Of Wails, Watchers and Wales

Of encounters, brief and long pants

For anyone wondering what had happened to me, I’ve been a long way away. In fact such a long way away that I almost feel I should sidle in to the strains of a Rachmaninov piano concerto.

Unlike Celia Johnson though, my absence has been of the purely physical kind - a long encounter with north Wales, the Lakes and Scotland. I stayed away from railway platforms, took my husband with me and got nothing in my eye, I promise.

Anyway, the curtains of Autumn are drawing in. Imagining blog-reading Trevor Howards everywhere chorusing ‘thank you for coming back to us’ (oh vanity, thy name is Judeness…) let us continue…

Moving left along the fireplace wall, you come to the first of two almost identical double cupboards which sandwich the chimneybreast.

The right hand one, where we’ll stop today, is where non everyday china is kept; the ‘best’ ware, reserved for special occasions, clearly distinguished from the forbidden china which lived in the seld in that it is, sometimes, pressed into service.

On the middle of the three shelves - a little crammed in - sits the tea-set which only comes out for funerals. In fact so closely do I associate it with the dead that I think of its pattern as ‘Norwegian Blue’ rather than the ‘Blue Nordic’ it officially is.

Collected piece by piece by my mother during the 1970s, each item walked home from town in her capacious red vinyl shopping bag, it’s a strange mixture of stylised flowers, foliage and - somewhat bizarrely - things resembling onions. It has, for some time now, been all that remains of the ‘best’ ware of my youth.

Grampa’s death was about as good as they get. He lived until he was 86, had had ‘flu, but died suddenly, in his own bed, holding the hand of someone who loved him. His last words were a request for my mother to put his pants to air as he felt better and intended getting up later.

Pants, for Grampa, were substantial things - welsh woollen long-johns, worn year-round. They kept him warm in winter and wisdom received when he served in Egypt in the First War was to ‘dress against the heat’ so he never wore less than a double layer of clothing on his bottom half and a triple layer on the top. His one concession to a heat wave might be to roll up his shirt sleeves, but neither his collar nor his waistcoat ever unbuttoned. His legs, when revealed from the knee down for their once-a-month soak followed by an application of Noxacorn and a little DIY surgery with a penknife were as white and as hairless as lard.

Working in the garden dictated the extra protection of ecru overalls. I can visualise him now, kneeling on an old folded sack between the regimented drills of potatoes, occasionally straightening up from his weeding to remove his hat and mop his brow with his handkerchief. In between, sweat soaked the fabric of his fedora dark around the petersham band and eventually dripped from the end of his nose.

Of sympathy, empathy and culpability

His funeral was the first I had known centred on my home and during the days that led up to it, I learned rather a lot about the welsh way of death, including the custom of ‘calling to sympathise’ - and I don’t mean picking up the telephone. Within hours of his passing, the quiet, respectful knocks on the front door harbinged neighbours, friends, relatives and acquaintances.

There was a strange formality to the process; I became door-person, ushering callers into the front room where they would commiserate in hushed tones with my mother before being given tea. Their cups drained, they would then ask ‘ble mae e ‘te?’ - ‘where is he then?’ - an indication that they were now ready to be shown into the parlour to pay their last respects to my grandfather’s body before leaving.

My mother though had broken with tradition; Grampa’s body had already been taken off by the undertaker to pass the liminal days between death and burial in the new-fangled ‘Chapel of Rest’. Disapprobation was considerable, I’m sure, but was shown only by little ‘oh’s of surprise and a slight awkwardness now that the culmination of the sympathising ritual had unexpectedly been cancelled.

Actually one of my friends tells a delicious tale of exactly the opposite happening - of her father’s body having been laid out by an undertaker who was also a coal merchant (well at least the suits are dark…) A family friend was bemused beyond to find himself being shown in to pay his last respects when all he’d actually intended paying was a bill for anthracite…

Anyway the lack of a my grandfather’s corpse didn’t keep people away and as the days passed, more and more of the callers either brought quantities of cakes or left with the promise of a sponge for Thursday. Sponges for funerals are, by the way, always plain or lemon. Chocolate would be too frivolous, coffee too bohemian and hundreds-and-thousands taboo. Once it was past the decent time for callers, the in-house baking began too; fruit cake, bara brith, scones and of course welsh cakes by the several dozen.

But the baking was only one element of the logistics involved in the post-funeral feeding of up to a hundred. Offers of teapots were accepted from neighbours whilst set-by-set all the china from the fireside cupboard had to be carried out to the kitchen, washed and dried in readiness. The morning of the funeral itself was consumed by loaves and dishes; once the salmon, ham and egg mayonnaise had had their fill, the kitchen worktops were washed, shrouded with tablecloths and laid out ready with cups, saucers and teapots.

Traditionally, the house of the deceased is never left empty during a funeral but we dismissed the superstition and locked the door behind us. Besides, I was glad of the excuse to head straight home from the chapel to get the kettles boiling; I had no wish to see the coffin interred.

It’s traditional, too, for the undertaker to remain outside the chapel during the funeral service - but highly untraditional for the aforementioned to have to conduct the bearers through the cemetery end of their duties whilst covered in an icing of guano. That a seagull chose to anoint black-suited ‘Billy the Box’ with quite extreme quantities of ‘good luck’ whilst the three preachers paid homage to Grampa brought some welcome lightness to the dark hour if not his dark jacket.

The luck, however, did not extend to the immediate family. Returning to the house after the service I sensed an unnatural stillness. For one thing it was the first time I’d ever come in to an empty home - the first time I’d needed a key to enter it - and Grampa’s vacant chair, pushed back from its usual fireside spot to allow better access to the food-laden table added to the poignancy. And why weren’t the dogs barking? They’d been shut in the kitchen away from the food but they always barked when they heard the front door open…

Cats, when interrupted doing something they shouldn’t, brazen it out. Some fix you with that look that purrs ‘hey, the thing with feathers was asking for it… we’re a different species… don’t expect us to share your moral code…’ Others suddenly find the need to wash utterly, utterly compelling. If they could whistle, they would.

Dogs, however, do ‘guilty’ rather better than most humans and Mab and Mitzi - obviously stopped mid tablecloth tug-of-war by the sound of my return - stood silent and shame-faced, as shattered by their culpability as the best china all over the kitchen floor. Only the Norwegian Blue, perched on trays on top of the cooker, was not a dead tea-set. The Glengettie, then, at Grampa’s funeral, was served very slowly out of a single blue-and-white coffee pot with a strained air that had nothing to do with it being loose leaf. The house was never left empty during a funeral again.

Of matters modern, mutes and mutual respect…

I’m not even sure that I want a funeral. Whilst recognising that preparing for them serves the purpose of imposing structure on the desolate days immediately post-bereavement, they’re fairly hideous ordeals for the immediate family and today of no vital consequence to anyone else. And I definitely don’t want one of those strange modern gatherings ‘to celebrate the life of…’ If you think I make a reasonable job of living tell me now; don’t wait until I’ve gone and if I’ve got to have some sort of send-off, at least do me the courtesy of being sad at it.

At one time of course you could hire people to be sad at your funeral, in the form of paid mourners and mutes. The former specialised in vocal distress whilst the mutes’ forté was standing round, silently, looking glum. Now there’s a career option for the thousands of depressed people the Government plans to throw off sickness benefits… Sorry, enable into work…

It’s a career option that was considered for Oliver Twist too: ‘There’s an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear,’ resumed Mr. Sowerberry, ‘…He would make a delightful mute…I don’t mean a regular mute to attend grown-up people… but only for children’s practice. It would be very new to have a mute in proportion… it would have a superb effect.’ A shame it doesn’t come from ‘A Christmas Carol‘ or you could have had the original ‘Bob, Marley and the Wailers’…

Anyway the popular employ of mutes and paid mourners in Europe lasted from the 1600s right through to the start of the last century although the tradition allegedly has much older roots. In his 1926 ‘Funeral Customs, their Origin and Development‘ Betram S. Puckle records: ‘Laugh as we will at the mute, he had a history and a pedigree which for longevity would put to shame the pretensions of many a noble house. He was a direct descendant of the Roman mime, who likewise dressed in black, but wearing a portrait mask of wax aped the mannerisms not only of the deceased in whose funeral procession he walked, but of the defunct members of the family.’

Puckle writes too of  paid ‘watchers’ who seem to have served a similar purpose to the mute: ‘So completely did the watcher take charge of the situation that in Scotland the thrifty poor were obliged to shorten the period between the death and burial of their dead in order to reduce his charges. The social status of the bereaved family was largely estimated by the length of time they were able to hold out against the exactions of the watcher, but it was considered a point of honour to employ the services of this functionary.’

Hazzlit, in his Dictionary of Faiths and Folklores also touches on the pressure to ‘keep up with the ex-Joneses’ in Scotland: ‘the desire of what is called a decent funeral, i.e. one to which all the inhabitants of the district are invited and at which every part of the usual entertainment is given is one of the strongest in the poor. The expense of it amounts to nearly two pounds. This sum, therefore, every person in mean circumstances is anxious to lay up and he will not spare it unless reduced to the greatest extremity.’

Some impatience with the seeming extravagances of the masses is recorded in the Statistical Account of Scotland 1791-99 (Parish of Lochbroom - volume 10 p.469-470). ‘At their burials and marriages the inhabitants too much adhere to the folly of their ancestors. On these occasions they have a custom of feasting a great number of their friends and neighbours, and this often at an expense which proves greatly to the prejudice of poor orphans and young people…’

A motive for such profligacy is offered by Maria Edgeworth writing in 1800 of Irish funerals: ‘The lower Irish are wonderfully eager to attend the funerals of their friends and relations, and they make their relationships branch out to a great extent. The proof that a poor man has been well beloved during his life is his having a crowded funeral…’

Certainly even in today’s rural Wales great importance is put on the numbers that attend any funeral although we tend to express it more as a measure of the ‘parch‘ - the ‘respect’ - felt for the deceased than a yardstick of love.

