‘Come on, Rebecca! You used to love going and l-l-looking at things. Well, let’s g-g-go and see if we can find spring.’
The weather could hardly have been less springlike, being cold and damp, with the great leafless beech branches swishing around irritably in a fretful wind. Rebecca was even more reluctant to go when Comfrey began heading off down the slopes towards what the moles in the Ancient System now called, ironically enough, the Old Wood. She had not been back since the fire and found she had a real fear of going there. It was all right for Comfrey; he was hardly old enough to remember it as it had once been—the Westside, the Marsh End, Barrow Vale—and could not feel the loss now that it was all gone.
But he went off so quickly that she had to follow, if only to stop him, and then she found she was twisting and turning down the slopes behind him, her eyes softening as she settled happily into being led, and she remembered how Bracken had led her once down the slopes, almost on this self-same route. Why! How big Comfrey was now compared with the weakling he had once been! He was thin and nervous, but he moved with a certain assurance through the wood. It was good being led by him. At the same time, there was an unusual air of secrecy, or suppressed excitement, about him that intrigued her. Comfrey was a strange mole!
The slopes were covered in sludgy leaf litter—mostly beech but with a few rotted oak leaves from the previous autumn and fresher ones that had blown up here from the few oaks still standing after the fire—all in the narrow zone at the bottom of the slope where both sets of trees grew uncomfortably together.
Rebecca knew when they were approaching the fire-devastated wood by the fact that the trees ahead suddenly lightened out, where once it had grown darker and more dense as they had gone under the thicker mixture of oak and ash branches and holly and hazel shrubs. The wind was freer than before as well, and there was a silence from the place ahead where once there might, even in this weather, have been the startings of a spring bird chorus.
Then they were there, among the stark, burnt stumps that stood stiff and unnatural above the ashy wood floor.
‘Comfrey! Comfrey!’ called Rebecca, wanting to stop him going any further into this desolate place, but he ran on, pretending not to hear, which wasn’t like him either. ‘Oh, Comfrey,’ she sighed, following on.
They skirted round blackened tree roots, over tangles of ashy bramble skeletons, round jumbles of shattered, burnt branches, black and wet and lifeless. She looked in vain for something she recognised, some scent, some tunnel entrance, some shape to the roots that might tell her where she was. But the air was dead of scent and nothing was familiar, and anyway, Comfrey was running on so fast that there was no time to stop and pause.
Here and there the wood floor was thick with a white, sodden ash where the fire had been so hot that it had reduced wood to bleached-out embers. In other places the heavy rains of winter, unimpeded in their drainage by undergrowth and living plant roots, had eroded out little gulleys that zigzagged downwards for a short way, with a few flints and stones left clear of ash and soil in their centres, like miniature dry river beds.
Then she saw something among the ashes that brought her to a startled halt. Fresh spring green it was, peeping from among grey ash.
‘Comfrey! Look! Stop, Comfrey, and look!’ It was the first pushings of a fern shoot, curled up tight and hairy, parts of it green, fresh green, among the dead ashes. Then she saw another, which had forced aside two or three lumps of grey-black wood ash to get at the light and air for its growth.
‘Comfrey! Stop!’ Oh, she was so excited! There was life still in the soil of the burnt-down wood and it would come up in the next few weeks and cover the dead, white, grey, black ashes of the fire with a carpet of green.
But Comfrey didn’t stop. He went on, darting this way and that, looking over his shoulder sometimes to see that she was following and then pressing on again. And he was smiling to himself, excited and pleased to see her excitement. ‘Where are we going, Comfrey?’ she called.
‘Just to see if there are any plants growing here,’ he called back, not stopping.
‘But there are, there are,’ she said, ‘didn’t you see them?’ He rushed on, deeper and deeper into the Old Wood, over the charred surface, ignoring the great hulks of dead trees that stuck up into the grey, billowing sky, snout ever onward. She had never seen him move in such a straight line for so long. Not Comfrey, who tended to snout at everything he saw and ended up going in the opposite direction to the one in which he had set out and finding a different plant from the one he had been looking for.
But finally he stopped, breathless and trying to act naturally. ‘Well, just a few ferns, and some thistles. Not much, I’m afraid. I thought we might see more… Still, we m-might as well press on a bit further.’
