If she had her way, she would have danced all day on the green grass of the Downs or the wet sand by the sea, because dancing – ‘wheee!’ – set her free. But there was work to be done, thread to be spun, clothes to wash and meals to make, but if she was awake, you can be sure this girl would shimmy, this girl would shake, even if it was only a leap between her steps or a strut at the sink.
In May’s mind, there were two types of dancing – hard and soft:
Hard dancing was what May did when all the work at home and school was too much. Pent up with pirouettes she would stride up to her secret place on the Downs and begin. She danced for the hedges, the nettles and the green folds of the open hills. Up there, with the sky close, May danced as fiercely as the wind blowing over from the Isle of Wight. Her body twisted like a sugar twizzle and her eyes glittered like pear drops from the Penny Lady’s sweet tray.
Soft dancing was what May called dancing with others. I often lazed on a broken branch of the rotten lime tree in the school playground while May and her friends danced in a circle, hand in hand. At those times, May’s eyes were as gooey as butter fudge. She seemed to float like a piece of driftwood that thinks it’s a wave.
May had one ambition. She wanted to dance in clogs, clickety, clackety, down Lewes High Street with the women and girls on May morning.
Come Christmas, May was given a brown package tied up with string. In it was a pair of clogs all the way from Lancashire. They were brown leather with white stitching and wooden soles all hammered together with nails. Her dad and eldest brother had taken on extra jobs as muck men for a season – emptying the dunnicks – the village toilets – to pay for them.
May practised her dance steps over and over. The only snag was, the clogs wouldn’t soften to her feet. Her heels were covered with sores and blisters and her toenails turned black. She didn’t tell anyone in case they stopped her dancing on May morning.
The night before, May was so excited she couldn’t sleep a blink. She was up way before the moon went down, walking towards Mount Caburn to gather flowers. I ran with her, leapfrogging the gates and somersaulting from sheep to sheep, as the glimmer-gowks* hooted.
May was wearing her clogs, hoping that the wet grass would moisten the hard leather before the dancing started. I watched her pick and garland damp flowers in the dark. She gathered every kind of blossom, knots of lilies and handfuls of hellebore, winding them round her head, neck, wrists and ankles. As she worked, she sang:
As I walk out this May morning, this May morning so early …
I’ll gather in the buds of spring before the sun comes a-rising,
With my rue-dum day, fol de riddle ray,
Wack fol de rol de riddle I-do!
May came to a circle of mushrooms as white as stars. You would call such a thing a fairy ring but we call it a dance halo. It’s an overland marker of an underground ballroom where we, the People of the Hills, like to dance, especially on May’s eve, when we do it till dawn without a break, to shake awake the seeds and make them sprout.
Sometimes I’m a lazy Puck and don’t want to foot it all through the night so I wasn’t dancing with them – and a good job too, because May stopped gathering flowers. She put her ear to the ground. It was clear she could hear the harps harping, fiddles fiddling and whistles tooting. She began to swish and sway, then she jumped right into the ring and began to dance.
‘No!’ I shrieked.
She didn’t hear. Her arms flicked, her hips dipped, she skipped and tripped.
‘No!’ But May’s eyes were going melty now and I could see she felt part of everything and would jig on till sunrise!
Why shouldn’t she dance? Well, I knew that beneath the halo of mushrooms, in the underground fairy ballroom, May’s steps would be making the chandeliers shudder as if there was an earthquake. Fiddles would be going out of tune and the drummers wouldn’t know which beat to follow. Worst of all, chalk flaking from the ceiling would be interrupting the goblins as they worked:
Nail the leather, mend the shoe,
In and out and pull it through,
Stitch it, cut it, tack it, glue
Slipper mended, lucky you.
In their dancing frenzy, the fairies need their goblin shoemakers because they wear out their footwear in hours. If the goblins lost their tempers and refused to work, the party would be over and it would all be May’s fault.
‘Get out of the ring!’ I jumped on her shoulders and tugged at her hair. I thought she’d heard me because she stopped dancing. But no, she yawned, stretched, kicked off her clogs, curled up on her apron and fell asleep.
