11

The Voice in the Shadow

BELIEVE THE FAIRY tales. What were fairy tales, they will come true.1

In very old, old times, one lovely spring, on a hot summer, a Polish friend of mine, Albin, was a part of an Arts students’ tour of Eastern Europe during September 1939. He broke off the tour and rushed home to die for Poland, and nearly achieved his mission when he was surprised by a patrol of German infantry who were out in the forest looking for Poles to shoot. Fortunately Albin was bilingual and he had a fraction of a second to decide whether to die for Poland, or be a stranded holidaymaker trying to get back to defend the Fatherland. He chose the latter, and, as a result, in due course invaded Russia to besiege Stalingrad.

He was a part of a small contingent of artillery, and their method of advancing, and of finding food, was simple. They attacked any farm or cottage that they came across, killed the inhabitants and took the food. Albin volunteered to be the executioner. He would ride ahead, in his leather coat and steel helmet, on his motorcycle, machine-gun slung across his back, roar into the farmyard, loose off a few rounds into the air, throw his helmet and gun onto the ground, and shout, in Russian, “Don’t shoot!” The genius of the plan lay in his getting rid of the helmet. He was no longer an icon of the Reich, but a teenager and a human being.

He would then make social contact with the peasant or farmer, occasionally firing into the air, for the benefit of the approaching Germans, tell the Russians what was happening, that he had to have some food to show for his efforts, and that they must hide. He would then go to every one of the family and say: “My name is Albin. Look at my face. Remember it. I shall be back.” Then he would empty his magazine, put on his helmet, and roar off back to the troop of artillery, a slaughterer of inferior beings and a member of the master race.

One Russian farmer made Albin strip while he killed and flayed a goat. He cut the hide into a continuous bandage, and wrapped it around Albin from his chest to his groin, then sewed him in. Albin wore that skin for two years without taking it off. If it had been discovered by the Germans, he would have been shot, because it was official truth that the German uniform was proof against all weathers. Albin says that, in the two winters he spent outside Stalingrad, it was all that saved his life.

Eventually, because the Germans were running out of ammunition, the order came to shoot at military targets only. Somehow, the Russian civilians got to hear, and there was an exodus. Albin was lying in a ditch beside the road, next to a fervent Nazi. A babushka came along, carrying her chattels, and, when she saw the men, she lifted her skirts and squatted above them. “I swear to you, Alan,” Albin told me, “what she did would not have disgraced a horse.” And the fervent Nazi groaned, and said, “We cannot win this war.”

When Hitler announced that the army at Stalingrad would not retreat, but must die for the glory of the Reich, Albin turned around and set off to walk home. He walked across Southern Russia, and not one peasant or farmer betrayed him and some shared even the last of their food with him, because they remembered.

Soon after crossing the border he was met by the Gestapo, and he expected to be shot for desertion. But things were not going too well in North Africa, so before long Albin found himself retreating up Italy. By this time he was in command of a troop of gunners who shared his views about Nazis and warfare. He was on one side of a hill, and the Americans were on the other. The hill had been hollowed out to make a monastery, and, through the mediation of the abbot, Albin got word to the Americans that there was a group of Germans who wanted to surrender, and so a monk led out these bedraggled men to be made prisoners.

After a thorough debriefing, Albin was recruited into the American army, first as an interpreter, then as an identifier of members of the SS. Since every barrack room in the German army had its SS spy, this was not a difficult task. But, after several months at the occupation, Albin felt sickened and complained that he was acting as the SS themselves had behaved. The Americans asked him what he wanted to do. Albin said that all this had started because he had gone home to die for Poland. No problem, said the Americans. But you’ll have to join the Free Polish Army, who are training in Scotland.

Albin took part in the D-Day landing and fought all the way into Germany until the end of the war. He was then told that he could go home. “But it is not now the Poland I would have died for,” said Albin. So they asked him what he wanted to do. “Well,” said Albin, “the only place where I’ve been happy since this started is Manchester, England.” No problem, said the Poles. But you’ll have to be discharged from the British army. So Albin joined the British army. And ever since he has lived in Manchester, painting, the holder of the Iron Cross, two Eastern Front Oak Wreaths, the American Africa medal, the Free Polish Army medal and the British Defence medal.

Now what can this have to do with mythology rather than black farce? The answer lies in the Russian winters. Albin was always in demand among his fellows, because of his drawing skills. At first he supplied the barracks with pin-ups. Then came the first winter, when the Germans were eating dogs, cats, rats and horses. Only one thing was required of Albin: explicit and detailed pornography. By the second winter, the Germans were reduced to boot leather and cannibalism. Yet Albin was still commanded to draw. He had to draw witches, trolls, tree-spirits, dwarfs, ogres, warlocks, goblins: all the creatures of folk-memory. The dying men were crying out for contact with the collective unconscious. They craved myth: the images of everlasting life. At the end, they wanted spiritual truth. What makes me think that this incident is of significance is that it is not the only time I have come across it.

When the British were deprived of their American Colonies, they were at a loss for a gulag in which to dump their political dissidents, especially the Irish, their petty thieves and social inadequates. Australia was a godsend, better even than America. It was as good as the other side of the moon.

The route from England was by Rio to the Cape and from there to Port Jackson, the future Sydney. The voyage took up to eight months, and all but a privileged few spent that time below decks, in irons and the dark. The shallow draught of the transport ships made seasickness almost perpetual. Though deaths were remarkably few, because the ship’s surgeon was paid a per capita bonus for every prisoner that was unloaded alive, it takes little to imagine the conditions, both physical and mental, under which the convicts suffered. Yet they survived. They survived, not by plotting escape, mutiny, sedition, the making of future plans for villainy or the remembering of old triumphs, but by telling fairy tales to each other, which developed into competitions, and even into academic disputes and seminars, to establish a definitive text for a given story. And these convicts were largely illiterate. They had no written texts to compare, even if there had been light to read them by. The detritus of Britain became folklorists. Little may have changed since.

