Many legends portrayed the barn owl as entirely benign, in spite of its nocturnal aspect. Endowed in popular belief with the gifts of foresight and sagacity, the owl was the favourite and familiar of Athene, Greek goddess of wisdom. The bird’s reputed magical inner light, which enabled it to hunt by night, gave it great vision and prescience, the power to ward off evil. The owl protector accompanied Greek armies to their wars; the sight of an owl on the eve of battle presaged victory. The Dakota Hidatsa people, too, saw the owl as a protective spirit for their warriors. For the Hopis tribe barn owls were the guardians of all hidden and underground things, the tenders of seed germination. More domestically and closer to home, in Yorkshire the barn owl is still a friend to shepherds and farmers, warning them of coming storms. Zuni women in New Mexico place an owl feather in their baby’s cradle to help it sleep; the watcher in darkness will keep the infant safe while the mother takes her rest.
My sweet love... It was the last letter; when Rebecca lifted it out, there was the nothing beneath but the lower layer of cotton handkerchief. She was moved by a soft pang, like the sorrow of distant loss. The final page, where the book must close. The end of the story. ...there was a light under Mrs Jillings’ door tonight when I stole up the attic stair. I swear she must have heard me but, Devil take the old tattletale, in truth I no longer care. My only care is to be with you as we were together tonight in the wood, to feel your arms around me and press you to my heart. My only sadness is that we must part and kiss goodnight and not come home together, to one hearth and bed and be as man and wife.
Ah, but now, my love, now I have such hope, such darling hope—
There the letter ended; or rather it was interrupted where the paper had been torn jaggedly across from side to side, so that a half-inch or so was missing from the end of the page. Frustrated, Rebecca turned it over, but the other side was blank.
Had Annie’s darling hope been met, her dream of being with the unnamed lover at last fulfilled? Did that explain the end of the letters? She need no longer write to him if he was by her side. But Rebecca would never know.
Now the tale was done; it was time to tie the letters back inside their handkerchief, re-knot the string and consign them again to their resting place and the care of the watchful owl. But when she lifted out the bundle of letters and fabric she saw that there was one more paper underneath. It was of heavier weight and better quality than rest, and watermarked, a single sheet folded precisely into four. The writing was unfamiliar: a different hand, bigger and bolder, with a negligent forward slant. And the message was short, just a very few brief lines.
My dear Anna... A liquid chill began to percolate through Rebecca’s stomach. ‘My dear’ was good – but ‘Anna’, not ‘Annie’?
My dear Anna, I am returning herewith your letters. I think it best that you do not write to me again. I trust I may rely upon your discretion to make no trouble with my wife or daughters. If we meet henceforth, it must be in public and as befits a limited acquaintance; I think it unlikely that our paths should cross with any degree of frequency. I pray that God may save and keep you.
So cold, so imperiously cold – at least until that closing benediction. And still not even the avowal of a signature, a name. She’d had the wrong idea, too, all this time, she realised. It was not his tin, but Annie’s: not he but Annie herself who had hidden the letters in the barn owl’s tree.
Slowly, almost mechanically, she laid his letter back in the tin, and on top of it the cotton-shrouded archive of Annie’s outpoured love. Sitting back on her heels she raised her chin, looking up through the branches to the broken bough where the owl kept guard. She wanted to stand, to jump and shout and flap her arms. Stupid, shiftless, impotent bird! What purpose was there in seeing more than men could see – or more, at any rate, than blind, deluded women – if it did not lead to action? What good was all the watching and waiting, after all – as Annie had watched and waited, and for nothing?
But she didn’t stand up. Instead, she tipped forward into a squatting position, and laced her hands across her stomach. There was an ache there, a dull clutch in her lower abdomen. Not the returning pain of cancer – not that, thank God, at least – but something like remembered menstrual cramps. And yet it was different: a rhythmic clenching, like something else remembered, a pain experienced just once, over forty years ago.
