Dear Max,
I have a suspicion that you're not going to like my explanation any more
than Michael Healy's.
I am quite sure that 'walking in the woods' is not a Sussex expression,
but a phrase that has meaning only within the story 'They'. It is clear
in the story that all the villagers, including unsympathetic ones like
the tenant farmer, know that spirits of dead children are met with in
that house and those woods. So 'walking in the woods' has come to be,
within that particular community, a euphemism for 'mourning a dead
child'. That is why it is something that you do not explain or talk
about, except to someone who has already experienced the presence of the
children.
It had not crossed my mind, until you asked, that it might be a more
generally known phrase, and having considered the possibility, I am
inclined to reject it because:
- when RK uses well-known local sayings, he usually signals them in
some way (I'd have to hunt for examples, but I'm sure that's the case);
- if it were an expression in use in Sussex at the time, I think he
would have used it elsewhere, given his preoccupation with the memory of
his daughter Josephine, and his feeling of her presence at Batemans;
- if it were in use anywhere else, I think someone would have remarked
on it by now;
- it fits with the logic of the story that those 'in the know' have
their own coded way of referring to what is going on.
Liz
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