From the Forest (17 page)

One notable feature of the North Wood was its long association with gypsies – who had a regular summer encampment there, on Gypsy Hill, no less. It is not clear when they started this regular annual settlement, but in August 1668 Pepys’ diary records:

This afternoon my wife and Mercer and Deb went with Pelting to see the Gypsies at Lambeth, and have their fortunes told; but what they did, I did not enquire
.

And thereafter their presence was recorded regularly; for example, Byron, as a schoolboy nearby, often visited the gypsies in Dulwich Wood, until they were driven off by police during the enclosures of the early nineteenth century.

The gypsies intrigue me. We know there were gypsies in Epping Forest too in the nineteenth century, because the poet John Clare slipped out of his lunatic asylum to associate with them; they were prevalent across the whole country, and, indeed, all of Europe. They were clearly distinguished from vagrants, tramps and ‘felons’, and never seem to be associated in the public’s mind with the robbers and other dangers and of the woods and highways (although in Jane Austen’s
Emma
(1816), some gypsies do scare Harriet). They tell fortunes, have a strange, almost fairy-like identity, and are recognised frequently as being ‘different’, exotic, and at home in the forests and other wild places – but they never appear in the fairy stories. Not in Grimm, not in Perrault: they steal no children, scare no travellers, make no prophecies, spin no spells and sell no fairings,
²
although other characters do all these things. In the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, Roma are much more visible within fairytales and legends. But the Roma did not arrive in northern Europe until the sixteenth century, which suggests that the basic corpus of fairy stories is genuinely medieval. Contemporary books that use fairy story devices and themes, like Kenneth Grahame’s
The Wind in the Willows,
do have gypsies, but Tolkein’s Middle Earth does not. However, there were definitely real gypsies in the real Great North Wood by the seventeenth century, and there is still an oak tree growing in the middle of a housing estate to mark the spot where Margaret Finch, ‘the Gypsy Queen’, once had her house.

Up until the middle of the eighteenth century, the Great North Wood still covered a good deal of ground – it is over three miles long on a map of 1745, with an additional mile or so tacked on to the north-east boundary and named ‘Oak of Arnon’ (now called Honor Oak) – but its decline was fast thereafter. As late as 1802, ‘Matthews the hairyman’, a hermit, lived in the wood in a cave, or ‘excavated residence’, but the long string of enclosure acts led to massive deforestation throughout the country, and the Great North Wood was no exception. The countrywide increase in the value of agricultural land was underscored here by the expanding population north of the Thames and the consequent need for more productive land to feed them as well as more residential land to house them. Thus, gradually, in a series of individual acts from 1797, the whole area of the Old North Wood was enclosed and much of the remaining forest cleared.

Then, in 1806, the heirs of Lord Thurlow, a major local landowner, broke up his estate and sold it piecemeal in quite small lots to prosperous Londoners for domestic housing. This was a very early example of profit for ‘developers’ and caused considerable concern and outrage. Nonetheless, the sale was successful and a whole new class of people became landowners, albeit on a small scale. To build themselves appropriate homes, these new suburbanites grubbed out yet more forest to replace it with gardens – even, curiously, with ‘wild gardens’ designed to look like superior forest.

In 1886 Thomas Frost recalled that, in his childhood in Norwood,

the hamlet had consisted of about a score of farm-houses and cottages scattered at considerable intervals along the lanes that intersected the woods . . . the greater part of the ridge was covered with thick woods of oaks and hazel . . . the lower northern portion, sloping towards the valley of the Thames, was a rushy waste, upon which two or three small farmers grazed their cows and their geese.
³

But only a decade later, John Corbett Anderson, in his history of the area, summed up the situation bluntly:

It must have been a fine sight to have witnessed the great forest of Norwood as in wild grandeur it appeared in days of yore . . . The district once covered by the Great North Wood, and which, within the memory of living men, consisted only here and there a dwelling, embosomed amid oaks or scattered around open commons, has now become an extensively inhabited region, locally divided into Upper, West or Lower, and South Norwood.
⁴

Now virtually nothing of that original wood remains – although there are fragments within the nature reserves of Dulwich Wood and Sydenham Hill Wood. The Great North Wood has vanished like a dream or fairy story.

