The Woodcutter Read online

  Sorry, I’ve gone on a lot more than I intended about all this early trauma stuff and I know all you really wanted was an account of how me and Imogen got together. But I started off trying to explain the kind of youngster I was, and to understand that, you need to know the rest.

  To cut a long story short, because of my instinctive reluctance to get close to anybody and because of the almost total lack of any meaningful supervision at home, I ran wild. Literally. Every free moment I had I spent roaming the countryside. Some streak of natural cunning made me realize the dangers of too much truancy, and I trod a line between being an internal nuisance and an external problem. But I usually turned up late and when I could I bunked off early. As I said, Aunt Carrie was ill-equipped physically or mentally to cope with me. Indeed, as I grew older and wiser, if that’s the right word, a combination of self-interest and I hope fondness for the old lady made me cover up for her as best I could.

  Of course my behaviour did not go unremarked, but unlike in the towns where suspicion of child neglect prompts people either to look the other way or at best to ring Social Services anonymously, in the countryside they deal with such problems in-house, so to speak. Looking back, I see that I was probably watched over much more carefully than I understood then. The postman was the eyes and ears of the district, the vicar dropped by a couple of times a week, and there was a steady stream of local ladies who found a reason to call on Carrie, and help with a bit of tidying up. Also for some reason I never really understood, everyone, teachers and locals alike, seemed ready to show a remarkable degree of tolerance towards my aberrant behaviour.

  Maybe I’d have turned out better if someone had been ready to skelp my ear a bit more frequently!

  Sir Leon was another one who missed the chance to sort me out. I remember when I was eight or nine I got caught by his gamekeeper. I was never a serious poacher, though if the odd trout or rabbit came my way, I regarded it as the peasant’s tithe. The day I got caught peering into Sir Leon’s newly stocked tarn, it was the fact that I had no criminal intent that made me vulnerable. I was stretched out on the bank, raptly viewing the tiny fry at their play, when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder and I was hauled upright by Sir Leon’s head keeper.

  When he realized who he’d got, he threw me into his pick-up and drove me through the forest to where my father was supervising a gang of loggers. Sir Leon was there too, and after the situation had been explained, he stared down at me and said, ‘This your brat then, Fred? What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘Wilf,’ I blurted.

  ‘Wilf?’

  Then he squatted down beside me, ran his fingers through my hair, opened my mouth and peered in like he was checking out a horse, then winked at me and said, ‘Sure you don’t mean Wolf? Looks to me like you’ve been suckled by wolves. That might explain things! Suckled by wolves, and here’s me thinking they were all dead.’

  He stood up, laughing at his own joke, and everyone else laughed, except me and Dad.

  Thereafter every time Sir Leon saw me he called me Wolf and gradually the name stuck. I rather like the notion of being suckled by wolves, maybe because Sir Leon with his long nose and great mane of grey-brown hair looked like he might have a bit of wolf in him too. His name, Ulphingstone, certainly did.

  Dad, however, hadn’t cared to be shown up in front of his workers and his boss. That night he stayed home and paid me more attention than I think he had since Mam died, and he didn’t much like what he saw. When I responded surlily to his remonstrations, he skelped me round the left ear, and when I responded angrily to that, he skelped me round the right.

  After that I was obliged to mend my ways for a while, but as well as developing a taste for the wild life, I was already well grounded in the art of deception, and I continued on my independent way pretty much as before, only taking a little more care.

  I suppose I was a bit of a loner, but that was through choice. At junior school I never had any problem getting on with the other boys; in fact most of them seemed keen to be friends with me, but I always felt myself apart from them. Maybe it was because I didn’t give a toss about who was going to win the Premier League, maybe it was something deeper than that. A lot of the girls were keen to be friendly too, but I reckoned they were a waste of space. At least with the boys you could run around and jump on top of each other and have a bit of a wrestle. It was a long time before I realized you could do that with girls too.

