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Matt Collins on H. E. Bates, Through the Woods 1 - Slightly Foxed 62

Small Is Beautiful

Among the books I’d assembled to help steer me through the boundless subject of trees and woodlands for a recent commission, H. E. Bates’s Through the Woods – a month-by-month account of a small copse in Kent – looked unassuming. Recommended via some unnerving algorithm of online commerce, it sat for many weeks among the accumulating pile beneath my desk.

When at last I glanced through it, however, one passage brought it suddenly alive:

Fear begins to come more quickly in a wood, with darkness and twilight, than in any other place I know. I have been in a wood gathering violets or orchis or primroses in the late evening, when the sudden realization of twilight coming down has sent a sudden damnable running of cold up my spine, and I have half run out of the place. That feeling is common.

When I later spent a long winter’s night in the notoriously ‘haunted’ Wayland Wood in Norfolk, Bates tramped with me, not only helping me interpret the experience but also contributing to it an element of purposeful enquiry. ‘A wood at night can be a strange place,’ he writes. ‘Why is it? It is not simply darkness. We grow used to darkness. It can only be some quality in trees themselves.’

In writing my own book, I was greatly helped by the observations of other writers. Some, like John Stewart Collis on his Dorset ash wood, and Roger Deakin on his global excursions from Suffolk, could always be relied on. Others kept me company on particular woodland jaunts: Jim Crumley in a Caledonian pine forest, Francis Parkman through strange tree farms on the North American prairie, Gertrude Jekyll, a little unexpectedly, on a wooded mountainside in Switzerland. But it was Bates’s

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Among the books I’d assembled to help steer me through the boundless subject of trees and woodlands for a recent commission, H. E. Bates’s Through the Woods – a month-by-month account of a small copse in Kent – looked unassuming. Recommended via some unnerving algorithm of online commerce, it sat for many weeks among the accumulating pile beneath my desk.

When at last I glanced through it, however, one passage brought it suddenly alive:

Fear begins to come more quickly in a wood, with darkness and twilight, than in any other place I know. I have been in a wood gathering violets or orchis or primroses in the late evening, when the sudden realization of twilight coming down has sent a sudden damnable running of cold up my spine, and I have half run out of the place. That feeling is common.

When I later spent a long winter’s night in the notoriously ‘haunted’ Wayland Wood in Norfolk, Bates tramped with me, not only helping me interpret the experience but also contributing to it an element of purposeful enquiry. ‘A wood at night can be a strange place,’ he writes. ‘Why is it? It is not simply darkness. We grow used to darkness. It can only be some quality in trees themselves.’ In writing my own book, I was greatly helped by the observations of other writers. Some, like John Stewart Collis on his Dorset ash wood, and Roger Deakin on his global excursions from Suffolk, could always be relied on. Others kept me company on particular woodland jaunts: Jim Crumley in a Caledonian pine forest, Francis Parkman through strange tree farms on the North American prairie, Gertrude Jekyll, a little unexpectedly, on a wooded mountainside in Switzerland. But it was Bates’s Through the Woods that became my constant companion. His lyrical yet down-to-earth reflections upon the life of a little wood – a chestnut copse just outside the village of Little Chart Forstal in Kent, where he spent the greater part of his adult life – were ones I could always relate to. Like the very best nature writing they highlighted the remarkable within the unremarkable, the uncommon buried beneath the common, weaving the many different elements of a wood into an engaging, spirited narrative. Through the Woods is a book I wanted to quote from to the point of plagiarism: the best nature writing, I would argue, is often produced by novelists. For most of us, woods, forests – a mere grouping of trees even – carry both a material presence and its immaterial shadow. Heightened by our natural responses to uncertainty, threat and enclosure, our senses all too readily weave a layer of fantasy into the physical fabric of a wood. As Bates himself puts it, ‘There is some precious quality brought about by the close gathering together of trees into a wood that defies analysis.’ As a novelist whose many stories inhabit the tall trunks and dark dells of a wood, he instinctively imbues his non-fiction account with the truth of human experience. Herbert Ernest Bates was a prolific writer, producing 50 or so books in just over 50 years, most of them set in the English countryside and less than a third of them non-fiction. Through the Woods, one of his earliest, can be seen as a kind of behind-the-scenes tour of the stage on which so much of his life’s work would be set, a methodical exercise in the lyrical observation of landscape that would form the bedrock of his fiction. Take, for instance, his description of the nightingale’s song, pouring in early summer from the high woodland canopy, ‘a performance made up, very often, more of silence than of utterance. The very silences have a kind of passion in them, a sense of breathlessness and restraint, of restraint about to be magically broken.’ The silences, he notes, are often broken by a long, protracted whist-ling, prolonged by the bird seemingly for pure enjoyment. These observations later turned up in the pages of his novella The Triple Echo, heightening a moment of romantic tension:

