The village where these boys were brought up stands on the
fringe of the old forest which once covered the whole of the
north of London. It has no beauty of its own, apart from the
white wooden cottages with gables and porches and garden
palings all covered up and almost hidden by every kind of
creeping plant, and the gracious amplitude of garden which
surrounds every house big and little, so that the inhabitants
may enjoy the fruits of the earth in due season. It is so near
London that a boy with an imagination may at any time fancy
that he can hear the bells of Bow Church — not Stratford-le-Bow
Church, which is much nearer — and if he stands with his head
half turned and his left hand curled round his left ear, he can
easily make out what the bells say, and turn again, and become
Dick Whittington, and ask Sir Charles the best way to become
Lord Mayor. Yet it is so far away that London fogs fall never
upon its pleasant gardens, and as for that great canopy of perpetual
smoke of which we hear so much, there is not so much
as the fringe of it between the children’s eyes and the blue of
heaven.

     
It is so far from London, again, as to be full of country
delights, rural sounds and rural sights. The rurality of the
place, to one fresh from town, seems overdone, an affectation
of rurality, a pedantry and pretence, somewhat overacted, of
rusticity.

     
Thus, nowhere are the roads more liberally edged with
broad belts of grass, as if land was plentiful and cheap; nowhere
will you find such broad, ugly, uncared-for ditches, with pollard-willows
and old oaks beside them, blackberry bushes and
brambles scrambling over them, and tall weeds, reeds, and
strange wild flowers growing in them; nowhere will you find
the ducks waddling by the roadside with more perfect trustfulness
as if there were no tramps or gipsies in the world; surely
a duck of all creatures, must be sincere: she would not pretend
a trustfulness she did not feel. The roadside inns are picturesque
and dirty; their signs — brave old signs such as the ‘Good
Intent’ and the ‘Traveller’s Rest’ —
hang creakily over the
wooden trough full of water for the horses. There is generally
a horse and cart waiting; the horse drinks at the trough, the
driver leaning against a door-post of the inn with a mug of
beer in his hand, drinks and exchanges opinions with the land-lord;
the people in the road roll as they walk, with hands in
pockets, lifting feet accustomed to a clay soil — quite as if they
were hundreds of miles from London; the very children roll in
their walk; they roll up, ragged and brown, like the cloud
rack; they are rosy and picturesque children, save when they
bang and beat each other and cry with dirty knuckles in tearful
eyes. The roads are quiet and there are few wayfarers. Sometimes
when the weather is warm and the sun is sloping downwards
you may see, leaning over the green palings of the cottage
garden, the meditative maiden, looking up and down the dusty
way. She waits, I suppose, for the Prince, who is to come
some day and change her quiet life, and give her a high old
time, a real romantic time, and make her happy ever after.
The seasons and the days of these quiet girls’ lives are very
beautiful to contemplate and to read about — in little bits. All
lives are to be taken, as the artist takes his landscapes — in bits.
If you take a bit so big as to be, so to speak, a Piece, it becomes
monotonous, even considered as a study of character. The
girls themselves in this quiet place say that to be always studying
your own character grows in the long run almost intolerable.
And as for that Prince; unless he goes about on a bicycle on a
Saturday afternoon, I have never met him in any of the lanes
in these parts, and one fears indeed that he may not come until
the spring of soft cheeks and tender eyes be gone.

     
In the road, besides the ditches and the belt of grass, there
is pig — white pig and black pig; they lie in the warm mud
happy and satisfied with life. They burrow their noses among
the coarse tufts of grass in search for something toothsome, of
which they know and would tell us if they could; let us never
forget, my brothers, that the pig was the original discoverer —
the Columbus — of Truffleland. The expression of the intelligent
and mobile tail, as its owner pokes his snout into the mud,
indicates the curiosity and excitement of research, and perhaps
the gratitude of success. Lastly, just to prove how deep we are
in the country, the air is full of sounds absolutely rural. Nowhere
else so near to London can you hear such singing of
birds; nowhere else so near do you get the nightingale, nowhere
else so near does the dove coo. You may hear the tinkle of a
sheep-bell just as if you were on Dartmoor. You may see a
hawk hovering in the air as if you were on Malvern Hill. You
may hear the sharpening of the scythe, the hammer of the
blacksmith, and the wo-wo-ing of the ploughboy. On Sunday
evening you may watch the ploughboy making love. And never
an omnibus, or a tram, or the whistle of a train.