My great great grandfather’s funeral report from 1905 provides an unusual glimpse of a working class welsh funeral. It’s unusual in that - as the report puts it - ‘We publish in this issue the portrait of a well known local worthy - a son of the soil. In so doing a departure is made from the customary usage of emblazoning the press with the features alone of the departed who have climbed the ladder of fame: but whoever in the dead past has gone to his fathers honoured and sung to doleful requiem, none more worthy has ever entered the portals of mystery than John Morgan of Cefynydre’…

The reason his funeral is reported remains unknown. He was, after all, as the newspaper calls him merely ‘a horny handed veteran‘ - a ploughwright and carpenter who had married a pauper. He had a trade but the family were still distinctly of the working class. Perhaps though it was his long-time devotion to the non-conformist cause which singled him out for recognition. It was, after all, the height of the Revival - indeed the same edition of The County Echo reports how the appearance of a meteorite in the sky over North Pembrokeshire had been interpreted by some of the ‘innocent country dames‘ as a ‘second star of Bethlehem predicting the coming of the Rev. Seth Johnson who is on tour through West Wales in the Methodist Connection‘.

Of the funeral itself we are told:

‘However high eulogy may ascend, no word picture can equal the outward and visible tokens of esteem shown by the inhabitants on Tuesday afternoon last, when all that was mortal of the late Mr John Morgan were borne to their final resting place at the Baptist Cemetery. The town wore the stillness of the Sabbath, business houses were closed and blinds drawn in every residence and there was unmistakable evidence of profound public feeling of regret and sympathy… Hundreds of mourners and friends of all classes had assembled to pay a last tribute of respect…’ Quite a turn-out then - I can only hope that they had several teapots at their disposal…

Back over in Ireland, Edgeworth tells us that ‘Even beggars, when they grow old, go about begging FOR THEIR OWN FUNERALS that is, begging for money to buy a coffin, candles, pipes, and tobacco‘

That last paragraph dampened my eyes - in fact it rates right up there alongside the ‘lonely sheep dying on the hill’ that I touched upon a blog or two ago. No matter how much I try telling myself that hypothermia’s probably quite a cool way to die, I still hate to think of anything or anyone being cold and alone at their passing…

It also brought to mind a song I first heard when I was 15.

Of portents, passage and Peel…

For weeks I had been helping to keep vigil. My Great Uncle John was dying a protracted death in the days when pain control was a very hit or miss affair. It was simply a matter of enduring the time. My mother and his sister, Sal, took it in turns to wait with him day and night, nursing him but mostly just being there - watching and waiting for the kindness of death. I waited with them, and in so doing obviously crossed some threshold in their eyes, for for the first time in my life I found myself being included in extremely adult conversations.

It wasn’t just a baptism in the fluids of the dying, although the way in which the contents of each sick-bowl or bedpan were discussed did rather bring to mind an examination of the entrails. Sal and mum were both deeply steeped in ‘old’ beliefs about deaths and dying and their exchanged reports of various signs and portents opened doors to a strange new world. Howling dogs, odd noises, birds of the day heard singing by night - all provided an eerie accompaniment to John’s groans during the slowest pre-dawn hours.

It was, in retrospect, one of the oddest periods of my life. Outside the disinfectant-soaked house I was rebelling - undertaking the challenge of being one of our sleepy little town’s first ‘punks’ (What has she got all those safety pins on for? Has her elastic snapped somewhere, do you think?) Within its walls though, I was being initiated into something very, very old; discovering rites of passage to a sisterhood bound by more than kinship.

Anyway, I found the record soon after John’s death, lying among a pile of long forgotten 78s in his attic. It was, it has to be said, one of the wilder numbers there - most were Welsh hymns or classical choral pieces - but nothing in its title prepared me for the shivers I would experience as its words crackled from the sound box of the old wind-up gramophone…

‘I was passing by a churchyard in the city when I saw a beggar old and grey

With his hands outstretched he asked the folks for pity

And it made me sad to hear him say

Oh I wonder yes I wonder will the angels way up yonder

Will the angels play their harps for me?

For my heart is growing dreary and my feet are growing weary

Will the angels play their harps for me?

Oh a million miles I’ve travelled and a million sights I’ve seen and I’m ready for the glory soon to be

Oh I wonder yes I wonder will the angels way up yonder

Will the angels play their harps for me?’

The words alone don’t come near to expressing the dolefulness of the hillbilly number. Nor can I explain why it affected me so at a time when my standard listening fare was Blondie, The Clash and Siouxie and the Banshees (more of them later…) Perhaps its impact was simply the clashing of zeitgeists. I noticed though with a smile - whilst unsuccessfully looking for a link to an mp3 for you - that John Peel played it on one of his 2002 shows. And hey, if John Peel kens it… A sad passing, his, too - but at least the angels have more than harps to choose from now.

Funerals also remind me of a happier story of Uncle John and his sister Sal. Before his retirement John ran a small bakery and grocery shop. John and Sal were both due to attend a family wedding and Sal had been hovering anxiously in the shop for almost an hour waiting for John to close up and go and get changed. But more and more customers arrived - and John was very fond of his pounds, shillings and pence. Eventually Sal lost patience…

‘John Owen - are you coming to this wedding or not?’

‘Oh, you go on without me Sally fach,’ John replied - ‘it would be different, wouldn’t it, if it was a funeral…?’

The need for a good ‘send off’ is still felt deeply amongst impoverished modern day celts it would seem, for during a study carried out in 1997 on the effect of cuts in Social Fund funeral payments, Professor Mark Drakeford also concluded that providing a ‘proper’ funeral was a social pressure felt most deeeply by the poorest families. Part of his research looked at the use of a ‘cheap but decent’ funeral service set up by a Welsh local Council. It was, he discovered, largely middle class families who were taking advantage of the cut price offer - ‘bringing granny in in the Volvo’ - whilst the poor continued to pay the much higher prices demanded by private Undertakers.

Of Père-Lachaise, Beaux pères and albumen…

The green sod of the other side has not always been as verdant for those who make their living from death though; the New York Times reports in 1910 that the funeral mutes of Paris were threatening to strike; ‘They say that since the separation of state and church, the former has assumed supervision of the undertaking business, which formerly paid the lay officers of the city parishes around $800,000 annually, a large part of which went to their underlings, the mutes. These hired mourners complain that they must now eke out their earnings by holding out the hand of beggary to the real mourners…’

By 1913 the cuts were really biting; ‘it appeared that the (Paris) City Fathers had received many complaints as to the unshaven and unkempt appearance of these officials supplied by the Department… on their slender stipend such relatively expensive matters as hair-cutting and shaving could hardly be insisted on… Forthwith it was decreed that these functionaries should be trimmed into respectability at the City’s expense…

‘Certain barber establishments in the city were commissioned to tend the coque-morts free of charge - then the storm broke! That one (establishment)… should be thus favoured with municipal patronage whilst others were neglected cut at the most cherished traditions on which the Republic is based. The neglected barbers rose to a man and demanded a fair share of the trade. “Give tickets to the coque-morts,” they demanded, “that they may extend their patronage to whom they will, rather than encourage a pampered minority.” And so the matter was settled. Even this equitable arrangement was found to have its drawbacks in practice, owing to a regrettable tendency on the part of the coque-morts to sell their tickets and go unshaven as before.’ writes Puckle.

A more recent Parisian funeral brought home to me the sheer scale of the industry of death. It took place at the renowned Père-Lachaise cemetery, where Seurat, Balzac, Wilde, Piaff, Bizet, Patti, Callas, Stein and Toklas, Chopin, Delacroix, Pissarrot, Rossini and Jim Morrison all lie. Marcel Marceau too - now I bet he had mutes at his funeral.

We were there though not for a burial but for my father in law’s cremation - or so I thought. Those of us accustomed to death the British way stood there at the end of the service, waiting for the coffin to slip, glide or slide euphemistically away. Instead the French master of ceremonies announced that it would not be possible to burn Monsieur M… until 8.30 that evening, but that anyone wishing to attend could return then if they so wished;  a spectre at the feast which made it impossible not to clock-watch as his closest family and friends gathered, as pre-arranged, for a meal that evening. It helped not a jot that we had chosen a Moroccan restaurant where almost everything ordered seemed to arrive in its own little urn…

It was, though, not the most uncomfortable meal I’ve eaten in Paris. We’d been hospice visiting when the Metro unexpectedly went on strike, confining us, sad and starving, to a distinctly non touristy restaurant; a grim little bistro populated by caricatures from Gothic horror- cum- Royston Vasey.

That it was empty didn’t seem a good sign, but we were soon cheered when a large group of obviously local people crowded in after us. Cheered until, that is, we clocked that they were all male, that there were thirteen of them, that they were all dressed in black and that they were each carrying an identical small dark suitcase. Real disquiet set in though when a second group of thirteen identically accessorized men walked in and sat down to eat with no acknowledgement whatsoever of the other party’s presence.

Trying to reassure ourselves that they were probably just rival sales team from some sombre suitcase symposium, we studied the menu. The vampish waitress appeared to have absolutely no English and we didn’t have technical French. When we asked then, falteringly, about the house ‘special’, she returned with the cook - a woman of indistinguishable age and behemoth proportions, her rolls of blubber trussed by a blood-spattered apron. In her hand she grasped a meat cleaver which she proceeded to use as an aide-illustoire, pointing her way through the menu with attitude - and no English either. We gained, though, the impression that there was a lot of offal involved.

Now I’m not squeamish where offal is concerned - I’ve tried most British offal bar tripe and most of it I’ve enjoyed. I’d learned, by this time though, that the French eat offal I’d never even dreamed of; I still remember the evening the waiter managed to discover - half way through my meal - that the English word for what Madame was eating was ‘gizzards’. For my first course I eventually then ordered ‘œuf en cocotte’ which I thought I knew was a (safe) egg baked in a ramekin, sometimes with a ‘lid’ of cream on top.

