Far Forest

by Francis Brett Young

Jenny Hadley’s early years were spent in Mawne Heath, a barren, blighted environment on the verge of the industrial Midlands. Her father, a hard man given to drink and womanizing, was a chain-maker with his own forge behind the hovel in which the family lived. When her mother suddenly left home, Jenny was sent to live with her grandfather and deeply devout Aunt Thirza in the depths of Werewood (Wyre Forest) in Worcestershire. Jenny was desperately lonely in the old cottage by the Gladden Brook but, as the seasons passed, she grew to love both her grandfather and the sprawling forest. Then in spring, when the cherry trees were thick with blossom, Uncle Jem came visiting with Cousin David. During the ensuing idyllic days Jenny’s heart was lost. A bond developed between the cousins but, apart from a second brief meeting, they were to experience many twists of fortune before their paths crossed again.

Genres: Historical Fiction

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Francis Brett Young was born in 1884 at Hales Owen, Worcestershire, the eldest son of Dr Thomas Brett Young.

Educated at Iona Cottage High School, Sutton Coldfield and Epsom College, Francis read Medicine at Birmingham University before entering general practice at Brixham in 1907. The following year he married Jessie Hankinson whom he had met during his medical studies. She was a singer of some repute, having appeared as a soloist in Henry Wood's Promenade Concerts.

Francis based one of his earliest novels Deep Sea (1914) in Brixham but was soon to be caught up in the Great War. He served in the R.A.M.C. in East Africa, experiences recorded in Marching on Tanga.

After the war Francis and Jessie went to live in Capri where a number of novels with African as well as English backgrounds were produced. Popular success came in 1927 when Francis was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Portrait of Clare.

The Brett Youngs returned to England in 1929, staying for a while in the Lake District before settling at Craycombe House in Worcestershire in 1932. During this period Francis was at the height of his fame and his annually produced novels were eagerly awaited.

During the Second World War Francis laboured on his long poem covering the spread of English history from prehistoric times. Entitled The Island, it was published in 1944 and regarded by Francis as his greatest achievement.

Following a breakdown in his health Francis and Jessie moved to South Africa where he died in 1954. His ashes were brought back to this country and interred in Worcester Cathedral.

Reviews

[Dorcas · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Far Forest" is very Hardy-esque, which for me was wonderful as Ive read every Thomas Hardy novel published and had none left.

This story starts off slow and pleasant. You have to like descriptions to enjoy this, buy they're descriptions that set time and place, and not the author waxing lyrical about couch cushions or other nonsense, so I felt happy with it and just enjoyed the ride. The second half of the book really picks up the pace.

The crux of the story is a girl Jenny who goes to live with her grandfather and aunt after her own mother leaves the family. (Jenny's father and brother are chain makers in Mawne Heath, the Black Country and have no use for a girl). She meets her cousin David and is enraptured by him but its a lifetime of experiences and many years later when their paths cross again.

There's so much in here. Coal mining, the 'Far Forest', hop picking, romance, murder, the iron works, the Boer War, gypsies and beautiful countryside. (I particularly found the passages about women iron workers fascinating, as they toiled stripped to the waist, their bodies blackened and their babies looking like grotesque spiders, hanging from the beams in rope swings).

The story makes a perfect circle and ends happily.

Highly recommended for lovers of Thomas Hardy, Catherine Gaskin, Catherine Cookson, Jane Jackson etc.

CONTENT:
SEX: Not shown to reader but there are illegitimate relationships and children
VIOLENCE: Some domestic violence
PROFANITY: D, B
MY RATING: PG

[Tweety · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first taste of Frances Bret Young and I almost feel like I just read something by Thomas Hardy. A mix of Tess and Far From the Madding Crowd thrown in.

Jenny Wilks is sent to live with her Grandfather and Aunt, after her Mother up an leaves the family. She grows up with them and comes to love the country and her Grandfather, if not her Aunt. Her Aunt nags and sermonizes the years away and can't help but show her jealousy of Jenny.

Days pass slowly with few standing out from any other till on day Jenny's Uncle Jem and son David come to visit..

Jenny isn't the same ever again and now she has a friend in David, maybe something more, even if they don't see each other often. But that friendship can't possibly last four years can it? Four years of neither a word nor a sight of each other. The years take them both in two very different directions and there's a slim chance of them meeting up again.

Jenny is sent off by her Aunt to work as a maid-of-all-work in a town a good-ish way off from the Far Forest and Nineveh. That's when she takes her first steps down a lonely and dark road. David has dreams of being a school teacher but instead he works down in the mines with his Father. When he's given the chance to be something else he takes it and goes off down his hard road to become something.

