The Thing in the Forest

English academic and writer A. S. Byatt uses the Blitz—Nazi Germany’s bombing campaign against London and other British cities—as the context for her short story “The Thing in the Forest,” which was first published in The New Yorker in January 2002. This work of historical fiction is one of many by the acclaimed author and critic, whose historiographic, metafictional novel Possession won the Booker Prize in 1990. This study guide uses the 2011 Kindle Edition from Vintage Digital.

Two girls, Primrose and Penny, are among the numerous young evacuees of the Blitz who are preparing to travel on a train to the countryside. These children, with their knitted gloves and their name tags pinned to their clothing, shuffle along the platform “[…] like a disorderly dwarf regiment” (3). Many carry very little—small bags at the most—while others wrestle with suitcases of toys and other knickknacks.

On the train, Penny and Primrose become friends and share a morsel of chocolate and an apple. They bond over their mutual confusion about their journey and speculate that it may be a punishment rather than a holiday. Both girls were sent away by mothers who could not find the words to explain the war, the bombings, or why they themselves were staying behind. Still, the girls are happy to have each other’s company. Through the train’s dirty windows, the girls see waterlogged pastures and “furrowed hillsides,” as well as empty train platforms with erased names. Not knowing the absence of names is meant to confuse the enemy soldiers, Primrose and Penny assume it is to keep them from finding their way home like Hansel and Gretel. This fear goes unsaid, and instead they muse on the everyday things they dislike, like gross food and having their hair washed roughly. Eventually the train stops and the children transfer to a bus for another journey. Penny and Primrose sit together again, enduring a nauseating, meandering ride through the countryside to a large mansion requisitioned as interim housing for the evacuated children.

They are served a light meal before brushing their teeth and going to sleep in the former servants’ quarters. In their improvised dorm, the children all collapse into exhausted sleep, with the exception of a few whose crying pierces the blackout. When daylight comes, the mood is brighter, and the children are fed breakfast and sent outside to play. While many children stay in the confines of the mansion’s grounds, Penny and Primrose venture into the nearby forest. Primrose is apprehensive, but the girls agree to seize the chance to see a forest for the first time. An even younger child named Alys tries to join them but, not wanting to babysit, they ditch her and run into the trees.

Primrose and Penny move carefully through the trees, touching the bark and leaves and taking in the eerie silence of the grove. There are no clear trails, so they remain within sight of the mansion’s gate. They begin to hear the sounds of birds rustling above them, as well as coughing and “sharp cracks” in the distance. They see mushrooms and fruits but avoid collecting the latter out of fear they may be unsafe. Soon, they are confronted with an overwhelming scent of “[…] liquid putrefaction, the smell of maggoty things […] blocked drains, mixed with the smell of bad eggs, and rotten carpets” (8). Accompanying this is a “threshing and thrashing” sound with “heaving, boiling, bursting” as well as “explosions […] and wallowings” (8). The girls grab hold of each other and hide out of sight while they wait for the source of the noises and smells to emerge. A large centipede-like creature with a triangular mask on its bulbous head appears. They see an enormous mouth that is enveloped by thin lips “like welts from whipstrokes” (8), set in a face frozen in a look of anguish. Its legs, which are positioned akimbo, are attached to a body made of “[…] rank meat, decaying vegetation” and other man-made detritus (9). As it moves through the forest, it clumsily destroys everything in its path, trailing “bloody slime and dead foliage” in its wake (9).

After it passes, the girls console each other as they cry and then return to the mansion. Primrose and Penny expect the world to have changed after seeing all that “obliteration and destruction” (9), but they are surprised to find the other children still playing normally. Releasing hands, the girls part and don’t speak with one another again. The following day, Penny is placed in a parsonage, while Primrose is sent to a dairy farm. Although the placements are brief, the girls form strong memories of details like the vicar’s wife’s corset drying outside and the sound of the cows being milked. They also remember the thing in the forest with intense precision. The girls eventually return to their homes and experience the terror of bombings firsthand. Added to this, both girls lose their fathers to the war. Primrose’s father drowns on a sunken troop carrier, and Penny’s dies while fighting a fire on the Thames. Their few memories of these men are imprecise, based on photographs and imagined details like ash on clothing. When the conflict ends, Primrose’s mother remarries and expands her family. Penny’s mother, however, is consumed by her grief.

Penny excels academically and pursues developmental psychology studies, eventually becoming a child psychologist; Primrose gets little schooling because she is responsible for her siblings. She works odd jobs in bars and shops to get by. Through working at churches and the Salvation Army, she discovers a gift for storytelling and becomes known as “Aunty Primrose.” Her stories become popular with children, and she sets up a spot in the mall where she entertains children.

