From the Forest (37 page)

But the robbers who were imaginatively scaring me in the Purgatory Wood are very much a product of forests. They lurk there in hidden bands, in old houses or caves. The four Bremen town musicians are trying to escape serious threats to their lives by leaving home and going to seek their fortune. They form an association and journey through the forest to find a better living. They get lost; night comes on; they seek what shelter and safety they can, and then through the trees (as so often) they see a light; they make their way towards it and arrive at a ‘well-lighted robbers’ house’. Through the window they can see ‘a table covered with good things to eat and drink, and the robbers sitting at it enjoying themselves’. So the four of them come up with a crafty plan to drive the robbers out and take possession. ‘After this the robbers never again dared to enter the house; but it suited the four musicians of Bremen so well that they did not care to leave it anymore.’

It is, in terms of the story, totally irrelevant that the four ‘heroes’ are a donkey, a dog, a cat and a cockerel. These are not magical animals, they are the fairytales’ usual old lags betrayed by their masters and using their wits to survive; they are the wounded soldiers, the abused children, the abandoned old women and all the other victims who do well in the fairy stories. Each of them has given good service in their appointed role and has now been rendered redundant; they seem to be animals solely to add an element of humour to the plot, and to make the abject defeat of the supposedly dangerous robbers all the more humiliating for them. The moral here is: ‘Don’t be afraid: the robbers aren’t that dangerous; the profit of cunning is greater than the profit of power.’ One of the hidden aspects of this story, and of others of a similar genre, is that the robbers do not actually do any robbing. Although the protagonists can, at a single glance, identify them as robbers – bad guys, whose property can reasonably be taken away from them – they do not in fact do anything except live well in a non-familial and therefore anti-social setting.

The usual function of robbers in fairy stories is to provide the protagonists with a rich source of money and comfort that they can legitimately lay claim to. The protagonists cannot, for example, steal from members of their own social group – other travellers, working families, lone old women unless they are witches (who are as easily identified as robbers), or children; this would be despicable and would lose them their hero status in an instant. They may, however, outwit kings and robbers. Indeed, they should.

This is not to say that historically there were not real robber gangs in forests and other lonely places, ready to prey on vulnerable travellers. Just over the hill, barely ten miles west of the Purgatory Wood, on the Ayrshire coast between Ballantrae and Girvan, was the cave-lair of the terrible Sawney Bean. In the early seventeenth century he and his vile gang, made up mainly of his incestuously generated offspring, terrorised the neighbourhood, attacking travellers, robbing them of their possessions and subsequently killing and eating them.
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When the local militia finally caught up with him they found his cave not just littered with human bones, but hung with carcasses being smoked over the fire.

Even earlier there was a worry that roads and paths through woods were particularly vulnerable to robbers and muggers. In 1285 some of the first legislation about this was passed, possibly in response to the murder of two travellers through the Prior of Barnwell’s Wood at Bourn in Huntingdonshire.

The highroads from merchant towns to other merchant towns [must] be widened wherever there are woods or hedges where a man may lurk to do evil near the road, by two hundred feet on [both sides]; but this statute extend not to oaks or to great trees, if they be clear underneath. And if by default of the Lord who may not want to level earthwork, underwood or bushes as provided above and robberies be done, the Lord is responsible. And if there be murder, let the Lord be fined at the King’s will.
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Curiously, clearing the sides of tracks through the forest, as proposed by this law, would produce an almost identical effect to the cleared areas between track and trees in the Purgatory Wood, and elsewhere, which the forestry developers have now made for other reasons. Moreover, although no ditches as such are mentioned in the legislation, these clearings were called ‘trenches’, bringing to mind the drainage channels either side of me as I walked. I was sensible to be a bit frightened.

But the real point about fairy stories is that they laugh at the powerful and the frightening. They diminish and belittle the danger by mocking it, and simultaneously they encourage cunning and trickery as a way of achieving the security that is every protagonist’s desire and right. Kings are mean-minded and foolish; robbers are cowardly and boorish – both deserve to be outwitted exploited and to provide the fortune that the heroes and heroines need.

In this sense, the robbers are closely related to giants, who also appear regularly in the stories. Although my own fears that afternoon focused directly on robbers, and I would have been startled in a very different way if a giant had emerged from the forest, the two perform almost identical functions in the fairy stories. They share a good deal in common too: although always fierce and threatening, and thus provoking great fear in mediocre individuals, they are stupid and easily outwitted by those who overcome their fear. Like robbers, giants have disgusting domestic habits, often living out in the open air or in dens rather than houses – and they enjoy heavily carnivorous diets. They also have hoards of loot or ‘treasure’, which the hero can access legitimately; in this particular, they are very like the dragons of medieval romance and hagiography. It is always heroic to kill giants because they deserve it, just because they are giants – they are too big. There seems to be something almost amounting to a rule here – the smaller the main character in a fairy story, the larger his opponent. I cannot find a story in which a prince kills or outwits a robber – that is the task of the poor but brave and cunning hero who tackles robbers with humour and insouciance. But the diminutive hero – the Little Tailor or the succession of Tom Thumbs and Thumblings, the physically weak, disempowered or vulnerable – performs the same task with giants.

In fact I probably misunderstood my own fear in the Purgatory Wood: the person who shot the rifle was the hero – I was the robber.

The Four Comrades

Once upon a time in a winter so cold and hungry that mothers cut and ground silverweed to make flour to feed their children, a farmer decided that he could not keep his donkey any longer. The donkey had served him well and faithfully for many years, but now it was weak, its knees knocking inwards like spindleshanks and its coat matted and patchy. It stumbled at the plough, was too scrawny to ride and unable to carry firewood in from the forest.

