Posted on by Luke Gilfedder

The Venatio – an extract

LUKE GILFEDDER tells a dark tale of Cheshire

Crime writer Stephen Niskus suspects that his long-lost school friend, Alexei Orphonov, is a serial killer. When he catches sight of Alexei in Alderley Edge, he embarks upon an urgent quest to prevent another murder. But Stephen’s investigations soon lead him into a far more tangled and deadly web than he could ever have imagined, one whose origins lie in the heathen history of The Edge, yet whose far-reaching strands threaten to re-engineer the future of humanity itself

CHAPTER ONE

A black-suited six-footer descended the steps of Manchester Victoria station. He twitched his Celto-Lancastrian nose like a rabbit. There was a storm coming, one of those Pentecostal storms which occur only in this region of hills and neogothic spires, tall as obelisks, when dams burst, roofs are swept away, squares are flooded, and every lead pipe becomes a fountain. After a few meaningless but magnanimous hours that had resembled good weather, so Manchester was, on cue, creaking back into its rainy groove like a tram proudly regaining its rails. The man signalled a taxi and gave an Alderley Edge address. Streets of angry red brick assumed a tone of purple as they drove out of town, until, beneath the uncertain and swinging illumination of a Northern gale, the skyline of his youth became but a badly smudged Lowry, an opaque deepening of twilight itself.

Fifteen miles later, the taxi’s headlights swept down the cobbled and very superior half-mile of Woodbrook Road, where bronchial trees soared high in the darkness, and medievalish lampposts bore aloft wavering haloes of golden drizzle. “People think Cheshire as flat as a pancake,” said the driver, “and it is for the most part, but not ‘ere.” Six hundred feet high and three miles long, the detached mass of the Edge rose from the Cheshire Plain, a long-backed hill that was tall and sombre and dark. Estates crept down its slopes, stepping on their own shadows.

At the base of the wooded sandstone hill was Alderley itself, the “best” postcode in all of Cheshire. It was Cheshire’s Kensington, its Linlithgow, its Sandycove, its Charlottenlund, and (to the Welsh at least) its Cowbridge. Alderley was rich in the early aura of old halls, fallen fortunes, and county families common to so many of too many English autobiographers. Much rarer in the North than the South, Stephen Niskus thought, but only mildly less intolerable. During the day, the Edge would hum with the sounds of Alderley villagers, be they cashmere-draped ramblers trampling down the dead leaves or the self-exiled grandchildren of the self-made racing their smoke-blue Mercedes’. But at dusk, such life withered in a moment, and the sounds became those of the wood, the crystal tongues of water and nightingale, and the heathen murmurings of Roman mines and druid bones lay beneath the marl.

The deluge was so great now that visibility was cut to a few yards; rain lashed against the windows, tearing the streetlight into golden shrapnel. The taxi turned off the bottom of Woodbrook onto Mottram Lane, which, having shaken off the shadow of the Edge, ran more straight and free. Cricket fields lay on the right, nude and white as blanched nut kernels, while a swim of oxblood manors and Mississippian mansions drifted by on the left, each with cactus and bamboo trees leaden in their greenness, sad feathery shafts dripping water, intense against the dark sky. The driver said:

“Strange weather, isn’t it?”

Stephen was slavonically mute. He had never been the type to answer a curt “yes” to such observations, nor to reply with a similarly hackneyed phrase. The driver continued:

“An’ they were sayin’ this might turn to snow overnight. Don’t think we’ve had a white Christmas since 2010.”

Stephen managed to say, “really?” and stroked a disinterested hand through neat terraces of auburn hair.

“Aye. I’d steer well clear of the Edge though tonight, it being the solstice an’ all. The crackpots’ll all be out in force.”

Alderley looked strange and melancholy in its moon-polished state, with only a few Brueghel-like characters, necks swathed in mufflers, stalking about the lanes like plump wraiths. It reminded Stephen of Prague last winter, of mist in the gingerbread gothic square, the bells of Týn Church echoing in their black Catholicly way, and of a tyrolean-hatted shadow receding into the darkness down Alchemist Alley. A nostalgia at least half revulsion affected him, only to be dissipated by the driver’s voice:

“What do you do, son, if you don’t mind my asking? Couldn’t help but notice all of them tags on your luggage.”

“I’m a crime writer,” said Stephen, “I’ve just finished a promotional tour.”

“Oh, really?” the driver replied with raised (or over-raised) eyebrows. A twenty-something living on his wits — what! — a label which, harmless as it may sound to foreign ears, somehow in England confers upon a person a moral ambiguousness. “I knew I’d seen your face around. You were in Cheshire Life, weren’t you? The missus reads it.”

He continued to talk as the taxi turned onto the high street, but Stephen no longer listened. His eyes closed. Being back in Alderley provoked other memories, the rain encouraging them to unfold like those Japanese flowers that open in water. He recalled being dressed in his confirmation suit, drenched to the skin, that first day he alighted at an autumn-leaved Alderley station which was quite unlike the godforsaken one (broken mirrors, tattered plush, arsoned vending machines) from which he had set out. Stephen had just passed the entrance exam for Manchester Grammar School, the “Eton of the North”, and it had divided his life as cleanly as Roald Dahl’s Boy and Going Solo. He had not gone to a poor primary: indeed, the best Catholic schools were all in the North, for the Reformation, like blood from the feet when the arteries harden, could not push up so far so easily. But his eschewal of the local Catholic secondaries (St. Ambrose and Cardinal Newman) meant that his life swiftly became one of two towns, two skies and two-tone shoes: streets of fatal poverty gave way onto a world of fatalistic wealth, Michaelmas blues, bonfire moons, and gothic quads, not to mention those metallic-green lawns whose edges you could slice your finger on, the eternal wait for fifth-period break after Double Latin, that most wintery of phases ‘Lent Term’, and, last but not least, Little Arthur’s History of England with its sketch of the Princes in the Tower, those two royal princes, so innocently embracing, so soon to be smothered. What only child could look upon them without a disturbance?

“Typical,” the driver tut-tutted as they hit the Christmas traffic on London Road, “would you look at the way they park…”

Stephen lowered the window to let out the smell of the driver’s cigarette, admitting a gust of rain and the sounds of swishing tyres on the wet asphalt. His taxi halted at the lights. He peered across the road. A Daimler Sovereign had drawn up outside De Trafford hotel as two silhouettes emerged from the lobby’s golden oblong. One was a boy, head held like an emperor stag, and the other a vulturine old man. The boy eased the aged fellow into the waiting Daimler, and as he did so, shot a glance up at Stephen’s taxi, sharp and swift as the click of a camera. Then he tilted the head away with that same arrogance made up of having stared at you, measured your value, and decided you were not there. That same! Stephen felt the stab of recognition as keenly as a knife on a wintery mountaintop. He was about to leap out of the taxi and shout hello when the boy vanished into the Daimler. The vehicle cleared its throat and, tyres slewing, sped toward the private road labyrinth of Nether Alderley.

The traffic lights remained mulishly red. Stephen was tempted to tell his driver to give chase, but he rapped on the partition screen and said:

“Would you please stop outside that hotel?”

“But we’re almost at Davey Lane!”

“Yes, but I’ve remembered I have to see someone. It’s urgent.”

The taxi turned into De Trafford’s horseshoe driveway, joining a flotilla of taxis who sought with the unwieldy wariness of reluctant machinery a place to park. Stephen leapt out by the flood-lit fountain and shouted:

“Wait for me here. I shan’t be two minutes.”

The trees flanking the hotel were shivering and erect. Above the half-hearted portico, smoky clouds were gathering, twirling in triskelions. Stephen took the shallow steps two at a time, the keen air of the dying year resisting each stride. He had the door open before the commissionaire could oblige. The very wood of the reception felt full of the imminent snowstorm. A teenage girl stood behind the hostess stand with her pentathletic head thrust forth. Stephen approached her.

“Excuse me, there was a young lad who left here a second ago. Do you have a name? Is he staying here?” He added: “I believe he’s an old school friend.”

“Gosh, I couldn’t say. We’ve had such a busy night tonight; it’s our Christmas buffet. All traditional Cheshire food, sir. There’s still some left if you’d like: Potted Pigeon, Fidget Pie, Rabbit Brawn, Chester Pudding…”

“I’m sure,” said Stephen. “But could I please see a guest list?”

Her eyebrows were ruched as she turned to find a manager. Stephen cursed the impulsivity which went along with his red hair— how often it led him into scrapes like this! He’d only seen the boy thirty feet away through a rain-spattered window. He could have been anyone… couldn’t he? A moment later, the girl returned with the list. Stephen scanned it twice, then shook his head and handed it back. She apologised and said:

“We did have a cancellation earlier, now I come to think of it. It was taken by an older gentleman, I would have thought he was with his grandson, but the boy didn’t seem local. His name was Alex, I think?”

“Alex?” Stephen pressed. “Could it have been Alexei? Alexei Orphonov?”

“It might have been… I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t say for sure.”

Stephen gave a rare double smile of eye and mouth. “Never mind, you’ve already been most helpful.”

“A pleasure, Mr Niskus.”

“You know my name?”

“Of course! I read your novel. How do you pronounce it, The Venatio? I love a good whodunit, but I have to say, I never saw that twist coming.”

Stephen thanked the girl again and then turned to leave. Thoughts of Alexei obscured the anonymous farewells of women pursuing him from the gaping mouth of the lobby. Before him, taxis began to purr, and keen patches of light sped over the slushy wastes of the drive. The word “venatio” echoed in his mind as he zippered his coat, offering the minuscule pleasure that one word from Double Latin had returned amid this electrifying turn of events. Vēnātiō: the hunt, a hunting spectacle. They taught Latin well at Manchester Grammar School. He climbed back into his taxi.

“Fun and games over for tonight, sir?” The driver inquired.

“No,” Stephen said, “they have only just begun.”

Posted on by Gomery Kimber

9/11: premonition of disaster

Credit: Shutterstock
GOMERY KIMBER believes there really can be second-sight

On the afternoon of September 11th 2001 I was making notes for a story I planned to write about the ghost of a slave ship captain. I’d already named the ghost Noah, but I couldn’t think of a suitable surname. I sat there, pen in hand, awaiting inspiration.

