The Forest (104 page)

‘“It isn’t a young man,” she said. “And he’s married.”

‘“Oh,” I said.

‘“I don’t know what to do, Dad. So I came out looking for you. I can’t face Mum,” she said.

‘It’s funny really it should have been me and not her mother she went to. Just then I remember thinking of that day when she got bitten by the snake. Because it wasn’t very far away from where we were then. I suppose that’s why it came into my mind.

‘“You’d better tell me who it was,” I said. “At least he can help you.”

‘“I don’t think he can, Dad,” she said. She didn’t want to tell me who it was, but I talked to her quietly for a while and in the end she shrugged and said, “It doesn’t make much difference, anyway.” And then she told me it was Mr Minimus Furzey.’

George stopped. For a moment Sally wondered if he was going to continue. Then she realized that he was weeping. There was no sound, just a gentle shaking of his broad shoulders.

Sally waited.

‘I suppose it was foolish of me to have let her go there,’ he said at last. ‘I shouldn’t have trusted him, should I?’

‘I don’t know about that, George,’ said Sally.

He remained silent for a few moments more.

‘The next day I went to see Mr Furzey. I was very angry, as you can imagine. Betrayed, really. But when I got over to their cottage I was very polite. I asked if I could have a private word with him. So he came out, looking a bit awkward. And when we were standing in his little garden where no one could hear us I told him what I knew and asked him what he was going to do about it. And do you know what he said?

‘“Oh dear,” he said, “I’m always doing this.” And he just shakes his head. “I haven’t any money, you know.”

‘I’m not sure what I might have done just then. But at that moment Mrs Furzey came out, smiling at me kindly, and I realized she didn’t have an idea of what was going on.

‘“What’s this?” she said to me. “Is there anything we can do for you?”

‘“Nothing much,” I said. “I just wanted to ask Mr Furzey about a bird’s nest I found.” I was so angry about Dorothy, but when I saw Mrs Furzey like that, I felt sorry for her too.

‘“That’s good,” she said. “He knows more about the wildlife in the Forest than anyone.”

‘“Well,” said Furzey quickly, “we’ll talk about this further, Pride. Give me a day or two.” And because I didn’t want to say anything in front of Mrs Furzey, I left. But of course I never did hear from him. That’s the way he was. He was a devil, really, you might say, but there wasn’t that much you could really do about it.

‘It was my wife who made me go and see the Colonel. I’d waited a week before I told her. She was very angry. And she let Dorothy have it. Didn’t mince her words at all, which perhaps was a pity.

‘I wasn’t so sure about going to see the Colonel. God knows none of this was his fault. And you’ve got to be careful, haven’t you? The Colonel was a verderer and the verderers employed me. It isn’t such a good idea to embarrass your employer. But my wife went on at me so hard that in the end I rode across to Albion Park.

‘I felt so awkward, but I just explained as simply as I could what happened that how I was still waiting for Mr Minimus Furzey to say something to me.

‘The Colonel went so red I was afraid he was going to have a heart attack.

‘“You did quite right,” he said, “to come and see me.” I was glad he said that. “That man,” he was shaking with anger, “ought to be horse-whipped.” Then he was silent a few moments. “Does my daughter know?”

‘“No Sir,” I said. “And I don’t mean to tell her.”

‘“Good. I appreciate that, Pride.” He shook his head. “I’m very sorry about your daughter. This isn’t the first time.” He looked thoughtful, then he started: “I assume you’re certain …” but then he stops himself and banged his fist on the desk. “No, no, of course it was him, damn him. Pride,” he said, “leave it with me. Something will be done.” He gave me a look. “I don’t wish it spoken of. Can you manage that?”

‘“Yes, Sir,” I said.

‘And sure enough, a week later, Furzey turned up to see me, looking pretty sheepish and gave me ten pounds with a promise of more when the baby arrived. I dare say it came from the Colonel, really. “We shall take an interest in the child,” he said to me. “I’m to tell you that. It’ll have all it needs.”

‘So Dorothy stayed at home and had the child. I rather wished we’d been at the woodman’s cottage in those days instead of up at Fritham, since then no one would’ve seen. But there was nothing you could do about that. Things like that happen in the Forest the same as anywhere else I dare say, but it was shaming for all of us, of course. We never said anything about the father. What others may have thought I wouldn’t know.

