by Ian Watson
How highfalutin’ and quasi-Roman for a rural Anglican church to house a relic! The reliquary must have been hidden away during the Reformation.
Was it the relic that had attracted Jeremy Partridge to the parish of Melfort? If indeed vicars did choose their destinations. Jeni remembered hearing on the radio that a good number of vicars these days were refusing to accept inner city slum appointments. (“One must heed the welfare of one’s family, mustn’t one?”) If vicars were able to reject a billet maybe they could also request one, particularly if they had connexions; as Partridge, with his airs, surely did.
If St Mary’s had indeed been a Catholic church the relic would have been enshrined more nobly, in some golden vessel studded with gems – not stuck in a stone ashtray inside a rusty man-trap. The sight of it made Jeni feel creepy. Throat-bone, stone, dust. Did its presence exalt the vicar?
“Easter,” she said to him. “Festival of the Prince of Peace.”
“To be sure. Three weeks come Sunday. Then I can down my next ginnypoo.”
She stared at him, baffled.
“Lent, you know. One gives up things.”
“Yes, well on the subject of giving up things, as you know there’s a peace camp outside our local base.”
“Oh, I heard they were being evicted.”
“They’re on a thin neck of land just alongside the bridle path, and as it happens nobody can prove ownership. Not the MOD, or the farm next door. It’s free land.” In fact, a token attempt had been made by the council to declare the camp a nuisance so as to evict under the Public Health Act; an enforcement notice had been posted, but never enforced.
“Don’t they rather clutter the path, even so?”
“They’ve a perfect right to use the lane, since it’s on the definitive map of the country. The right of way has never been abolished or extinguished.”
“Dear me, how technical.”
“In fact the base fence is illegal because it cuts the bridle path, and there ought to be a five-foot wide gate in it for the public.”
“To picnic on the runway?”
She ignored this. “If the campers were ‘cluttering’ the lane the police could do them for obstruction of a public highway – just as they ought to do the MOD.” She glanced at the concealed fragment of martyr. “I think those campers are modern saints, Vicar. The today equivalent. In the cold, in the mud. No mains light or water.”
“Nor sanitation,” Partridge tutted.
“They dig deep latrine pits, and they bury all their rubbish. Saints, Vicar. Poverty willingly embraced. Lack of material possessions and comforts.”
“Don’t they draw dole money, then? I heard there was some trouble at the Crown in Kerthrop. Your campers were drinking up their unemployment pay, weren’t they? Apparently there was a fight. A broken arm. Your friends got themselves barred.”
“That was the fault of some redneck Yanks and local yobbos. Plus the landlord.”
“Deplorable.”
“I mean it. Those rednecks terrorize the camp at night, when the weather’s warm. They get tanked up and chuck stones. When they get a chance, they swerve their cars at the campers. Not the blacks from the base; they’re laid back. But the whites do. The campers face the forces of Herod. As it were.”
Partridge smiled ruefully.
“Those aren’t sanctimonious saints, Vicar. They’re practical, down-to-earth ones.”
“I’m sure they’re extremely down-to-earth.”
“A lot of respectable people visit them, you know. People who care. A Dominican monk stayed overnight last week. And last month a curate who’s in Christian CND –”
“Brought them a basket of eggs?”
“Anyway, there’s to be a big peace festival at Kerthrop at Easter. Blessed be the peace-makers, hmm? We thought how appropriate it would be if the local churches were willing to … offer a stable overnight. Leave the heating on. The Rector of St Bartolph’s in Churtington already said yes.”
“Barty’s? That doesn’t surprise me! Old Rodney would welcome a congress of Zulu transvestites.”
“And the vicar of St Thomas’s too.”
“You amaze me.”
“Sleeping bags. There’d be no mess. None.”
Partridge massaged his brow as though faced with an actual crisis of conscience.
“The PCC are proud of St Mary’s, Miss Wallis. Its upkeep, its traditions.”
And the Parochial Church Council was … parochial in more sense than one.
“How much do you know of the history of this church, and Melfort Parva itself?” Partridge started to stalk up and down as if dictating a sermon. “I always believe that people who wish to rearrange history should first know some history.”
