There's nothing that quite says you are back in England like two weeks steaming wood-chip off the spare bedroom. Well the family is back in the mercurial wet-weather freak out that is Devon. Still, today there are a few flicks of blue scampering behind the bank of grey, but keeping a low profile. In the 'relative' quiet i have the delicious task of preparing stories and ideas and piracy for the upcoming: WANDERING COURT - the tenth year of the Year Course. We have wonderful and extremely rural new digs on the moors. We find ourselves in long barns in part of a working farm. The animal powers are just a snort away. We are literally down to the last couple of places i believe. But if you have a longing for deep myth, how to carry a story with elegance and pathos, to apprehend the shape of what constitutes initiation, then contact us TODAY. Not tomorrow.
I am delighted to be getting notes (and photos) of SNOWY TOWER arriving in folks homes from all over the world. Unbelievable response, so glad to see the story of Parzival getting so feasted on.
It hasn't all been steaming. Just mostly. Had an epic and lively conversation with the Canadian teacher Stephen Jenkinson (google Griefwalker) and the craftsman Duncan Passmore in the 14th century confines of the Cott Inn pub, on a particularly rainy Monday. Stephen and i will be just two of some great teachers at the 40th anniversary of the Great Mother Conference in Maine this first week in June. Oh yes, i got to do a little wet-weather painting too (above).
News of a one off public workshop coming up at Schumacher college - for the low, low, eye-wateringly low price of £45. The US teacher John Gouldthorpe will be joining me - John is a skilled and erudite scholar of James Hillman (amongst other things) - one of a very few. As Hillman wanders the Otherworld, it's vital we have teachers that hold fidelity to the teeth, claws and nuance of what he was working through. John will provide us with that. Ok - here's a quick description:
The Disguises of the Heart and the Soul of the World: Image, Hillman, and the Road of Story
16 & 17 May 2014
(an evening and a day)
With Martin Shaw and John Gouldthorpe
This course is open for bookings.
The ancients knew something that we’ve forgotten. That such a thing as a world-soul exists, and a key to its relationship is through apprehension of beauty. Fidelity to images that rouse our heart has been a powerful road to breaking open the often numbing strains of modern living. But when we say heart what do we mean? Poetic associations of the heart reveal a nuanced and educated state. Can thought dwell there?
Through story, discussion, and the challenging work of psychologist James Hillman, we will explore relationship to heart, the experience of beauty and an animate earth. Martin Shaw will be telling the lengthiest and most complex of the Grimm’s brothers tales – “The Two Brothers”, from the Friday evening to the close, whilst John Gouldthorpe will be our guide through some of the intricate revelations of Hillman.
This will be a lively and concentrated gathering, with Shaw and Gouldthorpe providing a way of seeing in which to apprehend our relationship to ourselves and a wider world.
*****
And just to prove to myself i'm really back on the old sod, here's a Dartmoor version of a wider west-country folk tale. Crops up a lot, this one.
What Price to Lay an Eye?
Night. A storm on the moors. Icy darts battered a harsh tune on cottage windows, cattle sheds shuddered as if needing rope. The old midwife, Morada, had just crawled between her blankets, had stoked the embers, was settling to sleep. It was at this moving-into-dream that she was disturbed by a knock at the door of her Holne cottage.
She wandered through the shadows of the creaking house and opened the door. Peering into bright rain and flooding track, she was greeted by what she recognised as an earth-soul, a Benji, a fairy. A slim figure, on horseback with ornate saddle, rook-dark hair settling his shoulders. Leaning down - a murmur in the agitated night - he offered her ten gold guineas to deliver his child. His voice was strange, like water passing over stones.
She swiftly agreed. He bound her eyes in a handkerchief and they rode up to the high moor and into deadly gusts of wind and rain. Past Vennford lake, over the bridge at Hexworthy, up past the old chapel and then on in the general direction of Bellever Tor.
Old arms grip
a slim waist,
alive in the liminal.
This rooted oak, this one that
has pulled so many cherubs
bloodied and spluttering
into this world, now hugs tight
her fey chauffeur.
