To the River Page 7
The two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water are sops for the dog Cerberus. Psyche is also told to refuse all offers of food except a piece of common bread, for eating in the underworld means you must never leave. It was this taboo that entrapped Prosperpine, whom the Greeks called Persephone or Kore. After being abducted by Hades – for the king is named after his realm – she ate three pomegranate seeds – but some say it was four and some five or six – and though she was allowed to return to the earth’s surface for the summer months, in winter she had to return as Hades’s consort. The high goddess Persephone, Odysseus called her, the Iron Queen.
These were stories from far away and very long ago. But our native folklore is full of odd echoes that suggest familiarity with the maps and mores of Hades, as if those ventilation shafts reached up through the caves and barrows of these damper islands too. There are thousands upon thousands of local ballads and tales that tell of the fair folk that lived under the hills, in the cold stone palaces they’d hived away like bees.
One such is Cherry of Zennor, which I first came across in a collection of essays by the poet Edward Thomas, who’d found it in Popular Romances of the West of England, a book of folktales collected by Robert Hunt in the mid-nineteenth century. Cherry of Zennor grew up in Cornwall, and at the age of sixteen she left her family to go into service and see something of life. After a day’s walking she reached the crossroads on the Lady Downs, which marked the limits of the world she knew. She plumped herself down on a stone by the roadside and, putting her head into her hands, began to sob with homesickness. When she dried her eyes she was surprised to see a gentleman coming towards her, for no one had been on the Downs before.
When he heard what she was about the gentleman told Cherry all sorts of things. He said he’d been recently widowed, and that he had one dear little boy. He lived but a short way off, down in the low countries, and if she went with him she’d have nothing to do but milk the cow and look after the baby. Cherry didn’t understand everything he said, for he spoke in a flowery way, but she decided to take the job.
They went together down a long sloping lane shaded with trees, so that the sun was barely visible. At length they came to a stream of clear dark water that ran across the road. Cherry didn’t know how she’d ford this brook, but the gentleman slipped an arm about her waist and scooped her up, so she wouldn’t wet her feet. After descending a little further, they reached his garden gate. A boy came running to meet them. He seemed about two or three, but there was a singular look about him and his eyes were very bright.
Her job was to rise at dawn and take the boy to a spring in the garden, wash him, and anoint his eyes with ointment. She was not, on any account, to touch her own eyes with it. Then Cherry was to call the cow and, having filled the bucket with milk, to draw a bowlful for the boy’s breakfast. After her ordinary work was done, the gentleman required Cherry to help him in the garden, picking the apples and pears and weeding the leeks and onions. Cherry and her master got on famously, and whenever she finished weeding a bed, her master would kiss her to show her how pleased he was. Cherry had everything the heart could desire, yet she wasn’t entirely happy. She’d decided it was the ointment that made the little boy’s eyes so bright, and she often thought he saw more than she did.
One morning she sent the boy to gather flowers in the garden, and taking a crumb of ointment, she put it in her eye. How it burned! She ran to the stream to wash away the smarting and there she saw at the bottom of the water hundreds of little people dancing, and there was her master, as small as the others, dancing with them and kissing the ladies as they passed. The master never showed himself above the water all day but at night he rode up to the house like the handsome gentleman she’d seen before.
The next day, he remained at home to pick fruit. Cherry was to help him, and when, as usual, he looked to kiss her, she slapped his face, and told him to kiss the little people with whom he’d danced under the stream. So he knew she’d taken the ointment. With much sorrow he told her she’d have to leave. He made her a bundle of fine clothes and then led her for miles on miles, all the time uphill, going through lanes and passageways. When they came at last to level ground, it was near daybreak. The gentleman kissed Cherry and said that if she behaved well, he would come sometimes to the Lady Downs to see her. Saying that, he turned away. The sun rose, and there was Cherry alone on a granite stone, without a soul to be seen for miles. She cried until she was tired, and then she went home to Trereen, where they thought she was her own ghost returned.
