CHAPTER TWO

The Forest

At the beginning of my life, there was a forest. I grew up in a staff house on the campus of Keele University, surrounded by institutional concrete. Occasionally the fantastical qualities of the times showed themselves. In 1968 the students all took their clothes off to protest the Vietnam War. Two students who baby-sat me painted a map of Middle Earth across an entire wall of their lodgings. Rumour had it that a Tolkien-loving academic gave a lecture in Elvish. Across the road from our front door, though, the Keele woods began. They were the plantations of an eighteenth-century park that had run wild during the neglectful reign of Keele's last squire, and never been completely taken in hand again once they'd passed into the cash-strapped public sector. What had been designed as a grand garden of many different botanical moods - like a cabinet with many different drawers - was shaggy now, overgrown and intergrown. Species had crept; the seams between Capability Brown's separate ideas had closed; the cells of the wood had knitted together. Yet the design remained, fuzzily, because the woods contained many zones, samples of different kinds of forest close together in space but far apart in spirit. I didn't know the names of the trees - I still don't, mostly - but there was an area where broad, resinous black-green pines kept the ground shadowed and bare, and the turning path was carpeted with dry needles and fir-cones; a stand of high beeches whose elephant-hide bark rose out of drifts of small gold leaves like coins; a neat conical hill which had been colonised by yellow and green sycamore saplings. There were oceans of shiny-leaved rhododendrons, which I'd crash into deliberately on my bike later, so that I somersaulted over the handlebars and disappeared into the branches in an explosion of pink petals. There was a dark zone dominated by alders around a stagnant pool, some kind of folly once, like the sandstone amphitheatre elsewhere in the woods, but given over now to algae and leaf mould.

There was a forest at the beginning of fiction too. This one spread for ever. Its canopy of branches covered the land, covered every form of the land, whether the ground beneath jagged or rolled. The forest went on. Up in its living roof birds flitted through greenness and bright air, but down between the trunks of the many trees there were shadows, there was dark. When you walked this forest your feet made rustling sounds, but the noises you made yourself were not the only noises, oh no. Twigs snapped; breezes brought snatches of what might be voices. Lumpings and crashes in the undergrowth marked the passages of heavy things far off, or suddenly nearby. This was a populated wood. All wild creatures lived here, dangerous or benign according to their natures. And all the other travellers you had heard of were in the wood too, at this very moment: kings and knights, youngest sons and third daughters, simpletons and outlaws; a small girl whose bright hood flickered between the pine trees like a scarlet beacon, and a wolf moving on a different vector to intercept her at the cottage, purposefully arrowing through thickets, leaving a track of disturbance behind him as an alpha particle does when it streaks across a cloud chamber. These people, these dangers were not far away, but you would never meet them. The adventures could never intersect, although they shared the forest; although they would be joined in time by more, and still more, wayfarers, the more elaborated beings who came from the more elaborate worlds of privately-read story, rather than the primitives of fairy tale. Mole from The Wind in the Willows would pelt in hunted panic through a night-time tract of the forest, whose bare boughs jutted 'like a black reef in some still southern sea'. Through twisted foliage would creep the Wart, in The Sword in the Stone, past pale-eyed predators and baby dragons hissing under stones, to his first sight of Merlyn swearing at a bucket. But each travelled separately, because it was the nature of the forest that you were alone in it. It was the place in which by definition you had no companions, and no resources except your own uncertain self. It was the Wild, where relationship ceases, where connection is suspended. There would be encounters, of course. Eventually the state that the whole wood represented would be embodied. One of those rustlings would become a footfall, would become a meeting, and you stepped forward to it as best you could. You could no more avoid the encounters of the wood - all significant, all in their way tests - than you could cross it on a neat dependable path. It existed to cause changes, and it had no pattern you could take hold of in the hope of evading change. You never came out the same as when you went in. Here and again, an old tree had fallen, and a dozen saplings were competing for its access to the sky. Depending which succeeded, that unit of woodland space would be coloured one particular green out of a dozen possibilities. The forest had been made by a million events equally lacking in intention. It was rich and it was strange: mile after mile, a carpet without a design.

And there was a forest at the beginning of history. The summerhouse in Cambridge where I sit writing this and watching a sycamore throw down its dry leaves one by one, stands on what was once the marshland edge of a wood as total as the forest of story. The botanist Oliver Rackham called it the 'wildwood' as a technical term, after Kenneth Grahame's Wild Wood. I sit in the ghost of the wildwood's Lime Province, a wonderful name, the title for a polity of trees alone. It stretched from sea to sea. Painted people slipped through its shadows, among the other animal species of the wildwood, indistinct in the slatted light. They left no permanent trails. They hunted and gathered, they retreated to basketwork houses where lakes had opened the land for them. Undoubtedly they told stories about the unending thicket whose signs they forever tried to read.

But those stories are lost. From the picture books of history I read in the early seventies I learned a version of the British past in which the wildwood endured into the Middle Ages, to be the Old English Jungle the Wart got lost in. Then men wearing hoods and woolly tights grubbed up the trees. It was a traditional history that produced an almost moralised contrast between the wild and the tame, and it fitted the fortunes of the landscape neatly together with the characteristics of the different inhabitants of the country. I had a vivid picture in my head of dead-straight Roman roads cleaving through endless green, joining square little white cities in clearings; and another image for what happened when the Saxons came and overthrew all the neat diagrams that made up Roman civilisation. I saw trees sprouting back through the roofs of smashed villas. The mosaics bubbled like boiling water as the tree roots writhed under them, and spilled into fragments lost in the undergrowth. In other moods I knew the forest was the domain of magic, and I was sorry it had been lost, I was on the forest's side. I wanted the place under the leaves that had never been owned or designed, where everything might happen that had withdrawn from the tamed landscape of the present. But the Saxons represented a fearful disorder. They were wreckers, they were the enemies of all exact lines and reliable shapes. They were chaos. When the wildwood was their ally it seemed purely fearsome.

However, while I was imagining this vegetable holocaust circa 1972, Rackham and other investigators were using pollen analysis and archaeological data to displace the chronology it depended on. Roman Britain and Saxon Britain were both, in fact, cleared landscapes. Woods coppiced for firewood and building poles stood amidst open fields. The wildwood had arrived at the close of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 BC, reached its climax state about 4000 BC, and began to be whittled back as soon the Mesolithic discovery of agriculture reached Britain. By 2000 BC there were big open spaces on the chalk uplands; by 500 BC half the wildwood had gone and a rising population with axes in their hands were constantly forcing up the clearance rate. The significance of these dates is that they put the death of the British wildwood before recorded memory. Memory in the forms of history or chronicle we could be without, and still inherit the shadow of the trees. But the death of the wildwood precedes story too; it happened before the oldest legends that now survive were first told. It is out of legend's reach. For stories to descend from then till now, there has to be a chain of peoples passing along mythology. They garble it, they subject it to the chaotic changes of Chinese Whispers, like the Celts of the second century BC who copied copies of Greek money till the chariot on the back disintegrated into a fluid whirl of dots and lines. Still, a signal arrives. Stories do not lapse easily into time's white noise because they are not passed on passively. There's a counter-chaotic imperative at work. Whenever static threatens to overwhelm them, whenever too much detail becomes meaningless, a teller will reform them in the act of transmission so that once more they make (a kind of) contemporary sense. But the wildwood predates the earliest, obscurest functioning link in the chain. It sends us no signal at all. It was just too long ago. We tell no stories of the great wood from memory in England.

Instead, we narrate it in the same spirit that the Hopi Indians of the American South-West tell tales hinging on orphans being cruelly...