Villager, page 25
BILLYWITCH (1932)
My name is William Millhouse. I am not a remarkable or interesting man, but these are my memories. It is late in the day now, and I have decided to set them down, not because I believe them to be a record of a great or interesting life but because if I don’t, being survived by no living relative, I will take them with me to the grave. Maybe that is not such a great tragedy but within my life is the life of a place too, and I feel great alteration is afoot, and some of that life may soon be frittered and blown on the wind. There will be others who could tell it better and wiser than me, but I am not quite as simple a man as some have taken me for, and this is my story, or at least the parts of it I remember most clearly. In the telling, I do my best, with the knowledge that I might make mistakes and be victim to tricks of the mind, as all who have tried to recall and record the times they have lived through surely have been.
1862 was the year of my birth. The time was May, the sweetest of all months, and the hour was early. As my mother would later tell it, our cockerel, Old Percival, crowed his biggest crow, and the next moment I arrived, and henceforth I was known as ‘Cockadoodledoo’, then, within time, ‘Doodle’, and it was said by those close to me that the spirit of the ancient idiot cock was in me. I was always the first up in the morning, always experimentally pecking at morsels I shouldn’t. I tried in vain to reach for objects that were beyond me, springing up in a flapping, futile fashion. It was hoped that this habit would change once I reached maturity, but, since my height failed to progress much beyond five and a quarter feet, such hopes proved forlorn. My mother, Dorothy, did not shred words when irate with me, frequently hurling insults centred around my stature. She was a fast squall of a person, a busy knapsack full of sharp stones, constantly taking charge of all situations, as she’d had to since her own childhood, living with her own mother, Katherine. Katherine, who died shortly before my birth, had been feckless in character, a serving girl at the Big House who’d been put in the family way by her employer Joseph Bamford when she was just sixteen. Therefore my grandfather Edward, a seller of kitchen utensils and mousetraps, was not my true grandfather, just a kind man who had stepped in to save the face of everyone concerned, with the exception of himself. Though not from a farming background, Edward, being his mild and easily plied self, in his later years came into the ownership of a cow named Mumble, as an alternative form of payment from a customer who was unable to remunerate him for a set of pots and pans. In the evenings, Edward and Mumble would graze the long acre, Edward, holding a rope attached to Mumble, taking the same route each time: a circle past the church, over the back of Stumper’s Cross and along Riddlefoot Lane. It was from Edward that I learned about the clairvoyance of cows. Nowadays I have thirteen of my own and I continue to place trust in their judgement as forecasters of fortune and weather. A cow, as it gazes on you, steady and vacant, takes in more about the core of who you are than most folk imagine.
That Joseph Bamford is my real grandfather – though never a man I have ever thought of as my grandfather, in the way Edward was – means I have the blood of country squires pumping inside me, though I must say on most days that I do not feel it, and I do not sense that many who meet me suspect it within me. I am rarely dressed up to the dick and I pass quietly along the edge of most occurrences in the parish unnoticed, that being a feature of my size and my daytime habit of being clad in the hues of the earth and the stone around me. Some saw the way I would remain quiet around my schoolmates and elders yet talk in great depth to chickens, cattle and sheep and thought me maized as a brushstick but just because I am not a man of conventional learning it does not mean I am a fool. I have seen a lot happen here but always opted out of village gossip. When I bore witness to Mary, the wife of Oldsworthy the baker, cavorting with Thomas, the schoolmaster’s boy, in the orchard behind the church, my lips remained as tight as if they had been sewn together, and I mention the incident today only because both parties are long gone from this mortal coil. I learned a lot about the benefits of silence in my home environment, where an ill-chosen word in front of my mother could so readily lead to a ladle or saucepan flying towards your head. My father Henry, a quiet man, learned the same, and in our house it was not a bad thing to learn since, owing to Edward and his trade, kitchenware was a thing that was never in short supply. His seat at the kitchen table was in front of the cottage door and on warm days, when it was open, it was not uncommon for a traveller passing along the lane beyond to have to dodge a plate or spoon as it came spinning into their midst.
