The Thing (Symbol)
The "Thing" that Penny and Primrose see in the forest is a symbol for the trauma of war. Although the girls are evacuated from London to the countryside to escape the German bombing of the capital, they cannot escape the life-altering disruption of the Second World War. With its blind, miserable, human-like face and a body composed of the detritus of daily human life (nuts and bolts, dishcloths, pan scrubbers, old bones), the Thing represents the broken, worn-out soul of humanity. It also stinks of civilization gone rancid—old bedding, blocked drains, putrefying trash. The creature—which the girls later learn is a mythological creature known as the Loathly Worm—drags itself through the unspoiled beauty of the forest. Like war, it leaves bones, blood, and destruction in its wake. As the story progresses, Byatt emphasizes the symbolism of the Thing by associating the scarring memory of witnessing it to the girls' shared inability to move past traumatic memories of having lost their fathers during the war. The Thing becomes synonymous with the girls' trauma, their memories of the creature becoming just as destructive, all-consuming, misery-inducing, and impossible to reconcile as their memories of the war.
The Forest (Symbol)
The forest in which Penny and Primrose encounter the Thing is a symbol of the boundary between the known and unknown. Upon arrival at the mansion house, the girls are excited to venture into the forest because, as Londoners, they have never explored the woods. When they enter the forest, the girls enter the realm of the unknown, finding unfamiliar scents and sights as they go deeper. However, they are soon overwhelmed by the daunting presence of the Thing—an unreal being suddenly crashing into their reality. At the end of the story, both women return to the forest to confront their childhood trauma of seeing the Thing and suffering the loss of innocence that came with having their lives upended by war at such a young age. As she reconciles her memories, Primrose reflects on how the forest is the source of both enchantment and horror. In doing so, she makes peace with the unknown, accepting that the unknown produces as much beauty and magic as it does trauma.
Jam and Cream (Symbol)
When Penny and Primrose meet again as adults in 1984, they catch up over tea and scones with jam and cream. Primrose comments to Penny that having lived through wartime rationing as a girl made her permanently greedy, by which she means she overeats out of fear of being deprived. In this way, the extra jam and cream Primrose takes for herself symbolize the compulsive byproducts of trauma. Because her body was developing during a time when the government strictly allotted how much food civilians could buy to avoid starvation and hoarding at a time of war-effort scarcity, Primrose feels a compulsive need to secure as much food as she can for herself, out of an irrational fear that she will not have enough. Just as traumatic memories haunt her thoughts, the wartime trauma has a physiological grip on Primrose's body, which is programmed to believe it never has enough food.
