Back in Lewes, in all the Mayor’s bakeries, men and women toiled, kneading and shaping dough into loaves, rolls, buns and baps and putting them into hot ovens. At midnight when the only other beings awake in the town were cats, rats and the odd duck on the river, the bakers in each of the Mayor’s premises went to check their bread.
Mary in Sun Street opened the oven door and fainted. Egbert in Ferrers Road dropped his paddle (a spatula for lifting bread in and out of the heat). Alfred in St Peter’s Place ran into the street screaming. At the same time, bakers from Southover High Street to Castle Keep were shocked and horrified by what they found in their ovens – or rather what they didn’t find: each oven was cold and empty. All except one.
On St Nicholas’ Lane, Will watched as the oven door opened and an enormous hand burst out of the flames. The hand became an arm, the arm became a shoulder, the shoulder became a whole body. A bread giant emerged, straightened his long legs, and crashed his head through the ceiling. He was twice the height of a tall man. Will stood in the doorway trembling, while the giant toasted himself in front of the oven door. As he turned from off-white to golden brown, Will snatched up his paddle. When the Doughman’s hands and feet were dark and hard as hammers he took a step towards the door. Will tried to beat him back, but his paddle snapped on the hard crust. Will fled down the street.
Smashing his way out of the bakery, the bread giant sniffed the air and stomped off towards the High Street. He was making for the dairy on Cockshut Road. On finding it closed up, he roared, then kicked out, splintering the gates and sending the locks flying.
Once inside, the Doughman found the butter churns and started to eat and eat and eat and eat. By this stage, Will had woken the Constable, and all the bakers who had discovered their ovens empty, formed a mob. Brandishing torches, their angry clogs clattering on the cobbles of the streets, they pursued the bread giant, following its flakey trail to the dairy, which they found ruined and empty of butter. Every last churn had been licked clean then hurled aside, but the culprit himself was gone.
Awoken by the clamour, the terrified townsfolk peered out from behind their curtains. A pale old man in a nightcap threw open his window and pointed, ‘That way! It went that way!’
The Doughman was striding up Lewes High Street. The mob pursued it, but it stopped and roared back at them.
One man had grabbed an ancient spear from above the fireplace on his way out of the White Hart Inn. He threw it now but it bounced off. Another shot an arrow into the giant’s bready belly – it went in through the front and out through the back. The mob fell silent. The Doughman shook his toasted fists at them, then turned and ran faster than a galloping horse in the direction of Kingston. They had no hope of keeping up as he disappeared into the copses and valleys of the Downs.
Meanwhile, nine miles away over by Burlough Castle, Chols was nicely settled into his nap when a high-pitched noise woke him up. He held his breath and listened. Hearing the squeak again, Chols jumped to his feet and followed the sound to a crack in the middle of the fairy ring.
‘Down here!’ a tiny voice shouted.
He lay on the grass and saw a hand the size of a thumbnail waving from beneath the ground. ‘A fairy!’ He laughed to himself with delight, but not out loud of course, since he knew, as all Sussex people do, that to laugh at ‘the pharisees’* – the fairies – brings very bad luck.
‘Help! Help!’ the voice cried.
‘What’s wrong?’ Chols asked.
The fairy said:
My spatula, my wooden peel
Got broken as I baked my meal
Now bread will stick and cakes congeal!
I have no tools, I have no glue
Unless you mend and make it new
I don’t know what on earth I’ll do!
‘Don’t know what under the earth, more like,’ Chols thought, but he was very handy, especially with his pocketknife, so he offered to have a go at fixing it. The wee arm passed the peel up – it was no bigger than a blade of grass, hardly enough to lift one biscuit.
Chols took it, and for nearly an hour in the moonlight he whittled with his pocketknife, shaping the break in the handle into a joint. Then he took a pin from the lapel of his coat and used that for a nail, repairing the peel so you’d never know it was broken. He handed it down through the crack in the ground. The fairy sang for joy:
That’s one for me, now one for you,
Come let me do a favour too.
