Light Shining in the Forest
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Synopsis
Norman Stokoe has just been appointed Children's Czar by the new government. However, before his first salary cheque has even hit his bank account, the Children's czar network is put on hold. He settles down in his new leather chair behind his new desk, but then two children go missing. The search will take him to dark places and will make him ask questions about the system he is supposed to uphold.
Release date: January 31, 2013
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Print pages: 320
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Light Shining in the Forest
Paul Torday
Praise for Light Shining in the Forest
‘A well-crafted novel . . . there is momentum, and there is excitement’
Spectator
‘[Torday] has blended some excellent social satire and even a dollop of the supernatural . . . this is an excellent mash-up, well-written, well-crafted and constantly gripping’
Daily Mail
‘Tautly written, the tone acid and angry’
Evening Standard
Praise for The Legacy of Hartlepool Hall
‘More intriguing is the skein of darkness that, in common with much of Torday’s fiction, runs discretely through the story – one sequence is sufficiently macabre as to recall the work of a young McEwan’
Literary Review
‘This is a novel about decay and destruction, but bracingly unsentimental and surprisingly moving’
Guardian
‘A gloriously enjoyable wallow of a read’
Daily Mail
‘It’s a novel that should enhance his reputation for excellent, ingenious writing’
Metro
Praise for More Than You Can Say
‘The certainties of the imperial world in which Buchan’s heroes operated have long gone, but Torday shows that today’s more ambivalent realities can also be pressed into service to produce intelligent and readable adventure stories’
Sunday Times
‘A Buchan-like set-up that pitches Gaunt into thriller territory . . . It’s a brave stylistic gamble’
Daily Mail
‘There are good reasons why Torday has found success, as this novel shows. There’s real substance to the characterisation . . . a keenness to incorporate the dark and the serious . . . and to engage with contemporary politics and issues. Above all, there’s his desire to entertain and to keep his readers turning those pages’
Guardian
‘Torday’s prose whips along in this involving, enjoyable novel’
Vogue
Praise for The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers
‘Charlie is a wonderful creation, at once sad and heroic, whose search for redemption attains real pathos at the end of this affecting, skilfully crafted novel’
Financial Times
‘Brilliantly and sympathetically drawn . . . this wonderfully written, clever book does not miss a single trick’
Daily Mail
‘Shades of both Greene and Ambler here, both in the crispness of the exposition and the marrying of humour with something close to tragedy’
Spectator
‘A brilliant, page-turning read that combines the pace of Torday’s The Girl on the Landing with his trademark humour in Salmon Fishing’
Granta magazine
Praise for The Girl on the Landing
‘Torday pulls it off magnificently . . . a clever, gripping novel’
The Times
‘The finale is terrifying, harking back to old-fashioned ghost stories, but with a modern, plausible twist – it stood the hairs of my arms on end’
Daily Telegraph
‘His prose remains anything but safe. It is supple, skilful and literary . . . this is a fabulously good yarn’
Observer
‘It seems Paul Torday can do no wrong. The Girl on the Landing is his third book and destined to do as well as the other two’
Daily Express
Praise for The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce
‘Grows more and more poignant as the novel progresses . . . satisfyingly full-bodied and slips down a treat’
Sunday Times
‘He has a good feeling for character and a sly sense of humour’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Torday’s confidence in his story’s power to command attention is not misplaced. Wilberforce is well worth sampling’
Independent on Sunday
‘A heart-wrenching tale of alcoholism and a lonely man’s search for identity . . . a mesmerising page-turner’
Mail on Sunday
Praise for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
‘Paul Torday’s debut novel is about an impossibility . . . And the remarkable thing is that a book about so deeply serious a matter can make you laugh, all the way to a last twist that’s as sudden and shocking as a barbed hook . . . As with all good comedy, there’s a tragic underside . . . And there is satire . . . To write a novel lampooning the looking-glass world of Blairite government must have given Torday as much gruesome fun as he gives his readers . . . Salmon Fishing is extraordinary indeed, and a triumph’
Guardian
‘[A] tender-hearted book . . . [and a] thoroughly enjoyable debut’
Sunday Times
‘Captivates the grumpiest reader within moments . . . if you imagine The Office crossed with Yes, Minister, you may get some inkling of how very funny it is . . . the intelligence, inventiveness and humanity of this novel in comparison to the usual run of literary fiction is as wild salmon to the farmed’
Daily Telegraph
‘This is a book of considerable charm, an echo-chamber of a dozen different voices adroitly ventriloquized . . . [it’s] a moral tale about the importance of believing in something and the comparative importance of everything else’
Independent
Kielder Forest lies along the English and Scottish Borders. A few hundred years ago, all this part of the world was a desolation of mires and low, heather-covered hills. Its inhabitants – more then than there are now – were once considered master-less men, who acknowledged no king and lived by violence and cunning. The Border clans were known as ‘reivers’ and they lived on either side of the Border: in Liddesdale, Teviotdale, Redesdale and Tynedale: clans such as the Armstrongs, Bells, Charltons, Dodds, Elliots, Kers, Nixons and Scotts. They stole from each other and fought with each other. The Border region was difficult for any king to control, whether he was king of Scotland or England. For a while, it was known as the Debatable Land.
It is an empty and silent country. Even today, on this crowded island, there are spaces along the Borders where you can walk for a day without ever seeing another human being.
