From that moment things moved swiftly at the school. The following day a young man with a briefcase, pink, black-suited, HMG’s own representative, so it was rumoured, appeared at the gates. Their headteacher was ‘indisposed’ he told the assembled pupils and it was unlikely that she would return. A new head would have to be appointed, but this had happened so suddenly that it might take some time to find someone capable of upholding ‘the splendid traditions laid down over so many years’. In the meantime, all of them must work as hard as they could to help out in this moment of crisis.
The real problem, of course, was that Miss Quintock – rebel to the very end – had chosen the worst possible moment for her ‘indisposition’. It was now mid-June and a mountain of preliminary procedures – committee meetings, advertising, selection panels and the like – had to be gone through if a fresh head was to be appointed for the beginning of the new academic year. And, no matter what the man from County Hall might say, our tiny school tucked away in rural Bereden was hardly the ideal posting for those aspiring to headship, however altruistic they might be. So that, over the next few months, Howard and his companions were to experience a succession of temporary appointments, varied as to enthusiasm, gender and effectiveness. Some had been reassigned from office jobs in Winchester, some on loan from other schools, a few drafted in from neighbouring counties. Occasionally also, there would be a flurry of excitement as candidates who had expressed interest in the position were brought to visit the school, sitting in on classes, asking awkward questions of both staff and pupils and poring over their teacher’s meticulously kept records before departing – never to reappear.
Throughout this time Miss Quintock remained secreted away, quite comfortable but at the same establishment, some twenty or so miles from the village, where – ominously we felt – her predecessor had ended her days. None of us really knew what was going on, nor was Jimmy forthcoming on the subject. He visited her regularly, and we pleaded to be taken with him. Always he declined, our parents adding their veto to his. It was too far for us to travel; she needed all the rest she could get; the hospital did not admit children. But the truth could not be withheld from us forever. Even if we did go, she was unlikely to recognise us; did not always know who she herself was. In fact, she was sinking fast. Then, as July turned to August, the older and more responsible among us were told to prepare for the worst.
It came one Sunday towards the end of the month. Harvest had been delayed that year, but now the heat shimmered off concrete, the melted tarmac sticking to our shoes as we waited for Jimmy’s return from the hospital, Freemaniacs and Humites united on this occasion in our grief. I remember the constant beat of the threshers working late into the evening, chaff catching in eyes and throat, the growl of a tractor as it pulled into the square, delaying the arrival of Jimmy’s bus by twenty minutes or so. And there he was, seated top deck, up front, as usual. We knew the worst the moment we spotted him. The way he came down those stairs, and were those tears in his eyes? No need for words. The merest shake of the head, a shrug of the shoulders, and he held out the book: blue with orange covers. Songs of Innocence and Experience. Enid Quintock would never have been parted from it whilst there was life in her body.
‘It was her hold on reality,’ he told us later, ‘that book. Never out of her sight all these weeks, no matter who she thought she was or where her mind might have been. Quite lucid at the end, though. Insisted I take it. Smiled. You know the way she did. “I’ll trade you Blake’s vision for Browning’s rationality”, she says. “Any day!” And that was it.’
But it wasn’t. Not quite. Blake remained tucked in alongside Browning’s Complete Works on the bookshelf right enough, and Jimmy continued the Quintock tradition of keeping it very much to himself. He would read to the children from it, allow them to look at the illustrations – in his presence and as long as it remained firmly in his hands – and never, no matter how urgently it was required, nor how respectable the individual, would he lend it out. There was the occasion, though, on one of my rare visits when I found it taken down from the bookshelf and Jimmy nowhere to be seen. Open at the title page, with some lines – from another of Blake’s poems, ‘Little Girl Lost’, apparently – and an inscription written inside the front cover.
Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time,
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.
Reg, Aldershot, 5th September, 1915.
