“I’d like to see the deepest parts, you know, the sort of middle bits of that forest, I would. Can we have a look now?” asked Drystan. “Gran? What do—”
The boys’ father, Henry Handley, interjected, “With all due respect to dear gran, she’s not your gaffer, is she? Who pays for—”
But Drystan cut him off, saying boldly, “You should be better to Gran. She knows more than—”
“Huh,” his father said, with an odd, taut smile. He was a dumpy, freckled man with long woolly red hair combed to the side and, at the time, muttonchop sideburns. He was often both irritable and transparent, so when he said to his aunties with clenched, stifled fury and a forced Brummie* twang, “Awww. ’E’s a swait boy oo adores his gran,” it sounded as false as it did spiteful. They all knew he beat the boys regularly, especially the elder one; they often had puffy pink welts on their white legs and arms, still chubby with toddler-fat in Cuthbert’s case.
Their grandmother didn’t react to these edgy exchanges between her eldest grandson and son-in-law, who had developed a recent mutual loathing. She waited a few moments and quietly began explaining how it was best to avoid the forest’s interior, which she still remembered well.
“Things thee’ll want to forget—that’ll be in the middle of the Wyre,” his grandmother was saying, hamming it up for the boys but not without real unease. They needed a look at the world out of West Brom, but she also sensed the Wyre might be too much for them, especially little Cuddy. “It’s a tricky place, boys, but it’s lovely, too. But honestly, thee const* get right lost.”
Cuthbert’s mother, Mary Handley, sat cramped beside Henry on a black-leather settee that looked big and misplaced in the cottage, fingering her teacup and leaning forward with a stiff, mannered face, unwilling to relax. Husband and wife each maintained, in their own miserable ways, an illusion that all was diamond-glinted good fortune in the city. Having moved themselves from the Marches to Birmingham years ago, they had barely broached the lower middle class; they kept their own ire at this state of affairs tamed with purchases of chocolate and lager and a few overworn sports jackets and perfumes, jingoism, and an abiding unctuousness toward the rich. Neither had any use for forests.
“I’d like to see it cleared, meself, except if there’s any, loik, swans in there,” said Henry. “There’s loads of woodlands in Wales, and no one makes a tuppence off Wyre these days, do they? It’s not like the old barking-peeling and tannin days, is it?”
Their gran, who was named Winefride after one of the local so-called miracle wells of the Marches, took a frank swallow of tea, trying to ignore the man’s foolishness. Hundreds of species of birds inhabited Wyre, but no swans. She was a white-haired woman with a strong, square face; for the day trip, she’d worn a long pretty nylon dirndl skirt with gold acanthus-leaf designs and a gray Orlon sweater, both bought by catalog order from Kays.
“Of course,” said Henry, sitting up a bit on the settee, and smirking. “The politics of chopping anything down is all mardy* these days. Even in Wales.”
Two plump rose-cheeked women of roughly the same vintage, the great-aunties, were scurrying in and out of the kitchen, bringing a pot of damson jam, triangles of toast, slices of Cox’s Orange Pippins, and a Spode teapot.
“Bist sure thee’st stay near the big oaks, along the edges, and don’t be too loud, and you’ll see or hear a thing or two,” their gran said to the boys, ignoring her son-in-law’s last comment. “But if errun of thee go loblolling in there, all tittery and tottery, no living thing will show itself. But the Boogles will!”
“Boogles,” gasped Cuthbert.
“I’ll outrun any Boogles,” said Drystan.
“No you won’t,” said Cuthbert. “You ’av to stay with me, Dryst. You’re not doing a runner, roight?”
The boys had heard about Boogles, the “owd sprites,” many times from their gran, but they had never been close to a place where the creatures supposedly lived.
Still restive from the car ride, they had been roving the tiny sitting room. A gold-framed photo on a wall cabinet caught Cuthbert’s eye, and he scrutinized it from inches away. It showed a young, burly soldier with a brisk, proud smile. He wore the same heavy wool tunic and puttees he saw in a photograph of his dead grandfather, but this soldier looked robustly healthy.
“That’s your great-uncle Tom,” one of their aunties said. “’E used to keep a pet hob-lamb e’d let run around our kitchen. E’yunt come back from Ypres.”
“That’s a man,” said Henry.