by Lizzie Lane
Meaning to keep up her disconsolate manner, Frances kept her head down but found feeling sorry for herself wasn’t easy to do especially considering she was surrounded by the most beautiful trees.
In some places no daylight penetrated the thick canopy of fir trees and pines. In other places oak trees grew. She couldn’t resist slowing her footsteps and staring at them. It didn’t escape her notice that they seemed to be planted in a circle.
‘It’s called a grove,’ Ada Perkins shouted over her shoulder having noticed the girl’s reason for slowing down. ‘They’re very old. It’s where the priests of the old religion used to pray to their gods.’ She turned, her bright eyes seeming to glow silver against a background of tangled branches and silver-grey tree trunks. ‘Oak groves are sacred and should never be violated. Do you hear me, girl?’
Frances shuddered at the look in eyes that seemed to shine with different colours. She made a mental note never to do anything wicked within sight of those oak groves.
The track through the forest zig-zagged ever upwards through tall evergreens, big enough to make telegraph poles, which Ada informed her were probably what they would be used for once they were fully grown. She also explained that the track was mainly used by loggers, Free Miners – whatever they were – some of whom owned the straggly coated Jacob sheep that roamed the forest at will. Few other people ever came this way.
The house in which Ada Perkins lived was little more than a shack clinging to the hillside overlooking a wooded valley through which the River Wye meandered like a grey silk ribbon. Sheep grazed in green pastures and the sky curved over it all, like the inside of a silver lid.
Logs were piled to one side of the shack and a small shed on the other which Ada told her was a smoke house.
‘So why do you smoke your pipe out here?’ asked Frances having never come across the term before.
Ada Perkins closed one eye when she looked at her and lit her pipe. ‘What d’ya mean?’
‘The smoke house. Is that where you go to smoke?’
Ada threw back her head and laughed long and loud. ‘No. No. No. I smoke things in the smoke house. Fish, fowl, sides of Gloucestershire ham. I might even smoke you if you’re not careful.’
During those first days, the local minister dropped by. Frances overheard him asking whether he might expect the young girl lodging with her at Sunday school.
‘If she wants to, but don’t expect me as well. You don’t, do ya?’
‘We … ll n …o,’ he said slowly, sounding more than a little bit nervous.
‘Then don’t expect her if she don’t want to go.’
‘But the child might be used to going to Sunday school—’
‘I was used to going to church until twenty-five years ago, my friend. I parted with God back then and have never regretted it, so if the girl wants to go, she can, but I’m not forcing her to.’
‘You say that very loudly and eloquently,’ he said in his hesitant, soft-mannered tone.
‘You should try doing the same yourself, Mr Jones, then less of your congregation would be falling asleep during your sermons.’
Frances was relieved. It had crossed her mind that she might be expected to attend Sunday school at least, and possibly church too. Uncle Stan had told her that if it pleased Mrs Perkins for her to go to church, then she should do so.
‘Be nice to her, Frances. She’s lived alone for a long time and has given you shelter when she didn’t need to. It’s a kindness. So be nice. Be like a daughter to her, or a granddaughter.’
Frances was glad that Ada Perkins had stood up to the minister and began to relax, her sullen manner slowly dissipating.
Ada began to open up, speaking in a strident tone about her daughter, her granddaughter and the fact that her daughter’s husband had been a weak man with beady eyes that to her mind were too close together.
‘Never trust a man whose eyes are too close together,’ she said to Frances, her expression deadly serious.
Frances had said nothing but readily took in the information. She soon came to know that Mrs Perkins, or Ada as she insisted Frances call her, was full of such sayings.
‘Never whistle indoors and never stare too long at a full moon. You’ll go mad if you do.’
Frances began to hang on to her every word. She didn’t have a living grandmother, but decided that if she should ever acquire one, she’d choose one just like Ada Perkins.