The country itself has changed. Once there were grey-green hills, covered in rushes and heather. Steep-sided denes scored the hillsides; thick with birch, alder, willow, oak and pine. These ancient woods have now been replaced by a patchwork of huge forests: Wark, Kielder, Redesdale, Harwood, Newcastleton, Craik, Tinnisburn, Spadeadam and Kershope, spread across hundreds of square miles. Tens of millions of trees: Sitka Spruce, Norway Spruce, Lodgepole Pine, Larch, Scots Pine; a dark host only occasionally relieved by avenues of broadleaves. Who lives there now? A few forestry communities, scattered villages and isolated hamlets. Foxes, deer, buzzards, goshawks, jays, magpies, ravens and crows far outnumber the human inhabitants. Once there were red and black grouse living in the heather-clad hills, and grey partridge in the white grassland. But the predators that live among the trees, the hawks and the foxes, have dealt with most of these. Nothing much else lives here; nothing except the trees themselves.
Intersecting the forest is a labyrinth of graded roads. Each year several million trees are planted and as many more are extracted, taken by road down to the chipboard factory in Hexham, or to the Tyne docks, or to the stockyards of timber businesses and fencing contractors. Most of what is logged is softwood, not suited for joinery or cabinet-making, and destined for some industrial purpose. The roads are cut through the forest as they are needed, and then abandoned, chained off to prevent access, quickly overtaken by weeds, and then by regenerating pine and fir. Kielder Forest alone covers two hundred and fifty square miles, and its siblings cover maybe twice that area.
Before the trees came, this was a land of marshes and rolling grass hills. Across the hills ran the old droving roads along which sheep were driven to markets further south, or else to the strongholds of the local clans. The place names recall the former nature of the land and its people: Haggering Holes, Bessie’s Bog, Bloody Bush, Foulmire Heights, Gray Mare Moss. The mires and moss were a perfect protection for the reivers who once inhabited this region.
It was a landscape of a thousand soft colours: the subtle shades of heathers, bog myrtle, sphagnum moss, cotton grass, lichens and the whites and browns of the grasslands: an infinitely varied palette, changing with every shift of light from the cloudy, windy skies above. Now only corners of this older world can be glimpsed in places where it has not yet been submerged in the sea of conifers.
Many of the trees were planted in the 1920s as part of a national undertaking to replace timber consumed in the trenches in France during the First World War. Much later, an enormous lake appeared in the forest. It was created by damming the headwaters of the North Tyne – seventeen miles of it between tree-clad banks – to provide water for industry further east. A drowned village lies beneath its waves. As for the trees, it is difficult to know what purpose they now have: they have become an end in themselves, a reason for their own existence. The trees are there because the trees are there.
Geordie Nixon has worked in forestry for most of his life. His father and his grandfather were woodmen. His father tended the private forestry of a local estate. In those days trees were still worth money: ash, beech and oak for furniture; larch was once cropped for ship’s masts. Now a tide of cheap timber from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has made home-grown woodlands close to worthless. His father was made redundant and died young, aged sixty. His mother died a few years later, still working as a cleaner.
Geordie began by helping his father during the school holidays. When he was sixteen, he left school and started work as a fencing contractor. He’s done fencing, planting, weeding amongst the young trees. Now he’s registered as a lone worker and he harvests the trees in Kielder for the Forestry Commission.
He has known nothing else. He visits Hexham, the nearest town of any size. He’s been to Newcastle, the nearest city, twice. He’s never been to London, and has no plans to go there. He barely knows where London is. What he does know is the forest, and the birds and the animals that live there. Almost every day he sees the deer lifting their heads to look at him as he drives deep into the forest in his truck. In their season he hears the vixens shouting. He knows where the badger setts are. From time to time, he hears the scream of a rabbit being taken by a hawk. These sounds and shapes and sights are his company when he works in the forest. He works in all weathers: in the faint sunshine that sometimes filters down through the trees; in driving rain; sometimes in the soft and soundless fall of snow, when the forest seems to go to sleep under its white blanket.
You don’t find men like Geordie Nixon in towns. You find few men like Geordie anywhere. He’s a big man, over six feet tall, and he looks as tough as the trees he cuts down. He has a square, pale face and grey eyes under thick black eyebrows.
His life is work. The money comes in and it goes out even faster. Geordie knows he won’t die a rich man. He doesn’t think much about the future. He knows he has to meet the lease payments on his vehicles and his HP on the forty-inch HD television in the flat. He has to pay his girlfriend, Mary, his share of the rent on her flat, and his share of the food and heating. He owns nothing except the clothes he stands in, his chainsaw and his mobile phone.
At first light, Geordie Nixon is working with the chainsaw and is already well into the area of forest marked out for clear-felling. He cuts away the small trees and other bits of rubbish to allow the harvester to reach the bigger trees that have to be felled and logged. By eight-thirty, he is cutting down trees in his harvester, a second-hand Valmet 941. It is tracked, to cope with the soft ground. Rubber tyres would just dig in and sink. The whole of this forest grew out of bottomless mires, or else fell land full of sharp rocks.
Geordie is contracted to cut down a block of thirty-year-old Sitka Spruce. The harvester grinds and chugs and whines as its hydraulically powered jaws grab a tree and then bite into its base. In a few seconds the tree has been cut, but it is not allowed to fall: instead the harvester tilts the tree over in its jaws and strips off the branches and most of the bark, then cuts it to length before placing it on top of a growing pile of poles beside the forest track.
Geordie works alone. It’s what he prefers. There isn’t the money in the job to pay the wages of another man. Once he would have had a lad helping with the stacking of the felled timber, so that he didn’t have to load up his truck at the end of the day. Now he has to do it himself. But even Geordie knows about market forces. He’s seen the price of timber go down year after year.