And, although bizarre, I don’t think that it was his patent mental disturbance alone that led Rudolph Hess, during the Nuremberg trials, to ignore the court and to spend his time reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Now I do not want to get bogged down over nice distinctions between myth, legend, folk tale and fairy tale. That is a different topic, and we are all near enough in agreement about what we mean, for the purpose of what I am talking about. We are here to discuss writing the world through myth, and there is something to be said that may not be immediately apparent.

I should like to define “myth” as the dream-thinking of the people. Dream. And thinking. The difficulty for us, I would suggest, is that the Western mind first meets myth in its written form. When we learn the word “myth”, in childhood, we tend also to link it to the word “Greek”. Unless we become specialists, all our experience of myth is through the written word; that is: after the myth has entered history, linear time, been written down in linear words, thought of in lines. That is only the latest form of its development.

As most of the world still knows, the Western mind is a very small representative of homo sapiens. The majority of humanity is concerned with time in its entirety. In its purest form, because geography has made it possible, the Australian Aborigine has developed, over some forty-thousand years, the subtlest and the most sophisticated philosophy I have met. It is the product of an empirical pragmatism reacting with a lethally hostile environment. If it did not work, there would be no survivors. At its most extreme, we have the Australian Dreaming, where there are nine temporal dimensions, which we may barely comprehend intellectually, but which the individual, initiated to the degree, can enter and manipulate at will.

Once you are involved with the culture of dreaming, then you are also involved with time. And that results, among the Australians (and probably among others, but it is the Australians that I know) in considering learning to be a process of remembering. It was the same for the Ancient Greeks, who as usual had a word for it: “anamnesis”.

Dreaming and thinking are uncomfortable bedfellows for our intellects, since our own experience of dreaming and myth is likely to be heavily defective because we are trapped in linear time. We know nothing about the real effects of myths, and we are not good at remembering dreams. Yet research tells us that most human beings dream each night, and lengthily. Westerners seem to have up to ten separate dreams a night, most of which they forget, or fail to bring into their consciousness on waking. That means that a considerable proportion of our total mental experience is undergone as dreaming and is largely devoid of waking logic. Australians who talk of the creative past as “The Dreaming”, who consider that that-that-was-and-is-and-will-be is the real world, are not incapable of distinguishing dreams from waking experience, but they are aware of the former as equally essential to them as the latter. For them, dreaming and thinking are parts of one, unbroken spectrum. Such people, who are, importantly, preliterate, depend heavily on dreams for the formation of their myths; whereas more materially developed cultures, being less skilled in remembering dreams, will depend upon them less.

We pay a price for our literacy. Duncan Williamson, the greatest living storyteller in Britain, who has three thousand stories in his head, was illiterate until his middle age. Recently he said to me that it had become harder to learn new stories since he had been able to read. I also know an old lady, who is losing her sight and can no longer read, who told me that it was not all loss because she was finding it easier to remember the detail of what was important.

So seamless is the division among preliterate cultures, that they do not differentiate between dream, thought and myth. All are the repository of precept, wisdom, and what I have to call history, since we have no analogue for the word they use. Because the division is seamless, it is traditional to indicate to the audience that, in the telling of a special truth, we are entering a different time, a different space, an eternity that, by the telling, is perpetually being created here and now. The clock may still be ticking, but we, while listening to the story, are in sacred time. Hence the many “Once upon a time” formulae, with one of which I began today. They indicate by their ritualistic absurdities, their temporal and spatial word-play, not triviality but that eternity. All cultures have them, and Russian is particularly rich in this area.

“Long, long ago, when the earth had only just been made and the blue sky was being put over it, and it was all set about with wooden boards, in a place where met the longest rivers, there was once a man . . .”

“Ask; only it isn’t every question that brings good. Once there lived an old woman in a house thatched with pancakes . . .”

“The roads are open to the wise, and they are not closed to the foolish, and once, or twice, there lived a man . . .”

“Once upon a time, when I was young and handsome, which was not so long ago, as you may see . . .”

“Once, long ago, in the golden holiness of a night, that never was, and never will come back . . .”

After the revelation of a truth in a dimension of timelessness, the hearers have to be returned safely to everyday living. Just as the start of the myth is delineated, so is the release from eternity, by a formal conclusion that is an act of play, no matter how serious the story has been.

“So Jack and his two brothers put the pot on the fire. And when the porridge is cooked, we’ll go on with the tale. But, just for now, we’ll let it simmer.”

“They lived in friendship and in peace, they lived happily and they lived long, and, if they are not dead, they are alive now, and they feed the hens with stars.”

“I once stayed in his palace, and there was much that I saw and much that I had to eat and drink, but it all ran down my beard, and not a drop got into my mouth and I rode home on a gingerbread horse.”

“There are good people in the world, and some who are not so good; but he who listened to my tale is my own true friend. Now drink kvass, and go to bed. The morning is wiser than the evening.”

“The owl flew and flew, perched on a tree, wagged her tail, rolled her eyes and flew off again. She flew and flew to the end of the world and the back of the sky. I’ve been clearing my throat to tell you a tale. The tale itself has not begun.”

By reciting a myth, the storyteller remembers a creation, and, by remembering, is a part of that creating. It is best understood in that dreadful solecism “walkabout”. In walking, the Australians speak the land. Their feet make it new, now, and in its beginning. And the land speaks them now, anew, and in their beginning, by step and breath that meet in its dance, so that land and people sing as one. It is a symbiosis of multiple time. They pity our ignorance in these matters. For the initiated Australians, the white Caucasian has, they say, “one sense less and one skin more.”

In all societies, including our own, learning is a structured process. We do not try to teach a six-month-old child the Special Theory of Relativity. Similarly, in societies where dream and thought and myth are integral, there are versions of every myth for every level of initiation; and the final initiation is death. This means that a myth exists on a primary, secular level, which may be told to the whole community and to outsiders, and moves, by degrees, onto higher religious and philosophical planes, while remaining recognisably the first easy story, so that the individual, right up to the rank of shaman, is always aware of continuity and growth, of the simple coexistent with the complex and the esoteric. It is akin to learning, eventually, that “Jack and the Beanstalk” contains a Beatitude. How much simpler and more beautiful would Biblical criticism be if that were true for civilised, literate us.