I read through this book in two sittings it was so good. The descriptions were brilliant, if a trifle dark. So many of the characters choices come back to their upbringing and what they were going through. Jenny was a sweet girl whose path quickly turned her into a woman with problems aplenty and the people who she spent time around rubbed off on her.

PG mistresses, children out of wedlock, murder and swears. Mainly Bs, Ds and a few Hs. Note: none of this is shown to the reader.

[Mela · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gem, rather not known, I think.

A book that teaches about the lives of the miners, country folk and people "in service", in other words, it was a great lesson about everyday life somewhere around the beginning of XX century.

Also, the narration and the plot has kept my attention completely. I watched Jenny and David's life with a quite big anxiety. Jenny was so uncomplaining hard worker and David was constantly unsatisfied with his life. Other characters were wonderfully chosen too (especially Uncle Jem).

I haven't found any weak point.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with other FBY books, this really brings to life the whole period and region. The accents of the people of the people of the Black country and Worcestershire come across strongly. FBY puts me in mind slightly of Thomas Hardy - inasmuch as the people he wrote about were real. They lived harsh and difficult lives, the ending are not always happy, or sometimes characters have some pretty bad things happen to them on the way to a happy ending. This is hugely readable, and the 550 odd pages don't seem as long as with other books.

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume has been on one or other of my bookshelves for as long as I can remember. I'd often wondered what it could be about and now, finally, I know.

Set in the Black Country, Shropshire and counties bordering the latter with some time in Wales it was published in 1936. It's the story of 2 cousins, Jenny and David. It's a page turner in the best sense. There were no giveaway clues, until the story was well advanced, as to the period in which it is set: c1880 -c1910. The differing working lives and values of urban and rural Britain through the characters who people the book are well drawn and the writing throughout is rich, crafted and never bland. It, and particularly the character of Jenny, reminded me of Tess of the Durbervilles. It's certainly Hardyesque in places with shades of Arnold Bennett perhaps? and a hefty pinch of Dickens' Hard Times. But above all, (and perhaps my imagination is over-fired at this stage) it made me think of William Morris et al and the Arts and Crafts movement of this period. Somehow its (ie A&C's) ideals are in the root system of this book: it is all about nature – human, animal etc.

I know nothing of Francis Brett Young but after reading this I know I must do something about that. Was there a sequel to Far Forest? The ending makes me feel that there should be.

[Teaspoon Stories · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find a particular pleasure in tracking down real life locations used in fiction. Francis Brett Young’s novels are especially intriguing in the way he uses place names from across the West Midlands, the central England location of his so-called “Mercian” novels.

For some places he leaves the names unchanged (like Bewdley and Kidderminster). Sometimes he slightly changes the names of real places (Halesby is Halesowen and Dulston is Dudley). And sometimes he uses real names but moves the place fictionally (like Stourton - which could be the real-life village of Stourton but might also be Stourbridge or Stourport-on-Severn).

In any case, the eponymous forest of this novel - fictionalised as Werewood, “a sombre expanse of forest and scrub” (p6) - is definitely the Wyre Forest on the Worcestershire and Herefordshire border. And ninety years on it’s still, thankfully, a forest - in fact, ten square miles of one of our largest remaining ancient woodlands.

Werewood is the main character of the novel, existing both as a real place - a natural wilderness just 15 miles from industrial Birmingham - and also as a metaphor for innocence and purity. The forest has grown on top of the mines and heavy industry of much older generations. Now it has become the imaginary Eden and Arden of David Wilden’s beloved books. Its magical sources feed a network of streams and rivers (Stour and Severn) which run through the novel each with their own distinctive human characteristics.

The main characters of a human variety, on the other hand, are:

- Old Adam Wilden, whose family have lived in Werewood for two centuries, “a hard, violent race, well fitted to their wild surroundings, engrossed in cruel sports, bitter feuds, unchecked passions: great drinkers and fighters and lovers, and poachers of deer” (p62). His names are bit of a clue - Adam in his Garden of Eden, natural and wild.

- Aunt Thirza, Adam Wilden’s formidable widowed daughter (aka Mrs Moule), obsessed with sin, hellfire and the very imminent (or so she fervently believes) Biblical Apocalypse.

- Jem Wilden, Adam Wilden’s widowed son, an inarticulate, clumsy but kindly collier.

- Aaron Hadley, Adam Wild’s son in law, a brutal, musclebound ironworker for whom “no excesses of labour or pleasure could mar his superb physique” (p11).

- David Wilden, Jem’s son, naive and imaginative, full of dreams, books and high-flown ambitions.

- Jenny Hadley, Aaron’s daughter and granddaughter of Adam Wilden, a passionate child of nature who becomes obsessed with her cousin David when he visits Werewood.

