“My father, George Thomas,” the swooping witch calls far and away, “called his band of machine-wreckers, the Luddites, after King Lud, who built old Celtic London full of palaces and towers and parks, not a chimney in it, all craftsmen plying their own trade with tools they used with their own hands. He wanted to get back to an England like that, fit for a free man to live in and work for himself, not an England where machines ate men. But he and his men didn’t wreck many threshing-machines. The moment the magistrates saw his flag, Bread or Blood, they called out the soldiers and all the band ran away. Ta, they weren’t men of stuff like George Thomas. The soldiers put him in Norwich Gaol, where someone gave him William Blake to read, all about how we had the first Israel here, then one of Blessed Joanna Southcott’s works. And he read it and he was converted to the true faith. And he heard that the Lord had just taken Her in a Trance to heaven, for, although She was immortal, yet He could no longer do without Her on High. And He also took Shiloh, Her Son born to Her according to Her prophecies at the age of sixty-five years, a miraculous birth. For the Lord in His Infinite Wisdom saw that the time was not yet ripe for the Millenium, when Shiloh would rule with His Mother Joanna at his side for a thousand years, until Satan should rise again with Gog and Magog to destroy the world before the final Judgement Day.
“When George Thomas heard the true faith, he prayed to Joanna, and lo, his prayer was answered. A trembling shook the earth and the walls of the jail were parted and George Thomas walked away to safety. And he gathered together other followers of Joanna and he performed the ceremony you saw tonight, when the Devil was burned in the shape of a black pig and the ashes were to be scattered over the heads of the faithful in order to hurry the coming of Shiloh back to a cleansed earth. Only, just as tonight, the military appeared and they took away George Thomas and they put him in chains and they sent him away to Bantry Bay. And he did not return from the Antipodes until he was sixty years of age, when he married my Welsh mother and begat me in the true faith of Joanna and passed away.”
The words of Granny Maria thunder or pipe in Gog’s ears, as she swoops and banks and glides on her wooden lion round the spacious firmament on high, through all the blue ethereal sky under the rafters, now brushing past Gog’s nose, now whisking away almost beyond his sight in the eddying smoke of the oil lamps. His senses reel as he tries to follow her whirligigs and gyrations. Gog tries desperately to focus his sight and establish that his granny is a witch on a lion-stick or else a respectable old lady sitting in a chair with a powerful line in home-brew; but his eyes won’t align themselves for long enough to clear his own mind, which is scooting way over the moon on its own.
“Of course, I had to marry in due time, and I should have been a boy. Although what’s wrong with a woman, ta, she’s got two legs and two arms and a head like any man? And the rest of her’s private, anyway. George Thomas made me swear that any son of mine should take the name of George Griffin, and that I shouldn’t marry a Celt who wouldn’t take the name of George for love of me. So Albert, my husband, became George Albert and your father was called George Griffin like my father. And both of them were a credit to him, they were. George Albert knew Keir Hardie and Lloyd George. He used to tell them, that’s how the people think, bless ’em, that’s what you should do. They called him, The Public Pulse. You just had to feel him and you knew what the people wanted. The Public Pulse. But my son George, your father, he broke my heart, as well you know. He left the true faith and married a Papist, your wicked mother Merry. And I never saw him from his wedding-day till his funeral, and then he was in a box. Still, he was his grandfather’s son in a way. He was what the Griffins always are, a fighter and a doer for what he thought was right. He read a fellow called Bakunin, and he used to talk of getting rid of His Majesty’s Government and letting everyone look after themselves, as though we hadn’t always had a King. That’s why, of course, he would go and live on nothing near his Celtic roots in Holyhead, where he said he could get the Welsh to demand their rights and break away from England. Decentralize. Ta, decentralize, he always used to say, and it didn’t do him a bit of good. They put him in the army all the same. He thought he could make the troops rebel and help the Irish, but the Papists killed him for his trouble. They would.”
Granny Maria on her lion-stick begins to hover above Gog and slowly drift down to earth. After a few seconds, she does a perfect four-point landing on the legs of her lion-chair, and, lo and behold, she is sitting on exactly the same spot from which she departed.
