The Woodcutter (12 page)

The only significant contacts I made was age thirteen when I had my accident. You must have heard about my accident, Elf, the one that left me with the scars on my back that the bastards at my trial tried to claim established I was in those filthy videos. It was a real accident, not carelessness or anything on my part. A boulder that had been firmly anchored for a couple of thousand years decided to give way the same moment I put my weight on it. I fell off on to a sheet of ice and went bouncing and slithering down the fellside for a couple of hundred feet, and when the mountain rescue team reached me, they reckoned I was a goner. Didn’t I mention this in one of my other scribblings? I think I did, so you’ll know that fortunately there was no permanent damage and a few months later I was back on the fells with nothing worse than a heavily scarred back.

But what the experience did do was let me see close-up what a great bunch of guys the mountain rescue team was. They were really good to me. I was too young to join officially, but none of them objected when I started hanging out with them, and a couple of them really took me under their wing and taught me all about proper climbing.

Mind you, I did sometimes have a quiet laugh when they roped me up to do some relatively easy ascent that I’d been scampering up like a monkey all by myself for years, but I was learning sense and kept my gob shut.

Now at last we’re getting to Imogen.

I was fifteen when I first saw her, she was – is – a year younger.

I knew Sir Leon had a daughter and I daresay I’d glimpsed her before, but this was the first time I really noticed her.

Like I said, after that first encounter with Sir Leon, whenever our paths crossed he greeted me as Wolf and always asked very seriously how the rest of the pack was getting on. I’d grunt some response, the way boys do. Once when Dad told me to speak proper, Sir Leon said, ‘No need for that, Fred. The boy’s talking wolf and I understand him perfectly,’ then he grunted something back at me, and smiled so broadly I had to smile back as if I’d understood him. After that he always greeted me with a grunt and a grin.

There was of course no socialization between us peasants and the castle, not even in the old feudal sense: no Christmas parties for the estate staff, no village fêtes in the castle grounds, nothing like that. Sir Leon was a good and fair employer, but his wife, Lady Kira, my dear ma-in-law, called the shots at home.

Scion of a White Russian émigré family, Kira was more tsarist than her ancestors in her social attitudes. She believed servants were serfs, and anything that encouraged familiarity diminished efficiency. For her the term servant covered everyone in the locality. In her eyes we all belonged to the same sub-class, related by frequently incestuous intermarriage, and united in a determination to cheat, rob and, if the opportunity rose, rape our superiors.

I don’t think anyone actually doffed their cap and tugged their forelock as she passed, but she made you feel you ought to.

So when Sir Leon suggested to my dad I might like to come up to the castle one summer day to ‘play with the young ’uns’ as he put it, we were both flabbergasted.

It turned out they had some house guests who between them had five daughters and one son, a boy of my own age, and Sir Leon felt he needed some male company to prevent his spirit being crushed by the ‘monstrous regiment’ (Sir Leon’s phrase again).

I didn’t want to go, but Dad dug his heels in and said that it was time I learnt some manners and Sir Leon had always been good to me and if for once I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d make bloody sure I didn’t do what I wanted for the rest of the summer holidays and lots of stuff like that, so one bright sunny afternoon I clambered over the boundary wall behind Birkstane and walked through the forest to the castle.

As castles go, it’s not much to write home about, no battlements or towers, not even a moat. It had been a proper castle once, way back in the Middle Ages, I think, but somewhere along the line it got bashed about a bit, whether by cannon balls or just general neglect and decay I don’t know, and when the family started rebuilding, they downsized and what they ended up with was a big house.

But that’s adult me talking. As I emerged from the trees that day, the building loomed ahead as formidable and as huge as Windsor!

Everyone was scattered around the lawn in front of the house. With each step I took, it became more apparent that the Sunday-best outfit that Dad had forced me to wear was entirely the wrong choice. Shorts, jeans, T-shirts abounded, not a hot tweed suit in sight. I almost turned and ran away, but Sir Leon had spotted me and advanced to meet me.