Such a structured process is possible only so long as the form remains preliterate; that is, non-linear. Which means that the myths we have from history, and the myths that field-workers bring home, are the secular versions, even though scholarship may correctly detect, elements of the religious. But they are not survivals, they are pre-echoes. The people, however, in their varying degrees of initiation, or education, have the totality. In a few, rare cases, an outsider has been able to obtain, and to publish, a myth at both the exoteric and at an esoteric level.

An instance is Paul Radin, who collected the Trickster myth of the Winnebago Sioux in 1908 despite the warning contained in the esoteric version:

This, too, remember. Never tell anyone about this rite. Keep it guarded secret. If you tell it, the world will come to an end. We shall all die. Into the bowels of our grandmother, Earth, we must send these words, so that by no possible chance can it ever come into daylight. So secret must this be kept. For ever must this be done.

Radin’s expressed reason for publishing was that, if he had not, the material would have been lost, since he claimed to have gathered it from the last surviving shaman of the Winnebago. If he was writing honestly, then he exposed his unawareness of the relationship between the shamanic and Time.

It is my personal view that the material should not have been recorded. Only in linear time would it have been lost. The myth did not depend on Radin for its survival. Exposed to an unprepared world, his published text cannot be interpreted aright. It becomes offal and garbage: pabulum for such as the New Age mystics, who act as though knowledge does not have to be won but can be scavenged. It is a degradation of the myth as lowering as the demeaning of religion by the obtaining of a theological degree for cash. Ignorance is decked out as wisdom, and its adherents are led into darkness, as the myth warned.

The future holder of the story, of the myth, has to be conducted into the mystery in stages, to hear the truth from an adept. Every would-be Dante, who, in Dante’s own words, wishes to “put into verse things difficult to think”, must have his Vergil, or he is lost; and, even so, there is no avoiding the terror of the moment when Vergil steps aside, and Dante must go on, alone, with the image of Beatrice, in order to become Dante.

John Maruskin, in his essay, “Listening to the Printed Word”, says it at its most haunting: “It is in the speech of carters and housewives, in the speech of blacksmiths and old women, that one discovers the magic that sings the claim of the voice in the shadow, or that chants the rhyme of the fish in the well.”

Are we, then, lost: condemned to feed our imaginations with only the most secular level of myth, nailed to linearity? We are not. Can we write the world? We can; if we are willing to pay. The problem with learning to read and being subject to the writing, is that it ends up by being our only way into constructive dreaming. But certain people have innate skills, and they are the visionaries, the poets, those who use language that is the great constrictor when it is on the page. They release it into the subconscious by providing us, not with factual information of history, but with ambivalence and the paradox that enables us to interpret what is being said, and what we read, just as we would if we were dreaming. That is the way, via the poet, to the myth, to the truth.

The trap of the linear word and the thoughts that it produces is overcome for us by those people who can enter into the written language and extract from it this dream, this paradox, this ambiguity, which forces us to interpret. It is what I would call the “preliterate writing” that provokes response, and, in its provocation, awakes, differently, for every one of us, the dream.

For the Western mind myth is further removed from us by the failure of its providers to recognise the need for the material to be entrusted to the visionaries and the poets alone. The providers are, of course book publishers, and they do not know what they are handling.

Myth has been further diminished for us by its being out of copyright. With a few exceptions, this has resulted in the already weakened being reduced to a pap, because publishers have commissioned yet another gutless volume of “retellings”.

Contrast this with traditional societies, where it is common for a storyteller to be forbidden to perform in public until an apprenticeship of twenty to twenty-five years has been served. Only then is it considered that the skill has been honed to the point where the individual may be trusted with the material and given the authority to improvise within it. And there has, throughout, been a master, both teaching and disciplining the novice. The master is all important, yet is unrecognised by the publisher today, and so the poetry is given to the unschooled, and the myth is degraded to garish drivel for infants.

That period of time, found so often, of twenty years or so, of the novitiate interests me personally. I write novels, but each novel has at its heart a myth, which should not be recognised by the reader, but provides the aetiology for the book. Yet I had been writing for twenty years before I felt confident enough to risk tackling the raw material openly. I am not the one to judge success or failure here, but it is significant that from infancy I absorbed, as if by osmosis, the precepts and music of the voices of masters.

Let me try to give you some of the flavour of the experience. If you know my books, you may hear the tonality of the voices of my masters speaking through me, but that will be a bonus, not a sine qua non of understanding.

I am a writer, and my duty is to the telling of tales through the medium of the written book, which will be read, either aloud to a group or silently by an individual. Although I must be able to hear and use the spoken word that I am interpreting, it is the printed text that is the vehicle. It may itself become again a spoken text, but I cannot, beyond a point, control or predict the voice that will speak it. That voice will most likely belong to a parent, a teacher, or an actor, all of whom usurp the position of storyteller without any questioning of their being qualified to do so.

The printed word, to be true to the primary voice, the voice in the shadow, must be proof against such performers. It must also communicate directly with the eye, and not obscure the story, so that it can speak to its other audience, the solitary reader.

An oral tale, merely transcribed, however accurately, will not fulfil these requirements. Some accommodation has to be made to phonetics in the transcript, and the result alienates both eye and ear; the words look, at best, amusing; at worst, baroque; grammar and syntax that represent plain speech become, in a mouth modulated to the dialect of white man’s business English, an embarrassment, a condescension, an affront. Scholarship may be served, but the tale is not. The claim of the voice in the shadow is not sung, nor is there chanted the rhyme of the fish in the well.

In the written traditional story, it is not enough to repeat the words as they were said; the skill is not to record the moment of the telling, to act as a machine, but to re-create the effect of that moment for the reader.

The achievement of such a balance between the natural voice and the formal page is not easy; and it is made harder by the differing worlds that the two elements often represent; for, whereas the audience of the traditional tale is naturally in the community of a rural society, the audience of the book is to be found more among the sophisticated and the urban.

How to serve both tradition and audience in a book? Each writer has to answer the questions with whatever skills are at his or her disposal, and with whatever insight experience may bring.