Years later, in 1984, Penny and Primrose happen to visit the mansion again on the same day. Unbeknownst to each other, both women recently lost their mothers and felt drawn to holiday in this region. By this time, the house has passed to the national trust and become a museum, offering tours of its elegant rooms. Absent among the many photographs and relics is any trace of the child evacuees. Primrose and Penny converge on the same book, which shows a knight in a forest battling a creature, “the Loathly Worm” (12), whose description resembles the thing in the forest. Legend says the worm wreaked havoc on the area and survived many attempts to kill it. Penny and Primrose instantly recognize each other and chat idly about the house, eventually returning to the subject of the thing in the forest. Primrose questions whether they truly saw it, but Penny is sure they did. Neither has spoken of it out of fear no one would believe them. They talk about the carnage it left in its wake and the fact that they could not find Alys anywhere after; they assume the worm killed her. The women agree to meet for dinner the next day, but neither shows up because they feel more nostalgia would be pointless.

The following day, both women rise thinking of the forest. While Penny deliberately goes walking elsewhere, Primrose returns to the wood and retraces the steps they took as girls. The forest appears as it did before, only lusher and thicker. She hears birdsong and finds traces of recent rain, a mossy bank, and flowers, including primroses and selfheals. Primrose also sees a squirrel that reminds her of the fur-stuffed animals her mother handcrafted for her as Christmas gifts through the war. The knowledge that her mother made the toys painfully undercut her belief in the magic of “Father Christmas.” Still, a young Primrose conjured stories of an “enchantress in a fairy wood” whose animals kept her safe (16). Primrose thinks the forest by the mansion is similarly magical, but at the same time she knows it as “the source of terror” (16). The forest tales she tells children are full of “glamor” that she recognizes as coming from the same place as this terror. Sitting in the wood, she thinks of her home—a shabby apartment above a Chinese restaurant—whose contents do not feel as real to her as the forest does. This makes her question what a person defines as “real.” Recalling learning of her father’s drowning, she remembers picturing a scenic underwater world that she knew was a fantasy. However, it feels more real to her than the memories of what she was actually doing when her mother broke the news. Primrose also remembers Penny talking about “things that are more real than we are” (17), and through this she finally finds understanding. Primrose gets up and leaves the woods.

Penny, for whom memories of “the Thing” are a daily occurrence, finds that her long walk has led her into the forest by the mansion. By this time, darkness has fallen and the forest is quiet. She sniffs for the telltale rotting scent but detects only the usual odor of decaying plants. Penny looks for signs of the worm’s slithering, thinking she sees tunnels strewn with “damp wool or fur” (18), bits of old newspaper, cloth, hair, and bones. She takes this as confirmation it has been in the area. She thinks of putting the bones in her bag but leaves them because they could just be animal remains. Instead, Penny sits and reflects on the way the thing shaped her path in life, making her abandon the imaginary worlds of fiction for the “dead, who inhabited real history” (19). This is responsible for her career as a psychotherapist and study of the “unseen things” within humans. She feels that seeing “the unthinkable” as a child makes her equipped to work with similarly troubled children. Eventually, she hears the familiar clattering of the worm’s approach in the dark, but it turns away from her and the forest quiets again. The moon rises, evoking a memory of her father saying they would be safe from bombings on full moon nights. She recalls an image of him dying in flame but is not sure whether it came from her imagination or from someone’s report of the incident. She also thinks of how she imagined his light coffin being empty. In the quiet, she feels disappointment that the moon “released the wood” when she had been ready and waiting to greet the thing (20). Penny leaves the forest.

Later, Primrose and Penny return home on the same train, seeing each other only after disembarking. It brings back memories of their first train ride together as small children; however, this train is shiny and new. Their eyes meet awkwardly, and in each other they see an expression that reminds them of the thing in the forest. Knowing the other had also witnessed this thing keeps Penny and Primrose from believing it was their imagination. This is an uncomfortable truth, and the women depart without acknowledging each other.

Penny, however, struggles to resume her life. The images of her parents’ faces, Primrose’s, and even Alys’s remain ever present in her mind, but looming largest of all are the details of the thing’s face. Its memory eclipses all else, making her patients indistinguishable and distracting her from her day-to-day life. She endures the train journey again and a “century-long night” back in a rented room (21); she must see and “face” the thing in the forest. The next day she retraces her and Primrose’s original path and returns to the clearing. Sitting, she wordlessly calls the thing and quickly hears and smells its approach. Ready and waiting, she closes her eyes and prepares to “look it in the face” (21). In a shopping mall elsewhere, Primrose sits with her rainbow chairs and an audience of small children of all races and backgrounds. A few are crying or restless, but Primrose smiles and begins an “amazing” story that has “never been told before” (22). Smiling, she begins a story about “two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest” (22).