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    Tales from the Forest
    Tales from the Forest
    Tales from the Forest
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    Tales from the Forest

    By Sam Jones

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The Forest of Dean is a place filled with stories. Stories of fact, stories of fiction and some that bridge that gap.
    Tales from the Forest is a remarkable collection of four such stories set in the 1950s, borne from cherished memories of the place and its inhabitants and created by a true Forester with a talent for storytelling.
    The tales encompass village life in a bygone era, intertwining and interacting just as small knit communities of the time did.
    Nostalgic, heart warming, intriguing and filled with the kind of characters that could only have come from the wonderfully eclectic, proud and magical Forest of Dean.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateMar 18, 2018
    ISBN9780244075606
    Tales from the Forest

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      Book preview

      Tales from the Forest - Sam Jones

      Tales from the Forest

      Tales from the Forest

      A collection of short stories about villagers in the Forest of Dean in the 1950’s.

      Sam Jones

      Another title by Sam Jones:

      Poems What I Wrote

      A fantastic collection of poetry inspired by a life in The Forest of Dean and its various inhabitants. Amusing, inspirational, thought-provoking, nostalgic, and heart-breakingly magnificent.

      Available as paperback and eBook

      Published 2018

      Copyright © Sam Jones 2018

      All rights reserved.

      ISBN : 978-0-244-07560-3

      All characters in these stories are not based on anyone living or jud.

      Also available in paperback.

      Forgewell (Retribution)

      He sat in the schoolroom with his nineteen classmates, the late summer sun shining through the long narrow windows of the block stone four room building. He shared his metal framed two seater desk with Janet Scrivens a chubby girl with long blonde hair who had a cold and kept sniffing snot back up her nose. ‘Christ!’ he thought, ‘why don’t ‘er use ‘er ‘anky?’. The ink blotted, stained desk was adorned with the scraped initials and symbols of past scholars, in the channel at the top of the lidded desk lay his pencil and spare wooden handled pen next to a recessed ink pot.

      He wore short grey worsted trousers held up by a hook and eye elasticated belt, a long sleeved grey shirt rolled up to the elbows with a short sleeved fair isle jumper over the top. His long grey woolen socks (knitted by his mum) reached to his knees, on his feet he wore black leather boots with hobnailed soles and metaled tips and heels, added by his dad on a last in the garden shed to prolong their life. His dark hair stood on his head like a mop as though he’d had a bowl put on his head which he had two days ago, Sunday morning, when his dad had cut his hair with a large pair of scissors. Some of the other boys in his class had the same sort of haircut. The others had theirs cut by Mr Prothero who lived down by the new bridge who did it for pocket money (three pence for a short back and sides). His dad reckoned that a three penny bit could be better spent elsewhere, so every fourth morning he had the bowl put on his head. His dark eyes and sharp features belied some Welsh ancestry on his mother’s side and in future years would catch the eye of many a young lady but now he wrestled with the figures before him in Forgewell Primary School.

      His face screwed up in concentration, nine year old James Morgan didn’t like sums and couldn’t get his head round multiplying big numbers by big numbers. Words were what he liked, they made more sense, they told you something. The letters could be turned round and about to make all sorts of descriptions and stories that could carry you off to faraway places where dreams became reality. Mrs Linda Green who taught Class Three had Audrey Hepburn looks like the up and coming film star, she had short dark hair, large dark eyes, and fine features. Her slim figure in a light blue twin set with matching pencil skirt and dark court shoes, she was a twenty eight year old modern woman. She had arrived here some three months ago with her husband Eric, he having been promoted and transferred to a local bank. She had found the teaching post after settling in to what was a different world to the one they were formerly used to in Surrey. The landscape was different and the locals were certainly different in this somewhat isolated Forest of Dean in the mid nineteen-fifties.

      She now sat at her desk at the front of the class and over the top of her reading glasses quietly watched the boy James Morgan who sat next to the constantly sniffing blonde haired girl. He had something in him he wasn’t aware of, she knew of his humble background that he shared with all his classmates but having read his stories and marked his spelling she knew that here was a writer in the raw who, if he could escape the pit, the forestry or the foundry could become something special. The large classroom clock at last clicked to three o’clock and Jim breathed a sigh of relief, at last, now to get out.

      Mrs Green announced the end of class and as they scuffled and tried to walk composed to the door as instructed, she called Jim’s name, asking him to stay behind. Jim kept going not because he hadn’t heard but because Mrs Green had asked for James to stay behind. This was a name he didn’t recognise for although that was the name on his birth certificate and he’d been baptised James Owen Morgan (Owen his grandfather’s name kept by tradition in the family) he’d always been known and called Jim. A soft hand placed on his shoulder gently held him to one side of the outgoing children and he looked up at the face he regarded (after his mother) as the prettiest he had ever seen.

      Sorry Mrs Green, I didn’t know you wuz meaning I, he said.

      James is your name, replied Mrs Green.

      Oy I know but nobody don’t call I by it, he said.

      All right, said Mrs Green, I won’t keep you long but I wondered after seeing some of your writing and knowing how much you like it, if you would like to take some paper home to do some extra work there? Jim scratched his head then rapidly brought his hand down fearing Mrs Green might think he had nits. He’d had nits once, discovered during a visit by the nit nurse and his mother had put some evil smelling lotion on his head and left it there for an hour before washing it out, telling him not to go anywhere near them Wilkinson kids because they were a dirty lot of heathens who didn’t wash properly and keep themselves clean and that’s probably

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