Children of the Forest by Juliette de Baïracli Levy

The New Forest is an interesting and natural place for raising children. I can well understand children growing up sturdy, independent and nature-wise in such an environment; the New Forest helped me to bring up my two as nature-children, and many neighbour children were much the same.

One of the best of the forest pleasures was the bathing in the clean, rushing streams or the quiet ponds; there children could bathe free as otter cubs, unhampered by clothing which cuts off true contact with water. There my boy and girl splashed and leapt and were taught first swimming strokes, rolled on the sweet turf, often chamomile turf, and ran and raced and chased down the grassy flower-pranked rides to warm themselves when the waters were over-cold.

A favourite pastime was for my children to stay as motionless as possible, at intervals in Latchmore brook at evening, and there watch the minnows rising to the flickering flies, whilst the brook pools coloured by sunset turned amber and rose. I would often let the children stay very late, and on a few rare occasions we were fortunate to see the deer come out from the dark tree shades, moving with their nervous dancing gait to the pools to drink, and there to be made twice lovely by reflection in the dim waters.

Rafik and Luz had been told that the New Forest deer are genuinely wild, having been brought there by the Romans, and that this forest is one of the very few places where all three types of deer are found, roe, fallow and red. Although we were so much in the quiet parts of the forest and often keeping very silent ourselves, we never saw one of the red species, which had been a familiar sight for me once when I lived on the moors of Exmoor.

But in the late evenings we sometimes met with herons, perhaps from the nearby heronry at Sandy Balls, and often saw fern owls hovering pale and mysterious over the bracken as they searched for small animal prey and then cast forth the hair of their victims in their wool-like pellets which we found everywhere. We loved the frequent sound of the nightjar in the evenings of summertime, the Jossy Grigory, as it is called in the New Forest. We loved also the equally jarring, creaking call of the cock pheasant from the water meadow below our cottage, where sometimes we saw him running in his glinting beauty through his own golden forests of marsh marigolds or water iris.

In the evenings further, the bells of the forest churches, near and far, could be heard often across Abbots Well, at practice or service. Eiza Cooper, with the long memory of the Gypsy, had once told Rafik and Luz about the cherry bells of Wood Green, how cherry trees there, famed for their black juicy fruits, used to be hung with bells to frighten away the crowding forest birds, and the trees had acquired the name of Merry Trees. Since that telling, my children always insisted that the church bells ringing were those of the Merry Trees. I let them think what they wanted; Luz was barely three years when we left the forest. Several summers we did get baskets of the black cherries from Wood Green orchards, big, juicy and very sweet fruit but with over-large stones.

Other forest Gypsies with equally long memories have spoken of the former cherry bells of Wood Green, for they were remembering when, hearing the laughter of their children and mine playing together in the Abbots Well garden, they described such laughter as ‘comin’ over as sweet soundin’ as the cherry bells.’

There are many wild cherry trees around the forest, a charm in the blowing, frail white blossom, and possessing fruits possible to eat though small and bitter. I added them to blackberry jam in the making, as it helped it to set very well.

One feature essential to nature-living is to be able to eat natural food. We were very sad about the disappearance of the watercress beds from The Merrie Thought woods, for the watercress there had been one of the foods that I most associated with living in the New Forest, and one which I missed when overseas. Now the pungent, healthful cress was entirely gone, and I expect gone for ever. Only a little grew elsewhere at the roadside below Abbots Well, and there the forest ponies and cattle usually got at it before it had attained a size worth the gathering.

Most of the year there was an abundant selection of wild salad herbs available, both within our garden and beyond in the forest. Of the wild garden salad things I have already told, beyond in the forest, we could get in addition to those which grew in the garden, watercress, watermint, lady’s smock, brooklime, shepherd’s purse, spearmint, peppermint, good King Henry and wood sorrel. All such wild salad plants were eaten raw, only chopped finely and mixed with flaked cereals, oats and other cereals, as wild salad plants are often over-pungent.

We cooked the large amounts of young nettle that we ate, gathering a deep basketful daily. We cooked it for several minutes in boiling, salty water, until softened, sprinkled with raw flaked cereals, then farm butter added or the white Caerphilly cheese of Welsh origin, but being made also near the New Forest, in Somerset. We considered that there was no more delicious meal, and we never tired of it. Often I added a handful of the forest wild onion to the nettle dish, and then it tasted best of all. We were able to enjoy our ‘Gypsy spinach’ as springtime nettle is often called, up to May Day, around which time the Devil is said to require the nettles for the spinning of his shirts; and around that time it certainly loses most of its tenderness and flavour, and we ceased to gather it.