There’s also a supporting cast of lively and distinctive secondary characters including:

- Mr Hemus, David’s moist, overwrought schoolteacher, “a rather delicate young man with a timid leaning towards high Anglicanism” and a penchant for “the company of young men in ecclesiastical surroundings” (p70).

- Hunky, hot-tempered, poacher turned gamekeeper, Fred Badger, and his provocative, ill-fated gypsy love, Savinia.

- Grace Grainger, Jenny’s new mistress at Gannow Green farm - tall, skeletal and as dark and menacing as Mrs Danvers; her befuddled, hen-pecked husband George; and her quirky spinster sister, Effie Foliot, with her extraordinary romantic imagination about the lives and loves of folk around her.

- Old Lisha,the kind and gentle farm worker, who dedicates his entire life to cultivating hops.

- Mrs Branch, the sharp-tongued housekeeper at Gannow Green - dark, harsh and brutally cynical about the ways of the world.

- Diana Isaacs, capricious and materialistic, an outsider at the teacher training college because she’s Jewish just as David’s an outsider as a former miner.

- Charley Potter, the fit young soldier from Shrewsbury barracks, with his scarlet tunic and roving eye, “a proper young bull” and “the hottest packet of mischief ever set eyes on” (p310).

- Mrs Parkes, the exploitative rich widow who owns the chain-making forges and keeps her workers in shocking conditions of near-slavery.


David and Jenny’s glimpse of Eden in Werewood is brief. Jenny is thrust out into harsh domestic service with the weird Graingers of Gannet Green. And David is cast for five years into hell. Quite literally. He works as a collier in a primitive coal mine where injury and fatality are ever present.

From this point, David and Jenny keep missing each other as their lives swing around violently. Jenny returns - with her baby by Charley Potter - to her brutal father and brother at the chain-making forge near the coal mine where David worked. But by this time David has long moved on, to South Wales as a trainee schoolteacher in a miserable mining village. There follows endless toil and misfortune on both sides - until a serendipitous reunion on the very last pages. Phew - well worth the 550 pages getting there.

It’s the women folk who are magnificent in this novel. They’re resourceful, resilient and brutally single-minded. They’re sometimes also the ones in charge - Mrs Moule, Mrs Branch and Mrs Parkes ruling in a man’s world - but sadly that doesn’t seem to make for a better world, least of all for their own exploited sisters in servitude.

The chaps are generally pretty feeble. Selfish, feckless and nescient (a word used often by Francis Brett Young), they stumble along, making a mess of everything. David Wilden spends the whole novel in a solipsistic daydream, inept and defensive. All he does is whinge about how difficult everything is and how nobody likes him (particularly the Welsh and Birmingham schoolteachers).

It’s always a delight to read Francis Brett Young’s prose. His style is fluid and elegant, with complex sentences of over a hundred words, multiple subordinate-clauses and sophisticated punctuation. Slightly shorter sentences that I particularly enjoyed, rich in irony and the humour of human observation, included these:

- “The workman’s world is more tolerant of eccentricity and less grudging of admiration than that of the middle classes” (p76).

- “Until that night she could never have guessed how much of her aunt’s impressive bulk was extraneous padding and how much Mrs Moule” (p94).

- “She learnt that the price of modestly, like that of beauty, was suffering” (p145).

- “Miss Foliot’s eyes envisaged the whole of her narrow world as seething in the flames of tender passion” (p209).

- “Mrs Moule automatically shot out of bed like a bolted rabbit and clapped on her stays above her nightgown, for she had long since decided that without their support she would be unable to enjoy the Last Day and the destruction of the wicked to the full” (p349).

I also always admire Francis Brett Young’s expansive vocabulary and I usually find I have to look up new words in his novels that I didn’t know. I was thrilled to see that this was something his character, bookish David Wilden, also did: “From that moment the boy was possessed by a passion for words: words whose meaning, it must be confessed, he could often not understand without using a dictionary” (p71). Words in this novel that I had to look up were:

- Teart (“It was lucky, in a way, that the winds blew so teart down Mount Pleasant Row” p5).

- Yeaning and cade (“One ewe died in yeaning, and Jenny was given the orphan to rear as a cade” p65).

- Fulvous (“The fulvous pall which shadows the central waste of the Black Country” p133).

- Divagations (“It may well be excused for its green divagations” p184).

- Susurration (“The air was full of a monotonous crisp susurration, like that of the brittle wings of dragon-flies rustling” p316).

[Rubí Santander · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Era una nueva perversidad de la naturaleza que tal extraordinaria belleza le rodease cuando más seguro estaba de la existencia de un peligro de muerte en la vida del ser que más amaba en la tierra."