The Forest

The smell of resin in the forest was strong, like the smell of the sea. And, as the salty sea smell clings to the clothes of sailors, so the pungent smell of resin clung to the clothes of the foresters. Their shirts and trousers were stained with it. Their hands were stained with it. And it ran down the bark of the felled trees.

To Barbara the forest was like a home, and its moist smells nourished and comforted her. The trees made a roof over her head; a dark sheltering roof.

Every school day she had to cycle through the forest, keeping to the narrow path thick with several years’ fall of pine needles, softly bumping over tree roots and occasional stones. As it happened, in truth, it was the best thing in her life, this ride through the forest to and from school. She came out of her dream. The rest of her life seemed shadowy, as if lived by someone she hardly knew. It was only in the forest that she felt fully alive. As if it were her real home.

The foresters themselves, Polish nearly all of them, lived in caravans in clearings in the forest, and even in converted horse-boxes. Living mostly without women, they worked hard, getting quietly drunk at weekends. On Sundays a lorry-load of them with hangovers went to Mass in Taunton. They worked through the daylight hours, sleeping rough, drinking their sweet black tea which they brewed on little fires that glowed in the dark forest. A few of them did have women – wives or common-law wives, and there was a handful of children. These were the children that Barbara taught. One or two of the women helped with the work in the forest, trimming the smaller branches from the trees and peeling the bark with a sharp tool. One or two women had young babies and lived isolated and uneventful lives, their men at work all day long.

Every day, on her way to school, Barbara passed one of these women. This was Lily.

Usually Lily was looking out over the half-door of her converted horse-box. She was married to one of the Polish foresters and had a baby of about six months. Barbara thought she was probably a local woman as her accent seemed local, though it was hard to tell as she spoke very little, and in monosyllables.

Lily was thought to be simple. It was a word that did not quite convey her half-baked complexity. Simple perhaps in her needs – these were scarcely human in their restricted simplicity. There was something amoebic, anchorite, in the way she never left the horse-box and the little patch of cleared forest around it. Lily’s complexity lay in the depths of her obscure, unknowable personality; layer on layer, clear on top, murky and unset and raw underneath.

The horse-box was very compact, like a ship’s cabin. Everything had a place. During the day the baby’s wooden rocker was stowed gipsy-style under the marriage bed with its thin hard mattress. On one wall there was a glass-fronted cupboard for china hanging on two huge nails. Lily had beautified the shelves of this cupboard with empty silver foil cases from shop-bought jam tarts and she had spaced out the three chipped and stained tin mugs, nicely laying them on lace paper doilies. A red enamel kettle for tea and a large kettle for hot water for washing were permanently on the boil on the stove. The stove was the heart of this home. Lily had her washing line tied between two trees, but the dripping and moisture from the trees seldom allowed anything to dry properly and she had to string the half-dried things above the hot little stove, where they sometimes scorched. The place smelled of scorched flannel, babies, and resin.

Barbara always waved and called out something cheerful – ‘It’s going to clear up later, I think’ or ‘Lovely morning to put the baby out’ – and Lily would sometimes wave back, but sometimes look as if she had not heard or did not want to hear. She might be simple, thought Barbara, but she’s temperamental. She regarded the woman’s life with horror; terror almost. It was not that Barbara did not love the forest, but to be trapped in it?

On her ride back from school Barbara would pass Lily again. The baby would usually be having its afternoon nap. This was the time when Lily got out her book. It was an ancient Girls’ Annual. Lily looked at the pictures of gym-slipped girls with lacrosse sticks and she ate jam tarts that she bought from the travelling van.

Once or twice Barbara had got off her bicycle and tried to start a conversation, but was met with suspicion.

Barbara did not realise that Lily suspected every woman her husband might lay eyes on, though these were few enough. She waited all day for him to come home to her, passing the time by looking out over the half-door with her baby on her arm, or hauling the water from a rain butt to wash the baby’s clothes, or getting the stove to burn. All day she kept her hair in rags to curl it, taking them out before she polished the red kettle and set out two enamel plates, two knives, and two spoons, ready for the evening meal.

When he did come home at dusk, Lily would watch him while he washed, his hands and body still streaked with the strong-smelling resin. As he washed his naked body the rivulets of resin on his arms would not wash off. At night he would lie beside her in the fug of the horse-box – she enveloped in the folds of her huge flannel nightdress (for she was prudish in her primitive way) which was rough from fierce washings and warm and scorched from drying over the stove. The baby slept in its rocker beside them.

At night the voices of the wood pigeons and owls came from the forest.

Barbara sometimes wondered what it was like at night in the forest. She rented two rooms in the village pub. Cool, dark rooms. Her bed by the window allowed her to see the night sky.

On the windowsill Barbara put things she had brought home from the forest – fir cones and wood anemones. In the evenings she sat preparing her lessons for the next day.