“Ta, when you were born, what a time ago! They wouldn’t let me come and see you, and it nearly broke my heart. I wrote that you had to be called Shiloh, my Voice told me. But they didn’t listen, though you were called George. I suppose a family name’s the next best thing to a Divine Name. And George, I’ll have you know, is a Kingly Name! But Gog, ta, what a corruption! When I heard you were called that, I knew it was a Sign and a Portent. And I said to myself, How can any Griffin be called Gog? When Gog is Satan’s chief lieutenant who’ll put an end to Shiloh’s Reign after a thousand years and bring about the End of the World. So I hunted through all my Bible, to see if there wasn’t another reference to Gog. And, of course, there was. Just one reference, Ezekiel, Chapter Thirty-eight, Verse Two. And the word of the Lord came unto me saying, Son of Man, Set thy face against Gog, the Land of Magog. Ta, it was all clear to me. You were to be the greatest Griffin of them all, the true fighter for the people. Though everyone was against you, though all the sons of men set their faces against you, you were going to fight for the right, yes, even in the Land of Magog, the cursed city of London where Magog rules. Yes, my Gog, you will pull the walls of parliament down about the heads of the wicked Bishops, who will not allow the Sealed Box of Joanna to be opened in their presence. For they fear that Her prophecies will foretell their doom. But their doom is already nigh, for my grandson Gog goes to London to force them to open Joanna’s Box. Swear to me you will go direct to London from here, not through unholy Canterbury, where the Archdevil himself rules in his red pride.”
Gog nods his assent, for he has already decided to take the shortest road to London.
“And when you get to London and tell the foresworn Bishops to open the box, if they refuse, ta, then all the Accursed City will be destroyed with fire and brimstone. For Gog is the forerunner of the End of the World.”
Gog’s whirling brain comes to rest for long enough to allow him to speak. He hears his words sound as if they came from a foreign tongue.
“Joanna’s Box? I saw a placard about that in Exeter. Why won’t the Bishops open it?”
“For fear. They fear that their lies will be shown up and their false authority exposed. Ta, poor Blessed Joanna. That She should have believed that the Bishops would ever cause the Box of Her Sealed Prophecies to be opened in their presence to prove that She spake truly the Word of the Lord. For one hundred and fifty years, even while Blessed Joanna was still alive, the Bishops have refused to recognize the Truth, that Joanna is the Inspired Bride of Christ. And now She is long taken up to Heaven in a Trance, we may advertise on boards and in the London newspapers, yet the Bishops turn a deaf ear to us. But you, Gog, you will make them listen.”
“Do they have the Box?” Gog asks, his stirred senses beginning to settle like mud at the bottom of his skull.
“No, an old Southcottian family has The Box. And it cannot be opened, by Order of the Blessed Joanna, except in the presence of the Bishops Assembled.” The old woman leans forwards, her stays or her bones cracking. “But there’s another Box.” She laughs and beckons Gog towards her. “Come closer. Another Box. Closer. We don’t want anyone to hear.”
Gog looks round the vast empty hall, in which an army could be concealed, only what army would not run screaming in terror out of such a nightmarish bivouac? And he rises delicately onto his feet and spreads his arms out as if balancing on a tightrope and walks across to Granny Maria’s chair. Once there, he squats in front of her, so that she can lea
n forwards and whisper into his ear.
“In the minstrels’ gallery. Up there.” Gog looks round to see high over the entrance door a small balustrade of railings carved in the shape of rams with their curving horns supporting the parapet. “We’ll go up there and find it. In a leather chest. Triple locked. You can’t get in. No one can. I always carry the keys on me. Ta, they’re heavier than a ball and chain. But safety first. If unholy eyes . . .” The old woman’s irises briefly glint under her hooded lids, as a nearby oil-lamp splutters and flares. “Shall we look? Not in five years have I seen it. But you are come. As a Visitation. You, Gog. You shall be armoured with Faith, now you go to London. Help me up.”