  Then came secondary school. There was the usual bullying, but I’ve always had a short fuse. Neither size nor number made any difference – if you messed with me, I lived up to my name and reacted like a wild beast, wading in with fists, feet, teeth, and head till someone lay bleeding on the schoolyard floor. Eventually the physical bullying stopped, but there were still scores to settle. One day, aged about twelve, I found someone had broken into my locker and sprayed car paint all over the stuff I kept there. I had a good idea who it was. Next morning I smuggled in the cut-down lumber axe my dad was teaching me to use and I demolished my chief suspect’s locker and everything in it. All the kids thought I’d be expelled or at least excluded for that, but the Head just settled for giving me a long lecture and getting Dad to pay for the damage.

  I didn’t get a lecture from Fred, but an ear-ringing slap which he made clear wasn’t for damaging the other boy’s gear but for ruining a perfectly good axe!

  After that, helped by the fact that I got bigger and stronger every month, I was left strictly alone by the would-be bullies. I wasn’t thick, I did enough work to keep my head above water, and for some reason the teachers cut me a lot of slack. I never sucked up to any of them but most of them seemed to like me and I suspect I got away with stuff another kid might have been pulled up for. I never made any particular friends because the kind of thing I liked to do away from school, I liked to do alone. But I was always one of the first to get picked when my class was split up for schoolyard games.

  The only significant contacts I made was age thirteen when I had my accident. You must have heard about my accident, Elf, the one that left me with the scars on my back that the bastards at my trial tried to claim established I was in those filthy videos. It was a real accident, not carelessness or anything on my part. A boulder that had been firmly anchored for a couple of thousand years decided to give way the same moment I put my weight on it. I fell off on to a sheet of ice and went bouncing and slithering down the fellside for a couple of hundred feet, and when the mountain rescue team reached me, they reckoned I was a goner. Didn’t I mention this in one of my other scribblings? I think I did, so you’ll know that fortunately there was no permanent damage and a few months later I was back on the fells with nothing worse than a heavily scarred back.

  But what the experience did do was let me see close-up what a great bunch of guys the mountain rescue team was. They were really good to me. I was too young to join officially, but none of them objected when I started hanging out with them, and a couple of them really took me under their wing and taught me all about proper climbing.

  Mind you, I did sometimes have a quiet laugh when they roped me up to do some relatively easy ascent that I’d been scampering up like a monkey all by myself for years, but I was learning sense and kept my gob shut.

  Now at last we’re getting to Imogen.

  I was fifteen when I first saw her, she was – is – a year younger.

  I knew Sir Leon had a daughter and I daresay I’d glimpsed her before, but this was the first time I really noticed her.

  Like I said, after that first encounter with Sir Leon, whenever our paths crossed he greeted me as Wolf and always asked very seriously how the rest of the pack was getting on. I’d grunt some response, the way boys do. Once when Dad told me to speak proper, Sir Leon said, ‘No need for that, Fred. The boy’s talking wolf and I understand him perfectly,’ then he grunted something back at me, and smiled so broadly I had to smile back as if I’d understood him. After that he always greeted me with a grunt and a grin.

&
nbsp; There was of course no socialization between us peasants and the castle, not even in the old feudal sense: no Christmas parties for the estate staff, no village fêtes in the castle grounds, nothing like that. Sir Leon was a good and fair employer, but his wife, Lady Kira, my dear ma-in-law, called the shots at home.

  Scion of a White Russian émigré family, Kira was more tsarist than her ancestors in her social attitudes. She believed servants were serfs, and anything that encouraged familiarity diminished efficiency. For her the term servant covered everyone in the locality. In her eyes we all belonged to the same sub-class, related by frequently incestuous intermarriage, and united in a determination to cheat, rob and, if the opportunity rose, rape our superiors.

  I don’t think anyone actually doffed their cap and tugged their forelock as she passed, but she made you feel you ought to.

  So when Sir Leon suggested to my dad I might like to come up to the castle one summer day to ‘play with the young ’uns’ as he put it, we were both flabbergasted.