‘Uggh grrr,’ he said in his pretended wolf-speak. ‘Wolf, my boy, so glad you could make it. You look like you could do with a nice cold lemonade. And why don’t you take your jacket and tie off – bit too hot for them on a day like this.’

Thus he managed to get me looking slightly less ridiculous by the time he introduced me to the ‘kids’.

The girls, ranging from eleven to fifteen, more or less ignored me. The boy, stretched out on the grass apparently asleep, rolled over as Sir Leon prodded him with his foot, raised himself on one elbow, and smiled at me.

‘Johnny,’ said Leon, ‘this is Wolf Hadda. Wolf, this is Johnny Nutbrown. Johnny, why don’t you get Wolf a glass of lemonade?’

Then he left us.

Johnny said, ‘Is your name really Wolf?’

‘No. Wilf,’ I said. ‘Sir Leon calls me Wolf.’

‘Then that’s what I’ll call you, if that’s all right,’ he said with a smile.

Then he went and got me a lemonade.

I got no real impression of Johnny from that first encounter. The way he looked, and moved, and talked, he might have been a creature from another planet. As for him, I think even then he was as unperturbed by everything, present, past or future, as I was to find him in later life. He took the arrival of this inarticulate peasant in his stride. I think he was totally unaware that I’d been brought along to keep him company. I can’t believe that being the sole boy among all those girls had troubled him for a moment. That was Sir Leon imagining how he might have felt in the same circumstances.

A tall woman, slim and athletic with a lovely figure and a face whose features were almost too perfect to be beautiful came and looked at me for a second or two with ice-cold eyes, then moved away. That was Lady Kira. The ice-cold look and the accompanying silence set the pattern for most of our future encounters.

I’ve little recollection of any of the other adults. As for the girls, they were just a blur of bright colours and shrill noises. Except for Imogen. Not that I knew it was Sir Leon’s daughter to start with. She was just part of the blur until they started dancing.

Most of the adults had moved off somewhere. Johnny, after two or three attempts at conversation, had given up on me and gone back to sleep. The girls had got hold of a radio or it might have been a portable cassette player, I don’t know. Anyway it was beating out the pop songs of the time and they started dancing. Disco dancing, I suppose it was – it could have been classical ballet for all it meant to me – the music scene, as they term it, was an area of teenage life that entirely passed me by.

But presently as they went through their weird gyrations, one figure began to stand out from the half-dozen, not because she was particularly shapely or anything – in fact she was the skinniest of the lot – but because while the others were very aware of this as a competitive group activity, she was totally absorbed in the music. You got the feeling she would have been doing this if she’d been completely alone in the middle of a desert.

The difference eventually made itself felt even among her fellow dancers, and one by one they slowed down and stopped, till only this single figure still moved, rhythmically, sinuously, as though in perfect harmony not only with the music but with the grass beneath her feet and the blue sky above, and the gently shimmering trees of the distant woodland that formed the backdrop from my viewpoint. Unlike the others, she was wearing a white summer dress of some flimsy material that floated around her as she danced, and her long golden hair wreathed about her head like a halo of sunbeams.

I was entranced, in the strictest sense of the word; drawn into her trance; totally absorbed. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it meant something hugely significant to me. I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted to sit here and watch this small and still totally anonymous figure dancing forever.

Then Johnny who, unseen by me, had woken and sat up, said, ‘Oh God, there goes Imo again. Turn on the music and it sets her off like a monkey on a stick!’

His tone was totally non-malicious, but that didn’t save him.

I punched him on the nose. I didn’t even think about it. I just punched him.

Blood fountained out; one of the remaining adults – maybe it was Johnny’s mother – had been looking our way, and she screamed. Johnny sat there, stock-still, staring down at his cupped hand as it filled with blood.

I just wanted to be as far away from all this as I could get.

Again without thought, I found myself on my feet and heading as fast as I could run towards the welcome shelter of the distant woodland.

My shortest line took me past Imogen. She had stopped dancing and her eyes tracked me towards her and past her and I imagined I could feel them on me still as I covered the couple of hundred yards or so to the sanctuary of the trees.

That is my first memory of Imogen. I think even then, uncouth and untutored though I was, I knew I was hers and she was mine forever.