The food arrived. Ramekin? Check. Contents? Yes, a layer of cream. Things looked promising.  When I inserted my fork and brought it up towards my mouth though, very little followed. In fact all that did was a viscous, translucent string of albumen. As it hung from the prongs it whispered - in English - that the egg hidden under the milky pool was still raw.

It was one of those royal ‘what exactly do you do?’ moments. Most unpalatable dishes can at least be pushed around your plate and semi hidden by a serviette to make them look as if they’ve been partially eaten. This, though, no matter what I did to it, refused to look like anything but a ramekin full to the brim of white. The more I thought of what lay beneath the more I needed to retch, but even if I’d been able to countenance a few mouthfuls, how on earth would I have conveyed them to my mouth?

‘You’re going to have to explain’ I hissed to Tom as Morticia walked past our table for the umpteenth time, eying my still untouched œuf with suspicion. ‘I don’t know how to…’ he hissed back. ‘The closest I can get is this egg is naked - do you want to try explaining that to Madame Cleaver?’ No, on reflection I didn’t…

In desperation I tried to ‘accidentally’ knock it over, but discovered that ramekins have remarkably stable bases and low centres of gravity. I even considered leaping to my feet in mock rage with my husband, capsizing the table in the process, but love for Tom’s features as they’re currently arranged and a glance at our fellow eaters persuaded me against any action that might prompt them to come to the assistance of a damsel in distress. In the end all I managed was a limp explanation that I was suddenly not hungry - ‘soudainement je n’ai pas faim…’ - leaving Mme. Adams looking at me sadly as if I was the oddball in the refectory.  She would, actually, have made an excellent paid mourner.

Of kith, kin and keening…

Whilst funeral mutes were almost always male, the mourners were usually women. Purely co-incidental, traditional, or, perhaps, indicative of the fact that men never seem to know quite what to say at these awkward times? Puckle explains the gendered division of duties by saying that ‘women are more given to the display of emotional grief… In this capacity their professional shrieks have echoed down the ages.’

I want to look though at quite a distinctive group of wailing women - the ones skilled in the celtic practice of ‘keening’. The English ‘keen‘ is derived from the Irish ‘caoine‘ (lament), with echoes in the Scots Gaelic ‘caoin‘, the Manx ‘keayney‘ and the Welsh ‘cwyn‘. The Dublin Penny Journal in 1833 notes though that ‘the word in the Irish language as originally and more correctly written is ‘cine’… which makes it almost identical with the Hebrew word ‘cina’ which signifies lamentation or weeping with clapping of hands‘. None of these should be confused with the latest offering by the popular beat combo Keane, no matter how many connections can be made with things musical or lamentable…

We would seem, then, to be considering an extremely old tradition. Indeed some say that the first woman to keen was none other than Bridget or Bride herself, loudly lamenting the kebab-ing of her son Ruadan on a javelin (Celtic Myths and Legends - Squire 1905). References to improvised poetry and song being performed over the dead occur in Irish literature from the 8^th Century on and early visitors to Ireland - including Giraldus Cambrensis in the 12^th Century - also found the practice worthy of mention, an indication that however we lamented our dead in Wales, it differed from - was perhaps  less obvious and public than - the ways of our neighbours across the sea.

The time for keening seemed to vary, but all seemed agreed that there was no place for it at the deathbed or even immediately after passing. Custom dictated that it was not until the corpse had been properly laid out and the soul of the departed had had time to make its peace with the afterlife that the wailing could begin - some adding that to keen earlier might attract the hell hounds. There were various keening slots on the pre-interment bill’s running order - as the warm-up act for the wake, around the coffin during the wake, on the arrival of any new mourner, just before the coffin was closed, on the morning of the funeral and whilst the coffin was being carried from the deceased’s home to the graveyard.

Some also describe keening taking place in the graveyard, with one of the most evocative accounts coming from J M Synge’s ‘Aran Islands‘ (1907). His description of a turn of the century funeral on Inishmaan offers a particularly valuable window on the past because of the isolated nature of the island’s predominantly Gaelic speaking community - it seems likely that the practice he witnessed would had been unchanged for centuries.

‘After Mass this morning an old woman was buried. She lived in the cottage next to mine, and more than once before noon I heard a faint echo of the keen. I did not go to the wake for fear my presence might jar upon the mourners, but all last evening I could hear the strokes of a hammer in the yard, where, in the middle of a little crowd of idlers, the next of kin laboured slowly at the coffin. To-day, before the hour for the funeral, poteen was served to a number of men who stood about upon the road, and a portion was brought to me in my room. Then the coffin was carried out sewn loosely in sailcloth, and held near the ground by three cross-poles lashed upon the top. As we moved down to the low eastern portion of the island, nearly all the men, and all the oldest women, wearing petticoats on their heads … came out and joined in the procession.

‘While the grave was being opened the women sat among the flat tombstones, bordered with a pale fringe of early bracken and all began the wild keen, or crying for the dead. Each old woman, as she took her turn in the leading recitative, seemed possessed for the moment with a profound ecstasy of grief, swaying to and fro, and bending her forehead to the stone before her, while she called out to the dead with a perpetually recurring chant of sobs.

‘All round the graveyard other wrinkled women, looking out from under the deep red petticoats that cloaked them, rocked themselves with the same rhythm, and intoned the inarticulate chant that is sustained by all as an accompaniment…

‘The morning had been beautifully fine, but as they lowered the coffin into the grave, thunder rolled overhead, and hailstones hissed among the bracken. In Inishmaan one is forced to believe in a sympathy between man and nature, and at this moment, when the thunder sounded a death-peal of extraordinary grandeur above the voices of the women, I could see the faces near me stiff and drawn with emotion.

‘When the coffin was in the grave, and the thunder had rolled away across the hills of Clare, the keen broke out again more passionately than before.’

The content of the keen seems to have been a mixture of traditional laments, more personalised content about the deceased, their life and achievements and a communal, high-pitched wailing. Something along the lines of:

‘O why did you leave us and where have you gone,

You, yes you Mike of Tralee,

Death claims us all, but why leave us now,

Your friends and your dear wife Maggie?

Across death’s dark river then Mike hear the call of your

9 bairns, 10 yews and 8 kine

We wish you had waited… Why you could have won

Your place in heaven any time…’

All:

O why did he leave us and where has he gone

And what are we going to do next?

The passing of Michael has left us all sad

Indeed you could say we were vexed….

Ullaloo… ullaloo’

I do, of course, a great disservice to the skill of the keener there; an act unwise given that many ‘bean caoinadh’ or keening woman was probably the canniest old crone of her locality. Ladies I, Jude of Pembrokeshire, apologise unreservedly.

For anyone wondering about the ‘Ullaloo’ element above, the tongue- in -cheek glossary to Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth (1800) offers the following information:

‘WHILLALUH. - Ullaloo, Gol, or lamentation over the dead…

A full account of the Irish Gol, or Ullaloo, and of the Caoinan or Irish funeral song, with its first semichorus, second semichorus, full chorus of sighs and groans, together with the Irish words and music, may be found in the fourth volume of the TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL IRISH ACADEMY. For the advantage of LAZY readers, who would rather read a page than walk a yard, and from compassion, not to say sympathy, with their infirmity, the Editor transcribes the following passages:-

‘….It has been affirmed of the Irish, that to cry was more natural to them than to any other nation, and at length the Irish cry became proverbial… In the twelfth century…  they applied the musical art… to the orderly celebration of funeral obsequies by dividing the mourners into two bodies, each alternately singing their part, and the whole at times joining in full chorus….  The relations and keepers (SINGING MOURNERS) ranged themselves in two divisions, one at the head, and the other at the feet of the corpse…

‘The chief bard of the head chorus began by singing the first stanza, in a low, doleful tone, which was softly accompanied by the harp: at the conclusion, the foot semichorus began the lamentation, or Ullaloo, from the final note of the preceding stanza, in which they were answered by the head semichorus; then both united in one general chorus. The chorus of the first stanza being ended, the chief bard of the foot semichorus began the second Gol or lamentation, in which he was answered by that of the head; and then, as before, both united in the general full chorus. Thus alternately were the song and choruses performed during the night.

‘The genealogy, rank, possessions, the virtues and vices of the dead were rehearsed, and a number of interrogations were addressed to the deceased; as, why did he die? If married, whether his wife was faithful to him, his sons dutiful, or good hunters or warriors? If a woman, whether her daughters were fair or chaste? If a young man, whether he had been crossed in love; or if the blue-eyed maids of Erin treated him with scorn?’

Edgeworth also tells us that whereas ‘formerly the metrical feet of the Caoinan were much attended to…on the decline of the Irish bards these feet were gradually neglected, and the Caoinan fell into a sort of slipshod metre amongst women.

‘It is curious to observe how customs and ceremonies degenerate. The present Irish cry, or howl, cannot boast of such melody… they begin to cry - Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Agh! Agh! raising their notes from the first OH! to the last AGH! in a kind of mournful howl… Certain old women, who cry particularly loud and well are in great request…’

Certain even older Irish women were also associated with keening though - none other but the Banshees - albeit without Siouxie.

The name ‘Banshee’ comes from ‘Bean Sidhe’ or ‘fairy woman’. Tradition has it that the oldest families of Ireland had connections with their own Banshee; she would not only warn them of death with her unearthly wailing but would also perform the keen at their funerals. Her Scottish equivalent is the ‘Bean Nighe’ - an old woman encountered at fords washing the bloodstained garments of those who are about to die.

My mind-picture of a Banshee has always been of a frightening old hag, but apparently they often appeared as beautiful young women with long golden or auburn tresses. Their eyes were red, yes, but only from their tears. Usually benign, they were only to be feared if crying. Is that another chorus of Trevor Howards I hear wailing ‘just like most women then!’?

Of fiddling and funerals…

Coming to terms then with the fact that I can no longer have a Bean Sidhe, a Bean Caoinad, a Mute or a Keeper at my funeral I was delighted to discover that I can still have a funerary violinist. I’d been surfing one night and was delighted to come across the Guild of Funerary Violinists at www.rohan-k.co.uk/guild.html. The site itself will tell you much more than I can about the ancient profession as well as allowing you to listen to some samples of traditional fiddling for funerals.

