CHAPTER SIX

The first part of the journey to Mersea was across gently undulating well-tilled fields. The track gave a fine view of the calm sea on one side and the distant forests on the other. The air was filled with a plenitude of singing bird and the hedgerows were expectant with fruits of the earth: blackberries, raspberries and greengages. Fresh-limbed and confident, James and Helen’s two palfreys dressed in satin saddles and fret-worked leather straps snorted columns of vapour into the fresh morning air. Nature surrounded by nature were they. Nature in all its resplendent summer burgeoning. The soil beneath them seemed a-tremble with expectation, with promises to be fulfilled.

Yet their quest was essentially a dark one, fraught with unknown perils, completely uncertain in its outcome. Nonetheless these fears were swept away in that radiant start to the day.

By late afternoon some weariness was beginning to show itself both in the riders and their horses. So they were glad when they espied an isolated white and black timbered manor house near to this estuary of a broad, placid river.

‘We shall spend the night here,’ said Helen… ‘In the house of our valiant ally’.

Their host greeted them with warmth and they soon sat themselves down by the side table to a hearty meal of duck, widgeon and oatmeal. Satisfied with their repast, their host, a fine-looking man with a beard already tinged with silver, said ‘I have received some very recent accounts of the evil fiefdom. I was in two minds about whether to let you know about them. Some details are so disturbing that they could persuade you two to turn back. But that would never do. You are our hope, our sword against the onslaught of loss and wickedness.’

‘We are ready to hear anything you have to tell us,’ assured James. ‘We can only become better prepared to face what must be faced.’

‘I have here an account smuggled out of the main prison, the citadel, in Mersea by Elric, one of our spies. I can do no better than read it to you.’

“I entered into the city through the main gate with no problem. My disguise was not detected, neither was my look or gait. As you told me I should not gage too deeply into anyone’s eyes and should walk with an even, almost driftless step. The first thing that assailed my senses as I entered the town was its silence. The silence of the birds, the animals and, most disturbingly, the silence of the humans. People were walking about the streets without speech, without awareness of each other’s presence, almost as if they were sleep-walking, certainly in a trance-like state. I then noticed high watch-towers built from stout timbers placed over various parts of the town, hovering over the cold buildings like carrion crows ready to swoop onto their prey. I could not look too closely, as you advised me, but I could see that they were manned by figures dressed in black, opaque armour, their faces hidden by falcon-beaked visors with two slits for the eyes. These apparitions were constantly on the look-out watching over the inhabitants, perhaps in search of some tell-tale change in some-one’s gait, in someone’s glance. But to come to the main point of my account. You know it is now thirty-years since that most holy relic, the nails from our Saviour Christ’s cross, the nails piercing the sinews of his feet, were sacrilegiously stolen from our church of the Magdalene. We are told that the nails will set free those of good heart and untainted belief but will imprison and oppress those who practice evil and necromancy and all those who come into contact with them. Well, there is a raised part of Mersea upon which a gaunt pointed structure raises its blackened walls to the sky. Towards sunset I saw a fiery light coming from within it and, at first, thought this was only the reflection of the setting sun penetrating the illuminated windows filling its side-portals. But the sun had already set and still the fiery glow emanated from within the dismal pile. I stepped up the hill towards the light and entered the building. Inside, I could see that the red light came from the direction of what should have been the high altar for I could tell that this building, now so defiled, had once been a church. Black-gowned figures were congregated around the glow. Silently, as possible, I hid behind one of the massy nave pillars to avoid detection. One cloaked figure, with what seemed to be a black-iron crown on his head moved towards the light. He ascended the steps leading to the altar. Upon the table was placed an elaborate tabernacle, likewise hued in black. The figure opened its door and took out a small metallic object. Christ’s nails! The nails of the Cross! The very same nails that had been so horribly stolen from our church of the Magdalene! I had no time, however, to contain my surprise. With a deep, ponderous voice the crowned figure began to speak:

“Nails of Christ’s suffering, you now have become the nails of the Anti-Christ’s victory. Give us your powers to spread our might throughout the rest of the land. Give power to the Apparatus (by this he must have meant the force of those few who have complete control over the inhabitants of Mersea) to enforce their rule and subjugate all humans to our supreme power. Give us knowledge to establish our mastership over all living beings and most of all over other men. Give us the knowledge to do this through the control of the mind, the extraction of degenerate elements in the brains of other humans, through the maintenance of our supreme rule over the centuries of centuries.”

‘I was chilled by what I had heard. How could something as sacred as the nails of our redeemer be turned to such evil purposes. I could not understand at first. Then I realized that God has given us free will to do as we please. But there is only one will, good enough to be followed. The punishment of sin is death, I recollected. But here, all around me was death without punishment.

‘Anyway, to conclude my narrative, as the hour is now approaching when I will lose all of my individual being, when, although my body will still live my being will be dead to all true humans, I state that I was captured, by a bird! Yes, a large raven snapped at my neck and made me screech with pain. They have control even over the animals here! In the sepulchral silence of the great vaults my position behind the clustered pillar was immediately found out. I was captured, gagged and bound and delivered to one of the deepest dungeons of this impenetrable citadel to await my seemingly inexorable fate. Within my chest I carried a collared pigeon, the same one you gave me after I left your manor. I trust to God that the pigeon may come through unscathed by evil carrion birds to deliver this hopeless message into your lap. I remain, for not much longer, you friend and supporter, Axel.”

‘So you still want to go on?’ asked their host.

‘Yes, of course. There is nothing to lose. It is still worth a try,” said Helen and James echoed her statement. But, discernibly both had had their resolve diminished and their courage weakened by the narrative they had just been related, a narrative which offered no way out, no hopeful resolution.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘You must arrive to Mersea’s shore at low tide; it is then that you will be able to move across the channel that bounds Mortan’s fortifications. This map will show you where the best point for crossing is” said Wulfstan to James giving him a brightly coloured chart with a sea monster thrown in for good measure at its south-east corner.