My way is simply my way; another writer will have another; but one element comes close to being essential, if the stories are to be handed on as living entities. The storyteller should, as all apprentices are, be guided by a personal master. It is a craft to which a proper time has to be served.

My good fortune has been to have had four such masters who have thought it a matter of importance that I hear what they have to say; and now I want to let them speak, to give you an example of how the voice in the shadow may be heard. I shall draw on three of these masters only, because with them I share a commonality of place and of culture that I do not with the fourth. That fourth is Welsh, and the bond between us, though adamantine, is not so clearly visible as it is with the other three, and would, I feel, be a distraction here.

The place that is shared in common is East Cheshire: a country of lowland hills on the flanks of the bleaker Pennines; the land, and the language, of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the location of the Green Chapel. The culture is that of its rural working class.

The first master is Joshua Birtles. He was a pig-sticker and small farmer on Alderley Edge, where both our families have been long settled, though his must have come originally from Birtles itself, which is the next township to Alderley, while my family probably came down from the hills above Macclesfield, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, to cut stone in the quarries on the Edge. I abused Joshua as the character of Gowther Mossock in my first two novels, as a result of which I became aware of the questions his and my consanguinity posed.

Every Friday, Joshua used to deliver eggs and vegetables in his cart, pulled by his horse, Prince. Some of my earliest memories are of Joshua’s britches, stockings and boots looming over me as I sat on the kitchen floor, and of hearing his voice, pitched to carry against gale and hill, jarring the windows. His hands were gigantic, spilling cauliflowers, cabbages and potatoes over the table, and themselves seemed to be producing the great bounty, without the need for soil.

He was huge in frame and spirit; he was almost not credible, so completely was he the image of a pre-industrial, bucolic ideal that never was or could be, except in the sentimental minds of the urban middle classes. And he knew how he looked. “You see,” he said to me once, “I’m just at the end, like, of one period, some way.”

It is an aspect common to all the masters I have known. They seem, but only seem, to be out of step with time. Yet it would be a mistake to think that, because a man is content to keep to the old ways, his mind is not up to date. It is not that such individuals are living in the past, but that their intensity of life includes both past and present; and from that security they grasp the future.

It was exemplified for me when Jos said, “You know how some people carry on if an old windmill has to come down: ‘Oh! They’re taking away a landmark!’ Then, when these pylons go up, they create the dickens about that. Well, there’s not a lot of difference between a pylon, in the distance, and a windmill. And, I mean, you can’t hinder progress.”

When I learned to walk, Friday became a high point of the week; for Joshua would let me ride next to him on the seat and to hold Prince’s reins. And all this time, he was talking to me, and telling me things: the reason why a particular stone in a hedge bank was called the Bull Stang; that a hummock in a field above his farm was called Finlow because a king was buried there. When formally educated, I recognised that the hummock was a Bronze Age tumulus, four thousand years old. So, in every way, I came to know my place, and to see that myth was also memory.

Here are some of Joshua’s words: the words he gave me as a child, and which I have kept safe.

“There’s an old thing he used to tell me. If I was a bit upset, my father would say: ‘Come here, lad, and I’ll tell thee a tale.

‘I’ll tell thee a tale

About a weasel and a snail,

A monkey and a merry abbot:

Seven good sons for winding.

They rambled and they romped,

And they come to a quickthorn hedge.

E’en the millstones we’re going to jump in!

What must I do to save my shins?

O’er Rinley-Minley common.

Up starts a red hare

With a good sort of a salmon feather in its tail.

Having a good broadsword by my side,

I shot at it.

No matter o’ that, but I missed it.

Up comes Peter Pilkison

Mowing oat cakes in the field of Robert Tellison.

Hearing this news, he come;

Tumbled o’er th’ turfcote,

O’er th’ backerlash,

O’er Winwick church steeple;

Drowned in a bag of moonshine

Behind Robert Chent’s door,

Chowbent.’

“Now what that means, I’ve no idea! He used to sing these little ditties to me. (He was no singer.) One was:

‘I’ll dye, I’ll dye my petticoat red;

For the lad I love I’ll bake my bread;

And then my daddy will wish that I were dead,

Sweet Willy in the morning among the rush!

Shurly, shurly, shoo-gang-rowl,

Shoo-gang-lollymog-shoo-ga-gang-a-lo!

Sweet Willy in the morning among the rush!’

“And what that means, I’ve no idea! Oh yes! Here’s another little song:

‘Oh, Taffy was born at Lincoln in Wales,

Sold him again to darling-a-Noddy.

He came over to England to tell his fine tales;

He sang: Tither-o, tether-o, kither-o, kell-o,

Kai nello!’

“Ay! And I think that’s about the lot of those little ditties he used to sing me!”

When Jos was a boy, he used to blow the bellows for the organ at Birtles church, as his father had done before him. The time came for a new organ, and Jos was allowed to keep the old bellows handle, which he split to make the runners for a sledge to ride on the Riddings, a field across the lane from the farm, and so steep that it could be sledged all the year round.

“When I was a youth, we had this big sledge I was telling you about. It held seven people. And one Sunday we were sledging there; and Sam Read, that lived down at the farm here, he was younger than me, a young lad, and he’d been to Sunday school; and, instead of going in, changing, he thought he’d just have a ride down first: just have one.

“Anyway, he was the back man, and when we got to this ridge where the sledge did a jump and left the ground for about five yards, his behind slipped over the end of the sledge.

“He couldn’t fall off, because someone had got hold of his legs (we held each other’s legs fast) and he was dragged down, and all the gorse that grew there, and his pants were just about worn out, to say nothing of the gorse thorns he had to contend with.

“His mother played the dickens with him! So that was that. He never had another ride in his best clothes. But, at different times, we sprained two young women’s ankles. Of course, it was such a big stop at the bottom, if you didn’t put the brake on: get your heels out; and even if you did, you ended up a bit rough. Ay. But it was a wild ride. It fair took your breath away. It was a good one.”

At the other side of the field called the Riddings, there was a brick cottage, divided into three dwellings. At one end there lived an old man; and, at the other end there was his barn; and in between lived Polly Norbury.