     
The forest, by which the village lies, was once a very magnificent
and royal place indeed. It has associations of history.
One of the kings was wont to hunt here, a fact which makes it
interesting to everybody. Another king once rode through the
forest. The old trees remember both events very well, yet
attach very small importance to them, being more concerned
with the recent steps taken for their own preservation. For a
very remarkable custom formerly prevailed there. The people
were a religious folk and anxious to live well and keep a clear
conscience. Everybody will applaud them for this. And in
order to make the clarity of conscience easier and safer, they
took the eighth commandment out of the decalogue, and very
soon forgot that it had ever existed, except when a new curate
came and noticed its omission, and fumbled about and turned
red, when one of the churchwardens would go and explain to
him briefly, that in the spiritual interests of the parish, this
excision had been found necessary. Because they gave up their
whole leisure time to carving bits out of the forest and adding
them to their own gardens, sticking up palings round these bits;
here a cantle and there a snippet here a slab and there a slice;
a round corner and a square corner; a bare piece of turf, or a
wooded clump: and all so neighbourly encouraging each other
the while with a ‘Brother, will this be to your mind?’ or
‘Help yourself, neighbour;’ and ‘Let me recommend! sir,
another slice;’ or ‘A piece of the woody part, dear friend.’
The only tune which was popular in that otherwise unmusical
neighbourhood was the Rogue’s March, and the only articles in
demand were axes to hew down the trees and wood ready cut and
shaped for palings wherewithal to stake out the new property.
On Sundays they knocked off work and went to church
and held the plate. If a rustic lopped a branch of these stolen
oaks he got six months’ hard, because the inequalities of rank
must be respected, and nobody can be allowed to steal anything
until he has begun to pay income tax.

     
This was, in fact, all that was left of the great Forest of
Hainault; once a vast wild wood filled with wild creatures, boar
and stag, fox and wolf, marten, weasel, badger, stoat, polecat,
water-rat, and squirrel. Nobody looked upon it, nobody lived
in it, not even the gipsies; and as it was on no high-road,
nobody ever visited it. In the good old days when the Lord
Mayor’s Court used to put rogues and vagabonds, whom pillory
failed to cure, outside the city walls, they came to this forest
and set up in business as robbers, murderers, highwaymen,
pilferers, and farm-house sneaks. Few grew fat in those trades:
most were caught and hanged: the rest, less fortunate, starved
when the winter came. All through the last century the great
forest was a safe, commodious, and convenient rendezvous for
those gentlemen of the road who took the eastern circuit. When
this profession decayed, the forest was deserted indeed, save for
the clipping, picking, and stealing all round its edge. Thirty
years ago they resolved on destroying it altogether: in fact,
they did destroy an enormous slice of it — the larger slice: they
converted miles of mild forest, with rough uplands and green
dales covered with grand old trees, into a treeless tract, staked
out in square fields and rectangular roads. Then they wagged
their stupid heads and rubbed together their ridiculous hands
and said it was a great improvement.

     
Yet not all; there remains a glorious fragment, so large as
to be still called the Forest. And this place was the playground
of the children of whom we write.

     
When Claire first began to run about with the boys I know
not; the custom grew up by degrees; its origin is prehistoric;
she was a very little girl at the time, and it continued till she
became a great girl, and a maiden fully grown.

     
To begin with, she had no other playmates; she lived a good
way from the school, where the other girls were mostly boarders.
Then the forest is a safe place for children; you may climb up
a tree and fall off a branch, no doubt; or a branch may be
detached by an evil-minded tree and come down upon you, but
very little else can happen. There are pools in the forest, but
most of them are shallow; there are marshy places and quags,
but a wet foot is the worst that can happen; there are gipsies,
but they have ceased to steal children, and only steal linen,
poultry, ducks, and sucking-pigs; and even on Sundays there
are never here, as there are in Epping Forest, men who bawl,
drink too much beer, laugh at nothing, carry their hats at the
back of their heads, shout, and behave, as regards walking, like
unto a sailor on board ship when the raging winds do blow.

     
Then the cottage in which Claire lived was the nearest to the
forest, so that she could wait at the garden gate for the boys on
their way, and be left there by them on their return.

