The Forest (38 page)

‘If we get back after curfew’, Willie said, ‘we’ll get whipped.’

Even in the villages, the curfew – the
couvre-feu
when the fires were damped down for the night and all men were supposed to be indoors – was generally observed. After all,
there was nothing much you could do in the deep darkness of the countryside anyway, unless it was some poaching or an illicit affair. In Lymington, men like Totton might cross to their houses from the Angel after dark, but generally the streets were empty. The curfew bell sounding from the church signalled a long silence.

Jonathan had never been whipped before. Most boys were, from time to time, by parents or schoolmasters but, perhaps because of his nature and the muted atmosphere that his mother’s illness had brought to the house, he had escaped this normal punishment. ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘But you can go back if you want, Willie.’

‘And leave you alone?’

‘It’s all right. You go on. You’ve got time.’

Willie sighed. ‘No. I’ll stay.’

Jonathan gave his friend a smile and realized for the first time that he himself was capable of being ruthless.

‘What if there isn’t a dragon any more, Jonathan?’

‘Then we won’t see it.’

But what if there was? They waited an hour. The sun was sinking across the valley now. A faint mist rose from the distant water-meadows. The heath that swept down to the north of them a burnished, orange tint. But the line of Burley Beacon, catching the sun’s full rays, was gleaming gold as though it might ignite.

‘Watch the Beacon, Willie,’ Jonathan said and ran off down the slope.

It was only two hundred yards to the edge of the field. For some reason the bracken had been cut there and raked into heaps by the hedgerow, yet never carted away. It was easy enough to build a compact little shelter with a good, thick bed of bracken to lie on. If bracken made bedding for animals, he reasoned, it would for humans too. When he was done he went back to Willie.

‘We won’t get home tonight. It’s too late.’

‘I guessed that.’

‘I’ve made us a shelter.’

‘All right.’

‘Did you see anything?’

‘No.’

Sunset came and Burley Beacon turned fiery red, and it was easy to imagine a dragon, like a phoenix, arising from its embers into the evening sky. Then the sun sank and the western sky turned crimson, and the fire on Burley Beacon went out. Above, the first stars appeared.

‘I think it may come now,’ said Jonathan. He had quite a clear picture of what it would be like: about the size of a cow, he supposed, with a large wingspan. It would be green and scaly. The wings would sound like a huge swan when they beat and there would be a hissing noise from the fire coming out of its mouth. That was the main thing you’d see in the dark. He estimated it would fly across about a mile in front of them on its way down to Bisterne.

The sun was gone. The stars were brightening in the sapphire sky. The line of Burley Beacon looked dark and dangerous as the boys both waited, their eyes fixed upon it.

When, at dusk, there was still no sign of Jonathan, Henry Totton had reluctantly walked down to the quay and approached the disreputable dwelling of Alan Seagull. Had he seen his son? No, the mariner replied, a little perplexed; both boys had been missing since dawn and he had no idea where they were.

At first Totton had been afraid they might have gone out in a boat, but Seagull was soon able to discover that no boat was missing. Could they have fallen into the river somewhere?

‘My boy’s a strong swimmer,’ Seagull said. ‘What about yours?’

And Totton realized to his shame that he did not know.

Then word came that someone had seen them leave the top end of the town in the early morning. Could they have
encountered danger in the Forest? It seemed unlikely. There had been no wolves reported for years. It was early for snakes.

‘I suppose’, said Alan Seagull glumly, ‘they could have fallen in a mill-race.’

By curfew time the mayor and bailiff had been consulted, and two search parties had been equipped with torches. One had gone to the mills of Old Lymington; the other through the woods above the town. They were prepared to search, if necessary, all night.

The shelter was quite effective. By packing the bracken close, they kept most of the moisture out. The night was not chilly, fortunately, and by lying together they kept warm. They had discovered a bramble and some stinging nettles in the dark, but apart from that, and the fact that they were extremely hungry, their sufferings were not great.

There was no moon that night. The stars, peeping from behind shrouds of cloud, were very bright. They had waited for a long time for the dragon, but by the time their eyes were drooping they had decided that, if it was residing at Burley, it was not coming over tonight.

‘You’ll wake me if you see it,’ Jonathan made Willie promise.

‘And you wake me.’

But once they were settled down, perhaps because of the dew forming on their faces, or through fear of animals disturbing them, neither boy slept for a while. And it was as they were gazing up at the night sky that Willie raised a subject they had discussed the day before. ‘You really think your dad’s boat from Southampton will beat my dad’s?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jonathan truthfully. The huge bet had been the talk of Lymington the previous day. After a short pause, however, thinking he owed it to his friend and his family to give them the best information he could, he
added: ‘I think if my father’s bet so much on the race he must be sure he’s going to win. He’s very careful. I don’t think your father ought to bet on winning, Willie.’

‘He never bets.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Says he takes enough risks anyway without betting as well.’

‘What sort of risks?’

‘Never mind. I can’t tell you.’

‘Oh.’ Jonathan thought. ‘What can’t you tell me?’ It sounded interesting.

Willie said nothing for a bit. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said finally.

‘What?’

‘My dad’s boat can go faster than your father thinks. But you mustn’t tell him.’

‘Why?’

Willie was silent. Jonathan asked him why again, but got no answer. He gently kicked him. Willie said nothing.

‘I’ll pinch you,’ Jonathan offered.

‘Don’t.’

‘All right. But tell me.’

Willie took a deep breath. ‘Do you promise not to tell?’ he began.

