How the Heather Looks Read online

  That night we slept in our narrow shelflike bunks with five blankets apiece over us – and never have I been so cold. Dawn finally came, and with it bright sunlight streaming through the skylight above us. We dressed as quickly as possible and crept out the door. The air outside was warmer than the air within. In a few minutes I had a kettle on to boil and we made breakfast. Supplies were so low that it was obvious that we must do some shopping in the village.

  It was not only food that we needed. We realized that the children’s shoes would be in a constant state of wetness as long as we lived on the moors, and it would be sensible to buy extra pairs of that cheap and sturdy variety of sandals sold all over England. I could remember them from my own childhood hanging in strings – like onions – outside the doorways of seaside shops. St. Agnes did not disappoint us – we found them at the local shoe store. At the draper’s we bought a warm nightgown for Lucy, a schoolboy cap and a blue jersey for Ian.

  On our way back to the car we noticed that a lorry parked next to the butcher’s was being decorated with flowers. Obviously great doings were afoot, and when we stopped to read a placard in front of the Methodist Chapel we learned that the annual St. Agnes Floral Fete would be held that very evening. A queen would be selected from candidates between the ages of ten and twelve years, all entrants being “members of this parish.” Teas, minerals, and Cornish pasties would be on sale. “Minerals” we interpreted as meaning soda pop, but it was the promise of Cornish pasties that won us over. We already knew about those envelopes of pastry filled with a mixture of meat, potatoes, carrots, and turnips. We had read about them in Dorothy Spicer’s From an English Oven, a book of folklore and cookery, and had tried the recipe for ourselves. Upon rereading George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin soon afterward we decided that Cornish pasties were probably the mainstay of the hot lunch which Curdie’s mother packed for him to take into the mines.

  We drove back to our caravan and I spent the afternoon washing clothes in a bucket, hanging them to dry on the spiny gorse bushes that ringed our campsite. Lucy and John went to sleep in their bunks, Ian went exploring, and I spread a blanket out on the grass, meaning to read and to write letters. The earth smelled of ferns and sweet grasses intermingled with tiny, almost microscopic, pink flowers. Sleepy in the hot sun, I recalled that the date must be very near Midsummer’s Eve and I wondered if the Fete had always been held so close to the solstice.

  In the early evening we bundled into the car and drove off toward the village. Parking the car on the outskirts, we glimpsed the procession coming down the High Street. First came the constable, tall in uniform and helmet, his truncheon held out in front of him like a scepter. He walked in solemn cadence to the music, a few paces ahead of the village band. Next a sad little last year’s queen was borne along on the butcher’s lorry. All the little boys in the village seemed to be hanging to the tail gate and Ian promptly ran off to join them. Lucy, with a two-year-old’s love of music, danced along with the little girls at the end of the procession, but as she grew tired her father picked her up and carried her. The village was more than a mile behind us when we came to the gates of an old country house. Tents were pitched on the lawn inside. We paid our sixpences at the gate (we discovered later that Ian had simply surged in on a wave of little boys), and found ourselves on the grounds of the Cornish Home for Unwed Mothers. We were mildly surprised, but remembering Mrs. S.’s description of Cornwall as a final refuge of fugitives and banished kings we bowed and smiled at the smock-clad young ladies who had crowded to the low-set French windows opening onto the lawn.

  We mingled with the villagers, ate cold pasties, drank warm Coca-Cola, and voted for the queen. We had almost decided that this was no more than the usual dull church outing when, suddenly, three young men in tight, tight blue jeans leaped upon a platform. One of them held an enormous guitar and before John and I could quite grasp the situation, the trio launched into “The Jail House Rock,” à la Elvis Presley. The new queen tapped her foot, the displaced queen smiled for the first time, the little princesses swayed back and forth on the platform. The villagers on the lawn broke into wild gyrations, the unwed mothers clapped their hands and cheered. A few elders looked on sourly, but most seemed to be enjoying the spectacle even if they did not participate. There followed “The Purple People Eater” and “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Houn’ Dog.” The crowd went wild. John and I hardly dared look at each other when the Methodist minister, his face beaming and benign, called out to his flock: “I see we’re all real gone tonight!”