Eventually, a name popped into my head: Shanks, Noah Shanks.  That sounded just right. I wrote it down, made a sandwich as I’d had no lunch, and turned on the TV.  When I saw what was happening in the USA that afternoon – real horror, real terror – making notes for work of fiction seemed not a little pointless.

It was two days later, while reading newspaper reports of the attacks on America that something strange happened.  As everyone knows, there was a fourth aircraft that never reached its hijackers’ target. Flight 93, a United Airlines Boeing 757, was carrying 38 passengers and seven crew. It crashed 80 miles south-east of Pittsburgh. Or to be more precise, 8 miles east of Jennerstown, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I looked again. Shanksville? My first reaction was, now that’s unusual, that’s the same name as the character in my story. Then I noticed that Flight 93 had crashed at 2:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time – about the same time that the name Shanks had swum to my head.

Now for several months before September 11th I had been plagued by nightmares of explosions, nuclear warfare, and natural disasters; one particularly disturbing dream concerned a skyscraper in a city under air attack. In June 1996, the flat I shared with my girlfriend was blown up by the IRA bomb which badly damaged city centre Manchester. I had assumed the nightmares related to that traumatic event, but now I wasn’t so sure. I’d dreamed of a skyscraper (there were none in Manchester) in a city attacked from the air (the IRA used a lorry bomb); could it be possible that I had glimpsed the future, dreaming of a terrorist attack that had yet to happen? But how could I have been?

Everyone knows that time is linear, flowing from the past into the future. It is impossible to have prior knowledge of a future event. Or is it? I recalled reading about the journalist John Godley who dreamed more than once of future horse race winners; on the strength of his fame as a psychic punter he went on to be a racing correspondent1. So perhaps time is stranger than we think, perhaps all of us have precognitive dreams but forget about them as soon as we wake up.

In 1927, in his famous book An Experiment With Time, J W Dunne suggested exactly that. Upon waking, Dunne would write down what he had been dreaming about, and quickly discovered that he did indeed dream of future events. While reading about a combination lock, he realised he had dreamt about it the night before. On another occasion he dreamed that his watch had stopped at four-thirty and that a crowd was shouting, “Look!  Look!”  Dunne woke up and discovered that his watch had indeed stopped at four-thirty. He wound it up, only to find the next morning that his watch was showing the right time: his dream had woken him at the moment it had stopped.

Not all Dunne’s dreams were so mundane. In 1902, as a soldier in South Africa, he dreamed he was on an island threatened by a volcanic eruption. In the dream he “was seized by a frantic desire to save the four thousand (I knew the number) unsuspecting inhabitants”. Days later he read an account of a volcanic eruption in Martinique. 40,000 people were said to have died, but Dunne misread the figure as 4,000. It was fifteen years before he realised his error. “My wonderful ‘clairvoyant’ vision had been wrong in its most insistent particular!” he noted, concluding that his dream was of reading about the eruption in the newspaper, not of the event itself.

Illustration from the 16th century Augsburg Book of Miracles

Dunne is not alone in having prior knowledge of disasters. In October 1966, a coal tip slid down a hillside and buried the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, killing 144 people, 128 of whom were children. Following a visit to Aberfan, Dr J C Barker made an appeal in the London Evening Standard for those who felt they had foreseen the disaster to contact him.  Of the 76 people who came forward, Barker was able to confirm that 26 had spoken to others about their premonition before the event. The precognitions had affected people all over the UK, from five weeks before the disaster to within two hours of it. So vivid were the precognitive dreams that in some cases people woke in great distress, reporting that they had heard children screaming. Some claimed to have had premonition of other disasters; Doctor Barker called such people “human seismographs”.

Indeed, it would seem that the greater the reading on the psychic Richter scale, the greater the number of people who receive glimpses of the future.  It should therefore be no surprise that a rash of premonitions preceded the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, which claimed 2207 lives. Ten days before he was due to sail on the ill-fated vessel, businessman J. Connon Middleton twice dreamed of a ship that turned keel upwards surrounded by frantic people in the water. Luckily for him, the conference he was due to attend in New York was cancelled and he stayed at home. Fortunate too was sailor Colin MacDonald. Three times he was asked to join the Titanic as second engineer, and three times he refused; he had a strong premonition that the ship’s maiden voyage would end in disaster. Newspaper editor W. T. Stead was not so prudent. Strangely, since he was interested in the occult, Stead ignored the advice of the fortune teller Cheiro (real name William John Walker) not to travel by water during April 1912, especially about the middle of the month (the Titanic sank on the 14th). Stead died in the disaster.

Perhaps the most uncanny of all the premonitions concerning the loss of the Titanic occurred in 1898. The American novelist Morgan Robertson was something of an oddity, in that he felt himself not a creative artist but a channel for the writings of someone else. Often Robertson was blocked and could only write when he felt himself possessed by his invisible partner. It was in this role as amanuensis that he wrote The Wreck of the Titan, the story of a ship designed to be unsinkable due to its watertight compartments. On its maiden voyage in April, the Titan, travelling at a speed of 25 knots, strikes an iceberg. The ship has only 24 lifeboats for its 3000 passengers and crew and sinks with huge loss of life. The parallels with the Titanic are remarkable. At the time it struck an iceberg on its April maiden voyage, the Titanic was travelling at 23 knots, and carried only 20 lifeboats. Like the 70,000-ton Titan, the 66,000-ton Titanic was sailing from Southampton to New York. 22,007 lives were lost, a death toll which would have been even greater at the ship not been two-thirds full . . .

But how is it possible to know about something that has not yet happened? Classical science, and common sense, revolts at such a notion. Newtonian physics tells us that all elements of the universe are isolated from each other, divisible, wholly self-contained and separate. We are Mind, sitting outside this mechanical universe, looking in. Strangely, this paradigm still obtains. I say strangely because discoveries in quantum physics should have caused its demise in the early part of the last century. In quantum physics, matter cannot be divided into discrete units, but is completely indivisible. The universe can only be understood as a web of interconnections. Things once in contact remain in contact throughout all space and time. Indeed, space and time appear to be nothing more than arbitrary constructs, and do not in fact exist.

Augsburg Book of Miracles

In The New Immortality, J. W. Dunne equates our lives to a strip of film which shows everything that happens to us from cradle to grave.  The ‘everyday you’, which Dunne calls Observer 1, travels along this film strip, totally engrossed in the mundane business of living.  But when the ‘everyday you’ relaxes, a strange thing happens: you become the ‘real you’, able to observe the strip of film from a distance and see into the future just as easily as you can see into the past. It was in such a relaxed state – trying to come up with the name for a character in a story – that the name Shanks drifted into my mind.

A similar state of mind, which we might call alert relaxation – is used by remote viewers, which is what the US military calls its clairvoyants. Astonishing as it may seem, during the Cold War, the Pentagon spent millions of dollars on the Stargate Programme, training military personnel as psychic spies, spies who were used to discover the secrets of the Soviet Union without ever leaving the USA. Stargate was disbanded in 1995, and since then former remote viewers have gone into business, predicting the future of the stock market for corporate clients and teaching civilians how to ‘’see at a distance’. One such RVer is Prudence Calabrese who claims to have had a vision of the attack on the World Trade Centre as long ago as 1997. Posted on her LargerUniverse.com website are the ten pages of sketches and notes she claims to have made during a remote viewing session on 10 March 1997.

But is there any hard scientific evidence to support the theory that everything is connected, that time is not linear, that we can forecast the future? In fact, there is.

On September 11th, 2001, three hours before the first airliner struck the World Trade Centre, a machine at Princeton University in New Jersey predicted some major disaster. The machine is a Random Event Generator used to monitor completely unpredictable processes, such as the decay of a radioactive ingredient. The results it produces are down purely to chance and are recorded on a graph. Most of the time the graph shows a wavy line, with only a few minor variations, but occasionally the line peaks. That is what happened on the morning of September 11th. Between 9am to 10am Eastern Standard Time, as the attacks began and those infamous pictures were broadcast around the world, the graph peaked enormously.

In fact, the REG graph began to rise at 6am, three hours before the first strike on the WTC. Writer on the paranormal, Colin Wilson, believes that this was because many people around the world, Barker’s human seismographs, were experiencing premonitions of the coming disaster, and that this surge of fear and distress showed itself on the graph three hours before the attack began.

I was not alone in my premonition of disaster. Actress Nicole Kidman has described how she intended to fly to New York from Los Angeles on September 10th, but changed her mind because she had a premonition that things ‘would not go well there’. A British writer on the paranormal has related to me how she cancelled a trip with her mother to the USA after experiencing a vivid nightmare in which the plane on which they were travelling was deliberately crashed into the ground Mother and daughter had been recommended by a relative to visit the viewing deck of the World Trade Centre.  The only gap in their tight schedule for such a visit was on the morning of the 11th . . .

In America, countless individuals have contacted psychical investigators to report similar premonitions. Perhaps the most sinister of all concern followers of Osama Bin Laden. In a video tape found by US troops in Afghanistan, Bin Laden and his lieutenants make extensive reference to precognitive dreams about September 11th amongst their own followers.

In The Roots of Coincidence, Arthur Koestler quotes Oxford Professor of Logic, H. H. Price. Price believed that “telepathically received impressions have some difficultly in crossing the threshold and manifesting themselves in consciousness. There seems to be some barrier . . . which tends to shut them out of consciousness . . . and they make use of all sorts of devices for overcoming it. Sometimes they make use of the muscular mechanism of the body, and emerge in the form of automatic speech or writing [we are reminded of Morgan Robertson who believed himself merely the channel for another writer]. Sometimes they emerge in the form of dreams . . . And often they can only emerge in a distorted or symbolic form (as other unconscious mental contents do). It is a plausible guess that many of our everyday thoughts and emotions are telepathic or partly telepathic in origin, but are not recognised to be so because they are so much distorted and mixed with other mental contents in crossing the threshold of consciousness”

So, were my nightmares a premonition of disaster, garbled and distorted? I am inclined to think that they were. As for the name Shanks popping into my mind at the time Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, was that coincidence or clairvoyance? I can’t prove it, but I think it was the latter.

  1. John Godley was the Irish peer, Lord Kilbracken, and the story of his dream winners are related in this documentary from the 1970s, introduced by Colin Wilson: Leap in the Dark – Dream me a winner – Paranormal – Documentary – YouTube [↩]
Posted on by Gomery Kimber

The War Party – extract

‘Hypnos’, Wilhelm von Gloeden
This is Chapter Thirteen of GOMERY KIMBER‘s novel, The War Party, the second book of the Big Shilling trilogy. ‘Verity Clissold wants the whistle-blower terminated. But he’s taken refuge in a London embassy and not even the CIA can reach him. There is only one solution. Call in the most accomplished assassin in the world, the Big Shilling.’

After his shower, the Big Shilling lay on the bed and closed his eyes for five minutes. He’d opened the upstairs windows, and, along with the banal cacophony of the city – emergency sirens, incessant traffic, airliners sailing overhead – there came the sound of a party in one of the back gardens. Raucous Australians were preparing a barbie.

As he drifted in his natural element, that state of consciousness on the borderland between waking and sleep, BS could smell burning charcoal, and sensed anger. He ignored it, and concentrated instead on imagining the future, on imagining the best.

Fidel, eh? You shouldn’t have crossed me, you shouldn’t have crossed me, Fidel. You’ll get what for, you’ll get what for. You don’t suffer from hives, eh? You don’t, Del? Are you sure, my boy? Are you sure?

A few minutes later, raised voices disturbed his tranquil state. There was some kind of altercation underway outback. No longer drowsy, BS threw on some clothes and went to investigate.

From the window of the back bedroom he saw that the garden next door was thronged with people, not only Australians, but Poles as well. There were two barbecues pluming grey smoke, but food didn’t appear to be the main attraction for these young men and women: no, they had gathered to get slaughtered. A black plastic dustbin was brimming with ice and cans of beer, and the Poles were doing vodka shots. There was an amusing drinking game in progress as well: with the aid of a funnel and a tube, an Aussie girl in cut-off jeans and a bikini top was able to consume half a litre of lager in two seconds flat. The Big Shilling watched as the girl gripped the handle of an upright garden hoe and attempted to circle the implement as quickly as possible. To hysterical laughter, she spun out of control, and ended up on top of a heap of half-naked men.

It gave the Big Shilling an idea. Seeing that girl and the hoe, and the smoking charcoal and the booze, it gave him an idea.

‘Soma,’ he said, delighted, ‘polar. The goddess naked, surrounded by flames, her hair loose, wearing a necklace of skulls, and dancing on the still body of Shiva.’

The secret ritual. Why not attempt it? Why not indeed? The powers would come to him. He would have powers. Now, that would be something to put his biography, wouldn’t it, eh? Powers? Yes, it would.

‘This is not fair,’ the Big Shilling heard someone call plaintively from above. ‘This is not right, or fair.’

From the garden there were a variety of replies:

‘Stop your whingeing, mate.’

‘It’s the Owl Man, woo-woo!’

‘Come and have a beer, mate.’

‘Let your bloody hair down for once and have a laugh.’

The Owl Man, thought the Big Shilling leaving the bedroom, how interesting. He went up the narrow stairs to the second floor. The door to the balcony was ajar, and he could see the painter of owls leaning over the parapet, appealing to the good nature of the pissed partygoers below.

‘Peace and quiet, that’s all I want, a little bit of peace and quiet,’ said the young man. ‘You said there would be no more noisy parties. But all right, if you are to have a party at least let it not go on till the early hours – please?’

‘All right, mate,’ said the biggest of the Aussies, ‘no worries. We’ll call it a night before eleven.’

‘Thank you, Brandon,’ said the Owl Man, as though he actually believed what the rugger-bugger had said. ‘I’m going to go out now, so you can make as much noise as you want.’

‘Yeah, see you later, mate,’ said Brandon, sarcastically. ‘Remember to stand well back from the platform edge, won’t you? Don’t want you throwing yourself under a train.’

‘Brandon,’ chided a couple of the girls, but their voices were submerged in the general laughter.

The painter of owls turned away, brushing his unkempt chestnut hair out of his eyes, eyes which spoke of pain and confusion and angst. ‘Swine,’ he muttered, ‘why can’t they leave me alone?’ Then he saw the Big Shilling, who had been observing him from the shadows, and started. Amused, Shilling raised a hand in apology, but the boy was gone, scurrying inside like a rabbit down a hole.

After observing the party further, particularly the girl with the hoe, the Big Shilling went downstairs and finished getting dressed. He was planning a night out as well, and as he dressed, he sang himself some Sinatra, some Frankie, even going so far as to perform a few dance moves. But the noise from the garden put him off his stroke.

‘Better not keep me awake tonight, Brandon,’ he murmured. ‘That wouldn’t be a good idea, Brandon. Eh?’

When he was done, he collected the bag with the painting, and went downstairs. He was locking the front door when he noticed the Owl Man coming down the steps next door.

‘Evening,’ said the Big Shilling, not too loudly. ‘Sorry if I startled you.’

The Owl Man again looked startled, and it was obvious that he really didn’t want to be forced to converse.

‘It’s all right,’ he mumbled, before lowering his head and setting off down Sundheim Street, shoulders hunched, his hands in the pockets of baggy, paint-stained brown cords.

The Big Shilling took his time following, not wanting to spook the young man further. But it soon became apparent that their destination was the same: Notting Hill Gate tube station. The Owl Man went through the turnstile, while Shilling went to the window to buy a Lobster card from a West Indian. He paid in cash, two twenty-pound notes, and admired the artistry of the black lady’s nail technician which earned him a shy smile.

Once on the eastbound platform, which was practically deserted, he encountered the Owl Man again. They stood well apart in the tunnelled heat, Mr Shilling relaxed and smiling, the Owl Man fidgeting in a threadbare tweed jacket, pacing up and down aimlessly, never calm, never still. Three minutes later, they boarded the same Central Line train. And both got off, eight minutes after that, at Oxford Circus. On the busy escalator, with its faint breeze of lukewarm air, Shilling stood behind him. The Owl Man glanced back, nervously.

‘Are you going to see Aunt Mimi?’ Shilling asked him.

The Owl Man nodded gravely.

‘Me too. She owns both houses, does she?’

The Owl Man nodded again. The Big Shilling climbed up the escalator until he was two steps in front of him. Since the Owl Man was stooping, they were at about eye level. Shilling pointed a finger at him.

‘You’re a painter,’ he said.

‘Not a very good one.’

The answer was immediate, and, Shilling decided, characteristic.

‘I’ve got a painting you might like to see, in my bag.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘It’s by probably the greatest British painter of the twentieth century.’

The Owl Man’s interest was piqued. ‘Bacon?’

The Big Shilling smiled. ‘The one and only Francis,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Geoffrey.’

‘Well, Geoffrey, I’m very pleased to meet you, eh, very pleased indeed.’

They reached the top of the escalator and proceeded, side by side, to the exit.

‘Have you really got a painting by Bacon in there?’ asked Geoffrey, boyishly.

‘As God is my witness,’ said the Big Shilling with solemnity.

Geoffrey’s eyes goggled.

‘Lead the way or lead astray,’ said Shilling. ‘I’ve never been to Mimi’s club before.’

‘Haven’t you? I think you’ll like it. It can get quite busy on a Saturday night. Auntie is always there. It’s hot, isn’t it? I’m rather thirsty.’

‘Are you going to speak to her about Brandon?’

Like a child, Geoffrey’s emotions immediately revealed themselves in his facial expression. Now he was anxious again.

‘Not sure there’s much point,’ he said. ‘I’ve mentioned the parties to her before, and she talks to them, she does, and it’s a bit quieter for a day, or even two, but then it goes back to the same way it was before.’

‘Well, maybe I’ll have a word as well. I’ve just moved in, you see, and I don’t want to listen to a racket from next door.’

‘Would you?’ said Geoffrey, hopefully.

‘In fact,’ said the Big Shilling, ‘I’ll probably be having a word with Brandon myself, hey?’

‘Oh, I see. He’s a nice chap really, just likes to let off steam. They all work jolly hard, you know, twelve hour shifts six days a week. At least I don’t have to. I mean I can’t, really.’

By now they had exited the station and were heading into Soho. The hot streets of the megalopolis were packed and rammed, and Geoffrey kept getting in other people’s way, and had to dart and skip to keep up with the Big Shilling who ploughed through the throng in his usual energetic manner, letting others get out of his way.

‘Are you a painter?’ Geoffrey said suddenly. ‘I mean if you don’t mind my asking.’

‘No, I’m not. You could say I’m a psycho-therapist.’

‘Oh,’ said Geoffrey, ‘are you? I see. That must be really fascinating.’

The Big Shilling guessed that young Geoffrey had had more than his fair share of dealings with the psychiatric and psychological professions, and really didn’t want to be reminded of it.

‘You know, I think I’ve changed my mind. I might just go and get a coffee somewhere, or go for a walk, or something. Or . . .’

But the Big Shilling didn’t stop moving, and the indecisive Geoffrey was forced to keep moving as well.

‘And miss out on the chance of seeing a Bacon that has been out of the public eye for over thirty years?’ Shilling said, smiling amicably. ‘Come on, Geoffrey, I’m new in town. Everyone needs a friend.’

‘I suppose they do. Are you American, by any chance? I mean, your accent, sorry, can’t quite place it.’

‘No, I’m a cosmopolitan, Geoffrey my boy. I’m a citizen of the world.’

Geoffrey smiled shyly.

‘Oh, all right then, you’ve convinced me,’ he said, and pointed up the street. ‘It’s not very far now, up there on the left. Glasp Mews, it’s called. Oliver Glasp was a painter. A bit like Van Gogh, in fact. Do you know him? It’s busy on a Saturday. That’s why I only come on Sundays, or Mondays sometimes. Aunt Mimi doesn’t like it if I keep myself to myself. She says it’s not good for me to spend so much time alone.’

Geoffrey was right. The New Colony Club was busy. In fact, it was standing room only, but at least there was air-con, as advertised on the torched flyer. At the top of the stairs, after by-passing the bouncers and negotiating the foul-mouthed greeter, Geoffrey held open the door, looking inside in what was almost despair. The Big Shilling ignored him, running an amused eye over the signs instead: No vaping. It is against the law to smoke in these premises. This is a gay-friendly space – respect it. We are a member of Soho Door Watch. Anybody found using or dealing illegal drugs will be banned for life and the police informed. On and on they went, the rules and regulations. Yep, the New Colony Club might have been as busy as the old place Shilling remembered, but it could not have been more different.

