Creative – The City of Lost Books

Jo Heaton, Red Button: A Story for Christmas (c. 1984). Illustrations.

In about 1984, at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, I had thoughts of trying my luck as an illustrator. Unfortunately I’d concentrated nearly all my efforts up to that point on black-and-white pictures, which meant I wouldn’t be much use for children’s books. This became obvious when my mother suggested I illustrate a book for children by one of her friends, the actor Jo Heaton. The book had a colour in its title, and featured characters who are often designated by their colours: red, blue, grey, brass, pearly-white and so on. All the same, I took on the project with enthusiasm, and worked on it for about a year while living with my brother in a one-bedroom apartment near St Pancras. I liked the story very much and was keen to try my luck on a large-scale project such as this one. In the end I produced thirty-six illustrations, and Jo and I went on to hawk the manuscript with its pictures around various publishing houses.

Needless to say, we were not successful. Apart from the basic absurdity of offering publishers a book about colour with black-and-white illustrations, I believe it was unorthodox to present the text with illustrations already attached, instead of leaving the publishers to select the most appropriate artist. I also think my pictures were a little stiff and stilted; a lighter touch would have improved them. The year after this, in 1985, I was asked to teach university classes on Renaissance and medieval romance, early modern prose and Shakespeare. I left St Pancras for Oxford, and the rest is (personal) history: I went on to become an academic, eventually working for thirty years at the University of Glasgow with little leisure to pursue my interest in drawing.

Jo’s book told the story of a young girl called Judy whose mother buys her a music box full of buttons at a charity shop run by a certain Mr Ball. The buttons, it turns out, have personalities, and the story tells how they get to know a new arrival after their journey to Judy’s house. Each button has an interesting back story, but the new button – who is large and red – prefers to remain mysterious about his origins; all they know is that he fell out of an empty sky onto Mr Ball’s head, and that he seems to have travelled further than anyone possibly could have done and to have been existence for about 2000 years. Of course it turns out that this button belongs to a large and rather care-worn person with a red suit and a large white beard, who has been looking for him from the moment he was missed. Red Button recovers his back story on Christmas Eve, and everything turns out exactly as it should in the end, for the girl, for the shopkeeper Mr Ball, and for all the other buttons we have got to know in the course of the narrative. The tale is full of inventive dialogue, and the various buttons and their adventures gave me the chance to picture a rich range of situations, as many as one might find in a book of short stories.

My pictures drew on the work of some of my favourite illustrators. Most prominent among them was Maurice Sendak, who I met around this time at a book signing and who told me with reference to publishers (after I told him I was trying to make it as an illustrator): ‘don’t forget, they need us more than we need them’. That’s advice with a wide application, and I haven’t forgotten it. Sendak drew wonderful Christmas pictures, especially his haunting designs for the Nutcracker ballet, which were incorporated into a picture book – the very one I asked him to sign. Another huge influence was Pauline Baynes, especially those wonderful pictures in the Narnia books and the Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes where she weaves together several images into a kind of cartoon strip, surrounded by a border constructed out of appropriate objects – plants, perhaps, or chains, or river currents. Some of the crosshatching techniques recall another of my heroes, Tove Jansson, especially her comics, which my Dad read to us as children, translating from Swedish as he went along. Now I think of it, Jansson too did fascinating things with the frames of her comics, and I may have been more influenced by her than by Baynes in this respect.Other artists I loved included Gerard Hoffnung, especially his illustrations for Colette’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges (the animated furniture in that book is everywhere in my drawings) and early Disney movies, especially Pinocchio and the musical automata in Geppetto’s workshop. Mimicking these artists was an education in itself for an aspiring book designer.

Jansson plays with frames in her Moomin comics

Here, then, as a Christmas offering, are some of the pictures I made for Jo Heaton’s story. I offer them in memory of her, and in want of anything more suitable to put up on this blog for Christmas.

[Nb: click on each picture for a closer view.]

‘You could walk into Mr Ball’s shop and find him busy with his feather duster’

‘The first thing Mr Ball did […] was take a giant red button out of his coat pocket and stare at it.’

‘There was a musical box displayed in the shop window.’

‘Pearl looks like the moon reflecting the sun!’

‘”As a matter of fact,” said Mr Ball, “That’s very suitable as a Christmas present. Let me show you why.”‘

‘”We’ve been s… sold,” said Flower, and burst into tears.’

‘It was a terrible journey for the buttons.’

‘One by one Judy inspected the buttons.’

‘It was then that Grey decided to escape.’

‘The buttons gazed round the large room.’

‘At the very top of the tree Star dangled from the neck of an angel.’

‘Have you ever felt as happy as you do tonight?’

‘”I remember a night long ago when my oyster opened his shell.”‘

‘A large man […] groped his way out of the fireplace.’

‘He looked just like a tiny, glittering moon.’

‘”Nobody would buy a Christmas card of you looking like that!”‘

‘He went straight to the drinks cabinet and took several gulps straight from the brandy bottle.’

‘Pearl imagined Red speeding away over the rooftops.’

‘They all saw the clothes they were going to be sewn onto dancing in their dreams.’

‘Mr Ball had a Christmas present to give to every homeless person in the town.’

Elizabeth Maslen: Poems on Death

[My mother, who died in September, was interested in death for much of her life. She wrote a number of poems on the subject in the 1970s, some of which were published by Chatto and Windus in a book called Treble Poets 1 (1974). This was intended to be the first in a series, each volume of which would showcase the work of three new or newish poets; the other two here are Stephen Miller and Kit Wright. The editor and sponsor of the projected series was the poet Dennis Enright, who worked with Chatto’s at the time (my mother got to know him at the University of Singapore).

Elizabeth Maslen was the only woman in this inaugural volume, and many of her poems are about women’s experiences, some hers, some those of eccentric friends and relations. In my mother’s lifetime women were, I think, far more closely associated with death than men, being largely responsible for the work and rituals relating to the passage into the next world, just as they were for the work and rituals relating to birth. One of my mother’s poems paints a picture of my Auntie Grace, who was a midwife but loved to pretend she could see ghosts or that she herself was dying or dead. Another takes its origins from memories of her father’s funeral in the early 60s; this was my favourite as a child, and I remembered it as I attended her own funeral. A third focuses on Yorick, the dead clown from Hamlet, about whom she later wrote a fine essay (‘Yorick’s Place in Hamlet,’ Essays and Studies 36 (1983), pp. 1–13). All have a rich vein of fantasy running through them, which gives me the excuse I need to put them here.