  We awoke the next morning to the sound of a gale and the patter of rain on the skylight. The storm lasted two days, then took another day to blow itself out. It was peaceful in the caravan. We slept for hours, especially John, who was still worn out by the rush of correcting exams before we left home. Somehow the ocean liner, with its constantly hovering stewards, had not been half so soothing as this solitude on the moors. I found a stack of old Penguin books in one of the lockers and began to gnaw a bookworm’s trail through them. John and Ian continued to peruse the green and gilt copy of Robert Hunt’s Popular Romances of the West of England: The Drolls, Traditions and Superstitions of Old Cornwall. I do not know whether it was the effect of those old tales, our isolated life, or our rich Celtic blood, but we became true believers.

  We read how the Giant Bolster, having fallen in love with St. Agnes, was outwitted by her when he promised to fill a hole over Chapelporth way with his life’s blood. He didn’t know it was bottomless. Chapelporth was just around the curve of the next bay, and we promised ourselves that we would one day go see the hole which is still there in proof of the tale. We read about Dorcas, the poor woman who flung herself into a mine near St. Agnes and whose ghost haunts the village and nearby moors. Later, Mrs. S. was briskly positive in confirming the ghost’s existence. Dorcas is often seen, and she rather makes a nuisance of herself down at the Railway Inn by turning certain pictures to the wall. We soon learned to differentiate between the varieties of Small People: Spriggans and Piskies, Knockers and Browneys (sic). It seemed quite natural to believe that we were especially vulnerable to their pranks and visitations, living as we did so far up the flanks of the most storied hill in Cornwall. It was comforting to know that we could protect ourselves by “turning the cloak,” and none of us ventured out after dark without carefully turning jacket or sweater inside out.

  The Knockers, who live in the mines, were especially interesting to us since they were so obviously related to the goblins who haunt George MacDonald’s books. Although we knew that MacDonald had lived in the north of Scotland, we were convinced of Cornwall’s being spiritually, if not geographically, a part of that strange, dim landscape that forms a background to his works. C. S. Lewis, in a preface to a collection of excerpts from MacDonald’s letters and sermons, freely admits that it was the writings of the Scottish mystic that stirred his interest in Christianity, and acknowledges his debt to him. This being the case, we could not help feeling that Narnia was not too far off.

  I shall always be grateful to the storm in Cornwall that drove us inward on ourselves. The quality of light being almost the same at ten in the morning as it was at ten at night, we lost all count of time. The soporific swaying of the wagon, the utter stillness of the moor broken intermittently by sounds of wind and rain, the glimpses of a shifting, shadowed landscape gave us the feeling of having embarked upon a long voyage.

  English children’s literature is filled with tales of children who fly back and forth in space and time. We had read the E. Nesbit books, and Mary Norton’s Magic Bedknob, but we were not to discover Hilda Lewis’s The Ship That Flew until we were home again. But best of all, our family agrees, are the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis. These are filled with symbol and inner meaning on one level, but stand as rousing good adventure stories on quite another. However, it is doubtful that any child who reads them would not recognize the root-stirring undercurrent of mysticism even though he could not put a name to it. />
  Joanna Field, in her self-analytic A Life of One’s Own, writes how one day she thought it would be amusing to draw a map of her life, to show in pictures what she felt had been the most important things in it. To her amazement she discovered herself drawing a scene of childhood – a river, a ruined chapel, a little spring. But even more amazing, she found that part of her mind assigned to these familiar landmarks a new significance. Although she would have sworn that she, an intensely practical and scientific person, could remember nothing of folklore or mythology, the chapel had become the Chapel Perilous from Morte d’Arthur “although I could not remember a single fact about the chapel….” The little river was the Styx, a dot (or safety pin?) on the floor of the spring was Odin’s eye. What struck her particularly was the way in which her thoughts took material from anywhere and everywhere in order to find a form in which to become “clothed and visible.” She then went on to remember arguments she had heard against reading fairy tales to children. Weren’t they a waste of time? Children have enough work cut out for them just to discover what are the facts of the world, without having the issue confused with fantasy. After the experiment, Miss Field was suddenly convinced that it is not only the facts about the world that children need to know, but facts about themselves, and it is only through imaginative symbols of fantasy that they can at first find and then express their knowledge of themselves.