Reaching once more into the hollow of the oak, Rebecca lifted out the box of letters and, as she did so, saw what lay there buried underneath. Clean, white and fragile, these were not the remains of some dead bird or mammal, an owl’s discarded prey. These were no bones tossed down at random, but placed with reverence, laid down to sleep with a mother’s loving care. And beside the tiny skull – so small, so very small – against its cheek, was the single feather of a barn owl.
Mad Maudlin
I’m looking at a piano. That is, I’m looking at the video image of a piano, because I’m in the half-light of a rented bedroom at the back of a pub after closing and it’s just me and the laptop.
Some time between 1954 and 1979, I notice, a new piano has appeared. The one in the earlier documentary clip has scrolled shoulders and is flanked by a pair of hinged brass candlesticks; I can make out the discolouration of the keys, even in grainy black-and-white. No surprise either, since back then everyone in the bar seems to have a roll-up attached to their bottom lip, the singers included. By the late seventies they’ve installed the piano that’s still there now, a functional modern upright in a satinwood case. The piano stool has survived the change. Its velvet seat and fanciful, fluted legs don’t match the angular new instrument, but there’s something admirable about their unconformity, like an old woman dressed defiantly in furs and silks to attend the Ritzy that’s now a multiplex. Everything else has survived, too, even down to the straw pack donkey which stands centre stage on the piano top, presumably a memento of some former landlord’s long-past holiday, its baskets the repositories of old ha’pennies, scoreboard chalk and a single featherless dart.
Pubs, I’ve always thought, can be divided into two camps according to the stability of their decor. There are those that undergo a complete refit once or twice a decade, reinventing themselves from Haywain kitsch through ebony veneer and mirrors and back again in accordance with the latest fashion (or in spite of it) like the shifting political colours over some volatile town hall. Then there are others, the ones you’ll generally find me drinking in, where change is so incrementally slow as to be almost imperceptible, as gradual as the softening of the contours of a familiar face. To say that the Ship falls into the latter category is to sell it far short. It is, of all the pubs in my wide and motley acquaintance, in a class of its own.
Moving the cursor over the older of the two archived clips, I click to play it again. In the foreground a slight sparrow of a man, who might be anything from fifty to seventy-five, stands crookedly to play the violin, one thigh wedged against a table, apparently for support, while the other rises and falls in jerks with the tapping of his foot. It’s an old Irish jig tune, and his fingers run like mice. But my focus is on the portion of the public bar that’s visible behind the fiddler. So many things are recognisably the same in 1954 as in the 1979 footage. In fact, most of them were still there this afternoon when I was in the bar myself, capturing the floor session on my little pocket Sony.
Along the back wall behind the piano runs a wooden ledge and on it stands a row of old beer bottles, photographs and other memorabilia. There, just left of the piano, is the obligatory team photograph: five men down on one knee in the grass in front of six more, standing, all of them balloon-shorted and sporting shirts and moustaches of various shapes and sizes. One or two of the elder players could be grandfather to the youngest, a grinning lad of twelve or thirteen, as if every able-bodied male in the village had to turn out to make up the eleven – and perhaps it was the case, it occurs to me with a bit of a shiver as I spot the date inscribed below the picture: 1919. Next to the football team leans another
framed photo of what looks a similar vintage: a man in a cornfield with a collie dog. He seems to be wearing too many clothes for what, by the height of the corn, is surely spring or early summer. His dark jacket strains out of shape at its single buttoned fastening. The man stares straight into the camera, his face impassive, but the dog clearly lacks its master’s stoic patience: its head is a blur of motion.
The fiddle player has shifted tempo now and is playing ‘Fathom the Bowl’, the verses sung out by a florid man in a cloth cap seated at a side bench, then the chorus taken up around the bar to the accompaniment of stamping feet and the thump of beer mugs on tables. As the camera pans towards the singer it brings into view behind him the far end of the ledge and below it an empty, high-backed wooden corner seat. On the ledge, beside a Toby jug, stands a third photograph: no more than a snapshot, really, taken there in the pub. A regular, no doubt, in a full beard and collarless shirt, grasping the neck of what could be a shepherd’s crook but is probably just a walking stick. A pint glass stands before him on the table – the same table, back to the left of the piano, where I sat this afternoon, because there in the photograph is the scrolled wooden sidepiece with one brass candlestick, and on the ledge behind him is the photograph of the football team, and the man in the cornfield with his fidgety dog.