Seek out the stream that runs ahead,
Like melting butter on warm bread.
Then float a cart upon the road,
A frying pan within your load.
Not spiders, only flapping webs,
Will help you as the darkness ebbs.
Goodbye, good Chols!
Chols knew that fairies sometimes spoke in riddles but this seemed to him nothing but nonsense. He was about to ask what it all meant when the crack in the earth closed.
‘Beheheh!’
Chols looked up – the ram’s eyes were gleaming and he was as hefty as an ox after only a few hours of grazing. He was so strong, Chols was able to ride him all the way back to Lewes.
The clock was striking three in the morning when the boy came to the River Ouse.
‘That’s it!’ he cried. ‘“The stream that runs ahead like melting butter on warm bread” is the River Ouse, or rather Oooooooze!’
He saw a rowing boat tethered to the bank. ‘“Float a cart upon the road” – the road must be the river and the cart must be a boat!’
He heard a quacking in the rushes. ‘Ducks! Their feet are the “flapping webs” the fairy was talking about! So, according to the fairy, I must float this boat on the River Ouse. But why do I need a frying pan?’
As they climbed School Hill, Chols saw broken buildings and people running with burning torches. Something really bad must have happened while he was over by Alfriston. He bumped into the Constable.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘The town is cursed,’ came the reply. ‘A bread giant rose from one of the Mayor’s ovens. First he ransacked the bakery, then, smelling the butter in Cockshut Dairy, broke in to feed.’
‘A giant bread man that loves butter!’ mused Chols. ‘Where is he now?’
‘We’ve searched high and low, out towards Kingston and Rodmell, Barcombe and Plumpton. No sign. Who knows where he is and what he’s up to! But as sure as butter’s butter, he’ll be back.’
‘What has the Mayor done about it?’
‘What Mayor? The greedy baker was last seen heading out on the Offham Road with a sackful of gold.’
The Constable made to leave, but Chols stopped him. ‘I have a plan. I need some butter and a frying pan!’
That night the townsfolk locked themselves in their houses. Only the mob of armed bakers stood in a quiet line forming a barrier at the bottom of the High Street. Looking up at Malling Hill, they saw the Doughman silhouetted against the moon. He bellowed, then started his galloping stomp down into Lewes. On the other side of the river, the bakers were waiting with their peels, spears and burning torches.
Seeing them, the Doughman bellowed once more and charged. But when he sniffed a whiff of hot melty butter drifting in from the Ouse, he clomped towards it, skidding on the cobbles that lead down to the riverbank. Chols was floating mid-stream in his ‘cart on the water’. He was frying a pan of butter over a small metal stove. Unable to get any closer, the giant clapped his hands, beat his chest and stamped his feet. Chols whistled to the ram. Head down, it butted the monster’s crusty ankles. The slipway was so slimy with riverweed and duck poop that the Doughman keeled right over onto his back with his legs poking into the river.
Have you ever thrown a piece of your sandwich into a pond for a duck? If you have, you know that two things happen: first, it goes soggy, and second, one duck rushes over, then another, and before you can say ‘Quack, quack, duck snack!’ there’s a barging crowd of them that seem to have appeared from nowhere
.
That’s what happened on the slipway that night. The giant’s feet went soggy and the ducks rushed in, more following more, until in no time at all they had nibbled and pecked the bread monster clean away. Not even a crumb remained.
When Chols and his ram were summoned before the Council of Lewes, the whole town cheered. The important merchants hailed him as the most public-spirited of all Lewesians and asked him to become Mayor.
The golden letters of the name ‘Leonard Lardycake’ were struck off the list of Mayors hanging in the Town Hall. Despite that, the old woman’s prediction came true. He was famous – for being the meanest Mayor the town has ever known.
