by Bill Broun
“God gave ’em souls, and what did the English give ’em?” she’d once asked. “A slaughterhouse in every town—a bunch of clarty land, dorty seas, rivers turned into gubbon holes,* and thousands of book-learnt clish-clashers who say the bastes* are nothing but bondservants or jumbles of chemicals or whatnot. No wonder they went quate!”
As Winefride remembered it, the Wyre Forest before the Second World War seemed like the last verdant haven against all this, a place of glory and grief somewhere between Eden and Gethsemane.
“It always ’ad a rainbow above it—the ‘bow in the cloud.’ A special green and gold one, like the one God had shown Noah after floodwaters. When I was a much younger lass, ’twas paradise to me, and to the animals,” she had said that morning, in the car. Drystan had been plucking habitually at the end of a dark green thread in the Hillman’s springy plaid upholstery. As he began to pull it, his gran gently took his hand in hers to stop him. “The beasts loved the forest. But they knew its end was coming, and it broke their wild hearts.”
“Mother,” her daughter suddenly said from the front. “These boys are gullible. You’re going to worry them.”
His gran had whispered into Cuthbert’s ear, leaning hard against him, “I wouldn’t ever lie to thee or to Drystan. Ever.” He’d felt safe and happy smooshed into her warm, damp muscles; she felt like some enormous dolphin, carrying him out to sea.
the death of the wheat farmer
BEFORE THEY ARRIVED AT THE OLD HANDLEY relatives’ house, his gran managed to tell Cuthbert the whole history of the region, even how she’d met his long-dead grandfather.
“Tell us, Gran.”
“Ha! You’re really going to suffer now,” she said. “It was this one lovely day, in 1919. I had my long black hair unpinned and hovering in the wind—the villagers sometimes used to call me ‘the Basque Beauty’—and I walked two pretty miles into the town of Bewdley, from the country, just beyond the Wyre, to buy a few stalks of this new fruit being sold called ‘banans,’ as I called them.”
These “banans” had stopped appearing at the grocer during the war, their gran explained, but they were finally back, she’d heard, and she couldn’t wait. They were beautiful things, soft and aromatic, “loik a kind of custard you can hold.” The fish and fruit grocer, Mr. William Wood, swore they were good for heart problems and “general nutrition” (though any girl from the Clees knew you used foxglove for whatever ailed the heart).
“Eat as thee please,” Mr. Wood had said. He was staring at Winefride with something just short of awe. She had long, deft fingers and that hair of hers was as shiny-black as Scottish obsidian—and blown over her one ear just so.
“I was a tall girl, and healthy, and Mr. Wood knew my family was poor, too. Back in the owd times, most of the country people had little meat to eat, but I gave it up on my own as a young lass.”
Being a vegetarian at the time, Winefride said, attracted incredulity in the town, and “a kind of pity” in the country.
But that day in 1919, she stood there near a table piled with bananas, oranges, and plums, pulling the bruised skin off three bananas in a row. She dropped a skin into her purse, almost reluctantly, and plucked another small, squat cylinder off the fruit.
“I’ll be making myself sick,” she said. “You shanna be canting about this to everyone, oo’ll be, Mr. Wood?”
Mr. Wood, a hardy man with a large belly, was amazed she could devour so much.
“Thee ’oodn’t be the first,” he said. “The children are mad for them. They can’t get enough.”
“Dack, dack, dack,” she had said, using the common pig-call from her neighborhood in the hills. “Dack, dack, dack,” filling her maw. “I’m a gilt-swine when it comes to banans.” And just then, as she stood with her mouth stuffed with this tropical food, a young farmer, Alfred Wistan Wenlock, not long back from the Great War, walked into the shop.
“’E wasn’t much of a sight—just a thin wimbling, I thought,” she recalled. “Loik summat grown in a soil of sadness. And I could see he drank too much.”
A sickly veteran with roots in Northumbria and a defining talent for impracticality, Alfred came from a long line of undistinguished clerks. He’d never quite fit in at Bewdley, but having survived the war, he felt resented and guilty; so many of the town’s own sons, and many of his friends, lay buried in Flanders and France among the ten thousand dead from Worcestershire. Anguish never was far from his heart, and homemade brandy never far from his lips. Occasionally, to ease his sadness, he painted harmless watercolors of town fountains and churchyards. The war depressed land prices, too, and Alfred took his paltry veteran’s pay from the war and managed to buy a small cottage and plot in the hamlet of Far Forest on the western edge of Wyre.