I didn’t know how old this story was, but some of its elements – the fairy ointment, the land beneath the ground – seemed familiar. The development of folk tales is much like that of roses; stories may be hybridised or grafted or pop up as sports far from their native place. Cherry’s ointment is a distant cousin of the juice Puck smears across the sleepers’ eyelids in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I thought the story’s topology might have sprung from Tom the Rhymer, the classic underworld story, which goes back at least as far as the thirteenth century and is probably far older.
Tom the Rhymer, who is sometimes called True Thomas or elsewhere Tam Lin, met the Queen of Elfland on Huntlie Banks and was taken by her to her own land far beneath the soil, from where he returned many years later with the gift of second sight. There are many versions of True Thomas’s tale and they bleed into one another and overlap, but the world he entered would be as recognisable to Odysseus as it would be to Cherry of Zennor. There’s that stream she crossed on her way to the lowlands, though here it has grown more fearsome by far than the river Styx: ‘For forty days and forty nights he wade thro red blade to the knee, and he saw neither sun nor moon, but heard the roaring of the sea.’ Further on there’s a garden green, where fruit grows that must not be picked ‘for a’ the plagues that are in hell light on the fruit of this countrie’. And can Thomas leave? Not of his own free will he can’t, and nor may he open his mouth, ‘for gin ae word you should chance to speak, you will neer get back to your ain countrie’.
The day hung open on its hinge. The sound I had heard was neither chainsaws nor flies; it was a pair of red tractors out cutting the hay. I could see them now through the trees. One cut and one gathered; one built the windrows and the other bobbed them dry. A whole village would once have cut these fields, and now there were two men, their faces turned from one another, the cut grass shooting out, the cut grass raking in. As I crossed where they worked I caught the sweet, sickening smell of coumarins lifting from the hay. It struck me that I had not spoken more than a couple of sentences all day. Gin ae word you should chance to speak, you will neer get back to your ain countrie.
What country was I walking in, what age? Across the hedge there was a perfect Tudor manor, three storeys high, with two great brick chimneys standing as tall as a man above the stone roof. As I got closer I saw the house was hemmed in by caravans and that the road was thick with dust. There were no people, just the empty vans, ranks of them, and the house that stood as silently as if it were circled by snow.
The light was falling unimpeded now, in sheets and glancing blows. I wanted, like Laurie Lee, to stagger into a village and be revived by a flagon of wine. Instead, I tramped through the dust, dodging blue-black dragonflies, and crossed the A275 by the temporary lights. Just before Sheffield Park Bridge the path ducked through a hedge into a spreading meadow of thigh-high grasses. And there was the Ouse, all of a tumble, the sun skating off it in panes of light. It was a proper river now, passing between banks made impassable by a wild profusion of mugwort, nettles and Himalayan balsam. On the far side a dog rose had scrambled its way along the branches of an elder, and the little faded roses grew intertwined with flat creamy umbels that smelled precisely of June. The water was opaque and so full of sediment it looked like liquid mud. Its surface caught and distorted the shadows of the plants and beneath them the castellated reflections of clouds slowly shuddered by.
I dropped down beneath an ash tree. My ha
ir was wet at the nape, and my back was soaked with sweat. What a multitude of mirrors there are in the world! Each blade of grass seemed to catch the sun and toss it back to the sky. Big white clouds were pressing overhead and beneath them crossed electric blue damselflies, always in pairs and sometimes glued into a wincing knot. After a while, my brain cooled down. I sat up and drank some water and ate a slice of cheese. As I chewed, a movement at the field’s edge caught my eye. A wave of golden air was working its way down the meadow, wheeling as it went. It moved like smoke, a persistent, particulate cloud made up of flakes of tumbled gold. Pollen. It was June; too late for alder and hazel, too late for willow. I weighed up the options: nettle or dock, plantain, oilseed rape or – but it was less likely – pine. A pollen grain is identified by its architecture and ornamentation; it can be porous or furrowed, smooth or spiked. Plantain pollen is covered in verrucas; the pollen of golden rod bristles all over like a miniaturised pineapple. Echinate is the technical term for this latter design, meaning prickly, from echinos, the Greek for hedgehog.