A girl again
on the rain-horse,
the glitter bright track,
this otter-wet night.
Somewhere out in the fusty acres of grizzled weather they got to the Benji’s cave. A few waxy candles spluttered next to pools of silvered water and mossy humps, the entrance was little more than a whip thin tangle of brambles. Inside, oddly, it seemed far larger, like the longhouse of some ancient moorland king. Ornate patterning was hewn into thick, timbered pillars, the floor thick with animal skins, a fire glowed, and its smoke was sweet, like dried herbs. There was a strange music, so tender it was almost painful to listen to. Morada met the fairy-wife and settled to her task. By lamplight she delivered the baby, wind screeching through the sodden branches outside. The whole moor was a-shake that night.
Part of her instructions were to rub an ointment – a kind of fairy mud - on the baby’s eyes. She did so, but, of course got antsy to try a little herself. Just the one eye. What could be the harm? Well, it stung a little but that’s it. After a time, she was delivered home to her door.
But hard to forget
a meeting in
the byre-hut
of the hidden
King and Queen
of Dartmoor.
Fairy.
These archaic ones
who squat in the dark
on the low branches
of the Birch.
Sometimes in the furthest
stable, or in the last field
between the farm
and the forest.
Who horses never tire,
who’s musics never cease,
who’s food must not be tasted.
Quite a secret.
Like tasting a wine
that no one knew
the vat of anymore.
Times granite persistance
loosens to coloured ribbons
of all-at-the-same-time memory.
Hours, days, years
curl like wood shavings
round your feet.
A day or two later she wandered down the green lanes into the market town of Ashburton, and everything was different. The stars were clearly visible in the daylight, cats were as large as hounds, salmon leapt from the river Ashburn with the faces of foxes – the whole world felt upside down. She tried to steady herself with a whisky in the snug rooms of the Exeter Inn, just off the market, but even that didn’t work. At the bustling market she, of a horror, spotted the fairy rider ambling slow and unseen through the throng. He immediately turned his attention to her. She almost stopped breathing. He leant down on his saddle towards her, face obscured by shadow from a battered old hat. “Which of your eyes can see me?” When she slowly pointed to the left he, in a flash, deftly scooped it out with an icy blade.
She carried a dark pit where her left eye should be for the rest of her life. Children would run to the door of her cottage and then away again, just to say they had. When she finally died of old age, they cleared her house and found ten gold guineas under her pillow. As the villagers gleefully picked them up they became oak leaves, withered and fell apart.
what price to lay an eye?
The old medicine man
lays his bundle on Bear Butte,
and shambles his dancing
low and furry, to charm
the lightning, that it may
cut him from habit,
light him up,
bring him the healing
only fire can
provide.
what price to lay an eye?
Copyright Martin Shaw 2014
Thursday, 10 April 2014
Wednesday, 19 March 2014
Home words.
That's it. Our bags are packed. Thank you Turtle Island for a greatly nourishing trip. So here's some words to start preparing for life back on the dreaming animal of Dartmoor. Slange and slange again. Remember - we have just a couple of places left on our year course in its new word-hall up on the moor. Join us by the fire for the tenth year: The Wandering Court. April 25-27th/June 13-15th/August 1-3rd/Oct 3-5th/Dec 5th - 7th.
The Rattle-House of Sound:
Beating the Boundaries
I am in the hut.
The warm hut of myself.
Where language is
a herding magic,
nine inky mares
galloping loose
on the bone-white page,
an equine flood.
Up in the crag-world
do you hear these whinnies?
Let the loom of my tongue
craft the wild bees furry speech.
Black clouds I am a-lightning;
I hurl rain-daggers into mud.
Black clouds I am a-shire,
loosening my muscle hoofed stomp.
The geese that flew for Parzival, I love.
The hawk that claimed three drops of their blood, I love.
The snow it fell upon, I love.
The hut is a rattle-house of sound.
A croft for wolves.
It stands in dark privacy.