I love the theatrical vein that runs through all these meditations, too, the frequent laughter in the face of pain, and the sense of human life as alternating light and shadow, each complementing the other. The latter theme led me to include here one poem which is not about death – though it is about the death-bird, the owl – because I remember exactly the tawny owl in question. We often saw it from our kitchen window being mobbed by smaller birds in the daylight as it waited for the welcome return of darkness. The owl in the poem is also a man, who is drawn to darkness rather than sunlight by his disposition; and darkness has rarely seemed so welcoming, for me, as it is in the final stanza.

The picture I’ve put at the head of the post is one I drew for my mother after her death, featuring Saint Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, which could be interpreted as a fable about making friends with death.]

***

A Visit to Grannie

I love to sit and chat to her
– Her old wise head
Nodding and clicking
Bone on bone…

Swinging my bag at
Each leap of the
Churchyard stones,
Banging the door
Of the family tomb
– I’ve jerked her awake again
But she never complains –
Kissing her dear dead yawn.

I open my bag and pour out
What I’ve brought her
– The latest neurosis,
An ultramodern grievance –
And the light peeks through
Those honest eyes,
Through her kindly smiling jaw.

When I come away
I always feel better:
Grannie, you’re so much wiser
Than we are.

In a Folk Museum

Here is the skull
Of an old wise women
With holes for the eyes
Lips brain and nose –

They called it her cauldron.
Just a joke: because
She dosed everyone
With the lore she brewed there
– Sometimes she forced it
On surly folk – but they all lived
To thank her.

And when this soldier
– The photo over there –
Broke in to rob her
All she said was
‘I keep my valuables
In my head’ – you’ll notice
Where the bone has been shattered.

Of course he found nothing
Inside the hole – they caught him
Still scrabbling for loot,
Cursing and shouting that he’d been tricked
– They say you could have sworn
That the dead lips twitched:
She was always one for smiling.

But the children began weeping
Outside in the sun; and asked
Who in the world would help them,
Now she was gone.

Yorick

The clown of many faces
Stands at my elbow
And interprets laughing
Life’s moon phases.

Pain is parody, he sings,
As wings sprout and he hops
To chirp to the morning’s birth;
Heartbeats stop

And stand: but he’s still there
Grimacing at the grotesque
Farce of laboured air, shambles to where
The bones gamble, themselves
At stake, mocks at the losers.

No one collects, they toss the coin
To Yorick, still grinning lipless
Lidless, though the jest is not
As he chooses.

The clown of many phases
Disintegrates in laughter;
Only the grin lies unchanged
For some time after.

When Father Died

When father died the neighbours stood upon their heads
And sang strange songs they never sang before;
They greeted his corpse in fancy dress
And changed their faces as they came through the door.

It was exorcism in hallowe’en guise:
Change face, sing strange, death will unknow me –
Death must be mad to send year-patterns skidding –
A burlesque will comfort the family.

A business friend came as a necrophile,
He and the corpse grinned gaping affection.
Every death’s day he visits one, he says,
To gather grimaces for his collection.

A veteran lawnmower went gay about the box:
He didn’t know anything was wrong until
He saw a coffin knock at our front door,
Heard the curtain’s last rattle on the window sill.

Sisters and brothers tumbled in and out
Singing how much money, weren’t you with him at the end?
Singing poor dear Lizzie, remember all the rows,
The stabs at his serenity? – we tease you as old friends.

We were rather confused, we were playing it straight,
(The lilies gave the death-smell blow for blow)
This fantasy lifted the minds from our heads,
The corpse played grotesque – on with the show!

‘Stand in a circle, chant, chant, chant,
Catch a clod of earth and pop it on a plate,
Keep well covered and serve thoroughly chilled –
The result is excellent bait.’

When it was all over, we resumed our faces,
Stood decorously up, observed the rules.
Living is serious, solemn as a suburb,
Death belongs to fools.

Night Bird

They whisper to him,
Night and silence –
Glass in hand, smoke-hazed,
He hears lips half-imagined
Speaking more clearly
Than all those puppet mouths
Of sunlit prisms.

Twilight creature,
Dazed by the creaking mob
Of four-square starlings
Dragging their shadows
Carelessly over the ground,
Dusting them shamelessly,
Eyes on the lurid wax of a
Moulded sun.

But as it melts,
Smudging the evening trees,
Shadows
So much more eloquent
Tiptoe to meet him laughing,
Softly greet him –
These are his friends.

So stoically he sits out
The light, enduring it till it
Ends, till darkness blends
Into the fluid rhythms
Of the night.

Old Aunt

She is very old now.
She has died many times
Since I was a child.
I recall
Countless occasions
When she has played her big scene,
Ably stage-managed
By herself, the protagonist.
I have seen her yellow
Life-drained eyes rolling in hollows,
Carried up to die
On my grandmother’s old brass bed –
It has to be a bed of character for such a scene.
I have heard my mother,
Mellow-voiced, trying to reach her
With a favourite song –
She has always been deaf –
My other aunt downstairs
Thrashing the piano to greater efforts
To support the distant singing.
I have seen my grandmother,
Anxious, exasperated,
Not sure which reaction
Is justified.
(We, the audience, slightly ridiculous:
Is it farce or tragedy?
The conclusion holds the clue.)
So far she has always recovered,
Come down laughing shrilly,
Head wagging, jokes endlessly repeated
On a semi-sane theme,
Reassuring us as we realise
It has been a comedy again.
We find it hard
To define the play beforehand,
As she never shows us the script.
Maybe she doesn’t know either:
She always says, when old age is over,
She will be all right.
Which is either very profound,
Or not profound at all.

It will be very strange, shocking almost,
When our long-customed comedian
Tries a different role.
But perhaps
They will let her play it extempore,
Not worry her with painful conning
Of her part. I hope so:
She has so long parodied the life-death theme,
Has comforted us by being ridiculous,
That we should prefer her last performance
To be in character.

The History of the Little Toy Soldier (1971)

[I wrote this story in 1971, when I was eight years old. At the time I was at boarding school in Sussex, so the situation of the toy soldier – who falls out of a window and finds himself alone and far from home – echoes mine. My arrival at the school at the age of seven, from suburban south London, came as a revelation; first because it marked the moment in my life when I was suddenly cut off from my family (apart from my older brother, separated from me by the abyss of one year’s difference in age), and second because the school was in the English countryside, a place I’d never really seen before. Here everything was strange and fascinating, from the beetles in the grass and the skimmers on the surface of the ponds to what I called the ‘barb wire fences’, which enclosed herds of giant parti-coloured animals, wet-nosed and gentle-eyed. I liked to hang from a barb wire fence and bend a living tree branch towards a cow to let it browse on the leaves, proud of my courage in coming so close to such powerful entities. The school grounds seemed vast, a continent containing wonders, such as the derelict swimming pool that had now turned into a marsh as big as an ocean, hidden among twisting rhododendrons and towering pines and bordered by overgrown footpaths at the edges of which lurked pheasants ready to spring out suddenly from under your feet with a bugling shriek that would stop your heart. Like the soldier I wandered through this landscape in search of adventures, friends, and creepy crawlies, and found them all in ample measure, along with the aching homesickness that came to me every night as it came to him.