‘Come on, Geoffrey. Piss, or get off the pot,’ he said, encouragingly, and pushed the young man through the door.

‘Are you a member?’ Geoffrey asked him, looking surprised. ‘If not, I can sign you in as my guest. It’s cheap to join, just a pound for life membership.’

The Big Shilling laughed. ‘Anyone can join, eh?’ he said. ‘No distinctions anymore. The inclusive economy, eh? Well, Mimi invited me in. I don’t need to be a member.’

But Geoffrey couldn’t hear what he said because a noisy group of Tamils or Sri Lankans was politely pressing around them, ferrying drinks from the bar. The Big Shilling walked through them, tugging Geoffrey along by the hem of his disgraceful tweed jacket. Have to take him to my tailor. Have to, eh?

‘Sorry,’ said Geoffrey, ‘so sorry. I do beg your pardon.’

Eventually, the crowd grew too thick to penetrate. After a moment, Geoffrey tapped the Big Shilling faintly on the shoulder.

‘Sorry, Mimi’s over there.’

‘Lead the way, Geoffrey, or lead astray. I can’t see a thing from down here.’

So Geoffrey led the way, inching between people, apologising, over and over again.

‘The Owl Man cometh,’ the Big Shilling heard Mimi say, and not in a friendly fashion.

‘Hullo, Auntie!’ Geoffrey cried. ‘I’ve brought a friend.’

Mimi was perched on a stool at the end of the bar, drinking gin. She did not deign to look at the puppyish young man, so her face was in profile and the Big Shilling was reminded of the famous optical illusion of the pretty young maid and the old hag. In profile, like the tips of a crescent moon, Mimi’s nose and chin arced to meet each other. It was only when she turned her head that she looked younger, and much more attractive. Now she saw him and, as though a switch had been thrown, her expression changed from frosty to delight.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘so this is your friend, Geoff! Why didn’t you say?’

‘Yes, er,’ said Geoffrey. He didn’t know the Big Shilling’s name and was too shy to ask.

‘Hello, Mimi,’ said Shilling.

‘How lovely to see you! And you’ve met the wonderful Geoffrey. So nice to be neighbourly, isn’t it?’

‘Er,’ began Geoffrey, ‘Mimi?’

‘What is it, dear?’

‘Well.’

‘Silly, it’s not your housemates been bothering you again?’

‘Geoffrey?’ said the Big Shilling. ‘Mimi? If I may, I think I can take care of this, eh. I’ll just have a little word with Brandon and sort it all out.’

‘Would you?’ said Mimi. ‘I’d be so grateful. You see, I have, in the past, but I think Brandon would respond better if . . .’

‘Say no more, Mimi,’ said the Big Shilling, sick of the sound of duplicity. The woman punched taxi drivers in the head, she could certainly cow a cretin like Brandon. ‘Allow me. Now, on the way over here I promised young Geoffrey a look at a painting.’

The Big Shilling pushed empty glasses out of the way with a forearm and laid his bag on the bar.

‘It’s by Francis Bacon,’ explained Geoffrey.

‘What!’ said Mimi.

‘Oh dear, sorry. Did I spoil the surprise?’

‘You’ve spoilt nothing,’ Shilling assured him. ‘First the photographs, eh? As you know, Francis didn’t like to paint from memory, let alone from life. He preferred to work from photos. These were taken by Carl Castering. You both know Castering, don’t you, the infamous thief and drunkard? Have a look, Geoffrey. Go on, open the envelope, it won’t bite.’

The young man opened the envelope with some reverence. The Big Shilling awaited his reaction.

‘No,’ he said. ‘This is you. Isn’t it? It’s you, when you were younger. I mean, is it? Yes, it is. Good Lord.’

‘What’s going on?’ asked Misha Bent, appearing from a mirrored door.

‘Bacon,’ said Mimi, excitedly taking the photos from the Owl Man. ‘Bacon.’

‘Uh?’ said Misha.

‘You’re a philistine,’ said Mimi, scathingly. ‘He’s a philistine, ignore him. Look at these, they’ve been retouched.’

‘By the master himself,’ said Shilling.

‘Oooh,’ said Mimi, ‘don’t keep us in suspense, I can hardly stand it.’

‘All right,’ said the Big Shilling, bringing out the painting, ‘feast your eyes, lady and gentlemen.’

He held up the master’s work for them to examine. It was Misha Bent who spoke first.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘Bacon. Now I know who you mean. It’s the guy who did them screaming popes.’

‘Maybe he’s not so stupid,’ said Mimi, in passing. ‘Oh my God, is it real? Tell me it is.’

‘It is,’ said Geoffrey, reverently. ‘No one else could paint like this. The photos are obviously Castering.’

‘You know your art, my boy,’ said the Big Shilling.

‘I should hope so,’ Mimi interjected.

‘Big, contrasting blow-ups,’ said Geoffrey, ‘showing every pore and blemish.’

Overjoyed, the kid’s face gleamed with excitement.

‘That’s right, Geoffrey,’ said Shilling. ‘Hey, I’m proud of you, eh? You come alive, eh, you come alive when you’re in the presence of genius.’

Geoffrey blushed and briefly hung his head, a big smile on his boyish face.

‘Is there any label or a gallery mark on the back?’ asked Mimi, rubbing her hands together.

‘There’s a label,’ said Shilling, ‘but it was never exhibited. Francis gave it to me. He told a lot of people he painted that he’d give them the painting, but he never did. With me, he was different.’

He turned the painting round so that Mimi could read the label: ‘Study for a portrait of R.H. 1971.’

‘1971,’ Misha repeated, taking out his phone.

‘Why was he different?’ asked Geoffrey, solemnly. ‘With you, I mean? Sorry.’

‘Well, Geoffrey, I was a different man myself back then. I was a tough kid who only knew how to talk with his fists. As you know, Francis was a masochist, liked to be beaten up. Well, back then I liked to hurt people. Don’t look so worried, my boy, that was then, this is now. Now I like to help people. And Francis, well, let’s say he decided it was best if he handed over the painting. Shortly after, I went away, so to speak, and we stopped seeing each other.’

Geoffrey was goggle-eyed at this. He leaned back, away from the Big Shilling, as though in awe of him, and regarded him from a greater distance. Someone else was goggle-eyed as well: Misha Bent.

‘Well, whadda you know? The little guy wasn’t snowing us,’ he said, showing the screen of his phone to Mimi.

Mimi raised her voice, because the unveiling of the painting and the photographs had earned them something of a crowd, saying, ‘It’s genuine, everybody, it’s genuine! A real-life Francis Bacon, here in the New Colony Club! Never before been exhibited.’

There was a clamour of excitement.

‘Drinks on the house, Mimi?’ called a wag.

‘Any more talk like that and I’ll bar you for fucking life,’ said Mimi, to a gale of laughter.

‘Here,’ said the Big Shilling, preening himself, delighted to be the centre of attention. ‘Take it. Put it behind the bar.’

‘Really?’ said Mimi. ‘I can hardly speak.’

Misha, however, was looking at the Big Shilling like he was the biggest dumb ass he’d ever met.

‘You can display it for a few weeks,’ the Big Shilling went on, ‘while I’m in town.’

Mimi took the painting. ‘If you’re sure, dearie.’

‘Sure I’m sure.’

‘You know how much the portraits of George Dyer made, don’t you?’ she said, eagerly. ‘There were three of them, but they made something like twenty-five mill at auction. This must be worth six or seven at least.’

The Big Shilling reached across the bar and gripped the painting by the frame. ‘Maybe I’ll change my mind, Mimi, if you keep crowing about how much it’s worth. Maybe I’ll change my mind, hey?’

‘Oh no,’ said Mimi, quickly. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’

The Big Shilling was looking into her eyes as she spoke and he could see she was furious at being criticised, and in her own club as well, in front of a crowd of sycophants she doubtless called her friends.

‘Here, Misha,’ said the Big Shilling, ‘hang it.’

‘You sure?’ asked Misha, his voice surly. ‘You better change your mind now, because once I hang something, it stays hanged.’

Shilling grinned at him. ‘Go get your toolbox, Misha.’

Misha grinned back at him, humourlessly, and took the painting from him.

‘Geoffrey, I want you to have the photos.’

‘Oh no, really?’

‘To remember me by, my boy. You know, Castering said Francis Bacon could be tender, generous, and cruel? Well, me, I’m just tender and generous, these days anyway. Mimi, give this young man a drink. Can’t you see he’s dying of thirst here? Give him a drink with plenty of ice. His face is all red, he needs to cool down.’

‘Your money’s no good here tonight,’ said Mimi with a sniff.

The Big Shilling winked at her and, unnoticed, slid a twenty into Geoffrey’s top pocket.

And with that, the Big Shilling slipped away. He slipped away through the gossiping crowd because the idiotPhones had come out and people were asking if he’d pose with his portrait, and what was his name again? Also, he had spied his quarry, the Latina diplomat, unlucky Loretta. He’d spied her in the mirrors behind the bar, drawn to the Bacon portrait like a moth to the flame.

At the door he turned and looked back through the throng. Loretta was speaking to Geoffrey the Owl Man who had a cold glass in his nervous hand. Loretta was asking if she could look at the photographs, and in his eagerness to accommodate her, Geoffrey spilled them on the floor. Quickly, he gathered them up and the girl examined them, clearly fascinated.

‘I am the power,’ said the Big Shilling to himself. ‘I cause it to happen. I imagine the best, and I create the future. My imagination is a godlike power, oh yes.’

Posted on by Claudia Gary · 2 Comments

Five poems by Claudia Gary

CLAUDIA GARY’s latest chapbook is Genetic Revisionism. She is also author of Humor Me (David Robert Books, 2006) and earlier chapbooks including Bikini Buyer’s Remorse and Epicurigrams. A writing instructor, health journalist, and composer of art songs and chamber music, she lives near Washington D.C. Her workshops at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) on Villanelle, Sonnet, Natural Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, and other topics are currently worldwide via Zoom. See pw.org/content/claudia_gary; follow @claudiagary

To a Mollusk             

Your life is not defined by an old story

in which, had you remained, you’d surely die.

Nor is it the palatial territory

you crave, create, secure, and occupy.

It’s rather the progression from before

to after, the formation of each new

foyer, parlor, salon, and corridor

in which your predecessor becomes you.

