After this time the citizens of Twyford celebrated ‘Clem Supper’ every 26th of November – Saint Clement being the patron saint of blacksmiths, and 26th November being his special saint’s day. Everybody would have a few drinks, sing some verses of ‘The Blacksmith’s Song’ (very loudly), then they would get some gunpowder, stuff it in a hole in the anvil, and set light to it. This would make a really loud BANG, which would remind everyone of the time the craftsmen had a fight and knocked the anvil over.
This custom died out in the 1880s – I think because of the carnage that occasionally happened when they stuffed too much gunpowder in the hole, and blew up the anvil. I suppose it was a bit dangerous.
Fun, though.
PART TWO
WHEN THE DEVIL CAME TO TWYFORD
Well, one day the blacksmith was in his forge when the Devil came wandering by. The Devil often wandered the roads of Hampshire, and in those days you could wander down a country lane without fear of being hit by a car.
The smith had just shoed a horse, and, as always, had made a good job of it. You might think that nailing iron shoes to a horse’s hoof would hurt it, but it doesn’t cause any pain if it’s done properly. The blacksmith of Twyford was so good at his work that the horse felt all light on its hooves, and started to dance up and down the lane, skipping and jumping, whilst the beaming blacksmith looked on with satisfaction.
The Devil looked down at his own hooves – because the Devil does have hooves as well as horns – and thought about how worn away they were with all that walking around Hampshire looking for souls that he’d been doing. Well – why shouldn’t he get the blacksmith to make him a fine new set of shoes?
So the Devil pulled his hood up over his horns, and with his eyes glowing red from inside the darkness of his cowl, he entered the forge.
‘I want you to put a couple of your finest shoes on me, and I want as good a job as you did on that there horse,’ said the Devil, ‘and get on with it, blacksmith, or it’ll be the worse for you.’
‘Sorry,’ said the blacksmith, ‘I don’t shoe devils.’
‘Who said I’m a devil?’ screeched the evil one.
‘Who else would have hooves?’ observed the smith.
‘Well, you can shoe me – or else I’ll drag you down to hell.’
‘You can try,’ thought the blacksmith, but he said nothing, he just caught hold of the Devil’s leg. But the Devil has cloven hooves like a goat, quite different to a horse – and as the blacksmith hammered in a nail the evil one screamed with pain.
‘Ow – stop – you’re hurting me!’
‘Why should I stop, Devil?’ bellowed the smith. ‘You like to cause pain; now here’s some for you.’
The Devil twisted and struggled, but he couldn’t escape the smith’s vice-like grip – he tried to prod the blacksmith with his toasting fork, but the smith just laughed and knocked it away with his hammer.
‘STOP!’ howled the Devil. ‘I’ll give you a wish … a wish.’
‘I want special stuff to stick things.’ The blacksmith could weld metal to metal, rivet wood to metal – but he couldn’t glue wood to metal.
‘I’ll give you the recipe,’ screamed the Devil, ‘then you must let me go.’
So the Devil told the smith how to make glue out of horses’ hooves, the blacksmith pulled the nail out of the Devil’s hoof – and the Devil hopped all the way to Portsmouth, where he put his hoof in the water with a hiss of steam.
Well, time passed and time passed, the blacksmith grew older, and so did everyone else; and one day Death came to the forge.
‘You’ve lived a long and useful life,’ said Death, ‘and now it’s time for you to come with me.’
‘I haven’t trained an apprentice to take my place,’ said the blacksmith.
‘Well, you’ve had time enough for that,’ said Death.
‘I wasn’t planning on dying just yet,’ said the smith.
‘That is not your decision,’ said Death. ‘Your time has come.’
‘Well, Death, why don’t you sit down on that chair, whilst I finish making this weathervane for the church tower, and then I’ll be ready to come with you.’
So Death sat down on a wooden chair, but the blacksmith had smeared the seat with the Devil’s special hoof glue – and Death was trapped.