Every now and then, he stops to take a nip of lukewarm tea from his Thermos, or else to light a cigarette. When he switches off the engine of the harvester, the silence of the forest is uncomfortable. At midday he stops again and eats the packed lunch – his ‘bait’, he calls it – that Mary has put up for him the night before: processed cheese slices in a bap, with not enough butter. He eats the dry food mechanically, and swallows the last of his tea. Although it is only early April, there is a hatch of midges. These trouble him whenever he opens the door of the cab. Around him a soft light filters through the forest canopy: a hint of the sun far above the clouds, just enough to gleam on the wet cobwebs on every branch, on the wet bracken by the edge of the wood, on the pools of water lying everywhere. From his cab, Geordie can see down into the shallow valley on whose upper slopes he is working: nothing but spruce and pine, nothing but trees in their endless dark tangles. The light turns greyer in the afternoon as the cloud thickens. Dusk comes early to these places: beneath the shadow of the trees it never really leaves.
At four o’clock he locks up the harvester and walks down to the forest track where he’s parked his truck. This is a big Scania tractor-trailer, with a jib-crane at the back for loading up the timber. That and the harvester are leased to him by a finance company.
He has a girlfriend, Mary, whom he thinks of as his ‘lass’. Once they had a child as well.
He begins loading the stacked timber from the roadside onto his truck. This is a hard task that requires patience: stack it badly, and it might start rolling and then the whole trailer could tip over. After an hour or more, he’s finished the job and he’s finished too. He’s absolutely shattered. It’s not just the one day’s labour. It’s the unending labour of a hundred days, a thousand days. He’s grateful for the work, but it’s killing him. Then he remembers the pills Stevie sold him in the pub a couple of nights ago. He doesn’t know exactly what they are: ‘Man, ye can gan forever on these’ was how Stevie made his pitch. Amphetamines, Benzedrine, Mephedrone – who cares? As long as they sort him out.
They do something to him, that’s for sure. Half an hour after taking them he feels less tired; but also a whole lot worse, as if something has changed inside him, or something outside has changed, but he’s not sure what.
Maybe it’s the pills, maybe not. As dusk approaches, his sense of unease grows. All his life Geordie has worked alone. He’s used to being in the middle of nowhere. This is the middle of nowhere: a remote area of the forest between Kershope Rigg and Blacklyne Common. Walkers and farmers rarely come here. There is no reason to: no grazing, no paths that go anywhere, nothing to see except trees. There’s nobody here; not at this time of day. He has heard the barking of foxes, the alarm calls of birds and often he has heard the screams of buzzards overhead as they float sideways in the winds that never stop blowing across these Border hills.
Now all he hears is the silence, and it is getting on his nerves. When the trailer has been loaded and the huge stack of wooden poles secured, he climbs into the cab of the big Scania and turns the key in the ignition.
He knows that the pills have done something weird to him. He wishes he hadn’t taken them, but it’s too late for that. His heart is pounding much too fast and he can feel the sweat beading on his forehead. He flicks on the headlights as he enters the dark tunnel of trees, following the intricate and confusing maze of forest roads down into the valley of the North Tyne, to Leaplish and on down to the chipboard factory in Hexham to drop off his load. When he’s done that he will drive to the village beside the Tyne where Mary and he live in their flat. There’s something else getting into his head: something he thinks he has seen rather than heard.
He switches on some music to drown out these odd and unwelcome thoughts – not really thoughts, but flashes from somewhere arriving in his brain like radio signals. Then the huge truck meets blacktop road, and he pushes the accelerator to the floor. Headlamps on full beam, the trailer sways dangerously as he drives much too fast down the valley. Only when the lights of the first villages appear does he slow down a little. As he drives through them, images come to him: images of children. In many of the houses, lights glow from upstairs windows. He imagines that those lights are illuminating bathrooms and bedrooms. He imagines children at their bath-time; children having stories read to them by their parents, sitting on the side of the bed, turning the pages in the gentle glow of a bedside lamp. He imagines the children turning over sleepily in bed and murmuring goodnight. He imagines – so clearly – the father and the mother smiling at each other as they close the door softly on the sleeping child. He imagines it; he remembers it.
Mary is watching television when he arrives home. She stands up as he comes through the door, but does not offer him a kiss or greet him in any way. Instead she puts the kettle on. She knows he won’t eat straightaway. He is too tired to eat, almost too tired to speak. He accepts a mug of tea from her and asks how she is.
‘All right.’
A little later, he stands up, as if uncertain what to do next. Mary asks: ‘Will I get you something to eat?’
‘No – I’ll do myself a fry-up in the morning.’
She leaves the room. He hears her running the tap in the bathroom and then the door of her room shuts. It isn’t really her bedroom. It used to be the nursery, where the boy slept. He disappeared just before Christmas, when most buildings in the street had fairy lights hanging over the door and Christmas trees visible through the windows. He disappeared while they were starting to wrap his Christmas presents, while Christmas carols played incessantly on the radio and Christmas jingles played over the public address systems in the supermarkets.
That was four months ago, and more. Mary hasn’t changed anything. The toys are all still in the cupboards. The ceiling is still pasted with stars and crescent moons that glow a little in the dark when the lights are switched off. Mary moved in there a few weeks after the boy went. She and Geordie haven’t shared a bed since. They haven’t shared much else either: not their thoughts, nor their worries. They have plenty of those, but they no longer talk about them.
It’s one of those things. She doesn’t particularly blame Geordie for what happened; that’s to say, she blames him equally along with the rest of the human race.
An hour or two later, Geordie switches off the television. He has no idea what he has been watching. He goes to the bathroom and brushes his teeth. He goes to their bedroom and strips off to his boxer shorts and climbs into bed. He sleeps in the middle now; it’s less lonely. After a few minutes he falls asleep, but it is not the dreamless sleep of the tired man. His hands twitch and he moans once or twice. Then he mutters to himself: ‘Light in the forest. Light in the forest.’
