The Forest (105 page)

‘By the time we got to the spot a few moments later, Jack was bruised and bleeding, but he was quite clear of the slide, which would certainly otherwise have buried him.

‘We could see Furzey’s hands. But we had to be careful digging him out because we soon realized both his legs had been badly crushed. I think he may have twisted as he threw Jack forward.

‘So your Jack had his life saved, which caused him to be in the newspaper. And Furzey got a lot of mention too, which I must say he deserved.

‘He never really walked properly after that. You couldn’t help being sorry for him. He was in a bath chair mostly, though it was remarkable how he managed to get himself about. Anyway, my wife would go over to his house to bring him one of her cakes now and then. I suppose, in her eyes, he’d redeemed himself, as you might say.’

‘I’ve often thought it strange,’ said George Pride the next day, ‘considering it almost killed him, that the one thing Jack loved more than anything else, was to go down to the railway line.’ Sally noticed that the lines of his face seemed to harden and his old hands tightened on the arms of his chair.

‘There were a lot of small cattle-bridges over the Forest railway lines, so that the stock could move about, and he’d trained his pony not to be afraid when the engines went underneath. He was always down by one of those bridges.

‘Perhaps one incident, though, should really have warned us of what was to come.

‘The Office of Woods never got over the victory of the commoners, and though he was polite about it, Mr Lascelles never lost an opportunity to undermine the verderers if he could; and you may be sure the verderers gave as good as they got. We had to be constantly on the lookout for those people planting trees where they shouldn’t – which they did – or messing up the Forest generally. They call the Office of Woods the Forestry Commission nowadays, don’t they? But it’s exactly the same and I dare say it always will be.

‘I was just saddling up with Jack to go out one morning when Gilbert came riding up. He’d just become an agister by then. “You’d better come with me,” he said. So off we all went, down to a place near the new railway line where there was a lovely lawn where the ponies liked to shade.

‘Normally, when timber is cut, it is taken to a sawmill in some appropriate place. The sawdust and chips make a terrible mess and ruin any grazing. But here, right beside that lawn, was a hideous sawing machine, a steam engine, puffing away, belching smoke, with sawdust blowing all over the lawn. “Who said you could do this?” we demanded. “Mr Lascelles,” the foreman replied.

‘We were furious. But next thing we knew, young Jack was round the other side of the machine, learning how it worked. And the next day he was down there again, we found out. And for weeks after that.

‘The verderers with Mr Lascelles went to law over that machine. The law case dragged on for years, not because the sawing engine was so important but to show who was in charge of the Forest. It was a stalemate in the end. But young Jack didn’t care about that.’

Jack had never talked to her about this. She watched with interest. She had never realized the bitterness that had come between her husband and his father. But she could see it now, in George’s face. His jaw was clenched.

‘Even if I forbade him,’ he continued, ‘he’d sneak off to play with that infernal thing so that whenever Lascelles saw me he’d just nod and say: “At least your son appreciates us, Pride.”

‘Anything mechanical: it was during these years that they started having military manoeuvres in the Forest. It was just a wasteland for the military of course. We were always clearing up after them. Stock were killed. But did Jack care? Not a bit. He’d be off learning how the guns worked and firing them too when the soldiers would let him.

‘Much as I loved him, I must confess that by the time he was eighteen I had no control over him. So I suppose it was inevitable that in due course we should have parted from one another.

‘We had gone riding one day, he and I, out past Lyndhurst. We’d just come by the old park pale where the deer used to be caught, when all of a sudden, along the lane from Beaulieu, the most extraordinary vehicle came towards us. It was a sort of little metal cart; it made the most horrible rattling noise, and smoke came out behind. I had read about the motor car, of course, and seen a picture, but this was the first time we’d actually seen one in the Forest. And a very unpleasant experience it was too.

‘It was the Honourable John Montagu, Lord Montagu’s son, who was driving this contraption, and I was very sorry to see that his father allowed him to do it. But Jack, needless to say, thought it was wonderful.

‘“That’s the future, Dad. That’s the future,” he cried.

‘And it was this talk of the future, on our way home that day, which led me to raise the subject of his own.’

George levered himself out of his chair and went over to the window. Outside, the poles that carried his favourite runner beans seemed to occupy his attention for a while. Then he shook his head almost angrily and turned round.