Up in the beech trees the nightingale held to one long pure sustained high note. The soldier drew in his breath and held it too . . . ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘listen to that.’ Once again, together, they listened to the nightingale. Sometimes there were soundless, breathless pauses in the song.

Through the Woods was published in 1936, with beautiful wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker. Bates was only 30 at the time and had yet to produce the books that cemented his literary career: Fair Stood the Wind for France, Love for Lydia, The Darling Buds of May, among many others. The woodland that became his muse for Through the Woods had only recently entered his life with his move to rural Kent, after marrying his childhood sweetheart and committing himself to writing. For him it was a kind of extension of the woods of his Northamptonshire childhood, which had provided an idyllic contrast to the unromantic reality of the factory work and stringent religious upbringing that had overshadowed his twenties. So the wood at Little Chart Forstal was a portal to his happiest countryside memories and a place in which to stimulate them. ‘The wood is not far from the house,’ he begins: ‘You can see it, in fact, from the windows. We might as well go straight down to it.’ Beginning and ending in the month of April, Bates takes us on a meandering walking tour through the cycle of the seasons: we pass the opening of early flowers, the fruiting of coppiced chestnuts, the snows of winter.

The wind does not trouble us at all. It makes an incessant swishing in the pines overhead . . . a whining, melancholy noise, and yet in some way sweet. We walk in stillness, in a primrose world of absolute spring.

He evokes the essence of his wood so well that visiting it, as I did one August morning last year, seemed to add little that I had not already experienced through his writing. It is his storyteller’s voice and grasp of drama, revealed again and again in his various woodland encounters, that holds one’s attention: foxes are ‘tireless in their own devilries’, wild cherry blooms are like ‘columns of shining smoke’; the stillness of the wood itself is ‘an expansive hush without wind, the strange silence of a small and confined world’. Bates even throws into this world a villain, the gamekeeper, universally loathed by the nature writer and very personally by Bates.

You must not step an inch away from the path; you must not look at a pheasant’s egg; you must not gather a bluebell. In fact you must not do anything, by word or look or deed, even in innocence, to upset the course of the drama in which he is a star performer.

Among the many components of the English countryside Bates considers the wood to be the most beautiful, but he does not disconnect it from the landscape. He makes frequent reference to adjoining features and terrain: cornfields, rivers and hedgerows, even a much larger woodland sprawled over the hills above. These elements give context and contrast and add colour to the little wood, making them part of its story. A particularly illuminating passage, for example, details the effect created by a bordering stream:

This fusion of wood and water is an entrancing thing. Without the wood the stream would be nothing . . . But water and wood, together, shading and watering and bounding each other, each give to the other something which the other does not possess, the wood giving to the stream something solid and shadowy and immemorial, the stream giving to the wood all the incomparable movement and twinkling transience of moving water.

Bates wrote that the best woods are small, ideally only a few acres, ‘not much more than copses’. Forests, on the other hand, are something quite different; they go on and on, he concludes, ‘like the vast bulk of an unread book’.

As I see it, prose can never overrate the wood: the small intimate English wood with its variation of trees, its many flowers and bird voices, its feeling of being only a part but never the whole of a countryside. It never dominates, never assumes the dark dictatorship of forests. You can walk in it and through it and round it without a sense of oppression, a sense of its being too great for you. At the same time its life is quick and, at its best, stimulating and entrancing. It is never dead, not even dormant.

This to me is a wonderful comparison, and a metaphor for his own literary approach – not least his inclination towards the drama of the short story. The little English wood is a novella, not an epic, but it concentrates within its small acreage stories of epic and noble proportions.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 62 © Matt Collins 2019


About the contributor

Matt Collins is Head Gardener at the Garden Museum in London and a writer on landscape and gardens. His new book, Forest: Walking among Trees, traces an intercontinental pathway between trees and their wilder wooded contexts.

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