I had played with toy soldiers at home, of course, but they were made of plastic, not wood. The soldier’s woodenness is lifted from my favourite story at the time, Ursula Moray Williams’s The Little Wooden Horse, which is also echoed in the episode where the soldier swims across the ocean. The opening comes straight from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Steadfast Tin Soldier, though I was determined to give my hero a happy ending – that was my reason for writing it, I think. The Wind in the Willows and The Tale of Mrs Tiggy Winkle can be found here too, as can the verse of Edward Lear, who was responsible for my tendency to use ‘quoth’ in most of my poems. I don’t know where I got the idea for calling the whole thing a ‘history’, but I remember it felt very grown up at the time.

As I wrote, I knew I was writing a story for children, being convinced that a child could do this best; this is why I used the diminutive so often (I thought of the reader as younger than me) and included careful instructions on how to safely cross the road. The Little Toy Soldier was by no means the first story I wrote; I had scrawled others in similar school exercise books, and liked to provide a list of my ‘works’ on the back cover, as well as dividing them up into chapters with proper headings and pagination so I could put a list of contents at the beginning. Signing my name R. W. Maslen was probably inspired by the names C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, my other heroes besides Moray Williams. Books mattered to me more than anything else, except perhaps the toys I used to act out my own fantasies, and I lived in hope of finding a book with the glorious title of The Bodley Head, unaware that this was the name of the company that published two of the Narnia books in hardback. The ultimate Lost Book, I guess.

A few things are worth mentioning before you start reading. I didn’t know the words for certain things, so substituted the nearest equivalent I was aware of: so the soldier’s epaulettes became a row of medals on each shoulder, his plume became a ‘feather’, and for lack of the word ‘tarmac’ I had to say the road he fell asleep on was ‘cobbled’. I also remember being dissatisfied by the claim that a toy could have stopped a truck by rolling under its wheels; but the plot required some sort of heroic act, and this was the one I came up with. It’s funny how the things you remember most clearly, even at this distance of time, are the things you’re not satisfied with.

Here, then, is a window into the world of a small boy in the early seventies. I’ve been drawing pictures for it as a way of practising the craft of illustration. I hope to add more in coming weeks, and will let you know on social media when a new one comes along!]

THE HISTORY OF – THE LITTLE TOY SOLDIER

by R. W. Maslen

IN THE BEGINNING. 1

A little boy was playing with his toy soldiers one day. they were all lined up along the window-sill. The leader was the best of them all, for he had Medals lined along his shoulders, a beautifull black busby and a little feather in the middle. He had a beautiful Red coat as well.

as the boy played it got rather stuffy so he opened the window. he went on playing when by mistake his elbow knocked the cheif over. He rolled over and over till eventually a ghastly thing happened! he rolled right out of the window! Poor little soldier fell what he thought was miles, and very soon he landed with a soft thud on the grass wich lay proped up against the window.

He sat there dazed in a sort of dream for a while till he had recovered slightly from his shock. “oh dear,” he thought. “how on earth shall I get all that way up to my master? oh, well. I had better look on it as luck, for how could I learn anything up there about the world about?” so saying he got to his feet and started walking into a world unknown for human being’s.

***

He walked till his little wooden legs could carry him no longer and then he sat and thought for a longer time than he had known anyone could think for, about the world outside.

THE LITTLE SOLDIERS FREINDS.

“I must have thought myself to sleep,” said the little soldier, shaking his little head and looking round. “Now I must find some freinds for it would not do to have every one your enemy – oh no!” so he got up from the stone he had been sitting on and looked round.

Soon he caught sight of a hedgehog busily polishing a nutshell. “Pretty shell,” remarked our soldier timidley for he had never seen a hedgehog before. “yes isnt it. its to keep the milk in for my babys!” said the dame, looking pleased as all mothers do when somone has remarked something of theirs is pretty. “excuse me,” said our soldier: “but will you be my friend?” the hedgehog looked surprised.

“why certainly,” she replied. “why should I want to be your enemy, after all?” So they both made a solemn vow that they should stay freinds for ever. They’re parting was rather unhappy, for the little soldier had been telling of his army and been growing prouder and prouder when suddenly he had found himself saying “well I’ll have to be going now.” and saying goodbye and there he was, walking away thinking about anything else but his freind.

he was thinking so deeply that he did not hear the rattle and clatter of a stream in front of him. by the time he looked up it was to late. he tumbled head first into the middle of the stream. He bobbed up and down for a bit, spluttering and Gulping as he went, until he hit something hard. he looked up and saw it was a little bit of driftwood going up-stream with the current. the little wooden soldier climbed up on to it and sank down into a deep sleep on top of it.

THE LITTLE TOY SWIMS THE OCEAN

When the little soldier woke up he did not know where he was. The sun was shining on his face and there was water all around him. “Now I shall die,” he thought. “After all what could one do, out here, stranded on this bit of wood?” so saying he looked around himself again.

Suddenly he saw far away, the faint glimpse of land. As soon as he sighted it he plunged into the water, little knowing that it was only one of natures cruel Mirages. He swam and swam in that direction. as he did the land came nearer, only to disapear as soon as he thought he was on it’s beaches. “Oh, no, now I really will die!” cried poor little soldier. “Out here, all alone, in the middle of the long stretching Ocean!” But he would not give up yet – not he! He braced himself and started swimming with all his might. He swam, it seemed to him, for hours on end, nonstop. He was so faged out, and yet his little wooden legs still went on going. Strange hazes lifted and fell over the sea. He could no longer feel his legs and arms and yet they went on going. He did not even notice that his paint was slowly losing coulor. He only could see hazy blue, red, green, purple, yellow all the colours of the rainbow in mixed mists, as the sun sank low over the horizon. His eyelids suddenly shut and he fell asleep.

***

A little old woman was sitting on a deck-chair, in the sun. she was on the beach, looking out to sea. Suddenly she saw a little peice of wood on the beach. “That looks as if its Got signs of paint on it!” She said to herself. “I’ll go over and have a look at it.” So she got up off her deckchair and hobbled over to the fragmant. “Ah,” She thought. “It is a toy Soldier! My son would be pleased with this!” So she picked it up and took him to her house. The woman soon came to a neat little cottage with windows deeply set into its walls.

THE WOMANS SON

As they came into the cottages back yard a dog barked. “Shut up!” Said the old woman shoving a bowl of dog-food under its mouth. toy soldier shivered. It was not the first time he had met a dog and he knew that they play with toy soldiers rather roughly! At first sight of the inside of the hut our hero knew that the boy must be very riatous if you see what I mean. The hall had lots of broken toys lying strewn about it. Soldier shuddered to think that he might become one too, one day.

he shuddered even more to think he would belong to the boy who came galloping down the stairs at the end of the hall!

So, to cheer himself up about it he made up a poem. It went like this: –

***

THE LITTLE SOLDIERS SONG

“How?” quoth the little soldier,
“do I come to be;
in this masters boyhoods
noisy liberty?”

“why?” quoth the little soldier,
“do I have to make do?
Oh! I suppose I really have to
as these toys did too.

“Besides,” quoth the little soldier,
“I’m a soldier to,
and little toy soldiers
simply have to make do!”

***

The little toy soldier by this time was being carried up to a little nursery at the very far end of the cottage. It wasn’t at all a pleasant sight! There was a little stained glass window at the far end of the room looking out onto a pretty little garden with pretty white, red and pink and yellew flowers growing in neatly cut earth beds. at the far end of the garden was a little shed with its doors slightly open. Through them you could see a battered looking tricycle, a few tins and a few rakes and shovels in the far corner. This made the little soldier very homesick – not exactly for his freind the master, but for his home-land. “And now,” Sobbed the toy soldier. “I will never get back! ever!” Suddenly he made up his mind. “I’m going to run away tonight!” he thought to himself. and in the next chapter you will see how he did.

THE ESCAPE

At last after a few ours the little boy was put to bed. The bad thing was that the boy slept in the nursery! Well, about midnight the little toy got up and crept to the door. Imediatly all the broken toys let up a shout. “THE SOLDIERS ESCAPING!” They screamed as if their lives depended on it. At this the little toy soldier was extremly frightened And made a dash for the door. The boy had rose sleepily from his bed but as soon as he saw our soldier he was on his feet. But as he was so tired he could not run as fast as he meant to. He stumbled after the soldier who by now had reached the stairs at the end of the hall. He bounded down them and flew down the great room. Soon he reached the door but the boy was still hot on his trail! The toy threw open the door and ran up, but the gate out into the world lay locked against him. Yet he had’nt a moment to lose! he reached them but he had not the time to climb over them! He scrambled under the spikes of it quicker than the fastest racehorse. And now he had the Whole countryside before him. he started making his way through the tall meadow grass as quickly as possible but he need not have been so quick for the ugly boy behind him made no attempt to unlock the closed gate but went back sulkily into the house.

LITTLE SOLDIER SAVES A LIFE.

The little wooden soldier sought rest long but he had to get to his home before evening or he would be completely lost. Although after escaping from the old womans cottage he was very tired, he still groped his way through the grass. It was daytime now, as you have picked up from the last few sentences and the birds were twittering joyfuly in the green birch wood wich rose up in front of the little toy soldier. But he had no thought for all this now – he only thought of sleep.

Soon he came to a long cobbled road and in the middle of it he sank into a deep sleep.

***

As he slept a little girl came skipping down the narrow pavemant wich stretched the length of the road. She looked up and saw the little soldier. She folded up her skipping-rope and stared in amazement. “How could a toy soldier have got there?” She thought to herself. “I had better pick it up or it would get spoiled!” Not looking left or right or right again she walked over the road to where the soldier was lying, and, while she was doing so, a lorry came roaring up the road! Little soldier leapt to his feet and rolled under the lorries rolling wheels. So doing, he stoped the lorrie long eneough as to let the girl run back to safety. But in doing so his little bodie broke in two and the lorry drove on! so the little girl went over to him (this time being more careful) and mended him. As soon as he found he was mended the soldier leapt to his feet and ran of leaving the startled girl behind him.

DANGER! 7/

He ran and ran and ran until he had at last flopped down to the ground to rest. As he lay there he now had a chance to look around. “Gosh!” he thought to himself. “what huge creatures!” (The huge creatures as he called them were really cows.). He got up. all around him was grass And the fence wich he had got under was realy part of a long barb-wire enclosure that ran all the way round the feild he was in. As for the feild itself it was like a world of lazziness excepting the little calfs wich romped about a few yards away. The older cows strolled about chomping grass wich they had pulled up slowly by the roots. Their tails were swishing up and down and now and then a bull snorted. But there was one bull wich thought of more than snorting! He thought of a charge at the little toy soldier! “Oh dear!” thought soldier. “I wonder how fast those creatures kill you? I hope they kill you quickly!” But he had already thought of one thing – and that thing was run! He got up, although his little wooden muscles ached and braced himself for the escape. The bull was already charging, in a few seconds the whole herd of cows would be after him! At last the soldier started to run. As he was young and not as clumsy as the bulls he ran much more faster than them. In fact he ran a bit to fast! He could not stop! He ran on and on, under the fence, up the hill, round and round again on the top and at last he flopped to the ground and forgeting that the fence was made of barb wire and the bulls could not get under it he thought he would be killed. But before long he was fast asleep in his own dreamworld again.

LITTLE SOLDIER GOES HOME. 8/

A beautiful doe with her fawn came upon a little sleeping figure lying in the bracken a few miles away from a feild with a few bulls snorting with anger and their wives. The little dappled fawn sniffed inquisitively at what turned out to be a toy soldier. Its mother nuzzled it gently so that it had to move away. Suddenly the little thing moved and both the deer bounded away through the bracken in a flash. Just then a little hedgehog came scampering along and stared surprisedly at the little toy soldier who now was sitting up with his back against a tree. Suddenly they both recognized each other – the two freinds who had met so long ago! There was great rejoicing between the two of them as soon as they knew they were the friends and little toy soldier was forced to tell his story again and again. very soon the couple of them went trotting through the undergrowth – a very happy pair!

***

By night at last they came to the little broock where so many adventures had first met the little toy. they had a little feast of gooseberry wine in the hedgehogs house and the little soldier met a few of her friends – the mole, the water-rat and the tortoise. The water-rat rowed them safely over to the other side in his little boat and they stayed the rest of their lives in his house – and they may still be there now!

THE END

The Sinking City

[This story first appeared in the anthology Stories from Home, edited by Hayleigh Barclay and Sylvia Hehir (Garmoran Publishing, 2020). All proceeds from the anthology go to The Ambulance Staff Charity in recognition of their frontline work in the Covid-19 epidemic in the UK. Please consider buying our book if you can afford it!]

I can see you’ve heard of Atlantis by the way your head sinks between your shoulder-blades as you gaze fearfully skywards, hurrying about your daily business. Atlantis, the city of the perfect prisms, the cubes, the pyramids, the pinnacles and the lamplight, Atlantis whose streets were paved with gold, I know because I swept them. You imagine Atlantis obliterated by some sudden catastrophe, a tidal wave, an atom bomb, but it wasn’t like that at all. Little by little the city subsided, unnoticed by any but we and the fishes.

