After seeing the stones, steepholm and I retired squelching to a pub lunch and a look round the church at Chew Magna.  A good ring of bells there, an excellent Elizabethan tomb—its sleepers Christianly composed, assured of green pasturage—and a brass plaque for that irredeemable neo-pagan Giles Lytton Strachey.  A pity there’s no monument.   Those long long hands cry out for stone.

As in most Anglican churches, there is a board listing the incumbent vicars, back to first records of the parish.   Besides the names and dates, this one gives each vicar’s patron and how his tenure was vacated—usually per mort, though one was deprived by Queen Mary and his three successors resigned.  The year 1643 was striking:

Incumbent                               How Vacated                          Patron

Robert Joyner                              Dispossessed                              John Amory
Stubbs—A Preacher                                                                          The Mob
Robert Cross                                                                                      Commissioners of the Great Seal


Having begun it the night before with steepholm's other guest, a scholar of medieval Welsh, we were hoping to finish watching The Owl Service (1969).  I’ve wanted to see that ever since 1975 in Cambridge, when I heard Alan Garner rant.  As I recall it, he was glittering mad.  He seemed to feel dispossessed by the boy who played his character, Gwyn.

Anyway, we got through about two-thirds of it.  O my.  I’ll bet that haunted some dreams.

(Later in Florence I saw cut and folded paper owls, very much to Alison’s pattern.  Hand-marbled Florentine paper, and alas! quite dear:  so I admired and sighed and went on.)

On the way to the airport, steepholm (ever the family archivist) handed me an old letter to read.  O my O my.  Some years ago Garner wrote a poem—an elegy, a celebration—on the late glorious David Munrow; he wanted steepholm’s brother the composer to set it.  A lovely lost undertaking.

Nine

They half gaze at a paler shadow, out of darkness; but their eyes are shut again with spiderwebs.

They are waiting for the fiddler’s second coming. For the hypnopomp.

Nine

I love how the stone seems to waver, like a half-spelled metamorphosis; or like the bedclothes of a restless sleeper. They are struggling to wake.

Nine

They’re a tipsy wedding party—says the usual legend—caught dancing on a Sunday to the devil’s fiddle. Some are frozen in a sprightly round, as for The Beginning of the World; some lying in a drunken heap. This is the West Country, and the cider goes straight to the legs.

(The ghostly splotches are where my lens kept getting splashed.)

Nine

The day after the memorial, steepholm took me to the stones at Stanton Drew. Three circles, a cove and Hautville's Quoit: you go through a farm gate with a box for offerings, and there they are, out standing in the rain.






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Under reconstruction!

Apologies for the mangling. Hope it's fixed.

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This was hanging out above the clothesline at Phoxinus' house.  All part of Englishness, along with shepherd's pie, The Archers, pots of tea, and hedgerow jams.

21 April 2012

Nine

"From the fringes you could see the blue remembered hills; then turning inward, heaven in a haze about the trees."

20 April 2012.

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In a dream I was asked if I would interview papersky. Sure, I said.

Now, said the dream. In French.

What?

Oh, we'll give you the questions. Just read them.

And I was pushed out onto a platform in a steep steep lecture room full of vociferous French university students, already on their feet and arguing.

I stood at the focus, like the body for dissection.

And the paper I had was in English, to be rendered on the fly. They were knotty questions, stiff considerations of philosophy, of the nature of time and space. All subjunctive at the very least.  And as I stood trying to remember the French for, say, tachyon, and was it du or de la, the words kept dancing on the page, as they will in dreams, shifting and reforming sentences.  I kept losing what I'd just remade.

The crowd was getting supercilious. Five hundred Sartres and de Beauvoirs.

And to my horror, I was wearing an orange dress. A lysergic print chiffon, and worse, a fragile, borrowed dress, too tight across the bodice and the long restrictive sleeves. And already I'd torn it, trailing yards of petticoat, a taffeta that rustled like the crowd...

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So in the dream, I was listening to the BBC telling me what words were difficult to spell today.

"...and Birmingham."

"Birmingham?" I said, buttering my toast. "Why Birmingham?"

And the radio answered, "The 'k' is silent."

Nine