Summary
Narrated in the past tense by an unnamed, third-person omniscient narrator, “The Thing in the Forest” opens with the statement that there were once two little girls who saw—or believed they saw—a thing in the forest.
Primrose and Penny are among a large group of children who have been evacuated from London to a mansion in the countryside to escape the Nazi bombing of the capital in 1940. Penny is tall and thin and pale, while Primrose is “plump and blonde and curly.” The two ride in the same train car on the way out of London; they have not met before. Both girls’ mothers neglected to explain the true danger of staying in the city, and so the girls are not sure how long they will be away. They discuss whether it will be more like a holiday or a punishment, concluding it may be a bit of both. Penny and Primrose agree to stick together for the duration.
The grimy train rattles along the track, stopping occasionally. The girls look out the window to see the names of stations are blacked out. They do not know that the lack of names is meant to confuse an invading army. Instead, they both assume the erasure is meant to prevent them from knowing where they are going or how to get back, like Hansel and Gretel. The girls eat squares of chocolate and bond over shared dislikes: mushy peas, fat on roast meat, gangs of children on playgrounds. They perceive the other children on the train to be like one of those gangs.
The evacuated children are taken to a mansion house. It is owned by a civilian but has been commandeered so the military can eventually use it as a hospital for injured soldiers. The children are told they will be housed temporarily until local families can take them in. Primrose and Penny hold hands and wish that they will both go to the same family. Primrose says it will feel less like they are orphans if they stick together. After eating, the children assemble in a line and walk up the great house’s staircase. All the windows are covered up so that no light escapes. They are to sleep on military camp beds in what used to be the servants’ quarters. The girls worry the other children will start laughing and teasing and turn into a gang. However, there is only an uneasy silence filled with sobs suppressed by the thin pillows the children press their faces into.
Things seem better in the daylight. Penny and Primrose go out to play together in the grounds. Beyond the manicured lawn is a forest. Although the other children are kicking a ball around on the gravel terrace, Primrose and Penny decide to venture into the forest. As urban children, neither have been in a forest before. They decide they should look at it while they have the opportunity. Alys, a younger girl who has been sticking close to Penny and Primrose because she is on her own, says she wants to come too. The older girls tell her she is too little and that she’ll get lost. Alys insists, and Primrose says, “We don’t want you, you see.” Suddenly the older girls run, neither looking back to see if Alys is following.
In the forest, there are no obvious paths through the thicket. Penny says they have to be careful not to get lost. Primrose says they will just explore a little. Slowly, the girls set off on tiptoe. The silence of the forest unnerves them. They look at spiders making webs. They smell mushrooms, moss, sap, and a distant hint of ashes. They first notice the “Thing” because they can hear and smell it coming. They hear sounds of crunching, crackling, crushing, thumping, gulping, heaving, boiling, swallowing, and smell scents of putrefaction, like the bottom of trashcans, blocked drains, dirty trousers, bad eggs, old bedding. The girls crouch behind a fallen tree as the thing comes into view.
The thing has a triangular face that is rubbery and fleshy. It has an expression of pure misery, its wide mouth pulled down at the corners in pain. Its eyes are opaque white and blind-seeming, fringed by protruding eyebrows and lashes. It has powerful forearms it uses to drag itself forward on the ground. The forearms are like a cross between those of a primeval dragon and a powerful washerwoman. The thing’s large body, which appears “glued together,” is a turd-shaped amalgam of rank meat, decaying vegetation, wire netting, old dishcloths, pan scrubbers, and rusty nuts and bolts. It has feeble little legs, like those of a caterpillar or centipede. The thing bends and crushes through the forest, moving sluggishly as it gets wounded on sharp stones. In its wake, the thing leaves a trail of bloody slime and sticks stripped of foliage.
After the blind, stinking creature passes, the girls kneel on the mossy forest floor and hold each other while sobbing. They hold hands as they walk out of the forest, but release each other’s hands when they see the other children playing soccer and skipping as they were earlier. The girls don’t speak to each other again. They are sent to different families the next day—Primrose to a dairy farm and Penny to a parsonage. Later, they both look back on their time with the alien families in the way one remembers a dream, seeing only fragments of their time there. Their memories of the thing in the forest are also dream-like. In their memories, they see and smell the creature in vivid detail. They feel they cannot escape and that “this is a real thing in a real place.”
Analysis
The opening words of “The Thing in the Forest” grab the reader’s attention through the self-conscious use of clichéd language that is associated with fairytales. By stating that “There were once two girls,” Byatt writes in the register of a story intended for children. However, the author immediately subverts the reader’s expectation of what the story will be by establishing the serious historical context in which the story takes place. With this jarring mix of the genres of fairytale and historical fiction, Byatt establishes the appropriate tone for a story concerned with the blurred boundary between the real and unreal, the known and unknown.
Having subtly introduced the theme of the unreal, Byatt moves on in her first paragraphs to establish another major theme: the loss of one’s innocence. Byatt emphasizes Penny and Primrose’s naivety and obliviousness through omniscient narrative commentary that conveys the gap between what the girls assume is happening and what is actually happening. Because the girls are so young, their mothers both found it easier to send them out of London without explaining the reason. This leaves the girls to interpret signs of wartime abnormality—such as the blacked-out station names or the fact of their evacuation—as being part of a punishment directed at them.
Finding solace in their shared confusion about the circumstances they find themselves in, the girls agree to stick together while they are away from their families in the city. They also share an aversion to the other children, who they suspect could gang up on them at any moment. This fear of others keeps the girls separate from the larger group when it comes time to play. Rather than take part in the soccer game, the girls venture into the forest to explore the unfamiliar environment. In their innocence, they have no reason to suspect that the forest represents the threshold between reality and the unreal, the known and the unknown.
Having left stable reality by walking deep into the forest, Penny and Primrose happen upon the creature from the story’s title. It is a giant, worm-like being that seems to belong to the realm of fantasy. Byatt goes into great detail to explain the sensory overload that comes with witnessing the Thing, from its overpowering moans to its horrible stench to its miserable appearance. These overwrought details confirm that the creature is not part of the normal world. It is also significant that the Thing wears an expression of human misery on its face and that its body is a patchwork of flesh, bones, and the detritus of daily life. This description highlights the Thing’s symbolic function in the story, as it is a consolidation of human suffering and material ruins.
The girls react to the unreal creature with tears, an instinct to comfort each other, and a sense of companionship as they walk out of the forest hand in hand. However, something about the sight of the other children causes Penny and Primrose to release each other’s hands and act as if nothing happened. This emotional repression carries forward as the girls are immediately sent to different families without ever having discussed what they saw. With these plot developments, Byatt introduces the themes of trauma and unprocessed grief. Because their opportunity to make sense of the traumatic encounter is interrupted, Penny and Primrose both grow up constantly reliving the event in their thoughts.