Once May is sleeping I’ve never been able to wake her even if I use my mosquito pinch.
It was then that I caught the whiff of a scent I knew so well: honeysuckle, wild rose and riverbed. The Queen of the Fairies was coming. A mushroom fell, tipped by a bony hand that appeared from beneath the earth, followed by a silver-skinned arm and a head of dark hair crowned with spider orchids. Up she came. Her wings buzzed like a bee as she flicked her fish scale dress. The Queen of the Fairies was no taller than the distance from the earth to May’s ankle bone but her voice bounced off the stars. ‘Get off the roof of our ballroom!’ she shrieked.
May carried on sleeping. Flushing dark as nightshade, the Queen of the Fairies scrunched up her face, opened her mouth and screamed:
Stamp one!
Stamp two!
I’m big
Like YOU!
The Queen of the Fairies erupted, stretching so tall she hit her head on the moon, then contracted until she was around May’s size. In her hand was a little green bottle of cracked Venetian glass, with a tiny mirrored leaf for a stopper. The potion was a gift from the King of the Fairies. She’d had it since we rode on dinosaurs. I knew what was in it – a mixture of foxglove, hemlock and yew berry. One smear of it on May’s eyes would shrink her until she was as small as a baby mouse, small enough to be pushed down a mushroom staircase into a fairy dance hall. When she woke up she would be intoxicated by the candle chandeliers, the fiddles and the drink from the buttercup punchbowl. She’d dance with the fairy folk till morning.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ you might ask. But which morning? The fairy dance has a power that humans never understand. Their whirling plays with time like a black hole. I once lost a couple of centuries there myself. If May danced with them till morning, when she was finally pushed out, back up into the fairy halo of mushrooms, so many years would have passed there would be nothing left of Sultan, her favourite horse, but bones in the meadow. Her baby brother Joe would have died an old man a hundred years before.
The thought made me so cross I started to shout:
Stamp one!
Stamp two!
I’m big
Like YOU!
So that Puck became a bristling, brown-muscled Sprite. I stood between May and the Queen of the Fairies.
‘Leave her alone!’ I grabbed the Queen’s wrist to stop her anointing May’s eyes with her tincture. She flipped me over her shoulder and onto the grass. As she did, the Venetian glass bottle flew out of her hand and shattered on the wooden soles of May’s upturned clogs, spattering them with a purple liquid. For a second we watched them sizzle.
Then:
We wrestled on the damp earth, wrestled in the dry air, on the itchy chalk. We wrestled in the soft clouds, wrestled on the wet sea, on the prickly gorse. And whether it was the wrestling that made our rage drain away, or because I’m the Queen’s adopted brother and we always get bored of scrapping, we began to shrink so that it took us a few minutes to fly back to the mushroom circle. By the time we did, it was dawn and we were just in time to see May, her clogs on her shoulder skipping ‘rol de riddle i do!’ down the hills towards Lewes town.
‘She’s gone.’ I said, without looking at the Queen. ‘You can carry on dancing!’
‘No thanks to you!’ she muttered. ‘You’ll pay for this!’
Brother or not, the Fairy Queen had me polishing
seeds and burnishing petals for a month, but I didn’t mind. The potion from the little green bottle that would have cost May so many years had just the right effect on her clogs. They shrank to fit her feet as snugly as a daffy down dilly* fits my head.
That May morning, May danced The Brighton Lasses, The Beau Knot, The Five Knots, The Lewes Stomp and The Lacemaker. Hand in hand with the others, she was one with the street, the Downs and the whole of Lewes town.
May passed the clogs on to her daughter, who said they were far too big. But when she slipped them on, not only did they fit her like a woollen sock, they grew with her.
May’s daughter didn’t have a child but passed the clogs on to someone as much like her as Pook is like a sprite and Puck is like a fairy. Although that girl passed them on to her daughter, not everybody dances, so the clogs ended up in a charity box.