After the briefest stay you labor on,

building a spiral path that winds toward more—

inwardly smooth, pearlescent where you’ve gone

ahead, outwardly rough as ocean’s floor.

You lodge concealed within the earthly mire,

inhabiting your curly multiplier.

Message to Earthlings from Voyagers I and II    

               for Carolyn Porco, Voyager imaging scientist and Cassini imaging leader

Beyond some human lifetimes now, we’ve filled

your minds with data, pictures, dreams. Though twinned, 

our paths diverge, itineraries build.

Reaching the boundary of solar wind,

we rode its termination shock to sail

out into plasma space. While you continue

sorting our childhood photos, they grow stale.          

We bear vital statistics from within you —

your faces, body images and voices —

toward other stars, toward anyone who cares

enough to grasp your golden disk, your choices

of what they’ll see, hear, touch, assuming there’s

contact or empathy. Onward we fly,

your complex way to say hello/goodbye.

Catheter Ablation 

Two hours on the table

his body reclines

arranged as a path

            for cautery’s snake

            to enter his heart.

Clean current stamps

invisible scars

to settle his pulse.

            No longer two steps

            ahead and one back,

blood coursing forward

oxygen-laden

quickens his brain.

            The serpent withdrawn,

            he gathers his wisdom.

Credo-in-Progress 

I. Tough Customer

A stubborn teen, she needed to find out

what life was for, whether it had a point.

“I won’t go on, God, till you let me know.

So tell me now or set me free.”  She waited,

and God did both. “Brilliant!” she said. “You win.

I’ll give you a few years – but I’ll be watching.

You’re going to have to show me every day

that you’re still there”. She heard, or felt, a rumble

that may have been laughter, as if the deal

were sealed.

II. Anything to Declare?        

Presented with the light

at seventeen, she chose

to turn back, stay a while,

having seen that joy

kept an outpost here.  

            And what was hovering there?

            No prophets, true believers,

            or any kind of shadow.

Because her life is made        

of unexpected gifts,

she won’t turn one away

without looking to see

what light it holds. 

III. Her Invocation

Temperamental universe in whose purpose

(known, unknown, unknowable) we are swimming,

safe within your energy and your chaos:

make me your prism.

Becoming Buddhist 

The summer of learning to type 

I also slogged to the river with Siddhartha

and analyzed dreams in the shallows

as Dr. Sigmund dictated the code.

Thinking I knew their source

made dreams seem safe, but Hesse was a puzzle

suffused with Eastern sentiments, ideas

I seldom understood.

So when I awoke at night

with fingers typing “nothing” on the blanket

over and over, I blamed nihilism 

or adolescent darkness. 

But no: I was absorbing 

what to expect in order

to be content.

http://www.pw.org/content/claudia_gary / 

@claudiagary

Posted on by Stuart Millson

The battle for the soul of a Kentish village

Credit: Shutterstock
STUART MILLSON reports from semi-rural England

The earliest settlement to have occupied the ground that we now know as East Malling, Kent, is thought to have been Roman, although who knows what band of ancient Britons wandered and settled the area before the Legions and arrow-straight roads came to our shores. Fragments of stone from Roman buildings may be found in the fabric of the village church – the Church of St. James the Great; a Norman and mediaeval structure which itself occupies the site of an Anglo-Saxon place of worship. Criss-crossed by streams (which powered the village’s mills of the 19th-century) the present-day village is a place which still preserves a country identity, notwithstanding the traffic jams which often bring the narrow High Street to a standstill, rendering the 20mph speed signs redundant.

Climb the church tower of St. James the Great Church and you will see East Malling surrounded by its very own greenbelt: a playing field, known as the South Ward Playing field, complete with a rim of ancient trees and a brick-built cricket pavilion, dating from AD 1985; the Bradbourne estate, dominated by the Queen Anne-era Bradbourne House; and most importantly, the large expanse of experimental orchards and fields, created in the First World War as the East Malling Research Station – still a body of national importance and world-leader in the field of horticulture. And finally, close to the railway line (built in the middle of the 19th-century), the Cottenham Orchard – once a place of abundant fruit trees, but now – due to the trees being unattended for some 30 years – an unexpected Nature reserve. Today, the former orchard is trying to become a woodland. Rewilding itself, the orchard is now home to a new generation of walnut trees and oak saplings – all threaded together by dense blackberry bushes. A few fruit trees do manage to survive and the pattern of the orchard can still be discerned, but it is likely, in time, that any semblance of the well-ordered apple and pear trees of the past will completely disappear.

Despite this Kent village-redoubt possessing such a green hinterland, the area in which East Malling is situated is now facing major challenges to its identity as a part of the semi-rural England of the South East. I use the expression, semi–rural, because a significant part of the countryside of Kent exists almost as fragments, compressed by growing towns such as Ashford and Tonbridge, and falling to the gradual, oil-slick-like creep of housing in-filling – the effect of which can be seen along Maidstone’s so-called M20 corridor. Here sits East Malling and its beleaguered neighbours, Ditton, Aylesford and Larkfield – the latter long since sacrificed to the will of the planners.

Most recently, conservationists and residents have been forced to abandon their usually quiet lives in order to join the fight for two areas adjoining their village: the Forty Acre field, separating East and West Malling, and the former hamlet of Leybourne, a pleasant community but made up largely of the modern brand of typical 1980s’ out-of-town housing. And southwards from East Malling and Leybourne is the area of Broadwater Farm, a commercial fruit-growing area, but with many ancient landscape features, such as deep holloways – lanes which seem to take you into a tunnel through the earth. The high sides of the holloway (at Broadwater Lane) provide an instant geology lesson for passers-by: strata of ancient rock and ragstone, all held together by ancient roots.

Despite a valiant effort by the letter-writers and organisers of protest meetings, Forty Acres will fall to housing: a blob of 250 properties (no doubt, the cul-de-sacs and closes named after the trees and butterflies they have crushed). Broadwater, meanwhile, is intended to provide no fewer than 900 houses – a vastly disproportionate housing allocation even for a community in the South East. Described as “land north of Kings Hill” (Kings Hill being the local equivalent of Milton Keynes – a new town built on West Malling’s old RAF aerodrome) the development is, in fact, a major encroachment into the countryside and existing village and community life.

Often described by its proponents as bringing much-needed housing, the reality is that the four or five-bedroom houses that will fill up the fields of the South East offer little or no provision for local families, workers or younger people who depend upon non-London wages. The over-development of the South East will, instead, absorb the large numbers of metropolitan dwellers, understandably eager to leave behind the congested suburbs and sprawl of Greater London, but who – in heading for the relative security of the Home Counties – bring with them the very conditions they wished to escape. And there is a rootlessness about the ‘new-build’ areas: a sense of a suburbia, suddenly planted in country fields – quite different from the slow growth of a small hamlet to the size of a large village, an organic process that barely registers on the consciousness of the local people from one lifetime to another.

The disappearance of the traditional contours of the landscape beneath the new suburbia also empties a place of an element less easy for the developers and council planners to understand: the spirit of a place. In East Malling’s case, this is the legacy of the ancient (and now extinct) Twisden family, whose names are carved into the memorials of the church in which they worshipped since before the Civil War. Then there is the First World War officer, married at St. James the Great on an early summer’s day in 1917, but whose tragic death in the last year of the conflict is commemorated on the church’s north wall; and then, just outside, over by the last-surviving pub in the village, the traces of the 18th-century estate which continues to remind us, emphatically, how the village belongs to Kent, to England – and not to the faceless world of a housing deluge threatening to obliterate the character of our countryside, forever.

Posted on by Christopher Sandford

Charlie Watts, 1941-2021 – the solidest Stone

Credit: Terry Murden/Shutterstock
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD salutes the most grounded member of the Rolling Stones

There can be few terms in the English language more debased than ‘rock star’. Nowadays, it seems, the press makes a fetish of every halfway plausible such chancer to appear over the horizon, regardless of whether their art will endure, or their generally slim recorded oeuvre instead be among the detritus one eventually takes to the nearest Oxfam shop. But the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died on 24 August aged 80, truly merits a place in the pop pantheon. He wasn’t just an original among the standard tub-thumpers of his profession. He was unique. Back in 1963 the Stones’s first manager, Eric Easton, fastened on the essential thing about Watts, which was that he was “totally unpretentious” and “perfect at his job”. Those same two qualities would remain intact for the next 58 years.

It was a curious path that took the impeccably polite, suave young drummer into a group that were to hear themselves described as ‘morons’ by a High Court judge, and to read newspaper accounts citing their UGLY LOOKS! UGLY SPEECH! UGLY MANNERS! among other unattractive characteristics. Watts, born on 2 June 1941, grew up in and around Islington, north London, at a time when the area was still a byword for urban decay rather than the spiritual home of Britain’s left-wing intelligentsia. His father, also called Charles, was a van driver for a precursor of British Rail, and his mother Lilian had been a factory cleaner. “He’s always been a good boy”, Mrs. Watts informed the press in 1967, the year of the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request:

Never had any police knocking on the door or anything like that. And he’s always been terribly kind to old people. He was always a tidy dresser. That’s why I get nonplussed when he’s called ugly and dirty. When he’s home you can’t get him out of the bathroom.

Ten years later, Watts’s father remained equally perplexed by his son’s public image, especially because Charlie (who never learned to drive) still came up on the tube every Friday night he possibly could, “with a lovely fresh cake for me and his Mum”.

Watts himself was later to remark,

Part of my problem was that I was never a teenager. I’d be off in the corner talking about Kierkegaard. I always took myself too seriously, and thought Buddy Holly was a great joke.

And it’s true there was something a bit melancholic about the London lad with the long, Buster Keaton face who only ever wanted to read about cowboys or play the drums. He acquired his first kit at Christmas 1955, after at least a year of practicing nonstop on his mother’s pots and pans. At 18, Watts had only one ambition, which was to somehow find himself at Birdland in New York, wearing a hipster suit and sitting in behind the likes of Stan Getz or Miles Davis. Instead, he drifted in to a smoke-filled suburban London blues club one evening, to be confronted by the embryonic Rolling Stones. They courted him for about a year before he agreed to join, and even then he contained his excitement. The Stones’ roadie and sometime piano player Ian Stewart remembered that he’d simply driven up to the Watts’s front door one night in his van. “I said to Charlie, ‘Look, you’re in the band. That’s it’. And Charlie said, ‘Yeah, all right, then, but I don’t know what my mum’s gonna say.’”