‘Ha ha, Death,’ shouted the blacksmith. ‘Now you can’t wrap anyone in your icy arms. We can all go on living and loving, smithing and singing, drinking and dancing, and I don’t need to train an apprentice.’
So – no one died. The elderly grew older, birds fell out of trees and then hopped back up again, farmers tried to slaughter animals for the butcher but the animals got back up again, houses grew fuller and fuller, and King Alfred’s beard grew down to the ground and trailed along behind him. The old were weary and tired, and more and more people became old – and the people clamoured for the return of Death.
The blacksmith felt worn down by care and responsibility, and he made himself a pair of iron shoes, and walked all the way to hell via Portsmouth.
The Devil peeped round the gates of hell, and squealed, ‘You stay out of here.’
‘Please,’ pleaded the smith, ‘give me the secret to free Death.’
The Devil needed souls, and he was scared of the blacksmith, so he shouted, ‘Water, you fool. Water dissolves hoof glue – now go and release Death; but when Death takes you, don’t be coming down here, because I don’t want you.’
So the smith plodded back to Twyford and used water to release Death. Death was ready to run around, wrapping her cold arms around all those waiting people, but she shouted at the blacksmith, ‘I don’t want you.’
And so the Twyford blacksmith can never die – he wanders the highways and byways of Hampshire forever. For hundreds of years there was work for him – he was often to be seen in one of those lonely smithies outside a village – but then came mass production and there was less call for blacksmiths.
Probably he’s a welder now, and I have seen one such person working from an industrial unit round the back of the Danestream farm shop, near Hordle. His ravaged face and haunted eyes make him look as ancient as time itself – so maybe he is the Twyford blacksmith – doomed to immortality: the fate worse than death, because it is a fate in which there is no death.
8
LOVEY WARNE
AND THE
TRIP TO
JERUSALEM
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries anyone importing luxury goods into England from abroad had to pay very high taxes: goods such as wine and brandy, tea and tobacco, fine lacework and fancy silks. So, in order to avoid these taxes, people smuggled them into the country.
In 1774 the writer Daniel Defoe wrote about the Hampshire port of Lymington, ‘I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smuggling and roguing; which I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land’s End in Cornwall.’ So smuggling was big business all down the coast of Hampshire.
In the hamlet of Knave’s Ash, between Crow and Burley, there lived a woman called Lovey Warne. She’d been born there, and grew up with her brothers, Peter and John. They were all active smugglers, or ‘free-traders’, as they liked to call it. Smugglers would run the boats from France into Christchurch and Highcliffe, and Lovey and her brothers would carry it, using New Forest ponies, up to hiding places in the forest during the night. Sometimes Lovey would wrap the silks and lacework around her body, under her skirts and bodice, so that no revenue officer could know that she was carrying them. The revenue officers were the customs men, there to police the coast and catch smugglers, and the smugglers called them by the not very flattering name of ‘shingle kickers’.
As Lovey grew older, she grew more portly, because she loved her food and her brandy and ale – but, on occasion, she looked even more portly, because of all the fancy goods she had wrapped around her person. Sometimes, indeed, she would car
ry great skins full of brandy or wine around her middle, and she’d make a sloshing sound as she walked along.
Another of her jobs was being the lookout woman. If Peter, John and the others were running contraband (smuggled goods) up from the coast, she’d stand on Verely Hill, which is near Picket Post, on the western edge of the forest. If she saw that the shingle kickers were about, she’d put on a bright red cloak, and the free-traders would be warned.
Well, as Lovey grew older, her brothers passed away – and Lovey herself became queen of the free-traders, though no one took the risk of calling her that.
There came a time when the shingle kickers were particularly active around Christchurch, Highcliffe and the far west of the forest, so the free-traders started to run the goods in further east down the coast, at a secret spot called Pitt’s Deep, over towards Lymington. Pitt’s Deep is a beautiful place, and if you go there nowadays, even in the height of summer when the New Forest is full of visitors, you’ll never find many people there. There’s a long shingle beach and a glorious view over to the Isle of Wight. There are a few houses there, and one used to be the Forge Hammer Inn, and it was a notorious smugglers’ haunt. No doubt this was because the landlady was Lovey Warne herself.
