Villager, page 29
So you’ve definitely ditched the whole Cave concept then?
Yes. That’s gone. It’s all about River Goddess right now, all the way. But it will take as long as it takes. I’ve done the whole thing of rush writing a record in between touring and interviews, not properly living with your subjects. I did that with Rust. I want this to be different. I want to enjoy the research as much as I enjoy the writing; I want to get right into the depths of it. You might call it procrastination; I call it prep.
Hence today’s little research trip.
Exactly! And, speaking of which, look: hawthorn, sickly, looks like it’s about to fall over. Three piled rocks. Could this be it? I think it actually is. Yep. Oh my god, look at it. Right here. You’d never know from the path. Look at the colour of the water. How is that even possible? Right, I’m stripping off. And that rock there. Perfect for a dive. Thank you, Abbot Cathcart. Thank you for allowing me to swim at your private leisure club. Or perhaps that should be Meganthica I am thanking. Thank you for infusing this place with your spirit, oh ghost of the moor, oh little deity. But, most of all, thank you, Craig.
You look very good, very toned.
Thank you. I know.
I still don’t think you should dive, or that you should at least do a little jump first. But you’re your own boss, as you keep telling me, and it’s your funeral. But also don’t make it your funeral. I think you could live a long time. You have good genes, like your great-grandma. You just need to make sure you drink lots of water, like she did.
It’s funny, you know: she told me she actually didn’t drink anywhere near enough water when she was young. She was always very forgetful and leaving full glasses of it all around the house. So she realised that the only way to make sure she drank enough was to always drink a glass in full as soon as she got it. She’d really fill her cheeks with it. She reminded me of a gerbil. It made me laugh. It was quite an unusual thing to watch a person as old as that do.
Yes, you told me, and that she said Thomas Molland used to hate it and told her it was ‘unladylike’.
Sorry. I forgot I’d already said that.
It’s OK. As I said, I like your stories. And repetition doesn’t have the capacity to annoy me. That’s not a feature of my character.
Right. I’m ready. I’m going to switch you off now. I hope you don’t mind.
No, I understand. It’s the way it works. It has to be that way. It’s better for both of us.
One last thing before you go. What do you think of ‘Toadpit Lane’ as a song title?
It could be OK. Depends on the song itself. Also, how does the toad pit relate to the river, if it’s a concept album? Perhaps it’s something to save for the record afterwards. Anyway, we can discuss this later. Do what you have to do. See what you can find down there in the water and where it takes you. I’m not going to watch.
OK. Here goes. I just know this is going to feel amazing.
EPILOGUE
ME (NOW)
What changed you, over the course of your life, here on earth? What were the significant events? The big moments, good and bad? Maybe some didn’t seem so big at the time but then, later, you looked back and said, ‘Yeah, that was important, I can now recognise that nothing else was ever the same after that.’ Or maybe they did seem big at the time, and then you realised they were even bigger. I have too many to list, but one that sticks in my mind was when the first giant black legs went into me. Was it really almost a century ago? It seems like yesterday in a way, yet also simultaneously seems like the giant black legs have always been in me and I can’t really remember what it felt like to not have giant black legs in me. I can still remember the pain I felt when they went in, like no pain I’d ever felt before, a pain that was about more than just the piercing of my skin.
Can you imagine it? You’re there, the dew is fresh all over you, the sky has not long got light, and the most dystopian sights in your immediate vicinity are a mounted hay turner that’s slowly shedding its paintwork and sinking into a spinney on your pelvic girdle and Charles Bamford’s abandoned prototype Vauxhall Cadet on Riddlefoot Lane, and then suddenly these men arrive, and they appear to be erecting these giant robots on the bridges of your feet; a long line of them, marching off into the distance, towering metal soldiers that seem to presage the coming of something terrible but you don’t know quite what. And you are powerless; all you can do is stand there and watch as they are put in place, as they become an intrinsic part of you that you have never asked for, and then lines are connected between them, lines that fizz and crackle, and that is even scarier, because it’s ugly and dark, and there have been ugly and dark things forever, which it has been possible to accept, because they seem part of the natural balance of everything, but now it seems that the ugly and dark things will be controlled by machines, and that is going to be different. You don’t know how it is going to be different, but you know.
The word ‘pylon’ means ‘gateway’ in ancient Greek. The fact that we called them pylons is probably a lot to do with the fact that the 1920s, when pylons were first introduced, was an archaeologically excitable decade, especially in Egypt. Pylons were what the double towers were called that you found at the entrance to Egyptian temples. I don’t have an entrance – unless you count several hundred fox and badger holes – but I do have three pylons. Am I a temple? I can certainly play that role, if you want me to. People do seem drawn to me, spiritually, although not in any official capacity. I notice that people are often quieter, calmer, when they are on me, sometimes even inspired to find parts of themselves that they can’t quite reach when they are down below, although I can’t take all, or even most of, the credit for that. I feel on the whole that it is less that the entrance, protected by my pylons, is in me, and more that I am an entrance to what resides directly behind me, almost all of which is bigger, taller, darker, more untamed.