There is no one to hear him, and when he wakes in the morning he doesn’t remember his dreams. There is no one beside him to ask how he slept, or nuzzle against him for a moment before he steps out of bed. He showers, then dresses laboriously, for the tiredness from the day before hasn’t left him. He goes into the kitchen and puts on the kettle. He raps gently on Mary’s door to see if she wants a cup of tea bringing in. There is no answer. They still love each other, he tells himself, although it’s hard to say why, or how you would know, they see so little of one another these days. He cooks himself a good breakfast: two fried eggs, beans, tinned tomatoes, bacon, a mug of hot tea with two sugars. After he has eaten, he experiences a rush as the glucose and the fats surge into his bloodstream – an illusion of energy; an illusion of purpose. By the time he has climbed into the truck and started it up, that flicker has died down again and he already feels weary as he heads north, back towards the forest.
Mary and Geordie have lost a child. Why should they think themselves anything special? Why should they feel entitled to grieve? It’s so commonplace. Abusing and losing children is something the nation excels at. Look at the headlines in the newspapers most weeks: children are tortured as witches; they are tortured for recreational purposes; they are abandoned, abused, trafficked, exploited, or just lost. It’s hard to believe how many simply disappear. Presumed runaways, presumed to have gone to live with a relation, presumed to be someone else’s problem.
It’s a profound philosophical question as to why we do this to our children. Some blame it on the decline of the family. Others bridle at this suggestion; what’s so special about families? Why should marriage be the only valid framework within which to bring up a child? It’s an interesting debate.
There’s a benefit system in place that rewards the production of children with money, housing and other prizes. Children are produced and nobody knows quite what to do with them. They go on the streets. They disappear. Or their economic value is recognised by entrepreneurs who know that children can provide services that will earn their owners money.
There are nameless children on the streets of every big city in the country: un-persons without family or even nationality.
There are children by their thousands in care homes. Some of them encounter compassion or even love; some of them receive less attention than rescue dogs.
A few of them encounter other kinds of love: a twisted, touching, groping kind of love that is hard to distinguish from hatred.
Every now and then some fresh crime against children is reported in the newspapers and the debate leaves the rooms of policy-makers and special political advisers and think-tanks and sociologists, and acquires a brief flicker of urgency. People are interviewed on television and say things such as: ‘It’s the twenty-first century. And we still live in a society that can’t protect its own children from harm.’ The statistics are dusted down and trotted out: the tens of thousands of children who go missing every year; the sixty-five thousand children placed in care homes. And everyone knows that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Then some especially gifted adviser whispers in the ear of the secretary of state. He whispers that this could become an issue for voters. Something needs to be done. There has to be an initiative.
This secretary of state is keen on initiatives. He senses his career is on an upward trajectory. Five years ago he was a back-bench MP, whose previous employment was as an actor in a long-running soap opera on television. Then his talent at histrionics resulted in him being plucked from obscurity and appointed as a parliamentary private secretary. He would never have dreamed, when he first stood for parliament, that one day he would be secretary of state for the Department of Children, Schools and Families. Now – who knows where he might end up? The voters want action? Using all his vast ministerial powers he proposes, as with the twitch of a magic wand, a network of Regional Children’s Commissioners. They will be known as ‘Children’s Czars’.
Something like this has been done before, but it’s going to be different this time. That’s what the secretary of state argues. In a major speech that receives wide coverage in the media, he talks about the importance of his department’s role. He refers to the recent conviction of a perpetrator in a case that shocked the country, and asks for more resources for his department to support his initiative. These new children’s czars will be individuals of the highest possible calibre, and paid a fortune. They will have undreamed-of powers and enormous budgets.
‘The new children’s czars will get rid of the culture of compliance within social services,’ intones the secretary of state on a BBC morning chat show. He has forgotten that, in response to an earlier crisis, he himself introduced many of the new compliance requirements that are keeping social workers behind their desks; filling in risk assessments; training in epidemiology; or engaging in ‘reflective practice’ sessions.
‘They will help get social workers back on the front line. They will set new intervention targets. They will cut through the red tape and make things happen! We will pilot this scheme and then, as soon as possible, we intend to roll it out nationally.’
It sounds good. A children’s czar! And who will be the first to be chosen? Who is this kindly person, muffled in furs, travelling everywhere by sledge and rescuing children trapped in gingerbread houses?
It is not some benign autocrat who is appointed to run the pilot scheme, but Norman Stokoe.
Norman Stokoe, Children’s Czar! Who would have thought that Norman could ever aspire to such a position? He started his working life in a North London Local Education Authority. Then an opening appeared for an administrator in the Social Services department. It soon became apparent that Norman was a clever man. He always did his homework. He always turned up at meetings on time. He spoke well. He was considered to be sound. And it wasn’t too long before he began to rise effortlessly through the great new industry of child protection.
Norman Stokoe, Children’s Czar. You wouldn’t get a job like that without knowing your business. And Norman does know it. He was involved in the second intergovernmental conference on Violence against Children. He is familiar with the UN Convention on Rights of the Child. He did sterling work for the Safeguarding Children review that was sponsored by Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission, Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Chief Inspectorate and other august bodies. He can reel off the annual statistics from the British Crime Survey: half a million children recorded as the victims of violent crimes in England and Wales; forty-three thousand the subject of child protection plans, thirteen thousand of them under four years old; twenty-one thousand children the victims of rape, gross indecency or incest; one in seven of those children under the age of ten; eight thousand violent attacks against children under the age of ten.