Well, there’d been a grand shipment in from France, and the smugglers had roped the brandy kegs together, and sunk them just offshore at a place called Brandy Hole. They would come back to get them when the coast was clear – for they knew that the shingle kickers had ventured down to Lymington from Christchurch, and they were led by Chief Riding Officer Abraham Pike, a man widely feared by the free-traders.
Just one keg had been brought ashore and tapped – so they could drink some, and bottle some for the people who had helped them, or who had looked the other way when they passed. The vicar was due to visit, and Lovey had some brandy for him.
It was just like in the poem ‘The Smugglers Song’ that Rudyard Kipling wrote:
Five-and-twenty ponies,
trotting through the dark–
With brandy for the Parson
and ’baccy for the Clerk.
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling,
while the Gentlemen go by!
(Sometimes people called smugglers ‘the Gentlemen’ –
it helped to keep things secret.)
So, you see, the vicar was as involved as anyone else, and he liked his fine French brandy.
Well, most of the free-traders had disappeared off into the forest, so Lovey sat down at the table for a fine feast of ale, brandy, bacon and Jerusalem artichokes. Oh, she loved those Jerusalem artichokes. Jerusalem artichokes are a vegetable a bit like a knobbly potato – they don’t come from Jerusalem, and they aren’t really artichokes, which is a quite different vegetable. They grow easily, and Lovey Warne had a whole patch of them growing round the back of the Forge Hammer Inn. The only problem is – well – it has to be said – they do make you a bit windy.
In 1621, the Hampshire botanist John Goodyer had written that ‘which way soever they be dressed and eaten, they stir and cause a filthy loathsome stinking wind within the body, thereby causing the belly to be pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine than men’. I suppose this meant that he didn’t like them, but Lovey Warne thought they were quite fit to eat. It is said that if you add the seeds of the herb ‘lovage’, that can take away the flatulent effects – but Lovey swore by the cleansing effects of the Jerusalem artichoke, so Lovey wouldn’t add lovage, though she did like lovage leaves in her brandy.
After Lovey had polished off her meal, the door opened, and in, rather nervously, came the vicar. Lovey locked the door after him.
‘The Lord allows me some brandy to assist my reflections, and some tobacco to smoke whilst I talk to the Almighty,’ said the vicar rather guiltily.
‘I have both for you, your reverence,’ said Lovey with a wink and a wicked smile. The vicar placed the brandy bottles and the tobacco into a bag, which he hoisted on to his back – just as the door handle rattled, and someone tried to open the door. Finding it locked, they hammered on it thunderously.
‘OPEN UP, IN THE NAME OF THE KING,’ bellowed the well-known voice of Abraham Pike. ‘We have you surrounded.’
‘It’ll take plenty of your men to surround me, Abraham Pike,’ roared back Lovey Warne.
‘Oh my Lord,’ squealed the vicar, ‘I cannot be found here, oh what would the bishop say? Oh, where will I hide these things?’
Lovey knew that the shingle kickers would search the inn from top to bottom, so she said to the vicar, ‘Only one place for you to hide, my luvver; under my skirts.’
The vicar looked both shocked and horrified. ‘Oh, ’tis decent, your reverence, I have many layers to protect my modesty’… and indeed she did – Lovey wore bloomers the like of which, if hoisted on a mast, would sail a ship to America and back again, and they were covered in pockets designed to hide all forms of contraband goods.
There came a huge crash at the door that nearly burst it open, and the vicar, knowing there was no other hiding place, ducked underneath Lovey’s skirts.
‘Hold there, my pretty boys,’ shouted Lovey. ‘Are you that desperate for a drink you’d drag a woman from her dinner?’
She shuffled towards the door, walking being difficult with the vicar crouching under her skirts. She unlocked the door, and in came Abraham Pike and his band of shingle kickers.