I think I noticed the course things took because I swept that course, so the citizens could take it without impediment. I took a pride in my work, to ensure that the cobblestones gleamed perfectly hemispherical in the rays of the rising sun. Several hours before dawn (a dawn scraped clean by giant wind-machines affixed to the tips of pinnacles, whence the term ‘skyscraper’) I rose from my doorstep and strapped a pair of shovel-shoes about my calves. Then I trundled the litter-sucker from its shed and proceeded to polish, scrub and scour until by sun-up the street would have blinded any downlooker with cleanliness. But the citizens never looked down. The citizens’ heads were sunk between their shoulder-blades as they gazed fearfully skywards, hurrying about their daily business. They feared some sudden catastrophe, a tidal wave, an atom bomb; the convergence of parallel lines caused by perspective was another of their nameless dreads. That was why the streets were short, and Atlantis was a city without vistas.

But the truth is that Atlantis was less pure and abstract than the citizens thought. There were accumulations of rapidly-growing weeds at street corners, and so much mud that I would have perished of exhaustion had I swept more than two or three streets nightly.

Then there were the People of the Road and the Hyperactive Children who slept in dustbins and under bridges. These watched the sinking of the city from the broken upper-floor windows of derelict buildings, as they had watched the hurrying citizens every day of their lives. We were creatures of another element, dirt-encrusted, shock-headed, with strident laughs that grazed the civil ear. The citizens were silver-skinned inhabitants of ethereal zones beyond our ken. We envied the tintinnabulation of their voices.

When the city began to sink I found it increasingly difficult to have the streets presentable by sunrise. I started work earlier and earlier till soon I was quite nocturnal in my habits, apart from those golden moments when the first golden rays of the sun’s benediction poured over the golden city. Each night more mud and then water clogged my litter-sucker. Rivulets in the gutters reflected the lamplight at odd angles. And the smell! I had never smelt anything so sickly, like a distillation from the decomposing flesh of a million corpses. I obtained a suction-pump from the Corporation and diverted gallons of evil-smelling liquid into the sewers, but the sewers only spewed it out again through grills and gratings. The Hyperactive Children splashed hither and thither with buckets, but there was nowhere to throw the water except in each other’s faces. The Corporation promised to send a plumber, the week after next.

My efforts at sanitation grew more and more desultory, until one morning I woke with a shock on my doorstep with a wavelet slapping my cheek. I was terrified that the Corporation would blame me for the spreading wetness and dismiss me from my post forthwith. But the citizens’ heads remained wedged between their shoulder-blades as they waded about their business gazing at the sky. They feared some sudden catastrophe, a deviation from the planet’s path, a comet; water did not enter their calculations.

That morning I moved my sleeping-quarters to the upper floor of a derelict building, whence I watched as carnivorous sea-creatures took to battening on the citizens. Not a day went by without some submarine marvel. When the water was a few centimetres deep a swarm of many-coloured eels came twisting and twining over the cobblestones in amorous play. Majestic hermit-crabs took up residence in boots and baskets. A crocodile set up house in an empty kennel, from which it sallied forth to dine on citizens’ legs. With commendable determination the citizens ignored these assaults; newspapers reported record sales of crutches.

When the flood was waist-deep I attempted to warn the citizens of their plight. That I stood on a soap-box to do so was not to give greater dignity to my utterances but to avoid the jaws of crocodiles. Small wonder if the passers-by ignored my supplications, for the appearance I presented was not prepossessing. I wear my hair at shoulder length entwined with bottle-tops and empty sardine tins, my eyes are vast and vermilion-veined, my shovel-shoes disgusting. The only tears my orations drew were my own.

Meanwhile the inundation augmented. Each afternoon I watched an old woman rise from her weed-matted bed and don a crayfish instead of her hat. One lunchtime I observed a group of three businessmen in conversation at the centre of a public square. An immense purple-spotted octopus approached them, extending its tentacles. One of the businessmen ran away screaming (I later learned he had narrowly evaded a conger eel in his kitchen sink the night before); his companions attributed his discomposure to marital problems. Their last muffled words as they were drawn towards the octopus’s beak made reference to the severity of the divorce laws.

Buses broke down, the failure of whose engines was attributed to anything but diesel-dilution. A rumour spread that some foreign plot was at work, which accounted for the missing persons and failed machinery. The police made extensive inquiries.

My new apartment became crowded, first by Hyperactive Children, then by People of the Road (who paddled dustbins and umbrellas to the broken bathroom window), and finally by the businessman with marital problems. Meanwhile I grew to love the salt sea-stench, and experienced as the waters rose a corresponding elevation of the spirits. Perhaps this was caused by the rainbow-striped whelks which encrusted the city’s prisms and pinnacles, perhaps by the angel-fish that spread wispy tails to cast shadows across the golden cobblestones. Perhaps it was due to the moonshine that licked the ripples on the surface of the flood now the lamps were quenched. In the past we were forbidden moonshine, for the motions of the moon are asymmetrical. Now she revealed new lights and shades in buildings previously familiar in all their permutations. The pinnacles lay propped against the velvet night like cardboard cutouts which would fall flat at a gentle touch. Albatrosses hung in the dying breath of the wind-machines.

Soon Atlantis was almost empty of citizens. Even we, the earthy ones in our derelict blocks and forgotten attics, felt our superfluity. For some nights we had been aware that the metropolis was shifting in its sleep, twitching and flexing its muscles at the point of waking. Soon, we felt, our paths must diverge from that of the city.

The Hyperactive Children spent their days diving from rooftops, balconies and flagpoles while the People of the Road kept watch for sharks. I too accustomed myself to a maritime existence, often diving to depths unrivalled by the Persian pearl-fisher. I had resumed my old occupation of cleansing the streets, this time from the debris of half-eaten accountants, undigested politicians and bone-dry lawyers. I discovered that a few of the dead businessmen still rose at seven each morning, trod their parallel lines to the office and worked till five in the afternoon. I suspect they had been dead for several years before the deluge. Tormented by the possibility that they might walk thus for ever, I ended their careers by breaking their alarm clocks.

The morning of our last day in Atlantis dawned clear and cloudless, despite the failure of the wind-machines. I mentioned earlier that the buildings looked almost two-dimensional at night; this morning they were flatter than ever, and in some districts had lain themselves down in overlapping rows, forming patterns underwater like a golden carpet.

At midday a school of porpoises entered the city, each with a brilliant sapphire nose, and gambolled in the shadow of our habitation. Occasionally they rose on their tails upright from the water and watched us with a gaze quite different from the skyward gaze of the citizens. We survivors looked at each other, then with one accord plunged into the rocking billows, arms outstretched to grasp the proffered fins. When every Atlantean had straddled a porpoise, with a flick of their tails the school shot out of the city and into the open ocean. I turned for a last look at Atlantis.

