Woods and Words by Julian Roup

For Julian Roup, woods and words have always been inseparable companions. From the magical faraway tree of childhood tales to the real forests of Table Mountain, Knysna, and Ashdown Forest where he has lived for more than four decades, each woodland has offered sanctuary, vision, and inspiration. They have been places of escape and homecoming, entwined with the words of great writers and the stories Julian has gone on to tell himself. This piece traces his journey through those landscapes – both of trees and of books – and how they have guided a life lived in nature and in writing.

The author, Richard Mabey, one of my heroes and the hero of many in love with the British landscape and nature, writes in the Accidental Garden: “Woods always beckon you in.” How right that is.

On first reading those words recently it stopped me in my tracks. Woods have been beckoning me in for 70 years. They have the same power, but different, to the seashore, both places where some primordial memory tells us we are home once more. They offer escape and freedom from oneself as much as from the world of man. And a quantum of solace, as the James Bond movie of that name puts it

Appropriately, given my subsequent history, or maybe it created the groundwork for my subsequent history, a blessed teacher read us the first book I remember – The Magical Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. To my shame I do not recall her name, maybe someone, a fellow pupil perhaps at SACS, my school in Cape Town ,when I was five and in the first class, Sub A in 1955, can jog my memory. This book transported me to a tree which had an ever-changing land in its canopy. One could never know what one might find up there, but it was always something new and fantastical and entered via the trunk and branches of this magical faraway tree. I put roots down at the foot of that tree, roots embedded in the roots of a tree and in the words that described its life. I had found my first wood amid the first truly impactful words I heard from a book. That grounding has informed my whole life, as a lover of woods, of words, as a journalist, as a pen for hire in PR and then finally as a writer and author.

My first real physical woods were those at the base of the north facing slope of Table Mountain, the lesser-known view to the fabled flat-topped colossus seen from the sea which is southern Africa’s icon, its totem. Here as a child in the 1950 I cautiously mapped out a secret world just half a mile from my home, a place tinkling with a stream falling down from the granite mountain heights that towered above, clear of any tree, soaring into the southern skies. It was in those woods, at the very fringe, that I found myself one day sitting at the foot of a cork oak, enchanted by its fantastic al knobbly bark. And as I sat there in my usual dreamy state, I received a sort of epiphany. It came to me in a powerful vision that my life would be bound up with writing and story telling. It gave me the most powerful sense of joy this glimpse into the future.

Later, in the army, doing my national service, I entered the wildwoods of Knysna, 300 miles northwest of Cape Town, with its remnant elephant population, a tiny fragment of the herds that once bestrode this southland. I camped there besides the signals Land Rover I drove, in a tent that also accommodated a small hill of condensed milk tins. A sweet and happy coincidence. But the real sweetness was to be free to slip away into the deep shade of the woods, offering privacy and respite from the hundreds of fellow soldiers encamped in the forest. It was a deep swim into a refreshing pool after the blistering heat and semi desert of our base camp in Oudtshoorn, surrounded by khaki bush and ostriches for hundreds of square miles. This wood was an oasis physically and psychologically. The thought entered my mind to simply keep walking with a backpack filled with condensed milk into the depths of the forest, so deeply that I would never be found and so claim my freedom from the army. One of the lost percentages that the army chewed up each year in dead or lost or damaged stripling recruits. But I knew too well that I would be found and would then enter a bleaker wood of army prison. So, I went just far enough to lose the sound of our encampment. And rested there and dreamed of a life beyond the army.

And then, finally, in my 30s I came to the woods of Sussex in the High Weald of south east England and had a sense of homecoming. There my twin passions, horses and forest bathing, led me down a fantastical path of enriched experience which found its way into a forest of words of my own making. I will not delve too deep into this as it is all collected within my books, A Fisherman in the Saddle, Boerejood, Into the Secret Heart of Ashdown Forest – A Horseman’s Country Diary, Life in a Time of Plague, First Catch Your Calamari – Travels with an Appetite and soon hopefully, Into the Enchanted Forest with Callum. All are available from BLKDOG Publishing and on Amazon in paperback, audio and electronic formats.

I have been blessed to live on the eastern edge of Ashdown Forest in East Sussex for the last 45 years of my life and that wood is my dream space just as much as the woods of Table Mountain were the dream space of my childhood and youth.

Alongside all this wood walking and dreaming I entered another forest, as magical in its way, and made of the wood of my first love, trees, the woodlands of words encased in books. For a dreamy boy with a head filled with romantic notions and a love of beauty it was my real great escape. It is the wood that has been my true home all these seven decades and counting.

I have slip-slided and marched through this worded landscape from adventure stories by Alistair MacLean to the cowboy tales of Louis L’Amour and then to the novels of a small army of English, American, Russian, French, Australian and South African authors. I loved Alan Paton Cry the Beloved Country, Rian Malan ‘s My Traitor’s Heart, Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let the Dogs Out Tonight.  The books of Steinbeck, Hemingway , Cormac McCarthy, Tim Winton and last but not least  John Fowels, whose books, The Magus and the Ebony Tower started me writing.  I fell in love with travel writing, authors like Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Dervla Murphy, Jan Morris, Colin Thubron and above all Patrick Leigh Fermor. And then nature writing engulfed me: Ronald Blythe, Robert MacFarlane, Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, and Richard Mabey.

And then in my 50s, I began to write as if my life depended on it and in a way it did. And all the while the woods stood around me patiently waiting, my horses less patiently.