Except that Will Anderson does not think it has vanished – rather, it has become hidden and secret. And so, one summer morning, we went to look for it, taking an irregular looping walk through the backwaters of Dulwich, Sydenham and Norwood.

For me, though, in a very real way, this expedition began before that. It began with spending a night at the home of Will and his partner, Ford Hickson, a house that, despite being in central south London, is like something from a fairy story. The Tree House, an ecologically state-of-the-art house which they built in 2004, is designed to honour the ancient forests and woodland. The very small plot they have constructed it on it stands within the shadows of a great plane tree, and the house itself mirrors a tree, with a wonderful single tree trunk supporting the spiral staircase up the centre, a ground-floor kitchen as the roots nourishing and feeding the life within the house and an airy wood-beamed room at the top, whose balcony opens almost within the canopy of the real sycamore tree and whose ceiling trusses mirror the high branches and spaces of timber trees in a forest. Given how many fairy stories begin with the protagonists spending a night up a tree in a forest and seeing from that height a ‘small light’ far off through the woods which they then follow to find their adventure and destiny, it seemed utterly pleasing to sleep in that nest and wake to the green light of the leaves.

We set out for the forest on a red London bus down Lordship Lane to Dulwich Common. The first clues to the lost wood became evident almost immediately. They are there on the map in the place names: Norwood itself is simply a contraction of North Wood and thus still bears verbal witness to its roots. Over and over again the pleasant suburban place names are clear giveaways: Woodside, Honor Oak, Herne Hill (the herons’ hill), Gypsy Hill, Selhurst (‘the homestead in the wood’), Forest Hill. At Thornton Heath there is a place called Colliers Water – this is not derived from an unexpected coal mine, but was where the charcoal burners once drew water to damp their kilns.
⁵
And street by street, estate by estate, the forest is preserved in the names.

But Will said we could find more solid evidence than that. We began walking down Cox’s Walk (I would like to persuade myself that this too is named after an apple orchard, but I have no evidence at all for that) along an avenue of big oak trees, like a country house drive, and before long we discovered an abandoned railway cutting. Here there were signs that the forest was regenerating – the cutting was overgrown with straggling young trees, as well as weeds, brambles and all the charred evidence of children and vagrants camping out. It was strangely encouraging to see how quickly the wood was reasserting itself. We crossed a bridge over the railway from where Pisarro, the impressionist artist, had painted his picture of Lordship Lane Station in the 1870s. It is a charming picture and not devoid of trees, but in it you can see clearly up the line to the station. Now that has changed – the wood is too thick to get even a glimpse of the station, though perhaps at night there would be a twinkle, as in the fairy stories. Like the characters in the stories, we would have been hard put to force our way through the undergrowth to reach the source of the light.

Shortly after 1900 there was a sinister shift in woodland ecology in Britain. It is called ‘oak change’: before the twentieth century, oak trees regenerated from acorns inside woods – under maiden, pollarded or coppiced oak, there was a constant supply of oaklings coming on. They were cut in large quantities for house building, and there never seems to have been a shortage. Now we cannot even reconstruct Tudor dwellings properly because they require quantities of young oaks that are simply not available. Acorns still germinate and grow well on the edges of woods and free-standing on open ground, but they no longer spring up and flourish among the older trees. No one seems quite sure why this happened, although Rackham believes it was caused by a new-to-Europe mildew,
Microspherra alphitoides
, which arrived from America in 1908 and is now more common in Britain than in the United States. This is the cause of the white silvery bloom one sees commonly on oak throughout the country. Now oak often invades disused railway tracks on the edges of woods, as free space in which to flourish, but I saw no young oak here among the ash, holly, birch, rowan and willow, despite the dignified line of oak trees above the cutting. Perhaps it is too dark and shadowy, for oak is essentially sun loving. Indeed, some people think that it was the decline of coppicing and the consequent thickening of the canopy, cutting out so much light to the forest floor, that caused oak change in the first place, although the experimental reintroduction of this more traditional form of forest management does not seem to have reversed the change.