As Gog aids the old woman to rise from the lion-chair and support herself on her two blackthorn sticks, he feels her claws push some banknotes into his pocket. “For your journey to confound the Bishops,” she says. Then she makes Gog stoop as he walks, so that he can buoy her up with his right hand under her left elbow. As they reach the end of the huge hall where the stairs mount up to the minstrels’ gallery, Gog sees a gas jet flaming in an alcove. Over the gas jet, a large iron saucepan bubbles and brews, sending out an aroma of herb and gamey meat and unspeakable intestinal odours that seem to signify that the liver and lights of Lucifer are in the pot.
“It’s my stew,” Granny Maria says. “On the boil for six years, ever since war broke out. I never empty it. Just add to the top. Anything that’s handy. Scrag-end and sweetbreads and nettles and mugwort and clubmoss and the pimpernel that grew on Our Lord’s grave. And . . .”
Gog cuts the recipe short, feeling his hungry stomach heave and turn inside him in horror at such a bill of fare. “It sounds marvellous, granny. But I’d prefer not to know what’s in the stew. Let it be one of those mysteries, like witches’ broth.”
“After we’ve seen the Box,” the old woman says, “we’ll tuck in to a nice plate of stew. You’ll like that. Granny’s cooking’s best.” Again she drops her sticks and says simply to Gog, “Carry me.” And Gog lifts her up in his arms and carries her up the steep stairway to the minstrels’ gallery.
The gallery is as small as a sofa and the boards below Gog’s feet crack and give alarmingly when Gog treads upon them. Half the area of the gallery is filled with a great leather trunk, upon which Gog deposits Granny Maria. The top of the trunk sags under her weight; but she is so bird-light that the old leather manages to hold her without tearing. “Lift me down, Gog, you fool,” she says. “How can I open it from on top?” So Gog lifts her down beside him; but the space in the gallery is so narrow that he is squashed against the railings and the parapet, which wobble outwards, barely containing Gog’s sideways thrust. He tries desperately to edge towards the centre of the gallery; but the old lady is squatting on the floor, fumbling with three enormous keys taken from her pouch of ironmongery. So Gog is left to squint over the edge of the hand-rail at the drop of twenty feet beneath him straight onto the flagstones of the hall, as far as he can see. Bats, disturbed from their rest, begin to flit and twitter under the starry rafters, glancing in and out of the black columns of oil-smoke like charred sheets of paper rising in the hot air.
At Gog’s feet, Granny Maria mutters as she tries the keys variously in the locks. “Not all Joanna’s Writings were Sealed. George Thomas was given one, in Her Own Hand. He kept it and passed it on to me. He said it was written especially for the Griffins, and indeed, it foretold that Gog would be born in the likeness of a griffin and that he would hasten the coming of Shiloh. There are many other Prophecies about you and about your children and your children’s children unto the Millenium. And also in the Box, there is the family tree of the Griffins, George Griffin after George Griffin after George Griffin, how they were champions of the people and heroes of the poor, ever since the lost Ten Tribes came to this holy island and settled here. In the ancient Hebrew language, do not Gog and Magog signify our name George, the patron saint of all England? And did not the Ten Tribes of Israel, fleeing here, bring the name of George with them to these sacred shores? And did not they bring also the name of Griffin, signifying Defender of the Poor? So you shall see, Gog, how the generations of the Griffins have begat you, how you are as they were, how you do what they did, how you live but as a plaything in the hands of the Almighty, the instrument of the Lord.”
Granny Maria manages to turn a key in the first of the locks, raising a screech and a cloud of rust. She fits a key into the second lock and twists it, unavailing. Her voice rises until it sounds as the incantation of inspiration.
“I have set down all that the Voice of the Lord hath told me of the generations of Griffin, since the House first landed on these shores with the Tribe of Japheth, son of Noah, and his son Magog. The Griffins were all giant men, and their women were as fierce as tigers. Some of the House turned to the abomination of desolation in their pride and they ruled over the people in tyranny and lust. But always from the same House rose up a George Griffin to topple them from their high places and work the Will of the Lord.”
Using both hands, Granny Maria turns the key in the second lock, which screeches even more piercingly than the first. She fits another key into the third and final lock, while her thin old voice chants and prophesies.