Deep nested, wine briared
from the drifting snows.
The floor is erotic dirt,
the air is sweet like stored apples.
Walls are the big trees
– Grimm’s trees,
Siberian, enormous Irish
voyaging stories.
Bark shines wet,
the roots are mad and deep.
I ramble under the
billowing skirts of
love’s tall pines.
This twigged hump
holds the vastness
of a stag’s breastbone,
a pirate’s cathedral,
is a smokey den of gaudy leaps.
Gawain’s bent head
in the green chapel, I love.
The heavy horse alone
in the orchard, I love.
The woman who lives at
the edge of the world, I love.
Grasses hum with beehive.
I break chunks of honeycomb
and offer them up to Dartmoor.
The hut shudders with foamy energy,
reaching northwards to coax the rivers –
the Tavy, the Plym, the Erme, the Avon,
the Dart, and The Teign.
Brittle gods are amok
in the tourists' sour heather.
I call the names
under the names
of old Devon
- Broken Court - Breazle,
Dark Stream - Dawlish,
Great Wood - Cruwys Morchard,
all shimmering in the gramarye
of this Kingdom of Dumnonia.
I carry green waves
from the bright girdle of the sea,
generous beer in a bronze cup
for the spit-wind.
I come in the old way.
I leave a hollowed out hoof
filled with apple-blossom on the turf,
I haunch the dream path of the adder
up to Hay Tor, Lucky Tor, Hound Tor,
Benji Tor, Yal Tor.
The dry-stone wall, I love. The moon over corn, I love. Branwen of the white breast, I love.
In my forties, I bend my head.
I come in my father's boots,
and Alec’s, and Leonard’s, and Bryan’s.
I carry dark bundles of my mother's hair,
and Christine’s, and Monica’s, and Jenny's.
The blood holds Shaw, Gibson,
Causer, Thackery.
I come to walk the boundaries.
I come to find a myth-line.
This spreading turf is the moor
– once a desert, a tropical island,
a red wood forest.
I clamber flanks of bailing twine
and rusting tractor engine to get nearer
to your gurgled speech.
I break the hard crust of snow with blue paws.
I lace granite with whisky and milk.
Within the stag’s bone there is a hawkish wine,
in the glisten of the hare's paw lies the old singing.
Let the tusks
of Dermot’s Boar
get soaked in the wine
of your education,
Let your milk heavy udders
splash hot into our
story-parched mouth,
Let the wild swan at dawn
rise to meet Christ’s dark fire
I ask for protection from the good powers.
Let all stories hold, heal and nourish my small family. Let they be hazels for our mouths. Nothing but goodness –
no fear, no meanness, no envy.
Copyright Martin Shaw 2014
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
two weeks left in America
Friends: good news - we have a few spaces available for the year course due to an upscale in venue. Deeper into the moor. These are getting snapped up daily - but if you know someone that this would be right for - please send them the link. Exciting times..tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com to sign up
Just two weeks now till we board the plane home to Britain - no doubt we will be peering into slate-grey gusts of rain at Heathrow wondering how to get back to Devon bearing in mind the rail track we charioted up on then got washed away with the flooding. Times have been rich here though - and there is a last flurry of events to celebrate the launch of SNOWY TOWER - readings and tellings in Point Reyes and Santa Rosa for the next two saturdays - scroll down or look online if you want details.
In an attempt to lure myself and la fam away from this life of hot-tubs/margaritas/pacific swell and coyote yips, i am going to put in some very local Devon writing today. I'm working on the final book in the trilogy that LIGHTNING TREE and SNOWY TOWER started - these stories with a tangible, localised geography. The commentary for the story is a much influenced by me walking the route as working with associative myths and folklore. One day soon i'll givc you the story this comes from - the place is around Berry Pomeroy Castle. In short it's a love story of a young woman of the parish and a farmers boy. it's geographical span runs the length of the forest and up to the church. When i first arrived in Devon with my black tent - over a decade ago - i was lucky enough to have it in the gardens of the castle lodge house awhile.