* * *
Helen shook her head. ‘Explains why you never got a look inside the covers. Anymore than Reg did, in a manner of speaking.’ She laughed. ‘Her fiancé presumably, and you’ve got to feel sorry for him. Off to the trenches, never to return, and no hint of home comforts. Leastways, not the kind he had in mind. You’d have thought she’d have shown some compassion.’
‘Don’t be too hard on her. Public morals were just as rigid in 1915 as they had been a hundred years earlier, or in Blake’s time. And, don’t forget, her father was a clergyman.’
‘As far as I’m concerned the love-life makes her all the more intriguing.’
‘But I thought you Catholics frowned on that sort of thing.’
Helen reached over and took my hand. ‘Not all of us by a long chalk. Would we ever have got together if I’d asked you to wait? Remember how shocked Uncle Henry was? And Mother? I thought she’d have apoplexy. What was it she called it?’
‘The “living in” sin . How can I ever forget?’
Chapter Nine
Pied Piper of Bereden
Songs of Innocence and Experience – the perfect epithet. Miss Quintock’s life distilled in five short words, her death as great a shock to Peter as Daddy’s had been to me. And so much more dignified.
He’d failed to return from one of his conferences. Nor, for that matter, had he arrived, but tyre marks were found beside a lake well off the beaten track; the Danger: Deep Water signs ignored. A car had been hauled ashore, his body at the steering wheel; sandwiches, half-consumed, on the seat beside him. The receipt in Daddy’s pocket was for ten red roses, to be delivered to Miss Alison Tate, Room 101 at the Greville Arms. With an accompanying note: ‘See you tomorrow, as arranged, sweetheart, for the plenary session of your life. No “living in” sin here.’ Daddy had dined out on it. Up and down the country; at and in between conferences; off and on, for the last three years. With the art mistress, no less. Uncle Henry had announced an ecclesiastical embargo but the tabloids had a field-day. At which point I arrived home, summoned from an expedition in the wilds of the Australian outback; too late for the funeral but confronted with a sanitised version of events.
I never really trusted anyone after that. Which probably explains my success, both academically and down at the library; my failure with the opposite sex. Till Peter came along. Older man meets guileless student; that’s what they all thought, another take on the Innocence/Experience theme. Well, hardly. Given his reserve, my own lack of restraint. It might well have affected my attitude towards Jimmy, though. I revisited the well-worn jealousy jibe: how the two of them had been friends before ever I came on the scene; my reaction to the stories he told. Childish fun, so Peter assured me; told for amusement only, to pass the time of day. But my suspicions went deeper than this. Instinctive almost in ways I never quite fathomed. Till he opened the ‘archive’, handed up the manila folder, and I took a renewed interest in Enid Quintock’s ‘hermit from the woods’. It was then I first heard Jimmy’s version of pre-Norman history, the Jutish Chronicles as it came to be known, and realised just how much Peter had underestimated the man.
He’d moved on to St Hugh’s by then, so it was from younger brother Howard and his companions that the latest of Jimmy’s stories reached him.
The Jutes, so Jimmy had told them, were one of the tribes employed by the Britons as protection against the Picts and the Scots once the Roman
s left our shores. But they took a fancy to the land and decided to settle. Some in Northumbria, others in Mercia or Wessex; the Jutes along the Kentish coast. Most of them remained there, but the hardiest struck out westwards, hugging the coast till they reached Southampton Water. There they followed upstream before finally putting down their roots in the Meon Valley which together with Kent, and according to Jimmy, were the only parts of the country where their traces could be found.
Little distinguished these people from surrounding tribes. The way they cleared the forest, set up villages, tilled the land and bred livestock was all much the same. As was the damming of streams for fishing, the hunting of deer or wild boar in the woodlands, the trapping of hares, rabbits and other small animals, for food and clothing. The warriors listened to sagas commemorating battles won, toasted one another in the Mead Hall; the women wove loose flowing garments – as did all such people. Much the same as set out in most history books.