A few of her friends back in Oldland Common had grandmothers. Most of them knitted a lot, but none of them, not one single one, was as interesting or colourful as Ada. And none of them lived in a forest as beautiful as this – it was even better than the orchard back in Oldland Common.
Gradually Frances let go of her initial hostility. In time, Ada was talking about anything and everything about her life in the forest.
Frances listened, fascinated by Ada’s stories and strange and interesting facts. Ada had a remarkable memory and spoke in vivid descriptions, so vivid that Frances saw pictures in her mind.
By the time she started school a few days later, Frances was quite content with her lot and had begun exploring the forest that surrounded Ada’s shack.
The shack was made of wood. The front was painted green, the same green as the bus that ran three times a week through Oldland Common. The sides of the house were painted a dull burgundy and the rear bright orange.
The windows of the shack, which Ada called a bungalow, looked down from a gap in the trees at the glorious view. At night the crisp air of winter was punctuated with the hooting of owls, the high-pitched bark of a fox and other wild creatures. The moon seemed much brighter than back in Oldland Common, but she was careful to adhere to Ada’s advice and not look at it for too long.
It had surprised her enormously on her walk to school to be confronted with a wild deer. For a moment their eyes had met, both dark brown and round with surprise. Then the deer was gone, bushes whipping behind it, dead leaves rustling where its feet had kicked.
A boy called Deacon was the first to speak to her. ‘Bet you can’t climb trees.’
‘Bet you I can,’ she responded hotly.
‘You’re a girl. My grancher can climb trees better’n you!’
‘I can climb better than any grancher,’ she further proclaimed. She presumed grancher was the name of his brother, but wasn’t going to ask. A new girl in the class had to stand her ground. It didn’t pay to appear ignorant or weak; making the right impression on the first day at school mattered.
His eyes narrowed. His grin widened.
‘What’s the bet then?’
Frances didn’t hesitate. ‘A catapult. I made it myself,’ she said proudly. ‘What you going to bet?’
The boy’s hair was overlong, flopping like a carpet over his eyes as he thought about it. ‘A rabbit skin. It’s all cured. I done it myself. I’ll bring it in tomorrow.’
Frances hadn’t a clue what to do with a rabbit skin having never owned one before, but accepted the bet anyway.
She didn’t fail to tell Ada when she got home.
‘Hm,’ said Ada. ‘Should make you a nice pair of mittens. Not gloves, mind you. You’d need two skins for that I shouldn’t wonder. P’raps even three. Now all you got to do is show ’im you can climb a tree.’
Frances dreamed of those rabbit skin mittens, all soft and furry and warm. The knitted ones she’d brought with her were warm enough, but got wet easily.
The contest happened on the way home from school the next day. The tree was old, its branches curving upwards like the arms of the silver candelabra that sat on Stan Sweet’s sideboard, a wedding present from a former employer given to his wife, Sarah, on their wedding day.
The kids stood in a semi-circle at the bottom of the tree, heads tipped back so that their eyes gazed skywards.
‘That’s the one,’ proclaimed Deacon.
‘That’s a good one,’ the rest of the kids agreed.
Frances pretended to be daunted. ‘I think I can climb
it. I’ll do my best.’
‘We know that. You’re only a girl,’ declared Ralph, the scruffiest kid in school.
Frances was overjoyed, though was careful not to show it. She’d show these foresters a thing or two about climbing.
First she searched out the best footholds and handholds, and then she spat on the palms of her hands. ‘Here we go.’
With a bound she was on the tree, hand over hand into the holding spots she’d spied, her long legs striding swiftly up the trunk of the tree, fingers digging into crevices and cracks, and feet following behind.
She made the first branch, then the second, moving sideways where necessary and climbing ever upward, thrilling at the sight of the sky through the topmost branches.
For a moment she perched on that top branch surveying the carpet of treetops, some bare of leaves, their starkness pierced by dark green evergreens.
‘Oi!’
