  41. She dreamed all the abused children lost or abandoned in the forest, crying from hunger or cold or fear, and all the dark and scary things they may encounter, and she was one of those children.

  42. She dreamed cliffs and crags and caves and the sudden black bogs that will suck small children down.

  43. She dreamed red-spotted fly algaric, pink mycena, slimy glaucous Stroparia aeruginosa, and the innocent-looking shining Amanita phalloides – the death cap toadstool.

  44. She dreamed giants, smashing up the woods in their foolish wrath, and goblins and pixies and the Devil himself searching for his own.

  45. She dreamed feral mink, cutting and slashing their way through the stream beds, killing without mercy.

  46. She dreamed barons and landlords and government officers destroying the woodlands for profit.

  47. She dreamed nettles, imported by the Roman legions, and briars and gorse and vicious barbed-wire fences.

  48. She dreamed ruthless robbers in their dens and lairs, grinding bones for bread and swilling great cups of blood.

  49. She dreamed witches and stepmothers, who are too often the same and who trick her with promises of sweetness and then eat her up, and gobble her down.

  50. And wolves.

  51. She dreamed the forests shrinking, retreating, enclosed by ditch and fence, the common land stolen from the trees and the plants and the animals and the insects and the people.

  52. She dreamed the pain of trees grubbed out, the hacking of root and branch, of foxes hunted and badgers baited, and of the deep cut of metal plough destroying the woodruff and the bluebells.

  53. She dreamed the brutal Black Act and the swinging gallows for the hanged poachers and the landowners who valued a human life less than a pheasant.

  54. She dreamed the huge machines that demanded huge fields and tore up the hedgerows and cut down the wood pasture and killed the song birds and the fritillaries and the field mushrooms.

  55. She dreamed the sulphur smoke from finger-pointed factory chimneys leaching out calcium, raising acidity and killing the forests.

  56. She dreamed roads and railways and airports cutting through the forest, breaking up the ancient patterns, and of pylons and cables and deer fences killing the bats and the birds.

  57. She dreamed a war-weary people who clear-felled ancient forests, destroying the trees, leaving acres that looked like the battlefields of France, and to no useful purpose.

  58. She dreamed Scolytus scolytus, the large elm bark beetle that carries the fungi that attack the great elm trees and leave them skeletal, then dead and gone.

  59. She dreamed the years of the locusts, the vast march of foreign conifers invading the country, supported by the fifth column of tax concessions and destroying the natives.

  60. And poor John Clare, lost and crazed in a landscape he could not recognise because the woods he loved had been stolen.

  61. She dreamed the wind flowers, Anemone nemorosa, fairy white and gold, and all the sweet and lovely things that are only found in the forests.

  62. She dreamed cow wheat, food for the heath fritillary butterfly, and herb paris, sanicle, wood sorrel, dog’s mercury, woodruff and yellow archangel.

  63. She dreamed the sun-bright thick-ridged girolle mushrooms and the white clusters of angel’s wings and the mysterious rays of the earthstars in beech-leaf litter.

  64. She dreamed the tiny red spoons of the carnivorous sundew along the drainage ditches and the wet places of the woods.

  65. She dreamed toothwort and the ghost orchid that grow in the darkest shade and have no chlorophyll, no green, but are cream coloured and waxy and rare.

  66. She dreamed pure mornings when the low sun caught the dew in spiders’ webs on dark gorse bushes and they danced like diamonds.

  67. She dreamed the wet blue smoke of bluebells drifting away from sight and the sharp acrid scent of the ransom carpet.

  68. She dreamed the climbing-twining, twining-climbing rich-smelling strangulation of honeysuckle and dog rose, tangling in her hair and between her breasts.

  69. She dreamed the frothed extravagance of meadow sweet and the dark pink sweetness of wild strawberries, juice dripping from fingers and lips.

  70. And of sweet violet and primroses and the stories of springtime they modestly whisper.

  71. She dreamed two little children, Hansel and Gretel, lost in the forest, and cold and frightened and tired, nibbling at the sugary little house until the wicked witch came out to punish them

  72. She dreamed the dark tanglewood where the wolf lurked waiting for Little Red Riding Hood to come trotting down the path on the way to her grandmother’s house.

  73. She dreamed the Goosegirl-princess, duped on a road through the forest, whose horse was slaughtered and whose joy and love were stolen.

  74. She dreamed the dark stories and then she dreamed Snow White running terrified through the forest but finding comfort and love in the home of the seven dwarves.

  75. She dreamed the twelve naughty princesses who vanished at night through forests of gold and silver and jewels and danced their shoes to rags and laughed at all their suitors.

  76. She dreamed a girl imprisoned in a high tower deep in the forest, who let down a strong rope of her own golden hair and hauled up a life of love and hope.

  77. She dreamed an abused child who fell down a well into a lower forest where, through hard work and good manners, she earned an unending stream of gold.

  78. She dreamed the faithful silent sister, sitting in a tree in the forest, sewing shirts for her swan brothers – pure and courageous and strong.

  79. She dreamed all the young women who, frightened and abused, found safety in the forest and learned the language of the birds and the language of their own hearts.

  80. And of a princess, who was herself, asleep in a green forest, waiting for springtime to wake up, preparing for love and joy.

  81. She dreamed her mother’s breast, sweet and round, her nipple like a wild strawberry, juicy, sun-warmed.

  82. She dreamed her father, the King, at the castle gate, holding up his lovely newborn daughter to the cheers of the populace.

  83. She dreamed he planned a party, with dinner and dancing, with fireworks and feasting to celebrate her birth.

  84. She dreamed that kings and commoners, princes and peasants came to the party, and twelve old women, gossips and friends, welcome for their wisdom.

  85. She dreamed they gave her eleven gifts: intelligence, beauty, grace, laughter, kindness, health, green fi
ngers, serenity, courage, courtesy, a voice like a singing bird . . .

  86. She dreamed a dark presence; a thirteenth old women, bitter and jealous, whom her father, the King, had neglected or rejected, who had not been invited to the party and who was cold and mean.

  87. She dreamed a shriek and a curse – before she became a woman she would prick her finger on a spindle and die, die, die.

  88. She dreamed the twelfth old woman weeping; and then, swift as thought, changing her gift from wealth to redemption: she would not die but sleep and sleep and sleep until her beloved came.

  89. She dreamed her long, golden, sheltered childhood and her father the King pushing her on a swing, higher and higher, his arms strong, his love embracing her.

  90. But still she ran away, up a spiral staircase to a little solar high in a tower. There was a twirling, moving, dancing bobbin, and a little old woman with busy, busy fingers; the wheel hummed, and the flax danced and the light caught all the movements and spun them into diamonds, all busy and playful and pretty. ‘Oh,’ she cried, and reached out to touch and she pricked her finger and fell down and down and down into the deep cold place where her dreams were waiting for her.

  91. She dreamed the dog roses twining over her, sweet smelling, sharp thorned, red and pink and white.

  92. She dreamed the hazel catkins, which had passed the winter tucked under their twigs, began to swell and stretch, stiff and thick with pollen.

  93. She dreamed a Swedish scientist with a wig and a Viennese doctor with a beard and glasses who both said it was all about sex and the hazel catkins giggled nervously.

  94. She dreamed dark curling moss growing between her legs, soft and damp and luxuriant.

  95. She dreamed the forest was stirring now, the days longer and the wind gentler, and the larches flushing rose pink.

  96. She dreamed the swallows in the hot, dry desert gathering themselves, flickering the hot air, yearning for small flies over dancing little rivers and turning northwards for the long journey home.