Just shows how wrong you can be, eh, Elf?

ii

I’ve just read over what I’ve written.

It strikes me this is just the kind of stuff you want, Elf. Childhood trauma, all that crap.

Except maybe I haven’t made it clear: I
enjoyed
my childhood. It was a magical time. Do you read poetry? I don’t. Rhyme or reason, isn’t that what they say? Well, I’m a reason man. At school I learnt some stuff by rote to keep the teachers happy but I also learnt the trick of instant deletion the minute I’d spouted it. The only bit that’s stuck doesn’t come from my schooldays but from my daughter, Ginny’s.

It was some time in that last summer, ’08 I mean, it was raining most of the time I recall, perhaps that’s why Ginny got stuck into her holiday assignments early.

At her posh school, they reckoned poetry was important, and one of the things she had to do was write a paraphrase of some lines of Wordsworth. She assumed because I was a Cumbrian lad, I’d know all about him. A father doesn’t like to disappoint his daughter, so I glanced at the passage. A lot of the language was daft and he went all round the houses to say something, but to my amazement I found myself thinking, this bugger’s writing about me!

He was talking about himself as a kid, the things he got up to, climbing steep cliffs, moonlight poaching, going out on the lake, but the lines that stuck were the ones that summed it all up for him.

Fair seed-time had my soul and I grew up

Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

That was me. I don’t mean fear of being clouted or abused, anything like that. I mean the kind of fear you feel when you’re hanging over a hundred-foot drop by your fingernails or when the night’s so black you can’t see your hand in front of your face and you hear something snuffling in the dark, the fear that makes your sense of being alive so much sharper, that lets you feel the lifeblood pounding through your heart, that makes you want to dance and shout when you beat it and survive!

Do you know what I’m talking about, Elf? Or are you stuck in all that Freudian clart, where everything’s to do with sex, even if you’re dealing with kids before they know what sex is all about?

Me, I was never much interested in sex, not even after my balls dropped. Maybe I was leading such a physical life, I was just too knackered. Of course my cock stood up from time to time and I’d give it a pull and I enjoyed the spasm of pleasure that eventually ensued. But I didn’t have much time for the dirty jokes and mucky books and boasting about what they’d done with girls that most of my schoolmates went in for.

Not that I didn’t have the chance to learn on the job, so to speak. Despite me ignoring them as much as I could, most of the girls seemed more than willing to be friendly, but I couldn’t see any point in wasting time with them that I could have spent scrambling up a wet rock face!

So what you’d likely call significant sexual experience didn’t come my way until . . . well, let me tell you about it.

Or rather, let me tell myself. I’m not at all sure I shall ever let you see this, Elf, which means I can be completely frank as I’m reserving the right to tear it all to pieces, if that’s what I decide.

So let’s go back to me taking off into the woods, leaving Imogen staring after me, Johnny Nutbrown bleeding from the nose, his parents puce with indignation, Sir Leon hugely disappointed and Lady Kira flaring her nostrils in her favourite
what-did-you-expect
expression.

Of course I’m just guessing at most of that, apart from Johnny’s nose. What I’m certain I left behind was the jacket and tie I’d taken off at Sir Leon’s suggestion.

He came round to Birkstane with them that evening.

I was in my bedroom. Naturally I’d said nothing about the events of the day to either Dad or Aunt Carrie, just muttered something in reply to their question as to whether I’d had a good time.

I heard the car pull up outside and when I looked out and recognized Sir Leon’s Range Rover, I thought of climbing out of the window and doing a bunk.

Then I saw there was still someone in the car after Sir Leon had climbed out of the driver’s seat.

It was Imogen, her pale face pressed against the window, staring up at me.

For a moment our gazes locked. I don’t know what my face showed but hers showed nothing.

Then Dad roared, ‘Wilf! Get yourself down here!’

The time for flight was past. I went down and met my fate.

It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Sir Leon was very laid back about things. He said boys always fight, it’s in their genes, and he was sure my blow had been more in sport than in earnest, and Johnny’s nose wasn’t broken, and he was sure a little note of apology would set all things well.