What set Jimmy’s version apart was the way these people were governed. In a democratic fashion, so he insisted, based on communal meetings held in the Mead Hall, where all voices were heard. With land and possessions handed down in equal measure to every member of the family, women included.
‘Unique they were, the Jutes,’ he told the children sitting around him in the churchyard, hanging on his every word. ‘Search the land over, you’ll not find their like. And you’ve their blood running in your veins. Each and every one of you. Sets you apart, that does. Makes you special. Can’t you just feel it in your bones?’
‘Imparting his own slanted version of reality,’ I protested. ‘Not the world as it was but as he would have liked it to have been.’ All compounded tenfold by his treatment of these people’s religion.
The whole ridiculous rigmarole would commence in February or March with the children preparing simnel cakes for Easter. A signal for Jimmy to wade in with his own version: ‘Solmonath’, the time of sowing, when the Jutes would bake loaves and decorate them with runes. Then, as the church prepared for the greatest of the Christian festivals, an alternative version would be on offer down at Third Class Cottage telling of the goddess Eostere; decorated eggs rolled downhill to represent the turning of the sun in the sky and buns marked out with his symbols. Harvest time, with the church full of fruit and sheaves of corn, classroom walls covered with harvest-gathering pictures, was prefigured among the Jutes by the dramatic feast of Haligmonath; Christmas by their Yule when the houses would have been decorated with streamers, candles and greenery. Mistletoe would have been as much in evidence then as now. As were customs such as bringing in the yule log, setting up of a tree, the celebration of Twelfth Night, common to both cultures.
‘Dressed up and paraded to appear more exciting than anything that Anglican church of yours has to offer, Peter, or my Catholic one, come to that.’ I was seething by now.
Not content with this, Jimmy set about peopling this world with a collection of stock characters, rivalling any of the Arthurian legends. Similar to Daddy’s, longer than usual, more fully sustained, but told with the man’s same ulterior motive.
First, there was Stoyan, son of Ceowulf, not yet in his teens yet charged with returning his father’s sword – Eanfled – to the place where the warrior-king had fallen. Four companions are sent by Morgana of the Mists, the resident goddess, to assist with the search. There’s Tonbert, the fisherman; Swidhelm, a wonderful cook who keeps the local tavern; Redwald, the blacksmith, immensely strong, who announces this a puny bunch for such a dangerous mission; and Alric, the nobleman, wondering what business he can possibly have with such low-born fellows. Saba, the falcon tethered to his wrist commiserates with him about such matters. But off they set as Morgana has instructed, crossing the emblem of a mighty stag carved in the hillside which forms the boundary of Jutish territory. Soon, though, their way is barred by a torrential river, too deep for safety, too broad to cross. Not to worry, Tonbert has experience of all things aquatic; he tests the rate of flow, condition of the bank, speed and direction of the prevailing wind; makes a number of rapid calculations and leads them to a point where they are able to cross.
Pushing forward they find themselves in an arid wilderness, where they seem likely to starve or die of thirst. This time it’s Swidhelm with his culinary skills who springs to the rescue. The roots he grubs from the soil may seem inedible, as are the beetles he grinds to a pulp and water drained from cactus-like plants gathered from the wayside – delicious, though, when nothing else is available. But now they are lost, till Tonbert discovers a shard he just happened to have pulled from the river a few days back and for safe-keeping has placed in his knapsack. It’s covered with runic symbols which none of them can decipher. Step forward the educated Alric, who tells them it’s a message from Morgana, a primitive sat-nav in fact, indicating landmarks they need to follow. Off they set once more, to the north, eventually reaching a dense forest, impenetrable to anyone except the blacksmith who hacks his way forward and, yes, there’s Saba acting as additional direction-finder from the sky above their heads.