He was going to grow wheat—an ambitious if not foolhardy crop for the district.
“Miss,” he said, with a trace of a smile. “Those bananas,” he said. “I had one in London. They are as lovely as anything I’ve ever seen.” He added, peering at her carefully, “Almost.”
They started talking. Alfred told her about the little plot, his plans for a farm, and Winefride, despite knowing better, found herself smitten. She lifted her hand to her mouth, trying to cover a fleck of the fruit that had emerged.
“Mmm,” she said. “Oh god. Yes.”
THE TWO MARRIED at St. Cuthbert’s Church in Far Forest on a rainy spring day in 1921; Winefride wore a silk gown that practically her entire village had helped stitch.
“I carried a bouquet of purple saxifrage with a few straws of wheat stuck in for luck,” she said. The rain, that day, had seemed providential, “a gift from the Green Man,” as she put it, “from the otters.”
The union brought much love and abundance, and Alfie’s field became renowned around Wyre for its flavorful, nutlike, quality cereal. Yet the small holding’s revenue never grew much; every year in the 1920s, it seemed wheat prices tumbled a little more. Cheap American wheat had begun pouring into England, too. Many farmers grew angry and moved to Birmingham; most who remained moved into dairy or subsidized sugar beets.
“Alfie,” Winefride remembered telling her husband. “If we have a few young cows, think of all the cheese we’ll sell. And they’re such lovely creatures.”
“But bread,” he answered. “Who doesn’t eat bread? Bread is everything.”
“I’d rather a’kern bread, Alfie. This wheat—it worries me, my love.”
“One day,” Alfie said, “wheat will conquer all.”
Two daughters and a son came, and in 1929, Cuthbert and Drystan’s mother, Mary, was born. But 1929 also brought more rain and more and more and more of it—and then poverty.
All summer, Winefride would hear around the village the phrase “wheat loves dry feet.” She grew to hate the words. Day after day, she would watch Alfie, his cheeks scarlet, trudge out to their plot with his shovel and pickaxe, struggling to carve channels and build temporary wooden sluices in mud as thick as what he’d faced at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette. He would come back, sometimes clutching evidence of what he considered his failure, torn straws of the yellow “gally wheat” that he would show to his wife and hurl down in shame.
ONE MORNING in the early autumn of 1933, Alfie drank his usual morning brandy with a raw egg in it and ate a bowl of porridge he heavily salted. On the wireless, he listened briefly to the news—Germany was withdrawing from the League of Nations, and a great drought was ravaging the American state of Oklahoma. Alfie went out to his scrubbly wheat field, hoping to salvage a bit of wheat for personal milling. The family needed food.
Later that morning, little Mary found her father, fallen in the mud, gasping for breath, his face bright red.
“Get up, Daddy!” She ran back to the house, terrified, screaming for her mum.
Alfie was carried inside by Winnie herself, and a doctor was sent for.
“It’s acute lobular pneumonia,” the doctor told Winefride, outside the sickroom. “It’s tough, Winnie. It’s the kind th
at gallops. You need to get the vicar over here.”
“Nonsense! He was fine yesterday.”
So she ran to the forest, tears in her eyes, gathering wild garlic for a tincture she made with brandy and vinegar. She tore her hands up, pulling the “crow’s garlic” up through nettles and haw branches, and when she returned, her hands dripping blood, the vicar was there, praying over his body, his feet still wet with mud.
THEN CAME, Winefride told the boys, a destitution that ended the world of Merrie Worcestershire. While many of their friends fled for the city, Winefride, numb with grief, turned back to the Wyre.