There is, of course, fiddling at funerals and fiddling at funerals. My colleague Sharon, for example, doesn’t have great luck with them. Her earliest mishap was arriving late for one and sidling her way upstairs in the chapel where she finally found a seat in the front row of the balcony amidst a throng of dark-suited fellow mourners. She didn’t realise her mistake until the male voice choir surrounding her rose as a man to perform their solo tribute to the deceased.

The fiddliest funeral I’ve been to was last year - a proper old welsh country funeral conducted at the height of an absolute deluge. The only place to leave cars was some distance from the chapel so that by the time the mourners got inside each and every one was soaked to the skin. Thoughtfully though, the keepers of the chapel had turned the heating full on; that we didn’t all pass out if not away from the naphtha filled fog of steam that quickly formed was in itself a small miracle.

The tribute to the deceased was long - three ministers were taking part and one of them decided to use the funeral as a platform for his views on Shambo, a sacred bull suspected to be suffering from TB in a small Hindu community just down the road. At the time the Welsh Assembly Government had just stayed the execution order on the friesian but the minister of the chapel wanted blood and wanted it NOW.

With the bull finally out of the way it came time to stand to sing the final hymn - the point at which a good half of those attending discovered that they were glued to their seats. Not in the ‘excited by the oratory’ meaning, actually stuck to their pews, the combination of heat and dampness having reacted with the old varnish. As I rose - more determinedly -  I experienced an unmistakeable sensation - that of ripping yarn - yet all I could do was stand there, singing ‘Arglwydd dyma Fi’ (‘Lord here I am’) hoping that He had a sense of humour and praying that those in the pew immediately behind were short sighted to a man. There are, after all, brief encounters and brief encounters…

P.S. In case, after following the link above you - yes you - start getting excited by the prospect of having a violinist at your funeral, you should also look here… http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article600440.ece . Yes, sadly, the Guild of Funerary Violinists is an extremely elaborate hoax, the quite brilliant brainchild of a busker from Brighton. Hats off to him…

Of time, tides and turns

Of waxing and waning lyrical…

In the space between the CD cabinet and the gardening certificate stands a moon clock which, single handedly, counts out the 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.8 seconds of each lunar month.

Although theoretically purchased for me, it’s one of those gifts which you know the giver needed more than the recipient. I like to know the phase of the moon at a glance, yes, but there are times when it’s vital for Tom to know the phase of my mood at a glance. Ensuring fresh supplies of doughnuts and putting corks on the tips of all the sharp knives in the house takes planning after all…

A link between the moon and the tides of mankind has long been perceived; indeed Pliny, writing in AD 77, called the moon ‘the star of our life‘. Sometimes exposure to any moonlight was considered perilous; many traditions cautioned against sleeping in moonlight for fear of blindness, madness or idiocy whilst Roman physicians believed that moonlight heightened the saturation of the air, causing seizures in the brain.

The adjective ‘lunatic’ - from the Latin ‘lunaticus’ or ‘moonstruck’ first entered the English language around 1300, meaning ‘affected by periodical insanity dependant on the changes of the moon’. It took eighty more years for it to start being used as a noun but once it was, it stuck; it wasn’t until the Mental Treatment Act of 1930 that British statute replaced the term ‘lunatic’, with ‘person of unsound mind’ and we continue to watch the progress of the tabloid press with interest…

More often than not it was the full moon that was credited with having the most malign influence. Writing in the late 1400s, William Langland records that ‘lunatic lollers’ become more or less mad according to the phase of the moon and around a century later Paracelsus warns of its powers to ‘tear reason out of man’s head’. A more precise definition within British Law defined a lunatic as someone who was lucid in the fortnight before the full moon but prone to odd behaviour during the subsequent fourteen days.

The Catholic Church waded into the debate in Mediaeval times, telling people not to be so silly and superstitious… of course it wasn’t the influence of the moon on people which caused insanity… it was the influence of the moon on devils…

‘For certain men who are called Lunatics are molested by devils more at one time than at another; and the devils would not so behave, but would rather molest them at all times, unless they themselves were deeply affected by certain phases of the Moon,‘ explains the Malleus Mallificarium.

Belief in the effect of the moon on the mind persisted though and as recently as 1940 a soldier being tried for murder at the Winchester Assizes pleaded ‘moon madness’ as a defence.

But of course believing that the moon - or aliens, or a secret signal being beamed at you from the spiral arm of some far distant galaxy come to that - affects your behaviour does not, in itself, establish causality. In fact it makes little intuitive sense that the phase of the moon should exert any influence on us whatsoever. Consider our artificially lit homes and neon-polluted nights. A single 100w bulb is 600 times brighter then the full moon and whether shining in its fullness or utterly un-illuminated, the moon is still there, after all, clutched to the earth’s mass by the gravity of the situation…

‘Ah but…’, I hear you say, ‘the phases of the moon also coincide with the strength of its pull, its ‘full’ or ‘dark’ force aided and augmented both by its alignment with the sun and the turn of the earth… Our bodies are, after all, largely made up of water… of course it will have an effect on us…’ But we must also remember that the forces that create the tides are exerted over the vast surface area of the oceans. Smaller bodies of water cut off from the seas - lakes, reservoirs, swimming pools, Jacuzzis - even though 100 per cent H₂O, show no evidence of being ‘pulled’ by the moon…

I was interested to discover actually how little of our bodies is water. I had a 80-90% figure floating around in my head, but it turns out that men are roughly 60% water (often more on a Saturday night) and women only 55%. Babies on the other hand - of either sex - are around 78% water; a figure that will doubtless come as no surprise to parents. It’s also, incidentally, been calculated that the difference it would make to our bodyweight if the moon were to disappear altogether would be around that of a gnat alighting on our shoulder. Mars bars and Milky Ways have a considerably greater effect then…

Studies have found correlations between certain natural phenomena and moon phases of course, but these are often ‘understandable’ connections. For example it’s quite graspable that the fullness - or darkness - of the moon would be the ‘best’ times for animals to do certain things; when seeing - or being unseen - is advantageous. The full moon acting as a signal for creatures to amass and breed is also easy to comprehend - but very different to claiming that it makes them breed, or migrate, or forage… That levels of radon gas - responsible for around 2,000 deaths in the UK each year due to its accumulation in our homes - can rise by up to 46% at the extremes of the moon’s phases is explainable by its effects on the earth’s crust and water-table levels…

Some scientific investigations have also claimed to find links between the moon and human behaviour - e.g. between moon phases and rates of admission to psychiatric hospitals - but the results have, on the whole, proven impossible to replicate and lose their significance in meta-analysis.

Any discernable differences in admission patterns could of course also be due to the beliefs and expectations of the staff responsible for assessing the ‘unwell’ rather than the behaviour of those admitted; ‘ooh, it’s full moon… we’d better lock this one up just in case…’ Do people really commit more crimes at full moon, or is it just easier to spot them doing so?

But for every one sceptic pointing at the figures, you’ll also find dozens of people working in frontline emergency, medical and psychiatric services who will swear that the moon does have an effect. The sceptics would answer of course that people who hold this belief are more likely to notice and remember incidents which coincide with full moon… which in turn will re-enforce their belief…

I have my own theory to offer; that the sleep deprivation associated with a) a series of lighter nights and b) being berated by crabby women for a week or two each month is enough to push anyone already teetering firmly over the edge…

Of tides in the affairs of men…

Anyway, today the clock tells me that the moon is ‘waxing gibbous’ - growing and more than half visible - but that by the time I post this, it will probably be a waning gibbous… as I hope none of my readers will be as a consequence of my prolixity. For gibbous comes from the Latin ‘gibbosus’ or ‘hunchbacked’. Those of you who do spend too much time bent over your screen here though may find the section on bells and the ringing thereof in my June blog of interest…

The naming words of the moon’s turns and the bulging tides it drags in its wake cast a lulling pull of their own for me - waxing, waning, ebb and flow, gibbous, crescent, flux, neap, surge… they’re words that draw me in with their mystery and antiquity; words to be savoured. You can imagine them being uttered in hushed tones attached to a fragment of folk wisdom; ‘it is very dangerous,’ cautions Bede ‘to bleed when the light of the moon and the pull of the tide is increasing…’

Many traditions concerning the moon and the sea wash in and out of each other’s inlets, echoing superstitions and sentiments; for example the common belief in coastal communities that people die only when the tide was ebbing is mirrored by others which looked to the moon as the marker of man’s day. In Shropshire it was believed that people would not die when the moon was rising whilst other superstitions held that an ailing man would last until the moon had passed its full.

To be born with the growing moon was considered lucky, to be born with the waning moon unlucky and to be born at the dark of the moon worst of all; ‘no moon, no man’, was the saying. Similarly a birth when the tide was going out was considered an ill-omen both for the newborn and the mother.

Nor should weaning be started on the wane - ‘a child put off the breast on the wane of the moon will continue to decay whilst the moon continues to wane’ was a belief recorded in Angus in 1808. Hazlitt claims older resonance here, pointing to ‘rath’ meaning both ‘circle’ and ‘fortunate’ in Gaelic. ‘The wane, when the circle is diminishing, and consequently unlucky they call mi-rath. Of one who is unfortunate they say at a mi-rath air’, he records.