The shout came from down below. Deacon was looking up at her, his hand shielding his eyes. ‘Now you’ve climbed up, let’s see you coming down!’
Agile as a cat, Frances began her descent, uncaring that the toes of her shoes were scuffing against the bark and that her socks lay in wrinkles around her ankles. Finally she landed feet first on the damp earth, her face alight with pleasure.
‘There! So where’s my rabbit skin?’
Once she’d climbed the tree designated by the rest of the class to be ‘the one’, there was no turning back. Deacon and the rest of the gang viewed her with goggle-eyed respect. She’d won their friendship and she in turn had impressed them so much she was instantly accepted, and not viewed as an outsider from a place where buses were more numerous than trees.
Although she still missed the only family she had ever known, her love for the forest crept up on her swiftly. The day following the tree climb, she walked back to Ada’s with a smile on her face and a rabbit skin tucked under her arm.
Trees to climb and the same kind of kids she’d known at Oldland Common; Frances was in heaven. There was also the game, the plants, the fruits of the forest that outsiders were not privy to.
‘Never mind them ration books. Nobody ever starves ’ere,’ declared Ada. ‘Though they might lose their way, though not all who wander and live alone are really lost; they’re just looking for the right path.’
Frances presumed she meant that it was easy to get lost in the forest. She’d thought she was a few times, but ultimately managed to find her way home. Although not yet twelve years old, she had a sneaking suspicion that what Ada said had two meanings.
Ada Perkins was as strong as a horse. She chopped her own wood from logs brought to her by the foresters – the name the people thereabouts gave to themselves. Ada told her the foresters were descended from generations of people who held ancient rights bestowed on them by a grateful king. Frances asked her what it was the forest people had done for the king.
‘Longbows. The forest people made and fired longbows. I hear their bodkins penetrated the armour of the French knights they were fighting.’
Although situated in Gloucestershire and touching the borders of Monmouthshire, the people of the forest regarded themselves as something apart, neither English nor Welsh. From what young Frances could gather, it had been like that for generations.
‘This was the border, the Marches it used to be called,’ Ada had explained when she’d asked her why the people were so insistent on being called foresters. ‘The lords of the manor back then used to march from here into Wales. The foresters were the best archers in the world, so got paid well to serve their lord and also their king. The French found that out at the battles of Agincourt and Plessey.’
Frances found Ada interesting and listened to her avidly. Ada knew so much about everything and not just about history. She also knew about herbs and medicines and how to birth babies. Those in need of her services rarely paid her with money. Instead they presented her with rabbits, hares, pheasants, wood pigeons and sometimes a haunch of venison. Best of all was a wild salmon poached from the river then poached in an entirely different way in a pan of boiling hot water on top of Ada’s black iron range. The smell of good things cooking filled the shack. Nothing was wasted.
Frances was allowed to look in the smoke house where she saw strips of salmon, pigeon and pheasant hung from hooks set into the ceiling, the acrid smoke rising up from smouldering mounds of woodchips.
‘All that food,’ said Frances in an awestruck manner.
‘The forest is our larder. Nature provides,’ Ada said to her. ‘Nettles for greens, wild garlic, field mushrooms, nuts and berries, fish and meat; it’s all here.’
Ada kept a supply of apples and wild berries, both used for jams and making pies.
Within no time at all, Frances was doing the same as the other kids on their way home from school, searching out sources of free food. Not all that they gathered was strictly legal, especially the trout they tickled in the private pond on the edge of the Rolls estate. To her great delight, Frances found she was good at tickling trout, her catch ending up hanging on hooks in the smoke shed.
‘What we can’t eat straightaway, we can barter or store for when the north wind blows,’ Ada told her.
‘What does the north wind do?’ Frances asked her.
Ada puffed on her pipe while gutting a particularly large trout. ‘The north wind blows strong in the winter, creaking and cracking the branches of trees until they can stand no more and snap off, falling on some poor unfortunate’s head if they’re not careful.’
