A. S. Byatt's "The Thing in the Forest" is a short story about two girls who leave London to escape Nazi bombings only to encounter a miserable, worm-like creature in a rural English forest. Decades later, the women have difficulty processing the trauma of WWII and their encounter with the Thing.
In 1940, Penny and Primrose meet on a train taking them out of London. Neither girl's parents have explained the full danger of staying in the city, and the confused girls find comfort in agreeing to stick together during the evacuation. The girls, along with other evacuated children, are temporarily housed in a mansion house in the country. On their first day there, the girls venture into the surrounding forest and duck out of sight when they hear and smell the giant, worm-like creature struggling toward them. The Thing's miserable face and strange, turd-like body made up of trash and bones are seared on the girls' memories. However, they do not discuss it, and the next day they are sent to stay with different families. Penny and Primrose don't see each other again until 1984, when coincidentally they both visit the mansion house, which has been converted into a war museum. Penny is now a child psychologist and Primrose is a children's storyteller. They find a book on display that tells of a local legend about a monster called the Loathly Worm. Over tea, the women discuss how they both believe they definitely saw the strange creature, and how memories of the creature have impacted their lives ever since. Both women skip the dinner they agreed to have. Independently, they return to the forest to process their memories. After not seeing the Thing again, Penny returns to the forest a third time and awaits her confrontation with the Thing. The story closes with Primrose telling an audience, for the first time, the story of two girls who see, or think they see, something in the forest.
With language that mimics the clichés of fairytales, Byatt explores themes of trauma, fantasy, unprocessed grief, and losing one's innocence. Although the Thing in the forest belongs to the realm of the impossible, the creature is "more real" than reality itself to the women: it is a symbolic representation of the disruption and misery that war brings about.