Walking the Story
Little Hempston is very old Devon – thatched, white-washed cottages, small bridges, small rivers just begging to have stick-races down. In the spring, every available piece of public soil erupts yellow with daffodil.
Walking from it towards Berry Pomeroy, you soon come to the fast moving road between Totnes and Newton Abbott. Left at the pub, and on for another few hundred yards until a swift crossing over and down into Berry. Not that our Sally would have been negotiating a seemingly endless sweep of 4x4s and horse boxes.
Past a few houses and the road widens, the castle’s surrounding forest on the left and onwards to the village itself. On the right is a green lane – once beloved of a motley assortment of travellers who lived quietly at the top. There were trucks, caravans, hastily assembled benders, folks coming and going. Some settled for as long as the law allowed, others – what locals call ‘blow ins’ - just passing through. Cara and I have known a few people up there, and as I passed I remembered dusk visits, clutching wine and cakes firmly whilst negotiating the slippery rutted track, settling comfortably by a wood burner for an evening of music and story.
Still, that is many years past, and I don’t have the time or inclination to wander up today to see the thin trails of smoke through the green that used to indicate occupancy. Just past the travellers turning is a swift cut to the left, into the greenwood. There is much felled conifer, two great banks of it, but behind, in the shadows, stands old growth forest, badger dens, and a bluebell patch. In the years that I was at the castle’s lodge house, these rough routes through the woods were a kind of open secret to the locals – there was dog walking, and surprise meetings, in the most unlikeliest of places. But today they are cordoned off, no goes, keep out.
Down at the ruins I produce coins and let them fly over the ravine that protects a good half of the castle. The original owner, Ralph De Pomeroy, apparently wilfully picked the most inaccessible keep he could find, on a ghostly knoll high above a low-sunk tributary of the Dart. I like his style. The coins don’t make the tributary today but simply disappear into the abundant ferns gripping the steep drop.
Scattering the wintering banks is the plant ‘Lords and Ladies’, what the scholars call Arum maculatum. This robust little plant is many named in England: the Cuckoo-pint, Naked Boys, Starch-Root, Devils and Angels, Bobbins and Wake Robin. In autumn, it cheers the grasses with resilient clusters of bright red berries, but take heed, they are not for eating. The root, when roasted well, is edible, and was even once traded under the name Portland sago. It was a working folks' drink before the introduction of tea and coffee, but prepared incorrectly it's highly toxic. I doff my hat, and leave it alone.
The wind is up. As a child I thought it was one of two things: the sound of all the felled ghost trees of Dartmoor talking to themselves, or the moans of elderly patients at Torbay hospital gathered on the breeze. When a little older, my father and I would walk down through the small woodland behind the estate I grew up on, he would stop me under the boughs and we would go very quietly and listen. It didn’t take too much of this to realise where this sound was coming from.
I see something I had long forgotten about. The Wishing Tree. A tall, wide-spreading beech. They say that three walks around it in the sun direction, and then three times backwards, always thinking of the wish, will lead it surely to come true. Surely Sally stopped at this tree? Despite some viscous pruning, even across the trunk itself, I can make out carved names of old lovers and wishers from other generations. In the three massive branches, I find, to my delight, attached lace, symbols of wishes. Unable to stop myself, I am soon clambering the slippery roots and holding a dear wish.
I am leaving the castle behind, and its attendant human dramas, and following the story's path again. I am heading up and out of the ruins' aura. There is a small tea house settled in by the path side, and I try to keep my mouth clear of the taste of dark roast French coffee. It doesn’t work but I trudge on, none the less. It’s not hugely steep, this track up to the lodge house, but long enough for a little tight ache to move into the thighs.
Everything is tall. The trees, either old growth or conifer, seem vast, and the path’s crumbled leaves blow up in glyph-like patterns for seconds in front of me and then settle. The steep banks bring back the very familiar sensation of being watched. To my right, two crow couples seem to play on the brisk currents of air way out over a sharp dip, two above the other. There’s no violence and no jostling. It’s sweet to hear the caw.