All Lymington was buzzing when Jonathan Totton and Willie Seagull returned safely in the morning, which they were able to do quite early since they had hurried along the Forest edge as soon as the first hint of dawn had allowed them to see their way.

All Lymington rejoiced, all Lymington was curious. And when all Lymington discovered that they had been up all night and worried themselves half to death because the two boys had gone looking for a dragon, all Lymington was outraged.

At least, they claimed they were. The women all said
that the boys should be soundly whipped. The men, remembering their own boyhoods, agreed, but were more or less lenient. The mayor told the fathers firmly that if they didn’t deal with their sons he would take them to the whipping post himself. Everyone privately blamed Burrard for telling them foolish stories about dragons in the first place. So Burrard hid in his house.

Henry Totton, before delivering sentence on his son, explained to him carefully that this showed the dangers of mixing with people like Willie Seagull, who had obviously led him astray; and was astonished when his son stoutly assured him that the whole expedition had been his idea and that it was he who had made Willie stay the night. At first he was unable to believe it, but when finally he did, his grief and disappointment were very great. For once, however, Jonathan really didn’t care.

Alan Seagull took his son by the ear and hauled him away to the quay and along to their strange house into which they disappeared together. There he took down a strap from the wall and hit Willie twice, after which he was laughing so much that his wife had to finish the job for him.

The punishment of Jonathan, however, was a sadder affair. Nobody laughed. Henry Totton did what he knew he must do. He did it not only with a sense of mystification at the whole episode but also with the belief that it could only make this strange boy hate him. So that Jonathan, although the whipping hurt, was rather proud of the whole affair; while his poor father ended the session in a far greater agony than any his son felt.

He is all I have, the merchant thought, and now I have lost him. Because of a dragon. Nor – so little did the poor man know of childhood – had he any idea what to do with Jonathan next.

It was a source of complete amazement to him therefore, the
next day, when his son quite cheerfully asked him: ‘Will you take me to the salterns with you when you go there next time, Father?’

And anxious not to lose the chance of a reconciliation he answered quickly: ‘I’m going there this very afternoon.’

The unusual warmth of the last few days had changed to more typical April weather. Small white and grey clouds crossed the washed blue sky. The breeze was damp; occasional gusts brought a light spotting of rain, as Henry Totton and Jonathan, having walked to the church at the top of the High Street, turned left and descended the long lane that led down towards the sea.

The coastal strip below the borough was a bare and windswept place. From Lymington quay, the river’s small estuary continued south for about a mile until it emerged fully into the Solent. On the right side, below the small ridge on which the borough stood, and extending southwest for two and a half miles to the little inlet and hamlet of Keyhaven, lay the wide, watery flats of Pennington Marshes.

It was an empty-seeming place: green wastes of tufted marsh grass, little gorses soaked with salty mist, small thorn trees stunted and warped by the sea breeze dotted the landscape. Beyond, the long line of the Isle of Wight hovered across the Solent, its blue-green slopes turning into chalk cliffs away on the right. You might have thought the place was habitation only for the gulls and curlews and wild duck upon the marshes. But you would have been wrong.

For down near the shore a string of small buildings and a score or more of what looked like tiny windmills, their sails at present motionless, told a different story, reminding you that it was this marshland that provided the most important commodity the merchants of Lymington shipped: salt.

There had been salt pans there since Saxon times. The need for salt was huge. There was no other way of preserving flesh or fish. When the farmers killed their pigs
and cattle in November, the meat had all to be salted so it could be used during the winter. If the king wanted venison from the Forest for his court or to feed his troops, it must be salted. England produced vast quantities and it all came from the sea.

Henry Totton owned a saltern on Pennington Marshes. They could see its boiling house and wind pumps as soon as they started along the gravelly path across the levels. It was one of a group down by the shoreline. It did not take them long to reach the place.

Jonathan liked the salterns; perhaps it was because of where they were, so close to the sea. The first thing needed for making salt was a large feeder pond, set just in from the shoreline, into which the sea water could flow at high tide. Jonathan loved to watch the sea come rippling in down the curving channels. He and Willie had once made a similar construction of their own when they were playing on a sandy beach along the coast.

The salt pans that came next were carefully built. They were, in fact, a huge single basin – shallow and dead level – divided into small ponds, about twenty feet square, by mud banks six inches high and just wide enough for a man to walk on. Water from the feeder pond was baled into these with wooden scoops; but they were only filled about three inches deep. From here, the salt-making began.

It was very simple. The water had to evaporate. This would only work in the summer and, the warmer the weather and hotter the sun, the more salt you could produce. The season usually began at the very end of April. In a good year it might last sixteen weeks. Once, in a very bad year, it had lasted only two.

The idea was not to leave the water to evaporate in a single pan.

‘Evaporation takes time, Jonathan,’ his father had told him long ago, ‘and we need a continuous supply.’

So the method was to move the water up a line of pans, so
that it gradually evaporated and achieved a higher salt concentration as it went. To keep it moving along the pans, they used wind pumps.

They were very simple; they had probably been used on the marshes below the New Forest in Saxon times and were hardly different from those known in the Middle East two thousand years before. They were about ten feet high, with a simple cross carrying four little sails like a windmill. As the sails went round they drove a cam, which operated a rudimentary water pump below. From shallow pan to shallow pan the water was pumped along, until it reached the final part of the process at the boiling house.

Totton’s reason for going out today was to make a thorough inspection so that any repairs needed after the winter could be made in good time. He and Jonathan went over it together.