“Ay! Polly Norbury! She had the misfortune to lose a leg; and I think that embarrassed her a lot, because, after coming back from the First World War, although I went to school with her, I only saw her twice in all the time till she died, which was about four years ago. Only twice in forty years. No. She didn’t seem to go out. No. I suppose it was a big shock, you know, to have a leg off, for one thing. And then living by yourself is no use. You just get tied up in yourself, don’t you?

“I’ll tell you a little story about that barn. The barn is eighteen inches higher up than the cottage floor where this Miss Norbury lived. Anyway; Percy Grainger and me must go kill him a pig one day, the chap as lived in the end cottage, and hang it in this barn.

“And I noticed that the water and, you know, water that was mixed with blood, bloody water, was getting away somewhere; just when we were finishing, I noticed this. It was going into her house. So I said to Percy, I said to Percy, ‘I think we’d better, we’d better go now. We’ve finished.’

“This little fellow, he did get in a row, that owned the pig! It was going in there, because it was lower there, eighteen inches lower, her floor was; and, of course, the walls were old; and it had just had time to start getting through. I said to Percy, I said, ‘I think it’s time we went.’

“That’s not why I hadn’t seen Polly Norbury. No. I think it was having this leg off.

“Now, we noticed, both our children had slight accidents. One broke a collar bone; it was Ruth broke her collar bone: that was it. And she was only about two. Do you know, although she was a child that was full of vim and all that, it must have embarrassed her. It put a quietness on her. She hadn’t as much to say for quite, oh, a few weeks, until it was better again. It has some effect. I suppose it’s a bit of shock. Well, it’s a bigger shock still, to have a leg off, like that.”

Alderley had a mummers’ play, which was performed annually, and jealously, by the members of the one same family: the Barbers.

“There was a fellow they used to call ‘Serjeant’ Barber. (He was some relation of Herbert’s. He may have been one of the mummers; he was one of the Barbers, anyway.) Serjeant Barber. And he was courting a girl from Delamere; and it was in the days when they used to walk. And this Serjeant Barber lived up at Cuckoo’s Nest, up near the Wizard there.

“Anyway, one Sunday he was there, spending the day; and it must have been about November time; and his fiancée lived down the wood about half a mile at Delamere; so she said, when he was going to walk home, she’d come up with him to the road. Some wag had put a turnip lantern on a post there; and she was frightened; and he had to go back with her.

“Well, her mother played the dickens when she got back: ‘Come on!’ she says. ‘I’ll go with you!’ When she saw it, she was scared. He had to go back again that half mile, and then, eventually, walk home. And he just landed home next morning in time to change into his working togs and get off to work. But he said, on the way home, love left him.

“How far is it? Good Lord, I don’t know! Twenty mile? It’s from Delamere to the Wizard, anyhow! Ah! But love left him on the way home. And no wonder.”

Fred Wright lived a mile and a half away from Jos Birtles, at the Beacon Lodge. He was a farmer, eight years older than Jos; stocky, with a white walrus moustache, and an impassive, Slavonic face. He was a man who spoke little. He had a reputation for surliness, but he was more shy than ill-tempered. However it was, the result was the same for me. I knew him from my childhood, but, unlike Jos, he did not speak much to me. Not directly. But he taught me the importance, and the communication, of silence. He showed, and did not tell in words, but through his eyes. At the end, what he did do was astonishing.

When Fred was in his late seventies, his wife, Sarah, died. The aloof man became more withdrawn, and people were worried for his health. But no one could speak to him of this concern. He was the remote patriarch, the stone-faced horse dealer, the alleged skin-flint. He was Fred Wright, and Fred Wright you could not talk to. But Jos Birtles did.

Jos told him that he was doing himself no good by going inwards. He should turn outwards. Fred said that it was not his way, and he was too old to change. So Jos urged him to write his memoirs: to get down on paper what he knew, so that, even if he could not mix with others, he would be communicating; he would be turning outwards.

Fred acted on Jos’s urging. His writing, since he left school nearly seventy years earlier, had probably been limited to postcards from Blackpool and to what little was needed to keep his accounting straight. But, because he had no experience, no sense of literary style or structure, he did not know the enormity of what he was undertaking; and so he wrote seventeen thousand coherent words without a sign of hesitation or struggle. He simply wrote as he spoke, letting the free thought and its associations direct the story. The impact is enormous, and a valuable social document. He inscribed it “The Life of Fred Wright and his Dear Wife.”

“I was born in a house at Varden Town the rent was IS 6d per week. I lived with my Grandmother we were very poor when I was 4 years old my grandmother sent me to the pub The Black Greyhound for 6d penny of whisky. It was pulled down in 1885 and rebuilt the same year but not as a pub. I had used to go on Saturday morning to Butcher Hattons for I shilling worth of beef and Mr Hatton used to put a slice of liver on for my grandmother and we had used to have a lb of butter 18 oz to the lb from R. Worthingtons at the Acton Farm.

“And then came the time to leave Varden Town and we went living at Daniel Hill with my Uncle Jim and then I went to Mottram school near to The Bull’s Head. The teacher’s name was Wilson, and he took to me like a father he used to shout to Fred Wright and say I want you to run me a little errand he would follow me out into the porch and give me a shilling to fetch him ½ gallon of beer from Hooley, and put it in the summer house of course ½ gallon was only 10d and the 2d left was for me also I had used to go and help Mrs. Wilson, with the washing, dollying all the napkins and I had used to take children in a three-wheel perambulator and I used to fetch her 2 quarts of stout 6d and hide them in the bottom of the dolly tub.”

[At the end of childhood]: “Now I think that ends another year. Anyway, I go back to Clockhouse with Jim Wright, that was 1896, me and Jim started to take two girls out for walks at night Annie and Edith Dunkerley from Manchester but my aunt went mad about that so we had to stop it anyway Jim left us and I drove the horses.