In March 1971, the Rolling Stones began a short tour of Britain prior to their taking up residence in the south of France. To this day there are different views of the primary motivation behind the group’s decision to embark on an extended Somerset Maugham-like exile on the Riviera. Keith Richards would long rue the fact that “the Establishment – a lot of fuckin’ judges and politicians – kicked us out of our country”, while others believe that Keith’s ire might have been better directed at the Stones’ highly paid business managers for allowing the band to run up an unpayable debt to the Inland Revenue and thus necessitating a period of non-residence in the UK. Either way, there was a so-called ‘farewell tour’ to mark the occasion. Everyone’s parents came to the final show at the Roundhouse in London. Mick Jagger was later forced to admit that “It was weird wigglin’ around in front of me mum”, and that the general atmosphere of the night had been “crazy – everyone was out of their brains on dope”. Against this debauched backdrop, Charles and Lilian Watts sat together in the front row, wearing their Sunday-best clothes, and courteously handed round biscuits to their neighbours. You could see again how their boy Charlie might have developed into the personality he did.

Amidst all the surrounding Stones-related tales about Mars Bars, drug busts and Margaret Trudeau, Watts remained the calm eye of the storm. He bought the former Archbishop of Canterbury’s country home in Sussex, raised sheepdogs, and collected American Civil War memorabilia. He was the politest man in rock music. Once, in Detroit, a record executive named Mo Schulman invited the drummer up for a drink in his hotel suite, which was awash in champagne, caviar and an impressive variety of recreational drugs. When Schulman was then urgently called away on business, he affably told his guest to help himself from the display. “Anything you want”, he stressed. Charlie took a bottle of beer, leaving both a five-dollar bill and a polite thank-you note on the counter. A few years later, again on tour, the Stones were living it up one night in the pinball room of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion with its underwater bar and hot and cold running Bunnies. Charlie took one look at the Satyricon-like scene, rolled his eyes, said, “Uh-oh, this is star situation”, and retired alone with a good book.

I saw this same unaffected modesty for myself when Watts once quite unnecessarily wrote to thank me for a small cricket-related gift. His actual handwriting was always a bit of a challenge, but the signature was clear enough. It read “Charlie W”, or possibly “Charlie R” (his middle initial), followed by a pair of brackets, in which he neatly inserted – as if his current occupation might not be generally familiar – “Of the Rolling Stones”.

Watts was always the steadying influence of a band that often seemed to be on the brink of a messy, Beatlesque breakup. For large parts of the 1980s, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were united only in their mutual affection for the dapper, self-effacing man doing the locomotion behind them on stage. Richards called Watts “the secret essence of the whole thing”, and “the perfect drummer for the material”. Watts’s light touch and crisp, jazzy sensibility distinguished some of the band’s most iconic songs. Sitting impassively at his minimalist kit, he lit the fuse to ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Honky Tonk Women’, ‘Brown Sugar’ and many others. Variety once wrote of him on stage, “He looks like the mild-mannered banker who no one in the heist movie realizes is the guy actually blowing up the vault.”

That’s not to say Watts was ever a pushover. He may have been the most genial of all rock musicians, but there was no way he was going to let the buggers tell him what to do. In the winter of 1984, the Rolling Stones and their sundry friends and aides convened for a few days in Amsterdam, not so much to make new music as to take advantage of the Netherlands’ uniquely generous tax provisions for those entities at least notionally based in the country. Following a lengthy presentation by the band’s business advisers, Keith Richards apparently felt the need to take Mick Jagger out on the town and get him drunk. The latter’s usual transition from gregariousness to mindless exuberance was abnormally swift. A blotto Jagger returned to the group’s hotel in the early hours of the following morning. At that stage he made the decision to pick up the phone to dial Charlie’s room, and to then rashly refer to him in the course of the ensuing conversation as “my drummer”.

At that Watts got up, showered, shaved, dressed in a Turnbull and Asser shirt, silk tie and three-piece suit, went downstairs, seized Jagger, and punched his lights out. “It was like a scene in a movie”, Keith Richards later said of a room containing 30 or so well-oiled musicians and their friends. Anyone familiar with The Island of Dr Moreau, with its apes and dogs surgically turned in to semi-human form, has only to think of these same fauna dressed in 1980s pastels to get a bit of the flavour. The band’s ever-present security crew froze in place – nobody seemed quite sure what the protocol was for separating one Rolling Stone from another – leaving Keith himself to grab Mick as he “landed on a plateful of smoked salmon and slid along the table towards the window”. Richards later remarked that he had been moved less by humanitarianism per se than by the fact that Jagger happened to be wearing his own favourite silk jacket at the time. His intervention possibly saved Sir Mick from being defenestrated into the canal below, but its real motivation was to “stop my gear being ruined”.

“Don’t ever call me your drummer again”, Charlie observed on his way out. “You’re my fucking singer.”

On another occasion, in 1992, Watts emerged from a period of seclusion to record his own big-band album, broadly in the style of Cab Calloway, which he promoted by a short American tour. Sitting behind his kit for a show at New York’s Blue Note club in his immaculate zoot suit without removing his jacket or loosening his tie, it was hard to remember that this silver-haired gentleman was the drummer in the world’s most notorious rock and roll band. A night or two later, the ‘silent Stone’, as he was billed, was to have appeared as the musical guest on NBC television’s Late Night with David Letterman. This highly coveted spot would have exposed Charlie and his album to an audience of some six million potential customers, but it came with an important condition. In keeping with NBC policy, the show’s in-house band would have to accompany him. The subsequent discussions had not proceeded far before it became apparent that Charlie would not be open to this arrangement. Minutes before the programme’s scheduled air-time, he left the building with a muttered “Sod it” and wandered off alone into the warm New York night.

 In 2014, Watts became the first rock star to celebrate a golden wedding anniversary. He married his childhood sweetheart Shirley Shepherd when they were both in their early twenties, and the couple remained together to the end. In later years the Wattses lived on a sprawling farm in north Devon, which they shared with a stable of 23 Arab horses and several dozen cows, sheep and dogs. ‘The squire’, as he was known locally, could sometimes be seen walking in a waxed jacket and gumboots around the nearby village of Dolton, unmolested by the few residents who associated him with the Rolling Stones.

While Shirley tended to the farm, Charlie was content to sit inside listening to jazz records or watching old cricket videos, a routine he sometimes varied by perching, in motoring cap and goggles, behind the wheel of his stationary 1937 Lagonda Rapide. When compelled to go on tour with the Stones, he typically assumed the air of bemused detachment that was as much a part of the whole spectacle as Mick’s rooster-on-acid gyrations or Keith’s laconic riffing. For years, Charlie enlivened the experience of clocking on and off for group rehearsals by the expedient of hanging an old-fashioned shop’s ‘Open’ or ‘Closed’ sign in front of his kit. Drummers, like goalkeepers, are a bit different.

The Stones’ final public appearance with Watts was a filmed segment for the first We’re-all-in-this-together Covid broadcast in April 2020. Seated on his living room floor, Charlie played along on a spirited version of ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’, drumsticks in hand, using a trio of musical storage cases and a nearby couch for percussion. It was an effortless, funny, and musically deft performance, and absolutely right for the occasion. Only the drummer in the world’s greatest rock band, it seemed, might not wish to keep a set of drums at home. Somehow that summed up the man.

Posted on by Liam Guilar · 1 Comment

Chapter 4 – Vortigern and Hengist

This is Part 4 of LIAM GUILAR’s almost completed epic of Britain. Chapter One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two and Three in The Brazen Head

The story so far: 449 AD in the Roman province of Britannia. The Legions have long gone and raiders and civil war are becoming endemic as central authority breaks down. The Vicarius, de facto ruler of the province, is dying and about to appoint his successor. There are only two candidates. Adolf of Gloucester has been sent North (See chapter three); Vortigern has been sent south to hire three shiploads of Germanic warriors who have arrived off the coast.

You can read more about Vortigern, Hengist and The Legendary History1 at www.liamguilar.com.

1. Old Friends?

What Vortigern wrote in his report

There are three ships,

60 fighting men,

all experienced.

They have a British Latimer  ((In Laȝamon’s time a latimer was a translator, the term is anachronistic here))

called Keredic.

I have made the standard deal.

What happened

From London, along Watling Street towards Canterbury

in easy stages for his infantry. Crossing the Medway,

he had left his officers billeting the troops

ridden the short distance to this estate

for the comfort of time

spent with someone he could almost trust.

Aurelianus was old-school.

An imperial patrician of

impressive pedigree.

Perhaps more honest than the rest,

but generations of his family

had enforced the rules

they were happy to ignore

then wondered why no one

respected their authority.

They had dissolved the distinction

between ‘legitimate behaviour’

and ‘corrupt self-interest’.

If he were appointed Vicarius,

that line was his to draw

and to enforce. But for now, imagine,

two old friends in an autumn evening

as the light softens and the air begins to bite.

In a tidy garden by the water feature,

sipping imported wine and reminiscing.

The abrupt shifts, unfinished statements,

allusions no one else would understand.

Aurelianus could talk the hind legs off a donkey

but retirement has made him garrulous.

‘I heard you freed the slaves on your estate.’

Vortigern waits for the verdict.

Aurelianus sips his wine

settles in his chair, brushing at the midges.

He was a very junior officer on this man’s staff.

First post, a favor owed to somebody,

a debt paid in another lifetime.

The neat patterns of tidy fields

fall to a distant line of trees,

sprinklings of huts, lazy,

innocent smoke from cooking fires.

Voices rising towards them.

Some of the huts are rectangular.

‘They’re calling you their new Stilicho.

Hardly a compliment.

Why are you heading south?

Adolf’s Comes Litotes2 etc. etc.’

‘Did you ever fathom the Vicarius?’

‘No one has. I knew hard men

who stood their ground, outnumbered,

facing Attacotti …

                          …You’d think he was a bad dream

and then meet someone who was there and know that he was real.

No one’s threatened him since Locrin was in nappies.’

‘Constantine?’

‘A minor irritation. Swatted,

with your co-operation,

if rumors are to be believed. 

‘I didn’t kill him.’

‘The difference between you and Gloucester?