All necessary preparations had now been made. Food, clothing and defensive weapons had been delivered into James’ possession. But in the turmoil and strange turn of events of the last few days he now had some time to himself to ponder about the situation as it presented to him. Why was he marked out to enter Mersea? Was Helen everything she appeared to him? What exactly was he to do once he entered the slave fiefdom? What would happen if he got caught? Perhaps best not to think about this one. All the same James felt something was missing, something had not been told to him, some essential element was left out.

They set out early the following morning. The first part of the way hugged the coast, the cliffs gradually descending to low lying ground, often changing into broad, salty lagoons which had to be carefully negotiated. Still, the weather was fine: a clear blue sky, immense with light, arched over the greenish purple of the vegetation. Holding hands tightly James and Helen strode confidently to the southern lands.

The plan, gone over various times with the assembly, was to ascertain the precise nature of the methods of control Mortan exerted over his unfortunate subjects. Was it just plain force or were subtler methods in effect? James was reminded of the illustration of the trepanned skull in the chronicle he had read. Once the various means of subjugation had been observed the idea was to return to Dunara and with this intelligence work out a way of liberating the inhabitants of Mersea from their unenviable fate.

‘What if we do get caught?’ The thought was never far from James’s mind. Helen, however, was not troubled by the concern.

‘We won’t get caught. But if we do I have been given ways of escaping. Don’t worry. Let’s just stick together. That’s the important part.’

The two planned to reach and stay at a fisherman’s cottage by the estuary of a large river by nightfall. Harold, the fisherman, was a friend of Wulfstan and also in the pay of the assembly in matters of information gathering. In short, he was someone who could be trusted.

The evening of their departure, after having made love with more than usual ardour and affection – each other’s body been turned by their yearning desire into an electric bundle of energy unleashing itself from all nerve endings from head to toe into a cataclysmal-like orgasm of pure, undiluted joy – Helen asked James.

‘Tell me more about this nurse who helped you escape the institution?’

‘Her name was Radha, or so she liked to think. More probably, as I remember it was a short name, she disliked it, she said: it was a name normally given to dogs. Anyway, she was thrilled when she saw I had this book in my hand called ‘The love songs of Krishna and Radha”. She smiled radiantly, came towards me put her arm round my neck and said ‘you Krishna, me Radha’. I shall never forget that moment. It still rings in my mind with supernal light to this hour: a beacon to the possible, an ideal state of being, perhaps all too often an unattainable relationship. But her smile was so lovely: something both humorous and sad about it. I shall never forget that moment.’

‘You’re obviously still very struck on her judging by your gushing account’ said Helen.

‘She was a formative Lady. There are many ladies one yearns from in life. In many respects it is the female who is the depository of wisdom. The male may speculate but it is the female which preserves. Radha, or whatever her name was, preserved me.’

‘From who?’ queried Helen. 

‘Some more cynical might say from myself. But in fact it was from that queen of the night, my mother.’

‘Your mother?’

‘Yes, that’s right. When I was bundled into the institution I was almost immediately taken to a long, airless, windowless room with a white-coated doctor at the far end.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

I can still feel on my jaw that awful moment when I wanted to say ‘mother’ but could not fully utter the syllables from my mouth. The drugs she had injected me with had virtually paralyzed my speech muscles.

‘‘Ma.. ma.. ma.. maa…’…’ I attempted but could not get the full word out. It was like one of those bewitchments one reads about in fairy tales. You know, the evil step-mother preventing the truth being told or changing it, so that one tries to say one thing and entirely the opposite comes out of one’s mouth.’

‘We used to burn witches here once,’ commented Helen. ‘But now we just banish them from our town on pain of death.’

Where I came from’, said James, ‘some types of witches are actual, revered in positions of great power over people who pay much money to follow their advice. ‘Those witches pronouncements costs them a lot, so they must be worthwhile. At least that is my conclusion.’

‘Did the doctor understand eventually what you were trying to say?’ asked Helen.

‘I think he must have, although I do feel he must have been part of the same coven. Confessing to the enemy, you see. So I began to shut up after that, in case they could use my comments against me.’

‘And Radha helped you to escape?’

Yes. That’s right. You see when three of these mind-doctors are gathered together they can sign a piece of paper to keep us inside their institutions for as long as they like. Sectioning, they call it- section number 21.’

‘But you must have done something to have landed yourself in there’ questioned Helen. Her brow furrowed:

‘Yes, of course I did. I failed to follow myself but heeded what false selves said I should do.’

‘What?’   ­

‘In other words I found myself at the wrong time in the wrong place with the wrong concept of myself.’

‘How was that? You seem to be pretty sure of yourself in your own uniqueness? You certainly appear to be more detached from the fripperies of this world than a lot of people I know.’

‘I think it’s because I must have renounced the reality of the world in some way. I must have found it too painful, that’s all. The unendurable business of life itself. At least that’s how I felt.’

‘That can be dangerous and it’s certainly unhealthy.’

‘It turned out to be both,’ confirmed James. ‘There was, of course, another woman.’

‘Why of course’

‘I was like a vessel on a storm-tossed ocean with no shore to see in the all-enveloping, drenching mist. I mistook a mirage for the protecting veil for the virgin mother herself.’

‘I see,’ said Helen.

And James could tell for once here was a woman, a lady that could see into his account, his previous existence.

CHAPTER FOUR

That night James, in the now familiar box bed in Wulfstan’s house, had an unsettling dream. He dreamt he was back in the institution. In the ward in which he had been placed he could make out in the half-light of early morning a group of three doctor-like figures passing a document around. Each one took out a pen and signed the document. He looked again. The third doctor figure he recognised. It was his own mother! He could just make out a broad smile of satisfaction running across her face as she, with whispered but still dreadfully authoritative voice, murmured “I think that concludes things very well for us all now.” He tried to rise up from his bed but found he could not. Straps tied him down. Firm inescapable straps. He was trapped. Now they could do with him as they wished. He thought of electrodes, statutory pills, the scalpel and occupational therapy.