Pollen is designed to drift. The tiny grains – hundreds of thousands in a single pinch – often have air sacs to help them float, as waterwings buoy a swimmer. These grains can travel great distances. In 2006 residents in East Anglia and Lincolnshire reported a pollen that covered cars and could be tasted on the air. It had come across the North Sea from Scandinavia and was seen on satellite pictures as a vast cloud: a yellow-green plume sweeping the coast, as the BBC report put it. Scientists identified it as birch pollen, the product of a wet April and sunny May in Denmark, though crop fires in western Russia may have contributed to the dust.
I leaned back and watched the cloud come. It could have crossed oceans, though it seemed more likely that it had risen from the neighbouring field, where coppery dock and nettle grew tangled amid the grasses. Didn’t Plato think there was a wind that could impregnate horses? It couldn’t have been more fertile than this generative swarm, twelve feet long and a yard wide, that rolled towards the waiting flowers.
That night I stayed at The Griffin in Fletching, a village that once specialised in the making of arrowheads; indeed, it was where almost all the English arrows in the Battle of Agincourt were cut. In the thirteenth century the manor belonged to Simon de Montfort, though he visited it rarely, and in 1264 his soldiers stopped here on their journey from London to Lewes, where the first great battle of the Barons’War was fought. Local legend has it that the barons spent the preceding night in vigil in the little church, though as with many stories handed down in villages it does not quite align with the historical record.
The Griffin was old too, and prided itself on its food. I arrived too early for dinner, and so drowsed for an hour in a tiny, sloping bedroom, the light seeping in through ill-fitting blinds. I got up at seven and went to the garden with a gin in my hand. It was Midsummer Night, and the whole country was basking, the sun streaming through the oaks and turning the grasses to flames. Near where I sat, a woman was talking and her voice carried across the lawn.
That fucking cunt, she said. Is that the fucking cunt, is that the fucking cunt that gave that girl the acid?
I looked over. She was sitting a few tables away, a tall deeply tanned woman with an elegant neck and long, slender legs. She was drunk. The alcohol had loosened her, though her voice must always have been loud. Her friend was smaller and chubbier, with a child’s messy hair and frilly skirt. There was a dog with them, a pug in a diamante harness.
I hate Brighton, the first woman said. No one ever forgets anything.
Her friend was preoccupied with the dog. Smuggles! Smuggles! she shouted. And then they began to talk together, their voices overlapping. There was no one in the garden who could not hear them. One by one the other tables fell silent, as they might in the presence of royalty or death.
I took the morning-after pill three times last year. You might have triplets! I might have quadruplets! He slammed me up against the bar – girls can always look after themselves – he slammed me up against the bar and he said – Smuggles! Smuggles! – he said if you ever talk to me about coke – he was going out with that girl – but I wouldn’t have! He said if you ever, but I never, I wouldn’t have. I said I’ve never asked you for coke. That fucking cunt, that fucking cunt. No one forgets, no one ever forgets what you’ve done.
Two men joined them and then they were four. They moved tables and upturned ashtrays, mislaid dog leads and sunglasses. ‘The Church has decided nothing on this subject,’ says the Catholic Encyclopaedia; ‘hence we may say hell is a definite place; but where it is, we do not know.’ Other people, answered Sartre. And three centuries earlier, Shakespeare: ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’ You can’t escape, however far you travel. After supper I walked out into the churchyard where Edward Gibbon was buried, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and died nearby of peritonitis after an operation to drain the massive inflammation of his testicles went wrong and poisoned his blood. In my head the woman’s voice translated: he had fucking big bollocks. It was an English voice and it had been going on forever: parochial and incensed, intent on cutting everything down to size. Meanwhile, the swallows were screaming the sky into tatters. I sat on a bench and watched them drop, wings akimbo, shrieking as they fell. How strangely we spend our lives: mapping the architecture of Hades or the ornamentation of a pollen grain. No one ever forgets anything. It’s all piled up here somewhere, on the surface or under the ground. It never stops, that’s the trouble. It keeps on coming, like that golden wind, breeding from out of its own ruin.
I lay awake for a long time that night, almost stifling. It was Midsummer Eve, bang on, when the wall between worlds is said to grow thin. Hell and Hades, Dis, the courts and palaces of the sidhe that exist beneath barrows: all these places seemed very close, perhaps just outside the hot little room.