“So thou shalt find out at last who thou art, Gog Griffin. Thou shalt discover that the seed in thee maketh thee do all that thou doest. Even if the unworthy vessel through which thou didst pass to this earth was an accursed Papist, yet the seed of the House of Griffin triumpeth over all things, yea, it is the chosen of the Lord. Whatever the errors the teachers shall instruct thee, whatever ways the unholy paths of the world shall lead thee, yet shall the seed of the Griffins and of Noah cause thee to fulfil the purpose of the Lord and to defend the maimed and the halt and the lame and the old and all who cry unto thee for succour. For thou art Gog Griffin, the heir of the Tribe of Japheth, Defender of the Poor and Servant of the Almighty!”
The third lock opens, wailing to the high beams of heaven, and the minstrels’ gallery sways and moves as a bough in a wind. And Gog sees his grandmother opening the locks that close the documents of all the generations that begat him, he watches the lid rise on the revelation of the great chain of the living and the dead that ties all men to the dim and distant prehistory from whence they all came, the great chain that shackles the ankles and wrists of every child in his crib so that he does unconsciously what he would not do and seeks for a reason why that he shall never find. For the seed of men blows on the wind as the dandelion puff, it roots itself where it may and it keeps no records. We sow our children blindly, and blindly they spring from the womb, and they reap the harvest in blindness. If they know the generation of their fathers, they are fortunate; if they know the generations of their grandfathers, they are blessed; if they know the generations of their great-grandfathers, they are aristocrats; if they know the origins of their tribe and their people and their race, they are historians, doomed to squabble together with rakes in their hands among the cinders of the past, unable to see for the dust they turn over, the dust which the wind bears away along with the seeds of new men floating in balls of down.
And when the lid of the trunk is open, Granny Maria screeches louder than the turning of the three keys, shriller than the bats twittering about the hall, more menacing than the floorboards splitting beneath them. And Gog peers down to see scraps of yellow paper, screws of documents, shreds of evidence made up into nests for innumerable mice, scurrying and squeaking round the confines of the trunk or running out of a vent in the corner of the trunk to clamber onto Gog’s boots and to scatter off to a safe hole behind the panelling on the wall.
“Gone, gone!” Granny Maria wails. “The Prophecies eaten, the generations lost, the House of Griffin fallen!” She turns in fury on the giant Gog, squashed up against her in the trembling narrow gallery, and she begins beating on Gog’s chest with her old knobbled fists. “You, you! You are no Griffin. Another bastard, like your brother Magnus your wicked mother bore out of wedlock. Y
our father did not sow you. The Devil did. You are the true Gog, come to destroy us all. The Gog of Revelations! Fall, deceiver! Fall!”
She pushes Gog and the railings give way at his back with a crack as if the crust of the earth were splitting and he is swallowed up into the bowels of the air. And he would shatter his spine on the flagstones, only the spirit of the late George Albert has prevented his widow from removing a large baronial dais from beneath the balcony, a dais padded with horsehair and sprung with the most enduring and resilient of Victorian springs. So Gog bounces up from the earth and comes to rest again sprawling on his back, looking upwards at Granny Maria perched on the edge of the broken gallery like a raven on a ruin. And she begins screaming unintelligible curses that should blast Gog dead on the spot or wither him to a toad, although he still seems to remain a sprawling seven foot man. But more serious is the smell of the stew, which enters his nostrils and cranks his stomach into turning over like a cold engine on the point of vomiting into life. And most serious of all is the volley of splintered rams’ heads and wooden horns that the old witch begins hurling at Gog, so that he is forced to spring to his feet and run to the entrance of the hall. As he passes under the gallery, the leather trunk is pushed down, missing him by inches and shattering apart in a shrapnel of paper and a concerto of mice and a stink of rotten hide. And Gog flings open the outer door and runs out of the red-and-blue glazed porch into the winding ways of the wood, where he blunders about in the night for nearly an hour until he finds his way back to the King’s Highway and the protection of sense and reason.
Once Gog has been walking along the road to London and the North, steering under the clear sky by the mariner’s star that points the pole, he can hardly believe that he has been visiting relatives. But he realizes with a start that the pain in his bruised shoulder is gone, gone for ever as though it had never been. And when he feels with his hand under his shirt, he takes out a damp linen square from the hollow of his collar-bone.
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