I walk each day in the small wood of my childhood, where the trees grow bent and gnarled under their ivy coats, beckoning the sun with arthritic fingers. Their roots make steps in the leaf litter for my feet to follow up, up to the sky. There, a turquoise pool reposes; waiting just for me. It is suddenly silent. She is overspilling her banks under a mantle of common weeds so fine, so green, that they might be the tiny petals of growing lily pads. I crawl out onto a hollowed-out log, stretch out my legs and hold my breath as it shifts on the water. Will it hold? Does anything hold?
When I was a child, we played at weddings in an aisle of white beeches in these woods. They led to a magnificent, cracked oak – the grandfather of this forest. Fallen trunks scattered here and there made for seating for an imaginary audience in this great, open-air church – this theatre of natural miracles. The carpeting, sweet summer moss and twinkling golden, starry leaves shed by the attendant trees. I search in vain, following every twist and rabbit track, but cannot find it. It appears in the distance, then is gone again. Perhaps it only comes in the Spring.
Down the hill and up again. I clamber across trunks and branches, push my way through thorny undergrowth, skid down banks with arms outstretched and stones skittering under my boots. I am still the child who sees stories in the stars and Fair Folk in the hollows. Who falls in love with books and moon dust and wandering feet. I am the bridge of my legs on the water and the sound of my laughter on the wind. I am a wildling with tangled curls, who belongs here in these woods. A creature of stories and magic, half mad and half sane. That’s always been the problem: you cannot tame what you does not belong to you. But Lord knows, you tried.
Follow the boundary stream: here muddy, clogged with branches set aside by a storm; there a light trickle of tan between steep banks. It refreshes the pools, upon which you stumble in the most unlikely places. In the clearings, tangles of holly keep out those with mischievous fingers. Take nothing but what is freely given, it warns. And don’t try to charm us.
The last remnants of an ancient woodland, the magic still clings here. In the pools, the ivy-clad branches, and the boundary stream. It keeps its secrets.
