Initiation
IT WAS A sub-culture, Prof Levin had said to Lol. Buried deep in English soil. You thought it was dead and gave it a poke and a bearded man rose up with a heavy stick and beat you around the head.
Long years ago this was, the first time he’d actually met Prof. Just a kid in a folk band they’d named Hazey Jane, after a song by Nick Drake who’d already been dead for years when they’d fallen ecstatically upon his albums. Poor Nick, destined to be twenty-six for ever.
The pages of the scrapbook were dry and browning. It hadn’t been a very expensive scrapbook; a few years later, in another era, it would’ve been a file on a computer which would’ve crashed long ago, taking the memories with it.
Lol found the picture: him in a borrowed rag jacket of many colours and a daft straw hat with a ribbon. Looking suitably embarrassed outside a big pub on the edge of the Cotswolds that might’ve been called the Golden Ball. Hazey Jane had been booked to play there that night, supporting a bigger band, now so long gone that he couldn’t remember their name, only that Prof Levin had been there to record them live. They’d all heard of Prof Levin and hoped he’d notice them and want to produce their music and make them almost-stars. So they’d come early, in time to take in the morris dancing in the afternoon on the pub forecourt.
Those of them who’d wanted to.
‘Spare us.’ Karl Windling, their bass player stomping off to the bar to get into the real ale. ‘Can’t abide them fucking squeeze boxes.’
But Lol remembered being mildly fascinated, watching the morris men. Never seen the real thing before, performed by grizzled blokes to a rolling rhythm from a band with an accordion, a fiddle and a side drum, under a syrupy August sun. It had seemed very ancient, like a stone circle.
It would have been to avoid having to match Karl, pint for pint, that he’d slipped outside. The more you drank the better you thought your playing was. A common delusion.
It had been a humid afternoon. He remembered it occurring to him, sitting on the steps, that the dancers were not dancing to the music, the musicians were playing to the dance. Which seemed so strange that he’d waited for a drinks break and gone to ask one of them. Odd, him doing that; he’d been so shy. He remembered getting into a discussion with a bunch of them, then the great Prof Levin coming across, peering over his glasses.
‘Only one way to find out, son.’
‘I can’t play the accordion. Or the fiddle.’
‘Not what I meant.’
Then someone was putting the daft hat on his head. They were taking the piss, but he didn’t mind too much. It was good to be outside.
‘Just follow me, mate, do what I do.’
Bulky bloke with a ginger beard and an earring you could use to hang a curtain.
The music cranking up again, slow and crunchy as an old cement mixer.
‘… now turn side-on…’
‘… up with the foot, now…’
‘… and again…’
‘I can’t do it. I’ve got no coordination.’
‘Nah, nah, you’re thinking about it too much. It’s not about your mind. You gotta bypass all that, let your body do the business.’
‘Like sex.’ A voice from the doorway. Karl Windling, with a new pint. ‘He can’t get that together either.’
He supposed it had all been about getting away from Karl – the reason he’d kept going back to the Golden Ball, driving up to seventy miles in his little van. If one of the side hadn’t turned up, they’d let Lol in, even though he was crap. They were very patient with him.
The night his body got the message it felt almost as if he’d left it. As if his awareness had become detached from the arms and the legs, the hands and the head that were operating like slow, primitive clockwork. He’d never forgotten that. Moments of initiation.
But then it was winter and by the next spring, Arthur, the leader, had been fitted with a pacemaker, there was new management at the Golden Ball – disco and karaoke – and the side had broken up and he never saw those guys again.
The morris had been good to Prof Levin. Still making money from an album he’d produced nearly twenty years ago from some crackly vintage recordings of a Herefordshire village concertina player who’d accompanied dancers. Prof using contemporary instrumentalists to add muscle to the music.
‘Collector’s item now,’ he told Lol on the phone. ‘I may reissue it again next year. On vinyl. With an album of old photos.’
‘Nice.’
‘Never goes away, Laurence. An obsession for quite a few people – the essence of what it means to be English. Reasserting itself in the face of all this Scottish and Welsh cultural pride. A lot of that’s as much bollocks as the bleedin’ awful bagpipes, but I’ve always been happy to go along with it all, long as it didn’t get political.’
