Storytime

by Jane Sullivan

  I had hit puberty by then: I was beginning to know a bit about strange yearnings, though for what I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t for the sirens in these tales, though I could understand why these men were bewitched. Suppose that just one tale had been about a young girl haunted by a seductive male ghost or supernatural creature, someone perhaps like Edward the vampire teen in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series? But it wasn’t to be. The only story with a female protagonist, ‘Afterward’ by Edith Wharton, is a good one, but it’s about a married woman totally in love with her husband, and he isn’t the ghost. The erotic element in these stories was tantalisingly present, often all-pervasive, but just out of reach of any fantasy tailor-made for me. It didn’t matter, however: that erotic element worked for me as a pubescent girl in ways that were not to do with a specific love or lust object, more a general feeling of arousal of the senses. There is a narcissistic component: I’m reminded of another book I read about the same time, Mary Renault’s second novel about the hero Theseus, The Bull from the Sea. Theseus is in the temple of a goddess forbidden to men, where the servant is a gangly girl about my age, and he’s thinking about her ‘coltish thighs’. Inadvertently her gaze meets his: he smiles, and moves his lips in a kiss. She looks down, confused, and accidentally brushes the screen, knocking it down, so Theseus sees the forbidden goddess. With an almost painful thrill, I recognised for the first time the experience of being both a sexual being and a sexual object. I was not sure whether to feel sorry for the girl or whether to envy her.

  “The erotic element in these stories was tantalisingly present, often all-pervasive, but just out of reach of any fantasy tailor-made for me.”

  I once heard David Malouf at the Melbourne Writers Festival describe a similar experience. When he was twelve, he said, he read great nineteenth-century novels, in particular Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and discovered in them a world of extraordinary passion. He couldn’t find it in the world around him, but he knew it was in him, and out there somewhere. Everything in The Hunchback of Notre Dame was eroticised with a displaced sexual energy. The writers of the period couldn’t write about sex directly, so they got sex into every single area.

  So far, my re-reading experience has made me by turns impatient, disappointed, contemptuous, amused, admiring, charmed, seduced and just a little uneasy. Nothing has terrified me… yet. So at last I turn to ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’. This is the only story I am reluctant to begin, but I make myself do it. Come on, you’re all grown-up now.

  Or am I? Child heroes are rare in these stories, and child heroines non-existent, but here at last is someone close to my own age at the time I first read it, with experiences close to my own. I don’t have to think about that, I instantly know it. Paul was – is – me. He’s sitting in class during a geography lesson, one of those interminably boring ordeals of everyday childhood life that I know so well, when you have to keep on and on doing things you don’t want to do. He’s apparently paying attention, but he’s thinking about his delicious secret, which is like a trinket he can carry around in his pocket, which gives him ‘a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession’. Why yes, I remember this: it was exactly how I felt about some of my treasures, perhaps particularly the books I read as a child.

  Gradually we learn that he’s thinking about snow. He goes back in his mind to the simple, almost absurd way this idea came to him: that everything around him is being constantly buried in a continuing fall of snow. It doesn’t stop him observing the real world around him: on the contrary, he still sees ‘Miss Buell and the schoolroom and the globe and the freckles on Deirdre’s neck,’ but that other world is waiting for him, and whenever he chooses he can see everything through the soft veil of whirling white flakes.

  His parents are worried. They try and chaff him out of this strange absent-minded mood, then call in the doctor. Paul is serenely indifferent, even laughs at them a little. For a while, he wonders if he should tell them his secret, but they wouldn’t understand. The story ends with a sense that the snow is rising up in fountains, hissing and roaring, talking to him. He retreats to his room, lies down on his bed to enjoy it. When his mother comes in, he experiences it as a horrible interruption: he screams at her to go away, he hates her. The snow is telling him a story, ‘the most beautiful and secret story – shut your eyes – it is a very small story – a story that gets smaller and smaller – it comes inward instead of opening like a flower – it is a flower becoming a seed – a little cold seed…’