If they were busy downstairs she would help out in the bar. Sometimes two or three of the Polish foresters would come in for a drink, but they were always well-behaved and quiet and never had more than one drink during the week. Barbara had a peaceful, ordered life; her supper brought up on a tray by the publican’s wife. Emotionally, it was a solitary existence. The best thing, the thing she looked forward to, was the ride through the forest in the mornings and then, after school, the ride back. Then she felt inside her skin as at no other time or place.

As she cycled steadily on her way back and forth to school she heard, as well as the soft bumping of the wheels of the machine, the whine of the rapacious chainsaws. It was the foresters who worked felling, stripping and stacking the fir trees. They worked piece work and so they worked fast and hard, in a regular rhythm, never stopping for long. From time to time Barbara passed one or two working by the path she cycled along. Sometimes they looked up, and sometimes they laughed and said something to each other in their own language. If she said good morning they would smile back with bold, shy smiles, their reticence overlaid with a certain male swagger. But they scarcely paused in their work. Occasionally she passed a man who preferred to work alone. Felling a tree alone takes a lot of skill. As it crashes down with an accelerating speed, bringing with it a shipwreck of broken branches and twigs, it could kill a man.

An ex-army hut had been hauled through the main forest road and set up on the edge of the forest to use as a school. Altogether there were about a dozen children between the ages of four and ten; after that they had to go to school in the town. Half of them spoke no English and Barbara had only a few words of Polish. She managed with sign language and smiles. If they had not been a quiet, docile lot she could not have managed. Only one or two spoke good English.

She taught them to read. She taught them little songs. Sometimes they painted pictures of the forest and of their fathers wielding huge chainsaws, their mothers stripping the smaller branches from the fallen trees. The older ones frowned over mathematics books while the little ones threaded beads and wound them round their brown wrists like bracelets.

At lunchtime they brought out their packed lunches and then they would chat to each other in their native language and eat little shrivelled apples and heavy home-made cake.

At the end of the afternoon school, their mothers came to fetch them. Strong women in Wellington boots staring in at the window. Then Barbara locked up the school and packed her books into the satchel on the back of her bicycle.

She usually took more or less the same way back through the forest, though sometimes she chose a slightly different path which met up later with her usual homeward route. Once or twice she had become briefly lost for a while. She was not really lost this warm May afternoon, though. Not lost. But she had wandered off her most direct path. She did not want to get to the village too quickly. It was lovely in the forest, quite magical, with the sun slipping through the leaves of fir, beech, and oak which grew on the periphery of the main fir forest, whose heart was thuya and sitka. Beams of sunlight streamed through the leaves and branches, silky bright as from some angelic source.

Barbara got off her bicycle and pushed it over the knotty tree roots on the little narrowing path. In the distance she could hear the frantic whine of the chainsaws rising and falling.

She was so sure she was alone in that part of the forest that the sight of a man standing quite still there beside a tree frightened her. She had thought at first that he was a tree, and then that he was an animal of some kind. She recognised then who he was: Lily’s husband. A thick-set man of about forty with a dark drooping moustache.

He just stood there, as the sun flickered leaf patterns over his face and body. She remounted and rode slowly on, nearer and nearer to him. He stepped towards her and took hold of the handlebars of her bicycle, nearly making her fall. But she was not frightened at all now. It was just Lily’s husband. She dismounted.

‘You have come the wrong way,’ he said. His English was good.

‘You are Lily’s husband,’ she said. He did not answer. Then he said, ‘I will show you another way.’

‘I can find my own way.’ Her words rang out between the trees.

‘I will show you,’ he said, pretending not to understand her rejection. Still holding the bicycle by the handlebars he set off into the wood. He walked quickly, not looking back, and if she had not followed him he would soon have been lost in the trees. She could think of nothing else to do but follow.

After a while he stopped, and let her catch up with him. She stood beside him and waited for him to relinquish her bicycle. He held onto it, saying nothing, looking at her with a curious expression. There was shyness there, but humour too, as if he were laughing at her, looking at her yellow full skirt and soft white sweater, her bare legs and old brown laced-up shoes. She felt transfixed by his gaze, and at the same time she was experiencing a horrible crawling sensation in her flesh. She was revolted by him in some peculiar way, as she might have been if her own father had made some forbidden approach. She was aware of his maleness; she could not avoid it, side-step it. He is a used-up male, she thought at the back of her mind, dimly. Father of a child, another woman’s husband. Sex to him is an everyday thing, a habit. To her it was not, it was delicate and new, hardly tried. These thoughts of hers did not form words in her mind.

She started to become angry with him, worried that he would not hand over her bicycle, and immediately he sensed this and, with a small laugh, handed it to her. He pointed out the path she should take, and she felt him watching her as she got on the bicycle and rode off unsteadily.