I have somewhere a map of hell that, in the manner of an anatomical drawing, shows its subject in both a transverse and a sagittal plane. In the first, hell is a labyrinth wound about with rivers: first Acheron, where the ferryman crosses; then the terrible Styx, which bubbles its way through a stinking marsh; and lastly Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, which runs through the interior of the earth and up to Paradise. In the second drawing, hell is seen as a series of steps. They begin as the shallow declivities where the lesser sinners roam, and then they shelve abruptly, as a shingle beach does, into the realm that is known as the Pit. The great city of hell is situated at the edge of this pit, encircled by the Styx. Beneath it, in that vast hollow at the earth’s core, is the body of Satan, encased in ice.
According to Dorothy L. Sayers, who translated the edition of the Inferno in which these maps are found, the centre of Dante’s world coincides exactly with Satan’s navel. The chasm in which Satan stands was formed when he was thrown from Paradise at the culmination of the war in heaven, plummeting at speed into our own circling planet; an event that in its horror caused a rearrangement of the world’s geography. The landmass of the southern hemisphere rushed back in disgust, taking up a new station in the north; the sea flooded in to fill the gap, and Mount Purgatory was created as a small island from the displaced matter at the earth’s core.
Some elements of Dante’s cosmology reflect the beliefs of his time; others are a matter of his own invention. In the fourteenth century, many geographers believed that all the world’s land was in the northern hemisphere, and that the rest of the globe was sunk beneath the sea. But the idea that Mount Purgatory existed as an island in the southern hemisphere: this seems unique to Dante, who placed the Garden of Eden at its peak, with the celestial state of Heaven floating above it.
Dante situated Mount Purgatory at the antipodes of Jerusalem, which would put it in the South Pacific, 1,010 miles south-west by west from the nearest inhabited land, Adamstown in the Pitcairn Islands. Curiously enough, one of the most active submarine volcanoes in the world, the Macdonald Seamount, is only a couple of hundred miles from Dante’s site, a
tiny distance in that vast ocean. The volcano, which was not discovered until 1967, is almost two and a half miles high, its summit rising to just beneath the water’s surface. Macdonald’s periodic eruptions have at least twice been witnessed: by the RV Melville on 11 October 1986, and by the NO Le Suroit and the diving saucer Cynara in Janaury 1989.
The findings of these two ships chart a submarine world of lava lakes and sulphide chimneys not dissimilar to the landscape that Dante and his guide so laboriously travel through. The mountain’s slopes are covered in a dense scree of lapilli, pillow lava and volcanic bombs in the shape of loaves and cauliflowers, testament to the furious upheavals that take place beneath the ocean’s surface. There is a fissure on the volcano’s eastern flank, and the seawater there is opaque and shimmering from the superheated gas that seeps continually free. It’s not hard to see why the interior of the earth might be thought to boil, but to imagine that as our final resting place: why?
As to the location of Paradise, it’s to be found on a bank on the path to Sharpsbridge in the merry month of June. I left the Griffin early, after a pain au chocolat and a bowl of prunes. It was the top of the morning, the very cream, and I skimmed it off and crouched in the cornfield, gulping it down. The clouds were coming over from the west like zeppelins, casting ballooning shadows across the metallic blue-green of the wheat. The field ended in a double ditch, and from it grew a mass of flowers in a profusion of colours and forms, such as is seen trimming the edges of medieval manuscripts. Black medick, I counted, buttercup, horsetail, ribwort plantain, hedge woundwort, musk mallow and curled dock, the clustered seeds a rusty brown. Wild rose, dandelion, the red and white deadnettle, blackberry, smooth hawksbeard and purple-crowned knapweed. Interspersed with these were smaller, more delicate flowers: cut-leaved cranesbill, birdsfoot trefoil, slender speedwell, St John’s wort, heath bedstraw, tufted vetch and, weaving in and out of the rest, field bindweed, its flowers striped cups of sherbet-pink and white. The stem of the knapweed was covered in blackfly, and a spider trap shaped like a dodecahedron had annexed a few pale purple flowers of vetch inside swathes of tight-woven web.