There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest. The two little girls were evacuees, who had been sent away from the city by train, with a large number of other children. They all had their names attached to their coats with safety-pins, and they carried little bags or satchels, and the regulation gas-mask.
With the phrase "there were once," Byatt opens "The Thing in the Forest" with the clichéd language of a fairytale. However, the paragraph that follows uses plain prose to describe a serious situation. With this juxtaposition between language intended for children and content having to do with the dangers of the Second World War, Byatt sets the tone for a story about the boundary between the unreal and all-too-real.
They did not even know why they were going, since neither of their mothers had quite known how to explain the danger to them. How do you say to your child, I am sending you away, because enemy bombs may fall out of the sky, because the streets of the city may burn like forest fires of brick and timber, but I myself am staying here, in what I believe may be daily danger of burning, burying alive, gas, and ultimately perhaps a grey army rolling in on tanks over the suburbs, or sailing its submarines up our river, all guns blazing? So the mothers (who did not resemble each other at all) behaved alike, and explained nothing, it was easier.
In this passage, the narrator's expository narration subtly changes to incorporate the thoughts of the parents who decide it is easier not to tell their children why they are being evacuated from London. This use of the narrative technique knowns as free indirect style allows Byatt's third-person omniscient narrator to parrot the internal voice of the parental characters. By using this technique, Byatt conveys the exasperation and incredulity of the girls' mothers as they come to terms with the absurdity of the dire situation they find themselves in.
The train stopped frequently, and when it stopped, they used their gloves to wipe rounds, through which they peered out at flooded fields, furrowed hillsides and tiny stations whose names were carefully blacked out, whose platforms were empty of life. The children did not know that the namelessness was meant to baffle or delude an invading army. They felt—they did not think it out, but somewhere inside them the idea sprouted—that the erasure was because of them, because they were not meant to know where they were going or, like Hansel and Gretel, to find the way back.
Ignorant of the reason they are being evacuated from London, Penny and Primrose don't know what to make of the eerie sight of the blacked-out station names at every stop. The narrator explains to the reader that the station names have been obscured as a wartime precaution; were the Germans to invade the British mainland, they would have a more difficult time navigating a landscape devoid of place names. In an instance of dramatic irony, this fact eludes Penny and Primrose. As children whose knowledge of the world is to a high degree informed by fairytales, the girls' default assumption is that the station names have been obscured so they cannot find their way home.
“We have to be careful not to get lost,” she said. “In stories, people make marks on tree-trunks, or unroll a thread, or leave a trail of white pebbles—to find their way back.”
As the girls enter the forest—the first time either has been in the woods—Penny relies on her knowledge of fairytales to navigate the unknown territory. In this passage, Penny references how child protagonists in stories such as Hansel and Gretel mark their paths so they know how to get back out of the forest. With this line, Byatt includes another fairytale reference as a self-aware announcement to the reader that she is playing with the conventions of fairytales to craft a story that exists as much in the real world as it does in the realm of the impossible.
Did they hear it first or smell it first? Both sound and scent were at first infinitesimal and dispersed. Both gave the strange impression of moving in—in waves—from the whole perimeter of the forest. Both increased very slowly in volume, and both were mixed, a sound and a smell fabricated of many disparate sounds and smells. A crunching, a crackling, a crushing, a heavy thumping, combined with threshing and thrashing, and added to that a gulping, heaving, boiling, bursting steaming sound, full of bubbles and farts, piffs and explosions, swallowings and wallowings. The smell was worse, and more aggressive, than the sound. It was a liquid smell of putrefaction, the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins, the smell of blocked drains, and unwashed trousers, mixed with the smell of bad eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding. The new, ordinary forest smells and sounds, of leaves and humus, fur and feathers, so to speak, went out like lights as the atmosphere of the thing preceded it. The two little girls looked at each other, and took each other’s hand. Speechlessly and instinctively they crouched down behind a fallen tree-trunk, and trembled, as the thing came into view.
In this passage, Byatt introduces the Thing into a story that has, until this point, existed within the realm of plausibility. Byatt breaks with the established narrative conventions of realism to describe a creature that belongs to the world of fairytales but that is nonetheless crashing into the girls' reality. The jarring introduction of the creature in the text is effective because it mirrors the way the creature suddenly arrives in the otherwise stable reality the girls have known. Rather than establish the creature's presence as something fleeting or possibly imagined, Byatt goes to great lengths to describe its unpleasant smell and appearance. With this detailed description, Byatt ensures there is no question for the reader or the girls that the Thing is undeniably real.
They returned from evacuation, like many evacuees, so early that they then lived through wartime in the city, bombardment, blitz, unearthly light and roaring, changed landscapes, holes in their world where the newly dead had been. Both lost their fathers. Primrose’s father was in the Army, and was killed, very late in the war, on a crowded troop-carrier sunk in the Far East. Penny’s father, a much older man, was in the Auxiliary Fire Service, and died in a sheet of flame in the East India Docks on the Thames, pumping evaporating water from a puny coil of hose. They found it hard, after the war, to remember these different men.
A few months after their surreal encounter with the Thing in the forest, Penny and Primrose return to London and experience similar fates. In this passage, Byatt uses plain language to detail the traumatic sights that become the norm for the girls as they adjust to life in wartime Britain. By using multiple clauses, Byatt's prose conveys the casual resignation the girls feel as the disorienting events pile up. Although both lose their fathers, they have become so inured to emotional pain that they respond to their grief with more repression, making it so that they hardly remember who their fathers even were.
"I think there are things that are real—more real than we are—but mostly we don’t cross their paths, or they don’t cross ours. Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours."
Decades after their encounter with the Thing in the forest, Penny and Primrose meet by chance. It is their first opportunity to discuss what they saw, and neither woman has any doubt that what they saw was real. In this passage, Penny condenses her thoughts about the Thing and suggests that it was something "more real" than she and Primrose are themselves. The passage is significant because it offers a symbolic interpretation of what the Thing represents. Although it is a decidedly unreal creature whose existence defies everything the girls know about the world, it is "more real" because it is a representation of the unknown realm of suffering and trauma brought about by war and grief. The Second World War is one of the "very bad times" Penny mentions: a time when routine life is severely disrupted and humanity's darkest impulses are brought to light. In this context, both girls have been violently disabused of their innocent notions of the world, and they have grown up permanently scarred by the jarring experience.
