POSTSCRIPT
Guidebooks to Hampshire don’t tend to mention the Rowner Estate. This is a housing estate in Gosport, originally built for the Ministry of Defence. If you go past it, though, you come to the Alver Valley Country Park, built on a land-fill site, and a beautiful wooded area. Follow a track down through the woods, and you might smell wood smoke and hear voices. Then you suddenly see a seventeenth-century village: Little Woodham. I enjoy the strange juxtaposition, the fact that you pass through a modern housing estate to get to the village.
Now, I’m a storyteller. I don’t need to adopt a persona, or wear funny clothes – I am who I am. As I’ve said in the introduction, a storyteller can be a man in a hi-viz jacket, sitting by a burger van, or a teaching assistant in a school who loves her locality. I am not a re-enactor. Once a year, however, on May Day, I do dress up. I don seventeenth-century clothes and go to Little Woodham. The more serious re-enactors each have a character, and that character has a role; a skill or craft, a place in things. I thought I’d better have a role for my once-a-year visit, and so my character was a tinker and storyteller. The year is 1642, just before the outbreak of civil war, and for fun I wrote, in cod seventeenth-century parlance, the storyteller’s story. Here it is. (A hagstone, by the way, is a holed stone; they used to be hung up in Hampshire barns to ensure good luck.)
THE STORYTELLER’S STORY
I love this land and oft times I do hate it, travelling far distances; from the wild heathes of Dorsetshire to that poxridden wen, Portesmouth, where the people have all gone to the Devile and the young men do wear hoodes and do swagger through the streets, and the maidens – who are not maidens – do disport themselves in a lewd and lascivious manner and do show their flesh, though they be distorted by the foul and malodorous food they do eat; for oft times they do eat food from that rascally Scottische victualler MacDonald, who does sell the most vile and noisome concoctions that do contain the very sweepings of the gutter. And they do destroy the very streets with their bynge drinking and they do call themselves chavies.
I do sell many things in many villages: pots and kerchiefs and sweet toys. I do also sell hagestones for to bring good luck to good wifes, though they do sometimes chase me away with their besoms.
More than all I do like to tell stories – and if thou lookest through the eye of a hagestone there be always a story to be told. For I have seen the giant Onion curse, and hurl a boulder at the giant Ascupart; I have seen Ocknell Pond turn red with the blood of a king; I have seen the dancing stones of Titchfield; I have seen the moon hurl madness at the cydersoaked loonies of Tadley; I have seen wonders. These stories are here in Hamptonshire.
But now there are many who will make these stories sinful – who will silence me and call me jabbering heathen – even those who will destroy the miz-mazes of old England and who say that old Shakespeare was a mere prattler. These men will hold all a sin, except for the sin of avarice, and they will cast me forth from the lands they grasp unto themselves with an oath and a boot up the fundament. Shall I meet one on a forest path though, and me with a stout blackthorne or my tinker’s knife, then they do sing another song – and they do sing out of their fundament and the boot is on the other foot. And so it is, for why leave a pair of good boots on a dead man?
And yet those who do make sin out of old stories do be telling us wondrous stories from the Bible. Twas I thought the Bible was Latin just for priests and bishops, but there are those who will read the Bible to common folk and those stories of far away and long ago are stories of here and now; folk do talk of Jericho as they would talk of a town that is here; and they do talk of Sodom and Gomorrah as they do talk of Portesmouth and Gosport; and they do tell stories of David and Goliath, and Cain and Abel, and Sampson and Delilah, and an angry God and a gentle son; and these stories are wondrous. And folk do say that the Devile is loose in the land and so I think he may be, though not in the miz-maze, or the nine man’s morris, or the song of a maiden.
I have been told of the Phooka, who had the head of a goat and the body of a man and I know he is here in Hamptonshire for I have walked many a Pook’s Hill or a Puck’s Lane and I have seen his red eyes in the darkness. And they call him Satan and I think he skips across this land – hippetty hoppetty – firing lightning from his eyes and thunderbolts from his arse and he do put madness in the minds of men. For folk do dispute, and brother do turn against brother; and if all the land do fall to hatred and strife, who will buy my wares, and who will listen to my stories?
But I love much. Though life do boot me in the fundament and do rattle my pate with a cudgel; yet I am one of the Lords of No Man’s Land, and sometimes I do lie by the fire like Old Lob-lie-by-the-Fire; and sometimes I do lie by the ragged robin in the hedge like Ragged Robin Hood; and oft times I do smell the dew on the grass and feel the sun come through the trees to warm me when I am wet and cold; and sometimes I do walk towards a village and smell the wood smoke and hear the song of a maiden. And these things are pleasures and I am a king. Though now the wenches roll not in my arms but call me sillie old bugger – yet they do at times give me a mug of ale, and the wifes do buy my wares, and the children do listen to my stories, and sometimes the older folk too.
And should I die at Little Woodham I think they will bury me right, and say holy words, and I could want no more than that. But if the Devile has his way and the land comes unto strife, there will be more to bury than I, and holy words will be mere prating.
This was a bit of fun, but it helps remind us that stories are not just about reading books, or looking at websites. They are more about walking the land and exploring your home county, whether that county is your home by adoption or birth. If you are a visitor, that exploration helps you value place and locality, whilst at the same time many of the stories demonstrate a universality. If we explore more, and leave ourselves open to stories, we might be less ready to accept the despoliation of our surroundings, and add pleasure and value to our own lives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books:
Boase, Wendy, The Folklore of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (B.T. Batsford Ltd, London, 1976)
Elder, Abraham, Tales and Legends of the Isle of Wight: With the Adventures of the Author in Search of Them (Simpkin, Marshall & Co., London, 1839)
Englefield, Sir Henry, A Walk through Southampton (Baker and Fletcher, Piccadilly, 1805)
Hoare, Philip, England’s Lost Eden (Harper Perennial, London, 2005)
Newman, Chris, Saints… The Glory Games (Southampton Reference Library, 2005)
Purslow, Frank (ed.), Marrow Bones; English Folk Songs from the Hammond and Gardiner MSS (EFDS publication, 1965)
Sillence, C.M., Tales of Old West End (West End Community Association, 1995)
Vesey-Fitzgerald, Brian, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (Robert Hale Ltd, London, 1949)
Wayland’s Guide: Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Dockyard (Wayland, approx. 1885)
Websites:
Alver Valley Country Park, Gosport:
http://www.groundwork-solent.org.uk/land#Alver_Valley_Country_Park
Blackwater Valley Countryside Area:
http://www.blackwater-valley.org.uk/valley_history.htm
Bursledon Brickworks:
http://www.bursledonbrickworks.org.uk/
Isle of Wight Stories:
http://www.iwbeacon.com/island-stories.aspx
The Wilfrid Pilgrimage Trail. Also produced as a booklet, available in Meon Valley churches:
http://www.wilfrid-meon-pilgrimage.co.uk/
Little Woodham, seventeenth-century village, Gosport:
http://www.littlewoodham.org.uk
The author:
http://www.michaelolearystoryteller.com/
ends
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Folk Tales Page 16
