The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [373]
For his gates Berty Puckle would take a tree fork to form the upright and the diagonal. Then he’d fit other pieces of wood, dovetailing, and nailing with wooden or iron pegs until the resulting gate seemed more like a natural growth than any man-made object. Sometimes he would even take some complex knotted growth and work round that. You could spot one of Berty Puckle’s Forest gates at a hundred yards. George Pride had fifteen of them.
Yet it was also the inclosures, their fences and gates that provided George with his only serious worry. For that was the other part of the woodman’s job: he had to guard them.
And they were likely to be attacked.
After the setback in the House of Lords, the Forest had had one piece of luck. A Member of Parliament named Professor Fawcett who had taken an interest in the area had passed a Resolution that halted all further inclosures or felling of ancient trees until new legislation for the Forest could be framed. The government was led by the liberal Mr Gladstone now, who hesitated to attack the commoners. So the Forest was granted a breathing space. But no one knew for how long. And if men like Colonel Albion and Lord Henry were preparing for the next battle in Parliament, the Forest people indicated their feelings.
They set fire to the inclosures and stole the fences.
In these years of uncertainty, with the hated Office of Woods temporarily checked, it was hardly surprising if the Forest folk had been having quite a few very satisfactory little fires. Cumberbatch had even employed some extra men as constables – not, of course, that it had the slightest effect.
‘We haven’t been up your way have we, George?’ a Forest man remarked to Pride cheerfully in Lyndhurst one day. He was a large, burly fellow, not the sort of man you’d want to get into a fight with.
‘No. And please don’t,’ said George.
‘I wouldn’t worry about that, George, not if I was you,’ the other replied. ‘You just sleep sound at nights.’
‘I really don’t know what I’ll do if they come,’ George confessed to his wife. ‘But I’m not letting them destroy my inclosures.’
Apart from these worries, however, they had been happy years. His family was growing. Gilbert, his eldest son, was ten years old now. When he watched the boy come back happily after catching rabbits, or go running down by one of the Forest brooks, he relived his own childhood, and it gave him a deep satisfaction.
He had four children now, but it was the two eldest, Gilbert and Dorothy that he usually took with him on his rambles. Sometimes they would go down by the amber streams, and walk along the greens where the ponies came to avoid the flies – to shade as the Forest people called it. They would watch a kingfisher flash by or observe the tiny Forest trout and he would teach them all that he knew about the Forest lore.
If he saw himself in Gilbert, he could not quite pinpoint who Dorothy was like. She had the same features as his wife, but her wiry body seemed more like the tall Prides. Her eyes were such a dark blue they were almost purple. As he watched her helping her mother about the house, baking dough cakes and bread, or making apple jelly in the autumn, he would smile to himself at what a good wife she would make some lucky man one day. Yet she could also run like a deer. Gilbert couldn’t catch her yet. George was prouder of her than he knew.
It was one day in summer, when she was nine, that he made a small discovery about his feelings that made him feel ashamed.
A deer had somehow got into one of the inclosures and, as he was allowed to do, he had shot it. After he and his wife had skinned it and cut it up, he had taken the haunches across to Fritham where the landlord of the Royal Oak – the only inn for miles around in that part of the Forest – had agreed