Coffee Time - Story Archive

This is a small selection of our archive of featured stories from our Coffeetime Storytime section. We are hoping to publish a bumper book of Funky Angel Coffeetime Stories at the end of the year, so keep an eye out!

The Wood

by Claire Burdett

Lightly spread and smoothed over the swell of the Downs, the wood lay at the heart of my child’s-eye world, tucked as it was between my grandparents’ village and our own.

It was a wild place between the edges of civilisation; overgrown, mysterious, with winding paths through half-light, and tiny unexpected patches of sunlight. Drifts of bluebells would turn the hazy shadows smoke-blue in springtime, when the wood lay open and inviting, alive with celebratory birdsong. By mid-summer, the wood would sink in on itself, seagreen and murky, silent bar the constant murmur of the uppermost leaves.

When we were young, Mother would often take my sister and I, matching tots in red hoods and coats, across the wood to tea at our grandparents’. The path followed the edge of the trees and glittered with hoar frost in winter. It seems always to have been blustery weather, with singing wind and pink cheeks, as we searched along the way for presents to take to Grandma. Catkins, conkers and red-tinted leaves were favourites. Sometimes we found a feather – ebony crow, silver pigeon, amber pheasant. But it would always be stuck upright by the path – to stop the luck running out, said Mother – valiant against unknown fears.

Such a busy path, always so many footprints, Some were just passing through, like the farmer and his dog; others lived in the wood. Reynard, said Mother, and Mr Brock. Then I would run on a little, hoping to surprise them round the next bend. The next bend and the next, that last stretch always so long, our legs so short, until the first one to spot the stile at the end of the track would cry out, as if it were the first glint of the sea at the start of a summer holiday.

Many slender, secret paths converged on that stile. A venerable oak stood in a clearing at the end of one such path, its substantial trunk smothered with the carved initials of a century of sweethearts. My grandparents’ were there, beautifully carved within a holding heart, as were my parents’, dated a quarter of a century later. I would have liked to have been courted there, and watched my beloved join our initials high up where there was room, but the farmer cut it down with the rest of the wood when I was fifteen.

Old men spat, and said the topsoil would run off. Friends of the Earth organised a nine-mile march from the local market town, carrying a symbolic coffin which, attended by the national press, was ceremoniously laid upon the farmer’s mock Georgian doorstep. He was somewhat rattled, red of face and damp of brow, but stood firm for profit and progress, his sole concession to leave an acre intact at each of the four corners.

And so it was. Within the week. Badly shaven fields where once lay wild society.

Postscript: 20 years on

I passed by today with my own small daughters, their coats rosehip red and pheasant gold, their voices carrying clear on the Downland air as they searched for presents to take to Grandma. And I saw the tide of progress has turned.

Softly, gently, stealthily, the quilt is reworking itself.

Repatching where the centre was torn.

Making it anew.

© Claire Burdett