Jeni frowned. “I am a history teacher.”
“Of course you are – at the comprehensive in Churtington. Rise of the trade unions; causes of the Russian Revolution, or whatever. I’m talking about the history of this parish.”
Fortunately there had been a visit to the John Clare School by the president of the County Antiquary Association.
“Melfort Parva means Little Melfort,” replied Jeni. “Presumably the name Melfort is Norman French for stiff, or strong, honey.”
“Indeed?”
“Produced by monks at the earlier site of the village, down by the base. The Black Death wiped out the ancient village, so the survivors rebuilt up here – bringing the old church door along with them. And the wishbone over there.”
“So they did a moonlight flit, like squatters?”
“Quite a lot of villages relocated themselves after that particular plague. Get away from the imps of illness.”
Partridge nodded. “A mile or so; I’m well aware. Four or five miles is a fair distance to flee, don’t you feel?”
“Nearest hilltop, presumably.”
“Hmm. Accurate records are so scanty. The new Melfort didn’t fare too well in the Civil War. The Parish Register went totally astray, thanks to Cromwell’s men – they pitched camp in this churchyard and dossed inside St Mary’s, generally wrecking it. Just as they ruined the village.”
Oh, so that’s where this history lesson was leading. St Mary’s had been desecrated by campers once already. What a dreadful precedent.
“Maybe the Roundheads had heard about the relic?” suggested Jeni.
“And presumably that was when our reliquary was concealed, not during the Reformation at all?”
“Why not?”
Partridge smiled pityingly. “Maybe this, maybe that! You presume too much. I’ve come across ambiguous references in one old monkish Latin chronicle which indicate that something ghastly happened to the original village back in the fourteenth century.”
“Bubonic plague, right.”
“I fear the mass death and chaos of the plague is a convenient camouflage in this case, Miss Wallis. A red herring. It hides what really happened.”
“Which was?”
The vicar’s cloak swirled as he paced to and fro. “The ecclesiastical scribe spells the name of our village as Malfort, with an ‘a’.”
“So? Shakespeare’s name was spelled eight different ways when he was alive.”
“Mal means ‘evil’. Thus Mal-fort is ‘powerful evil’. The monk hints at demonic activity. Why else should my unknown predecessor have gone to the lengths of obtaining a blessed bone of a martyr to protect his church? There’s no mention of a Melfort in Domesday. The village may have gained its present name only subsequent to the devastation of the old site. With Parva tagged on; that’s Latin for ‘little’.”
“I know that.”
“A diminishment of the evil force.”
So. This ever-so-elegant rural vicar toyed with the notion of demons and evil. Was that merely predictable – par for the course – in view of his ritualistic affectations? Jeni sighed.
“There’s genuine evil in the world today, Vicar. The evil of nuclear weapons. Help us combat it.”
He ceased his marching and stood
still, as if defending faith against vandals.
“One wouldn’t wish anything noisome to besmirch St Mary’s, or this village – as in Cromwell’s day, as in medieval times.”
“Damn it, peace isn’t evil. CND isn’t evil.”
“Damn, indeed? Do you truly understand damnation?” Partridge strayed towards the cage and touched the grim iron bars.
For just a moment in the shadows Jeni saw a severed head inside the cage. A head resting on the raw-meat stump of its neck. Bulging eyes and swollen, protruding tongue – the head of some medieval criminal or heretic. The tongue was almost bitten through in agony. Yet the head was … trying to speak. To beg. The head inside the cage was still alive!
Brusquely Jeni shook her own head and the phantom vanished.
“Do you understand salvation?” continued Partridge. “The church has thought about these matters for a very long time.”
Had she seen such a thing? No, of course not. The vicar had spooked her with his mumbo-jumbo. Of a sudden her flash of hallucination brought to mind a college room in Oxford with a flowering chestnut tree outside the window….
It hadn’t even been a hallucination, damn it! It had been no more than a moment of heightened suggestibility, such as when you see figures dancing in a fire.
(Or wheels and whips in the boughs of a chestnut tree …?)
“Wiser minds than mine, eh?” she muttered.