But stout and strong cider are England’s control
Give me the punch ladle, I’ll fathom the bowl...
The singer is warming to his theme, his tankard now raised aloft and pitching hazardously, while his brow gleams beneath his cap. I shift the cursor to the time bar at the bottom of the screen and drag the little round dot to the right, stopping ten minutes or so further into the clip to let it resume playing. The soundtrack here is a muddle of scraping chairs and rumbling voices, loomingly loud and close at hand and then quiet again, before at length from out of shot another song begins. A solo voice, unaccompanied and uncertain at first as to key but swelling in confidence: male and, I’m guessing, elderly. I don’t know the song, but its themes are familiar: love, betrayal, a girl with raven hair. The camera is on the move again, scanning the circle of faces, all angled towards the unseen crooner. A new section of the side wall appears and, hanging on it, one more photograph.
It is taken in the bar again but this time the subject is a woman. Her clothing is dark and nondescript, bleaching to white where the picture is over-exposed or perhaps has faded with the light from the nearby window, and her face, tilted away from the camera, is cast half into shadow. I feel the stir of recognition nonetheless. It’s that deeply cleft, almost heart-shaped chin, unusual in a woman. I’m sure I’ve seen it, or an echo of it, very recently. Just this afternoon, in fact. That’s it: a woman with the same chin sat in the corner seat – the one with the high wooden back which in this clip is empty behind the cloth-capped singer – and sang ‘Tom o’ Bedlam’ in a soft but sure contralto. Looking more closely at the photo before the camera swings away again, I can see that the woman in it is seated at the same corner place that her counterpart occupied today. Family tradition, maybe? This afternoon’s singer might be, what, daughter or granddaughter, great-granddaughter even, of the woman in the photo?
The film was made in 1954 but the photograph would be older, might date from almost any time in the century prior to that. It is difficult to place the age of either one of them. Both in their forties or fifties, at a guess, but that’s all it is. For one thing, women’s dress always distorts their ages in old photographs; I’ve seen pictures from the 1950s where two-piece suits identical to their mothers’ make matrons out of girls of seventeen. Not that there’s anything distinctively of their time about these women’s clothes. In fact, now that I try to focus my mind back, I can remember almost nothing about what the singer wore today beyond an impression of something plain with long sleeves, and black or at any rate dark in colour. Her hair, too, as I recall it, gave little away, being that type of pale English dusty fawn from which the pigment seems to leach away gradually with the years, instead of any positive change to grey. The monochrome image in front of me on the laptop screen offers even fewer clues.
Abruptly, I click to freeze the film and select instead the clip from 1979. The bar of the Ship now springs to life in colour before me – or, rather, that peculiar version of colour which seems to be unique to video footage of the 1970s, strangely lacking in bold primaries and dominated by the in-between shades, as if the world back then was mainly orange, mauve and turquoise. Music flares, the soundtrack kicking in a fraction after the picture. An instrumental piece, a Morris tune I think I recognise, cranked out at a spirited lick by two melodeons in unison, with a third adding creaking harmonies.
On the ledge along the back wall the objects are much as before, although their order has switched here and there, and perhaps a few more bottles have accumulated. The striped and moustachioed football team is still in its place to the left of the piano but the man with his collie in the cornfield has now shifted along, the space between taken up by an old Bell’s whisky jeroboam half filled up with crown bottle caps. Around the room the cigarettes are now king size, filter-tipped, and the gathered locals also seem to be somehow larger, broader. Coastal Suffolk might not jump to every whim of fashion but the trouser legs, the skirts and sleeves and collars are all perceptibly wider, and in several cases floral. I even spot a cheesecloth blouse, draping a pleasingly ample female bosom.