She’d never lost her awe of the glimmering forest. It always resurrected itself. The disused hearths, after the Great War, quickly grew over with wild strawberry and strange fire moss with orange-tipped setae, as if the hearth’s embers, centuries old, still burned beneath. Wavy hairgrass, cowslip, and valerian took over the old barking brush-piles, and these became sites of badger runs and weasel dens. The Boogles were there, yes—it was their forest, and if you crossed them, they would bedevil the mind. Your next ramble into the forest for tinder might end with an adder biting your ankle. So you must tread with respect. This is what she’d been taught by her own grandfather when she herself was a little girl. When she spoke of the “mysterious mysteries” of the Wyre to Cuthbert and Drystan, she meant it not only as a serious admonition but as a bequest, too, of what to her was sacred knowledge, the Wonderments. She loved Wyre and its creatures, and she feared them, too.
calamity at dowles brook
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER CUTHBERT’S GRANDDADDY’S death, as the family sat socializing in the dark sitting room, Winefride found herself echoing, once again, the old sentiment about the “Boogles,” as she had with her daughter. This time she was warning her grandchildren as they contemplated a walk into the forest.
“Thee dunna want to hespel the Boogles,” Winefride was telling them. “There bist worse things in this world, but it’ll still be a mighty good job if you taks warnin’, chaps.”
“Hespel? That’s it, stop it, Mother,” Cuthbert and Drystan’s mum had answered. “Speak proper to these children, or they’ll grow up to be thieves living in Dudley. And poor. Or farmers.”
“An what’s wrong with farmers?” Gran had asked. “They inna any worse than the ewkins* in West Bromwich.”
“I want to see the Boogles,” Drystan had said that day. He was jiggling the front door’s knob, rocking on his heels, and nearly waking his sleeping great-uncle George. “And that magpie-sort goat.”
“Be good to that goat,” Granny said. “And stay out of the forest—or be careful. They’ve adders in there, little noodle-like ones, but adders no less.”
The two Birmingham boys obeyed their grandmother—at first. They bolted from the house but stopped almost immediately upon encountering the goat close-up. They stared in silence for a minute at the chewing, imperturbable goat. (“It’s a funny old goat,” Drystan kept saying. “Easily the best one I’ve ever seen.”) They carefully clambered over hedgerows and ran across a barley field and one of Bewdley’s many overgrazed pastures. They finally arrived at the sundrenched southeastern flank of the forest itself. Local children would have scampered right in, and they often did—but Cuthbert and Drystan, out of their West Brom world of street kickabouts and corner shops, dawdled. They’d just have a little look, but not enter the forest.
“Oooooooh, it’s really smashing,” said Drystan.
“It’s all right,” Cuthbert said glumly. “Can’t see much, not from here.”
A stand of very old oaks festooned with huge shriveled globes of gray-green mistletoe stood on the forest’s edge. It had been raining hard in recent days, yet there had been no relief from the high temperatures. The flora seemed scorched, raving with energy, subtropical. Yellowish liverwort with designs as filigreed as fine necklaces hung everywhere in strands. Regal stems of pinkish purple betony and Scottish thistle grew at the feet of the ancient trees. The shiny leaves of the oaks, enmeshed in striated sunbeams and swamped in golden light, gave the forest’s boundaries a kind of honeyed radiance.
Cuthbert leaned over and picked up a gnarled old black stick. For reasons one can hardly conceive, two condoms, uncurled but evidently unused, had been tied upon its end like ribbons of skin. Neither sibling knew what they were. Cuthbert pulled one of the condoms back and let it snap back.
“This is a good stick,” he said.
“Might do,” said Drystan. “Let me coppit for a second?”
Cuthbert handed it to him.
Drystan crouched down and began swinging the stick at imaginary monsters. He said, in a retro-pulp TV-announcer voice: “And Dan Dare lands the Anastasia on northern Venus, surrounded by artificial tornadoes hatched by the Treens. He hunches down, gripping his Uranium Melt Sword.” Cuthbert squealed with laughter, showing his gappy baby-toothed smile. “Now Dan Dare begins slashing at horrible gangs of dinosauroid warriors, lopping off their scaled fingers, then bashing the bulbous head of the Mekon until the evil creature spins off on his Floating Disc.”
Cuthbert clapped his hands. Just turned six, he was beyond the patty-cake stage of entertainment, but Drystan could still charm him to no end with utter ease.
Drystan swung a few more times. Little hums came off the stick as the latex flapped in the air.