The dream, like so many dreams, seemed so convincing, so truer than reality that James firmly believed that he had failed to escape when the nurse he had befriended there had advised him to. “Fool”, he said to himself. “Why didn’t I take my chance? Why couldn’t I get out’! What stopped me?”

It was, therefore, with some sense of relief that he found the straps magically changed into the drapery closing in the side of his bed.

The drapery was moving but there was a breeze. Then he felt the smooth warmth of a feminine limb caress the side of his body.

“Hello stranger from the headland,” whispered Helen’s soothing voice. “Can I join you?”

“Why yes; of course. But your father?” hesitated James.

“My father wants me to know you better. After all, I am to be your partner in the salvation of our town,” Helen reassured him.

Her body smelled like a summer pasture bedecked with sweetest herbs, thought James, as Helen put her arm round his neck. He realised she too was naked as her erect nipples, so roseate in hue, proudly proclaimed.

Like two midsummer swans they necked and encircled each other and an unexpected confidence arose in James as he felt her total being ever closer to his tired, startled body. As their lips touched in warm moisture he could taste both the sun-drenched salt of the sea and the distilled nectar of the reddest rose. This was the real, the true dream, he reflected. The dream to banish the previous nightmare, with its power of redemption, of purest love.

Raised to high ecstasy of consummation they both fell asleep, the young lovers satisfied with each other’s being, happy in each other’s fulfilment of desire.

*

“Wake up,” smiled Wulfstan as he opened the drapery to disclose a picture-like scene of two idyllic lovers. . “Time to get down to business. Remember, saving our town and all that,” he said jocularly:

A large parchment chronicle and various quilled scrolls lay spread out on the table in Wulfstan’s study where James and Helen had betaken themselves.

“Read these, in particular this section,” advised Wulfstan. “If you have any queries my clerks and servants will be in attendance-for your every wish for knowledge.” 

James and Helen stuck their noses into the pile of documents. It was sometimes difficult to follow their thread, as with so many old manuscripts fact and fiction, natural and supernatural seemed to intermesh with one another so naturally. Certainly, some pages were obviously missing and the chronology in many parts did appear to be somewhat mixed up. What was not missing, however, was the care with which these documents had been transcribed, illuminated and bound. Scarcely a section but did not have its own Capital letter decorated with gold paint and illustrated with vignettes of life, from the reaping of the harvest to the hunt in the woods, all done with consummate artistry and attention to detail. James particularly enjoyed the illustration for autumn showing a drunken miller falling into a large barrel of cider. However, after two hours reading together (for Helen, unlike many of her contemporaries, could also read and had received an above-average education at the nearby convent of Benedictine nuns) a somewhat confused, but still discernible, picture of events in the area formed themselves in the readers’ minds. 

Briefly, Mortan was merely one of a succession of schismatic rebels who had tried to set up an alternative social organization based, not on the post-feudal system of services and reciprocity but on an oriental scheme of absolute despotism and slavery. This idea had been born ever since the receipt of manuscripts from central Turkestan through a devious route via merchants from Italy who had visited those regions about two hundred years previously. The idea was simple: control the water supplies, and you control the country. Of course, thanks to its rainfall this country had rather more water than the Asian steppes. However, as all inhabitants knew, for the last few years the weather had undergone a climatic change: wells had dried up, fresh water had turned salty, even some well-known watercourses had dried up altogether and ponds and small, lakes had vanished. Strange birds never before seen in these lands had started to roost here and weird fish had been caught off the shore. Summer had come in April which now had few signs of those “showers sweet” beloved of the Poet.

For evidence of the contemporary situation in ‘Mersea the two had to rely on smuggled-out transcripts and reports. Evidently, for hundreds of miles around Mortan and his entourage had subjugated formerly proud and independent people to a state of humiliating slavery. They did this by more than the force of arms and control over the water, however. A fragment of a skull was depicted in one of the documents showing clear signs of trepanning which, according to the account, was used to remove “contrary” parts of the brain “harmful” to the correct working of the state of authority. Primitive mind-control, thought James, and then reminded himself of the little violet and yellow pills force-fed upon him during his stay at the institution. It was all rather disturbing and, frankly, having experienced it once, James did not feel he wanted to put himself in a position to place himself in danger of experiencing it again.

A soft hand caressed his knitted brow. “Horrendous,” said Helen. ‘Indeed,” replied James. “But now I’ve found you what matters?”

“What matters indeed!” confirmed Helen and for a few highly delectable minutes the vivid horrors penned in the parchments were forgotten, over­come even, in the sweet embrace they gave each other.

“At least,” thought James, as he traced his finger on the contours of Helen’s downy cheek, “I’ve found my Lady of the Unicorn”.

CHAPTER THREE

James awoke the following morning and for a few moments was somewhat disconcerted. He had no idea where he was. He drew the curtain enclosing the box bed and looked across the room whose floor was covered with a large bearskin rug. Then last night came back to him; his walk to the bath-house with Helen and the amazing nudes mixed bathing which he joined in, all apparently very normal and innocent. Then the huge supper with plentiful steaks of venison and seemingly endless tankards of ale which, however, did not appear to have done his head any ache. He was introduced to the rest of the household; the mother, still attractive with her youthful plumpish figure and catching laughter, an elder brother and a younger too and several other figures of the household retinue, for James concluded that although probably there was not too much difference between rich and poor in Dunara he had definitely come across the richer part of the social stratum in his host and family.

James found much of the conversation difficult to catch for the accent spoken was often filled with unfamiliar vowel sounds and vernacular expressions which he had only come across in the writings of Chaucer and Langland which he had studied at school. Anyway, he would pick up more of what people spoke if he stayed here longer. He always was rather good at languages.

The patriarch, whose name was Wulfstan, entered the bedchamber.