I reach out to touch the rough bark of the older trees. Moss lies thick like drifts on the northern flanks. A white pheasant is seen for a second, to the left of the path, just as it opens out of the tree line.
I decide to break the law and walk past the do not enter! sign that stops entry to the lodge house or further fields. The signs are there for good reason – years of car loads of Torbay youth congregating at the gates at midnight; dealing, brawling, and generally getting a kick out of being so near a scene of dark power that somehow mirrors their own turbulence. The old initiations were a way of sacralising this kind of death-wrestling - as we know, when the rites-of-passage disappear, the longing remains but turns feral.
There is a view to end views just beyond this forbidden track. A dark soiled field, pine forest, and then a panoramic opening – of patchwork fields, budding tumps of woodland, glints of dusk light in nearby Totnes and Dartington, and then more forest and field before hints, just hints, of Buckfastleigh and Ashburton. And beyond them? Haytor and the moor, caught in shadows, bleary, forbidding lumps in the distance. To the right, just out of view, but salt-scented in the air, is the ocean.
It’s like a Ravilious painting. Cara and I often ate supper underneath the dry stone wall, or she would take her guitar and disappear into the field. One form or another of that view had held my attention my whole life. But Sally’s story doesn’t end there. That’s my layer of the story. Hers is still to be walked.
St. Mary’s the Virgin is on the edge of the village. Lovely to behold, ornate architecture, stone well cleaned, but, almost as a symbol of our recession times, resolutely locked. With that traditional pagan flourish, two yew trees add a dash of the old religion to the graveyard. But times have moved on in little England: I glance up at the notice board and see that the Reverend is called Deborah.
The birdsong is more playful here, clusters of starlings chatter noisily to each other, before taking short direct flights into other trees. In the distance a solo Mr Magpie passes. Catching its flight, I notice a sturdy stone hut between fields. In a second, I have a mad desiring of that hut. That looks like a writer's hut. I can see Dylan Thomas, shirt crumbled with pasty flakes and balancing a couple of Guinness’s, making his way across the rutted field before delicately producing a secret, rusty key, and entering. After a minute, we would see kindling smoke from its discreet chimney. Or is that Alice Oswald at the small door, sending out for a double espresso? I am getting distracted.
I take in grave stone names – Henry Fletcher, William Jordan – I am almost expecting to find a Sally and a Will. I’m about to leave when I notice one finely carved thick stone, all swirls and baroque show boating. It’s been erected by a John and Mary Ann Hawkins. They lost three children in one month in June 1832.
Elizabeth and John Home, both five years and six months, and little Sophia, just seven-months-old. There must have been some sickness that just passed through the district, I am somehow resistant to digging up more information about it. Suddenly my eyes are filled with tears at the thought of the little bones underneath the soil and also for the utter heartbreak of John and Mary. I realise that this time my coins are for them. The walk has been leading here. I crouch in the dirt and place silver for each of their heads, and lay some simple prayers over the site. Something for the ancestors.
So a myth-line takes me to the grave of a flesh and blood family, and my flesh and blood experience of living in Berry leads me to the telling of the story. It’s a raw tangle. That wind has got up again. I look around, at the dive bombing starlings, and the church steps where maybe Sally met her true love, and I say goodbye. Minutes later I pass the old red phone box where my father would ring my mother in Berry village on breaks from rehearsing with his band in the local hall. All part of the courting. Only then do I burst out laughing - her name? Sally.
copyright Martin Shaw
Just two weeks now till we board the plane home to Britain - no doubt we will be peering into slate-grey gusts of rain at Heathrow wondering how to get back to Devon bearing in mind the rail track we charioted up on then got washed away with the flooding. Times have been rich here though - and there is a last flurry of events to celebrate the launch of SNOWY TOWER - readings and tellings in Point Reyes and Santa Rosa for the next two saturdays - scroll down or look online if you want details.