  It turned out they had some house guests who between them had five daughters and one son, a boy of my own age, and Sir Leon felt he needed some male company to prevent his spirit being crushed by the ‘monstrous regiment’ (Sir Leon’s phrase again).

  I didn’t want to go, but Dad dug his heels in and said that it was time I learnt some manners and Sir Leon had always been good to me and if for once I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d make bloody sure I didn’t do what I wanted for the rest of the summer holidays and lots of stuff like that, so one bright sunny afternoon I clambered over the boundary wall behind Birkstane and walked through the forest to the castle.

  As castles go, it’s not much to write home about, no battlements or towers, not even a moat. It had been a proper castle once, way back in the Middle Ages, I think, but somewhere along the line it got bashed about a bit, whether by cannon balls or just general neglect and decay I don’t know, and when the family started rebuilding, they downsized and what they ended up with was a big house.

  But that’s adult me talking. As I emerged from the trees that day, the building loomed ahead as formidable and as huge as Windsor!

  Everyone was scattered around the lawn in front of the house. With each step I took, it became more apparent that the Sunday-best outfit that Dad had forced me to wear was entirely the wrong choice. Shorts, jeans, T-shirts abounded, not a hot tweed suit in sight. I almost turned and ran away, but Sir Leon had spotted me and advanced to meet me.

  ‘Uggh grrr,’ he said in his pretended wolf-speak. ‘Wolf, my boy, so glad you could make it. You look like you could do with a nice cold lemonade. And why don’t you take your jacket and tie off – bit too hot for them on a day like this.’

  Thus he managed to get me looking slightly less ridiculous by the time he introduced me to the ‘kids’.

  The girls, ranging from eleven to fifteen, more or less ignored me. The boy, stretched out on the grass apparently asleep, rolled over as Sir Leon prodded him with his foot, raised himself on one elbow, and smiled at me.

  ‘Johnny,’ said Leon, ‘this is Wolf Hadda. Wolf, this is Johnny Nutbrown. Johnny, why don’t you get Wolf a glass of lemonade?’

  Then he left us.

  Johnny said, ‘Is your name really Wolf?’

  ‘No. Wilf,’ I said. ‘Sir Leon calls me Wolf.’

  ‘Then that’s what I’ll call you, if that’s all right,’ he said with a smile.

  Then he went and got me a lemonade.

  I got no real impression of Johnny from that first encounter. The way he looked, and moved, and talked, he might have been a creature from another planet. As for him, I think even then he was as unperturbed by everything, present, past or future, as I was to find him in later life. He took the arrival of this inarticulate peasant in his stride. I think he was totally unaware that I’d been brought along to keep him company. I can’t believe that being the sole boy among all those girls had troubled him for a moment. That was Sir Leon imagining how he might have felt in the same circumstances.

  A tall woman, slim and athletic with a lovely figure and a face whose features were almost too perfect to be beautiful came and looked at me for a second or two with ice-cold eyes, then moved away. That was Lady Kira. The ice-cold look and the accompanying silence set the pattern for most of our future encounters.

  I’ve little recollection of any of the other adults. As for the girls, they were just a blur of bright colours and shrill noises. Except for Imogen. Not that I knew it was Sir Leon’s daughter to start with. She was just part of the blur until they started dancing.

  Most of the adults had moved off somewhere. Johnny, after two or three attempts at conversation, had given up on me and gone back to sleep. The girls had got hold of a radio or it might have been a portable cassette player, I don’t know. Anyway it was beating out the pop songs of the time and they started dancing. Disco dancing, I suppose it was – it could have been classical ballet for all it meant to me – the music scene, as they term it, was an area of teenage life that entirely passed me by.

  But presently as they went through their weird gyrations, one figure began to stand out from the half-dozen, not because she was particularly shapely or anything – in fact she was the skinniest of the lot – but because while the others were very aware of this as a competitive group activity, she was totally absorbed in the music. You got the feeling she would have been doing this if she’d been completely alone in the middle of a desert.