‘Well, Lovey Warne,’ said Pike, ‘I have reason to believe that you have smuggled goods on the premises.’
‘Me, Abe?’ said she. ‘Surely you know that I’m a God-fearing woman that would never do anything contrary to the law.’
‘Oh, ’tis so, Lovey,’ said Abraham Pike, with a knowing grin in spite of the serious nature of his duties.
‘Go on then, boys,’ he ordered his men, ‘take the place apart, I want every cupboard, every hidey hole, gone through.’
‘You’re a terrible fuss,’ said Lovey. ‘Now, would you want a bite to eat?’
‘What is it you have?’
‘Lovely Jerusalem artichokes – they say that eating them brings you closer to God; every bite is a step closer to Jerusalem.’
‘Fartichokes!’ roared Abraham Pike. ‘You’ll not have me eating them, Lovey Warne, the wife would throw me out of house and home.’
‘Please yourself,’ said she. ‘I swear by them; nothing better for clearing out the system.’
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ said Pike. ‘The men will be a while searching out your contraband, and then you’ll be a’walking to the goal house.’
‘I’ll be a’walking nowhere,’ said Lovey, ‘and I generally have to stand after a meal of Jerusalem artichokes.’
PARP…
… came a noise from beneath Lovey’s skirts, and this was followed by something that sounded like a strangulated cry.
‘What was that?’ exclaimed Pike.
‘What?’
‘I heard something, coming from beneath …’
‘ABRAHAM PIKE. Are you saying that I passed wind? A lady never passes wind, and a gentleman would certainly never point it out.’
‘No, no, not that. Something afterwards.’
‘Ricochet,’ she said – and then FLUMFF - a more soggy-sounding guff, followed by a groan of such agony and despair that had surely never been heard since Saint Michael cast the evil one out of heaven.
Abraham Pike took out his handkerchief and pretended to be blowing his nose, whilst really trying to protect himself from the aromatic waves that swept towards him.
‘Good God,’ he thought to himself, ‘guffs that have such power, they echo with the sound of the very devils dancing in hell.’
Lovey Warne now had a slightly pained expression on her face, and as she put her two hands to her stomach, there came a rumbling from beneath that sounded like a storm at sea advancing towards a full-rigged ship, as the sailors rush to the yard arms to haul in the sails.
‘THAT�
�S ENOUGH!’ bellowed Abraham Pike. ‘Search over, boys, there’s nothing here – we’re away back to Christchurch, and we’ll take the coast path, through the good sea air.’
After the shingle kickers had gone, the unfortunate vicar emerged from beneath Lovey’s skirts, and it is said that he was green as a frog. He staggered back to the vicarage, looking a bit like a frog crawling round a pond.
Well, the vicar didn’t remain in the parish long after that – he took another parish as soon as possible, and I believe that this was the parish of Windlesham in Sussex.
As for Lovey Warne, queen of the free-traders – she lived a good, long life – a testament to the beneficial effects of ale, brandy, bacon and Jerusalem artichokes.
9
POMPEY,
THE DEVIL
AND THE
DEEP BLUE SEA
PART ONE
Chips and the Devil
They do like a grim story in Portsmouth, and if the Devil comes into a Portsmouth story, no one gets the better of him like the blacksmith did in Twyford. Maybe the Devil comes from Portsmouth, and being a sailor on one of those Royal Navy sailing ships in the days of Nelson must have been like living in hell – the close quarters below decks, the stench and the lack of hygiene, the scrambling around the rigging in all weathers, the maggoty salt beef and weevil-ridden biscuits, the rationed brackish drinking water, the cat-o’-nine-tails – and then, when the ship went into battle – the noise, the shattered eardrums; the shattered bodies from shot, chain, splinters, cannonballs; the decks awash with blood. No wonder there was a press gang to kidnap men to serve aboard these hell ships – no one in their right mind would sign on voluntarily.
Hampshire Folk Tales for Children Page 7