The Devil also interfered with another of our favourite forest foods – blackberries – which in the New Forest are considered not fit to eat after September ending, as on October the first of every year, the Devil spits on them! We found this belief also to possess truth.

For that same Caerphilly cheese that we ate with nettle, we used to seek out another forest plant which has association with devils: and that was the bay shrub and tree. The leaves of the bay (I also used bog myrtle) when pressed on to the cheese impart to it a most pleasant flavour. Around us in the forest among many of the old ruins of former clay cabins, bay trees are yet growing, showing the site of the former door, where it was an old New Forest custom to plant bay for more than the good flavour of their leaves, for the protection that they were considered to give against all evil things, from thunder and lightning and forest fires, to serpents, witches and devils. ‘Neither Devil, evil spirits nor destructive elements and beasts will harm mankind where a bay tree grows.’

We also used young fern fronds, which when cooked similarly to nettle (which means a quick dipping in boiling salty water) have a texture and flavour quite like asparagus.

Our best forest harvests naturally came in the autumn, including the various fungi, nuts, berries and wild crab apples. Hasley enclosure is famed for its sweet chestnuts, and forest people come from far away to pick the fine chestnuts. Also in Hasley, after a warm summer, magnificent chanterelles grow, especially in association with the roots of the fir trees.

All around our Abbots Well garden on the water-meadow side were old hazel trees, and we reaped a fine harvest from them. The Gypsies also brought us baskets of hazel and cob nuts: and such a harvest has much beauty, the gold-brown nuts in their light-green cases the colour of still water in the framework of the old baskets. Zoe Birkbeck, my friend, then modelling for Augustus John, brought us cob nuts from Fryern Court, which tasted like the sweetest of goat’s milk. One does not garden for nuts, nature grows them, but I consider Dorelia John to be a talented gardener, and she loves the land with the passion of a peasant. I gave her my yellow-berried holly tree, luteo, before I left my garden; it was a tree that I loved and I know it went to a good place. So many things had come to us from the Johns’ garden. One especially to be remembered was a vast Victorian-type porcelain tureen filled with raspberries of a size which I had not seen before. And the scent of that gift! It filled the cottage for three days, for I kept the fruits good by pouring honey over them, and that in turn gave to us countless glasses of the ruby-coloured fragrant juice in addition to the fruits.

Among our happiest forest events every year were the summer and autumn fruit gatherings: cultivated and wild strawberries in the market gardens, wild berries on the heaths and in the glades. We had especially good times in the nearby market garden of Bob Brown, another of our forester friends, and who in both cases like Lenn Witt, grew more than he could find the time or the labour to market, and who used only natural, non-chemical cultivation.

We were allowed to pick our own fruit for purchase and the two children told by the Brown family to eat as much as they could pick. Our first summer there came much sunlight, and a big strawberry crop growing amongst meadow grass and awaiting ploughing-in. Strawberries growing amongst tall grass are laborious to gather but close in nature to their cool woodland origin, and I think grown that way they taste best of all and possess such a glow of colour.

My boy, Rafik, and I, walked barefoot down the grassy places where the crimson berries hid themselves. The little girl Luz was crawling at that time more than walking, and we seated her at one side of the field in a place where wild marguerites flowered, and which she could pick, and fed her with handfuls of strawberries as we passed by, her mouth ever open like a young cuckoo’s for the sweet, refreshing food that we brought to her. As we generally picked in the late evening when my usual day’s work was done, we most evenings had the added pleasure of the swifts which Bob Brown was fortunate to have around his place. They came gnat-chasing over the strawberry fields, never low-flying like the swallows, but passing high overhead in drifts like winter-darkened leaves, wind-swept across the sky – wildest and most wonderful and wayward of birds. Filling one’s mouth with sun-ripened strawberries and at the same time seeing and hearing the swifts: that was very good.

One treat for the forest children comes late in the year, and is the occasion of Guy Fawkes’ night. With so much natural fuel all around in the forest, it was usual to have great fires flaring like beacons on the commons and up on the moorland ridges.

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Juliette de Baïracli Levy was a pioneer of holistic veterinary medecine. She was born in Manchester and studied veterinary medicine at the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool, but became disillusioned with the way these institutions treated animals. Two years into her studies, she left university and embarked instead on a journey around the world, living with nomads, Gypsies and peasant farmers, so she could learn how to use plants for the treatment of animals. In the late 1930s, she returned to England and started a clinic in London that became particularly well-known for treating canine distemper. She also wrote many influential books on veterinary herbs, including The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable (1952) and The Complete Herbal Book for the Dog and Cat (1955). She died at the age of 96 in Burgdorf, Switzerland.

This is an extract from Wanderers in the New Forest, republished by Little Toller Books, spring 2023, with a new introduction by Megan McCubbin.