It is a problem on an industrial scale and it requires an industrial response. The UK leads the world – but whether in measuring the problem or solving it, it is harder to say. The UK has some of the most stringent codes of practice of any country regarding the exploitation of children in sweat factories in Thailand or Vietnam. It is somet. . .
‘A well-crafted novel . . . there is momentum, and there is excitement’
Spectator
‘[Torday] has blended some excellent social satire and even a dollop of the supernatural . . . this is an excellent mash-up, well-written, well-crafted and constantly gripping’
Daily Mail
‘Tautly written, the tone acid and angry’
Evening Standard
Praise for The Legacy of Hartlepool Hall
‘More intriguing is the skein of darkness that, in common with much of Torday’s fiction, runs discretely through the story – one sequence is sufficiently macabre as to recall the work of a young McEwan’
Literary Review
‘This is a novel about decay and destruction, but bracingly unsentimental and surprisingly moving’
Guardian
‘A gloriously enjoyable wallow of a read’
Daily Mail
‘It’s a novel that should enhance his reputation for excellent, ingenious writing’
Metro
Praise for More Than You Can Say
‘The certainties of the imperial world in which Buchan’s heroes operated have long gone, but Torday shows that today’s more ambivalent realities can also be pressed into service to produce intelligent and readable adventure stories’
Sunday Times
‘A Buchan-like set-up that pitches Gaunt into thriller territory . . . It’s a brave stylistic gamble’
Daily Mail
‘There are good reasons why Torday has found success, as this novel shows. There’s real substance to the characterisation . . . a keenness to incorporate the dark and the serious . . . and to engage with contemporary politics and issues. Above all, there’s his desire to entertain and to keep his readers turning those pages’
Guardian
‘Torday’s prose whips along in this involving, enjoyable novel’
Vogue
Praise for The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers
‘Charlie is a wonderful creation, at once sad and heroic, whose search for redemption attains real pathos at the end of this affecting, skilfully crafted novel’
Financial Times
‘Brilliantly and sympathetically drawn . . . this wonderfully written, clever book does not miss a single trick’
Daily Mail
‘Shades of both Greene and Ambler here, both in the crispness of the exposition and the marrying of humour with something close to tragedy’
Spectator
‘A brilliant, page-turning read that combines the pace of Torday’s The Girl on the Landing with his trademark humour in Salmon Fishing’
Granta magazine
Praise for The Girl on the Landing
‘Torday pulls it off magnificently . . . a clever, gripping novel’
The Times
‘The finale is terrifying, harking back to old-fashioned ghost stories, but with a modern, plausible twist – it stood the hairs of my arms on end’
Daily Telegraph
‘His prose remains anything but safe. It is supple, skilful and literary . . . this is a fabulously good yarn’
Observer
‘It seems Paul Torday can do no wrong. The Girl on the Landing is his third book and destined to do as well as the other two’
Daily Express
Praise for The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce
‘Grows more and more poignant as the novel progresses . . . satisfyingly full-bodied and slips down a treat’
Sunday Times
‘He has a good feeling for character and a sly sense of humour’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Torday’s confidence in his story’s power to command attention is not misplaced. Wilberforce is well worth sampling’
Independent on Sunday
‘A heart-wrenching tale of alcoholism and a lonely man’s search for identity . . . a mesmerising page-turner’
Mail on Sunday
Praise for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
‘Paul Torday’s debut novel is about an impossibility . . . And the remarkable thing is that a book about so deeply serious a matter can make you laugh, all the way to a last twist that’s as sudden and shocking as a barbed hook . . . As with all good comedy, there’s a tragic underside . . . And there is satire . . . To write a novel lampooning the looking-glass world of Blairite government must have given Torday as much gruesome fun as he gives his readers . . . Salmon Fishing is extraordinary indeed, and a triumph’
Guardian
‘[A] tender-hearted book . . . [and a] thoroughly enjoyable debut’
Sunday Times
‘Captivates the grumpiest reader within moments . . . if you imagine The Office crossed with Yes, Minister, you may get some inkling of how very funny it is . . . the intelligence, inventiveness and humanity of this novel in comparison to the usual run of literary fiction is as wild salmon to the farmed’
Daily Telegraph
‘This is a book of considerable charm, an echo-chamber of a dozen different voices adroitly ventriloquized . . . [it’s] a moral tale about the importance of believing in something and the comparative importance of everything else’
Independent
Kielder Forest lies along the English and Scottish Borders. A few hundred years ago, all this part of the world was a desolation of mires and low, heather-covered hills. Its inhabitants – more then than there are now – were once considered master-less men, who acknowledged no king and lived by violence and cunning. The Border clans were known as ‘reivers’ and they lived on either side of the Border: in Liddesdale, Teviotdale, Redesdale and Tynedale: clans such as the Armstrongs, Bells, Charltons, Dodds, Elliots, Kers, Nixons and Scotts. They stole from each other and fought with each other. The Border region was difficult for any king to control, whether he was king of Scotland or England. For a while, it was known as the Debatable Land.
It is an empty and silent country. Even today, on this crowded island, there are spaces along the Borders where you can walk for a day without ever seeing another human being.
The country itself has changed. Once there were grey-green hills, covered in rushes and heather. Steep-sided denes scored the hillsides; thick with birch, alder, willow, oak and pine. These ancient woods have now been replaced by a patchwork of huge forests: Wark, Kielder, Redesdale, Harwood, Newcastleton, Craik, Tinnisburn, Spadeadam and Kershope, spread across hundreds of square miles. Tens of millions of trees: Sitka Spruce, Norway Spruce, Lodgepole Pine, Larch, Scots Pine; a dark host only occasionally relieved by avenues of broadleaves. Who lives there now? A few forestry communities, scattered villages and isolated hamlets. Foxes, deer, buzzards, goshawks, jays, magpies, ravens and crows far outnumber the human inhabitants. Once there were red and black grouse living in the heather-clad hills, and grey partridge in the white grassland. But the predators that live among the trees, the hawks and the foxes, have dealt with most of these. Nothing much else lives here; nothing except the trees themselves.