Last May morning, Lewes High Street was closed to traffic but open to dancers. The crowds lined the streets waiting for the May parade. They juggled their takeaway coffees with those camera phones they like to hold up at anything. In the Red Cross shop, a young girl spent all her pocket money buying May’s old clogs. She put them on and whirled out of the store, her eyes sparkling like lemon sherbets, a single violet in her hair. She danced alone on the cobbles, for the dust in the sunbeams, for the clothes in the windows and for the smiles on the sea of faces.
When the other dancers skipped down from the castle, they took her hand and she danced with them, her eyes as gooey as butter fudge. As soon as one girl had been included, the dance spread like a flame on Bonfire Night and everyone joined in:
With my rue-dum day, fol de riddle ray,
Wack fol de rol de riddle I-do!
* bleared – this means cried in Sussex dialect.
* glint – glimpse.
* glimmer-gowk – owl.
* daffy down dilly – daffodil.
5
Skylarks of Sussex
• The Ashdown Forest •
All, all that to the soul belongs,
Is closely mingled with old songs.
Eliza Cook, a poet who lived for a time on a small farm
in St Leonard’s Forest near Horsham
After the Romans left Britain, the Saxons came to the South. They were a band of warrior pirates from Northern Europe, who arrived on the coast and like wolves among sheep, began to take over the land. The old name for South Saxons was ‘Suthsaexe’. From ‘Suthsaexe’ came the name Sussex.
Words are as slippery as wet moss on the Ashdown Forest, that upside-down triangle of land that stretches seven miles up and seven miles across the top of this county.
The very name, Ashdown Forest, is slithery. Firstly, the Ashdown Forest is not a forest, it’s a heath. A forest is dark, with tall trees growing close together, whereas a heath is wide open with low-growing plants like purple heather and yellow gorse. Secondly, you would think the word Ashdown comes from a combination of Ash tree and Downs, when it actually comes from the Anglo-Saxon name ‘Aescadun’, meaning Aesca’s Dun. Aesca was a powerful fairy or sprite, and ‘dun’ meant hill.
We have slipped down a bank of words and landed with our feet firmly on the soil. Ashdown Forest means ‘the hill of Aesca’. The name Aesca was a mixture of sounds from nature: the ‘eee, eee’ of birds singing and the ‘aaah, aaah’ of animals panting. Not all Saxons were fighters, many were farmers and came with their families, who loved the land. The Saxons believed that they had to look after Sussex because it held the spirit of Aesca. The hills were her body and the stars were her eyes.
Aesca was forgotten until, not so long ago, a ranger on the Ashdown Forest lay in bed. He couldn’t sleep. Was it the full moon? Was he overtired from cutting the scrubland? Had he stayed up too late writing his notes? If he didn’t rest, how would he have the strength to work in the morning? He threw off his blanket.
His heart tapped at his chest like a woodpecker. ‘You’re lonely!’ it seemed to say. ‘You need a companion! When did you last sing, or dance?’
‘I have no time to sing! I have no time to dance!’ grumbled the ranger back to his own heart.
He shut his eyes and sighed, long and hard. When he opened them again, a woman was sitting beside him. She had brown hair, a cloak made of sacks and a simple, pale, cotton dress. ‘You’re never alone in the forest!’ she whispered. ‘I’m always here.’ And, leaning towards him, she sang a fluting lullaby. She had only sung one verse before he fell asleep:
Just picture the bluebell and helleborine,
The purple bell heather and marsh moss so green,
Remember wood sorrel and hay-scented fern,
The bright golden gorse buds that make the heath burn.
The next morning, as he went about his business, the ranger noticed the sun on the bracken and he didn’t feel lonely. That night as he lay in bed he shut his eyes and began to run over the pictures of his day. As he was drifting off, he was aware of the woman singing, but he was asleep before she had finished the second verse:
Remember the fallow, the roe and red deer,
The shearing of sheep in the spring of the year,
Remember the cows and the full flowing milk,
And dragonfly lace upon lakes of soft silk.