Just as I had been the first to notice the encroachment of the sea, so was I the last to glimpse the golden city, as the two or three buildings not yet horizontal subsided beneath the waves to assume their places in the pattern. What happened next has haunted me ever since. Perhaps it was an illusion, perhaps a spout of water caught the sunlight as the city settled on the ocean bed, perhaps a fleck of spray blurred my vision, but I could swear that where the last buildings had collapsed a sudden turbulence broke out as if some leviathan had stirred in the crystal depths. Then, vast and majestic in the afternoon blaze, a giant goldfish shattered the surface as it launched itself in a hundred-metre leap, scales burning as it rotated, metallic eyeballs flashing at the sun.

Since that day, the golden years have composed themselves like scales or well-laid cobblestones over my memories of the sinking city. I have passed my time with the Hyperactive Children exploring the nutmeg-scented islands of the Archipelago, still mounted on the blue-nosed sea-pigs. On the whole I shun the larger conurbations; for sometimes the sight of a bustling town will spark to new life some recollection of Atlantis, and loose my tongue in prophetic utterances whose meanings I myself can hardly guess. Too often on these occasions it becomes clear that my listeners and I tread parallel lines that can never meet. Then the tears in my beard are bitterer than seaweed, and only the crooning of the porpoises can soften their sting.

Birdcage

[I wrote this story in the mid-1990s, for a workshop run by the late, great Aonghas MacNeacail when he was Writer in Residence at the University of Glasgow. It shows its age in the colour of the buses; in Glasgow now they are no longer orange. In the alternative Glasgow of this story, of course, they may still be.]

The central station of this northern city is built to resemble a harbour. The trains dock at the platforms like huge sea-monsters, gleaming fishes and breaching whales, electric eels and diesel-driven walruses which balefully study the land with great glass eyes. The concourse is awash with passengers who eddy here and there in brightly-coloured schools drawn back and forth by the immeasurable tides. On either side of the concourse ticket offices, supermarket outlets and coffee shops are housed in wooden buildings whose elegantly curved facades mimic the flanks of nineteenth-century merchant vessels riding at anchor. In the old days the shed was filled with the fog of steam, but now the air in the station seems crystal clear, like the air of the city it serves, and the stationary ships at the station are the only ships you’ll see apart from the hulks on the river which have been turned into casinos, restaurants and wedding venues.

The young man who sat on a suitcase in the middle of the concourse sighed and screwed up the paper he had been writing on. ‘Too fussy,’ he muttered. ‘There must be a way of catching a city in words that doesn’t involved turning it into the scenario for a second rate musical.’ He pocketed his notebook, picked up his suitcase and wandered out into the rain. This is why he failed to see the Flying Pict pull in at Platform One and a man get out carrying the future of the city in a violin case made of scratched black leather.

The tall thin man stood still for a moment on the platform. He was so tall and thin that the passers-by, who were mostly short, darted furtive glances at him as they hurried towards the concourse. His head was remarkable: flattened on top with a crest of black hair which spread out behind in a spiky ruff. He peered about with quick jerky movements as if he were spearing the air with his pointed nose. When he began to stalk after the other passengers dust rose from his shabby black coat and with every step his trouser-cuffs lifted to expose a length of yellow sock. The roof of the shed seemed to fascinate him. This was noticeable because to look at it he had to tilt his head sideways, as if his eyes weren’t mobile enough in their sockets to look upwards without assistance from his crane-like neck. His inspection of the roof had an odd effect on the passers-by. An urge to look up likewise possessed the people closest to the stranger, spreading outwards from them to their more distant neighbours like ripples on water. Some resisted the urge by setting their jaws and hurrying on, determined not to be tricked into showing interest. Others gave way to the impulse and raised their eyes. Each of these saw something different: a cage of girders, a metal cobweb, a harbourful of tilted glass sails. The ones who looked up collided with the ones who didn’t, muttered apologies and hurried on, looking foolish. One young woman bumped into the stranger himself. For an instant her gaze was filled with bright black eyes, a pointed nose, a crest of spiky hair. In that instant she noticed that his skin was raw and yellow as if it had been freshly plucked. The stranger said in a harsh voice, ‘I peck your pardon,’ but the woman only squawked and ran. She never travelled by train, had only taken the short cut through the station to escape the rain, and swore to herself she wouldn’t take it again if she could help it. You never knew what queer birds you might meet on the concourse.

Towards the station entrance stands a defused brass shell of the kind fired from naval guns in the Second World War. The rows of names on a brass plaque behind it betrays its function as a war memorial, but it also functions as a useful meeting place, an island amid the eddying crowds, and two men stood by it now with the bored but watchful expressions of professional loiterers. They both wore mackintoshes and unlit cigarettes hung from their long lean jaws. When they noticed the disturbance caused by the stranger they swung their heads in his direction and drawled to each other out of the corners of their mouths.

‘Would you look at that, Jeek. Walking this way, bold as brass. Must be – what, seven, eight feet tall?’

The younger man surreptitiously lifted his sleeve to look at a note he had written in biro on his forearm. ‘Black hair, yellow skin, dressed in black, carrying a bag. Fits the description, Bill.’

‘Jeek,’ said the older man, who was balding and wore his hair cropped short so the baldness wouldn’t show. ‘Jeek, you’re thinking again. Leave the thinking to me. Of course he fits the description. That’s because he’s the fella we’re here to meet.’

Jeek turned up the collar on his mackintosh to show that thinking was the very last thing on his mind. ‘What do we do, then, Bill? Do we grab him now?’

‘Jeek,’ said the older man with weary patience, ‘when I want your suggestions I’ll ask for them. Look around you, Jeek. What do you see?’

Jeek took the cigarette from his mouth and stared around him, trying to look haughty but succeeding only in looking haunted. ‘Eh – nothing, Bill. Nothing much, that is.’

‘People, Jeek,’ said the older man. ‘The place is full of people. We cannae grab him here, can we?’

‘Do we – do we follow him then, Bill?’ Jeek asked hopefully.

‘No, Jeek. I’ll follow him. You follow me. And try not to look so much like a fucking bent copper.’

At this point the stranger stalked past them and nodded amicably. ‘Coot evenink,’ he said, and continued his inspection of the roof. The two men froze into parodic statues of nonchalance, Bill suddenly absorbed in examining his jaw in the polished surface of the naval shell, Jeek thrusting his hands into his mackintosh pockets and growling like a dog. As soon as the stranger had passed they sprang into action. With hurried glances to left and right, as if calling the world to witness their anonymity, they trotted after their quarry. In his haste Jeek barged against an old woman who had come to look at the shell, as was her custom, and reminisce loudly about the war to anyone who cared to listen. ‘Well really,’ she shrilled after him. ‘There’s no respect among young people these days. Nobody behaved like that in the war, let me tell you. Manners counted for something then.’