He wants the title; you want the job.’

‘Gloucester’s good.‘

Aurelianus pours more wine and waits.

‘I’ll say it if you won’t. He’s competent.

He’d make a fine quartermaster.

But well-meaning, hard-working, ordinary’s not enough.

Men who thought that power and influence

were theirs by right of birth or wealth,

who went to the right schools and joined the right clubs,

could rule the province when it ran itself

and competence was irrelevant. But now

they’re learning how inadequate they are

and talent, skill and application, regardless

of the family’s history, are what’s required.

Extra ordinary times highlight just

how ordinary our leaders are.

There was a time a clumsy oaf like Constantine

could rule the creaking province

and you and I, young Gorlois, Adolf, the Vicarius,

we’d sweat and bleed to make it work.

I saw a bridge collapsing once.

Dust first, then random bricks,

then a pillar, then the whole thing went.

The bricks are loose. It’s only time

before it all comes tumbling down.

The Vicarius will name you his successor.

The question is, will you accept?’

‘Only fools pick fights that they can’t win?’

‘Someone has to hold the pass.’

You have Germans on your estate?’

‘Hard working men.

I hear you’ve learnt their language.’

‘Slaves?’

‘No. I followed your example.

I give them land for service.

So many days a year to work my fields,

a pig from the litter, honey from the hive.’

‘And if the land you offer them

happens to be on the wrong side of that tree line?’

‘My estates spread. If my neighbors object…’

‘Your Saxons fight well.

No magistrate to hear complaints?’

‘Magistrates, yes. Magistrates with clout, no.’

‘There is no longer Greek nor Jew, slave or free?’3

‘All that bollix about Britain for the Britons.

Any man who rolls the dice, leaves his home,

and braves the crossing, recommends himself.

As for the women, they’re a race apart.

If I were younger, I’d have me a Saxon wife.

The sons we’d breed. How are your boys?’

            ‘Vigilant, on the coast, with troops,

watching the new arrivals.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

‘They’re bringing them to Canterbury.’

‘You’ll stay the night? No? Of course not. 

You’ll be there when the first man stumbles out to piss.

Which is as it should be.’

Torchlight, patient horses, patient grooms.

‘I’ll lend you a guide if you’ll send him home.

What’s left of the army will follow you

unless you put it on a ship to France.

You are the best man for the job.

There’s a rumor in the fields.

South of here they’ve called the county out.

An armed mob moves on Thanet.

You’ll meet them on the road.

You cannot reason with a man

who thinks ten thousand Saxons landed.

Ask him how many ships that would require

show him three keels pulled up on the sand

he’ll still call you a liar and claim

you hid the rest by sleight of hand.

Don’t bet on their obedience. 

Deference has been replaced with calculation.

We’ve lived to see the end of institutional authority.’

2. The job not the title

Said the man expanding his estates.

And if that were the last time that they met?

He thought of things he didn’t say,

wondering if they needed to be said.

Some debts lack their vocabulary.

And if that were the last time that they met?

Or if they met again as enemies?

Take the title, become the title.

The obligations of the office

before friendship or desire?

Overhearing the soldiers in the column

as they crunched their way south-east

in perfected order of march.

Yes Ma’am, he tells her memory4

I did take notes. I studied hard,

and learnt from men who knew their trade.

His officers about their business,

until the scouts returned and put an end to banter.

A mob in the road.

Britons, with farm implements,

rusty swords and hunting spears.

No match for a German warband.

A pot-bellied old man shouting at him in a reedy bellow:

‘A thousand Saxons pillage Thanet.

The county’s out and armed

we go to slaughter pagans.

Ride with us!’

‘There are three ships: sixty men.

They have come in peace.’

Spears and pitch forks twitching,

like reeds in the wind

as they ebbed towards the riders

then recoiled from the levelled spears.

The wide boys at the back began to chant

the usual obscenities and physical impossibilities.

Your father was a traitor too!

He never met his father!

His mother outdid Messalina.

She never knew which bean made her fart.

The mob seethes,

growing coherent in its shoaling.

stones starting to rattle and ping

as the men behind him tightened their ranks.

A spear wobbled towards him from the back.

Softly, for the form of it,

knowing nobody could hear.

‘This is your last warning:

obey the law, go home.’

The mob surged forward.

He shouted the necessary words.

 

3. Foederati

Bugger meeting on a beach and pandering to pagans.

Vortigern and his staff arranged the reception as a set of signs: 

nothing ornate, redundant, nothing ramshackle or improvised.

Everything tidy, trim, bright, like a well-honed killing edge.

Turned out in battle order. We are fighting men,

we strike a deal; wealthy enough to pay,

strong enough to crush you without effort.

Vortimer, his eldest son,

riding beside the walking Saxons.

They stack their spears.

He notes their care,

the bright, honed points,

their polished shields,

abundant swords.

The knives that name them

are to be left outside.

And God,

these were not the shabby discards time had spat up on a beach.

These were fighting men who didn’t need to strut.

With an army of these men he can hold the Northern Border

and use The Wall for landfill.

‘Who are you?

You are not the usual dregs

washed up on these shores.

Unless my eyes deceive me,

these are front-fighters

battle scarred and tested. These men

have stood their ground.’

Keredic translates.

‘I am Hengist, son of Wictgils,

son of Witta, son of Wecta, son of Woden.

This is my brother Horsa son of Wictgils,

son of Witta, son of Wecta, son of Woden.’

Vortimer, interrupting:

‘Who does he worship?

We are Christians here.’

‘I don’t care who he worships

if his god has a special hell

for men who break their oaths.

Where are you from?’

‘We have no home. We seek a lord

who will reward our service.’

‘Without a lord or land

a man is nothing to your people.

If you are exiles, speak now

and do not hide your crimes.’

The translator hesitates.

‘Exactly what I said,

and nothing more.’

Like little knife cuts.

This Hengist does not flinch.

‘Fierce, unrelenting tribal warfare

interrupted by long, bitter winters.

The sea rises, pushing us towards the Franks.

The Franks push us towards the rising sea.

So we drew lots and those who lost stayed home.

You will be our Lord.

We will astonish you.

And we will see our families again.

I have my name and sword.

I will keep both bright

and earn your gratitude.’

As if that were sufficient.

Later Vortigern thinks

one culture’s arrogance

is another’s confidence. 

He’s met this type before:

one more tribesman on the make

one more thug who kills,

and lets the paymaster decide who dies.

Who wants whatever the Empire has to offer.

But this man, this Hengist, is impressive.

There’s something godlike in his certainty.

If his self-confidence is tinged with madness

it’s the kind that founds dynasties and crumples empires.

 

4. Vortigern the King

The past begets us,

then grows old as any parent must.

Comes a time it cannot offer shelter.

Cannot satisfy our restless need

for whatever tomorrow calls to us.

It becomes the parent standing at the door

watching us set out on our own.

A private audience.

The map is still rolled out across the table.

Mad as a cut snake

and twice as vicious,

the Vicarius is folded into a high backed chair;

a skull balanced on a bundle of fine cloth.

Word is, he’s got less than weeks to live.

‘You took the oath to serve:

For the ashes of my fathers,

and the temples of their gods.

You gave your word,

under the watchful gaze of your ancestors

as custodian of their tarnished honour.

You stand by it?’

The Vicarius almost smiles.

Perhaps he winces,

old age raging his joints,

and twisting his mouth.

‘Of course you do.’

The old man starts to cough,

doubles and shakes,

a man beaten by time.

((See Chapter Three, ‘Adolf of Gloucester goes to the Wall’, The Brazen Head – https://brazen-head.org/2021/06/09/adolf-of-gloucester-goes-to-the-wall/))

‘He’d have wasted his time 

playing with the Empire’s carcass

rebuilding towns we can’t live in

maintaining roads that lead

nowhere we need to go.

What will you do?’

Poisoned as any half-expected chalice.

But there’s no time to say,

take this cup away from me.

‘The Saxons and Picts don’t worry me.

They’re a military problem.

The legions were victorious while they held their line.

Now that line is broken,

so many little princelings who’d rather claim a dung heap

than work their corner of a mighty empire.

Who don’t care if their kingdom falls tomorrow

as long they‘ve been ruler for a day.’

‘Talking won’t save you.

You can lay out all the reasons

for co-operation. Explain

why they always win if they’re united.

And still they will refuse.

Splintered, word will spread,

is spreading even now.

This is no longer Ynys y Kedeirn5

The land is good, the Britons weak. Soon

three hundred ships, not three will land.’

‘Even now the Picts are gathering.’

‘Gloucester didn’t mention this.’

His voice has the dirty edge of a blade

the executioner doesn’t clean.

‘He saw empty villages

met with no resistance,

assumed they were afraid of him.

The women and children

head to the heather

while the men are gone.

They know what we know.

Once they cross The Wall

there’s nothing to oppose them.

The princelings have to choose:

join in or be destroyed.

This is their moment.

If they succeed,

they’ll swarm over the midlands.

Death and misery on a scale

no Briton’s seen since Boudicca trashed London.‘

But Vortigern isn’t looking at the map.

The wind behind him mutes the stench

of so many unwashed bodies

but doesn’t dim the shaking

cacophony of their howling voices

as they race towards his waiting ranks.

Discipline beats numbers every time.

His voice, calm, saying, ‘Hold your lines.

Hold your lines and you can’t lose.’

The Saxons proud of his centre to break the first assault.

Afterwards, his horsemen in pursuit.

The horrors of a routed army,

hunted down ‘til the beasts of battle,

so glutted on their favourite food,

lie down and refuse to move.

Then the work of devastation

until there comes a day when no dog barks

between the stone wall and the turf.

‘We have a month before they move.

an inauspicious moon demands

their priests’ attention.

We’ve summoned the leaders of the North.

The messengers will bring them,

or their replies, to Lincoln.

I’ll meet Adolf and his soldiers there.’

‘Those who don’t respond?’

‘Once the Picts are defeated

these tyrants are no match for us.

Not one can field an army worth the name.

Most of them have twenty, fifty men at most.’

‘After you defeat the Picts,

take this Hengist and his men,

find the kinglet furthest north

who refused your call,

slaughter his people,

devastate his ‘kingdom’.

Become a terror to your enemies

and your friends’.

‘They make a wasteland and call it peace?