After she had ridden for a while she came to the clearing that was Lily’s forest home. Lily was putting curling rags into her brown hair, which was all different lengths. She was doing this expertly, with quick fingers, not using a mirror.

She looked at Barbara, who at once thought the woman somehow knew what had happened. But that must be imagination; it was impossible. And anyway, there was nothing to know.

‘It’s a lovely afternoon. Is the baby asleep?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Lily said. She twisted another rag into her hair.

Barbara decided that she would not think any more about it. She put it right out of her mind. And she did not see Lily’s husband for several weeks. She had forgotten all about him.

Then, one day, there he was in her classroom. He had actually come into the classroom, just walked in. She had been drawing a star shape on the blackboard and was colouring it in with yellow chalk, writing its name beside it for the children to copy. A star.

Suddenly he was there, standing beside her, and the children had gone very quiet. They weren’t used to seeing a man in the classroom, except once a week when the vicar came in his robes and smiled strangely at them. This man was out of place. He might have sprung from one of the story books: a giant streaked with resin.

‘I have come to ask for something,’ he said. It was as if the children were invisible to him. He was not aware of them. He spoke only to her.

Barbara did not reply. Her tongue had frozen in her mouth. She was stunned, unbelieving, her thoughts stilled inside her head. That he should come into her classroom like this was shocking to her. None of the other men, not one of them, would have done this. The classroom was an alien place to them, territory that would never be broached even if they had a child in the school. Even the mothers did not seem to want to come further than the door. It was the way it was.

He began searching for words. He came very close to her. ‘Will you teach Lily to read?’ he asked.

‘Lily,’ she said faintly, whispering.

‘Will you say yes?’ he asked.

She was overwhelmed by him. She agreed without thinking. She just wanted him to go.

And so, after that, on her way home from school, she stopped at the horse-box that was Lily’s home and began to try to teach Lily to read.

She made cards which read ‘baby’ and ‘jam tarts’ and ‘book’ and all the things she thought Lily might be interested in. She taught Lily the sounds of the letters and how to write her husband’s name – Oscar. She already knew how to write her own name but that was all. Barbara tried to teach her how to build up words and also how to recognise word patterns, in case she found that easier.

She would call in and have a cup of tea with sterilised milk and teach Lily how to read ‘tree, baby, milk, apple, bird’. Lily copied the words, her tongue between her teeth. Lily wanted to read her book about the girls who played lacrosse. She wasn’t very interested in the book that Barbara tried to teach her from, about two little children called Dick and Dora.

She made very slow progress, if any at all. She wanted to learn but she couldn’t retain anything in her head from one day to the next. Barbara began to feel that her task was impossible. Lily was indeed very simple. And although Barbara had now spent many hours with her, she knew as little about the woman herself as she had at the beginning. It was as if it would have needed something different from words to communicate with her. She began to think she was wasting her time trying to teach her to read, and began to lose heart. She did not know if Lily was losing heart.

One day Lily’s husband came home early from work. It had never happened before, wasting daylight when he could be earning money. Lily still had her hair in curlers and was overcome with embarrassment. She went to the darkness at the back of the horse-box and, bending her head away from him, started to pull the rags from her hair.

‘Can Lily read yet?’ he asked Barbara.

Barbara could not bring herself to tell him that his wife probably would not ever be able to learn to read, that she was too – simple. ‘She is not learning very fast,’ she said.

‘It will take time,’ said the Pole.

The baby woke up, hearing its father’s deep voice, and began to cry. The man lifted the child out of its little wooden bed and began tenderly speaking in Polish. Then, with an encouraging nod of his head, as if to brook no refusal, he gave the baby to Barbara to hold.

As she held Lily’s baby, Barbara felt fear and disgust at the smell of its wet nappy and the sight of milky saliva dribbling from its gummy mouth. It stopped crying and gave her a toothless smile but she was not won over, only now felt guilt at the hardness of her heart.

Nevertheless, something had moved inside her. It had to do with the feeling she had as she cycled home through the forest, but was less pleasant, more disturbing and new and imprisoning. Now she knew why the forest smelled salty and milky. It had to do with this warm baby in her arms.

She felt disgusted by it all. By everything. The cramped little place where they were all squashed in, the warmth of the stove on this fine evening, the Pole’s hairy arms, stained with resin, as he washed his hands in the tin basin, the pathetic doilies and jam tart cases on the shelves. Everything.

‘I must go,’ she said.

‘Have some tea,’ said the man, drying his hands on a nappy he had taken from the line over the stove.

‘I must go,’ she said, handing the baby to its mother. ‘I’m sorry, I must go.’

‘Come again. For another lesson.’

She looked at him helplessly, not knowing what to say.

‘It will take time,’ he said.