Ireland and Wales meanwhile shared a belief that the outgoing tide could carry sickness and particularly whooping cough away; at one time it was common practice to take an ailing child to the water’s edge and allow the ebbing tide to take the cough away with it. One particularly unpleasant variation involved making the child vomit through the consumption of sea water; I can almost hear the conviction with which they would subsequently insist that they were feeling ‘much better now, thank you mother…’

Although my family lived on the coast, the folk remedy for whooping cough in my mother’s childhood involved being taken to the local gasworks to inhale the fumes there. At first I suspected a corruption of the older tradition, given that the gasworks was only a stone’s throw from the sea, but some Googling has confirmed that a trip to the gasworks was a common whooping cough cure throughout Britain in the 19^th and early 20^th Centuries. Kill or cure at times; whilst surfing I also came across a sad little snippet from the New York Times dated September 25^th 1909. It records:

‘There is a widespread belief that fumes given off in the process of gas making are beneficial for whooping cough, and Mrs Mathias of Lawrenny, Pembrokeshire, took her son, aged 4 years, who is suffering from the disease to the Neyland Gas Works to inhale gas. A spark from a passing locomotive is believed to have ignited the gas in the condensing house and an explosion followed. The mother was so badly burned that she died in a few minutes, and the boy is not expected to recover.’

Back at my blogging the old moon slips away and I realise that ‘waning gibbous’ is now rather over-ambitious for posting; my brain feels slow and my word count seems to have got dragged into the undertow.

Of hiraeth, heleniums and hemerocallis

I suspect that my inertia’s more to do with the turn of the sun than the moon though. Well over a month has now passed since it reached its high point and the nights - I whisper - are drawing in. Something in me ‘senses’ the change far earlier though and as the longest day slips past, my energy and mood dive in unison. Pre-solstice everything seems possible; post solstice is the beginning of the end.

The Welsh name for July - ‘Gorfennaf’ - hints that I’m not alone in my post-midsummer gloom either, for it means, literally, ‘end of summer’. Monty Don too writes of the period immediately after the solstice as a particularly low time for him. Perhaps it’s a gardener thing - or at least something felt most by those who usually spend a deal of their time outdoors?

It’s been compounded for me this year of course by the continuing absence of my robin. I shrink from writing ‘death’ and tell myself tall tales about his having lost a territorial battle and moved on, but in my heart and in my head I grieve for his passing. I’ve been strict with myself ever since he first crossed the divide to land on my palm; rigorously refusing to name him and reminding myself that one day he would fail to appear. But of course robins have a name already - and nothing could have prepared me for the silence he’s left.

And so I repeat the platitude that he had a ‘good, long life’. The average lifespan for robins is, after all, less than a year and I know that he was at least seven years old. We first became acquainted soon after my mother’s death in the late summer of 2001; his chirruping company was the spur I needed to dig at one of the few times in my life when the garden yielded little but sorrow.

Reading her diary for 1997 recently though, I found several entries about an unusually fearless juvenile robin which was frequenting the garden and cannot help but wonder…. If it was the same one, that would make him 11 - three years older than the ‘oldest recorded British robin’ but still a couple of years younger than the German record holder. I find myself wondering if elderly robins go pink?

I also find myself wishing that I had not come to take his ‘ever there-ness’ so much for granted. So ubiquitous was he that instead of savouring every minute of his close company, I reached the stage where I’d sometimes - albeit fleetingly - ignore his demands to complete some task before delving for the can of worms. He had his ways of making his presence felt though…

Thankfully the gloom is not mirrored in my garden. Interest there reaches its zenith in mid July when the lilies swell, sneezewort kindles and green-skirted clumps of Hemerocallis trumpet from the borders, their warm notes spilling onto a white tide of over-blown feverfew.

There’s a glorious hand-over week or two early in the month when a few blousy irises, billows of pale blue geranium and royal side-spikes of delphiniums remain to cool the high summer hues, but much as I love the gentler shades of spring, I like my garden best wild awake.

In a good summer I’m topped up on serotonin by now and am happy to seek shade; to pause and draw breath, sit back and sip the flowers. In summers like the last two we’ve allegedly had, I lose heart, survey the damage done to flora and fauna by weeks of rain and midsummer gales and long for a patch of sunshine to mend the hole where happiness leaks out.

Of Sirius, scorching and serpents…

I check the origin of ‘Dog Days’ - the period between early July and mid August - and growl at the irony, for they are meant to be the hottest days of summer ,when both man and beast are driven to madness by the incessant -oh wouldn’t it be lovely - warmth. They’re called the Dog Days though not for the mad canines and welsh women who yearn to go out in them; their name comes from Sirius, the Dog Star.

In ancient Egypt, Sirius was observed to rise just over the horizon at dawn this time of year - its ‘heliacal rising’ as in ‘with the sun’. For the people of the Nile, its early morning wink was welcomed and marked, for it tipped them off that the annual flooding vital to the fertility of the Delta was nigh.

The Greeks also looked to the stars - including ‘Seirios’ as they knew it (literally ‘scorching’ or ‘searing’) - to mark the passing of time precisely, for the beginning and end of lunar calendar months could vary considerably over a number of years. They took a dimmer view of its presence though.

Homer warns of ‘That star which comes on in the autumn and whose conspicuous brightness far outshines the stars that are numbered in the night’s darkness… yet is wrought as a sign of evil and brings on the great fever for unfortunate mortals.’

Alcaeus meanwhile records that when ‘Seirios, is come around, the season is harsh, everything is thirsty under heat, the grasshopper pours his song from the branches… the artichoke flowers; now are women most wanton, but men are feeble; Seirios parches their heads and knees’ .

Hesiod also uses Sirius as a marker in his ‘Works and Days’ - an agrarian teaching text which could have doubled as a script for an early Greek version of ‘The Archers’ - ‘But when Oarion and Seirios are come into mid-heaven, and rosy-fingered Eos (Dawn) sees Arktouros [i.e. in September], then cut off all the grape-clusters…’ he counsels. Next week, Clarrie spins the golden fleece, the Ministry vet vaccinates the Gorgons and Brian sets up an artificial insemination programme for Minotaurs…

The Greeks and the Romans both believed that Sirius actually added its heat to that of the sun during the dog days; ‘Twas the season when the vault of heaven bends its most scorching heat upon the earth, and Sirius the Dog-star smitten by Hyperion’s full might pitilessly burns the panting fields.’ wrote Statius in first century Rome.

And the view of the period from early July to mid August being accursed persisted; ‘In these Dog Days it is forbidden… to be let Blood or take Physic. Yea, it is good to abstain all this time from Women. For why, all that time reigneth a Star that is called Canicula Canis… broiling and burning as Fire’ warns the Husbandman’s Practice in 1729. ‘All this time the Heat of the Sun is so fervent and violent that Men’s bodies at Midnight sweat as at Midday: and if they be hurt, they be more sick than at any other time…. In these days all venomous serpents creep, fly and gender, so that many are annoyed thereby…’

I have in fact been delighted by a venomous serpent recently; my first ever close up and personal encounter with a live adder (unless you count maths undergraduates, that is…)

Of whinberries, wars and snakes in the grass…

I was gathering Whinberries - also known as Blaeberries, Whortleberries, Bilberries, Huckleberries or Whimberries, depending on where you live. We also know them as whineberries in our household, from the noise that those not of a hunter/ gatherer persuasion make when a whinberry picking expedition is suggested. For whinberrying is probably the ultimate measure of fruit-picking patience within these isles; the shrubs on which they grow hug the ground, the berries nestle amongst the leaves and are TINY. You pick other fruit; you earn whinberries.

I have berrying juice in my veins though. My father would pick contentedly for hours and I’d match him minute-for-minute, smiling, satisfied, submerging day-to-day cares in the meditation of gathering. His technique was better than mine but he had bigger hands and had also had many years of practice.

Growing up in Germany between the wars he experienced gnawing poverty; gathering from the wild was an everyday matter of survival. I got the feeling though that whinberrying was an ‘event’ rather than dragging routine for his family. The Heidelbeeren - as they knew them - grew in the pine forests near his Rhinepfalz home - on land usually off limits to the poor and closely guarded by foresters. Once a year though (oh why didn’t I ask him when - and why then?) the forest would be ‘opened’ and villagers allowed in at dawn to gather the navy jewels. All the children helped in the early morning harvest but the pickings weren’t for their eating; the following day my grandmother would carry a metal pail of berries on her head to the market in Trier, where they could be exchanged for precious cash.

My grandfather couldn’t pick; his hands were wrecked by frostbite contracted when he fell into a partially frozen river. He’d been dragging a dug-out tree-stump home for fuel under cover of darkness when he slipped on the icy bank.

My father only knew him ‘til the age of 12, when, in 1933, true to his Communist beliefs, he voted openly against the Hitler government and as a result was forced to flee his home for fear of interment - and worse - at Dachau. He left my grandmother with five sons, no income, and no choice, given the politics of small village life, but to thrust her offspring into the Hitler Youth. I often wonder whether I am proud or ashamed of him. Probably both.

By the time he was able to return in 1945, his two older sons had died of the cold fighting for the cause he so despised on the Russian Front and his middle son - my father - had been shot and taken prisoner by American soldiers, not far from death himself at the time.

Perhaps it’s little wonder then that my father’s ‘old stories’ were all either of his younger childhood or of his Prisoner of War days; picking cotton in Mississippi and litter on beaches in Florida, working in a Heinz factory where the secret ingredient of each batch of ketchup was a judicious spit of the supervisor’s chewing tobacco and finally labouring on farms in West Wales. They were, I suspect, by far the greenest fields he had ever known.

Anyway, back in the pastures of today - well rough scrubland anyway - the adder curled unhurriedly just inches from my footstep before slipping, soundless, into longer grass. It was surprisingly big; I can’t estimate its length as it travelled coiled, but it had a thickness to it which I certainly didn’t expect. Its striking, black-on-tan markings which most reference books interpret as zigzags I perceived as diamonds. However should you come across a snake which doesn’t have classic adder markings, don’t assume it isn’t one. Some adders are unusually pale with very feint markings whilst others can be plain dark grey or black. A cunning plan indeed…

Had it been Kaa from the Jungle Book, I couldn’t have been more fascinated - hypnotized indeed - by its brief presence; indeed for once it didn’t even occur to me to point my every-ready camera. Sincere thanks then to photographer Simon Harrap of Norfolk Nature for his permission to use the image below - you can follow the link at the end of this ramble for more of Simon’s stunning images of both fauna and flora.