“Have you slept well? I’m certain you have after drinking my daughter’s mead. It is well known throughout Dunara,” he chuckled.

‘Thank you, Sir,” answered James.

“Call me Wulfstan,” said the patriarch. “Look, you have quite a busy day ahead of you today. I realise you have many questions to ask us which you, a guest, politely refrained from asking yesterday evening in the confusion of my household’s evening repast.”

“Indeed I have,” asserted James.

“Well, today we shall try to explain to you why we have asked you to come to Dunara. There will be a meeting of elders at our assembly hall when the sun has risen to its morning mid-point. You will accompany me to that meeting. But before then the tailor has come to fit you with garments more seemly for a person of our rank.”

The new clothes were ready and measured within one hour. James donned an elegant woollen garment, embroidered at the cuffs and the collar in rich colours. Comfortable wooden clogs were also shaped for his feet by the cobbler and, to cap it all, a fine satin beret-like hat with the decoration of an iridescent pheasant tail feather.

Wulfstan and James set out for the meeting at the assembly hall followed by three retainers. The street led steeply up to a knoll upon which a flamboyant stone building was perched, its vaulted dormer windows gaily festooned with the flags of the port’s various mercantile associations and guilds. Now few people looked at James, contrary to his initial entry into Dunara. With his elegant robes and perky hat he looked indistinguishable from any other rich merchant’s family member. Only his somewhat unfamiliar intonation when speaking would have given him away as a stranger both in place and time.

The great assembly-hall with its massive oak hammer-head roof was already filled with representatives of the various guilds, each one resplendent in elaborate robes. The sunlight filtered in multicoloured rays through the stained glass windows enclosing the hall’s clerestory. At one end a raised dais, topped by a draperied throne was positioned, as yet still unencumbered by the presence of the port’s chieftain.

James took his place on a bench by Wulfstan who introduced him to those companions immediately seated around him.

“All rise for the entry of our beloved chieftain Elremond,” proclaimed the herald’s booming voice. As he put a silver trumpet to his mouth the gaunt figure of Elremond shuffled across from a side door to take his place on the throne. He rose to respectfully greet and bow Elremond’s august presence.

Straightway the proceedings began and Elremond began speaking in a weakened but still penetrating voice:

“You all know why you are gathered here this morning at an extraordinary meeting of our town council. My brother, my misguided brother has fled from the confines of his imprisonment after bribing some in whom we had placed our highest trust. He has betaken himself to an adjoining region, to the island of Mersea and there he conspires to wage war against us and our beloved town. He has allied himself with the Norsemen from across the Great Sea. This we know in full details from our spies who have ever supported our trade and our cause. The future of all our citizens is at peril. Our fair town, our way of life, our times of happiness and contentment, our wives and children, these, these all are threatened by the evil Mortan is preparing against them. We must fight this evil. We must stop it before it spreads like a canker throughout our fair regions of villages and sheep farms, trading towns and mercantile ports.”

A murmur of assent rose up from the congregation. Elremond continued: “You know well that in the chronicle of our patron saint, Edmund, it’s written that in a time of peril such as this a simple man, unadorned except for a black leather jerkin and black leather leggings shall arise from the headland of Penance over yonder.” ·

Here Elremond pointed in the direction of where James had first been awakened by Helen’s silhouette only yesterday. James had a vertigo-inducing feeling that he might, indeed be the simple man Elremond had referred to. If he only knew!

“I am glad to say,” continued the chieftain, “that the Fool has indeed come among us and been found by Helen, daughter of Wulfstan.”

James’ worst fears were now, all too soon, confirmed.

“He is there among us. Rise young man and come before this assembly.”

“Come on James, do what Elremond asks you. Let all see you.”

James blushed as he stepped forward before the assembly. What did they want of him? Surely it was all a monumental misunderstanding? He had escaped to what? Anything, anything to have stayed in that dark forest among those endless rows of pines.

Sheepishly, James came forward, stepped up the dais and turned towards the staring assembly.

“James, for that is your name as I gather’, began Elremond, “you do not know why you have come to be here. The fact is you do not have to know. You are merely an instrument of destiny which has ordained all things for countless generations before your birth. Neither do you need to explain your presence nor do you have to imagine what is requested of you. Yourself is all. This may seem a great mystery to you at present but destiny shall explain all things to all men if they have but the patience to stand and wait.”

James bowed to all present. A hearty applause rang round the great stone chamber, barely muffled by the courtly tapestries which covered the Gothic panelling. As James gazed upon their themes of knights in search of impossible quests of ladies with unicorns in forests of strange fruits he felt both even more confused and even more resigned to the unexpected situation in which he now found himself. “Destiny”, he echoed to himself.

CHAPTER TWO

James must have already been asleep for sometime, lulled into it by his meandering thought, when he woke up to find a silhouette hovering over him and partly obscuring the mid-afternoon sun.

“Hello James” spoke a soft feminine voice coming from the silhouette. James looked up, disoriented.

“How do you know my name? Who are you?” he questioned the unexpected apparition.

The silhouette now gained colour and a clearer shape as she moved to one side of the sun’s beams and James could make out more distinctly who was talking to him with such confident sweet tone. The girl, for she could not have been more than eighteen, was swathed in a long dress made in what seemed was a brightly coloured woollen material. In the room where he lay it appeared rainbow-hued, the sun catching the edges of the woollen threads which acted like a prism. He could see her dress was, in fact, light grey-white but at her cuffs these was rich embroidery of reds and blues woven into the fabric. The face, Madonna-like in its serene and noble placidity, was framed by blackbird shaded locks cascading in seeming abandon down healthily coloured cheeks.

“My name is Helen”, answered the girl. “I might equally ask, what are you doing here’?”

“I don’t quite know,” answered James, still somewhat groggy after his sleep “I’m lost, I’ve escaped from an unhappy place. I’m lost, but I feel at the same time I know where I am. I’ve been here before, you see.”

“Have you?” said Helen, half-smiling at him. “We’ll soon find out. Come, wake up and follow me.”

James got up and followed Helen along the cliff-top. It was now late afternoon. The sea horses were tinged with a crimson streak presaging the sunset and the heath emanated a full, perfumed warmth.

Helen confidently strode round a headland, her gown gracefully flowing behind her and began to descend into what seemed to be a bay. James followed her, uncertain. Where was she taking him, he wondered? Yet something impelled him to follow her, almost without wishing to question her. Something fatefully, he imagined.

As they cleared the headland James looked down before him. Yes, it was indeed a bay, a wide bay with what appeared to be a settlement on the farther shore. He wiped the remaining sleep from his eyes and looked again, more sharply. A forest of pointed towers and tall spires crowned the town which glimmered mirage-like in the hot atmosphere. Round the steep-gabled confusion of houses which clustered around the towers and spires a high wall wound its course, punctuated at intervals by important-looking gateways.

“I don’t remember a town here at all,” puzzled “James.

“That is my town, the port of Dunara,” replied Helen, who was now almost running towards the bay.

“But what is this Dunara? I don’t even recall its name on any of the maps I have,” said James.

“It won’t be on your maps,” replied Helen, “it has been gone a long time ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that what you now see before you has long disappeared,” said Helen teasingly.

“I really don’t understand what you mean.”

“I mean what I say; you have stumbled into the past, into the long forgotten past. You see now what was and I have been sent to take you there.”

“Why me?” pleaded James.

“That is not for me to say”, answered the girl. “I have merely been asked to find you and take you here.”

James was increasingly confused but thought that he best accept the situation. After all, he had nothing to lose by following Helen and, anyway, she was attractive, really attractive to look at. And her voice…

The town gates were opened for them and James found himself in a car-less cobbled high street bustling with activity and crowded with people all wearing some type of woollen garment. He passed a large, trundling cart hauled by two white oxen with dark, goddess-like eyes. He smelt the frying of cakes on improvised griddles by the street corners. In the overhanging upper stages of the elaborately carved houses strident women were arguing and chatting with each other, beating out carpets, hanging up the washing. A procession of deeply-cowled members of some religious confraternity passed silently by him. The rich scent of wood smoke assailed James’ nostrils. All activity seemed out, on show to him. No closed doors or hidden proceedings here.

“This is my house”, remarked Helen as they stopped before a particularly large gabled construction. James had noticed that the doorways of the houses, particularly the lintel, were elaborately carved with designs of a twisting, convoluted nature which upon closer inspection on turned out to be animals, strange stylised animals, dragons eating each other, metamorphosed beasts emerging from each other.

James followed Helen up a gaily painted staircase into a large chamber with large, mullioned windows spread out on one side. As he climbed he suddenly realised that he had come across the town of Dunara before. Of course, here he was in the submerged port, now risen from the waves and emblazoned anew into life. How could it have happened?

“Meet my father”, said Helen as she introduced James to a strongly-built man with hair already tinged with grey but with a youthful hearty complexion, green eyes and a large noble, aquiline nose.

“Welcome young man, please be seated. I am glad my daughter has sought you and found you out. There are many things we must talk about and many things you must learn too.” The father spoke in a firm yet gentle tone, full of sympathy and friendliness.

James sat back as Helen delivered into his hand a large tankard of clear sweet-smelling mead and placed a tray of brown buns before him.

“Eat and rest awhile. Then at supper tonight join us at table. For you will stay with us awhile and partake of our family and little ways,” explained patriarch.

James, who had not eaten now for over eight hours, found the food set before him delicious. Drinking the mead likewise satisfied his thirst and its strength put him into a gentle reverie and not a little light-headedness.

“My daughter shall take you to the bath-house, for you need to relax after your journeying. Afterwards my tailor will come and measure you for a new set of clothes for the ones you have on look sadly worn and not a little out of keeping with your new situation.”

James looked at his scuffed leathers and mud splattered boots, then suddenly realised he had left his motorcycle near the headland. Panic caught him. Would it still be there if he left Dunara? He looked out through the mullions to where he had left his two-cylinder horse. But the landscape which he had left seemed curiously changed, a forest now bestrode the headland. He was sure it had not been there when he followed Helen down to the bay and this town.

“Are you ready to come with me?” smiled Helen to James, interrupting his concerned gaze. “Let’s go to the bath-house.”

Recently I’ve been going through my photos in an attempt to catalogue their contents. Coincidentally I’ve also discovered some unpublished literary things I’ve written. Among these are novels and short stories.

Let’s start with this one. I gave it no title but remember that it was written during a stay in mid-Wales. However, I have absolutely no idea what this novel is about or whether it was ever completed, let alone revised.

CHAPTER ONE

The forest was all around him. Tall pines protected him with their dark needles. Silence. The late afternoon sun filtered greenly, tinged with gold down to the circular clearing he had marked for himself. The motorcycle had been placed by one tree, the road left quite behind, the sound of cars abandoned to this sylvan calm. Reaching this spot he had driven through half-timbered villages bathed in the reddening sun, their eaves speckled with gold. The ancient countryside seemed quite devoid of inhabitants. Once he had stopped to let a woman cross to the village church. He had smiled at her through his visor and she smiled back at him. Contact had been made. That was enough. Apart from her he had been by himself the whole day.

It was a large forest, very large forest. Abandoning the winding secondary B road, which appeared to have been traced by tipsy mediaeval surveyors, the confident purr of the motorcycle’s twin cylinders took James into long dark avenues of sentinel-like fir trees, plantations covering over what once was a vast heath land. They marched on relentlessly towards the end of the dying summer day.

It was becoming noticeably cooler now. The sun still burned on his face but his toes were beginning to feel the drop in temperature. ‘Time to get ready for sleep’. Laying out a groundsheet and a sleeping bag James prepared himself for the short night. High above a nightingale began to pour out its tiny soul in virtuoso trills and cadences.