     
As the children grew older they went farther afield, so that
there was no part of the forest which they did not know. They
belonged to the forest; when they left the houses and crossed
the great meadow which stretches away from the road, and
found themselves in the broad green way which, like a made
road runs here into the very heart of the forest, they were at
home. The lanes which lead right and left from this green
road were known to all of them; they are lanes of springy turf;
over them are the boughs of oak and elm and birch; beside
them, sometimes across them, are tufts or clumps or little
jungles of hawthorn, honeysuckle, elder, and blackberry; the
sunlight falls on these lanes through the leaves and is always
soft, and there is a continual shifting of light and shade caused
by the movement of the branches. The children explored all
these lanes and knew whither each one led: where the broad
way of turf widened out into an amphitheatre, they made it a
playing-ground, a race-course, a stage for dramatic representation;
where it narrowed again and became no wider than one
of the little lanes they followed on through shade and sunshine
under the branches of the old oaks till it opened again. They
knew it all. It is not a very great forest: beside Fontainebleau
and the forest of Eu or Chantilly, or the New Forest, or the
Forest of Dean it is small; but it is real forest, it is wild. An
active lad would soon cover the whole ground. But then a
forest is not a park nor is it a field; there are endless things to
explore in it; there are creatures — wild creatures — which may
be started in the underwood; among them are the tame cats
who have grown wild and now pass precarious lives in great
discomfort; in the spring and summer the air is musical with
birds of which these children knew every note; in the winter
there are the donkeys who run loose and keep themselves — they
will let themselves be ridden in hard times, bare backed, and
never a kick, for a crust of bread: and there are things, yea,
tritons and evvets, and wriggling things, in the pools, and jack
may be caught in the river Roding; there are butterflies and
moths to be chased; there are flowers in the spring and blackberries
in the autumn. Besides the creatures and the trees and
flowers there is scenery; here and there hill-sides clothed with
wood; slopes on which, as you stand upon them and look among
the trees, the sun produces strange and wonderful effects;
stretches of elastic turf; places where the forest seems to recede
and still to recede as you walk along, great trees, avenues of
oaks, gatherings of beeches, with ash and elm and sycamore;
everywhere the underwood of hawthorn, honeysuckle, and wild
rose; everywhere the freshness and fragrance of the wild wood;
always light and colour even in January, when the delicate
purple bloom lies upon the masses of bush and shrub and the
late leaves linger on the sheltered branches, and always silence
and rest from the talk of man. In such a forest the talk of
money, that was too much in the ears of these boys, was forgotten;
the meanness and the poverty of their homes were
forgotten; it was a school in which the boys learned those
things which cannot be written down.

     
It is, moreover, a forest so deserted, so forgotten, that
Robinson Crusoe might live there and seldom regret his island;
no one knows of it; no one goes there; it leads nowhere: it is
five miles from any railway station; the children had it altogether
to themselves. The rowdy and the rough know it not;
there are no tea-gardens; on Sunday or on the week-day it is
silent and lonely; you may dream away the livelong day alone
under the old trees, as grey as those olives of Provence, which
are born a hundred years old. No one ever goes to Hainault
except, two or three times a year, a few school feasts; and then
the children do not penetrate far into the wood; they play in
the broad meadow that lies stretched out before it; and if you
get to the right distance from them you may catch the sweetness
of the hymns which they sing; but you must not be too near
them or you will hear the Cockney twang. Why, even the
guide-books do not know Hainault Forest.

     
To have such a place all to themselves, with such a countryside
to walk in, surely compensated for poverty. Why, with a
turn of the wheel they might have lived at Lancaster Gate and
then they would have had nothing but Kensington Gardens.
On the other hand, with another turn of the wheel they might
have lived in the Mile End Road and so have had nothing at all
but Stepney Green.