  I am cold, I am haunted, I am horrified. The story has not lost its spell. I am still Paul, and I am still Jane, that child lying in that bed reading that terrible book, thinking of how I love my parents, how they are everything to me, how I have always wanted them to come to my room to comfort me when I have bad dreams; but one day soon I will turn on them, shut them out, so I can shrink into a little cold seed. The snow’s sinuous movement is as erotic and as seductive as any siren. What am I so afraid of? I still don’t know exactly. It is a loss of identity, an annihilation of self, but it isn’t quite death: more a retreat, a regression to a state that maybe exists before birth, or outside life. And the worst thing is that part of me wants it. I want the adventure, I want to sail into the Dark Island, to go down the rabbit hole, to escape to another world, and then to the end of the other world, further up, further away, to the piper at the gates of dawn. But suppose I can’t get back? Will I even want to get back? What will happen to me then? Will there even be a ‘me’?

  “I am cold, I am haunted, I am horrified. The story has not lost its spell.”

  What’s going on here? ‘ The Dunwich Horror’ begins with a quotation from Charles Lamb that seems to hint at my fears: ‘The archetypes are in us, and eternal,’ Lamb says. There exists a purely spiritual fear that ‘predominates in the period of our sinless infancy’, that comes from ‘the shadow-land of pre-existence’. Guy de Maupassant has something to say too in ‘The Horla’: ‘We are so weak, so defenceless, so ignorant, so small, we who live on this particle of mud which revolves in a drop of water.’ And for a more benign view of the possibilities, the deluded scientist in ‘The Great God Pan’ quotes the alchemist Oswald Crollius: ‘In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.’

  “the worst thing is that part of me wants it. I want the adventure”

  After I first read ‘Silent Snow, Secret Snow’, I was in a fug of miserable recognition and apprehension that lasted on and off for weeks. This time round, the effect wears off very quickly, in a matter of minutes. I am grown-up, after all. I have not lost my grip on reality. And I remember that the stories of my childhood have kept me safe, have brought me more wonder than horror. I can choose between a little cold seed and a grain of wheat with the soul of a star.

  “I remember that the stories of my childhood have kept me safe, have brought me more wonder than horror. I can choose between a little cold seed and a grain of wheat with the soul of a star.”

  A bold hypothesis this time. I needed to confront my deepest fears.

  SANDWICHED BETWEEN MILES OF ROCK

  The Weirdstone of Brisingamen

  by Alan Garner

  The greatest praise a book can receive, according to many, is the verdict ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ That phrase gets bandied around far too much for my liking. Of course you can always put a book down, however mesmerising it is. And sometimes not being able to put it down is no indication of its worth. As a child, I was such a devoted reader that I would spend my breakfast poring over every word on the cereal packet. Even now, I can almost tell you the percentage of riboflavin and niacin in Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, though I didn’t have a clue about what these substances were or why they were supposed to be good for me.

  But The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was one book I truly couldn’t put down, because I remember Polly came round to play, and I wouldn’t play because I was too engrossed in it. This was unheard-of. Play with Polly took precedence over everything else; I
would happily drop anything I was reading and join her in our made-up games. This time, I sat in an armchair in the playroom and kept reading, while Polly kept hovering. I knew I was being rude, but I couldn’t stop. I don’t remember what happened – obviously Polly got impatient and fed up, and maybe I gave in to her in the end, or maybe she just went home in disgust. We had our quarrels from time to time, and we always made up. But something about that book made me break all our rules.

  “As a child, I was such a devoted reader that I would spend my breakfast poring over every word on the cereal packet.”

  In many ways, so it seems to me now, it was a standard children’s book formula. A group of kids (brothers and sisters, I suppose) were sent to stay with relatives in Cheshire, near Alderley Edge. There was a kindly woman who looked after them and spoke in the local dialect: she called them ‘childer’, not children. They had adventures, and there was magic. I remember it in disjointed ways, but clearest to me is how it began. They were exploring old mineshafts in the forest when a swarm of hideous creatures burst out of the holes in the ground. They were called svarts, they were something like orcs, something like goblins, and they had infested the underground passages.

