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extraordinary noises coming from the scullery. They shot out of bed, pressed through to the back of the cottage and peered through a slit in the door. There was a bloated wolf, struggling to fit back into the drain through which he had obviously entered. They felt giddy from sleeplessness and anxiety, and could make little sense of what they could clearly see.
    Then they heard a well-known, piercing little voice, somewhat muffled inevitably, but calling, ‘Get me out of here. Now.’
    The father whacked the wolf with an axe and the mother ran for the big meat knife and slit open the dead beast carefully. Inside its maw, somewhat bloody and in need of a good wash, was their son. He was laughing.
    He was full of himself too. He told them of his adventures:
    He had escaped from the impresarios easily enough by hiding in a mouse hole. He had fallen in with a gang of thieves and got them all arrested. He had been swallowed by a cow, but shouted so loudly that the village priest thought the animal was demonically possessed and had had it killed. Still inside the cow’s third stomach, he had been gobbled down by the wolf. He had tricked the wolf into the scullery and then let it eat so much that it could not get out again. He obviously thought he had been pretty damned clever for a small chap. And actually he had.
    She cleaned him down by the kitchen fire, trying to be angry with both her men, but laughing and laughing at his ridiculous adventures and her own immense relief and joy.
    ‘Bedtime,’ she said firmly when he was all clean and sweet smelling and warm. She carried him to his tiny bed and popped him in. He calmed down suddenly and she tucked him up.
    ‘Can I have a wolf skin counterpane?’ he asked. But before she could answer, his eyes closed. Just before she straightened up, longing for her own bed, he murmured, ‘Actually, Mother, it was quite scary, some of it. But I coped and I made us a fortune.’ There was a short pause, and then he added slyly, ‘Better than a fancy princess, anyway. I think I’ll stay home from now on.’
    So he did and they all lived happily ever after.

2
    April

    Saltridge Wood
    T here is a freshness of green in beech woods in the late spring. Beech leaves open quite slowly; they break out of their pointed scaled buds and seem to dance, an extraordinary pellucid shade of green. Although the trunks and branches of beech trees look especially solid, the twigs that carry the leaves are delicate, feathery almost, and spread out, by and large, in horizontal fan shapes. It takes a beech tree quite a while to fill in its canopy solidly, and so in the spring and even in the early summer the sunlight breaks through, dappling the ground underneath them. It seems impossible to describe the green of early beech woods in sunshine: it is somehow a pure essence of green, to which other lesser greens can be compared to their detriment. In fact the first green of larch trees is very similar, and underappreciated, but larch needles do not move and bounce the light in delicate breezes the way beech leaves do. There is something in the dancing of beech leaves that adds to this greenness. Of course, beech green cannot be the ‘best’ green – that would be nonsense – but it still feels true, somehow, and lifts the spirits.
    It is not just the green that makes spring beech woods so pleasing. The trunks of beech trees are grey and smooth. It is into beech bark that lovers most satisfactorily carve their hearts and initials: the graffiti stand out clearly on the smooth surface, and the messages grow with the tree. The more gnarly trunks of oak, the long ridges of elm, or the scales of pine not only make for a less emphatic visual statement, they tend to grow back over any carving and obliterate it. Etymologists think that the word ‘book’ may be derived from the word ‘beech’ ( boc is an old variant for both), and that in northern Europe the earliest books were perhaps written on thin slices of