Beyond the forest lies a wasteland with nothing but stumpy trees and rocky outcrops as far as the eye can see. But suddenly there’s a subterranean rumble, one of the boulders rolls aside and Ceowulf stands before them. In a rousing speech he praises their fortitude, censuring Alric’s high-mindedness at the beginning of their adventures and Redwald for believing that strength alone would carry them through. Along the way they’d met insurmountable dangers; individually they had the skills to overcome them, but it was only working together they had succeeded. A simple magic, more powerful than all the shamans’ sorcery, not to be forgotten on their return. And no further need for weapons such as Eanfled. Taking the sword he kisses the hilt then plunges it into the nearest rockface. ‘Here she shall remain,’ he proclaims, ‘sleeping through the ages lest called upon in time of greatest peril. ‘Seek not otherwise to disturb her slumber.’
‘Not the old Sword in the Stone routine?’ I broke into the narrative. ‘Mallory or Tennyson? T. H. White’s The Once and Future King?’
Peter seemed unconcerned: ‘I don’t think Jimmy ever heard of that lot. To him it was always “The Sordid Stone.” Ceowulf’s rock-face, a “cliff-hanger”.’
The new ‘magic’ works wonders. Stoyan draws men of all quality into his counsel, nor are women excluded. Skill and experience count for more than hearsay or rhetoric. The frail and the elderly are cared for, the young brought up in the ways of their ancestors.
‘A proto welfare state,’ I protested, ‘in which harmony prevails, everyone is educated to the full extent of their ability, prosperity evenly distributed?’
But there is a cloud on the horizon. The Saxons have been converted to a new religion, which they intend inflicting on all neighbouring tribes, by force of arms if necessary. Surrounded on all sides, his army hopelessly outnumbered, Stoyan remembers his father’s sword, held fast in the rockface.
The five companions reconvene hurriedly to retrieve it. Stoyan heaves with all his might but Eanfled is stuck fast – a twist in the tale I’d not seen coming. Neither is Tonbert, the blacksmith – who has the strength of three such men – anymore successful. The people mock them both but Morgana puts in a timely appearance and reveals her master-plan. The ‘sordid stone’ was to be their talisman; victory assured in ways other than open battle. And the strategy they were to follow would be distinctive of the Jutish people from this time onwards.
‘Shamans and broadswords, meadhalls and female inheritance, falconry and animism, equal rights for thane and peasant. Bit of a rag-bag, isn’t it?’
‘You’re not enjoying it then?’
‘Carry on, Scheherazade, I can’t wait to hear what happens next.’
Part of the Saxon army has been drawn up along the open plains before the village, the other ordered to attack from the forests in the north. It is to this group a traitor appears, promising t
o lead them into the village by night. They find it deserted. Stoyan, coward that he is, must have surrendered his birthplace without a fight and fled into the forest. They’re about to send out search parties when a trapdoor flies open and a hoard of Jutish warriors pour out from a secret passageway. Pandemonium breaks loose; men on both sides are hacked down till it’s discovered this has not been a battle of Saxons versus Jutes, but two sides of the invading army fighting against one another. Just as one traitor had led the northern army into the village disguised as Jutes, so another had persuaded the southern troops to adopt the same ruse: dressing in enemy garb and following him along Stoyan’s escape tunnel. Each had attacked what appeared to be their Jutish foes, the two ‘traitors’ disappearing in the midst of the fray to rejoin their companions deep in the forest.
Here Stoyan and his followers adopt totally new tactics. Routes are marked out by-passing the usual pathways, lookouts posted in true Robin Hood style up in the tree-tops. Secret caches of weapons are hidden, underground escape routes tunnelled in case their main encampment is over-run. Harried from all sides from the moment they enter the forest, the Saxons are driven into pits or caught up in scarcely visible nets like a haul of helpless fish. They’re set upon by an unseen enemy that materialises silently from nowhere then disappears back into the mist – we’ve all of us seen the movie – or are picked off silently, one at a time, by snipers supplied with deadly armaments devised by Redwald, the ‘blacksmith from hell’. Worst of all, close-quarter combat when they’re cut down in an instant – James Bond style – by the dreaded Jutish secret weapon.
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