Intersecting the forest is a labyrinth of graded roads. Each year several million trees are planted and as many more are extracted, taken by road down to the chipboard factory in Hexham, or to the Tyne docks, or to the stockyards of timber businesses and fencing contractors. Most of what is logged is softwood, not suited for joinery or cabinet-making, and destined for some industrial purpose. The roads are cut through the forest as they are needed, and then abandoned, chained off to prevent access, quickly overtaken by weeds, and then by regenerating pine and fir. Kielder Forest alone covers two hundred and fifty square miles, and its siblings cover maybe twice that area.
Before the trees came, this was a land of marshes and rolling grass hills. Across the hills ran the old droving roads along which sheep were driven to markets further south, or else to the strongholds of the local clans. The place names recall the former nature of the land and its people: Haggering Holes, Bessie’s Bog, Bloody Bush, Foulmire Heights, Gray Mare Moss. The mires and moss were a perfect protection for the reivers who once inhabited this region.
It was a landscape of a thousand soft colours: the subtle shades of heathers, bog myrtle, sphagnum moss, cotton grass, lichens and the whites and browns of the grasslands: an infinitely varied palette, changing with every shift of light from the cloudy, windy skies above. Now only corners of this older world can be glimpsed in places where it has not yet been submerged in the sea of conifers.
Many of the trees were planted in the 1920s as part of a national undertaking to replace timber consumed in the trenches in France during the First World War. Much later, an enormous lake appeared in the forest. It was created by damming the headwaters of the North Tyne – seventeen miles of it between tree-clad banks – to provide water for industry further east. A drowned village lies beneath its waves. As for the trees, it is difficult to know what purpose they now have: they have become an end in themselves, a reason for their own existence. The trees are there because the trees are there.
Geordie Nixon has worked in forestry for most of his life. His father and his grandfather were woodmen. His father tended the private forestry of a local estate. In those days trees were still worth money: ash, beech and oak for furniture; larch was once cropped for ship’s masts. Now a tide of cheap timber from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has made home-grown woodlands close to worthless. His father was made redundant and died young, aged sixty. His mother died a few years later, still working as a cleaner.
Geordie began by helping his father during the school holidays. When he was sixteen, he left school and started work as a fencing contractor. He’s done fencing, planting, weeding amongst the young trees. Now he’s registered as a lone worker and he harvests the trees in Kielder for the Forestry Commission.
He has known nothing else. He visits Hexham, the nearest town of any size. He’s been to Newcastle, the nearest city, twice. He’s never been to London, and has no plans to go there. He barely knows where London is. What he does know is the forest, and the birds and the animals that live there. Almost every day he sees the deer lifting their heads to look at him as he drives deep into the forest in his truck. In their season he hears the vixens shouting. He knows where the badger setts are. From time to time, he hears the scream of a rabbit being taken by a hawk. These sounds and shapes and sights are his company when he works in the forest. He works in all weathers: in the faint sunshine that sometimes filters down through the trees; in driving rain; sometimes in the soft and soundless fall of snow, when the forest seems to go to sleep under its white blanket.
You don’t find men like Geordie Nixon in towns. You find few men like Geordie anywhere. He’s a big man, over six feet tall, and he looks as tough as the trees he cuts down. He has a square, pale face and grey eyes under thick black eyebrows.
His life is work. The money comes in and it goes out even faster. Geordie knows he won’t die a rich man. He doesn’t think much about the future. He knows he has to meet the lease payments on his vehicles and his HP on the forty-inch HD television in the flat. He has to pay his girlfriend, Mary, his share of the rent on her flat, and his share of the food and heating. He owns nothing except the clothes he stands in, his chainsaw and his mobile phone.
At first light, Geordie Nixon is working with the chainsaw and is already well into the area of forest marked out for clear-felling. He cuts away the small trees and other bits of rubbish to allow the harvester to reach the bigger trees that have to be felled and logged. By eight-thirty, he is cutting down trees in his harvester, a second-hand Valmet 941. It is tracked, to cope with the soft ground. Rubber tyres would just dig in and sink. The whole of this forest grew out of bottomless mires, or else fell land full of sharp rocks.
Geordie is contracted to cut down a block of thirty-year-old Sitka Spruce. The harvester grinds and chugs and whines as its hydraulically powered jaws grab a tree and then bite into its base. In a few seconds the tree has been cut, but it is not allowed to fall: instead the harvester tilts the tree over in its jaws and strips off the branches and most of the bark, then cuts it to length before placing it on top of a growing pile of poles beside the forest track.
Geordie works alone. It’s what he prefers. There isn’t the money in the job to pay the wages of another man. Once he would have had a lad helping with the stacking of the felled timber, so that he didn’t have to load up his truck at the end of the day. Now he has to do it himself. But even Geordie knows about market forces. He’s seen the price of timber go down year after year.