“Wiser than Marx or Engels. Certain things endure; certain things are merely fashions.”
Jeni glared at the Dracula cloak.
“This house of God once suffered some … evil devastation. The door, and the martyr’s larynx, endured. Yet that’s all that is needed: a way in, and a voice.”
“I thought you said the bone came later? Oh never mind! If devastation’s the game, how well do you think St Mary’s would stand up to a few megatons five miles away?”
“Russian megatons, Miss Wallis. One might say that’s why the base is there: to protect St Mary’s and Melfort from such brutality.”
“Oh shit this,” she said to herself. Since she was getting nowhere very fast she smiled – sarcastically, she hoped – and left the church. She walked to the lych gate, outside which she’d left her Mini. Next stop, the peace camp.
Oh double shit it.
A pair of horses came clopping along Church Lane, bearing devotees of the hunt in full regalia. One was Mrs Parkes from the Manor. Stout, beef-faced Mrs Parkes, black-booted and jacketed, chin-strapped into her black riding hat. Whip clutched in her fist. The woman’s greying hair was bound in a bun as tight as the corn-rowing of her grey mount’s mane.
Jeni didn’t recognize the hatchet-faced fellow who rode alongside, on a big black beast. Narrow head, harsh watery blue eyes, jutting jaw and chopper of a nose, cheeks that looked flayed – he seemed all the uglier because of his impeccable outfit.
Jeni felt like some medieval smocked peasant cowering before a charge of armoured knights. Or a peace protester faced with police horses. She took refuge in the sky-blue Mini as the riders advanced, towering high and both ignoring her. The horse power of her little tin box on wheels struck her as puny, compared with them.
The veins of the black horse, which was shaved naked from the ribs downwards, stood proud like exposed electrical cable, wires of blood. Stupid, servile, massive, hysterical animal. If it crashed through brambles or hawthorn, nature’s barbed wire, surely a few veins might be slit.
Down where Church Lane joined the High Street a Range Rover drove by, horsebox in tow, followed by a larger mobile stable the size of a furniture van. The Thrushby Hunt was on the move this morning – meeting where?
It wasn’t on account of a few foxes being hounded to death that Jeni loathed the hunt; to her mind drag hunting would be equally pernicious. What she hated was the uniforms, like rural SS gear – the strutting of power and privilege, the fascist ceremony of it.
Mind, even if it did cost a bomb to keep a hunter, fox hunting wasn’t entirely a class phenomenon. Jeni had canvassed enough local villages on behalf of the Labour candidate during the last election to realize that some working class council tenants rode to hounds too; no doubt flush from cowboy building enterprises on the black economy. What’s more, the rural proletariat would be out in their cars blocking the roads, gawping admiringly at the chase.
She gladly obeyed the country code for ordinary riders, and girls on ponies, even if some girls on ponies grew up to become Mrs Beef-Face, dressed to kill. But it stuck in her craw to slow down for hunters and hunt lackeys. Hoping that the route wouldn’t be too “cluttered”, she tugged out the choke and roared the engine.
Three
Oxford, yes indeed. Fifteen, going on twenty years earlier – the best of times, worst of times.
Jeni went up to Somerville during the brief hangover from the Swinging Sixties into the Sour Seventies, during the two or so year appendix of freedom, protest, and joy which finally festered.
The underground press were still churning out their wares: Oz, Frendz, and IT, Black Dwarf and Red Mole. But Jeni’s main subterranean reading matter had been the Workers’ Press; for a while she’d been a slave to the then Socialist Labour League. A busy chicken with her head chopped off, to a fair degree.
Then there was all the Glastonbury stuff: the Incredible String Band, Yes, and Close to the Edge, and communes … which wasn’t quite Jeni’s scene, though it was headily in the air, like dope fumes.
Dope and acid and acid rock, Jim Morrison, Jefferson Starship: not exactly her scene, though the sounds thrilled her.
And police were merely pigs back then, who busted people for pot. They hadn’t yet got their trotters into riot gear and stocked up with CS gas, plastic bullets, real bullets. The Angry Brigade had only set off a few amateur bombs; which Jeni knew was sheer adventurism with no solid theory, no industrial base.