We came up from the cutting and into an area which offered us an even more pleasing image of the wood’s determined survival and return. Here we were walking along a slope, below what, not much over a hundred years ago, had been a row of smart villas. They had been built originally with large gardens running down the hill but, too big to maintain, the gardens have been slowly abandoned, and the wilder wood has taken advantage, sneaking back into places from which it had been exiled. Just as previously forests have crept over Bronze Age field systems, Roman buildings and medieval farms, here they are doing the same again. Throughout the rough woodland there were traces of brick garden walls, terracing, buildings, even what was obviously once a folly, a fake medieval summer house, now decayed and breaking up, ivy clad – and probably looking far more like the romantic Gothic ruin it was meant to represent than it ever did under the care and attention of owners and gardeners in its heyday.

Of course, even in the highly unlikely event that this whole area were to be left entirely alone for the next two hundred years it would not turn back into recognisable ancient woodland: everything has changed too much. Not just oak change, but the whole infrastructure: the water table in the South-East has fallen; pollution and acid rain have changed the atmosphere; there is no longer the simple extent of woodland (the larger a piece of woodland is, the more diversity can develop, and this affects both flora and fauna; conservationists have increasingly recognised the need to create corridors linking one species-rich site to another so that there can be at least some movement between them to the benefit of each). The fauna has changed radically; originally there were wild boar in the Great North Wood, and beavers and wolves. There were also domesticated animals – a great many pigs, for example, foraged freely in the woods. In the Domesday Book woodland was sometimes measured by the number of pigs it was sustaining (rather than by acreage or number of trees). In Chapter 11, I will come back to some questions about conservation, re-establishment and the dreams of wildwood. What Will and I were looking at and for was not original wildwood, or even revivified ancient woodland; it was something new, and we do not really know what will become of it. But just as the stories change and grow and draw strength both from their ancient roots and from new influences and aspirations, so there is a deep energy in woods (and in all plant growth everywhere probably), corroded and corrupted if you like, but biding its time, lying in wait, sneaking back whenever it gets the chance. What we do know from many sites throughout the country, though few are as complex as this, is that fresh woods growing on ancient woodland sites are different from those planted on brand-new sites. At the very least, these sites are places where trees like to be.
⁶

Perhaps this mysterious, changing, responsive, but always vital pattern of forest re-growth and emergence offers a good image for the way fairy stories change too. They change across cultures – the ‘Cinderella-type’ story is the same in African cultures (including the deep malice of stepmothers – although in central southern Africa the stepmother is usually a polygamous second wife) as in European ones, but the specific details are very different. They change through time as well – the Grimm brothers wanted their stories more ‘innocent’ and more Christian; recently, Disney has given us a ‘post-feminist’ Beauty who loves her Beast initially for his library as much as for his luxurious house and lavish meals; pantomime needs ugly stepsisters for its own farcical cross-dressing ends. The stories, like the forest, change but continue.

Before long, Will and I emerged from the trees and arrived in Peckarman’s Wood. Peckarman’s Wood, as is not difficult to guess, was once a real wood – it was a managed coppice for centuries, but like so much else around the area, it became redundant and was finally grubbed out, not for agricultural land, but for housing. Now it is a charming 1960s enclave of delightful arty little houses, each almost, if the imagination is given a loose rein, a potential gingerbread house, except instead of being isolated deep in the forest, they are huddled together intimately, each with its little garden. Since it was probably designed for much the same sort of people as the older villas were – prosperous spill-over from the ‘Great Wen’ to the north seeking something more romantic and ‘natural’ than overcrowded noisy streets and dense urban housing – it is fascinating to see how much smaller gardens are now that their owners expect to have to maintain them themselves without gardeners, and how much closer to each other the middle classes expect to live than our similarly prosperous great-grandparents did.