My father worked as a gravedigger at the church of St John. I never believed I smelt the dead on him, but an earthy odour lingered constantly around his skin and clothes, crusty and pungent, with an edge to it that made me squint when he kissed me goodnight. As he was ordered around at home he was ordered around at work, mostly by the stern vicar, Alfred Boyland, whose sermon on local sin had once infamously sent members of the congregation at his previous parish, Wickhampstead, running from the church in tears. ‘It’s not just about laying a body in the ground,’ my father told me. ‘Folks like things just so.’ When John Ludgate succumbed to cancer of the throat, the Ludgate family insisted that he not be buried on the south side of the churchyard, since over there had been recently interred Richard Cavendish, a rotund bully with whom Ludgate had been involved in a thirty-year feud over a prize hog. The bereaved, however, more often requested that the north side of the churchyard be avoided, since it was said that was where the Devil’s Door was located. As a child I searched and searched for the door, but was never successful in locating it. Some said black dogs had been buried there too, but my father was dubious of that and had never found any evidence in his excavations. When not with a shovel in his hand or being harangued by my mother, he hid in books, taking a great interest in the history of the moor, particularly its Bronze Age and Beaker relics and the unfortunate vandalism inflicted on many of them during the last couple of centuries. It saddens me that he did not live to see the excavation of the kistvaen near Trembling Hill mine, in which the remains of a girl, thought to be no more than fifteen years old, were found preserved in the peat, along with those artefacts her people had believed would see her safely into the next world: an axe, a necklace and a shawl, woven from a beaver’s pelt. It was his habit of a weekend to walk up there, along the old Lych Way, and he once remarked to me that when he did, he felt the presence of the dead more strongly than he had ever done in his working day.
It is a right handsome church, St John’s, here in Underhill, and as the child of one of its employed I came to know it with some intimacy. I did not like the fresh, slick tombstones – their cold blankness frightened me, and seemed like a hard stark statement about what was waiting for me in the great beyond – but the old stones, with their dimpled lichen tales etched all over them, always gave me comfort. When nobody was around, in the autumn evenings, and the air was smeechy from bonfires, I would sometimes get close and give them a proper big cuddle. I don’t know why I favoured this activity more on those autumn evenings with a new chill in the air but that was the way it happened. The building itself has a heavy appearance, even more so than most other churches in the area, a wider rim of granite being used close to its foundations, and it is said that this was a deliberate measure taken so the Devil did not carry it off to higher ground, as he had done with the little-visited St Constantine’s, whose ruins stand halfway up Underhill Tor. Over on the west side of the church is a yew tree of some 1,400 years in age and, for the first decade of my life, and the century preceding it, carcasses of the badgers and foxes that had been killed in the parish were left on the trunk, five shillings being paid to the successful hunter for a fox, half a crown for a cub, and a shilling for a badger. Mercifully I have no actual memory of this.
On the whole, I associated the church with feelings of warmth and benevolence. Other children in the village were most frightened by the Bird Lady carving on the font, in which a woman is crudely depicted, apparently about to do grievous harm to a man, while watched by her sisters and her feathery accomplices, but I always thought of the Bird Lady as a friend and many times had dreams of her watching over me. Like her, I possessed a great affinity with avian life. Whether or not this has anything to do with Percival, and the way I arrived into this world, I do not know, but to this day, blue tits and chaffinches are not shy about entering my kitchen. It is far from uncommon for me to arrive downstairs of a morning and find a song thrush perched on my ottoman. At the Underhill Fair in 1901, when a great gust of wind blew down the Duck Marquee, setting a melee of geese, ducks and hens flapping across the village green, many eyes – eyes that normally ignored my presence – looked immediately to me for assistance, knowing of my reputation. I caught four geese and a duck very easily, while Mrs Addlestrop from the tea room at Upper Wadstray showed great calmness in her handling of a large, vexed black cock. By this time Old Percival was long gone, although he had lingered for more years than had been expected. Many was the time that Dorothy would instruct me to check on him with the words, ‘Doodle, be going out to that hen house un see if that bird un snuffed it yet,’ upon which instructions I would promptly venture to the wooden enclosure where Percival roosted, peer in, ask of his health, and be answered with a croaky ‘Cwawwwk.’
My playground was Combe Woods and it was here that birdsong was most intoxicating, especially in May, that most colourful and bonny of all months, the month that I still believe is mine, by birthright. I could not imagine that the most talented symphony orchestra in all the land could come close to matching the melodies my friend Sarah Slatterley and I heard above us in the infinite emerald canopy as we amused ourselves on those stretchable afternoons. Sarah was possessed of a singing voice as pure and life-affirming as a blackbird, and, while I fail pitifully now in trying to recollect the voice she spoke with, the melodies that issued from her mouth are as fresh in my mind as they would be if I’d seen her just yesterday. Sarah was always in charge of the games we played in the woods, one of her favourites being Black Pig, in which I would hide behind one of the many large boulders in the woods and it would be Sarah’s task to find me before I leapt out, making tusks with my hands, running at her and shrieking ‘Black pig! Black pig!’ In her other favourite game, which she called Little Meg, it would be my job to build a bridge across the river for Sarah at one of its shallower points, using whatever material – rocks and branches, usually – was not too heavy to carry. I would place a chain of dog daisies around her neck and Sarah, being Queen of the River, would then stand on the platform I had constructed for her and wave to Her People, who I always imagined were Lilliputian and not completely of this earth. I do not know why the game was called what it was called, other than it was also the name of an old song Sarah used to sing very sweetly. One day, when we were out in the trees, she asked me, ‘Doodle, will you call me Meg, but only when we are here?’ so, because I would have sawed off my own right foot clean at the ankle if Sarah had asked me to, that was what I did, and it became one of the many little secrets we stored in the trees. Maybugs were often around as we lolled on the grass in Riddlefoot Meadow and we laughed at the noise they made, so loud and impolite that it seemed to come from the century ahead of us, or maybe that is just how I now think of it, now I am in that century. Billywitches, my father called them. Sometimes, as an evening chill stalked through the tussocks and raised pimples on our bare arms, Sarah pressed up close to me, and I felt a feeling I didn’t understand that was like syrup pulsing through me and that, while only being a foreshadow of a feeling I would feel as a fully developed man, was no less potent for it.