In an attempt to lure myself and la fam away from this life of hot-tubs/margaritas/pacific swell and coyote yips, i am going to put in some very local Devon writing today. I'm working on the final book in the trilogy that LIGHTNING TREE and SNOWY TOWER started - these stories with a tangible, localised geography. The commentary for the story is a much influenced by me walking the route as working with associative myths and folklore. One day soon i'll givc you the story this comes from - the place is around Berry Pomeroy Castle. In short it's a love story of a young woman of the parish and a farmers boy. it's geographical span runs the length of the forest and up to the church. When i first arrived in Devon with my black tent - over a decade ago - i was lucky enough to have it in the gardens of the castle lodge house awhile.
Walking the Story
Little Hempston is very old Devon – thatched, white-washed cottages, small bridges, small rivers just begging to have stick-races down. In the spring, every available piece of public soil erupts yellow with daffodil.
Walking from it towards Berry Pomeroy, you soon come to the fast moving road between Totnes and Newton Abbott. Left at the pub, and on for another few hundred yards until a swift crossing over and down into Berry. Not that our Sally would have been negotiating a seemingly endless sweep of 4x4s and horse boxes.
Past a few houses and the road widens, the castle’s surrounding forest on the left and onwards to the village itself. On the right is a green lane – once beloved of a motley assortment of travellers who lived quietly at the top. There were trucks, caravans, hastily assembled benders, folks coming and going. Some settled for as long as the law allowed, others – what locals call ‘blow ins’ - just passing through. Cara and I have known a few people up there, and as I passed I remembered dusk visits, clutching wine and cakes firmly whilst negotiating the slippery rutted track, settling comfortably by a wood burner for an evening of music and story.
Still, that is many years past, and I don’t have the time or inclination to wander up today to see the thin trails of smoke through the green that used to indicate occupancy. Just past the travellers turning is a swift cut to the left, into the greenwood. There is much felled conifer, two great banks of it, but behind, in the shadows, stands old growth forest, badger dens, and a bluebell patch. In the years that I was at the castle’s lodge house, these rough routes through the woods were a kind of open secret to the locals – there was dog walking, and surprise meetings, in the most unlikeliest of places. But today they are cordoned off, no goes, keep out.
Down at the ruins I produce coins and let them fly over the ravine that protects a good half of the castle. The original owner, Ralph De Pomeroy, apparently wilfully picked the most inaccessible keep he could find, on a ghostly knoll high above a low-sunk tributary of the Dart. I like his style. The coins don’t make the tributary today but simply disappear into the abundant ferns gripping the steep drop.
Scattering the wintering banks is the plant ‘Lords and Ladies’, what the scholars call Arum maculatum. This robust little plant is many named in England: the Cuckoo-pint, Naked Boys, Starch-Root, Devils and Angels, Bobbins and Wake Robin. In autumn, it cheers the grasses with resilient clusters of bright red berries, but take heed, they are not for eating. The root, when roasted well, is edible, and was even once traded under the name Portland sago. It was a working folks' drink before the introduction of tea and coffee, but prepared incorrectly it's highly toxic. I doff my hat, and leave it alone.
The wind is up. As a child I thought it was one of two things: the sound of all the felled ghost trees of Dartmoor talking to themselves, or the moans of elderly patients at Torbay hospital gathered on the breeze. When a little older, my father and I would walk down through the small woodland behind the estate I grew up on, he would stop me under the boughs and we would go very quietly and listen. It didn’t take too much of this to realise where this sound was coming from.
I see something I had long forgotten about. The Wishing Tree. A tall, wide-spreading beech. They say that three walks around it in the sun direction, and then three times backwards, always thinking of the wish, will lead it surely to come true. Surely Sally stopped at this tree? Despite some viscous pruning, even across the trunk itself, I can make out carved names of old lovers and wishers from other generations. In the three massive branches, I find, to my delight, attached lace, symbols of wishes. Unable to stop myself, I am soon clambering the slippery roots and holding a dear wish.