By this time the stranger had stepped out into the porch of the station and was cocking one bright black eye at the ornate metalwork that framed the roof that guarded the station entrance from the elements. ‘Splen-tit,’ he cried, and plunged between two black taxis that had just roared into life at the taxi rank.

‘He’s headed up Slope Street,’ Bill bayed to Jeek as they narrowly avoided having their shins broken by one of the taxis. ‘Jesus he’s fast.’

And so began a game of tag up and down the streets of the northern city: an ungainly dance whose only rules were that the three dancers must avoid contact with each other at all costs. Either the stranger knew the streets like a native and was trying to shake off his pursuers, or else he was merely insane and his pirouettes and gyrations were the random products of a tortured brain. A little way up Slope Street he spun and seemed to be staring in ecstasy at a spot just above his mackintoshed followers’ heads. ‘Preathtakink,’ he trilled, and glancing round Bill saw that he was gazing at the massive corner tower of the Central Hotel, a mock-medieval chateau which dominated the north-west face of the station. Having vented his admiration, the stranger whipped round again and swooped up the incline of Slope Street, only to fling himself into the path of an orange bus a few blocks further on. The bus let out a screech of indignation and Bill gave a startled bark.

‘He’s nuts, I tell you! Where’s he headed now?’

The two men splashed impatiently in the gutter, looking for an opening in the traffic. When they finally stumbled into St Vitus Street they found the stranger performing a jerky triumphal jig in front of the building known as the Birdcage: a tall art-nouveau structure with many curved, barred windows that stoops over St Vitus Street as if it is melting. ‘Vot light! Vot crace!’ called the stranger to a group of little boys who had stopped under some scaffolding for a smoke. Then he was off again, waving one ungainly arm at the monolithic façade of a bank which looked as if it was aspiring to become the base of a Chicago skyscraper. ‘It traws your eye to the sky, sir, tuss it not?’ he cawed to an elderly tramp, who snarled in an unexpectedly pompous voice, ‘Go away! I don’t have any change!’ But by the time the tramp had shaken his torn umbrella at the stranger’s back, and almost been carried off into the sky himself by a sudden gust of rain-sodden wind, the tall thin man was already hopping down Renfield Street and pointing at the Casa di Vetro, which now houses a supermarket. It is modelled on a Venetian palazzo, but its slender columns, high arched bays and ornately decorated eaves are made of cast iron, a graceful marriage of Victorian engineering and Mediterranean exuberance, as the stranger did not fail to inform a woman who was pushing a shopping trolley towards the doorway on Eireachdail Street where she would spend the night.

The stranger stared for several minutes at the way the reflective windows of the Casa di Vitro mirrored the upper storeys of the neo-Gothic buildings that faced it and the racing clouds above their steeply-pitched roofs. Jeek and Bill were able to catch their breath, which was short and noisy from all the cigarettes their professional loitering forced them to consume. They noticed that when the stranger was still he was unnervingly immobile, as if his internal organs had ceased to move along with his limbs. They found themselves mesmerised by this stillness, so that when he suddenly sprang to life again and galloped eastwards towards Maskull Street it took them several seconds to react. Bill cursed as he set off after him. ‘If he’d packed a piece,’ he gasped to no one in particular, ‘and if he’d wanted to, he could have picked us off like bunny rabbits.’ The scenarios that presented themselves to Bill’s imagination were invariably savage.

They caught up with him on Maskull Street, craning his neck to get a better view of the pagoda-like structure that balanced on the highest point of the former office of a city newspaper. ‘Zere is another city, my frients,’ the stranger was explaining to a startled woman dressed in what looked like a lampshade, ‘up zere, apove your hets.’ The woman staggered off on high heels towards the relative safety of Argle street, with its crowds of shoppers, and for the first time Bill and Jeek found themselves alone in the street with the stranger. Maskull Street narrowed at this end to a kind of funnel, and just before it began to narrow, there was an opening on the left that led to an unlit cobbled alley. ‘We’ve got him now,’ Bill hissed to Jeek. ‘You take the right arm, I’ll take the left. We’ll have a nice chat with our long-legged chum in this wee side-street.’ With intense concentration the two men advanced on the exultant stranger from either side, their jaws thrust forward, their ears laid back. Bill was clenching and unclenching his gloved hands, which were as thick and clumsy as the paws of a bear. He had a mad gleam in his eye, and Jeek knew that this was one of the rare moments he had been living for through all those months – maybe years – of loitering. But before they could reach out to grasp the stranger’s elbows, the stranger took a long step backwards and wrapped his long, skinny arms around their shoulders, pinning them to his chest in a grip of impossible and terrible power.

Jeek found his nose pressed up against the stranger’s shabby coat. His nostrils were filled with a rank smell that reminded him of the time when his mother had made him pluck a well-hung pheasant on the kitchen table. His eyes filled with tears and he began to choke.

‘My frients,’ the stranger whispered in an intimate croak. ‘I luff ziss city already. I vill make it my home. Putt I vill need somevhere to liff. Somevhere high up, viz pig vindows and a coot few. Do you haff any suchestions?’

Jeek thought he was going to suffocate, and the pressure on his shoulders made his bones creak. He began to struggle and strike feebly at the stranger’s side. He could hear Bill struggling more violently somewhere close by. Fear seized him: this was a monster, only a fiend in human form could have such dreadful strength. With a sudden wrench he freed himself from the stranger’s embrace and stumbled aside. At the same time Bill broke loose, letting out a volley of colourful curses. He was fumbling for something under his mackintosh; his face was purple. The stranger paid no attention. He merely spread wide his arms, with the violin case dangling from one hand, and proceeded to leap and twirl like an ungainly ballerina.

‘You see, I haff such plans,’ he crowed. ‘Such clorious plans. Ziss place iss ripe for transformation. For example, ziss old puilding,’ and he struck the wall of the abandoned office. ‘It iss empty! It shoult be full off life ant noise! Consider ze soarink imachination that coult conceive off such a puilding, that coult erect it stone by stone ant top it off viz a pacoda, yes a pacoda so high up, so far from ze dirt ant sqvallor of ze street! It is ass if ze architect so long ago foresaw my arrifal ant ze gifts I voult pring! I vill make zis city great, I tell you. Greater zan it hass effer been!’