‘You must understand that around the turn of the century the New Forest was going through a period of what you might call success. Many farmers and landowners in England had been badly hit, even ruined, by all the cheap grain coming in from America. But there was a big demand for dairy products. So the smallholders in the New Forest were doing quite well. The ponies were fetching good prices. Some went to the coal mines as pit ponies – they were very sturdy, you see; and others, sad to say perhaps, went over to Flanders to the horsemeat market. There was also work to be had doing jobs for the new people coming to live at places like Lymington. The price of land was going up, so some people made a bit by selling building plots. All in all, life in the Forest wasn’t bad.

‘I’d been working as an agister many years now. I’d saved up a bit. It seemed to me a good idea to start Jack off with a little smallholding, which I was in a position to do. So I made my offer.

‘“Thank you, but no thank you,” he said. Just like that.

‘“Oh?” I said. “Then what plans have you, might I ask?”

‘“I’m going to be an engine driver on the railways,” he said.

‘I wasn’t best pleased, as you can imagine. “Well, I suppose,” I said, “you could get a place by Brockenhurst,” thinking this was near the railway station. But he shook his head.

‘“I’m leaving the Forest,” he said.

‘“Leaving the Forest? Where would you go?”

‘“Southampton, I should think. Or London.” He gave me this rather pitying smile, which I didn’t appreciate. “I don’t just want to stare up the back of a cow all my life. It’s boring.”

‘And then I argued with him. And then he said some things that I don’t care to think about as they don’t matter any more. One thing he did say, I shall always remember. “Before long, Dad, we won’t even be needing horses any more.”

‘I thought he must be daft.’

George sat down heavily and closed his eyes. Then he sighed. ‘So he left us and went to Southampton. He had to work on the railways a few years before he had his wish. But drive the engines he did.

‘He also, strange to say, became considerably better acquainted with the Honourable John Montagu.

‘When the railway had been built across the northern bit of the Beaulieu estate, a bargain had been struck. The line could go through, but a little station was put in, right in the middle of the open heath. If his Lordship wanted a train for himself and his guests, a signal would let the driver know, and the train was to stop for him. It wasn’t long before Jack was driving the train and saw the signal. So he stopped all right; but to his surprise the Honourable John Montagu steps up and says: “I’ll ride with you if you don’t mind.” He was already a very mechanical man, you see, and a qualified train driver. You can be sure Jack lost no opportunity to ask if he could inspect the Montagu motor car in return. So the next time we saw Jack he’d learned all about the motor car. As for the train, you could never be quite sure when it went past whether it was a Pride or a Montagu driving it.

‘After ten years, Jack moved away from Southampton further up the line. He still wrote us a letter now and again, but we didn’t see much of him.

‘It was no surprise to us, really, that when the Great War came, Jack was mad keen to join a motorised unit. He volunteered at once. And in due course he did manage to drive a vehicle near the front. His letters were full of it. Of course none of us quite realized what was happening, let alone what was going to happen, up at the front; and I suppose somehow we felt that if he was in an armoured vehicle of some kind he must be safer. I dare say he was safer than many of those poor boys in the trenches. But not safe enough.’

He cleared his throat. ‘Well, we got the telegram telling us he’d been wounded. They said it was bad and that we’d have to wait. So wait we did. And of course, when he finally did come back – you remember it, Sally – we were shocked. The idea that he could ever be near normal again, let alone marry and have a family – well, he didn’t have much of his face left, so you can’t say we held out much hope. But he was alive.’

Oh, yes. Sally remembered. The poor shattered invalid they brought into the Southampton hospital where she had been nursing. Even the doctors hadn’t thought they could do much for him. Nor had the other nurses.

But she had. And she’d proved it, too. She’d brought him back to health herself. And then she’d married him. She smiled. She’d earned her happiness.

But George was talking now.

‘“I heard them say it, you know, Dad,” he said to me once. “I heard the officer, young Captain Totton come by. A good officer he was. Lost a leg. He came hobbling by asking after me. And the nurse – I never knew what she looked like, of course, but she sounded pretty, if you know what I mean – she said to him: ‘I’m afraid he’s going.’ And he said: ‘Why’s that?’ And she said: ‘I don’t think he wants to live.’ And then she whispered something and he said: ‘Oh.’

‘“And then there was a bit of a pause, and I heard him come up, tick-tock with his crutch and say quite loud to me: ‘Come on, now, we can’t have that. I know it’s hard, but you’ve got to fight. Don’t give up.’ I didn’t make any sign, Dad. I mean, I knew he was doing his best. ‘Think of England,’ he says. But though I tried, it didn’t seem to do much good. If I thought of England I just thought of driving my train, and of course I knew I wasn’t going to be doing that any more. So I just lay there and I thought, well, that’s it then. I may as well go really, and no harm done.

‘“And then, about an hour later, I hear this sort of rustling sound by the bed. And even with all my dressings and all the disinfectant I could smell something, mud and sweat, I suppose, that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. And then I hear this voice. ‘Your name Jack Pride?’ it says. ‘Well if it isn’t you can die and it’s all right. I just got here and my name’s Alfie Seagull. But if you happen to be the Jack Pride I’m thinking of, I watched you nearly get buried under a gravel slide in a railway cutting. Is that you, then?’

‘“So I tried to make some sort of sign that it was. ‘So it is you then,’ he says. ‘You can’t die here,’ he says. ‘Blimey! Have you forgotten who you are? You’re a Pride of the Forest.’ And it’s funny, but then I remembered our cottage, and the woods, and how we used to ride out together in the early morning; and when I thought of that, somehow it did give me strength, Dad, and so here I am.”

‘And I suppose it’s foolish,’ said George, ‘but I was always so pleased he told me that.’

THE FOREST

APRIL 2000

Sunday morning. Dottie Pride had only arrived at the Albion Park Hotel the evening before, but already she felt the familiar flutter of nerves. There was a whole week to go – a week in which to work out what the story was and find the angle. Plenty of time. But this was the stage at which she always began to panic.

She decided to visit Beaulieu first. She would be going there on Saturday to set up the shoot, but she wanted to have a private look around the place in advance. Perhaps it would give her some ideas. It was only a ten-minute drive, even at the forty-mile-an-hour speed limit which was in force to protect the ponies and the deer.

She was impressed. If the stately homes of Britain needed tourists to pay for their upkeep, the present Lord Montagu had shown considerable flair. Taking his father’s interest in the first motor cars as his starting point, he had built up the Motor Museum at Beaulieu into a huge national institution. Dottie wasn’t particularly interested in mechanical things, but she spent a fascinating half-hour gazing at Victorian Daimlers, Edwardian Rolls-Royces, and even the later cars of the fifties. As she left the museum and walked the short distance into the abbey itself, however, the mechanical age seemed discreetly to vanish, and she entered the quiet peace of the medieval world.

It was all very well done. After the house, she walked through an exhibition of monastic life in the huge
domus
where the lay brothers had lived when they were not out at the granges. And when she went out into the ruined cloisters, she could almost see the Cistercian monks, moving quietly about their business amongst the old grey stones. In one of the carrels where they used to sit, she noticed with disapproval that some vandal had carved a little letter ‘A’.

Beaulieu would open the documentary and the timing was perfect. Lord Montagu had chosen the twenty-fourth of April, Easter Sunday, to mark the nine-hundredth anniversary of the killing of King William Rufus in the New Forest. He had organized a large archery competition at Beaulieu with the actor Robert Hardy, who happened also to be a world authority on the longbow, opening the proceedings. Lord Montagu was to act – this was the medieval term for the patron of such an event – as Lord Paramount of the day. A colourful day, full of pageantry. Excellent television material.

With an historical surprise. A prominent local historian, Mr Arthur Lloyd, had shown beyond much doubt that the killing of Rufus had been recorded at the time as taking place at Througham, on the coastal stretch below Beaulieu. The famous Rufus stone, one of England’s best-known tourist sites, was actually in the wrong place.

And then? She spent the rest of the day driving round the Forest. First she went down to Buckler’s Hard. There was a maritime museum by its grassy banks now. There was a model of the shipyard as it would have been during the building of one of Nelson’s ships, the
Swiftsure
, which caught her eye. She noted that sections of the great Mulberry Harbours used for the D-Day landings in World War II had also been built on the Beaulieu River. Interesting stuff, certainly.

East of Beaulieu lay Exbury Gardens and Lepe County Park. Along the edge of the Forest on the Southampton side were a nature centre and a model farm. A little further north she found a leisure park with children’s rides. The message was clear. The modern New Forest had equipped itself in a very professional way to attract large numbers of visitors. Nor was this only a matter for the larger operators. When Dottie drove across to the dark little enclave of Burley in the afternoon, she found that the village was busily trading on its reputation for witchcraft with at least three shops selling witch’s trinkets of every kind. Tourism and recreation: was that the future of the king’s old hunting ground?

Monday morning was bright. Dottie was quite excited as she made her way up the steep curve of Lyndhurst’s main street. On her left, the high Victorian tower of the church soared into a pale blue spring sky.

When she had telephoned the New Forest Museum, she had not only been told she should go to this morning’s meeting, but they had offered to have someone there to meet her. ‘Don’t worry,’ the voice on the telephone had laughed. ‘We’ll find you.’

As she came to the top of the street, she saw why. The Queen’s House, the ancient royal lodge and manor, was a handsome old red-brick building. Outside a door to the side of it, a group of about twenty people had already gathered to wait. It was obvious from the way they were talking that they all knew each other. She was the only stranger. She looked around.

‘Would you be Dottie Pride?’ a voice asked behind her.

‘Yes.’ She turned. A hand was held out. A nod. A smile. Did he say his name? If so, she did not catch it.

All she knew was that she was looking at the most beautiful man she had ever seen in her life. He was tall and slim, Celtic-looking. He might have been Irish. His hair fell in dark ringlets to his shoulders. With his pale, sensitive face, he looked like the pictures of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. His brown eyes were soft, wonderfully intelligent. He was wearing a brown leather jacket.

‘We can go in now,’ he said pleasantly. ‘The door’s opening.’

The Verderers’ Hall was a large rectangular chamber. At the far end a raised dais ran the width of the room like a magistrate’s bench, with the royal coat of arms on the bare wall behind it. Round the walls were deers’ heads and antlers and glass-fronted showcases. In a place of honour, the ancient stirrup was displayed through which dogs had to pass unless they were to be lawed. The floor was taken up with wooden benches except for the space at the front where there was a table and a witness stand. Old oak beams crossed the ceiling. Dottie, somewhat dazed, sat at the back, trying not to stare at her companion.

‘The Verderers’ Court meets on the third Monday of the month, ten months a year,’ he murmured. ‘The Official Verderer’s appointed; a few represent official bodies; the rest are elected. They have to have commoning rights to stand.’

‘This is the court set up in 1877 to replace the old medieval court?’ She’d done her homework. She wondered if it impressed him.

‘Modified once or twice, but basically, yes. Here they come.’ The verderers were filing in. He gave her quick sketches of them as they appeared. Two had published books on the New Forest. The Official Verderer was a prominent landowner. Most of them had roots in the Forest that went back centuries. There were eight present on the dais that morning. In front, in green uniforms, stood the two agisters. The Head Agister, by the witness stand, called out:

‘Oyez, oyez, oyez. All manner of persons who have any presentments to make, or matter or things to do at this Court of Verderer. Let them come forward and they shall be heard.’ She was back, Dottie thought, in the Middle Ages.

A brief report was read out. Then came the list of ponies knocked down by cars: a melancholy record at every meeting. When the meeting was opened to the floor, a succession of people came up to the witness stand to make their depositions, known as presentments. Each time, her companion would murmur a word of explanation in her ear. One man, with a broad face and fair hair, came to complain of litter from a nearby campsite. ‘That’s Reg Furzey. Smallholder.’ Another man, with a curious gnarled face that seemed to her to have been carved out of oak came to complain of a new property whose fence was encroaching upon the Forest. ‘Ron Puckle. Sells wooden garden furniture in Burley.’ The young man smiled. ‘It’s funny, when you come to think of it,’ he whispered. ‘For centuries the old Forest families spent their time making encroachments on the Forest; now they spend their lives making sure nobody else does!’ At the end of each presentment, the Official Verderer would politely rise, thank the person concerned and promise to consider their point. Some of the issues raised concerning Forestry Commission activities on local bye-laws were too technical for Dottie to follow. But the sense of the meeting was very clear: this was the ancient heart of the Forest. And the commoners with their verderers, were determined to protect its ancient character.

It was still before noon when they emerged from the court. Her next appointment was in the museum early that afternoon, and it seemed that her companion was now preparing to leave. She wondered how she could keep him with her.

‘I’ve got to go to see Grockleton’s Inclosure,’ she said. ‘Could you show me where it is?’

‘Oh. All right.’ He looked surprised. ‘I suppose so. You’ll have to walk a bit.’

‘That’ll be fine. By the way, what did you say your name was?’

‘Peter. Peter Pride.’

‘Pride?’

She had never walked that fast before. She wondered, if she stopped, whether he would just continue on his way, and didn’t dare find out. Fortunately, however, he did pause frequently to show her some lichen, or a strange beetle under a log, or some small plant which, to the trained naturalist, made this ancient area such an ecological paradise. At one point, as they came out onto some open heath, she had noticed that the holly trees on a nearby ridge had a curious profile against the sky.

