Читать книгу The Willow Pond - Mervyn Linford - Страница 11

Chapter 3. Witches and Whizzbangs.

Transgressions were manifold. Despite the threats of eternal damnation, two of the most abhorred dates of the festal year - when looked at from an ecclesiastical point of view - were nevertheless indulged in to the full by the backsliding adepts of our less than sacred community. Halloween and Guy-Fawkes continued to exert their pagan influence in the face of a millennium of crusades against infidel and heretic alike. Having achieved the safe distance of five heathen miles between Pitsea and Stanford-le-Hope, the two great fire and spirit festivals of the northern calendar were to be celebrated regardless.

Not withstanding the derivation of the word Halloween, All-Saints and All-Souls were to be forgotten in favour of witches, wizards, slit-eyed gleaming pumpkins and apple bobbing. Perhaps not the trick-and-treat party-night of a festival that it’s become nowadays, it was nevertheless highly regarded by the young and Nordic-hearted. St Michael’s church - perched on the top of a hunchback-hill overlooking the marshes and encircled by two or three stands of towering elms - afforded the necessary atmosphere. There at dusk on one grey and misted late October day - looking for all the world like the set of a Hammer-Horror movie - myself and a straggling band of boot-scuffing, shoulder-shrugging oiks, made the ascent towards that squat castellated tower so rightly patronized by one of Christianity’s most famous dragon-slayers. There in the owl-hooting twilight of an x-rated, eye-covering feature, we’d come to confront the Devil. Unbeknown to us a couple of local roughnecks, half our age again and secure in the knowledge of that fact, had prefigured our arrival. Bravely - with feet and minds going in opposite directions - we passed under the lych gate and stood defiantly in God’s cold acre. The black pall of a funereal darkness fell from the wings of returning rooks. Skeletal shivers ran as fleet-footed as spiders from coccyx to cerebellum. Muscular co-ordination was of the essence. At any moment messages of fight or flight would be communicated throughout our bodies from a million and one as yet unsuspected ductless glands. The stomach would lose its pound of flesh and take on a ton of lead as compensation, and the heart like a manic balloon would expand to the point of bursting in its prison of rattling ribs. By the south-porch a freshly dug grave with its attendant mound of excavated earth waited for that band, of by now, somewhat dispirited ghost-hunters. Secreted within that macabre chamber our unanticipated assailants were prepared. At the prearranged instant they arose wailing in unison from the grave, each with a writhing Medusa-like crown of turf attached to his loutish skull. Nothing I could say now could possibly describe the shock of that chimerical moment. Me and my, for once, struck dumb as well as dumbstruck companions were, in accordance with the myth, petrified. Having neither the courage nor the requisite magical accoutrements, when blood, adrenalin and everything else necessary for the revivification of the frozen metabolism had returned to its rightful place - we legged it into the night.

Even before Halloween, nay, even before the very end of summer itself, Guy-Fawkes was already being planned, prepared for and discussed. September, that sweet and sour, sloe-black, mellowest of months found us after school and at weekends foraging the hedgerows like a tribe of ragamuffin pygmies. It was the land of the blackberry. Of dew-webbed and spidery early morning grasses, where hawthorn and brier, blackthorn and bramble, were crystal diademed and shot through with misted watery sunlight. If asked to chose a favourite month there would of course be twelve near equally praised contenders. But September, that equinoctial, pivotal world between light and darkness, garlanded with flowers, bulging with fruit and illuminated by the kindled fires of autumn leaves, wins by a wisp of gossamer. Nothing burns quite so gently as the pallid candles of the wayside toadflax. No lanterns glimmer with a more pale and feathery light than those of the wild-hop. What diffuse glow of summer in retreat could compare with the smoky heads of a field of scabious? What is more seasonally satisfying than to see on the looping staves - of the as then - high-tech, telegraphic wires, the crotchets and quavers of gathering swallows adding their valedictory music to the year’s unsung lament?

Into that dreamy, moist-eyed eclogue of romantic idealism marched Pitsea’s answer to the Seven Dwarfs. Hi, Ho, indeed, was the order of the day. Axes, single and double-headed, saws, single and double-sided, ropes and Powerful Pierre mentalities were ready to be swung, drawn and tugged into lumbering action. Into that rustic idyll the most environmentally unfriendly brotherhood since the demise of the dodo itself, was about to be unleashed. Trees of all species and sizes, that had done no harm to anybody - other than as monstrous anthropomorphisms from the pens of demented fairy-tale writers - were about to be decimated. This yearly, uncalled for, unskilled and unsupervised pollarding reduced some of the most precious of nature’s gifts to but quivering shadows of their former selves. Bonfire mania spread throughout the neighbourhood like an outbreak of rabies. Hydrophobic adolescents, foaming at the mouth, could be seen dragging their intractable cargoes from all points of the compass. How the countryside ever managed to survive those perennial ravages is beyond comprehension. Suffice it to say, that survive it did, if only at a later date to be covered by brick and concrete and surrounded by ring roads and flyovers. But that’s another story.

In the large field bordering our estate two of the most important bonfires in the area grew, like wigwams, from late September right up to the emblazoned night itself. One, for the sake of clarity, we will call Linford’s. The other - at the opposite end of the field - we will call, in deference to its eponymous builders, Bates’. Wigwam was the appropriate metaphor. Usually on friendly terms, at that particular time of the year the tribes divided into two separate warring factions. The pilferage of hard won timber and the likelihood of premature ignition were constant hazards. Any forced absence from the danger zone entailed coming to terms with the neuroses creating symptoms of uncertainty. At school, concentration on the ‘Three-R’s’ - always difficult - was next to impossible. Bedtime - that plague of all right-minded infants - become worse than the little death it was already reputed to be. One wanted, and needed to be on perpetual guard. The honour of the clan was at stake. There was a difficult problem to resolve concerning those autumnal proceedings so beloved by the pyromaniac. One of my most special friends belonged to the opposing camp. Eddy Bates, now there’s a name to conjure with even after all these years. At the risk of mixing my already mixed metaphors even further, I would have likened us to the infatuated offspring of rival ranch-owners. You’ve all seen the movie. You know the scenario. The difference in our case - as you’ve no doubt guessed by now - is of being of one and the same gender. Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t turning into a story about rampant youthful homosexuality. We’d been known to indulge in the trousers round the ankles, willy-waggling bit. What healthy young buck of the wildwood hasn’t? We had even - in the sight of one and other I must add shame-facedly - experienced the wide-eyed, breath-convulsing guilt of un-climaxed masturbation. “Forgive me father for I have sinned.” But I can say in all honesty that our relationship was of the good old-fashioned dib-dab-dob, help an old lady across the road, platonic variety. Those of you looking for more spice would do better to find a second-hand copy of this book. The relevant pages will become instantly apparent owing to their dog-eared, dowdy, well-thumbed accessibility!!! No, the problem was simply the one of reconciling our year round blood brotherhood with that seasonal breakdown of tribal relations. Somehow we managed to. Nothing could stop us coming together in the name of such unutterable delights as penny-for-the-guy, pseudo begging, and in my case profanity to boot - or the equally enjoyable but far more dangerous pursuit of gunpowder, treason and pre-festivity pyrotechnics. In general the guy was a sorry looking affair, something of a cross between a drunken scarecrow and a pile of dirty laundry. Artistic endeavour and sartorial elegance were not on the agenda. The sole function of that poorly trussed bundle of rags and screwed up newspaper was an extortive one. We trundled that lolloping sprawl of an effigy on the top of the rusty chasis of a squeaky wheeled, tyre-less old pram, down to the local hostelry. There, in the dark, dank, alcoholic fug of beer-swilling, smoke-billowing autumn, we set up shop. “Penny fer the guy mista!” “Piss orf!” came the slurred retort. Undeterred we kept up a barrage of persistent banter in the face of every insult imaginable. In the end - as we always knew it would be - victory was ours. Those, half-cut and teetering on the borderline of sobriety, were soon to become imbued with the spurious bonhomie long associated with the company of John Barleycorn, and stagger merrily across the Rubicon. In that newfound state of stupefied philanthropy, pennies in the bright alchemical wonder of bleary moonlight were miraculously turned to silver. Those once insensitive, hostile brutes were themselves transformed into earthbound Agnus Dei - Whatever the plural for that is in Latin! Along with the money, an unquenchable shower of crisps and lemonade came tumbling from the hands of saints. “Hallelujah Eddy! Hallelujah!"

What was to be done with the accumulated bounty? Sweets were always an option and would be succumbed to, but the futures to be most invested in were fireworks. Legendary names at the forefront of the market - then as now - were Paynes, Brocks and Standard. Whether in boxes with star-spangled, volcano erupting lids, or under glass and loose in irresistible rows - like lessons in a multicoloured Euclidian geometry - they were the prizes valued above all others. In the middle of a tumbledown parade of shops, in what was euphemistically known as the High Road, there stood an emporium of dusty old-world splendour known by the less than politically correct name of The Jew Boys. The proprietor, a long-suffering, skinny, rheumatic wheeze of a man, was the living denial of the oft-cited, much fabled, symbiotic relationship between wealth and Jewishness. There, there was poverty in extreme. And what did the cowardly multitudes of local reprobates do about it? I’ll tell you. Like the very plagues of Egypt itself, we descended upon him. We mercilessly tormented that man at every available opportunity. And worse - like the voracious locusts that we were - in one way or another we took the unleavened bread out of his deserving mouth. If anything in my despicable past should sentence me to the thermal depths of eternal suffering, the treatment meted out to that poor, defenceless upholder of the Sabbath should be at the head of the list. The details of our many taunts and jibes shall, out of a sense of shame and genuine atonement, remain unspoken. All that needs to be related here are the bare incriminating facts of our sweets-cum-fireworks subterfuge. Expensive fireworks were kept in a display-cabinet at the front of the shop. For some unknown reason, squibs, jumping-crackers and tuppenny-canons were stored in tin boxes behind a curtained door leading on to his living quarters. He tried his hardest to keep his eye on all of us at once. He was aware that whatever our motives were for peering and poking around his store, they were certainly not honourable. Once we felt that we’d raised him to the necessary pitch of suspicion, one of the assembled throng would ask for a half-a-crown’s worth of tuppenny-canons. As quick and backward glancing as he was in his efforts to fulfil the order without losing sight of us, there was always that heart-thumping seemingly infinitesimal moment when observer and observed were eclipsed. In that blinding instant pockets were stashed with blackjacks, fruit-salads, liquorice-pipes, gob-stoppers and anything else that would stick like an accusation to our sugary fingers. He must have known. The look of feigned innocence simpering across our un-scrubbed faces must have been as transparent to him as the centuries of unjustifiable persecution suffered by the descendants of Abraham and the twelve tribes.

Having acquired sweets and tuppenny-canons on occasions such as those - whether en mass or in ones and twos - that virtual Diaspora of insensitive gentiles scattered like chaff to the four winds. Wherever they settled the sound of peardrops and spearmint-pips being ground between ruminating molars pervaded the atmosphere. And of course, the black, saltpetered grist to their nefarious mills bristled with fuses from the bulging precincts of their explosive pockets. For Eddy and myself - near inseparable partners in the pursuit of crime - the first objective was the procurement of milk-bottles. To that end raids were carried out on the unsuspecting doorsteps of innocent plotlanders. From there - with our best scrumping jumpers full to overflowing with their vitreous contents - we made our way to the secluded acres of our own private atoll. Testing was about to begin. First, one banger was lighted and dropped into the open neck of a bottle. We retired into cover and awaited results. The fuse caught and a shower of sparks issued forth. A liquefied white smoke spilt from the lip of the bottle like the ghostly dregs of milk drunk long ago. Bang!! A somewhat muted and hollow explosion admittedly, but interesting enough nevertheless. Next, two bangers were inserted with a blob of clay as a stopper. Poohf! Even more muffled, and clouded by the confinement of vapours. But at least the bottle had cracked. That was far more promising. Finally, three bangers were used, sans clay. Crack!!! Splinters and shards of glass were blasted in all directions. Exciting? Perhaps. But for experts in the arts of warfare it was still too tame. Eddy suggested that we repair to his father’s workshop. That brick-built, asbestos-roofed shed - connected to the house by a glass-covered walkway - was an Ali Baba’s cave to the more than forty thieving rascals who lived in that unsavoury neighbourhood. Eddy’s father was a bit of a whizz when it came to tinkering. To us children he was a Merlin of the machine shop. It seemed that he could make or mend anything, and the fixtures, fittings, and variety of tools lying about in that den of mechanical demonology, proved it. Everything that we needed was there. Half-inch diameter gas-pipe, block-ended bends, three-eighth threaded metal plugs, a vice and a power drill. Considering our tender years we were as adept and efficient as any indentured gunsmiths. If our existence had been more widely known, I’m sure that the Birmingham Small Arms Factory itself would have made us offers of employment. Tubing was cut to the required lengths, one end of each section being died, greased and bound with string. Tapped and threaded bends of the correct diameter were then screwed tightly into position. Those - by now weapon-shaped artifacts - were clamped one at a time into the vice to have a small aperture drilled into the top of each bend. That was all there was to it. The resultant six-inch pipe-guns were deadly. Wadding was crammed into them. The fuse removed from a banger was inserted into the small, drilled hole, and then the powdery black contents of the firework were poured carefully into the barrel. More wadding was added, followed by one of the three-eighth metal plugs. Finally, just enough more wadding was inserted to hold the metal plug firmly in place. Everything was ready. All we needed now was a target. A galvanized bucket was secured and set up at the end of the garden. I held the gun at arm’s length - just as I’d seen the duelists doing at Saturday morning flicks - and Eddy lit the fuse with one of those wonderful, green-glowing matches so redolent of the Guy-Fawke’s season. Crasssh!!! The explosion was deafening and reverberant, and the instant recoil as near as damn it bone shattering. Hopping around in a hot-footed, foul-mouthed manner, shaking and blowing my sizzled fingers, whilst at the same time shrieking with gales of nervous laughter, I moved off with Eddy to inspect the damage. A starburst with a half-inch aperture was emblazoned where the projectile had entered the bucket. On the opposite side a great, gaping, jagged orifice had been rent completely out by the secondary impact. That was the firepower afforded the most undisciplined army to have ravaged in the area since the drug-crazed Berserkers of our infamous past. Nothing, whether furred or feathered, scaled or skinned, would be certain of safety while there was enough powder to charge the muzzles of those unchallengeable weapons.

At last the big day arrived. Sometimes on those longed-for occasions the weather was kind, those classic November days fondly remembered and yet somehow nostalgically enhanced by the deficiencies of memory and distance. Those misty and sun-hazy autumnal days, followed by fog-frosted, potato-roasting, buttery, starlit nights. Invariably however, November the Fifth was the culmination of the longest period of web-footed inclemency since St Swithin slipped on the bath-soap and flooded the entire bishopric. It was one of those days, a squelching, soggy, rain-slanted morass of a treasonable day. It was the quintessence of damp-squibedness. The clouds oppressed with their continuous weight of southwesterly nimbostratus. That unwanted cargo of H2O multiplied to the power of infinity, extinguished the fires of our hopes with an incessant, down-streaming, diagonal drench. Forlorn behind my hand-wiped, rain-runnelled window, I looked out upon the dismal scene. It was the Jewish shopkeeper’s revenge. In my childish imagination I could almost hear the rending of cloth. Very God himself had deserted me. It was indeed the fate of the damned.

By late afternoon the rain had eased. A light, all moistening drizzle dampened my hair and trickled down my face with all the effectiveness of Japanese water-torture as I prodded about at the sodden edges of the bonfire. The chances of Guido-Fawkes being engulfed in celebratory flames seemed further away than the combustive brandy on the Christmas pudding. The day continued to drag its soaking feet for what seemed to the impatience of youth an eternity. Eventually darkness fell and adults were pestered into becoming a part of something that they had up until now been totally excluded from. They were the combustion men, the ignis fatuus - the spontaneous jack-o-lantern men performing their miraculous duties. Those can-carrying torchbearers were for once in their lives heroes to be admired. Forgiven were all the cuffs and cantankerousness suffered throughout the preceding months. Wads of dry newspaper were thrust with long poles into the heart of the bonfire. Petrol liberally sprinkled into and around the circumference of the sacrificial piles. Torches were thrown and results waited for. Usually after a number of unsuccessful and disappointing attempts - accompanied by sighs and the re-charging of dry paper and kindling - the flames would hold amidst the cheers of the surrounding war party. Boxes were opened and children admonished for getting too close to them. Unknown to the guardians of our safety most of us had our own secret supplies concealed about our person. While parents concerned themselves with setting light to fireworks and the serious business of policing the perimeter of the bonfire, the warring factions sent out their scouting parties. The favourite weapon on those sorties was the Roman candle. They could be held in a gloved hand and aimed purposefully at the enemy. Like the popular song of the same name, ‘Great Balls of Fire’, their heavenward trajectory curved like tracer bullets across the night sky. Unfortunate warriors struck down by stray rounds out of the meteoric rise and fall of that deadly Daneon Shower were to be seen rolling around in the wet grass screaming for mercy. White flags were for wimps. No namby-pamby suing for terms would be tolerated in this man’s army. The first assault was followed up swiftly by a barrage of tuppenny-canons, jumping-jacks and ear-splitting squibs, intent on their own serendipitous trajectories. While that was going on the oohs and aahs of the less rebellious children could be heard in the wake of star-scattering rockets and diminutive Mount Etnas spitting and spluttering through their streams of lava and smoke. The night was a riot of sound and unaccountable colour. Despite all the previous rain-soaked fears it was to be considered as a success. Except that is for one poor lad, who in the absence of the necessary years required for the build up of practical knowledge, had decided in his naivety that Swan-Vestas and bangers could share the same pocket with impunity. Events were to prove him mistaken. On tripping over while frantically waving handfuls of sparklers in the air the offending pocket and a knob of hard earth made acquaintance with each other. On impact the Swan-Vestas ignited, these in turn - as is the usual sequence of events in such matters - did ditto to a pocket-full of bristling fuses. Fortunately for the boy - who was by now writhing around on the ground giving a fair impression of the verbal restraint exhibited by stuck pigs – quick-witted adults had the presence of mind to pull his trousers down over his unforgiving boots. The sight of that lad slithering bare-arsed across the wet grass closely followed by his exploding trousers was a vision never to be forgotten. The iconoclast has not been born who could shatter the deep, spiritual satisfaction associated with that sacrificial image. The fiery immolation of the guy itself - with all the undertones implicit of paganism - could not compete in kind with that striking portrayal of a juvenile Via Dolorosa. Luckily injuries sustained - other than those to his pride - were negligible. To this day warnings about the dangers of fireworks pervading the air-waves on the well-meaning voices of TV pundits, brings vividly to mind not only that lad’s trouser-less, knobbly-kneed embarrassment, but also the thousand and one blue-eyed indiscretions committed in the name of gunpowder, treason and plot.

The days following the event - especially if of the school-less variety - were almost as exciting as November-the-Fifth itself. The surrounding countryside was scoured for the burnt out remains of the once majestic bonfires. Within the rocket-falling, banger-throwing radius of those sacred ruins were often to be found the relics of the previous night’s festivities. Working on the maxim that you can’t get enough of a good thing, the season of sun-propitiating ritual, was prolonged for as far into the distance as possible. Trophies were collected and disposed of in the traditional ear-shattering, smoke-belching manner. Embers were stirred, fuel added, and fires revived. Around the rekindled flames - flickering with the lambent glow of smouldering memories - parleyed the indigenous worshippers. Talk of burnings at the stake, smoke-signals and baked hedgehogs proliferated. Mention was made of the walking on fire initiation ceremonies performed by certain exotic tribesmen. Someone suggested a reenactment in the name of authenticating our proclaimed savagery. The potential headhunters amongst us prepared ourselves by war dancing in the peripheral puddles. Those too young or thought of as unworthy - for whatever reason - to participate in this particular rite continued to occupy themselves by raking out the hot, glimmering coals. Words of encouragement were offered, strongly laced with insults for those thought to be tardy in the performance of their sacred duties. The task proved to be well within our capabilities and a number of runs were made. Sparks flew and cheers followed. Not satisfied with the effectiveness of wet-shoed magic a bare-footed attempt was proposed. I for one thought it rather unnecessary. But not wishing to lose face in front of the assembled multitudes, agreed to give it a whirl. That day I came closer than I have ever been to achieving the Olympic qualifying standard for the hop-skip-and jump. I have since received correspondence from articulate kangaroos complimenting me on my near marsupial agility. The sound of my post-ceremonial feet sizzling through the grass was no less sibilant than the noise to be heard coming from a nest of disgruntled vipers. The sight of pustulant, discharging blisters has the same mortifying effect on me now as it did then in the days subsequent to that inflammatory event. Slippers and a footbath are now my constant companions.

Somebody else tormented to distraction during that season of witches and whizzbangs, was a poor, wretched, dishevelled old lady known locally as Topsy. To all of us children she was definitely a witch. Whether or not she wore the tall pointed hat that my reminiscing mind so richly adorns her with is hard to say for certain. But the long black cloak, from its silver clasp at the neck, to its frayed edges trailing along the ground, is without a doubt no imagined garment. She lived in a house about mid-way along the bridle path between Pitsea and my own estate. If you saw it now you wouldn’t believe that anyone could have lived in it. Although brick-built and slate-roofed - a rarity thereabouts - It had as they say, seen better days. Windows were either cracked or non- existent and hung with rags of hessian. The roof had as many slates missing as it had intact and was neither impervious to light or rain. One corner of the house had split open from the eaves to the damp course and the equally derelict character of its insides could be seen through the gaping brickwork. Set in its own copse, comprised mostly of elm and hawthorn with a couple of stag-headed ancient oaks for company, it had all the appearance of a setting for a story penned by the Brothers Grimm. Down the bridle path there was a general store known locally as the back shop. One of my not too infrequent chores was to visit that shop whenever my mother had forgotten anything on one of her own shopping expeditions. The dread of bumping into Topsy on any of those excursions was constant. I’ve run faster past that house than Roger Bannister’s shoelaces. Once, at full-pelt, I met her coming towards me on the curve of a sharp S bend in the path. Unfortunately, at that point, the path cut its meandering way through a blackthorn thicket. Veering off at an angle - and in need of a machete and a pith helmet - I left a boy-shaped hole in the hedge only to come out on the other side streaming with blood and as prickly as a porcupine. On another occasion - being more courageous than usual - owing to Eddy’s older brother Reg being with us - we crept into the copse and taunted her from behind the relative safety of the trees. Much to our terrified surprise she was much quicker on her feet than we expected. She came screeching out of the woodshed - axe in hand - like a reincarnation of Boudicca. “I’ll kill yer, yer little barstards,” she croned. Before our legs - in my case and Eddies, very little legs at that - could overcome the lack of traction, she let fly with the axe. To my heathen amazement, my swift and extremely breathless supplications in the direction of my Maker were answered in full and the hurtling weapon bounced harmlessly of the bole of a life-saving tree. “May the saints preserve us!” as my mother used to recite in moments of high anxiety. Needless to say, our shocked selves, and the far horizon, were soon to become acquainted. It was rumoured in the neighbourhood that this old lady and water were natural enemies and that periodically she was taken into hospital by the authorities to be scrubbed, fed, and checked out in general. During one of those enforced absences, we decided - cowards that we were - to take revenge. We ‘acquired’ a couple of short scaffold-poles from one of the building-sites on our estate and made off in the direction of demolition. It was easier than we thought. The mortar had lost most of its adhesive properties. Very little in the way of ramming and levering was necessary before the cracks in the brickwork became crumbling holes. That was just another episode in the sorry history of my childhood that I’d far sooner forget. If anyone was a candidate for Bell, Book, and Candle in those days, then it was I. It seems strange to me now that I didn’t even think of it as wrong. I made up lies in the confessional, inventing mere peccadilloes because the priest wouldn’t believe in my pleas of innocence, yet it never occurred to me that I had committed enough real sins to keep the staff at the Vatican on overtime until well after The Second Coming!

To my remembering mind the culmination of that season so resonant of the ‘Old Religion’ always coincided with that other recusant activity - mushrooming. The emergence of those mysterious subterranean entities - whose phallic symbolism though not fully understood, was nevertheless immediately recognized and commented upon - signalled the commencement of a form of worship more associated with the Twentieth Century than anything to do with our mythic past. Money! What else? My idolatrous relationship with ‘the root of all evil’ started at an early age and mushrooming was one of the highlights of the fiscal calendar. Some of the less scrupulous local greengrocers were prepared to buy them by the sack-load. How much they paid for them I can’t recall now, but you can rest assured that it was considerably more than the starvation wages offered by that scourge of the under-aged and oppressed classes; namely, the newsagent. The Essex marshes in autumn - and in my opinion at all times of the year - were a wonderful place to inhabit. Before the ravages of Dutch-Elm disease those tall, stately, undulating, top-heavy trees added a rhythm to the otherwise more monotonous music of the level deltas. Rooks and jackdaws joined in with the pitch of their raucous voices and the shallow pools of standing water were replete with the echoes of a sky-wide symphony. Redshanks tewked, curlew fluted, and shelduck curved into shrieks of eerie laughter. Creeks were sinuous, dykes deliberate, and fleets feathered with whispering reeds. On the slightly drier meadows - much grazed by cattle and nibbled by horses and rabbits - grew the desired crop. Sometimes the harvesting would be a mob-handed affair but on other occasions I would work alone. Although I had no shortage of friends - even when I was quite young - I often felt the need of solitude. The uncharitable amongst you might think that that had something to do with wanting to keep all the mushroom money to myself. How dare you, think such a thing! No, the truth is that even at a tender age I communed with nature as easily as I do today. I did not have then, or have now, any need for guru or priest to instruct me in the arts of spirituality. Any sense of alienation suffered in my life has invariably found its cause in other human beings, nature and myself have always existed in continuum. When out and about in God’s great wilderness the only time I’m affected by the meaning of the word vacuum is when my spiritual refreshment needs supplementing with a cup of coffee from the flask. Spontaneity of response and oneness are second nature to me. My only fear is, that the void - some would say abyss - between my then spiritual awareness and my then intellectual development may have unwittingly been the cause of much of my secular misery. To me all mushrooms look alike. To unscrupulous greengrocers - perhaps with enemies in the community, or long-suffered nagging wives - field-mushrooms, yellow-staining mushrooms or destroying angels are all - give or take a stomach-pump or two - substantially the same. Sell them I did by the hundredweight. But eat them - never! Even now when walking through that marshland cemetery - with the quaint nostalgic name of Dicky Bird Hill - The memento mori of the ubiquitous skull-and-crossbones transubstantiate in front of my guilt-ridden eyes into the cups and stipes of highly toxic fungi. R.I.P. until we meet again!

A Scottish friend of mine tells me that where he lives people from Essex are ‘affectionately’ known as Clay-Kickers. Some may take umbrage at such nomenclature, not I, I for one am proud of my somewhat tacky heritage. It seems that Essex clay was the main reason why the area had relatively few large working farms and was more suited to smallholdings, plotlanding and other forms of pseudo bucolic endeavour. Due to the Depression - and other things best known to students of agricultural economics - farmland was not in as great demand as was usually the case. Consequently, the best land got sold off first - and as is the way with supply and demand, or so they tell me at the Adam Smith institute - the worst land failed to reach the asking price and was either left fallow or taken out of agriculture altogether. Far-sighted speculators - who were obviously in dire need of the services of an optician - bought thousands of acres of that potential hard-pan and divided it up into plots to sell to Londoners looking for somewhere to build their summer dream-homes. In conjunction with The London Tilbury and Southend Railway, weekend excursions were arranged to show the prospective buyers the advantages of country living. For some reason, whether it was to do with the ague, the infertility of the soil, or a surfeit of inbred, indigenous idiots, sales were slow. In fact they never really gathered momentum at all. And that accounts - I think - for the miscellaneous patchwork of thorn-thicketed, grass-tufted territory that I was to become heir to. Those who did buy, build and stay in the area - whether for purposes of tax-avoidance, family evasion, or even genuine agricultural interest - were soon to find out, as all of us unsuspecting immigrants did eventually, something of the intractable nature of Essex-clay. In summer it was a rock-hard, dust-blowing desert. Owing to shrinkage it formed a reticular moonscape of interlinking chasms. Some of these were so wide and deep that newcomers could be recognized by a grimace and a hobbling gait. It’s rumoured that one smallholder lost a gaggle of geese and his mother-in-law down one of those abysmal trenches for a week. But that could be the elderberry wine talking. Sufficient to say that for those interested in market gardening, you’d probably find more tilth on a greengrocer’s scalp! With regards to the season that concerns us now we have to shift into the diametrically opposite mode. Wet, cold, claggy, and pretty near impervious to rain, is a fair résumé, I think. But for my fellow agrarians and me this was the ideal soil-profile. To walk across those late autumn-cum-winter fields was as to step into your father’s shoes. The accumulated weight of the adhering clay built up to the point where the equation of legs + boots + gravity = dry feet, became untenable and was as insoluble as infinite regression itself. The leaving of boots behind and squelching off into the mire was all part of the ten-toed, mud-oozing, morass of mathematics. “Take that,” splat! One of the boys having grabbed a handful of clay from his retrieved boot had scored a bulls-eye. “You filthy pig!” I responded. Throwing an even bigger handful back in his direction. Somebody else would join in and before you knew it everyone present had got in on the act. Between the sucking sounds of mud and the wet slap of direct hits, expletives buzzed through the air like black satanic bees. “Shit!” “Damn!” “Bollocks!” “Sod it!” It would end in tears. And it did. It always did. One of us, or two of us, or all of us, would fall headlong into the glutinous furrows. Then the heart-stopping realization of our predicament would dawn on us. Another tricky arithmetical calculation would have to follow. Wetness + mud + clothes + parents was as near an insoluble problem as that of infinite regression or even Zeno’s inscrutable arrow itself. Though not the time of year for skinny-dipping desperate situations required equally desperate remedies. Water over grass was usually the answer. Cold, but at least mercifully clear. Stripping off, scrubbing clothes and flesh, turning blue and purple, was all part of the teeth-chattering excitement. We never got fully dry or clean. We always ended up with thick ears, hot-baths and runny-noses. Lying in bed - earlier than usual - sniffing and whimpering, you swore to yourself that you would never, never, ever, do such a stupid thing again! But of course you did, you did........

Fog was another perennial joy. Schools have been known to close early because of it - guardians to be confused by it. Literally and metaphorically to my un-fathoming mind it is one of the most obscure and obscuring of nature’s miracles. How by subtle shifts in temperature, invisible water-vapour - which to me is something of a contradiction in terms anyway - can become visible water-vapour is like having your cake and conjuring it out of thin air at the same time! Having tentatively dabbled at the keyboard of a microprocessor I’m patently aware that you don’t necessarily have to know anything about the scientific principals lying behind something to gain benefit from it. So it is with the word-processor, and so it was with invisible water-vapour. “Where are yer Eddy?” “Over ‘ere, where d’yer fink?” So it went on. Like binary black holes we revolved around each other, spared only from the crushing weight of oblivion by virtue of our equal and opposing gravitational influence. Along the bridle path a muted, indivisible cloud of overhanging branches mimicked the ways of rain. At the slightest breath, the once intermittent drops altered their frequency. As in the lull after thunder they gathered their strength and spattering momentum only to descend en mass. “Bloody ‘ell Eddy, I’m drowned!” “Me an’ you bof mate. Let’s get out of ‘ere!” Coming together again, like twin apparitions newly evolved from the diffuse unknown of the astral-plane we ran along the path as the sole inhabitants of our own grey bubble of thoughtlessness. “What shall we do next Merv?” enquired Eddy. “Let’s go an’ look at the one-eyed man,” I said. “Not me!” replied Eddy in quivering castrato. “What’s a matta,” I taunted. “Not scared are yer?” “Who me? I aint scared of nuffin,” he countered. He was though, and so was I. One of the greatest games of do-and-dare in our neck of the woods was that of confronting the one-eyed man. This - as I see it now - shy, reclusive, old soul, lived on his own in another of those near uninhabitable dwellings scattered about the plotlands. In the deep, hushed unwelcoming dankness of that foggy, late November day, that lopsided box of a home made up of little more than pebble-dash and tin reminded me of the immortal - but ill-remembered words - of that much anthologized and much quoted poem by Thomas Hood - November. No sun, no moon, no gas, no coal, no light, no warmth, no way! “Praps we could do somefink else?” I suggested. “Scared are yer?” came the triumphant response. Rather like the atmosphere itself there seemed no way out. “All right then,” I said, “Let’s go!” Just how that poor old man came to have the terrible disfigurement I’m about to describe, I don’t know. What I do know is the spine-chilling effect it had on all of us children. One side of his face was red and blotchy, and hung with loose wattles of folded skin. Above that was a dark unseemly orifice, which drew us in with its hypnotic power to the very brink of corruption. If a wriggling mass of worms and maggots had come spilling out of that eyeless orbit we should not have been surprised. The closer we got to his home, the further we were from sanity. All sorts of imagined disasters crept in to our distraught minds. Looking through the bushes into his front window we could see him at his table carving a lump of meat. To me that lump of meat could have been the carved remains of any of my erstwhile acquaintances. Unaware of our presence he began to eat his meal. The sucking sensation of canines and incisors tearing at my goose-bumped flesh was as real as it was electrifying. “Ow! yer little bastard, get yer teeth out of me arm.” Such was Eddy’s juvenile sense of humour. Whether or not it quite compensated for the reciprocal blow to his ribs, I wouldn’t like to say. All that can be said is that the resultant yell was enjoyed far more than the preceding laughter. This of course had the less than desired effect of attracting the attention of Vulcan’s feasting Cyclops. His swivelling one-eyed glance had all the force of an impacting thunderbolt. The smithy’s contract between Vulcan, Jove and himself had been fulfilled, and we were the unfortunate recipients. If running away could by any stretch of the imagination be called an art-form, then it goes without saying that we’d perfected it. We were once again about to experience that strange and somewhat disorientating thrill of high-speed fog jogging. To see one’s pursuer in the light of day is frightening enough but to be continually looking over one’s retreating shoulder into the fog-shrouded world of monstrous possibilities is petrifying. Waves of diffusing sunlight entered the space-time continuum of the enveloping foliage. Throughout the hurtling track of our converging trajectories the constellated glitter of condensing droplets followed our ill-starred progress. At a certain point in the proceedings the combined force of our accelerating mass crossed the horizon of that meteoric event and we vanished into breathless singularity.

After the fog came the first frosty days, those hoary outriders of the big snowed battalions themselves. Short-lived substitute that they usually turned out to be we nevertheless made the most of them. In those days of hot-water bottles and single glazing, winter windows - so our memories seem to tell us - were always opaque. Waking to a yellow painted bedroom and white frosted glass, I often fancied myself as the coiled element in a particularly drowsy light bulb. Having been switched on and illuminated by the wonders of whiteness, getting up was easier than usual. Rubbing the fern patterned glass with benumbed fingers the world outside was soon to be exposed. Gardens at that time of year were very much the domain of Brussels sprouts. Come on admit it, when you think of frost don’t Brussels sprouts come leaping to mind? And if not, why not? They should do if for no other reason than Christmas dinners depend on the coincidence. I digress. Out there in the beak-bending answer to the name of grass, worms - with all the elasticity of six-inch nails - were for once in their wriggle-less lives safe from the marauding instincts of blackbirds and thrushes. That resplendent, shivering expanse - denied the luxury of deckchairs and daisies - was to minds of the lowest degree - of which I include my own - portentous of frozen puddles. They in turn conjured the rosy, glissading images of those scarf wearing and be-muffled skaters so inspiringly and eagerly depicted by the Victorian artist. Where I lived there existed some of the biggest puddles in the universe. Even the ever-revolving swathe of the Milky Way itself paled into insignificance when compared with those hyper-galactic watercourses. Understandably breakfast was some thing to be skated through. “D’you wan’t ‘ot or cold milk wiv yer cornflakes,” queried the lady of the house. “Cold please,” I blurted. “But yer always hav’ ‘ot milk,” she continued. “Well yes, but I fancy cold fer a change,” I mediated. “What on a frosty mornin’ like this,” she challenged. What was the use, how could you tell a grown-up that that was precisely the reason why! Our two minds had the same polarity. On the surface there was everything in common but the closer and more often the contact the greater the repulsion. Age and understanding continually strove to drive us apart. The great Magnet in the sky had deemed it necessary that attraction was okay up to a point but that eventually every little iron filing had to find its own place in the pattern of things. “Yer can’t go out yet, yer hav’n’t finished yer breakfast,” she implored. But alas the glint, Boreal frost-smith of the Pole had drawn my southern soul towards his craft. “I won’t be long,” I remonstrated, while all the time gathering my frictionless momentum. At the end of the long slide the Aurora awaited. And who was I to deny the charge of that particular electronic power?

The redoubtable Eddy and I found ourselves in that proverbial winter-wonderland so pertinent even now to the Peter Pans amongst us. The fairy-dust of a glittering winter’s night had transformed the bleak reality of a dull and leafless landscape into the dazzling intensity of a glacial Never-Never-Land. A dispersing mist had left its frozen residue on the trees and hedgerows. The bifurcating tips of white-furred branches bristled in the diffuse sunlight. Spicules of shimmering ice drifted like dust-motes in the wake of alighting birds. Along the hedgerows the radial spokes of shivering cobwebs shone into infinite regression with all the sparkle of a set of diminishing solar-wheels. There, in that eerily candescent world of blue and white and gold, was the El Dorado so often found in the gilt-edged dreams of the eternal slide-maker. As always when one travels along the slippery paths of nostalgia, wish and outcome are bound to coincide. In the shape of the innumerable corrugated ruts to be found in the unmade roads of that bucolic yester world the Promised Land was encountered. Like manna from the very heavens the Ice Queen had performed her perennial miracle. The slides already in place were both long enough and wide enough for our slithering purposes. All that was needed was polish. Something that has to be said - that in our case at least - was in rather short supply. However, the attempt was made. Tentatively at first, like apprentice tightrope walkers, arms outstretched, in a teetering file of two, we inched along the frozen rut. Slowly, on gaining confidence, we gathered pace. Our erstwhile vacillations were forgotten. A run-up was selected and the trampled grass partially defrosted. From a flying start, ice and shoe-leather came together in unison. At first two-footed with the occasional twirl, then at a crouch, then on one leg, and then inevitably head over heels in a temporarily ego shattering tumble. Soon, inured against any amount of derisory laughter, an unwarranted optimism regarding one’s capabilities concerning the sports d’hiver was attained. The fairy-dust itself was about to be transformed into a shower of shooting stars as the headlong giggling speed skaters inevitably became head-bumped sprawling imbeciles in an avalanche of tears. Those two bruised and battered athletes of Olympian stature were ready to settle for bronze. Peter Pan was in danger of growing up, El Dorado had been confused with iron pyrites and the golden beginnings of that crystalline day of enchantment had ended up by being tarnished with blood and abrasions.