I’ve learned, since, that European adder bites are rarely fatal in humans, but the after-shiver of the snake and be-sandaled state of my feet combined to persuade me that perhaps we had, after all, collected sufficient whinberries for one day. Should you ever find yourself bitten though, please don’t let my ‘very rarely fatal’ put you off getting medical help. Official advice is to do so immediately whilst ‘immobilising’ the bitten part and keeping it below heart level - although I suspect that that doesn’t mean standing on your head should a viper nibble your earlobe… Nor should anyone be allowed to indulge in amateur dramatics such as applying tourniquets, trying to suck or cut the poison out or cauterising the bite. It will hurt quite enough by itself, thank you.

I smiled when reading Stefan Buczaki’s ‘adder’ entry in ‘Fauna Britannica’ - he lists a bewildering number of folk cures, including the fat from another adder which had recently been deep fried, pieces of live pigeon and a ‘bag of heads’ - a bag containing the heads of an adder, a toad and a newt which sounds to have come straight from The Scottish Play. He also observes that there are so many ‘cures’ probably because anything tried almost always ‘worked’, greatly enhancing the reputation of the local wise woman or man…

Whilst reflecting on my encounter I was also intrigued to learn that the name ‘adder’, has actually had something subtracted from it - for the word was, once, ‘nadder’ or, in Old English ‘nædder’. The same root can also be found in the current Welsh (naidr), Irish and Scots Gaelic (nathair) and Cornish (nader) words for ‘serpent’ or ‘snake’. Sometime during the 14^th century, courtesy of ease of speech, ‘a nadder’ became ‘an adder’, around the same time that ‘an ewt’ became ‘a newt’. Young newts however never gained the ‘n’ and remain ‘efts’ to this day…

Of welshcakes and S&M

Anyway, I used the whinberries snatched from the wild in spite of near-certain indifference from the snake to make whinberry welshcakes.

For the uninitiated, welshcakes are flat, flour-based cakes cooked on a ‘planc’, ‘maen’ or griddle which are basic to the upbringing of almost everyone west of Offa’s Dyke. Traditionally they’re made incorporating dried fruit - currants and/ or sultanas and even sometimes candied peel and mixed spice… Ooh, there’s fancy for you… I, however, have taken to making them with fresh whinberries around Lammastide each year.

This has its advantages. The preparation of the mixture for welshcakes is not particularly time-consuming but the cooking of them is - especially as it seems to be compulsory to only ever make them in quantities of four dozen or more. They have to be watched over, nursed six at a time, deftly ‘flipped’ mid cooking and then precariously transferred from planc to wire cooling tray, inevitably leaving the cook hot, cross and with semi-scorched fingers.

A couple of times a year then, when whinberries are in season, I’ll enjoy the novelty of their making and the oh-so-evocative smell of their cooking. But by the end of the second batch, I’ll be quite glad that seasonality will soon give me a valid excuse not to produce them once a week, as was standard practice in most welsh homes until not so long ago.

The other practice standard to welsh homes was the pinching of welshcakes. They’re nice enough cold, but hot they’re different creatures altogether; sweeter, softer and - the ultimate seasoning - illicit. Of course for the person cooking the welshcakes, having them disappear almost as fast as they can be made is initially a compliment but, as time goes on, becomes more and more dispiriting to say the least. I suspect there was, then, a fine line of ‘accepted’ thievery in most household beyond which the wrath of mam would be incurred. In fact had Max Moseley been Welsh, he may well have found contentment being tied up with apron strings and given a damned good talking to…

Apron, incidentally, is another one of those word which has now lost its initial ‘n’… Why didn’t the viper viper hands? Because the nadder ‘ad ‘er napron of course…

I notice that Delia Smith - who I’m sure has a cult following of her very own amongst the ‘whip to a light froth’ brigade - proscribes butter or honey with welshcakes but these are English aberrations. Proper welshcakes are eaten naked. She also goes completely wrong by asserting that ‘it’s important to cook them completely through’… Oh, no, Delia, the real secret lies in taking them off just before they’re cooked through, leaving a thin but delectable band of slightly moister mixture in the middle. I’m sure Nigella would…

For 24 welshcakes then, you need

1lb self raising flour (and a bit more for rolling or pressing out)

½lb butter

½lb sugar

2 eggs, soundly beaten

milk if needed

¼ pint fresh whinberries (or dried fruit, out of season)

A planc, maen, griddle or thick, flat bottomed frying pan.

Rub the butter into the flour and mix in the sugar.

Get your whinberries out and curse as you remember that whinberries need picking twice; the first time to get them off their bushes and the second time to pick out all the tiny leaves which will inevitably end up clinging to the berries in your collecting receptacle. It’s easiest done by pouring them out onto a big flat plate or tray which will give you a good view of a thin layer of berries. Rocking it from side to side helps to uncover hidden foliage - but don’t rock too vigorously as picking whinberries for a third time, from the floor, is no fun whatsoever.

Put your cooking implement of choice on to warm thoroughly - a medium heat is what you need. Do NOT oil it though unless it’s brand new or recently scrubbed - sufficient fat will cook out of the welshcakes to make them ‘non-stick’.

Tip the fruit into your dry mixture and from here on in try to touch it as little as you possibly can. Some berries will inevitably burst but the finished product looks rather nicer if the initial dough isn’t completely pink from juice. I use a knife to ‘cut’ the eggs into the mixture, just squidging it together with my hands at the last minute - you may need a splash of milk too although the welsh measure would be a ‘lwtched’, which relates, I think, more closely to a ‘slurp’ or a ‘slosh’ than a splash.

If making it with dried fruit you can roll the dough out - to around a third of an inch. To minimise berry bursting I press it into a flat with my hands instead, avoiding as many of the whinberries as I can.

Cut out your welshcakes with a fluted cutter and cook them a few at a time, remembering to leave yourself some space on the planc to flip them half way through. I use the same broad-bladed knife that I suspect has been used by three generations in this household, but there’s nothing to stop you cheating with a small fish-slice or spatula. They take roughly three to four minutes a side and when ready to turn will become slightly convex - gibbous even - on their upper face. If your first batch break try again - for some reason the first six are always the trickiest. You will have no trouble disposing of any that look less than perfect.

Dried fruit welshcakes will keep up to a week in a tin, whinberry ones need eating within a couple of days due to the fresh fruit. Oh, what utter hardship…

Of feathers, fellowships and farewells…

Gentle readers! The moon by now is almost at its dark and yet I ramble on… I have an excuse though. For a fortnight now the sky has been intermittently painted blue and I’ve taken every chance to catch the sun and hold it. I sit, then, under an old apple tree, my forearms jaundiced by nothing but lily pollen and feel it warm my face, my heart, my spirit. My word-rate has dropped to an absolute crawl for I’m watching something magical in the branches above me… a handful of long-tailed tits performing unparalleled gymnastics as they pick insects from the undersides of leaves. Their fragile form and elongated tail feathers whisper of the cobwebs with which they bind moss together to make a nest…

I’ve only once before seen even a single long tailed tit in the garden; today I have six. It is though, apparently, more common to see half a dozen birds than a solitary one, for they spend most of the year in tightly-knit social groups, travelling, eating and sleeping as if connected by invisible elastic. Indeed should one get even temporarily left behind you’ll hear the separation anxiety in its call until re-united.

This time of year these groups are made up of an adult pair, their this-year’s offspring and any ‘aunts or uncles’ on the male parent bird’s side. These other adults will have ‘earned’ their place in the group by helping to feed their brother’s young. In spring the groups break up into pairs and begin nest building. If for some reason one couple’s attempt at breeding fails, they will split up and each return to a brother’s territory where they join in the mammoth task of collecting invertebrates for their sibling’s brood. Up to eight ‘helpers’ have been recorded at a single nest site.

Doing so is not altruism. Yes the chance of the brother’s brood surviving is increased, but so are the chances of the adult birds making it safely through to try to breed another spring. Long tailed tits are absolutely tiny and so particularly susceptible to the cold. By winning themselves a place in the social group they get to sleep snuggled up with their family through the long winter nights. They are, actually, the only British birds which habitually huddle at night. Wrens will do so when forced to by extreme cold but long tailed tits actually choose the communal wrap of 12-tog living feather and down all year round.

Over the course of the winter the ‘daughters’ of the family will transfer to different social groups and be replaced by females from other families so that by next spring a mixed gene pool already exists in the social group.

Their nests - formidable domed structures of moss and cobwebs pebble-dashed with lichen for camouflage - take weeks of building. It’s the final phase of construction though which really demonstrates this amazing little lollipop of a bird’s second feat of turning misfortune into success…

For each nest must be lined with up to 2,000 feathers. And whereas finding 2000 feathers this time of year when birds are moulting might not be difficult, finding them in the spring when all species are near perfection plumage-wise is a very tall order. Long tailed tits then - these fluttering bundles of sweetness and light - seek out the corpses of less fortunate birds, pluck them and re-cycle…

So, heads under wings, beaks under blankets, it’s definitely time to bring my waxing to a close before the moon starts doing so again. Just a mention though that as it rises at its full on the 16^th August, it will appear, from Britain, to have a chunk missing… The folklore of eclipses, then, probably, next time…

Links:

http://www.norfolknature.co.uk/ More of Simon Harrap’s lovely photographs

http://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/adder_lore.htm Lots of adder folklore from Devon

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/173/12/1498 More about the various studies on the moon and mental health

http://unauthorised.org/anthropology/anthro-l/october-1995/0174.html Ouch…

http://www.astrosociety.org/education/publications/tnl/33/33.html What if the moon didn’t exist?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/mar/16/thisweekssciencequestions.environment The moon and radon

Of messengers winged, wandering and wondering…

Of birds, baths and beaks…

Above the CD collection of mixed ownership hangs a certificate, testifying that the quarter acre or so which I now tend was once registered as a wildlife garden.