The passage between awakedness and dreaming: strange thoughts began to flicker on his mind’s screen. The great escape, the feeling, perhaps the knowledge, that he was being pursued, the relief that he had managed to get so far away from the institution. The hurried preparations, the knowledge that he had both nowhere and everywhere to go. Slowly the physical tiredness overcame him.  He fell asleep in the immense darkness of the forest.

The following morning was clear and bright. But the forest was cold after the night. The sun’s light could be seen but not felt. James had to imagine its warmth on his shivering, body. He was now quite hungry. Slowly he took a chocolate bar from his pocket; a bar which had melted then reformed itself into a fantastical shape, unwrapped it and slowly began to savour it: it would have to last a long time. Where exactly was he? Where was the nearest settlement? Would it have a shop which was open? And, anyway, did he have enough money to spare?

One thing James was certain about: he was not too far from the sea. Judging from his mileometer and the direction of the rising sun he knew that if he carried on further into the same horizon he could soon hear the sound of the waves on an unknown shore. A perceptible salt smell in his nostrils and the swooping of a flock of gulls above him proved him right. Half-an hour outside the forest his motorcycle landed him at the top of a high heavily eroded sandy cliff. Below he gazed upon a gently curving strand, all that remained of a once great mediaeval port.

The sea both led him on and halted James. The curving horizon fading into an imperceptible turquoise strip teased him into fantasies of exotic kingdoms peopled by seductive houris and kindly princes. Yet, if he stepped just once forward he would tumble down the cliff and if not bruising himself badly would still be prevented from moving forwards into the foaming undulations of this grey-blue sea. O for an amphibious motorcycle, one with wings that would let his imagination perform the leap it so much desired:

Yes, this was far enough. Far enough to leave the events of the past two days far behind him. James at least felt himself free, if he knew deep down that he would never really be in that state of sublime consciousness in which everything is possible because impossibility is finally realised, the impossibility of all things. James suddenly had the certain feeling that he had been to this place before. The strange crumbling fabric of the cliffs, the memory of a submerged city, the song of the skylark high, invisibly high above the flowering heath, all these sensations rushed into his blood with that certainty that he had been here before, that he knew where he was standing. He cast his mind back; to a time when he was half the height he was now. James remembered a holiday on an English farm. He had stayed with his parents and his brother in an ancient half-timbered cottage in the high street of a straggling village; in Suffolk it may have been. The cottage was so ancient it did not even have electricity. Going to bed up the crooked staircase had been an adventure with unknown giants as the flickering oil lamp cast immense shadows onto the whitened wattle-and-daub passages. Across the lane from the cottage was the entrance to a farm. How he had loved to take in the succulent farmyard smells and be surrounded by the hens and ducks demanding aggressively the feed he had been given by the farmer and which he now kept secure in his tightly-shut hand. There had even been rides on the combine harvester through ripened august cornfields. How he loved to see the swathes the mechanical monster cut into the fields and how he was astonished to see the neat square bundles of hay left in its wake Yes, this had truly been the best holiday of his life. The holiday in which he had become sure that there was such a thing called the countryside, without which no town or city could hope to be ever understood. The holiday in which he had realised that friendships could be made with others than relatives. Those interminable holidays, so-called, with relatives, jarring on each other, so often at each others throats. Holidays were meant to get away from them, not to survive in the hothouses which these stifling relations created for each other, to imprison each other.

Freedom, total non-attachment, to people, to money: freedom to realise oneself. These thoughts crowded into his mind as he sat on the cliff edge observing the play of waves, clouds and birds. Strange that the same place could remember to impart the same thoughts of that delicious freedom. Perhaps not so strange, after all. For he had gazed upon this beach before. But the thriving port had already been swallowed by the destroying, creating sea.

The second of February is a day chosen in several parts of the northern hemisphere for the purpose of deciding how soon the spring will start.

In the USA, for example, it’s called groundhog day. The tradition there says that if it’s cloudy when a groundhog (our equivalent would be marmot) comes out of its burrow on February 2^nd it will be an early spring. On the other hand, if it’s a sunny day, the groundhog will see its own shadow and go back into its burrow. This means that winter will carry on for another six weeks.

The rhyme goes like this:

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
winter will not come again.

In French Canada it’s called Jour de la Marmotte. .

In Italy February 2^nd coincides with the religious festival of Candelora (in the UK, Candlemas).  Named after the lighting of candles in churches to symbolise the arrival of Christ’s light on the earth, it also celebrates two other event which have an ancient Hebraic root. First is the presentation of Jesus in the temple. Second is the purification of the Virgin since for forty days after giving birth a woman was reckoned to be in an impure state.

(Fresco by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel Padova which we visited some years sgo)

The February festival has both pagan origins and later accretions. In pagan times it celebrated the rebirth of light after the darkest and coldest period of winter (c. f .my post at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/i-giorni-della-merla/). In parts of Italy the festival became combined with that of popular saints. In Catania, for example, the 2^nd of February also celebrates Saint Agatha, the city’s patron saint who is depicted bearing a dish on which appear to be two crème caramels but are, in fact, her breasts which were cut off at a torture session before her martyrdom (significantly Saint Agatha is patron saint of breast cancer victims – and also, incidentally, of safe eruptions on mount Etna.).

Be as it may, does the Festa della Candelora in Italy bring any weather predictions? Surprisingly, the weather on Candelora can signal two opposite trends depending on what one does (or doesn’t believe). The first is signalled by this verse

Madonna della Candelora
dell’inverno sèmo fòra
ma se piove o tira vento,
de l’inverno semo ancora ‘rento.’

(My translation follows:

 Candlemas Madonna,

If the day comes fine

We’ll be out of winter.

But if it’s rain or brine

To more winter we must re-enter.)

In other words, if the weather is fine on February second we’ll be out of winter, otherwise winter will drag on.