Oxford … and Trotskyism … and Donna the Dominator who wasn’t a member of the SLL at all….
Looking back, Jeni reckoned that she’d mostly wasted her time at Oxford, though some might argue that was Oxford’s forte: to find your own way of wasting time, which later on might pay unpredictable dividends.
How proud her Mum and Dad had been when she won that scholarship from grammar school. And how she’d rebelled at their assumptions, their bourgeois complacency. Not that she quarrelled openly, at least not for long, with her insurance-broking Dad and her plump, fey Mum. Perhaps she quarrelled with herself instead. That was when she stopped being Jennifer, which was such a well-bred, twitty, cuddly, Young Conservative sort of name, and became Jeni, or Jen. That was when she joined the SLL.
Her weekly college essays were thin and doctrinaire, heavy on Marxist theory often culled directly from SLL publications, short on pragmatic historical facts, but she ended up with a Third in History. In those days before mass unemployment a Third was good enough for teacher-training, quite good enough to net her a post in the history department of a Reading comprehensive, a factory-like shambles of buildings with a housing estate catchment area. She could well have aimed for a swankier grammar school, but that comprehensive was her choice, a political commitment even though by then she’d quit the SLL.
People who end up with a Third from Oxford usually have some fun en route. Drama, societies, sports, the Union. In retrospect Jeni hardly had fun as such, though she smelled the early Seventies in the air and heard the sounds; even though she was drunk on vodka at 6 a.m. in a punt below Magdalen Bridge once, along with the best of them, to hear the choirboys pipe out The Merry Month of May from the top of the tower. Much of the time maybe she was incapable of “fun”, since fun was a frivolous symptom of capitalism in crisis. What had Donna Hodges said? That Jeni’s was a rigid personality; that she wore Reichian character amour.
Mad Donna was a disciple of Wilhelm Reich, author of The Function of the Orgasm and The Mass Psychology of Fascism, founder of the Socialist Society for Sexological Research – though would Reich have agreed that Donna was a discipl
e? That terrible evening when Donna…. To break through someone’s armour erotically, by force…. Don’t think of it, not just now!
During a good two-thirds of her student years Jeni had worked hard. Not at history as much as on behalf of the correct historical cause, Trotskyism – which was, in retrospect, the wrong cause. Yet this prepared Jeni for sane politics in the actual world, now that she was more realistic. Now that she was wearier – though still energetic. Now that she was less hectic – perhaps! Sometimes she fantasized herself as … not a terrorist, oh no; the Trots had taught her that was adventurism. But something more than a snipper of Ministry of Defence wire in some Snowball action; more than a human sack of spuds blockading a gate, till the sack got hauled aside.
That ghastly evening when Donna….
Urgent, conspiratorial days those had been in the SLL! The coach trips to Digbeth Hall in Birmingham to hear Gerry Healey orate: a charismatic hobgoblin with the brawn of an ex-merchant seaman and a shiny bald head stabbing the same finger over and over again at the ceiling, as if telling all capitalists to stuff themselves. No luxuries such as fish and chips were allowed on the return journey.
Fellow history student Michael Berry, whom Jeni mentally christened “the Whipmaster”, would thump on her door demanding, “What did you think of the paper?” just two hours after delivering it as though she should have learned the Workers Press by heart in the interval. At that time the paper was hailing Solzhenitsyn as a true critic of the Soviet state capitalist system: Solzhenitsyn who would soon call for that yellow atheistic Genghis Khan horde of Chinese to be nuked by a future Holy Russia. Burnt out early like so many SLL activists, the Whipmaster had a nervous breakdown. He packed his trunk and fled to Gerry’s bosom in London. No word from him ever again….
High times, being lectured by a Leyland convenor. And even higher times getting acquainted with the working class, which meant tramping round blocks of flats in Cowley preferably during a snowstorm to pester pissed-off men who’d just got back from the car factory or Pressed Steel for their tea. Ironic that “trots” was a name for diarrhoea; she and Michael and Phil and Carol and Len and Steve had been selling something as welcome as verbal diarrhoea, diarrhoea of the mouth.