‘The baby was a girl. A pretty little thing I must say.’ He paused. ‘It only lived six weeks though. Caught a fever. Dorothy cried for days.

‘A couple of months after it was born, I was summoned down to Albion Park, to see Mrs Albion this time.

‘“Do you know the Hargreaves at Cuffnells?” she asked me. I knew Cuffnells as being a fine house just outside Lyndhurst, but I’d never had occasion to go in there. The Hargreaves family had bought it years before and recently young Mr Hargreaves had got married to a Miss Alice Liddell. You still see her about nowadays, of course, but she was the Alice, as you may know, that figured in
Alice in Wonderland
.

‘“They are very good friends of ours,” Mrs Albion went on. “And they have a position for a girl to work as a maid to young Mrs Hargreaves. Actually,” she smiled, “I think it might be as a nanny before too long. I had a long talk to them two days ago and I wondered if your Dorothy might be interested. It’s really a very good position and naturally I should be glad to recommend her. Would you like to ask her?”

‘Well, you can imagine my feelings as I rode home. This was a very respectable position. A new start in life for Dorothy.

‘When I got home, I saw they were all looking a bit glum, but I told them: “I’ve got news that’ll cheer you all up.”

‘“I don’t think it will,” said my wife. And then she told me: “Dorothy’s gone.”

‘She’d gone away. We didn’t know why. We didn’t even know where. Nor did we for a month, when we had a letter from London. No address. Just to say she was sorry and she wasn’t coming back.

‘We couldn’t do anything. The Colonel hired a man to try to find her for us, but nothing came of it. So that was the end of Dorothy, as far as we knew.’

He looked down at his hands and then out of the window. ‘I don’t think I can talk any more today,’ said George Pride.

‘Your Jack was only five, hardly old enough to be a nipper, as we say, when he got into the newspapers,’ George began the next day. He went over to the dresser and pulled out an old brown envelope stuffed with papers and slowly unfolded a yellowed newspaper cutting. ‘He made headlines too.

‘It was a year I’d remember anyway. We had a very cold winter. It was the year that Lord Henry was given the title of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, on account of all he’d done for the Forest. The commoners were pleased about that.

‘It was a sign of the times, I suppose, that ordinary people were coming to retire down by the coast. We saw it all the way from Hordle along to Christchurch: little brick villas, semi-detached mostly, springing up like mushrooms. But the biggest area of building was further west, beyond Christchurch.

‘When I was young, Bournemouth was just a fishing village a few miles west of Christchurch. Open heath all round it. But then it turned into a little town and by the time of these events there were already houses, hotels and boarding houses spreading right along the coast.

‘The old railway line, Castleman’s Corkscrew, went from Brockenhurst over to Ringwood, miles inland from the sea. So now they wanted a coastal line across to Christchurch and on to Bournemouth. A good enough idea you might think. Mr Grockleton had a new enthusiasm now: he was one of the directors of this railway line.

‘Quite a few young men from the Forest had gone to work on it. The pay was quite good. But I hadn’t been at all pleased when Gilbert told me he was going too. I’d been training him to be an agister.

‘The trouble was, there weren’t any jobs working on the Forest just then and he wanted to earn some money.

‘“It’ll only be for a year or two,” he’d said to me. “The line will be finished then anyway.”

‘About a week after Gilbert signed on I had a visit from Mr Minimus Furzey. It wasn’t often he came over to my house, as you can imagine.

‘“Don’t you let your son work on Grockleton’s line,” he said. “It’s not safe. They’re mad trying to go down there. They’ve only got to look at the geology.”

‘Well, I wasn’t in much of a mood to hear anything from Furzey, after what he did to us. So I said, “I don’t suppose you know more than the engineers of the London and South-Western Railway line.” After all, like him or not, Mr Grockleton was a magistrate and an important man. You couldn’t imagine him starting a big thing like that if he didn’t understand what he was doing.

‘“That’s Headon clay and gravel,” says Furzey. “The whole Forest is running off through it,” or words to that effect. I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I didn’t listen. And Gilbert went off to work there.