‘They’re flat underneath, like mushrooms,’ she remarked.

‘That’s the browse line,’ he explained. ‘The ponies and deer eat the leaves up as far as they can reach.’ And she realized that most of the trees she could see exhibited this feature. In the distance, it gave them a magical, floating effect.

And so the lessons went on. If she couldn’t always follow the scientific information with which he constantly plied her, she could at least get a sense of the subject. And then she could watch his tall, athletic form striding ahead of her again.

He was an ecologist by training, but a Forest historian too. And knowledgeable. Impressively so. She wondered how old he was. Early twenties, twenty-five perhaps. Maybe a year or two younger than she was, but not more. She wondered if he was attached.

He was amused by her name. ‘I’m just one of them,’ he explained. ‘But there are Prides all over the Forest. Are you sure you don’t come from here?’

Her father had told her when she was a girl that she reminded him of his grandmother Dorothy, and indeed she’d been named after her. She had also discovered from him, more recently, that his grandmother had never been married. ‘She led a bit of a life, actually,’ her father had said. ‘Lived with an art professor for years. Then another one. She seemed to have a talent for attracting artists. The first one left her a lot of pictures, which turned out to be quite valuable. Who his father was, my own father was never quite sure. But he took her name anyway, which was Pride.’

‘My great-grandmother was born Dorothy Pride,’ she said. ‘But she came from London.’

He nodded quickly, but said no more on the subject.

He was curious about why she wanted to see Grockleton’s Inclosure. When she explained that her boss, John Grockleton was connected with the Forest, he seemed to think it very funny. ‘Grockleton was a Commissioner of the hated Office of Woods,’ he explained. ‘Built a railway line where several people were injured. Not a popular name here.’

‘Oh.’ She would have to think of something else to tell him.

‘Here we are,’ he said cheerfully, a few minutes later. ‘Grockleton’s Inclosure.’

The plantation, though it had been harvested several times, was much as it had been a century before. The lines of conifer seemed endless. Beneath the trees, in what little space there was, all was dark, silent, dead.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

They were a few minutes early at the New Forest Museum back in Lyndhurst, so they took a quick turn round the exhibits. Every facet of Forest life, from a recent famous snake-catcher to a detailed diagram of how to build a charcoal fire, was covered. By the time they went upstairs to the library she was longing to ask some questions.

The figure who rose from the big central table proved to be a short, white-bearded man with a kindly face and twinkling, observant blue eyes. Peter Pride had already explained that, although the older man’s manner was quiet, he was the discreet force behind much of what went on in the Forest museum.

He was immediately welcoming to Dottie, introduced her to several friendly people working there, explaining that the place was also manned on a daily basis by a team of volunteers.

‘This is Mrs Totton,’ he indicated a rather distinguished-looking lady, who must have been a stunning blonde in her youth. ‘She’s on duty today.’ He gave Dottie an encouraging smile.

‘What would you like to know?’

Dottie had prepared carefully for this meeting, and it proved informative. Was the Forest facing a crisis, she asked?

‘The challenges of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are new; but they grow out of the past as you’d expect,’ the careful historian answered. ‘The reason for the protests and fires is simple enough. The commoners aren’t only having a hard time as farmers, with terrible prices for cattle, pigs and ponies. The newcomers, from outside, are paying such high prices for their pony paddocks that the price of land is being driven beyond the farmers’ reach. Above all, they feel that the modern world – Forestry Commission, local government, central government – just despises them. And yet they really are the Forest, you know.

‘Then you have the degrading of the ancient Forest environment: careless campers and tourists generally.’

‘Thousands of cars?’ she suggested.

‘Yes. But ninety per cent of people in cars never go further than fifty feet from the road. The new influx of bicycles may prove more damaging. We’ll see.’ Dottie had noticed a lone bicyclist on her way to Grockleton’s Inclosure, riding through the trees, churning up the ground as he went. She nodded.

He smiled ruefully. ‘As always, we want tourists for their income but not for the damage they do. That’s another big subject, of course.

‘But there is a third, long-term danger – the great threat of the new century, you might say.’

‘Building?’

‘Exactly. The massive increase in housing needs, the existence of a huge area scarcely touched by housing development. Some people think we should protect the Forest by making it a National Park, which would make development extremely difficult; others, especially the commoners, fear that might take away from the power of the verderers who, for the last hundred and fifty years, have been their one protection.’ He smiled again. ‘We could discuss any or all of those.’