The melodeon players reach their final chord more or less together and, after a splash of applause and some coughing, at length one voice emerges through the throb of conversation, low and singing unaccompanied. For a moment, my breathing stops.
For to see poor Tom o’ Bedlam
ten thousand miles I’d travel;
Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes
for to save her shoes from gravel...
The camera angle shifts and she comes into view, there in the high-backed corner seat. Same heart-shaped chin, same faded hair. The voice is the same as this afternoon, as well: the quiet, confident contralto. The tilt of the head, too, and the way she sings with her eyes half closed as if she’s lost in the words of the song. How can it be the same woman, though, more than thirty-five years ago? The singer on the screen in her simple, long dark dress might not be old but is certainly not young. And then there’s the other one, the woman of the photograph, already framed on the wall in 1954. Mother, daughter and granddaughter? If so, the family resemblance is quite uncanny.
Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys,
Bedlam boys are bonny,
for they all go bare and they live by the air,
and they want no drink nor money.
Behind her, at the end of the ledge beside the Toby jug, stands the picture of the bearded man with his crook and pint, and on the ledge behind him no doubt, although too small to see, are the striped shirts of the football team. There rushes over me a sense of the sucking whirlpool of time, as each image folds in on the next, smaller and smaller, ever more distant, until I’m engulfed and anchorless, toppling towards the void. It’s the same sensation, almost of nausea, I remember from when I was small, angling the three-panelled mirror on my grandmother’s dressing table to see endless repetitions of myself, receding away to nothing. Too much beer tonight, before I turned in; that last pint was a mistake. I refocus my eyes away from the pale illumination of the screen and onto the solid wall of the pub’s guest room, the squat jug kettle with its pair of upturned cups and, by the window, my coat on the back of the chair.
She has come to the end of her song now, and back on the laptop a stout man in corduroy trousers has taken possession of the fluted piano stool. He picks up a tune which is known to his audience and is soon joined with enthusiasm around the bar: and the larks they sang melodious... But at this point the picture freezes and the slowly rotating circle appears, buffering. When it resumes the film flickers and jumps, so I suppose it must have been damaged, and the soundtrack, too, because there’s nothing but a fuzz of white noise. Then, suddenly brig
ht and unblurred, the woman’s voice breaks through again.
Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys...
Has the tape been reconnected wrongly, or is she really reprising the song? But the portly man still sits at the piano; his fingers still scamper over the keys. There seems no logic to it.
I sit back to uncrick my neck, and unfold from under me a leg that has gone to sleep. Which is what I should do, really, instead of befuddling my brain with these imprisoned versions of reality, these overlayered electronic pasts. But there’s a strange magnetism about them that makes me want to keep on looking.
It’s stupid to be perching on the bed like this, but there’s no desk or table in the room. I think longingly of the bar, but it’s late, and the landlord, Raymond, will have called time long ago and be cleaning out the pumps. A lugubrious type whose chief delight, from what I’ve seen, is in flooding, crop failure and the hope of bird flu, he’s unlikely to be pleased to interrupt his bottling up to serve an after-hours drink, even to an overnight resident. Moving to the head of the bed, I raise the pillows to an upright position and settle myself against them with the laptop on my thighs.
I quit the Suffolk folk archive website which houses the two historic films and drag the cursor to the desktop file where I’ve uploaded my own video of today’s floor session. It’s funny, when I click to start it running, to see my own life of nine hours ago replayed on screen. There’s an unsettling awareness of my divided self, of being both there in the video, the participant observer, and simultaneously here in the pub bedroom, watching from the outside. Timeframes, places, selves, with the walls between them dissolving... I shake myself. I’m not normally prone to these vertiginous fancies – it must be the effect of looking at the old film clips, and of course I’m tired, and there’s the effect of the beer. I’d be better under the duvet, and with the bedside light switched off. The screen’s low gleam will be enough.
Sandlands Page 6