  As for ourselves, peering out of our caravan for a glimpse of the mist-shrouded Beacon, every gorse-clothed indentation, every rocky outcropping was a reminder of the pagan and Christian past and had a dimension in time as well as space. We had come upon the landscape of our dreams. We slept and ate and read, washed socks, and slept again – and awake or dreaming we would never be quite the same.

  The weather cleared, but not for long. “Absolutely shocking,” said everyone in the village. They shook their heads and complained that England was not what it used to be. The fruiterer explained that “things as would be right for harvest are not yet in the ground,” and Mrs. S. and her sister were anxious about the first haying. The hired mowers and their itinerant helpers would arrive on an appointed day and it would be a matter of luck whether or not the weather was right.

  One day, when Ian and I had scrambled up to the Beacon, we decided to take a less steep path back to the caravan and started off along a rarely trodden track that led through the fields. After a few feet we found the way strewn with some curiously woven grasses that looked somewhat like the cross one is given to take home on Palm Sunday. Later we learned that we had found a trail of gypsy patens, a sort of secret sign language blazing the way to a good campsite or, more likely in this case, a chance for employment in the hayfields. Here was still another use for the Beacon. I wondered how many centuries the gypsies had used this hilltop as a rendezvous and message center.

  Although it was too early for school to be out officially, Ian had found two boys who were staying in one of the metal caravans in the meadow. Their mother was a laundress (like Mrs. Ruggles in The Family from One End Street) and their names really were Roland and Nigel – the very ones that Mr. Ruggles decided not to inflict on the twins. The family owned a motorcycle with a sidecar and were off on excursions most of the day, the older boy (who had a broken arm) sitting behind his father on the pillion; the mother, younger boy, and dog encased under a transparent dome in the sidecar. They had ridden all the way from Bristol this way, Mrs. Ruggles explained, although she had been rather worried about Nigel’s safety, handicapped as he was with a cast!

  In the evenings the boys and Ian played cricket in the meadow or sat and read Nigel’s comic books. Or Ian and Roland, who were of the same age, ran about the moor playing cowboys and Indians together. Mrs. Ruggles (whose real name I cannot remember) and I had many heart-to-heart talks down near the water tap and once she came up to our caravan for a cup of tea. She was worried about Roland because he had a terrible stutter. Everyone, including his own brother, made fun of him, she said, and that was one of the reasons they had taken their holiday early this year, to give him a rest from school. I thought it interesting that the school therapist had recommended it. The curious thing was that, although Roland continued to stutter as badly as ever when speaking to the rest of us, his speech was almost entirely free when he played with Ian. Mrs. S., who had once been the educational director of Cornwall, was the first to notice it.

  “I do love Americans,” she said. “Especially the children. They are so polite.” Polite! I was dumfounded. I thought of those public meals with my ravenous and uncoordinated children, their habit of talking anytime and anywhere, the commotion we seemed to cause just walking down a village street.

  “Polite?”

  “Why yes,” said Mrs. S. “They are what I call truly courteous. So outgoing, you know. I wish our English children could be like that. American manners seem to come straight from the heart.” I was to hang onto her words like a talisman for many a day to come.

  Mrs. S. was most interested in our “literary tour” and assured John that if we wanted to see the river bank of The Wind in the Willows we must by all means go to Fowey and row up the river there. Mrs. S. had been a friend of “Q” (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch), who in turn had been close friend to Kenneth Grahame. She said that once “Q” had taken her and James out in a rowboat and pointed out some of the literary landmarks for their especial benefit. When John brought this back to me, I am afraid I rather discounted it. Why, Kenneth Grahame had spent almost all his life along the Thames! Would that I had heeded, but at the time I thought that either Mrs. S. or John must be mistaken, or that this was a further example of Cornish chauvinism.