The next night, the ranger was determined to stay awake. He kept his eyes wide open to see how she got into his room. Was it through the locked door or the window, open only a finger’s breadth? He must have blinked because there she was again, singing. He was asleep by the time she’d finished the third verse:
Just think of the Blackcap, the Linnet and Lark,
The ‘croak’ of the Nightjar that ‘creaks’ through the dark,
Consider the Siskin ‘chit chatter tea, tea!’
The quick Yellowhammer ‘bread, bread, bread no cheese’.
The next night he waited and waited but she never came again.
One morning he decided to go and look for her. He packed himself a sandwich and started walking. He hadn’t got very far when a fox started nibbling at the toe of his boot. ‘You’re hungry!’ he said, and fed the fox some crumbs.
It ran ahead, looking behind as if encouraging the ranger to follow. Beside a stream, the fox shot into his sandy earth, but on the other side of the water were one hundred and fifty girls, some had gold hair, some red and some black. They were dancing. The ranger began to wave and shout because there she was, the brown and white girl that had sung him a lullaby for three nights!
‘Come to me, come!’ he called.
‘Not now!’ she called back. ‘Come to me next year – same time, same place. Now I’m a girl, then I’ll be a bird. Pick me out from the others and I’ll be yours!’
‘What’s your name?’ he shouted.
‘Aesca!’ she replied.
He waited the full year. By day he seemed to hear her voice all over the heath: in the wind, the water, the hoof beats of deer, the rustling of shrews and the slithering of snakes. By night, his dreams were full of wings.
The next year he came to the banks of the stream and there were one hundred and fifty birds – pipits and redpolls, cuckoos and crossbills, firecrests and finches – so many! But, where was she? It was only when he saw a very ordinary little bird with brown and white feathers and a tiny crest that he began to blush and cry out.
‘You! Aesca! It’s me! I’ve found you. It’s been a long year. Come to me, come!’
She cocked her head and kept her distance and only when he stopped speaking and stood very still did she come:
Peck peck hop, hop, peck peck hop hop.
‘Keep on! Don’t stop!’ he said, willing her closer.
With a flutter and a flick, she perched beside him on the yellow gorse.
As slow as mist moving across the river, he raised his hands, but as he touched her, he felt his fingers begin to feather, his feet begin to claw and his body begin to shrink. He was becoming a small brown and white bird! He fluttered into the air uncertainly, but she was beside him, singing, as the other bir
ds rose with them:
Let’s swish with the Chiffchaff a 1,2,1,3,
Take off with the Stonechat, ‘chack, chack, chack, chack chee!’
Let’s loop and let’s sing and go soaring so free,
And swoop with the Kestrel a ‘ki ki ki ki’.
So, if you are walking over the heathland of Ashdown Forest and see two skylarks circling around each other, it will be the ranger and Aesca, the birds that watch over Sussex.
6
Devil’s Dyke
• Hove, Poynings •
Flour of England, fruit of Spain,
Met together in a shower of rain;
Put in a bag tied round with a string:
If you’ll tell me this riddle, I’ll give you a ring.
Traditional riddle (answer at the end of this story)
The Devil was hopping, stropping, smashing, crashing, lashing, flashing mad!
And his nose still hurt from his meeting with St Dunstan (see Story 2, ‘The Devil and St Dunstan’).
He felt like a fox in the weald; churches hemmed him in like hounds and he was unable to cavort until after dusk. With a butt of his horns he knocked off the nearest spire. Sparking the flint, he tore up brambles, spat blackberries and bounced from Seaford to Newhaven, Newhaven to Peacehaven and Peacehaven to Saltdean. He was just warming up.
As he boinged about Sussex like a parkour artist he heard snatches of songs from the children as they got ready for bed:
At Nutley Green the Devil was seen,
At Wealden he was shod,
At Mark’s Cross he fell of his hoss,
The Crawley Coven,
Threw him in the oven.
And ate him bones and all.
He would give them something to sing about! But how? He sat on a blue shingle beach and a great grey wave slopped over him, battering him with pebbles. He wondered, ‘Why did I ever love Sussex? Claggy* sea! Stubby cornfields!’ He clenched his claws.
Sussex Folk Tales for Children Page 3