Every now and then, he stops to take a nip of lukewarm tea from his Thermos, or else to light a cigarette. When he switches off the engine of the harvester, the silence of the forest is uncomfortable. At midday he stops again and eats the packed lunch – his ‘bait’, he calls it – that Mary has put up for him the night before: processed cheese slices in a bap, with not enough butter. He eats the dry food mechanically, and swallows the last of his tea. Although it is only early April, there is a hatch of midges. These trouble him whenever he opens the door of the cab. Around him a soft light filters through the forest canopy: a hint of the sun far above the clouds, just enough to gleam on the wet cobwebs on every branch, on the wet bracken by the edge of the wood, on the pools of water lying everywhere. From his cab, Geordie can see down into the shallow valley on whose upper slopes he is working: nothing but spruce and pine, nothing but trees in their endless dark tangles. The light turns greyer in the afternoon as the cloud thickens. Dusk comes early to these places: beneath the shadow of the trees it never really leaves.
At four o’clock he locks up the harvester and walks down to the forest track where he’s parked his truck. This is a big Scania tractor-trailer, with a jib-crane at the back for loading up the timber. That and the harvester are leased to him by a finance company.
He has a girlfriend, Mary, whom he thinks of as his ‘lass’. Once they had a child as well.
He begins loading the stacked timber from the roadside onto his truck. This is a hard task that requires patience: stack it badly, and it might start rolling and then the whole trailer could tip over. After an hour or more, he’s finished the job and he’s finished too. He’s absolutely shattered. It’s not just the one day’s labour. It’s the unending labour of a hundred days, a thousand days. He’s grateful for the work, but it’s killing him. Then he remembers the pills Stevie sold him in the pub a couple of nights ago. He doesn’t know exactly what they are: ‘Man, ye can gan forever on these’ was how Stevie made his pitch. Amphetamines, Benzedrine, Mephedrone – who cares? As long as they sort him out.
They do something to him, that’s for sure. Half an hour after taking them he feels less tired; but also a whole lot worse, as if something has changed inside him, or something outside has changed, but he’s not sure what.
Maybe it’s the pills, maybe not. As dusk approaches, his sense of unease grows. All his life Geordie has worked alone. He’s used to being in the middle of nowhere. This is the middle of nowhere: a remote area of the forest between Kershope Rigg and Blacklyne Common. Walkers and farmers rarely come here. There is no reason to: no grazing, no paths that go anywhere, nothing to see except trees. There’s nobody here; not at this time of day. He has heard the barking of foxes, the alarm calls of birds and often he has heard the screams of buzzards overhead as they float sideways in the winds that never stop blowing across these Border hills.
Now all he hears is the silence, and it is getting on his nerves. When the trailer has been loaded and the huge stack of wooden poles secured, he climbs into the cab of the big Scania and turns the key in the ignition.
He knows that the pills have done something weird to him. He wishes he hadn’t taken them, but it’s too late for that. His heart is pounding much too fast and he can feel the sweat beading on his forehead. He flicks on the headlights as he enters the dark tunnel of trees, following the intricate and confusing maze of forest roads down into the valley of the North Tyne, to Leaplish and on down to the chipboard factory in Hexham to drop off his load. When he’s done that he will drive to the village beside the Tyne where Mary and he live in their flat. There’s something else getting into his head: something he thinks he has seen rather than heard.
He switches on some music to drown out these odd and unwelcome thoughts – not really thoughts, but flashes from somewhere arriving in his brain like radio signals. Then the huge truck meets blacktop road, and he pushes the accelerator to the floor. Headlamps on full beam, the trailer sways dangerously as he drives much too fast down the valley. Only when the lights of the first villages appear does he slow down a little. As he drives through them, images come to him: images of children. In many of the houses, lights glow from upstairs windows. He imagines that those lights are illuminating bathrooms and bedrooms. He imagines children at their bath-time; children having stories read to them by their parents, sitting on the side of the bed, turning the pages in the gentle glow of a bedside lamp. He imagines the children turning over sleepily in bed and murmuring goodnight. He imagines – so clearly – the father and the mother smiling at each other as they close the door softly on the sleeping child. He imagines it; he remembers it.
Mary is watching television when he arrives home. She stands up as he comes through the door, but does not offer him a kiss or greet him in any way. Instead she puts the kettle on. She knows he won’t eat straightaway. He is too tired to eat, almost too tired to speak. He accepts a mug of tea from her and asks how she is.
‘All right.’
A little later, he stands up, as if uncertain what to do next. Mary asks: ‘Will I get you something to eat?’
‘No – I’ll do myself a fry-up in the morning.’
She leaves the room. He hears her running the tap in the bathroom and then the door of her room shuts. It isn’t really her bedroom. It used to be the nursery, where the boy slept. He disappeared just before Christmas, when most buildings in the street had fairy lights hanging over the door and Christmas trees visible through the windows. He disappeared while they were starting to wrap his Christmas presents, while Christmas carols played incessantly on the radio and Christmas jingles played over the public address systems in the supermarkets.
That was four months ago, and more. Mary hasn’t changed anything. The toys are all still in the cupboards. The ceiling is still pasted with stars and crescent moons that glow a little in the dark when the lights are switched off. Mary moved in there a few weeks after the boy went. She and Geordie haven’t shared a bed since. They haven’t shared much else either: not their thoughts, nor their worries. They have plenty of those, but they no longer talk about them.
It’s one of those things. She doesn’t particularly blame Geordie for what happened; that’s to say, she blames him equally along with the rest of the human race.
An hour or two later, Geordie switches off the television. He has no idea what he has been watching. He goes to the bathroom and brushes his teeth. He goes to their bedroom and strips off to his boxer shorts and climbs into bed. He sleeps in the middle now; it’s less lonely. After a few minutes he falls asleep, but it is not the dreamless sleep of the tired man. His hands twitch and he moans once or twice. Then he mutters to himself: ‘Light in the forest. Light in the forest.’