‘What’s at the heart of it, Prof? I never did work it out. Does it come out of pagan ritual?’
He was at his desk in the window, with the lamp on, the phone tucked under his chin, the scrapbook closed. He’d run over to Ledwardine Livres before they closed and Gus had unearthed a pocket-size second-hand copy of The Morris Book by Cecil Sharp and Herbert MacIlwaine, a reprint of the 1912 original.
‘Let’s not complicate things,’ Prof said. ‘Some of them ramble on about drawing their energy from the earth, some just like to get rat-arsed on real ale. I never thought too hard about it. The earliest mention of it’s about the fifteenth century, and it was a courtly dance, then, probably imported. But that don’t mean it didn’t merge with some existing tribal thing.’
Lol had pencilled a heading, BORDER MORRIS, on a fresh page of his lyric pad. Until the traditional folk revival in the 1970s, the black-faced men in rag jackets seemed to have disappeared from the Welsh border for a good few decades.
‘Discredited, perhaps,’ Prof said. ‘It was never pretty, Border morris. No fluttering handkerchiefs and flowery hats. Not for genteel ladies to watch while sipping tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. Not that it was cucumber sandwich weather when they were doing it. Usually done in winter.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Nothing sinister. The dancers were usually farm labourers trying to raise some cash at a time of year when there wasn’t much farm work around. Tour the villages, dance for the people, throw down the hat. Also explains the black faces. Didn’t want to get clocked by their employers.’
‘You think that’s all there is to it?’
‘Generates its own myth, Laurence. Short days, dark nights, black faces, undertakers’ hats. And the drink and the violence in the dance itself. Some of them play up to it to this day. Essentially, less refined, shall we say, than other forms of the morris. A courtly dance it is not.’
‘Where did they do it?’
‘Anywhere they didn’t get banned. Market squares, pub yards. Border morris usually demands more room for flailing around.’
‘Not sure. Processional folk-dances were performed during religious festivals when the dancers would lead villagers to church.’
‘What about churchyards?’
‘This is what you’re planning at your chickenshit festival? To use church premises?’
‘Would they have danced among the graves?’
‘That might’ve been pushing it. The Church was boss in those days. Morris was lucky to survive at all. Graveyards? Who knows where they wound up if they were pissed enough? They were bleedin’ hooligans. Maybe that’s why it came back in the seventies – an air of the anti-establishment about it, Border morris. These days it’s mainly January wassails and other pseudo-pagan events which no longer raise eyebrows.’
‘What about funerals?’
‘What?’
‘Would they dance at funerals? Or afterwards?’
Silence in the phone except for the sound of strong coffee percolating.
‘If it’s a member of the side who’s being planted they might dance in his honour, the way some professions form an arch for a coffin to pass under. I wouldn’t know. Where you going with this?’
‘I’ll tell you sometime.’
He didn’t think Prof knew that he’d kept going back to the Golden Ball.
‘Be careful of distractions, Laurence. Too late in your career. Stick to what you know.’
About half-eleven when Lol put the phone down. He was tired, hadn’t slept too well last night in Prof’s granary, half dressed under damp bedclothes.
He switched off the lamp so he could see through the window to the vicarage.
He looked past the open door into the hall, where Lucy Devenish used to hang her ponchos on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. The winter poncho and the summer poncho in which she’d died.
His fleece coat was on the newel post now. He went into the hall and took it down, found his woolly hat in one of the side pockets, woollen gloves in the other. He really didn’t want to do this, but he didn’t really have a choice.
… like what if they come back, Lol?
At least there was no fog and no rain as he slipped out of the front door, closing it very gently behind him.
There was nobody about. Saturday nights at the Black Swan would become more animated in the run-up to Christmas, but not yet. Lol stepped down to the pavement, moving into the silent square, past the fake gaslamps, extinguished now, and the shiny beetle-backs of parked cars.
Under the lychgate, into the churchyard.
Just to make sure.