Millennium [antikvár]

Chapter I THE WOOD i At the bottom of the garden was a broad meadow and across the meadow lay the wood. Both belonged to a farm whose buildings were half a mile away. Meadow and wood, they were the outskirts of the farmer's holding. To Charles and Anne that wood was a world. All places outside it were circumscribed ; confined to events that were to be expected, possessed by people in authority. It might be the farmer's wood, but deeply they knew it belonged to nobody. It did not, they felt, belong to them. Once they had both been taken to the city of London. To them the wood was of less limited dimensions even than that. They had seen the crowds of people on the pavements, coming and going; they had indeed wondered enormously at the crush of traffic in the streets. From the bridge that spanned the river over which their train came into the station they had seen the sea of roofs that had no horizon but seemed to go on into the sky, yet the wood —no more than a few hundred acres of it—was bigger than this. To them its proportions were made up of and governed by its possibilities. These were beyond all reckoning. They had seen a fox and many squirrels in the wood. They had seen an otter in the stream. There were rabbits and hares, stoats and weasels. Charles found birds' nests he declared were never to be found in the garden. From their bedroom in the Vicarage they heard cries in the wood 9