Qualification - twenty five years ago - required us to have five ‘wildlife features’; long grass, woodpiles, bog areas, ponds and the ilk. I think it likely though that had the registering body known that our original ‘pond’ was a bath, we’d have been more likely to have been certified than certificated.

My father was pretty wild too; having manhandled the cast-iron hulk down the steep quarry steps and spent hours sinking it in at ground level as a ‘surprise’ for his beloved-who-wanted-a-pond, his beloved’s reaction was not quite what he expected. The clincher for my mother was probably the taps, but even without the no-longer-running H&C it was always going to be a buried bath - which of course now had to be exhumed and hauled back up the steps, my father leaking good karma with every riser.

His subsequent silence - anger and hurt invariably manifesting themselves in a lowering rather than a raising of the volume in our household - lasted for several days, during which time mum no doubt had time to reflect that he had, after all, meant well. Not a word of protest was raised then when a neon turquoise plastic sheet later appeared lining the rather sinister, coffin-shaped indent.

I swear the imported tadpoles wore sunglasses that first year - they looked, after all, as though they’d ended up on a Club Med holiday. Time, however, is a great fader, and today, bar the shape, it looks almost like a pond. Only algae seem to thrive in it, but I suppose they’re wildlife too

Oh! I just discovered something courtesy of Word… I’d started that last sentence ‘only algae seems…’ to be rewarded with one of those annoying little green squiggly underlining. Wondering indignantly what it was objecting to now, I right-clicked, only to learn after all these years that that the singular of algae is ‘alga’. The option it offered me - ‘an only alga’ - must be one of the loneliest phrases I have ever encountered, but I will go to bed wiser courtesy of Microsoft tonight. ‘Tis such a reversal that I shall consider fragmenting…

Anyway, back in the garden the pond still blooms, the bath overflows with francoa and life is as wild as ever it was. A little wilder, in fact, this year, for the triumvirate of robin - seagull - crow which rule its airways have been joined by an usurper; a male blackbird anxious to elbow in on the pecking order. It started by stalking the robin and has now graduated to stalking me, venturing to within a foot in its determined quest for mealworms.

The indignant crow watches from a short distance, hunched on the wall like a sulking hoodie and Tig is definitely struggling with it all. If she half closes her eyes she can just about convince herself that something as small as a robin isn’t really fluttering fearlessly around her, but the blackbird’s on a bigger scale altogether and as such much harder to ignore, especially as it will insist on punctuating its every darting movement with an anxious, piercing ‘twick’.

Sammy’s sanguine enough though - he, after all, has never relied upon a diet of worms. No, his prime source of nourishment is cat food - or to be precise, the bits of alleged ‘meat’ left after Tig has sucked the jelly off her Felix. All Sammy has to worry about from his haughty perch is ‘will it be beef or will it be salmon in cat saliva gravy?’

The robin hardly seems to notice either - its brood hatched around a fortnight ago and it has, since, become a bird driven. I treasure being close enough to pick up on these changes in his life; he has, after all, been carrying mealworms to courtship-feed his partner for some weeks now; had I been less familiar with his behaviour I might well have concluded that he already had young.

After seven years of watching though, I spot the difference that announces break-out from eggshell Alcatraz immediately. Suddenly, instead of helping himself to a mouthful he’ll pick up a single grub, manipulate it from side-to-side-and-back-again across his beak like some macabre mouthorgan and then break it into shorter lengths before flying off with a meal made-to-measure - the perfect pecked lunch.

I suspect that he’s feeling both the width and the quality, ensuring that there are no choking hazards in these small parts. The dexterity though with which he manoeuvres and then sections the worm leaves me with renewed respect for the precision engineering of his beak; true wormsprung durch teknik.

An apology to purists, incidentally, for the heavy reliance on hand-based metaphor in the previous two paragraphs, but seek a synonym for ‘dexterity’ and what are you offered? ‘adroitness’, ‘dextrousness’, ‘legerdemain’, ‘handiness’… the results of some word searches, it would seem, are as empty as the sound of one wing flapping…

As days pass and the robin’s beak-loads grow larger and larger, I use their swelling and frequency to measure his brood’s progress. His current winged message hints at two to three well-fed young roblings - no mean feat when you consider that each one will demand around 140 small grubs or insects a day. It’s lucky then that it’s the time of year when I’m almost a fixture in the garden myself; an ever ready worm-o-mart where the only bills are full ones.

Of beauty, beasts and burial…

It is, you see, the start of the iris season. I am entranced.

I like spring flowers, or course, but having long ago lost the bulb battle to starch-seeking badgers and squirrels, my early-year garden boasts little impact after the fading of the hellebores.

The contrast, come May then, is sudden and startling. Clematis montana fleshes out the old pig sty roof, pale paper hats of astrantia crown shady borders and honeysuckle ‘Graham Thomas’ pours its scent into the waiting glass of evening. Awakened by bluebells, the garden’s getting up at last; ghostly globes of clematis Miss Bateman yawn open, meadow rue and chives comb out their shaggy locks and the perennial cornflowers stretch wide. In the borders, the first cranesbills and Cambrian poppies compare their crumpled, just-out-of-bed skirts.

And then the irises begin to bloom. The dozen-or-so varieties I grow will unfurl in waves from now until July, each spiralling a fresh charm of fascination as they corkscrew open. For one who photographs they are a delight, a muse of which I never tire whether viewed face on, from above, from below, lit by the setting sun or bejewelled by raindrops. I adore their complex form, the intricacy of their markings, the depth and breadth of their colours; small wonder that they are named for the winged messenger of Greek mythology who personified the rainbow.

In fact considering the beauty - and the inexplicability at the time of the phenomenon of rainbows - it surprises me a little that Iris wasn’t a bigger player in the Pantheon. But no, her role was very much that of trusted go-between, a B-list deity conveying the messages of A-list gods with accuracy and alacrity. Mentioned a few times in the Iliad - and called upon to deliver Stygian water to Mount Olympus, come the Odyssey she seems to have been largely usurped by Hermes, almost as if Zeus and Hera had decided to change their utility supplier.

The Theogony - a didactic ‘who’s who’ of the gods by Hesiod - gives Iris’ parentage as the Titan Thaumas and the nymph Electra. And if he is right, it means that she was a bit of a Cinderella in other ways too, for she had, you see, some very ugly sisters.

Exactly how many ugly sisters depends on who you read; Homer only mentions one, Hesiod two and later writers three or more, but whatever their number, they were, collectively, known as the Harpies; loathsome, ravenous creatures with the heads and sometimes bodies of women but the wings and claws of terrifying birds.

Originally associated with the sea, wind and storms, the name ‘Harpy’ comes from the Greek ‘harpazein’ -‘to seize’ - and this was very much their role in myth. Be it children, the wounded, food or souls, the harpies were always lurking, ready to smash and grab.

One of the best known stories tells how Zeus sent them to plague Phineus the seer as punishment for his revealing things that should only be known to the gods. Every time Phineus tried to eat, the harpies would swoop from the heavens and make off with his fare, befouling any scraps left behind with their vile guano. I look around the high perches of my home and wonder whether I should rename Sammy and the crow Aello and Celaeno…

They’ve been joined in the last couple of days by a dark rash of Corvidae; I woke this morning to find two magpies within feet of the bedroom window looking on whilst a jackdaw grappled with a birdfeeder half its size and yesterday I watched astonished as a jay made repeated visits to the enclosed confines of the back, gathering up peanuts spilled during replenishment. It’s only the second time in my life that I’ve known a jay venture so close-up here; that the last time it happened was during a bitter, snow-clad snap hints at the stress that adult birds are under at the moment.

For we’ve had, you see, three consecutive days of rain and at times gale-force winds too. Providing for the needs of baby birds is a difficult task full stop, but in conditions like these it becomes exhausting and at times impossible; small wonder then that adults are willing to take unusual risks to access food either for themselves or their young.

The hideous weather also explains the odd behaviour of a blue-tit I watched yesterday evening. Humming-bird like it hovered around doors, window frames and under sills, clinging momentarily here and there, probing and pecking. I can only assume that heavy rain and wind having washed the caterpillars, grubs and aphids from the trees, it was searching out the spiders which spin between the angles of buildings; they would, after all, be relatively protected from the elements.

The message conveyed by the blue-tit’s flutterings was not an optimistic one though; even if they come in multi-packs, there’s not much meat on spider drumsticks and I’m sure that many, many baby birds will have perished either from hunger or hypothermia over the last few days. Apparently only one-in-ten eggs laid ever goes on to become an adult bird and consecutive days of bad spring weather must up these already sad odds considerably.

The baby robin I buried today though fell prey, I’m ashamed to say, to Tig. Well would have fallen prey had I not heard its cheeping and opened the back door on the beaming cat. I’ve wondered since whether it would not have been kinder to have left it shut, but once face-to-face with the bedraggled mite I had, of course, to scoop it up. I did so with heavy heart though as I know from experience that bird-saving is not my forté. From abandoned ducklings to numerous cat and weather casualties, my record is in fact just two successes over quarter of a century of trying - but hey, there’s never two without three, is there?

So over the space of 30 minutes I warmed it, I dried it, I tried - and failed - to feed it. I even sat it in a makeshift paper-lined nest-bowl and played it a recording of my robin’s song to try to make it connect me with bird-dom and food, but its beak remained stubbornly shut whilst its heart thumped and its eyes gazed wide. So I took it back to the garden and left it, in some shelter, near its parents. Half an hour later it was dead. Such a very short life.

Of vagabonds, vagrancy and varied diets…

Things being cold and wet have always bothered me. When little, my ambition in life was to be rich enough to buy a house big enough to home all gentlemen of the road. Whether they would actually want to be homed or not didn’t even occur to me. It also never occurred to me that I would need anything more than a single, very large building with perhaps twenty bedrooms at most at my disposal; I must have assumed at the time that almost every tramp in existence eventually found his way to our front door.

In my defence we did seem to get more than our ration of hopeful callers looking for food and perhaps some old clothes; in fact my mother swore that our dwelling had something she called ‘the mark’ on it, identifying it as one where there was welcome to be found. It would, she said, be carved in a spot ‘known to the wise’ - and it sounded even more thrilling when she said it in Welsh.