“Now we are got into 1897 the Queen Vic Diamond Jubilee it was a hectic year we had the largest bonfire that ever was built on Alderley Edge on Stormy Point. Now I have got another girl Amilia Leech very dark but deceitful took her to Blackpool at Wilmslow wakes paid for everything then she gave me the poke about three weeks after anyway she lives Brook Lane and has never been married now she is very fat and ugly, thank goodness nothing never happened I am positive I could not live with her. Now it is 1900 and I go and work for Mrs. Needham again at 12s 6d per week. I had the Irishman’s rise, IS less.

“Now we are at the end of the Boer War and we had a carnival every time we killed two Boers, now there seems to be girls everywhere we are going to a dance at the Public Hall, dancing from 7 till 11 for 6d. This was every Thursday night and sometimes Saturdays, but we had a long night once every month for which we paid 2s 6d but we had all the refreshments free ham and pork pies cakes jellies trifles Blanchmange as much as you could eat.” [It is here, at the public hall, that Fred meets his future wife, Sarah, a farmer’s daughter, and therefore far above his status, whom he writes of as “Ma”.]

“One night who should come into the hall but Ma and I never seen her before there of course I had a dance or two with her but with her being a few years older you have not got the cheek to ask questions.

“Anyway, Thursday night comes again and Ma was there again anyway I said if you were going home and you have not got a partner I will walk up with you as we both had to go the same way home a few times I just left her on the road and just said goodnight and asked her if she would be there next Thursday all being well I shall come and it was the best day’s work I had ever done because I was just beginning to be a wild card, going out every night nearly dancing and coming in at 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning.

“Now then me and Ma seem to understand I had got to going across the field to their house I had never given her a kiss not even tried till this night but it came off now we are courting proper now we keep on courting till the spring of 1904 and we got engaged. It was on the peesteps up Findlow lane then we got married on Boxing Day 1904 at Birtles Church. I walk to the church and I send a cab for Sarah from Len Smith’s and Charlie Eveson drove them there anyway we went to the copper mines for our honeymoon.”

[From the wedding, Fred Wright moves swiftly, by anecdotes, through the fifty-five years of marriage, as though he is being driven to record the death before he can go back and record the life. His description of Sarah’s last illness, and of her death, is harrowing; and it is literature.]

“Hilda said she was a Martyr how she stuck. Then of course she comes home and is in bed, then in a few days Dr Edwards come in and reads the report from the Specialist now that knocked the stuffing out of me now she is a good patient she wont give you anymore trouble than she could help, anyway we bring her downstairs into the New Room. Dr Edwards said I must stop climbing the 12 stairs. Now she is lying in the new room and listening to the hundreds of people that have come into the yard, now she is very poorly for about one month only taking drops of water and Brandy and often unconscious. Then the last two weeks were the worst on the Monday she said am I getting better or worse now these were you could not help her any and she always had to Kleenex tissue always in her hand Now Hilda as been stopping with her and then Ann came also but the final day Sept 5 I was sat holding her hand about ½ past four in the afternoon and she looked at me and said it will not be long now and she rallied till ½ past six and she whispered ‘come with me’ twice and I and Ann thought she had passed out so I went out of the room while Ann was going to straighten her up and she began breathing again and she rallied till ½ past ten but those last 4 hours did me more harm than all the time she had been bad, I don’t really know why she had to suffer like this she was a very good living woman. I never knew her tell a lie or sware and she always said a little prayer at night.

“I think we were made for each other as we seem to be identical in everything what I was thinking I am sure she was but we have had a very happy life all through the fifty-five years and the three courting years, I wish we could live it all over again, one thing I wish she could have kept up this summer and seen the sun and the gardens but no it must not be but one thing I am sure I know she is gone to heaven and I am hoping to meet her there, God bless her.

“Now I am writing tonight December 28 1959 as we went to Edith’s party we had only been courting a few weeks that would be in 1903. I was driving the quarry horses I had to give them the supper before we could go we started about ½ past 4 and got there about 6 for tea of course we had to go on our bicycles and I know we started back about 2 o’clock on Sunday morning, of course there were no motors or Busses on the road then now let me tell you after we got married of course we were at Adder’s Moss so one day she said to me I don’t think it is right for you to have to get all the money to live she said I am going to let the two front rooms which will bring in a little more money and she did and she did very well out of it then in 1911 we left Adder’s Moss and went to Bradford House and she did the same there letting the rooms in those days every shilling counted then came a time when the ladies of Alderley Edge started to fetch the poor children out of Manchester and of course Ma said she would have some they paid 6s each with them that was 36 shillings per week of course that helped us along.”

[The novelist in me would be thankful to be able to handle pace, mood and time as deftly as that. But a novelist is making a knowing artefact: Fred Wright is reporting his life.]

“Now I will tell you about the Boer War. It started in 1899 but there was no conscription like this has been like the World War One and this second war. Now of course we had fires while this war was going on. We had a carnival every time we killed two Boers.

“I shall never forget one in Particular we were in the Trafford, and 6 of us said we would have a cavalry parade in front of the carnival and we borrowed horses and rode them in front of the band. Now I will give you the names of the riders Aaron Shuttleworth, Walter Read, Charlie Eveson, Charlie Ford, Bill Gray, and myself now there is only Charlie Eveson and me living out of them.

“Now we had all sorts of gun warfare 6 inch waterpipes fixed to Handcarts. Of course a lot of fools were pulling these. Now I will tell you about Krudger now he was the big mouth, like Hitler was in the last war anyhow Burgess’s lads, Tom, Ernest and Jack they brought their old horse rake and had a man sitting on acting as Krudger with a placard on his back called himself Kruger King of South Africa now they used to march through the village and go down Chorley Hall lane to the recreation ground now Ted Lewis lived with Sarah Henshaw who kept 2 cows and poultrey and old Ted had found a nest of rotten eggs, and he told two girls about them and they got them and as Kruger went past riding on this rake didn’t they pelt him with these rotten eggs oh I forgot I must tell you the names of these two girls one was Alice Russell and the other was Aggie Aston; Aggie is dead but I don’t know about Alice and I think the war finished at the end of 1900 and that was when they would not have old Joe in the Trafford as he stunk the place out and he had to drink his beer in the yard and the Alderley Edge Temperance band2 were all very fresh and they were playing in the road at the front of the Trafford some were leaned against the High School wall for to play and G. Cragg was sat on the floor he played the big drum they say he was the only one to keep time sitting down.