However, there is a second Italian version which goes like this and predicts the complete opposite event:

Per la Santa Candelora
se nevica o se plora
dell’inverno siamo fora,
ma se l’è sole o solicello
siamo sempre a mezzo inverno’

(My translation follows:

On the feast of Candlemas,

If the day brings rains or snows,

We’ll be well out of winter.

But if there’s sun and no clouds pass

And all about brightness glows

We’ll still be in mid-winter.)

Which versified Candlemas weather prediction should I believe in? All I can say is that this year February has started with fine weather. The nights have been close to zero but the days have radiantly warm sunshine by midday.

Yesterday we took a walk up to the little chapel of the Madonna of the snow. Two of our cats followed us. It was lovely to see so many signs of the end of winter in the crocuses, the merry birdsong and the emerging buds.

Ah well. Let there always be verses to cope with every weather condition so that no-one can ever be proved right or wrong! At least I saw these for the first time yesterday:

In 2017 London’s Ealing Philharmonic orchestra visited Lucca and performed a concert in one of the city’s most resplendent churches, Santa Maria Corteorlandini. I describe that event with more details in my post at Ealing Comes to Lucca | From London to La Costa (and Lucca and Beyond) Part Three (wordpress.com).

Among the items played was Elgar’s superb ‘In the South (Alassio)’ tone-poem which encapsulates the colours and sensations of Italy from a glorious sunrise to the march of Roman legions to a shepherd’s evening song.

It’s not often one gets a dollop of Elgar in Lucca; it was most welcome and, as befits an English orchestra, played to perfection.

Unhappily the Ealing Symphony has never returned to Lucca and the inhabitants of the beautiful tree-lined walled city have been starved of British orchestral music despite the interventions of its own maverick conductor, Andrea Colombini.

This is all to do with Brexit which has had calamitous effects on the ability of British orchestras to tour in the European Union. There are four main areas the ghastly event has affected them:

• Travel and tourism.

Before Brexit orchestras were able to freely travel and perform in Europe without the need for visas and work permits. They could also extend their stay on the European continent without any bureaucratic problems. It’s all different now that Britain has, since 31 January 2020, become a third-world country. Visa and work permits have to be applied for requiring time and money. There is also the impact on the transport of musical instruments with checks at customs for everything from piccolos to double–bases to violin bows.

• Financial.

As the UK is now outside the EU’s single market import and export of musical instruments and sheet music has been adversely affected by trade regulations and tariffs adding significantly to musicians’ expenses. Furthermore, British musical organisations have lost EU funding opportunities for any educational projects and festival management.

• Orchestral recruitment.

Music is a universal language. Musicians are a universal resource. They join orchestras from different countries, especially European. Restrictions on musicians’ movement between the EU and the UK lead to recruitment problems and the availability of top class soloists and conductors. This clearly has affected orchestras’ and instrumental ensembles’ performance quality.

• Cultural Exchanges

This is perhaps the most disastrous result of Brexit on the world of music as it affects the youngest players. British persons between the ages of 16 and 26 are no longer eligible to join the European Union Youth orchestra which was once open to them when they were EU citizens.

Cultural exchanges and artistic collaborations have all been seriously affected by Brexit. Within the EU it’s possible for opera productions to travel from one EU country to another. Lucca’s Giglio theatre (now renamed Puccini-Giglio in the centenary of its most famous son’s death) exchanges with France and last year it received a visit from the Vienna Philharmonic:  I Wiener Philharmoniker al Teatro del Giglio il 29 novembre (lavocedilucca.it) Imagine now trying to get any part of a Covent Garden season to travel abroad in the EU! It’s difficult enough for an eight-person band of musicians from that benighted country.

UK orchestras are trying to cope with their country’s disastrous decision to leave the EU – the only one to do so in the union’s seventy-year-old history. The whole arts field has been very badly affected as the philistine UK negotiators were far more interested in trading arrangements than in cultural ones. However, culture is economically as important to a nation as industry and farming and contributes so much revenue to its finances in areas like tourism and other services.

Recently I received this email from the director of an instrumental group I enjoy listening to and support.

“Yes, Brexit remains a problem for us. We haven’t toured to Europe (besides one festival in Malta and a couple of engagements in Germany for a UK promoter) since Brexit. The paperwork is onerous for a small charity and frankly we don’t get invited by EU promoters since the vote. We hope this will change!”

I just hope things may change a little after the UK’s general election this year. The predictable result will mean that that we shall have a Prime Minister who plays flute, recorder and piano, and was a Guildhall music scholar. The fact that he chose Beethoven’s ode to Joy’ – the European Union’s anthem – for one of his Desert Island Discs is a promising sign.

In 1991 Terry Waite was finally released by his captors after almost five years (1,763 days) imprisonment of which four years were spent in solitary confinement. The story of how Terry Waite became the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy, how he successfully negotiated the release of many hostages and how he too became a hostage in the Lebanese civil war is well related in his book ‘Taken on Trust’.

We were privileged to meet Terry Waite in 1992 when he was invited to Blackheath Concert Halls in south London to talk about his experiences in the Middle East.  At that time Waite was living in the attractive London village. He has since moved to Suffolk.

(Woodland House, Blackheath. Built in 1776 for Julius Angerstein, the founder of London’s National Gallery. Until 1967 it once housed the convent the Little Sisters of the Assumption. This photograph, taken in 1985, shows the Virgin Mary’s grotto now demolished – her statue had been removed when the house became an art gallery. The snowdrops remain.)

Of the evening spent at the Halls I remember two things.

First was what Terry said about his experiences with the captors:

“If you are bitter, it will eat you up and do more damage to you than to the people who have hurt you.”^[

This is a brave and very true statement. It is so easy to pour metaphorical burning oil onto those people who have hurt you. One wishes the most horrific things would happen to them in the most abject moments when reflecting on one’s ostensible injustices.