For years I thought I’d found it on the talcen wall but said nothing; I liked our strange visitors and loved the idea of a secret symbol. It was quite a let-down then when I eventually discovered that the arrow I’d kept to myself all that time was nothing more romantic than a benchmark inscribed by travellers from the Ordinance Survey, proclaiming the house to be precisely 228.2 feet above sea level. I consoled myself by reflecting that perhaps people living at that altitude were particularly renowned for their generosity of spirit in vagabond circles.

I’ve since learned that a circle is exactly what I should have been looking for, for that was the sign of a welcoming house (although how long that welcome would extend if the owners caught you chiselling into their masonry is of course a moot point…) A circle bisected by a line was a sign of warning, and a ‘Z’ an even more definite ‘do not call’. A triangle denoted a police house which could be a mixed blessing; a particularly bitter night might, after all, be better spent at her majesty’s pleasure than in the bite of the elements.

Anyway, signposted or not, our regular irregulars returned starling-like with the fall of the leaves each year. In spring and summer casual farm work would provide them with both both board and bedding but once harvest had passed, rural pickings were poor.

I don’t remember my family making any great distinction between the tramping folk and the gypsies who were also regular callers, although in a household where money was often scarce I suspect that the latter’s entreaties to part with hard cash in return for clothes-pegs, charms or frivolous glimpses of the future were less easy to comply with then requests for food.

There was, after all, always food to share - 95% of the garden was given over to vegetable production and a further 4% to chickens and bees. Eating and cooking apples in abundance, pears, blackcurrants, strawberries, gooseberries and rhubarb cocked a further snook at greengrocers whilst the surrounding countryside yielded blackberries, whimberries, elderberries and mushrooms.

Every Thursday morning my father would rise at five thirty and go and help one of the butchers at the local market to unload and set up his stall. The payment - always in kind - provided ample protein to last until Sunday and buttered the family bread for the week. On Sunday a chicken was eaten roasted, on Monday cold and on Monday night the carcass would be boiled to make cawl for Tuesday and Wednesday.

We actually paid for very little then; flour, sugar, milk, dried fruit, lard, margarine, tea and coffee were the staples whilst the occasional luxuries came in tins - baked beans, spaghetti, Goblin hamburgers, and Nestle’s cream. The cream - slightly grey and oily - would be served at teatime on a Sunday along with tinned ‘fruit cocktail’ - a syrupy mass in which only colour and texture distinguished peach from pear from pineapple. The punctuation marks of palid grapes and day-glo cherries tasted no different either, but were to be coveted all the same.

I must have thrown the family economy into crisis then when, at the age of five, I decided that for tea I would eat a dry currant bun with a glass of orange squash and that my supper would be a tin of Chef beans and sausages; every day; for years. I suspect that what triggered it was starting school dinners and the trauma of being forced to eat things I truly disliked to the point of retching; children’s taste buds can be such drama queens.

At home then I craved predictability and my parents, themselves fairly traumatised by picking a beetroot-faced child up from the school gates each day and dragging her back there the next morning, capitulated. There must have been times though when their patience was as sorely stretched as the household budget and I clearly remember my brother’s calm suggestion that I should be ‘given to the Boswells’.

The Boswells were our ‘local’ gypsies. I know that sounds a little unlikely, but for travelling folk they seemed to spend an awful lot of time in the area. They were headed by ‘Queen’ Marjorie, a weather-haggard crone who was generally held in awe by adults and children alike in spite of her diminutive stature.

My brother’s threat was made all the more credible because goodwill between our families was high. Perhaps my parents experienced sufficient prejudice as a result of my father being German to make them more tolerant than most of ‘difference’ - even to feel a camaraderie with those who hovered on the edge of exile. And my grandfather had long been a favourite with Marjorie since, whilst waiting outside chapel to troop in with the other deacons one Sunday morning, he had obliged her with a light for her clay pipe. The act prompted her to declare ‘Morgans’ to be ‘a gentleman’ - and once Marjorie declared something, it was so.

They’re all gone now; long gone in fact. Today I’m forced to buy my clothes pegs in the supermarket and the old tramps call no more. And so, with my chosen career path of hostelier to the homeless closed due to lack of demand, my current post of mental health Welfare Rights Worker is probably as near as I’ll get. I don’t house or feed people directly, but I do try to ensure that the sate fulfils its duty to do so, even if I fear that Government plans to introduce a much tougher test of ‘sickness’ this autumn will once again see growing numbers estranged from the safety net of social security.

I despise the way politicians play with people’s lives to meet their own ends. I’ve seen thriving communities and industries crucified in the name of free enterprise and generations of people lose their self-worth and hope as a result. I’ve seen people told that they’re sick because that’s cheaper than providing them with work and less embarrassing than having them join the millions of jobless and I’ve since seen them grow more and more unwell as a result, whilst first Conservative and then Labour Governments told them that they weren’t really ill at all. And now, when the Government have themselves concluded that fraud amongst sickness benefit claimants is actually negligible, what do they do? They move the goalposts. You’re almost all genuinely sick? OK, let us show you what sick really means.

And even more shamefully, they’re also planning to remove safeguards which have, until now, protected the most unwell from the random quality of government medical testing. It may no longer be legal to hang someone for a repeat offence of begging but some are sufficiently vulnerable to take the rope into their own hands.

It’s nothing new, of course, to classify and persecute the poor in justification of inadequate opportunity or state provision. As early as 1383 the Statute of Cambridge made every parish responsible for the care of people too unwell to work, but demanded that unless vagabonds could, if required, ‘display their means of support’ they should be thrown in gaol. Somehow I suspect pulling out a battered guitar or accordion wouldn’t have sufficed.

Keeping people in gaol cost money of course - and could provide many with a better lifestyle than they enjoyed at liberty - so by 1495 the punishment for vagrancy became three days and nights in the stocks followed by banishment from the parish. Whipping replaced the stocks from 1530.

Employment and Support Allowance recipients of 2008 are probably the closest equivalent of the ‘impotent poor’ first recognised in statute and allowed licence to beg in 1537, whilst Jobseekers would be the ‘sturdy beggars’ - capable of work but wilfully incompliant. At least today we only have monetary sanctions - unlicensed begging in the 1530s was punishable by two years’ servitude and branding, with the death sentence for a second offence. By 1572 first offenders were ‘bored through the ear’ - and not by an Elizabethan minstrel strumming James Blunt’s greatest hits - whilst persistent offenders faced the noose.

Things got a little easier after the 1601 Poor Law recognised that as well as the ‘idle poor’ and the ‘impotent poor’ there were also ‘able bodied poor’ and established Houses of Industry for the latter as well as Houses of Correction. We have to wait until 1795 though to meet the precursor of Tax Credits - the enlightened ‘Speenhamland System’ under which a poor family’s wages could be topped up depending on the number in the household and the cost of a loaf of bread that week.

The Poor Law of 1832, for all the well-meaningness of its authors, looks positively draconian by comparison. All outdoor relief was banned, families were broken up with separate workhouses established for women, men and children and conditions further toughened to try to ensure ‘lesser eligibility’ - it was vital, politicians felt, to make life within the workhouse walls tougher than it was on the outside. Fortunately they eventually concluded that the living conditions of the poorest could simply not be replicated without starving people to death which would, of course, rather have defeated the purpose and by 1842 outdoor relief was once more legalised.

‘Doles’, too, were an important aid to survival for the poorest - whether in cash or in kind - bread, cheese, blankets and coal being amongst the most common commodities distributed, often ‘in memoriam’ of a local dignitary. How many making provision in their wills for these annual hand-outs were driven solely by the wish to alleviate the plight of the poor is questionable - many of them would, no doubt, also have been motivated to perpetuate their own memory or even shorten their stay in purgatory. The difference they made though was significant.

The beneficiaries of doles varied from ‘the poor’ to very specific recipients - ‘four old men’, ‘ten youths born within the parish’ or in one case ‘six women who had lost their husbands through drowning’. Often though a distinction was still made between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor - ‘as for beggars by trade and election I give them nothing’ stated a will of 1687.

A more random way to deal with the distribution of a dole was to simply throw the goods to an assembled crowd and allow them to scramble for them. If the dole was one of coins, it was common to heat them first, no doubt adding to the enjoyment of spectators. Examples of ‘scrambling’ doles still survive in several parts of Britain, often now attached to civic ceremonies such as Mayor Makings. Health and Safety considerations have been taking their toll for some time though; many of the scrambling doles were eventually moved from indoors to outdoors and a decision was taken in Harwich in the 1960s to wrap buns in cellophane before they were thrown to the crowd…

The only state provision for ‘my’ tramps in the early 70s would have been a daily amount of either 30 or 40 pence, paid at the discretion of the local DHSS. The distances between offices were considerable though, so most failed to claim daily and many preferred not to claim at all. Why tramp? Well, I suppose their survival depended on maintaining the goodwill of strangers, many of whom might willingly share their repast once or twice a year but who might feel less inclined to do so if requests were made monthly or weekly.

Where are they now? Well, judging from their ages I suspect most of them turned to vagrancy either as a result of post-war trauma or during the depression of the 20s and 30s and that death has long since accompanied them down their last road. I hope it was a gentle companion.

Of ewes, earthworms and angels…

I found myself thinking similar thoughts up on the Preseli Mountains a couple of weeks ago when, excited by a group of stones I’d not previously noticed, I began an enthusiastic yomp to a ridge. Anticipation and ascent both warm the blood, so that I didn’t notice the wind until I stopped. Once I did though, it rapidly began to dissect my folly with cutting remarks. But there was glorious clarity to the day and the cloud-studded sky was just yelling ‘take me, take me’… I fumbled over my camera, trying to adjust my fffffff-stops.

And then salvation flapped at me from a gorse bush where, entangled, lay a long length of agricultural black webbing. Remembering Abraham and