“Blasted,” said Drystan, in a normal voice. “It’s a noice stick.” He gave it back to Cuthbert. “Coppit good, Cuddy. We may need that.”
Dryst seemed to have braved himself up.
“Let’s conquer,” he said.
Then he remembered. Their granny had said “The Boogles ’as more full of nabs and tricks than Owd Nick. And by gum, thee canna be top’over-tail maskered* an’ confused at your age. Dunna stay late thar. The animals—the owd ancient animals, thay come out.”
The forest before them looked gorgeous and intimidating; Cuthbert felt pulled in. The sun had hit its zenith, and it wouldn’t be dark for hours. Drystan was generally protective of his younger brother, but he couldn’t help reciting a story Gran had told him the night before in Birmingham.
“Cuddy, you know Granny said something once before, she said ’er own old aunt, Millie—she’s dead now, roight, Cuddy?—well, she had come down off those hills where they’re all from, the Clees or Clays or what, and Aunt Millie and what ’ad got lost in the forest. For three days.”
“Liar,” said Cuddy. “You’re ’aving a go at me.” He whipped the condom stick through the air.
“I’m not. When Millie finally came out, Aunt Millie, Granny said, well she was doolally—off her head or what—and she never got any different. She sat in a birch wood chair, like, for thirty years, petting her white cat. It’s the truth.”
Cuthbert looked down at his stick and used his thumbnail to scrape off some of its thin, green bark.
Drystan continued, “Aunt Millie would sometimes say that she was looking for leftover charcoal from the charcoal makers, but what she found was the King of Night. The King of Night. Bloody hell—that’s all the reason I need to go in there. It must have been one of the prehistoric lions. Or that Welsh tiger.”
“Or them Boogles,” Cuthbert said sternly (his upper lip trembling).
“All right,” said Drystan. “Let’s nip along, then.”
But they didn’t move. For a while, they nervously kicked at a dead log and shouted nonsense words to hear their echoes and swatted at red damselflies and at each other.
“Googa maga waga maga!” yelled Drystan.
“Biggle flix!” screamed Cuthbert.
“Maga maga!”
“Shite!” said Cuthbert, with tingling boy-laughter ringing from him in tiny bright bells.
“Boogles!” Drystan said. Then, in a derisive, squeaky old-lady voice, he added: “Thee dunna want to hespel the Boogles.”
It was rare for Drystan to show disrespect for their gran, but a spectral excitement combined with a prepubescent wildness had momentarily gripped him. Cuthbert frow
ned at him.
“Well, let’s get on with it then!” said the older child a bit huffily, and started walking into the forest. “Fuck it all!”
“Wait up,” said Cuthbert. “Drystan! No!” But Drystan didn’t stop.
“Come on, tittybaby.”
“Shut.” Cuthbert didn’t like naughty words, but he never threatened to tattle on his brother. The consequences were too severe.
The younger boy trotted behind, still carrying his prophylactic branch.
For a while, they combed through a sunny, flat grove of Scots pines. All these softwoods were tall as streetlamps and planted in precise, bright gaps of twelve feet or so. They weren’t native to the forest but had been flash-planted in recent decades to counter vast losses of hardwoods and prevent flooding of the Severn. The smell of pine and rainy loam made Cuthbert feel secure. He and Drystan walked with sure steps over a homogeneous carpet of oranging pine needles, springing a little with each pace.
“A’ve had enough, Dryst,” said Cuthbert. “I wanna go back.” He tugged Drystan’s hand with hot slippy fingers. “I dunna want to see any—you know—them Boogles. I don’t need to see them.”
“Oh, come on, Cuddy,” said Drystan. “Just a little more. There ain’t no bloody Boogles.”
“Don’t say ‘bloody.’ You’ll get a smack from Mum.”
Drystan said, frowning sadly, “What could I get worse than what paerstins* I’ve already ’ad from the Devil himself? That bastard.”
Cuthbert didn’t argue. He had seen Drystan treated worse than a dog by their father—hit hard with broom handles and belts and punched in the stomach. Drystan claimed their father had even once pushed him down the steps at their house, and Cuthbert, skeptical at first, eventually realized it was probably true.