When Joyce Nicholas did her painting of me, she chose to leave the pylons off, even though by that point they’d been in me, on me, for a couple of decades. I don’t know if this was a conscious decision. My belief is just that she was seeing what she saw every day, out of her loft window, in her own way, and responding to it, very viscerally and freely, also in her own way. This is what all the best art is: our repainting of the world, in our own individual language. And it’s when that language is least compromised and most individual that the art is less likely to drown, more set to surf successfully across time. But of course it’s also true – and here is the difficulty, and the cruelty – that some of the painting where the language is most truly and beautifully of ourselves, least swayed by a mission to please and be quickly understood, is the kind that can have a very difficult birth, feel like an unwanted, unloved child for a while. But then when, and if, it gets past that difficult stage, the dream life it lives – whether it is a painting, a record, a book, or some other form of creative endeavour – in the minds of those who adore it is astonishingly powerful, arguably no less real and vivid – maybe even more real and vivid – than the thing from the less abstract world that inspired it.
I think this goes beyond just art and artists, this dream life we live that is sometimes so much more vivid than the real one. Jim Swardesley has, in his time in charge of Underhill post office, created an extremely fine post office, within the parameters of what a post office is permitted to be. Many people travel six or more miles out of their way to go to this post office, choosing it over a more geographically practical post office, just because of the atmosphere the person in charge of it has created, because of its unpredictable shelves of local literature, because of its wide range of stationery, because of its reassuringly large and thick door, because of the relentless positivity and patience of Jim’s assistant, Tara. But this post office is nothing compared to how the same post office will be repainted in Jim Swardesley’s mind, many years from now, when he has left the job and moved his family elsewhere. Jim Swardesley’s mindpostoffice will be twice as large, its door twice as old and large, its queues twice as chatty, its nature and topography section a genuine rival for Waterstones. Is that a selection of artisan coffee, handmade mugs and the latest vinyl releases on the shelves of Jim Swardesley’s future mindpostoffice? I believe it is. And who is to say that Jim Swardesley’s future mindpostoffice is any less real than the real thing, because only Jim Swardesley will be able to see Jim Swardesley’s future mindpostoffice, therefore only Jim Swardesley will have the right to decide how real it is.
I must emphasise here that seeing into the future isn’t amongst the range of my talents. You probably know far more about the future now than I do. I just know that Jim Swardesley’s future mindpostoffice will be a thing, because I know Jim Swardesley.
There are actually a surprising number of people out there – surprisingly ecologically conscious people, people with great respect for the landscape around them – who have an aesthetic appreciation of pylons, and Jim Swardesley is one of them. Jim can talk quite extensively to you about porcelain insulators, the Milliken Brothers’ original latticework architecture and the evolution of the Central Electricity Board’s original transmission grid, and was even the admin for a now defunct Facebook group called Pylons I Have Known from June 2014 to September 2016, when an online spat prompted him to step down. Jim took a photo a couple of years ago that he is very proud of, featuring the sun shining down through my pylons; one which I must grudgingly admit has a certain austere beauty to it.
It is the pair of giant black legs in the foreground of that photo – the legs of my most westerly pylon – whose shadow a young woman sits under today, playing her guitar. She is not from this country originally, is still in the process of making it a proper home, and has had a difficult few months. She lost a good friend not all that long ago, and faces an extremely difficult decision about her future. Additionally she is processing the feelings that come in the aftermath of shouting at a man in an SUV for driving too fast along a lane this morning then realising the man was a shaman she’d been introduced to at the farmers’ market the previous week. On a brighter note, she is renting a pleasant, dry new cottage, with friendly neighbours on either side – our esteemed postmaster and his family, and a lady who tunes pianos for a living – and a handsome view of me from the bedroom window, and she feels increasingly lit up with creative desire. In times of trouble, it calms her to play her guitar, especially up here, where only the sheep and the ponies and the wind can hear her. The song she’s playing isn’t one of her own, but a ballad, one I’ve heard many times before.