((Vortigern is quoting Tacitus ‘quoting’ Calgacus, an enemy of Rome))

‘Fear, the rack and a well-stocked gallows

guarantee obedience.‘

‘A frightened man is never loyal.

If he thinks you’re weak, or threatened,

he’ll run or rip your heart out.

The mess we’re in proves that.’

‘Unreason frightens you. It always has.

A man who’s wrong and disregards the facts,

short sighted, blinded by self-interest,

acts knowing that his actions are disastrous.

You might as well talk philosophy to your horse.

Don’t be misled by eloquent historians

who make the past seem rational.

Don’t think that your intelligence

will solve the problems you encounter.

You have to deal with people as they are.’

‘Better a dead friend than a live enemy?’

‘Yes. [Cough] Emphatically, yes.

Always.’

‘There has to be a better way.

When Gwendoline ruled this island,

a woman, with a baby at her breast,

or a man, with the red gold in his bag,

could walk the length of Britain unmolested6

 ‘…That old fairy tale.

Kill Gloucester before he murders you.

Then purge the council and the senate.

Survive or perish. That’s your only choice.

If you decide to rule, power has its logic.

You can no more change this system

than you can push the cart you’re sitting in.’

5. What may mon do but fonde7

In the early morning light,

on the inland wall,

now looking north,

London at his back.

His position ratified

by a wary council.

The old man’s pyre

still smouldering.

Could he have had the clarity

to understand his world was gone?

The ideology that held the empire; gone.

Comfort and sophistication; gone

and none of it was coming back.

For the next five centuries,

tiny kingdoms and their tyrant kings,

scrapping each other with armies

that would have made a Caesar laugh:

‘Surely they’re not serious?’

His map torn up to make a jigsaw,

the tiny pieces ‘kingdoms’

with their ragged edges 

lines of rivers, ridges, roads.

Glued together, then re-torn

as violent men compete,

for the right to strut a short day

as King of the Breadcrumbs.

In their draughty barns,

with their mead and alliteration

their imperial fantasies

their beautiful books and demented priesthood

whose love of learning and their God,

will give them strength to lecture

killers about a God of Peace.

He watches his soldiers prepare to march,

and Hengist’s men accumulate untidily.

The road leads straight to Lincoln

to the mustering of his army. 

There will be more than he expected

and less than he wanted.

But they will come to his name

not to some ornate Latin title

that would once have activated

a well-drilled, dutiful response.

What’s left is personalities,

rivalries, irrational animosity.

In place of public servants,

working for the public good

self-serving functionaries

asking ‘what’s in it for me?’

With greed its own event horizon,

and a life defined by its fulfilment

or frustration. Loyalty and obedience,

replaced with automatic calculation:

weighing effort against cost.

The empire was expert in legalised brutality;

whips regulation length, tortures itemised.

Four hundred years and not one independence movement?

After it stacked the corpses of its enemies

possessed their lands, erased their way of life

it offered their descendants the benefits of Empire.

From Persia to The Wall the grandchildren

of those it killed queued up to out-Rome Rome.

Beyond greed and fear, there are better reasons for obedience.

Britannia stood or fell on their discovery.

In retrospect, and there’s 1500 years of it,

it’s obvious he must lose

but he stands on the inland wall,

that faded coin in his hand8

planning to save his province.

  1. ‘The Legendary History’ is shorthand for the history of Britain that was being told in the 12th century. These chapters began life as an attempt to understand the version told in Laȝamon’s Brut. The Legendary History cannot be reconciled with modern understandings of the history of this period. Improbabilities, anachronisms and contradictions abound. I have not tried to tidy them up [↩]
  2. Count of the Saxon Shore. The Saxon Shore would include the area Vortigern is heading towards, while Gloucester has been sent North [↩]
  3. Vortigern is misquoting St Pauls’ letter to the Galatians [↩]
  4. See Chapter Two, ‘A Man of heart?”, The Brazen Head – ((https://brazen-head.org/2021/02/28/britannia-in-peril-an-extract-from-an-epic-of-britain/ [↩]
  5. ‘The Island of the Mighty’ [↩]
  6. Gwendoline’s story is told in A Presentment of Englishry, Shearsman, 2018 [↩]
  7. What can a man do but try? From Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain too sets out on an impossible quest and holds himself to an impossible standard [↩]
  8. An imperial coin worn smooth which he found in Chapter Two [↩]
Posted on by Ian C. Smith

Marooned in Van Diemen’s Land

IAN C. SMITH’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review , Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North.  His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide).  He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

I rationed precious pencil, notebook, checked the tideline, garnered flotsam from sea-wrack to supplement my meagre conveniences.  At dawn, arcing that cove, sliver of sunlight blessing water, wave-beat at my back, upwind of them shielded by giant stacks cloaked in orange, I shivered in slipped time.  Behind a bark windbreak they squatted, wallaby hunters sharpening stones, wrists slender, eucalyptus smoke in the cove’s tresses incense waft evoking ritual, piercing me, my beloved distant, with memories, loneliness.  Gutted ormer shells, mussels, glistened, tea-tree trembling in this constant offshore wind.  A woman lulled a child with breast comfort.  Working rhythmically, voices guttural in tribal certainty, fur-clad, festooned, sometimes chanting in harmony, they put me in mind of honour, tradition.  Hastening back to my makeshift camp around the shoe of the bay in sudden sunburst, fervid to record time, place, impressions, I gazed back across that light-blessed strand, the threnody of Roaring Forties water-wind-wash the only music still heard, this remembered from long ago.

Posted on by Ian C. Smith

Requiem for a recluse

IAN C. SMITH’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds, The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review , Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.

The board’s appearance beyond my high fence, though expected, startles, a braggart, brilliant interloper featuring photos touched with gold.  Former Calulu Post Office, it proclaims, High Ceilings.  Its festival of colour glows, warm inside and out, glory grapevine left unpruned for picturesque effect.  One of 3 Bedrooms lays bare where I rest my head to dream.  Detached Studio with Loft brings to mind a second-hand bookshop, old odour imbued.  Verandahs, Porches twists my heart with love as artless as these framed angles are artful.  Lots of Shedding conjures a wry verb.

Donkeys’ lugubrious faces peer into the lens, cue Chesterton’ poem from schooldays.  Big Caravan is actually small, tyres slumped.  Proximity to River, School Bus.  I know, I know.  2 Bathrooms, 2 Living Areas.  No mention of birds in the tall lemon-scented eucalypt on still mornings.  How shall I fare away from here when I can no longer return to gather windfalls under the espaliered pear, listen to the iron tattoo of rain on spring nights?

After WW1 these small paddocks fed three families.  Dread of discontinuity led to a hope the buyer might share my long-ago feverish dreams.  I have hung on alone here for too many years through flood and fire.  Historic Old Charmer, the brochure blares.  Ah! the throb of my days.  I am up for auction I jest.  Nobody laughs.

On inspection day strangers note the disused doorway where I notched the growth of boys shooting up like saplings, smirking locals take selfies before coloured glass, yak on phones.  Referring to my Detached Studio with Loft the agent whispers: Have you anything of value in there?  He had directed a slovenly man to where I cherished hours flanked by books.  Only to me, I reply, intended rueful tone sounding like the creak of an old boat slipping its moorings.  He has seen these mementoes: blue-tacked schoolboy art, loosened now, framed prints, among them a $10 flea market Raymond Wintz, sentimental, typical.  Of him and me.

I drove our Moke fast over the cattle grid, lickety-split, bunkety-crunch, foot poised above the brake, straight through the open doors of a former grain store that became my office, always stopping just before smashing into the wall where tyres gripped oil stains, where carpet now muffles the past’s rawness when we moved in, possessions piled in two vehicles, or was it three plus a trailer, grass unkempt, hum of insects, a wildflower forest hiding fences, our rescued dogs pointing towards freedom.  I remember that air’s intoxication, the future held at bay.

My son hefts furniture, scraping doorways, narrow stairs, exposing cracks.  Without archives these bared walls suggest echoes heard only by books and garage sale objets d’junk.  The cats, spooked by space, prowl, trip me.  With the donkeys, they shall be left with neighbours.  The jack snorts, restless, kicking behind his closed gate.

Night, windows wide, the soft thud of fallen fruit.  In the emptied morning my luminous digital clock shows no time, the power having briefly shut down.  The whole world seems stopped.  Then I make out the strain of a distant truck, laden, receding.

Posted on by Marcus Bales · 2 Comments

Stonehenge, Bottle, Loss – three poems by Marcus Bales

Not much is known about MARCUS BALES, except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, and his work has not appeared in Poetry or The New Yorker. His latest book is 51 Poems; reviews and information at http://tinyurl.com/jo8ek3r

Stonehenge

Here I am at last amid these stones

Watching as some hippie tries and fails

To hear the English tones or semi-tones 

From rocks once hauled a hundred miles from Wales;

Spiritually, I feel out-gunned

By others dancing barefoot, walking shod,

Or simply standing staring upward, stunned,

Imagining they feel some local god.

I still myself and reach both out and in

To feel the feelings they appear to feel.

The scent of grass, the light air on my skin,

But nothing seems to stretch beyond the real

From here and now to back to well before

The Saxons, Celts, or Normans came ashore.

Bottle

In 1815 Joshua Bales, as well-known 

As any artist’s model, was a handsome man. 

Double-jointed, slim, with muscle-tone

That artists loved to paint, he soon began 

His trips to France, where many more could see

His nimble poses, not least of which was on

“The Raft of the Medusa”, which won the Prix

D’Or in the 1819 Paris Salon.

Earlier, to earn his work permit,

He’d posed for the same artist in a glass

Container even he could barely fit

Inside – a painting lost to time, alas,

     So family lore’s the only way we know

     That Joshua fit the bottle of Gericault.

Loss

South from Starcross lies the Cockwood Sod,

The bay along to Dawlish Warren known

For sandy beaches. We’d walk past Cockwood’s squad

Of older houses built of rubble stone

Against the marsh beneath the Cofton Hill

On which we’d picnic from the hamper you

Prepared and I would carry. The path is still

A lovely walk alone. I’m making do.

The poet says that we will all live on

So long as we’re remembered. I recall

You every day, the summer’s fruiting antiphon

Of joyousness to winter’s coming pall.

     As you implored, I try to laugh and sing,

     But I cannot imagine any spring.