“Now then. Let me tell you about George Birtles who was a comical man now Over Alderley Chapel had just bought one acre of land from Lord Stanley as a burial ground so when the day of consecration were of course old George must have gone anyway he went home and said he should be buried there he said it was a grand place and you could see White Nancy from there and Ma Birtles said thee get on with dieing and we will show thee where thou will be buried and I think he is in Birtles churchyard.

“Now I seem to have forgotten about Ma talking about everybody else that is one thing I never shall forget she is in my mind night and day and I don’t want to forget it is just twelve months she was just taken ill it was on the 19th. of February twelve months ago and she will have been dead 6 months on 3 March. What a pal I have lost which I am sure never can be replaced.”

The life of Fred Wright and his dear wife. He wrote as he spoke. Yet I would ask you to notice that, even here, it is not enough for the written word to copy the spoken. No one wanting simply a story would read it, even punctuated to the received norm. The text is strong, all seventeen thousand words of it, because it is stark anthropology. It is not, in itself, the natural medium for telling a tale. But, for me, a writer from that culture, the language, rhythm, grammar, syntax and content are one and the same gold.

The greatest of the masters was Wilfred Lancaster. He was the miller of Swettenham, six miles from Alderley. The mill is a water mill, and the water is used to generate the electricity for the mill house as well as to grind corn and to run a saw bench. Wilfred’s grandson is an engineer at the nearby Jodrell Bank radio telescope and built himself his own computer. It is the only water-driven database that I know of.

Wilfred Lancaster was always able to deflate me instantly. He cut across my intellectualisations with concrete logic. “Can you tell, Alan,” he said once, after I had been plying him with questions about traditional beliefs, “which side of the church yew trees grown on?” I ransacked my brain for all that I had read about tree cults, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death, and the merging with later tradition, but had to admit that I could see no significant pattern of ritual deployment about the churchyards in the cases I knew personally. “Why,” said Wilfred, “they grow on the outside, dunner they?”

From such chastening experiences I learnt the lesson of the mythopoeic mind: use metaphor, never the abstraction.

The information I gained from Wilfred had to be got cannily: by waiting; by indirect reference; by elliptical conversation. I had to earn my right to move from the secular knowledge to the esoteric, and that would happen only when Wilfred judged that I was fit to hear him. So it was a surprise when he sent word that he wanted to see me. All my life, before, the only way to visit him was to drop by, as if through happenchance; and sometimes he would talk, and at others, not, allowing me to be present, but to watch, not speak. This time it was a summoning. I went.

Without preamble, Wilfred said, “I want to tell you everything I know. I’ve still got my wits, and I’m in good health, but it wunner always be so, and then it’s too late, inner it? You see, there’s things I can tell you that aren’t in books and are on no maps, and it inner right as we should die and keep it all from other folks. It’s nowt only right as we should let somebody else know, shouldner we? And it’s nowt only right as we should let the young uns know, and then let it be carried on.”

It was as simple as that. I would go to the mill, and Wilfred Lancaster talked, insisting on using my tape recorder, fluently, almost oracularly, without prompting or questioning, unselfconsciously and with force. History, legend, folktale, anecdote, gossip, ribald humour, tragedy, opinion and superstition: he never repeated himself. Here, the voice in the shadow speaks most clearly to me. You may find amusing some of the exoteric parts of the Divine Comedy through which I was led by my particular Vergil.

“It was easy enough when you got in the rhythm of it, Alan. You know, same as I say: you can be cross-cutting a piece of timber, two on you as know what cross-cutting is, and it isn’t hard work; but get another beggar as dunner know what it is, and, same as I say, he’ll maul your blooming belly out. And yet he thinks he’s working! He is, by gum! And hard work for you, and all! ‘I dunner mind you having a ride, but pick your feet up!’, that’s what I tell ’em. And they look at me like a cow at a cabbage. You know, when you tell them that, they wonder what the heck’s up. But, oh, they’ll blooming murder you, some on them will, for cross-cutting. Oh, no, bigod, they’re murderous. But they dunner know they’re doing it, you know; they’re laying on, and they think it’s cutting, but it inner cutting it at all. You know, your saw should cut itsel’, if it’s anything like. Oh, be beggared, ah!”

[Undertakers were frequent visitors to the mill, on the lookout for suitable timber. One of them gave Wilfred this story.]

“‘So, anyroad,’ he said. ‘Did you hear of that job as we had,’ he said, ‘the other week?’ He did say such-and-such a place. ‘We were doing the job. They’d been in church; taken the corpse into church; come out again; put it at grave side; lowering it down; pulls planks from under; lowering it down by its handles; and the bottom dropped out! Man dropped out! Clatter! Straight in the bottom!’ I said to him, I said, ‘By the God,’ I said, ‘you dunner go to much trouble at screwing bottoms in!’ ‘Oh, no,’ he says. ‘They get these here staples and staple them in now.’ Well, of course there was pandemonium. Folks was fainting, and all beggaring roads. They had to cover it up. This undertaker had to fetch another beggaring box and put him in. They had to take the beggar in church again and have another beggaring service. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘I got to know him particularly well.’ Ah. The feller clattered out o’ th’ bottom. Ah! Oh ah! He fell out, right enough. He fell out!”

“Did you hear of Dr Jack as lived in Macclesfield? Well. Now then. He’d been to a Christmas party; and old Jack goes for bed; about two o’clock in the morning, a rattle on the blooming door. And anyroad, he gets up to the window. A fellow there. He says, ‘Come on, doctor!’ he says. ‘I want you to go with me!’ ‘What’s your trouble?’ He says, ‘I don’t know’. ‘Be down in a few minutes,’ he said. Anyroad, he said, ‘I want you to go up to Macclesfield Forest.’ His wife, like, up at Macclesfield Forest. This and t’other.” [Macclesfield Forest is a wild area of the Pennines, some five miles from Macclesfield, and fifteen hundred feet higher, up vicious gradients and over bad surfaces.] “He said, ‘How much will it be?’ ‘Oh, at this time of night,’ he said, ‘ten shilling.’ Anyroad, he gathered his traps up, the old Dr Jack did, and chap sits by him, like, in the motor, and away they goes.