I am leaving the castle behind, and its attendant human dramas, and following the story's path again. I am heading up and out of the ruins' aura. There is a small tea house settled in by the path side, and I try to keep my mouth clear of the taste of dark roast French coffee. It doesn’t work but I trudge on, none the less. It’s not hugely steep, this track up to the lodge house, but long enough for a little tight ache to move into the thighs.
Everything is tall. The trees, either old growth or conifer, seem vast, and the path’s crumbled leaves blow up in glyph-like patterns for seconds in front of me and then settle. The steep banks bring back the very familiar sensation of being watched. To my right, two crow couples seem to play on the brisk currents of air way out over a sharp dip, two above the other. There’s no violence and no jostling. It’s sweet to hear the caw.
I reach out to touch the rough bark of the older trees. Moss lies thick like drifts on the northern flanks. A white pheasant is seen for a second, to the left of the path, just as it opens out of the tree line.
I decide to break the law and walk past the do not enter! sign that stops entry to the lodge house or further fields. The signs are there for good reason – years of car loads of Torbay youth congregating at the gates at midnight; dealing, brawling, and generally getting a kick out of being so near a scene of dark power that somehow mirrors their own turbulence. The old initiations were a way of sacralising this kind of death-wrestling - as we know, when the rites-of-passage disappear, the longing remains but turns feral.
There is a view to end views just beyond this forbidden track. A dark soiled field, pine forest, and then a panoramic opening – of patchwork fields, budding tumps of woodland, glints of dusk light in nearby Totnes and Dartington, and then more forest and field before hints, just hints, of Buckfastleigh and Ashburton. And beyond them? Haytor and the moor, caught in shadows, bleary, forbidding lumps in the distance. To the right, just out of view, but salt-scented in the air, is the ocean.
It’s like a Ravilious painting. Cara and I often ate supper underneath the dry stone wall, or she would take her guitar and disappear into the field. One form or another of that view had held my attention my whole life. But Sally’s story doesn’t end there. That’s my layer of the story. Hers is still to be walked.
St. Mary’s the Virgin is on the edge of the village. Lovely to behold, ornate architecture, stone well cleaned, but, almost as a symbol of our recession times, resolutely locked. With that traditional pagan flourish, two yew trees add a dash of the old religion to the graveyard. But times have moved on in little England: I glance up at the notice board and see that the Reverend is called Deborah.
The birdsong is more playful here, clusters of starlings chatter noisily to each other, before taking short direct flights into other trees. In the distance a solo Mr Magpie passes. Catching its flight, I notice a sturdy stone hut between fields. In a second, I have a mad desiring of that hut. That looks like a writer's hut. I can see Dylan Thomas, shirt crumbled with pasty flakes and balancing a couple of Guinness’s, making his way across the rutted field before delicately producing a secret, rusty key, and entering. After a minute, we would see kindling smoke from its discreet chimney. Or is that Alice Oswald at the small door, sending out for a double espresso? I am getting distracted.
I take in grave stone names – Henry Fletcher, William Jordan – I am almost expecting to find a Sally and a Will. I’m about to leave when I notice one finely carved thick stone, all swirls and baroque show boating. It’s been erected by a John and Mary Ann Hawkins. They lost three children in one month in June 1832.
Elizabeth and John Home, both five years and six months, and little Sophia, just seven-months-old. There must have been some sickness that just passed through the district, I am somehow resistant to digging up more information about it. Suddenly my eyes are filled with tears at the thought of the little bones underneath the soil and also for the utter heartbreak of John and Mary. I realise that this time my coins are for them. The walk has been leading here. I crouch in the dirt and place silver for each of their heads, and lay some simple prayers over the site. Something for the ancestors.
So a myth-line takes me to the grave of a flesh and blood family, and my flesh and blood experience of living in Berry leads me to the telling of the story. It’s a raw tangle. That wind has got up again. I look around, at the dive bombing starlings, and the church steps where maybe Sally met her true love, and I say goodbye. Minutes later I pass the old red phone box where my father would ring my mother in Berry village on breaks from rehearsing with his band in the local hall. All part of the courting. Only then do I burst out laughing - her name? Sally.
copyright Martin Shaw
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