     
In Long summer holidays the children could take their
dinners with them and make excursions around and outside the
forest. For instance. they would walk over to the school at
Chigwell and thence take a path across fields to Loughton; the
river Roding runs through these fields; they could fish in the
Roding, which after rain is an impetuous, headlong stream, but
is sluggish in fair weather. There are houses to be passed at
Loughton, but beyond the houses is High Beech, and beyond
High Beech stretches another forest outside the range of tramp
and rowdy, and as wild almost as Hainault; beyond this comes
the road, and beyond the road Copped Hall Green, an outlying
bit of wild wood; and then three miles of road and then an
ancient town. There is nothing in the town except the bridge
over the Lea and the old Abbey Church. The Abbey buildings
have long since been pulled down; the east end and chancel of
the church are gone, yet what remains is stately; and it is
surrounded by a churchyard in which stands an old, old tree,
bound about with iron bands and provided with a bench on
which should be sitting none but old men, contemplating with
faith and resignation the place where they soon must lie, To
one of these boys, if he went there alone and sat long enough,
there presently came a vision. He saw a fierce battle, with men
in armour and armed with cross-bow, long-bow, pike, lance,
and heavy sword. There was a great shouting and clashing of
weapons; there was the heavy tramp of chargers carrying
knights in iron armour; there was the rushing to and fro of
men who charged and men who fled; there was the hurtling of
bolts and arrows in the air; there was a flight and a slaughter.
It was the vision of Senlac Fight which came to the boy, because
somewhere at his feet there lay the bones of King Harold and
his brothers.

     
Or, there is another field-path which takes you to Buckhurst
Hill, where there are more houses; but you can soon get through
these and then you are in the forest again, where there are
avenues of oaks. When you get through these you are only a mile
or so from an ancient deserted church. It is empty now and dismantled;
its windows are broken, its roof is gaping, it is covered
all over roof and walls with the ivy of five hundred years. A
place hallowed by the joys of love and marriage, the hopes of
childhood, the prayers of life, the tears of death, through all
these generations. Those who have lived and loved, rejoiced
and wept, lie now around their ruined church; their forgotten
dust, and the very oblivion of their lives and their hopes
consecrate the place. It is by such things, far more than by the
formal footstep and perambulation of the bishop, that a church-yard
is set apart and hallowed.

     
Or, again, there is another way beyond the forest which
leads along narrow leafy lanes, the like of which you cannot
find outside of Devonshire. You pass by the way a place at
which the children always stopped to look over crumbling. old
wooden palings into a strange deserted graveyard. There is no
church or chapel in it or sign of any building; it is a small
square covered with graves, and containing one or two headstones;
trees stand round it, and it is covered with long grass;
a wild and ghostly place. A mile or so farther you come to a
little old town; a town of which nobody ever heard, whither
nobody goes; a town of red-brick gabled houses with red-tiled
roofs standing all huddled together in a circle, as if there were
once walls round it; a strangely quiet town, which looks as if
it had never even heard of the outer world, and took no interest
in anything but itself, but proposed to go on in this retired
fashion, as secure and happy and peaceful as the city of Laish.

     
A child who is brought up beside the sea learns daily lessons
in the vastness and illimitable variety of the world. He sees
the stately ships go by; he watches the waves and gathers the
shells; his mind may become full of great thoughts; it cannot
learn from the sea any thoughts that are small and mean. A
child brought up in the monotony of endless streets must get
great and noble thoughts in spite of the houses standing innumerable,
row after row, line upon line; there is no education
for such a child outside its home. A boy born on the steppes
of Central Asia is not so badly off, because there are quantities
of things to watch and wonder at on the steppe — snakes, wolves,
bears, Kurd and Cossack, Turcoman and Tartar. But a child
brought up in a forest learns, besides the manners and customs
of trees, the underwood, the flowers, the grass, and the forest
creatures; besides the beauty of the open glades and hanging
woods and tangled branches overhead; the cheerfulness of
nature, the joy of every living thing, and the freedom which
makes that joy possible for humanity.

     
This forest playfield, these wanderings in the free and open
woodlands, among green glades and wild woods, affected the
boys in a different way. For one, they strengthened brain and
nerve and eye; they made him strong of limb, stout of heart,
and keen to see things as they are. As regards the second, the
forest filled his imagination and gave him food for the vague,
delightful dreams which haunted him day and night.

     
There was the third boy. But he very soon dropped out
from among them and longed for the city pavement. He sat at
home, where he ruled over his mother and sisters and read
tales of fashionable life, and wondered how soon it would be
before he, too, might smoke cigarettes with reckless baronets,
and listen to the popping of champagne corks and sit up gambling
till they were all knee deep in cards.

     
But Claire went with the other two when she was a little
girl and it was delight enough to run and jump; when she was
older and could learn with them the secrets of the forest; and
when she was so old that she could think and wonder and ask
herself, in vague and girlish way, what life had yet to give.