Chols never saw the old woman again, but he always remembered her words and became the kindest Mayor in the history of the town. When he retired, he bought an inn at Firle and named it The Ram after his lucky mascot. It’s still there now.
Often people who hear this story ask what the Doughman did during that Midwinter’s day before returning to his doom. No one really knows, but I suspect he spent his time in Ringmer, just loafing.
* pharisees – in Sussex dialect this means fairies.
13
Seven Sisters and One True Shepherd
• The South Downs between
Seaford and Eastbourne •
When first you beheld me from sorrow I was free
But now you have stolen my poor heart from me.
From ‘Shepherd of the Downs’ sung
by George Copper, 1784
When the last ice caps dissolved in the south-east, they carved stone and chalk into seven sinuous cliffs curving against the sea between Cuckmere Haven and Birling Gap. These cliffs are called the Seven Sisters, after seven star sisters who used the cliffs as landing pads when they fell from the sky at night, which they did often, so that they could dance high up, looking out across the sea. Their whirling was known to be fast and dangerous. No one ever dared interrupt them as they span in their dizzy circles for hour after enchanted hour.
Until it happened that a kind shepherd who worked the sweeps and folds of the Downs was searching for a lamb in the darkness. One hand rested on his belt which had three buckles. He had made it for himself as a little bit of decoration because he had no mother or sister or wife to embroider his rough linen smock. The other hand rested on his shepherd’s crook. He was exhausted and was just about to give up, when he caught sight of the creature at the edge of the cliff called Rough Brow. Throwing his staff to one side, he raced towards it and lunged. Catching hold of its back legs, he grappled its soft middle and saved it from falling.
Panting, the shepherd looked up towards the distant brink of the next cliff, Haven Brow, and saw lights flickering like fireflies threaded on a silver string. Approaching, he saw the lights were woven into the hair of dancing women in dove-white dresses.
They were blowing single notes from bone whistles, each whistle a different pitch, each pitch made by a different woman, who never took the whistle from her mouth. As they span, the dancers beat their feet upon the stones and between whistling, made low grunts and calls with their throats.
The shepherd was drawn like sparks to flint. Six of the women were dancing around a girl with hair as black as the back of a bear and lips as red as rosehips. Although the other dancers flung themselves in wild circles, she swayed slowly from side to side, her cheek on her hand. She seemed tired.
The shepherd stood with his mouth open. The other dancers were too caught up to notice him, but the girl in the middle slowly lifted her head from her hand and smiled. She pointed at him, tapped her chest and nodded. Taking it as a sign that she wanted him to take her away, the shepherd ran forward and, just as he had with the lamb, grabbed hold of the girl by the waist. The six other dancers attacked him with nails and teeth that were like the claws and fangs of wolves, but he put his head down and with the girl under one arm and the lamb under the other, he didn’t stop running until he was back on his familiar carpet of downland.
Leaving the lamb with its playmates, he took the girl inside and sat her by the fire in the middle of his hut. He began to pour out hot stew and a stream of words: ‘If you want me to take you back I will, but if you want to stay, I’m yours …’
She silenced him with an upraised hand. For three days, she stared: either at the flames or at him. She saw that the shepherd had three stars – three good qualities. The first: he was true. The second: he was kind. The third: he was hard-working. She liked his stars and so, when the three days were up, she spoke.
‘I will stay with you. But should you mention my sisters and my dancing even once, I will return where I belong.’
The shepherd swore by every sheep he owned, by the land that he walked and by the crook that he carried, ‘I will never mention your sisters, or your dancing.’
She smiled. It was like the first green leaf of spring.
If time were a line of bunting we could abseil down it, and when flags became feathers and ribbons became bones, we’d see for ourselves that from that time to this there has not been a happier man than the shepherd. He was over the moon, he was inside out, not a shred of doubt, not an ounce of fear, he kept her as near as his breath for minutes that seemed hours, days that seemed weeks, weeks that seemed years. It was an eternal summer.