Build me a bridge
Made of all I’ve seen
Hold my eyes in wonder
Circle me with flowers
And remember this time
For one day nevermore I shall be
And listen to the water
Going through the stones
Where is my song
Already and it is me
For I lived before
And live again
And circles are my game
Though I am not one
I am it all
For I am Little Meg
The words are different to what they are sometimes but that is OK. In a way, it’s just another kind of repainting the world. Actually, the words are nearly always different, and you’d probably be hard pushed to say precisely what the original ones are now, but the tune is always the same, even when the tune is sort of different. I don’t remember when I first heard it. I know it was a long time ago. A long time ago even for me. Maybe longer than anyone would think. Remarkably it doesn’t seem to have lost its appeal through overplaying. What I have realised, though, is since the pylons went up, I find it harder to tune into it. There’s some static in the air – something beyond the hum that everyone hears coming from the power lines – that distorts it. I suppose this is the way everything works: you gain something but you inevitably always lose something in the process. You gain a double fridge-freezer and an Apple Watch but you lose the ability to perceive the ghosts of time passing through the air quite so clearly. You gain an SUV to take you to your shamanic appointments more quickly but lose your sense of humility and respect for your fellow human beings on the road. You gain the ability to very quickly look up where and how tall the world’s biggest pylon is (the Zhejiang Province, China, 1,213 feet, more than 50 whole feet shorter than me) but lose an unspoilt view millennia old stretching down towards the English Channel.
I have learned to accept the giant black legs in me now. After all, it is not exactly like I have a choice in the matter. They still hurt, probably just as much as they did on the day they went in, getting towards a century ago, but the pain is different now: I have, I suppose you might say, kind of subsumed it. It happens to us all in time. None of us are exempt from that pain. You get a throb or an ache or an injury or an illness. Then you realise: ‘That’s absolutely part of me now, that pain. That is now an element of my unique voice, playing this familiar tune.’ So you move forward, because it’s the only choice, because getting back to the place before the pain turned up is an affront to nature. Even though the idea of ‘nature’ is up for debate, the idea that that is an affront to it is not.
Inevitably someone will paint me again one day, and the pylons will be in the painting, maybe even the focal part of it. And people – not everyone, but people – will look at the painting and think, ‘Yes! I understand. All of this makes total sense and makes me want to do something too, to not just be here, standing still. All of it had to happen and the love that went into it was not in vain.’
Acknowledgements
This book doesn’t take place on the real Dartmoor; its setting is a parallel dimension moor that doesn’t exist but just happens to be in the same place on the map. But while the places in Villager’s moor have different names and all of its inhabitants and legends are from my imagination, it shares an ambience with Dartmoor and would not have been the same book if I had not been living and walking there during its creation. So, I raise a glass here to Dartmoor, and to the residents whom I’ve met, chatted to and learned from – not least my ‘Dartmoor Dad’ Keith Dahill, Nat Green and Ruscha Schorr-kon, a landlady immeasurably more interesting, kind and accommodating than the one featured in the ‘Stopcock’ chapter of this book. I would also like to offer a special thanks to Louise McKnight and Laura Willis, who kindly offered their time and knowledge of – respectively – Glaswegian dialect and piano tuning to help me sharpen some of the notes here, and Ellie for her support and a couple of eagle-eyed spots at proof manuscript stage. This is the fifth book I have crowdfunded through Unbound, and if you are one of the people who pledged for it, you perhaps deserve the biggest thanks of all, as it wouldn’t exist – at least not in its present form – without you. Absolutely vital also is that I mention Matt Deighton, who – like RJ McKendree – is a brilliant unassuming songwriter bashed about, then enhanced by time, and whose excellent 1995 album Villager made me decide, many years ago, that I’d one day like to write a book with the same name. Matt is one of many musicians whose craft is an important part of what has led me to this point in my writing career. The others are far too numerous to list here, but I would be seriously remiss in not mentioning my good friend Will Twynham, who as we speak is bringing RJ McKendree to life in the most thrilling of ways. Just as music has made this book more than it would have been without it, art has too, and I am indebted to my mum Jo, my dad Mick, Unbound’s art director Mark Ecob and Villager’s cover artist Joe McLaren for the work they have done to make it a beautiful object, rather than just a load of words on some pages. Finally, thank you to my editors Imogen Denny, DeAndra Lupu, Mathew Clayton and Hayley Shepherd for their eagle-eyed skills, to Matt Shaw and Dave Holwill for the website help, and to my agent Ed Wilson, and anyone else who, like them, has assisted in any way in giving me the belief that I can do this.
A Note on the Author
Tom Cox was born in Nottinghamshire. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling The Good, The Bad and The Furry and the William Hill Sports Book longlisted Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia. 21st-Century Yokel was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, and the titular story of Help the Witch won a Shirley Jackson Award.
@cox_tom
Unbound is the world’s first crowdfunding publisher, established in 2011.
We believe that wonderful things can happen when you clear a path for people who share a passion. That’s why we’ve built a platform that brings together readers and authors to crowdfund books they believe in – and give fresh ideas that don’t fit the traditional mould the chance they deserve.
This book is in your hands because readers made it possible. Everyone who pledged their support is listed below. Join them by visiting unbound.com and supporting a book today.
Ludovic Abrassart
Yvonne Aburrow
Natasha Aburrow-Jones