It must be very difficult to forgive those who steal five years of one’s life through false imprisonment. At least the special envoy’s life was spared although Waite was told by his gaolers on one occasion that he would be executed .Some people may recoil at the thought of forgiveness. Others will shy away from offering the other cheek if they are the victims of an offence. But what happens then? No closure? No end to recriminations? What if you walked down the High Street and met one of these persons? Would you smile ’hello’ or would you ignore them and walk away quickly?

The astounding thing is that Terry Waite actually returned over twenty years later and met his captors in a reconciliatory gesture.

There is something truly satisfying in achieving closure on any unresolved wrong. I believe this is what Terry Waite means when he says that continuing bitterness about a situation one has found oneself in will always hurt more than the actual wrongs suffered.

We, poor humans, always seem to carry a list of real and presumed injustices inflicted upon ourselves. We may not pretend to be saints and try to forget them for they will always be there. The only way to stop them from affecting us with bitterness is to reflect that it’s not a good idea to allow them to infect our existence with malignant growths.

That wonderful French songster Edith Piaf, whose life-story was particularly fraught with disappointments and hurts, sang that ‘I regret nothing’. So is every trial sent to us to make us better beings then? No pain no gain? Turn the page and burn the previous ones? Let’s see what we can do…

What was the second thing that I remember about that memorable evening with Terry Waite in Blackheath?

It was the singing of his favourite piece of music. The one, when he appeared on BBC radio’s ‘Desert Island Discs’, that Terry declared that if he could have only one piece it would be this one.

It’s Ivor Gurney’s setting poem ‘Sleep’ a poem by John Fletcher, playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare.

Sleep

Come, sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving
Lock me in delight awhile;
Let some pleasing dream beguile
All my fancies, that from thence
I may feel an influence,
All my powers of care bereaving.

Tho’ but a shadow, but a sliding,
Let me know some little joy.
We, that suffer long annoy,
Are contented with a thought
Thro’ an idle fancy wrought:
O let my joys have some abiding

And here is Gurney’s setting

Bing Videos

‘Sleep’ is one of the Five Elizabethan Songs (or ‘The Elizas’ as he called them) written by Gurney (1890-1937) while he was still a student at the Royal College of Music, and published in 1920. Gurney was himself a hostage of sorts. A victim of First World War shell shock as a result of his time in the trenches of northern France Gurney spent the last fifteen  years of his life in mental hospitals, where he was diagnosed as suffering from “delusional insanity, and died at Stone Park hospital in the Dartford marshes.  (The hospital has since been closed and turned into luxury flats).

Listening to the radio news this morning I can see that bitterness, particularly in that part of the world where Waite passed five years of his life in darkness, will never seem to be relinquished but will instead build up an insufferable store among anguished people. When will it ever end?

The ghastly failure of Brexit was the main factor in preventing the Northern Ireland executive from carrying out its duties and, indeed, threatening the Good Friday agreement which has restored a modicum of peace to the area.

Happily, thanks to that agreement Northern Ireland has not found itself in the situation we encountered when, as holiday makers sight-seeing in the Falls Road area in 1993 and wishing to visit Belfast’s Roman Catholic cathedral we had machine guns pointed at us by squaddies. ‘Why are you here?’ the commander asked us. My wife replied ‘we are not answering that until you stop pointing your guns at us’. They desisted thanks to Sandra’s admirable sang-froid.

In retrospect I think they might have thought that the wooden case I had built for our camping equipment on the roof rack of our car contained materiel!

How could a part of the United Kingdom have a customs border separating it from the rest of the nation? The Irish Channel not only divides Eire from the UK but divides Northern Ireland as well. For this reason the protestant Democratic Unionist Party refused to take part in the government of Northern Ireland at Stormont. This was in spite of two major facts. First, the DUP voted for Brexit. Second, the DUP is not the majority party of Northern Ireland. Instead it’s Sinn Féin (Gaelic for ‘ourselves’), the Pan-Irish party, under the leadership of Michelle O’Neill.

Brexit has hit English food exports to the EU badly (and will do even more so now that new import-export controls have been imposed particularly affecting smaller enterprises which just can’t cope with the extra red-tape and charges involved). Cheeses have been particularly affected  since so many smaller enterprises are concerned. If anyone can locate Blue Stilton, Double Gloucester, Wensleydale or Crumbly Cheshire in any Lucchesia store do let me know pronto!

We sometimes shop in one of Lucca’s two Lidl supermarkets. One can get good Greek Feta cheese there. Most importantly, Lidls are the nearest place I can find cheddar, so brilliant for cheese toasts.

Looking at the label on my Lidl-bought cheddar cheese I note that it is imported from Northern Ireland .

Most of Dale Farm products are made in Northern Ireland but they also have production sites in England and Scotland. Dale Farm milk, cheese, cream and custard for example come from local grass-fed cows and its produce is prepared by their dairy plant in Ballymena, Co. Antrim.

A dairy success story for over sixty years, Dale Farm is a cooperative, owned by 1,300 dairy executive farmers across Northern Ireland, England and Scotland. This means every farmer that supplies it with milk also owns the company, so the business is able to support this generation of dairy farmers, and the next.

It’s no surprise that Italy’s Lidl-store cheddar cheese comes from Northern Ireland which is still placed in an enviable position, thanks to its border being, paradoxically, both inside and outside the EU. Indeed, Northern Ireland is having a topping time thanks to this situation.

I do find it difficult to believe that in my comune of Bagni di Lucca there are British part or full-time immigrants who voted for Brexit and still believe they were right to do so. The current tractor-led demos blocking roads in countries like Germany and France show that there are many dissatisfied farmers in Europe. However, suffering under the hardship of Brexit, the UK is particularly hard-hit and it’s a wonder that its farm vehicles have not yet blocked Downing Street and requested a better deal and a request for a customs union and a single market.

I’m now going to make a scrumptious Northern Ireland cheddar cheese toast on my Greek pita bread topped with our home -grown capers lovingly pickled by Alexandra and wish all the best for Northern Ireland”s restored executive which begins this month.