But when the leaves were turning, he woke and she wasn’t there. He missed her. The first hour he shrugged it off, the second he split wood, the third he took his shepherd’s crook and strode over the Downs, searching. The more he walked, the more frantic he became, breaking through branch and bracken, his staff striking the stone.
When he returned to his hut, jaw set, hair matted with sweat, boots wet with mud, she was there, by the fire.
He howled, ‘Where have you been?’
She stood up, arms wide, ‘I’m here now!’
‘I suppose you’ve been dancing with those sisters of yours!’
She backed away from him, dried petals flying from her pockets. He covered his face with his hands. After a few seconds, he took them away and whirled round and round in panic. She was gone, not a whiff of her scent, not a whirl of her skirt.
The shepherd picked up his staff and walked to and fro along the seven cliffs that are now known as the Seven Sisters. He walked from Haven Brow to Short Brow, from Rough Brow to Brass Point, from Brass Point to Flagstaff Brow, from Flagstaff Brow to Bailey’s Hill, from Bailey’s Hill to Went Hill. Eyes roving, he forgot his sheep, forgot to eat and forgot to drink. Days later, worn out with longing, he fell flat on his back and looked at the night sky. There she was! Unmistakable, shining directly above him, back where she belonged, one of seven stars we call the Pleiades, but once they were called ‘The Seven Doves’.
The shepherd sighed one long sigh, connecting earth with heaven.
A body is just a body and when he sighed, the Seventh Sister took him with her to the sky, where he still exists in a line of three stars who are always close to the Pleiades. Three stars for the three buckles on his belt. Three stars for the three things the Seventh Sister loved about him, his kindness, his hard-working nature and his honesty. We know those three stars as Orion’s Belt but once the constellation was called ‘The True Shepherd’.
14
Duddleswell Woman, the Hare-y Witch
• Duddleswell •
On the Ashdown Forest, among the tall straight trees and prickly gorse near Duddleswell, a wise woman lived by herself. She knew all the healing qualities of plants and was known to talk to animals. Because she gathered herbs into a long pointy hat to protect their roots, local gossip speculated that she might be a witch. The woman didn’t take any notice, she had so many other friends. Foxes with the mange, badgers with snared paws, and frozen hedgehogs who would crawl, limp and stagger to her door, to be released a few weeks later fit and well.
Living in Fairwarp at this time, there was a forester who had two things he loved best in the world: his young daughter and his hunting dogs. He made his living from wood: gathering it, c
utting it and burning it into charcoal.
One spring morning, he was out hunting when he saw a big old hare cleaning its ears in the spring sunshine. The forester released his hounds. The hare lifted his head and sprinted.
He bounded across streams, up banks, through gullies, but he couldn’t shake off the hounds. A hunting dog will gain an extra spurt when sensing it is about to catch its prey, and as the hare began to flag, the gap between him and the hounds narrowed. Rounding a corner, the hare saw the old woman’s hut. With new energy, he surged forward. Still he wasn’t fast enough; the leading hound’s teeth closed around his left hind leg. Kicking back at the beast’s nose with his right leg, the hare managed to free himself and pelt towards safety.
The door opened, the hare ran in and the door closed. The hounds began to bay and the forester banged and bellowed, ‘Give back the hare! We won’t get another; the hounds are spent!’
There was no answer.
That night the forester could not sleep. At dawn, he pulled on his boots and his hat and set off towards Duddleswell. Anger powered his legs and in no time he was pounding on the door.
It opened instantly. There was the woman. He saw she had fine grey hair and a thin red nose. She was wearing a rough cloak and had a basket on her arm. She looked at him, her eyes as soft as the back of a dormouse. ‘We don’t get many visitors here. Are you lost?’
‘I want to know where my hare is! The one you took away from my hounds yesterday.’
Sussex Folk Tales for Children Page 7