Ada Perkins was full of stern advice; there was so much Frances was learning, and not only at school. So determined was she to learn all there was about forest lore – how to snare rabbits and capture pigeons – she began writing it down in the notepad Ruby had given her before leaving home. It was supposed to be for letter writing, but none had so far been received from her family, so she took the view she wouldn’t write to them until they wrote to her.
Also before leaving, Uncle Stan had given her a photograph of her father. He was wearing a suit and had a flower in his lapel. ‘To keep beside your bed.’
To be accurate, it was only half a photograph, three sides with the normal white border, the fourth obviously cut away.
Frances was bright enough to know that there had been two people in the photograph, her father wearing a flower in his jacket lapel, and a woman in a wedding dress, her mother.
Uncle Stan never referred to her mother and neither did anyone else; they’d receive short shrift and a dark frown if they did.
Frances had asked questions about her mother, but got no proper answers, her uncle’s jaw stiffening as he declared her mother Mildred not worth mentioning.
Mary had given her a tortoiseshell comb as a leaving present with a warning to make sure she combed her hair thoroughly and washed it once a week. ‘Be on the lookout for nits,’ Mary had added.
Frances had nodded solemnly. She knew what nits were and didn’t want them hatching into lice. Even so combing her glossy hair was not a favourite occupation, but something happened after the tree climbing. Frances began to take care of her appearance though didn’t realise she was doing it. She also found herself blushing when Deacon was around.
Warmed by the old log burner that kept the shack warm, she noted down what she learned of forest lore and drew pictures of the forest and its people in her sketch pad. She also divided up the notebook and recorded what she’d eaten that day. Food was becoming the main topic of conversation at school, everyone comparing notes of what they’d already eaten and what they were likely to eat that night. They purposely left out what they had for school dinners which didn’t seem to count in the way as meals at home counted. Displays on the shelves at the local Co-op were sparser than they had been. Things they’d taken for granted were getting scarce, and this before rationing had been introduced.
The weather turned colder as it got closer to Christmas. People were sneaking out into the forest to cut down small fir trees to take
home and decorate with tinsel, strings of nuts and painted fir cones. They also cut holly and Frances was called upon to climb up into an oak tree for mistletoe.
Deacon had glowed with pleasure when she’d presented him with a bushy sprig. People kissed under the mistletoe and that’s what she thought he was going to do. Instead he told her he would sell it for a penny or even tuppence. ‘I’ll knock on a few doors,’ he exclaimed.
Frances did her best not to look disappointed.
Ada complained that the price of salmon was going up, though in her case the salmon she cooked came by way of a little poaching. The forest people were rich in that they had the knowledge to make the most of the food around them.
It was a week before Christmas that the man from the post office in Coleford arrived on his bicycle at the village store to relay a message that had come over the telephone that morning.
The telephone was situated in a bright red box outside the post office. Reg Grantley, the man who ran the post office, disliked mechanical and electrical things. He still rode a bicycle, didn’t like motorcars and the post office was lit by strategically placed oil lamps on convenient shelves. Reg carefully avoided the telephone, insisting he was deaf to the ringing. Everyone took his excuses with a pinch of salt.
‘He’d send messages by carrier pigeon if he had the chance,’ somebody had remarked.
When Ruby Sweet phoned him from the red phone box in Oldland Common, he’d had to get involved. Mrs Sanderson, a local busybody, had answered the phone’s vibrant ring. Before informing Reg Grantley, she elicited every bit of information she could before Mary realised she was nothing to do with the post office and insisted she fetch the person who was.
‘There’s a Miss Sweet on the phone out there who insisted you speak to her.’
Reg eyed her warily. ‘Ask her to give you a message.’
‘Tried that,’ croaked Mrs Sanderson who seemed to have a permanent frog in her throat. ‘Said it ’ad to be you. It’s a message for Ada Perkins. I do know that much.’