  The children escaped, but were enlisted in a quest (to find the weirdstone, perhaps, which was some kind of magic jewel) which meant they had to go deep underground through a complex system of caves. There was a constant menace from the svarts, but the natural hazards were just as bad: they had to crawl through black tunnels that got smaller and smaller. In particular I remember they came to the end of a tunnel and shone their torches down a cliff face to a little island in the middle of an underground lake. I imagined the island in the torchlight as orange-yellow, and the lake as bright blue-green. They either had to accept they were at a dead end, or they had to jump into that lake, with no idea how deep it was or how far it extended. I had read about underground tunnels and caves in Enid Blyton’s books and elsewhere, but I’d never read descriptions so vivid, beautiful, claustrophobic and suffocating. It felt as if I had to go on through the book as the children had to go on through the tunnels, for there was no turning back.

  “I’d never read descriptions so vivid, beautiful, claustrophobic and suffocating”

  They must have emerged at some point and I don’t remember how the story went on, but I do remember that the magic got darker and darker, and more and more magnificent. I was in the middle of some epic tale that I vaguely sensed was part of a far larger and older mythology. There were huge creatures called Maras – females, made out of something like rough-hewn mud or stone, that I imagined looked like Henry Moore sculptures I’d seen in my father’s art books. They roamed the land making terrible cries. And there was a giant wolf, Fenrir, whose leap spanned the sky. It was Ragnarok, the end of the world. Something as vast as the end of Narnia in The Last Battle was happening; but it was in our world. How on earth did the children and Cheshire and everywhere else on the globe get out of that fix? Curiously, I don’t think I was all that spooked, perhaps because I was a little older than the child who had read the Narnia books. I found the story invigorating and very thrilling because it had dared to start in the usual way, with children on holiday, and had then inflated itself, like a party balloon turning into a zeppelin.

  “I found the story invigorating and very thrilling because it had dared to start in the usual way, with children on holiday, and had then inflated itself, like a party balloon turning into a zeppelin.”

  I remember I wanted very much to visit Cheshire and meet quaint grown-ups who would call me and my sister ‘childer’ and I wanted to explore the caves, which I suspected were real, even if there weren’t any svarts in them. I had no yearning to go on any perilous journey, just a look-around. The romance of caves (Coleridge’s caverns measureless to man and the sun-less sea, as I later read at school) was always very strong for me. The lure of glow worms and underground lakes and stalactites and stalagmites (wonderful names, and you had to remember which was which) was irresistibly powerful. Cheshire was close to Cheddar, and I once got a postcard from a friend who went to a place called the Cheddar Gorge, which had caves. But no-one ever took me to Cheshire, and the first time I ever saw a stalactite or a glow worm was in an Australian cave. That experience recalled another childhood book: in Scotty in Gumnut Land, May Gibbs wrote about and drew an Australian cave full of jewel boxes, draped shawls and pieces of bacon, and when I saw the limestone formations, I discovered she had been right. The benign pig-witch Tiggy Touchwood found God there, or at least a Godlike presence she called Mifrend, and a monster too, and both the monster and Mifrend aroused the same queasy feeling in me as the piper at the gates of dawn. A cave certainly seemed to me like a place where you would find gods and demons.

  My re-reading copy is the same one I read the first time round. I was visiting my sister Julia in Adelaide, and talking about this project I wanted to do on children’s books I had once read, and I asked her if she could dig up a Moomin book for me, because she had kept some of our childhood books and had brought them with her to Australia. So we had a look for the Moomin book, and it wasn’t there. But we did find The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and the moment I saw it, I decided I had to read it again.

  It’s a blue hardback first edition, published by Collins in 1960, and on the title page I have written ‘Jane Horner, Xmas 1960’. So it was a Christmas present, probably from my parents, and I read it when I had just turned eleven. I have also illustrated it in the spaces at the ends of chapters, in pale sketchy pencil. To my adult eye the drawings are shamefully amateurish, without the saving grace of charm. Everyone and everything looks wooden, even the ravening wolf in the sky. There is an infinitely better illustration on the dust jacket, but then I didn’t do it: the jacket design is by a proper artist, George Adamson. It shows a fierce-looking dwarf with a black beard and cross-gartered legs, holding a red goblet. I remember the drawing well, though I don’t remember the dwarf. The jacket is very frayed at the edges and along the spine, but otherwise the book is in good condition.