The old man decided to send it to the knackers. That’s gratitude for you. ‘No, no,’ said his children piteously, and possibly nervously, for they knew from the old stories that kindness to animals made you rich. But it did no good. Hard frosts make hard hearts.

The donkey was not having any of that. In the night it slipped its halter and set off along the road through the forest, planning to go to the nearest city and join the circus – or even try a little street busking if nothing better came up.

As the icy dawn broke the donkey met a dog – a poor, sad, mangy thing, its claws pulled to stop it hunting and its back quarters stiff with age. It was pretty much toothless and but a weary shadow of its youthful self. It lay beside the roadside, the very portrait of dejection.

‘What ho?’ said the donkey, full of bravado now it had made its break from slavery. ‘Smile, mate, it may never happen.’

‘It has happened,’ said the dog gloomily. ‘Years of faithful service, all-round good and devoted canine, competent pointer, cunning retriever, energetic house guard, a bit of herding and gentle with children. And what do I get for it? Rendered redundant, no pension, no dinner and an overheard threat of murder. All the children said “No, no” most piteously, but I didn’t see them feeding me any scraps. That’s gratitude for you. Didn’t have any options but to slip my leash and make a getaway. Hard frosts make hard hearts.’

‘Well,’ said the donkey, ‘let’s join forces. United we stand, you know. I’m off to the town – and could use a partner. Can you do any tricks?’

‘I can do quite a stylish begging thing, and can die for my country. The kids like that.’

‘Patriotism is not enough,’ said the donkey.

So together they went on along the track through the forest and before long they met a cat.

‘Bugger,’ said the dog. ‘Now I suppose I’ll have to chase it.’

‘New occasions make new duties,’ said the donkey; ‘time makes ancient good uncouth. Defence is the best form of defence, if you ask me. Give it a try.’ In his imagination he refigured himself as a Robin Hood type wearing a Che Guevara-style beret, though it fitted oddly because of his ears.

It transpired that the cat had a similar story to tell: despite a lifetime’s employment in efficient rodent management and letting the babies pull her fur, the cat had – that very morning – learned that she was going to be put in a sack and drowned in the mill pond. ‘That’s gratitude for you,’ she said,. ‘The children said “No, no” piteously of course, but they drank every drop of milk in the house and never offered me so much as a lick. Felinism is worse than sexism. I know how it is. Hard frosts make hard hearts.’

‘You’d better come along with us,’ said the donkey. ‘Workers of the world unite; we have nothing to lose but our chains.’

‘No one chains me,’ said the cat haughtily. But noticing that the donkey looked peevish, she quickly added, ‘Great rhetoric though.’

So the three of them together went on along the track through the forest, and before long they met a cockerel. He was far from shabby and run down; his comb was scarlet and his feathers fine and his voice loud enough to wake the dead.

‘Damn,’ said the cat, ‘Now I suppose I’ll have to hunt it. No rest for the wicked, eh.’

‘Au contraire,’ said the donkey. ‘Give peace a chance.’

(The others were beginning to find his sententious quotations rather irritating, but live and let live was their motto.)

The cockerel’s tale was a sorry one. Although he crowed piercingly each morning, so the children got to school on time and the milch-cow knew when to let down her milk and the hens when to lay their eggs, his owner had unfortunately discovered that he was gay and therefore unable, or at least unwilling, to service the flock, and had decided instead to wring his neck and boil him into soup.

‘There’s gratitude for you,’ said the others, ‘but hard frosts make hard hearts, they say.’

‘It is not about ingratitude,’ said the cockerel indignantly, ‘it’s about homophobia and sexual exploitation.’

Nonetheless, he liked the idea of being in a troupe in the city a good deal more than he liked the idea of being in a pot in the oven, so he went along with them.

So the four of them together went on along the track through the forest. They passed a pleasant enough day exploring their ideological differences and exchanging competitive stories of their personal suffering and oppression. But towards evening it became clear that they would have to pass a night in the forest, which appeared to be endless.

‘Ah well,’ said the donkey dramatically,

‘Fair this long road, these hoary woods are grand

But we are exiles from our fathers’ land.’

‘Cliché,’ exclaimed the others, finally infuriated, for it was getting darker and colder by the moment, and hard frosts make hard hearts, as we have learned.

Nonetheless, there was nothing to be done so they had to make the best of it, and they settled in, under, on and up a great granny of a Scots pine whose branches offered some small shelter from the rising wind. Separate now in their chosen beds, they turned inwards each to sleep in his or her own way.

‘Tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep,’

murmured the donkey,

‘that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.’

But before any of them could find true contentment in what the donkey might well have called ‘the tender embrace of Morpheus’, the cockerel, who was furthest up the tree, suddenly let out a surprised squawk. Through the thick woods and the thick darkness he could see the cheerful light of a fire. His comrades were less keen than he might have hoped.

‘Typical,’ said the dog. ‘Now we have to get up and plod through the trees until we come to a little house or cave and it will be a witch’s cottage, or worse, because it bloody well always is.’

‘Or a robbers’ den,’ sighed the cat.

Nevertheless, the requirements of the narrative obliged them to make their way towards the light.

The cat was right. It was a robbers’ den, and peering through the window, they could see the robbers looking fierce and wicked, all gobbling down an enormous and tasty dinner.

But these four were not stupid human beings who – at this point – always go in and ask for succour and get into trouble and the story runs on for another six pages. They were intelligent animals nearly at their wits’ end. So the donkey stood at the window and the dog jumped onto his back and braced himself against the horror of letting a cat scramble onto his head. She did, nonetheless, and the cockerel fluttered onto hers, and at the word of command they began their concert: