The Voice That Thunders, page 7
The internal activities of a story’s growth, however, are almost impossible to describe. Every book is the first: or ought to be. By this, I mean that any facility gained through experience should be outweighed by one’s own critical development. The author should become harder to please. And not only is every book the first, by this definition, but no two books arrive through the same door. As a rough generalisation, there does seem to be a flexible pattern common to them all.
It is this. An isolated idea presents itself. It can come from anywhere: something that happens; something seen; something said. It can be an attitude, a colour, a sound in a particular context. I react to it, usually forget it; but it is filed away by my subconscious.
Later, and there is no saying how long that will be, another idea happens involuntarily, and a spark flies. The two ideas stand out clearly, and I know that they will be a book. The moment is always involuntary and instantaneous: a moment of particularly clear vision. The spark must be fed, and I begin to define the areas of research needed to arrive at the shape of what the story is going to be. It is an hallucination, but there is always the sense that the book exists already, has always existed, and the task is not invention but clarification. I must make the invisible object such that other people can see it. The period of research varies. It has never been less than a year, and the most, to date, three years. The spark struck by the primary ideas is all that originality is or can be, and the discovery of the point where hitherto unconnected themes meet is the excitement of writing.
As with all the books so far, The Owl Service contains elements of fantasy, drawing on non-Classical mythological themes. This is because the elements of myth work deeply and are powerful tools. Myth is not entertainment, but rather the crystallisation of experience, and, far from being escapist, fantasy is an intensification of reality. When I first read Math vab Mathonwy, it struck me as being such a modern story of the damage people do to each other, not through evil, but through the unhappy combination of circumstance that throws otherwise harmless personalities together. So far, and for about three years, no more than that.
Then I happened to see a dinner service that was decorated with an abstract floral pattern. The owner had toyed with the pattern, and had found, by tracing it, and by moving the components around so that they fitted into one another, the model of an owl could be made. The spark flew.
Welsh geology (I always start from first principles); Welsh political and economic history; Welsh law; these were the main areas. Nothing may show in the book, but I feel compelled to know everything before I can move. It is a weakness, not a strength.
I learnt Welsh in order not to use it. Through the language it is possible to read the mind of a people; but just as important seemed the avoidance of the superficial in characterisation: the “Come you by here, bach” school of writing. Presented with such a sentence, we know that the speaker is Welsh. We may guess that the author knows Welsh, especially if, from time to time, a gratuitous, and untranslated, line of the language is inserted. We can admire the author’s erudition, or be irritated by it, but we do not experience what it is to be Welsh. This is “reality” laid on with a trowel, and it remains external and false.
By learning the language I hoped to discover how a character would feel and think, and hence, react. The importance is not to know that someone is Welsh (“Diolch yn fawr, I’m sure,” said Williams the Post) but to experience the relevance of the fact. The success or failure of The Owl Service here is impossible for me to judge, but I am warmed to learn that the publisher has been approached to negotiate the Welsh translation rights of the book.
On a more general level: the ideas have struck a spark, and the spark has been fed. There is nothing else to be done but to write. At this stage, panic sets in, because the ground has been covered, and there just is no story.
Coming to terms with this has been difficult. I call it the “Oh-my-God” bit. I find myself unable to function at any but the lowest levels. The days are spent asleep, or reading pulp novels, and the evenings to the worst of television. Then a sudden, unpredictable, brilliantly original idea erupts, which makes me race around for a while, prophesying a great future. And then I remember where the idea came from. It is an amalgam of that book, and that film, and that conversation, and that book, and those notes, and that book, and that book . . .
There follows a string of such unexpected flashes of worked-out ideas, which have to undergo another process of shaping and selection, but this part is relatively straightforward, and it is possible to get on with the excitement of telling the story. The worked-out ideas form stepping-stones over which the book must travel with a simple logic. The details are never planned, but grow from day to day, which helps to overcome the deadly manual labour as well as to give the whole an organic development.
This has been, of course, no more than a statement of intent, since all books fall short of the vision, and the original question is truer than the questioner knows. There is always the hope that I shall write a real book: when I’ve had a bit more practice.
* * *
1 First published in The Times Literary Supplement, 6 June 1968.
5
Oral History & Applied Archaeology in East Cheshire
THE PURPOSE OF this paper is to show how, in at least one instance, an orally inherited legend may give valid clues to the interpretation of an archaeological site.1
The legend I shall use is the Legend of Alderley. I absorbed it from my paternal grandfather, Joseph Garner, who was born in 1875. He lived all his life in the same house on Alderley Edge, as had at least the two generations before him. The Garner name occurs in the same square mile, the Hough, as early as 1592, and is one of the five basic families of craftsmen of the Edge, the self-styled Houghites.
“Long ago, one day at the end of October, a farmer from Mobberley was riding to Macclesfield Fair. By dawn, he had reached Thieves’ Hole on Alderley Edge. The horse he was riding was a milk-white mare, and he intended to sell her that day at Macclesfield.
“But, at Thieves’ Hole, the mare stood still and would not move. The farmer saw an old man, holding a staff, at the side of the road. The old man said that he wanted to buy the horse, but the farmer thought that he would get a better price at the Fair and he refused to sell.
“The old man did not argue. He said that no one would buy the horse, and that he would wait for the farmer to return.
“And so it happened. The farmer could not sell the horse, and the old man was waiting for him at Thieves’ Hole that evening. This time, the farmer did agree to sell, and the old man led him from Thieves’ Hole, by Seven Firs, and Golden Stone, to Stormy Point and Saddle Bole. He stopped at a rock on Saddle Bole and touched it with his staff The rock opened, and behind it was a pair of iron gates and from them a tunnel went into the hill.
“The farmer was terrified, but the old man told him that there was nothing to fear, and led him down the tunnel into a cave beneath the Edge. Here slept a king, with one hundred and forty-nine knights in silver armour; and one hundred and forty-eight white horses. The farmer’s horse was needed to complete the number of the enchanted Sleepers.
“The farmer was paid with treasure, taken back to the Iron Gates, and he found himself alone upon the hill. And though he often looked he could never find the place again.”
That is the story as I remember it, told to me before I was five years old; that is, before 1939.
It is the myth of the Sleeping Hero, for which there are many analogues, in Britain and stretching across Europe deep into Russia. The hero is usually given the name of a national hero. In Switzerland, “he” is the three founders of the Swiss Federation. In the Devil’s Den, on the Isle of Man, in Sutherland and on Alderley Edge, the Sleeper is nameless. There has been an attempt to call the Alderley Sleeper King Arthur, but I suspect that this was a nineteeth-century attempt at Romanticism. My grandfather had no name for him, and although he was literate, he did not read: certainly, he did not read treatises on folklore. Joseph Garner, whitesmith, of the Hough, knew only his sleeping king. He could not borrow from analogues. He had to tell the truth. We have here an oral tradition.
By the time that I could return to my grandfather with a mind trained and primed, my grandfather was dead, so I never could test the story in his presence. But I did have that story, and many of the analogues. If my grandfather had been word perfect, that is, if the actual words had been as important as my memory told me that they had been, and since he could tell only what he knew, it seemed to me that I had, within my own culture, a clue. I felt that there were answers to questions that I had not asked. So I set out to discover my grandfather’s truth.
Let us keep in mind that the concern here is for archaeology, not for myth. It is the material culture of a people that I am looking for, not the numinous in Man. The numinous is present on Alderley Edge, but I am looking for the factual in a metaphor, and the first question is the hardest. It is that of where to begin.
The difference between legend and modern storytelling is that the modern story is a conscious fiction, whereas the legend, however degraded now, was, in its origin, an attempt to explain a reality. It is news that time has warped: a game of Chinese Whispers passed from generation to generation, so that what we receive now is a fantastic structure surrounding worn truth. It is a pearl. The shimmering accretions hide the central grit. How shall we look for the grit?
Francis Bacon knew the risk.
“Now I suppose most people will think that I am but entertaining myself with a toy, and using much the same kind of licence in expounding the poets’ fables which the poets themselves did in inventing them. . . . But that is not my meaning. Not but that I know very well what pliant stuff fable is made of, how freely it will follow any way you please to draw it, and how easily with a little dexterity and discourse of wit meanings which it was never meant to bear may plausibly be put upon it. . . . All this I have duly examined and weighed.”
In other words, this time the words of Professor Cohen here in Manchester: keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains drop out.
So I addressed myself to the Legend of Alderley. I began by accepting the whole legend as a literal truth about the physical Alderley Edge, as if it were history or journalism, all grit and no pearl, and from there examined it to see what could be ignored. The implication was swingeing. All elements for which there were analogues in other versions in other places were unlikely to be relevant to the Edge. It seemed that I could throw the story away and forget it. But Joseph Garner had told me something that mattered. So I looked again, differently.
I collected all the versions of the Legend of Alderley that I could find and compared them, not with those from other parts of Europe, but with each other. My comparisons, therefore, were with texts. And, at this stage, the analogues became significant. Superficially, there were wide variants, but there was a theme: that of a mortal becoming involved with an immortal through an intermediary. And the farmer always came from Mobberley, over Alderley Edge, at dawn on a day at the end of October, to sell a white horse at Macclesfield Fair.
A feature of oral, preliterate tradition is the importance of exactitude. But my texts were literary, of the nineteenth century, and their authors had felt neither inhibition nor an obligation to scholarship. Yet the source must have been oral, and I looked for some vestige of the tradition; and found one. Although the plot was frequently embroidered, a seemingly inconsequential detail remained constant, and was in the version told by my grandfather. For some reason, the route taken by the wizard and the farmer from where they met to where the Iron Gates opened was always given in the same words. “They went from Thieves’ Hole, by Seven Firs, and Golden Stone, to Stormy Point and Saddle Bole.” Though not proof, it was suggestive of an oral fragment, especially since only two of the places were still in living memory: Stormy Point (known commonly as the Devil’s Grave) and Saddle Bole. The rest were lost.
Over a period of years I was able to recover the names. It was a slow matter of building up a series of fixes from documentary evidence, while taking none of the evidence for granted. Too often, authority for fact is based on the lazy multi-repetition of one unchecked error. The Golden Stone is an interesting example of a fix, and can stand for all. The oldest reference is from a Court Leet of Nether Alderley of 1598.2
“On this day we did begin at the merestone at Findlow Hill and so to the great stone and so to the mere stone in the bottom of the ditch at the old dytche and so on up the old dytche to another merestone which many do remember stood on the end and is now fallen down, from there to a great mere stone in the Intack and straight to another in the bottom near the pit on the common that Lingard had marl out of and so lineally by the merestones to the top of the bank near Lingards house and so to a great stone called the golden stone on the north side of the main way that cometh from John Lingards to the Beacon.”
Obviously the Golden Stone was a mere, or boundary, stone. By 1954, aged nineteen, I had enough fixes on paper to place the Golden Stone on the ground. And I went to the spot, and saw only an undisturbed bank of earth at the side of the track. I sat down and checked my fixes. They tallied. All that was missing was the Golden Stone. At which I waxed a little peevish and jabbed my trowel into the earth of the cop. The trowel blade snapped. I had hit rock.
A fortnight later, the Golden Stone lay excavated, and can still be seen. But the excavation was not all bliss. True, I had hit upon rock at the right place, but on the Edge it would be hard not to. For a day I was unimpressed by the systematic uncovering of a stretch of Lower Keuper conglomerate sandstone, identical to the natural outcrops that surrounded the site.
Then patience, if not virtue, was rewarded. I came upon chisel marks and almost immediately a weathered, but definite, right-angled corner. The stone had been worked. It was not a rough outcrop. Eventually I found that it was not an outcrop at all. It was approximately 60 cubic feet of free-standing stone, the positioning of which had been important enough to cause the 4-ton block to be cut, moved and placed. Such was the Golden Stone: a grey conglomerate; not yellow, not golden. As with most discoveries, every solution asks more questions. Each place on the route was now known. I put them on the map, and looked again at the legend as fact.
The earliest written reference to the legend is in 1805, in the Manchester Mail, where it is stated that John Shrigley (who was curate of Alderley from 1753 to 1762 and died in 1776) held that the local peasantry believed the legend both to be historically true and to have occurred in about the year 1680; which is ninety years later than the first documented Garner in the district. Even at this naïve level of interpretation, my grandfather loses no ground. But let us accept John Shrigley’s dates for the moment, and consider another matter.
The Edge was open common until the decade 1745–55, when it was afforested by Sir James and Sir Edward Stanley. Therefore, if we are to believe John Shrigley, the legend was current before the hill was wooded. Immediately the map is absurd. From Thieves’ Hole to the rock known as the Iron Gates would, before 1745, have been a walk of 700 yards across open ground. But the route constantly referred to, “by Seven Firs and Golden Stone, to Stormy Point and Saddle Bole”, is 850 yards, in a zig-zag line, that increases the journey by more than 20 per cent.
The phrase that had stood out to me as being an oral fragment made no sense on the ground. Yet it had been retained by the very people who knew that ground, as I knew it, as Joseph Garner knew it. Why was it so important that it had to be remembered? I went to look with fresh eyes. At each of those places I discovered singly, or in groups, hut circles, earthworks, tumuli, superficial pits and primitive hearths. The route of the legend made sense if it was seen as the preserved memory of a connecting path between a number of settlements. And here is the frustration of Alderley. The Edge is a public place, so heavily populated by visitors that any attempt at serious archaeological excavation would be to invite the destruction of the evidence.
In 1954 and 1955 I was able to make three small investigative probes, to try to establish whether there was a coeval pattern for the sites. The results cannot be said to be conclusive, but there is a prima facie case for considering the oral tradition of my grandfather to contain evidence of the Bronze Age. That is, I inherited a memory that was four thousand years old.
And here I would like to think aloud and to ask whether, if Arthur (or whoever he is) can survive preliterate tradition, he may also have swept similar fragments of grit into his synthetic pearl. The sword in the stone is a perfect image of the mystery of smelting metals.
But Joseph Garner is my concern here, and he has not yet finished with me. I am left with a grey Golden Stone.
The legend, by coincidence or not, had shown me a series of early occupation sites on the Edge; and I had seen them by trusting that the unschooled mind would convey information with less distortion than would the educated. I had believed in the belief of the storyteller, and found him most convincing when he had appeared to be at his most absurd. It was my introduction to the most valuable tool of any research: “Pursue the anomaly”.
I looked again at the legend. It contained another absurdity: one that any fool could have spotted, but that this one had not. If we accept the legend as a factual report, the farmer must explain why he should be at Thieves’ Hole at all. There is a road from Mobberley to Macclesfield, but it does not go past Thieves’ Hole. There is even an alternative, which avoids the gradient of the Edge. The farmer was labouring, and off course. It was four years later, in 1959, that I saw. And it was one of those inductive acts of vision, the instant of clarity, that plagues years for its proving. My interpretation had been unintelligent. The legend was correct.