  The difference eventually made itself felt even among her fellow dancers, and one by one they slowed down and stopped, till only this single figure still moved, rhythmically, sinuously, as though in perfect harmony not only with the music but with the grass beneath her feet and the blue sky above, and the gently shimmering trees of the distant woodland that formed the backdrop from my viewpoint. Unlike the others, she was wearing a white summer dress of some flimsy material that floated around her as she danced, and her long golden hair wreathed about her head like a halo of sunbeams.

  I was entranced, in the strictest sense of the word; drawn into her trance; totally absorbed. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it meant something hugely significant to me. I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted to sit here and watch this small and still totally anonymous figure dancing forever.

  Then Johnny who, unseen by me, had woken and sat up, said, ‘Oh God, there goes Imo again. Turn on the music and it sets her off like a monkey on a stick!’

  His tone was totally non-malicious, but that didn’t save him.

  I punched him on the nose. I didn’t even think about it. I just punched him.

  Blood fountained out; one of the remaining adults – maybe it was Johnny’s mother – had been looking our way, and she screamed. Johnny sat there, stock-still, staring down at his cupped hand as it filled with blood.

  I just wanted to be as far away from all this as I could get.

  Again without thought, I found myself on my feet and heading as fast as I could run towards the welcome shelter of the distant woodland.

  My shortest line took me past Imogen. She had stopped dancing and her eyes tracked me towards her and past her and I imagined I could feel them on me still as I covered the couple of hundred yards or so to the sanctuary of the trees.

  That is my first memory of Imogen. I think even then, uncouth and untutored though I was, I knew I was hers and she was mine forever.

  Just shows how wrong you can be, eh, Elf?

  ii

  I’ve just read over what I’ve written.

  It strikes me this is just the kind of stuff you want, Elf. Childhood trauma, all that crap.

  Except maybe I haven’t made it clear: I enjoyed my childhood. It was a magical time. Do you read poetry? I don’t. Rhyme or reason, isn’t that what they say? Well, I’m a reason man. At school I learnt some stuff by rote to keep the teachers happy but I also learnt the trick of instant deletion the minute I’d spouted it. The only bit that’s stuck doesn’t come from my schooldays but from my
daughter, Ginny’s.

  It was some time in that last summer, ’08 I mean, it was raining most of the time I recall, perhaps that’s why Ginny got stuck into her holiday assignments early.

  At her posh school, they reckoned poetry was important, and one of the things she had to do was write a paraphrase of some lines of Wordsworth. She assumed because I was a Cumbrian lad, I’d know all about him. A father doesn’t like to disappoint his daughter, so I glanced at the passage. A lot of the language was daft and he went all round the houses to say something, but to my amazement I found myself thinking, this bugger’s writing about me!

  He was talking about himself as a kid, the things he got up to, climbing steep cliffs, moonlight poaching, going out on the lake, but the lines that stuck were the ones that summed it all up for him.

  Fair seed-time had my soul and I grew up

  Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

  That was me. I don’t mean fear of being clouted or abused, anything like that. I mean the kind of fear you feel when you’re hanging over a hundred-foot drop by your fingernails or when the night’s so black you can’t see your hand in front of your face and you hear something snuffling in the dark, the fear that makes your sense of being alive so much sharper, that lets you feel the lifeblood pounding through your heart, that makes you want to dance and shout when you beat it and survive!

  Do you know what I’m talking about, Elf? Or are you stuck in all that Freudian clart, where everything’s to do with sex, even if you’re dealing with kids before they know what sex is all about?

  Me, I was never much interested in sex, not even after my balls dropped. Maybe I was leading such a physical life, I was just too knackered. Of course my cock stood up from time to time and I’d give it a pull and I enjoyed the spasm of pleasure that eventually ensued. But I didn’t have much time for the dirty jokes and mucky books and boasting about what they’d done with girls that most of my schoolmates went in for.