‘We found out soon enough what Furzey meant though. At first the digging of that line seemed easy. Going across from Brockenhurst through Sway, it’s all sand and gravel which is hardly difficult to shift. The first year or so they were very pleased with themselves. But things aren’t always what they seem, in the Forest.

‘You know on a beach, you can be sitting on the sand and it seems quite dry? But any child with a bucket and spade that digs down soon discovers that it’s all watery underneath and the wet sand’s runny and won’t stay still. It turned out the southern Forest was like that. There were tiny streams coming down by Sway – you could see them – but underneath there was a huge seepage, water just oozing down through the clay and the gravel. Every time they made a cutting and tried to build up the banks, everything just collapsed again. Several people were injured. The treacle mines, they called those workings, because the clay was a golden colour and as runny as treacle. The work was soon months behind schedule.

‘Only Grockleton didn’t seem to mind. “It’ll come right,” he’d tell them. “It’s the path to the future.”

‘I suppose the land of the Forest didn’t feel the same way.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘But eventually it looked as if things were getting sorted out. The line by Arnewood and Sway, where the worst of the trouble had been, was duly laid. The banks of the cuttings looked solid.

‘And to celebrate, Mr Grockleton announced there was to be a picnic on the heath beside the line. I think he felt it would be good for morale, as they say.

‘He did that picnic in style. There was a brass band, tables of pies and cakes, more than you could eat. Beer and cider. It was like a fair, and a lovely, hot August afternoon he had for it too. All sorts of people were invited: the families of the men working on the line; people from Lymington and Sway, and even Christchurch. Colonel and Mrs Albion came along, the Furzeys too.

‘It must have looked a bit strange, in a way – two or three hundred people, with a brass band, sitting around by a half-finished railway line, under the hot sun, in the middle of a heath. There was an even stranger sight, though, to keep us company.

‘Have you ever noticed that when people make a lot of money they often get a bit strange? There was a man like that who’d retired to Sway. His passion was for concrete. He might’ve been a bit like Mr Grockleton I should think. Everything he could lay his hands on he wanted covered in concrete. And he was building this concrete tower. A huge thing – you can see it for miles around today. They say he wanted to be put up at the top of it when he died. It was about half-built then and I shall always remember it, pointing up into the blue sky not half a mile away from where we were that day, like a great broken pillar.

‘People were in a cheerful mood. Even Grockleton, who could be severe, was doing his best to be friendly. He organized games for the children; and when we had a race and Furzey organized a tug-of-war, he joined in too.

‘It was late afternoon and the Albions and some of the Christchurch people had already started leaving when I noticed little Jack had gone.

‘He was already a very daring little boy, with dark hair and bright eyes. Always climbing things. He was always getting into trouble, but you couldn’t help loving him because he was so cheerful and so courageous.

‘I knew he couldn’t be far away. He’d found another boy a bit older than he was – a big draw to him of course – called Alfie Seagull, from Lymington, and the two of them had been playing; so I felt sure if we found one we’d find the other. And it wasn’t long before someone pointed out the little Seagull boy playing over near the railway cutting.

‘“Is Jack with you?” my wife called out, and he nodded and pointed down into the cutting, so we reckoned that was all right.

‘Mrs Furzey came over to talk to us then, who we were always glad to see, and we had a good chat. I did notice out of the corner of my eye that Furzey was walking along the edge of the cutting, some way off. Inspecting it, I dare say. But I didn’t pay him any particular regard.

‘And then I saw him running. I don’t believe – and I’ve seen many things – that I ever saw a man run as fast as he did then. I truly think he was faster than a deer. And I do not know how it was that he knew what was going to happen. At any event, he flew towards the place where Alfie Seagull was standing and just as he got there we heard the sound.

‘You’d think when so much earth and stone is in motion that you’d hear some sort of a rattle or a roar. And maybe in some landslides you do. But from where we were, as that cutting gave way, all we heard was a kind of hiss.

‘Furzey ran straight over the edge. He never paused, he went straight over. He must have actually run down that landslide as it was moving. And somewhere before the bottom he scooped up our Jack and kept on running with him. I reckon the weight of all that gravel and clay and stones must have reached him and overwhelmed him within a few yards of the base. He must have held Jack high then, and thrown him forward as he was toppled over.