I could see nothing important in my future but Sarah’s face at times like these, framed by the soft honey of her hair, but I feared she was a girl whose yearnings stretched out far wider, far beyond me and this glade.
‘Doodle,’ she said, one especially fine afternoon, as we sat under the Black Tree.
‘That is my name,’ I replied.
‘If I told you something I have not told another soul, could I tell it to you, knowing you would keep it to yourself and it would never enter the ear of another?’
She had an oil beetle crawling across her forelock, but I did not want to sidetrack her, so chose not to mention it.
‘You could,’ I replied. ‘I promise it shall go no further.’
‘One day, I intend to go to Honiton, and France, and maybe even the Americas.’
It was from my father and Edward I heard about most of the legends of the moor: the black dogs and the piskies and the river sprites. Edward told me it had been many years since a flibbertigibbet had been spotted in the area but they were rife in his own father’s boyhood and, having learned of their reputation for frightening young maidens on dark lanes, I worried about what that could spell for Sarah once she made the transfer to womanhood. Because of this, I always insisted on walking her to her front door when we were out anywhere close to nightfall. Then there were the piskies to worry about, too. My father himself had never been tricked by them but Edward remembered a time when he was up the moor and the land seemed to slant half on its side as a great mist came down and every direction he walked in led him to the same locked gate, the air only clearing when he turned out his pockets. My mother dismissed this story as ‘pish and twuddle’, claiming that Edward had never had any sense of direction and could not be trusted, as a man who had once argued blind that Scarborough was in Cornwall.
I did not need to speak to my father to know of the story behind the stones on Trembling Hill, since it was common knowledge that each was a young girl who had been turned that way for the crime of dancing on the sabbath. Underhill has long nurtured a reputation amongst neighbouring parishes for breeding disobedient women and I have seen enough evidence with my own eyes to not doubt the reputation’s foundation. Many is the time that I saw a young lad from the village being led emphatically by the hand towards the woods by a member of the fairer sex, although it is seldom that I have seen the reverse. I often picked up an abandoned blouse or frock, corset or pair of breeches on my wanderings in Combe Woods. Houses being crowded places, where bedrooms were shared with siblings and even on occasion sheep and goats, more children than not were conceived under the stars. Our cottage, containing for many years just me, my mother, my father and Edward, was a relatively capacious anomaly, although my mother’s personality filled the space that would probably normally require six other persons of at least medium size. With each year she became more ornery, and with each year my father took another polite step back from asserting himself, perhaps hoping that it might placate her, when in fact it was an equation that seemed to make the opposite result, and finally he retreated so far back that he was entirely within his books and antiquarian concerns. It is from reading his diaries, and later his library, rather than any of my schooling, that I am able to put words on a page in the way you see before you now. He never missed an entry, and though some are rather mundane (‘grey rain, saw a strange horse outside Mrs Fitchett’s’), others are a document of alterations in the parish, the lores of the time, and his concerns about the frittering of our history in front of his very eyes. On 3 March 1871, he laments the vandalism of Hannaford’s Plob, the tomb of a fifteenth-century hunter, by local builders who repurposed the stones for new cottages on the moor’s north-east side. Later that month, he talks of watching a young couple in the village pass their newborn through the forked trunk of an ash tree, to cure the child’s nascent cough: a custom I have heard about from other sources but not seen evidence of for nigh on four decades. ‘Edward twisted fiveways insensible with drink,’ says the entry for 5 September 1883, and nothing more. ‘Solstice. Bilious. Coach to Newton,’ the diary is told on 21 June 1882. ‘Flowers for Dorothy. Not bright enough.’ By this point, the feared Alfred had passed away, being replaced at the pulpit by his son, Cedric, a far milder character and keen early student of photography. My father had a stout and rewarding relationship with Cedric, especially after – if memory serves right – my father saved his life by pushing him out the way of a falling gargoyle during a storm in 1887.