  Mrs. S. had also much to say about Lyonesse, the lost land that is said to lie off Cornwall. She told fascinating tales of fishermen who look down through the waters and see the roofs of ancient houses and the spires of churches. We could witness for ourselves the uneven struggle between land and sea. As we walked along the cliff edge we could see where rocks had dropped down into the steep coves below, or where the sea had carved caves and gullies into the cliffs, and we could hear the sounds of earth and rocks rattling down through the darkness to splash in the sea when we leaned over the shafts of old mines along the cliff tops. Several times we took the children for picnics along the cliffs. There we would seek shelter from the cold wind and sit and munch hard-boiled eggs and look out to sea and talk. Sitting with our backs to the rock, Ian and I would discuss what Mrs. S. had had to say about Lyonesse or the tales we had read in Hunt’s Popular Romances and wonder if it was true that fishermen had heard church bells tolling beneath the waves or, looking down on a summer’s day, had seen mermaids swim through coral-encrusted windows. Ian was far less credulous than I. Lucy, playing with pebbles or bits of wood nearby, seemed neither to listen nor take part, but months later when we read Father Bear Comes Home she was more than usually attentive.

  “I saw a mermaid,” she said quite firmly. Challenge only made her adamant. “I did too,” she said. “We sat on a rock and ate eggshells, and I saw a mermaid with green hair!”

  “Well,” said Ian, “if she was going to see one, that was the place.”

  Among all the fact and folklore in Hunt’s Popular Romances, we read about a “lost chapel” over Perranporth way. According to Hunt, the great sand dunes near Perranporth had shifted so that “toward the end of the last century” a “reputable person” had reported seeing the walls of the original oratory established by St. Piran in about 490 A.D. But Hunt wrote his book in 1865, and we were doubtful that it would be worth while to go in search of walls that might by now be buried under sand again. Mrs. S. assured us, however, that the chapel had been unearthed several times since, and that it was now freed of the surrounding sands and protected from them by a concrete shell. All we had to do, she said, was to find the little lane branching off the main road along the coast. “Just follow the line of rocks marked with white paint.”

  But of course it wasn’t as easy as all that. Every once in a whi
le, when we reached a marker, we would stop to rest and argue which way the white blaze meant us to go. It was rather like a treasure hunt. Ian and Lucy would run ahead, circling and sniffing like puppies, then Ian would run back to report if he had found another marker. We had almost given up finding the chapel, when there was a shout from Ian. Running to catch up with him, we came over the shoulder of a dune and looked down into a little hollow onto a low, crude building of cinder blocks. We stumbled down the slope and stepped aside just in time to let a middle-aged man and his wife come out of the only opening. The woman seemed a trifle dazed, perhaps from the sunlight. “It makes you feel fair queer,” she said. They had been searching for the chapel for several days, walking all the way from Perranporth across the sands. We stood watching as they trudged off and disappeared over the dunes behind the church, toward the sea.

  I had never heard of St. Piran before coming to Cornwall. In fact, I had never heard of most of the Cornish saints. St. Petrock, St. Crantock, St. Kea – who are they? They are not Roman Catholic, nor even Anglican. John pointed out that when St. Augustine arrived in Kent, there were already Christian communities in Wales and Cornwall. The Celtic saints were not men canonized by Rome, but hermits or anchorites come as missionaries from Ireland. What we were seeking was something that Puck, in Puck of Pook’s Hill, would call “older than England,” for it was purely Celtic-British, not Anglo-Saxon.

  According to a guidebook we bought in Perranporth, St. Piran probably came from Ireland in the fifth or sixth century. Legend says he floated in on a millstone, but it is more likely that he arrived in an Irish coracle (a round boat made of stretched skins), and he may have brought his altar stone with him. Celtic altar slabs were often round, whereas those in Anglo-Saxon churches are rectangular. Piran was evidently a hard-working saint. Not only did he cope with wolves and pagans, but with all the powerful demonology of Cornwall. The guidebook credits the good and practical anchorite with instructing his followers in the art of smelting tin, although history indicates that tin-smelting has been going on in Cornwall since the Roman occupation. Nevertheless, local legend has it that St. Piran discovered the art by accident when his hearth “black as coals” was heated more than usual one night and suddenly sent forth a stream of white metal. After his death, Piran’s saintly relics became an object of veneration not only for Christians from all over Cornwall, but for pilgrims from Ireland and Brittany, too. During the Middle Ages the relics were carried in an annual parish procession and the church records show that in 1433 money was set aside to repair and reset the jewels in the box containing Piran’s head. No one seems to know what ultimately happened to the box – or the head – but when the little chapel was rediscovered in the nineteenth century a headless skeleton was found buried under the altar.