There is no one to hear him, and when he wakes in the morning he doesn’t remember his dreams. There is no one beside him to ask how he slept, or nuzzle against him for a moment before he steps out of bed. He showers, then dresses laboriously, for the tiredness from the day before hasn’t left him. He goes into the kitchen and puts on the kettle. He raps gently on Mary’s door to see if she wants a cup of tea bringing in. There is no answer. They still love each other, he tells himself, although it’s hard to say why, or how you would know, they see so little of one another these days. He cooks himself a good breakfast: two fried eggs, beans, tinned tomatoes, bacon, a mug of hot tea with two sugars. After he has eaten, he experiences a rush as the glucose and the fats surge into his bloodstream – an illusion of energy; an illusion of purpose. By the time he has climbed into the truck and started it up, that flicker has died down again and he already feels weary as he heads north, back towards the forest.
Mary and Geordie have lost a child. Why should they think themselves anything special? Why should they feel entitled to grieve? It’s so commonplace. Abusing and losing children is something the nation excels at. Look at the headlines in the newspapers most weeks: children are tortured as witches; they are tortured for recreational purposes; they are abandoned, abused, trafficked, exploited, or just lost. It’s hard to believe how many simply disappear. Presumed runaways, presumed to have gone to live with a relation, presumed to be someone else’s problem.
It’s a profound philosophical question as to why we do this to our children. Some blame it on the decline of the family. Others bridle at this suggestion; what’s so special about families? Why should marriage be the only valid framework within which to bring up a child? It’s an interesting debate.
There’s a benefit system in place that rewards the production of children with money, housing and other prizes. Children are produced and nobody knows quite what to do with them. They go on the streets. They disappear. Or their economic value is recognised by entrepreneurs who know that children can provide services that will earn their owners money.
There are nameless children on the streets of every big city in the country: un-persons without family or even nationality.
There are children by their thousands in care homes. Some of them encounter compassion or even love; some of them receive less attention than rescue dogs.
A few of them encounter other kinds of love: a twisted, touching, groping kind of love that is hard to distinguish from hatred.
Every now and then some fresh crime against children is reported in the newspapers and the debate leaves the rooms of policy-makers and special political advisers and think-tanks and sociologists, and acquires a brief flicker of urgency. People are interviewed on television and say things such as: ‘It’s the twenty-first century. And we still live in a society that can’t protect its own children from harm.’ The statistics are dusted down and trotted out: the tens of thousands of children who go missing every year; the sixty-five thousand children placed in care homes. And everyone knows that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Then some especially gifted adviser whispers in the ear of the secretary of state. He whispers that this could become an issue for voters. Something needs to be done. There has to be an initiative.
This secretary of state is keen on initiatives. He senses his career is on an upward trajectory. Five years ago he was a back-bench MP, whose previous employment was as an actor in a long-running soap opera on television. Then his talent at histrionics resulted in him being plucked from obscurity and appointed as a parliamentary private secretary. He would never have dreamed, when he first stood for parliament, that one day he would be secretary of state for the Department of Children, Schools and Families. Now – who knows where he might end up? The voters want action? Using all his vast ministerial powers he proposes, as with the twitch of a magic wand, a network of Regional Children’s Commissioners. They will be known as ‘Children’s Czars’.
Something like this has been done before, but it’s going to be different this time. That’s what the secretary of state argues. In a major speech that receives wide coverage in the media, he talks about the importance of his department’s role. He refers to the recent conviction of a perpetrator in a case that shocked the country, and asks for more resources for his department to support his initiative. These new children’s czars will be individuals of the highest possible calibre, and paid a fortune. They will have undreamed-of powers and enormous budgets.
‘The new children’s czars will get rid of the culture of compliance within social services,’ intones the secretary of state on a BBC morning chat show. He has forgotten that, in response to an earlier crisis, he himself introduced many of the new compliance requirements that are keeping social workers behind their desks; filling in risk assessments; training in epidemiology; or engaging in ‘reflective practice’ sessions.
‘They will help get social workers back on the front line. They will set new intervention targets. They will cut through the red tape and make things happen! We will pilot this scheme and then, as soon as possible, we intend to roll it out nationally.’
It sounds good. A children’s czar! And who will be the first to be chosen? Who is this kindly person, muffled in furs, travelling everywhere by sledge and rescuing children trapped in gingerbread houses?
It is not some benign autocrat who is appointed to run the pilot scheme, but Norman Stokoe.
Norman Stokoe, Children’s Czar! Who would have thought that Norman could ever aspire to such a position? He started his working life in a North London Local Education Authority. Then an opening appeared for an administrator in the Social Services department. It soon became apparent that Norman was a clever man. He always did his homework. He always turned up at meetings on time. He spoke well. He was considered to be sound. And it wasn’t too long before he began to rise effortlessly through the great new industry of child protection.
Norman Stokoe, Children’s Czar. You wouldn’t get a job like that without knowing your business. And Norman does know it. He was involved in the second intergovernmental conference on Violence against Children. He is familiar with the UN Convention on Rights of the Child. He did sterling work for the Safeguarding Children review that was sponsored by Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission, Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Chief Inspectorate and other august bodies. He can reel off the annual statistics from the British Crime Survey: half a million children recorded as the victims of violent crimes in England and Wales; forty-three thousand the subject of child protection plans, thirteen thousand of them under four years old; twenty-one thousand children the victims of rape, gross indecency or incest; one in seven of those children under the age of ten; eight thousand violent attacks against children under the age of ten.
It is a problem on an industrial scale and it requires an industrial response. The UK leads the world – but whether in measuring the problem or solving it, it is harder to say. The UK has some of the most stringent codes of practice of any country regarding the exploitation of children in sweat factories in Thailand or Vietnam. It is somet. . .
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Light Shining in the Forest
Paul Torday
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