“Got to the bottom somewhere, this Macclesfield Forest. About six or eight gates they opened, like. They sees farm, up at top; and he stopped at the last gate. He says, ‘You’ll do at that, doctor.’ Doctor was out with his bag and for up. He says, ‘How much did you say it was?’ ‘Oh,’ says doctor, ‘ten shilling,’ he says, ‘but,’ he says, ‘I haven’t done the job yet.’ ‘No, but,’ he says, t’other chap, ‘you were half-a-crown cheaper than taxi man.’”

Sometimes the directness, the assumption of a shared background of understanding, can result in an allusive language that needs a commentary if it is to communicate. Here, Wilfred is telling a story to illustrate the truth of the belief that to order more wood for coffins than is needed for the number of corpses in hand, leads to the death of the undertaker, in this case within the week.

“It was this fellow, and he’d come for this; chap had died, like, and he’d nowt put him in, sort of thing, as fetched him and come for this here, a suit of coffin stuff, put him in, you see. And then he was wanting this coffin stuff, and it was that clean, you know, he’d stop a bit extra long and have another suit cut, you see. And then me uncle said, ‘Ay, it’d pay a chap die to have a suit of that sort!’ And that were it. Ah. But he had it in the week. Ah. Had it in the week, right enough. He picked his own out. He said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll have that, and I’ll have that, and I’ll have that. And a bit of old shelving will do for the bottom.’”

Finally, Wilfred Lancaster on the problem of a man’s having to be away from home, when he can’t keep his eye on his wife’s activities.

“It’s a bugger of a job, then, inner it? When you come back, and they’re singing, ‘When you come back and there’s nothing left for me.’ It’s there, you know! Oh yes! A slice off a cut loaf isner missed – unless you cut too deep. Of course, you’ve getten bread ready sliced now, dunner you? It gets missed a bit sooner then, dunner it, when it’s ready sliced?”

It’s by honouring such men that I know the Voice in the Shadow; by listening to the music of their cadences that I hear the Rhyme of the Fish in the Well. I take it into myself, and, with as much skill as I can muster and as humbly as I may, I shape it into my song. For them.

You might well think that a writer who ploughs such a narrow furrow is asking for oblivion, since he risks incomprehension on the part of his readers. But my experience is not that.

Somehow, and I think that it is a combination of a proper craft and of the universal power of myth, I appear to communicate. In one instance, The Stone Book Quartet, I thought that, since I was using my own family history and idiolect over a century, I had gone too far: that it was too personal. Yet, of all my books, that is the one that has drawn the most animated response from readers, of all cultures and races. They want me to tell them how it is that I knew that that is how their history was for them. And the book has been singled out for the Phoenix Award by the Children’s Literature Association of America. Turning inwards, and going through the self, would seem to be the road to what, translated, the Australians call the “All-Self”. How else could one square mile of Cheshire hillside speak to the world?

I would answer that, by employing such intensity, I have allowed that hill to speak its myth.

Here, to end, and to thank my masters, is a brief story retold by me, but not from them. I hope that it shows how I have tried to serve the Cheshire voice in the shadow. The story is called: “Johnny Whopstraw”.

“I’ll see if I can tell it as it was told to me; but I’ve got a bone in my leg, remember.

“Johnny Whopstraw was out walking one fine day when he spied a hare sitting under a bush on a common. He thought: What luck! Here’s me; and I’ll catch this hare, and I’ll kill him with a whip, and then I’ll sell him for half-a-crown. With that money, I can get a young sow, I reckon; and I’ll feed her up on scraps, and she’ll bring me twelve piglets.

“The piglets, when they’re grown, they’ll have twelve piglets each. And when they’re grown, I’ll slaughter the lot of them; and that’ll bring me a barn-load of pork.

“I’ll sell the pork, and I’ll buy a little house for my mother to live in; and then I can get married myself.

“I’ll marry a farmer’s daughter; and she’ll fetch the farm with her. We’ll have two sons; and I’ll work them hard and pay them little. They’ll be that whacked, they’ll oversleep in the morning, and I’ll have to give them a shout to rouse them. ‘Get up, you lazy beggars!’ I’ll say. ‘The cows want milking!’ But Johnny Whopstraw had fallen so in love with his big ideas that he really did shout, ‘Get up, you lazy beggars! The cows want milking!’

“And that hare, it took fright at the row he was making, and it ran off across the common; and he never did catch it; and his money, pigs, house, farm, wife and children were lost, all because of that.

“And so the bridge bended. And so my tale’s ended.”

I first told that story at a conference of storytellers, and it was well received, especially when I revealed that I had collected it from Siberia. But my moment of smugness did not last. In the audience was Duncan of the Three Thousand Tales, on his first venture out of Scotland. He came up to me afterwards, his eyes twinkling, and said: “That’s one of my stories, too.”

It brought home to me that, though we may be the lantern bearers, we are not the lanterns. When Wilfred Lancaster summoned me and told me that he wanted me to know what he knew, I was put into a spiritual turmoil by the implications of his changing from teaser to teacher: of giving freely what he had hitherto kept close. I asked him: “Why me?”

His reply to the question may be translated as: “Because not many people round here now would know the value of what I have to say; but you do; and I trust you to handle the material and to be true to it and to me.” His actual words were: “Because you’re the only one of us left, Alan, with the arse hanging out of his britches.” It was Wilfred’s greatest compliment, and my proudest charge.

A story for you. A crock of butter for me.


1 Children’s Literature New England: “Writing the World: Myth as Metaphor”. This lecture was delivered at Trinity College Dublin, 13 July 1995. (An extended version of an address to the Story-telling Festival given at Battersea Arts Centre, London, 1 February 1985.)

2 Founded by Robert of the ophicleide, whose grandson, my grandfather, would be blowing the E flat cornet at this event.