  The whole of the back cover is a portrait photograph of the author. I thought he looked old and wise back in 1960, but he looks young to me now. He has curly hair, he wears a pullover and a cravat, and he’s smiling. The inside flap reveals a biography. ‘Twenty-six year old Alan Garner lives in Blackden-cum-Goostrey in Cheshire. He found his lovely old half-timbered house, surprisingly called Toad Hall, lying derelict and crumbling, away from the main road. Although it had only a well for water and no electricity, it was the perfect home in which to settle and delve into his three passions – archaeology, history and the folk-lore of Cheshire, particularly in the Alderley region where he grew up.’

  If ever there was a perfect author biography, this must be it. Gorgeous names, a romantic renovation, a family, a passion for ancient things and ancient stories, and plenty of local colour. And still-youthful promise. This is Garner’s first novel, and clearly he is heading for great things. What’s more, the endpapers have maps, with woods and lakes and routes and pointers such as ‘Here they saw first Mara.’ Already I’m in love with this book all over again.

  “Quite soon, I discover why I couldn’t put this book down when Polly came to play, because it’s also very difficult to put it down now.”

  I read, and I’m not disappointed. Quite soon, I discover why I couldn’t put this book down when Polly came to play, because it’s also very difficult to put it down now. This is a full-blown fantasy thriller, like Tolkien without the boring bits. The svarts burst out of their holes on page 31, and after that the breakneck pace scarcely lets up for 194 pages. I’m left gasping for breath when I come to the splendid last lines: ‘And this tale is called the Weirdstone of Brisingamen. And here is an end of it.’

  But I’m getting way ahead of myself. The story starts with a fairytale, The Legend of Alderley, which for all I know is a real legend. Then we’re into familiar Blytonish territory: the brother and sister, Colin and Susan (only two of them, not
the horde I’d remembered) arrive by train at Wilmslow. They are going to stay for six months with farmer Gowther Mossock and his wife Bess – who nursed their mother when she was a baby – because their mother has to go abroad to stay with her husband. Gowther and Bess are stock salt-of-the-earth farming characters but fun for all that, and I like the Cheshire dialect they speak, all ‘sithee’ and ‘dunner’ and ‘Yon’s th’Edge’ (the sinister hill where much of the action will take place). And yes, ‘childer’.

  There are many important characters I have forgotten about in this archetypal good versus evil story. On the good side we have a wizard, Cadellin, who guards twenty slumbering knights beneath the earth, ready to wake when evil threatens the world. There are two dwarfs: Fenodyree, the black-bearded fellow on the cover, and Durathror, a Viking who loves a battle. And a race of elves who are fleeing the polluted world of man. On the bad side are the morthbrood: a local witch, Selena Place, also known as the Morrigan, who has three huge hounds with no eyes; Grimnir, a sorcerer who lives in a fetid lake; hundreds of svarts; the Mara, giant troll-women made of stone; plus various spies, birds, scarecrows, etcetera. And an arch fiend, Nastrond, whom we never see, the Great Spirit of Darkness who lives in the Abyss of Ragnarok and plots the Earth’s doom, and can send his evil into the minds of men. Everyone talks in slightly olde worlde English (‘I like it not’) and everyone is after a magic jewel, the Weirdstone, which controls the sleeping knights, and hence the fate of the world.

  Does this sound familiar? Of course it does. Even at the age of eleven, I knew these characters, or something like them. The closest parallel is probably Tolkien, though at that age I had yet to come across The Hobbit, let alone The Lord of the Rings. But it would be meaningless to accuse Garner of plagiarising Tolkien or anyone else, because it’s clear to me now that all such storytellers are making use of the same sources in ancient mythology and folklore to create their own world.