‘For God’s sake, no!’ howled Jeek, and it was not clear even to him whether he was shouting at the stranger or at Bill, who had pulled out something black and gleaming and was pointing it with trembling hands at the stranger’s head. Curses continued to stream out of Bill’s mouth like brightly-coloured ribbons. ‘Bill, Bill!’ wailed Jeek. ‘Don’t do it, man! Ye’re mad!’

‘Did I ask for your opinion, Jeek?’ Bill shouted back. ‘Can’t ye see he’s tanked up to the eyeballs wi some kind of junk the likes of which we’ve never seen? What do you think he’s got in that bag of his? He’ll make this city great, all right; but not before I’ve plastered his brains all over it.’ As he spoke he shifted his eyes momentarily from the stranger, the better to fix his young accomplice with a withering stare. In that instant the two men found themselves alone in Maskull Street. ‘You stupid ape!’ roared Bill. ‘You let him escape again!’

Before Jeek could answer back, Bill had rushed down the funnel into the buzz of Argle Street. Jeek followed more slowly, shaken by his recent ordeal and hampered by the weight of the rain that had soaked his mackintosh. He stopped at the mouth of Maskull Street, looking into the busy thoroughfare, and watched in horror as several things happened in quick succession.

The stranger was bounding down the middle of Argle Street, dodging the traffic with nonchalant ease. His black coat flapped behind him, his violin case swung wildly from his right hand, and his yellow socks flashed at the throngs of astonished shoppers who had stopped to stare as he bounded by. The oddest thing about him was that his enormous feet never touched the ground; they kicked and thrust at the empty air two or three centimetres above the gleaming tarmac. After him ran Bill, with heavy thumping strides, his shoulders hunched, right arm extended, right hand clutching the gun. Bill’s arm jerked, there was an explosion, and the stranger gave a mighty leap that carried him high over the wet black roof of a passing taxi.

A second later Jeek heard the obscene and unmistakable crunch that a heavy vehicle makes when it hits a man.

His first thought was that the stranger’s leap had carried him into the taxi’s path, but an orange bus obscured his view and he couldn’t tell. Shoppers began to scream in an almost matter-of-fact fashion, as if it was their duty as honest citizens, and the screams were taken up by other shoppers closer to Jeek who had no more idea than he did of what had just happened. He saw a man and woman look at each other inquiringly, pucker up their foreheads and start to scream with the perfect timing of opera singers. Jeek hurried along the pavement to where the screams were loudest, and saw that another orange bus had come to a standstill and that shoppers were now converging on it, again with an oddly businesslike air. A pair of scuffed black cowboy boots stuck out from under the bus. They belonged to Bill.

Something shiny lay in the gutter. Jeek picked it up. It was a life-size replica of a colt revolver, of the kind that Gary Cooper carried in ‘High Noon’. The stink of gunpowder still hung about the hammer: Bill had adapted the replica to fire blanks. Weighing the toy gun in his hand Jeek looked up and down the street. The stranger had disappeared: vanished into thin air. The young man had a fleeting vision of those nightmarishly thin and powerful limbs dwindling down to the width of a line drawn in ink on paper, then winking out altogether, leaving only a shadow behind. The rain plastered his hair over his eyes and dripped off the barrel of the revolver. Shoppers had begun to stare and point at him; those closest to him backed away, their mouths shaping little black O’s in their white faces. Men and women in official black with chequered hatbands forged their way towards him from left and right.

‘I saw him, officer,’ called a fat man in a yellow plastic anorak. ‘He gunned him down like an animal.’

Jeek contemplated brandishing the gun and making his escape after firing off a few rounds into the air; but that was exactly what Bill would have done. Suddenly the city felt heavy with menace. The dark clouds scudding overhead, the darkening concrete and stone of the sodden buildings, the merciless rain, the glare of headlamps which turned the raindrops into tiny flashing knives, the black of the tarmac that glistened like an underground river: the street had become a trap into which the dancing stranger had led them. Jeek dropped the revolver, lifted his face to the rain and began to howl.

‘Something about the devil coming to town,’ the fat man confided later to an anaemic policewoman. ‘Turned my blood to ice, I can tell you. Sounded just like a sad lost dog. I swear I won’t sleep a wink tonight.’

The policewoman wrote down his words very carefully in her notebook. Normally she would have taken little trouble to record such nonsense; but as she had pushed through the crowd towards the young gunman she too had seen and heard something remarkable. Perhaps it was merely some trick of the light, a hallucination brought on by the rain and the passing headlights; but she could swear she had seen over the young man’s head a dense black cloud in the shape of a bird, bigger than any she’d ever seen, maybe five or six metres from wingtip to wingtip; and before it vanished she could have sworn she had heard it laugh.

*****

The stranger stood in the topmost window of the Birdsnest. The window was curved like a Halloween lantern, and when it opened, the curve of the frame and the curves of the panes made the shape of a bird in flight. Dark shapes and lights mingled and moved on the streets below, which looked more than ever like rivers in motion as the rainwater splashed and spread across their smooth black surfaces.

When the stranger raised his eyes he met the eyes of an almost naked statue on the building opposite, the statue of a man who stooped beneath the weight of a sandstone portico incongruously perched on an upper storey far above any door it might have embellished – yet another of the pointless decorative features that encrusted the higher levels of buildings in this once prosperous city. The stone man glowered balefully at the stranger as if humiliated by the attention he was receiving. Leave me alone, his glower implied. I prefer to work unseen, as I always have.

The stranger nodded as if in agreement, turned his back on the street and went into the room. It was bare of furnishings. The Birdcage had stood for years now with advertising hoardings plastered all over it, urging passers-by to rent office space in its oddly shaped apartments, but nobody had accepted its invitations. Not, at least, till now. With a smooth single movement the stranger stalked to the middle of the room, knelt down on the wooden boards by his violin case and reached for the buckles with his long thin hands. The case sprang open. Inside, neatly packed in straw, lay six large eggs, glowing a mottled pale blue in the light of the streetlamps. The markings on the eggs made them look like pebbles from some distant beach, smoothed by tides for countless millennia. For the stranger they seemed to tremble with possibility.

‘Fery soon now, my little treshurs,’ the stranger murmured, smoothing their surfaces each in turn with feather-light fingers. ‘Fery soon you vill choin me in ziss place of empty nests. Togezzer ve vill fill zem, yes? And zen… and zen…’

Outside, the stone man continued to glower across the street at the open window, his shoulders bowed under the weight of the useless portico. It would be wrong to describe his work as loitering, but it was clear from his every curve that he had been doing it for many years. His glower had a world-weary look, as of one who refuses to be surprised by strangers no matter how tall, no matter how eccentric their movements, no matter how grandiose their plans. He would be watching, it seemed to say, till the moment came when he must spring into action.

It was hard to gauge what kind of action he had in mind.

The Face of the Deep

On the last day in May, when the sky is at its deepest blue at eight in the evening, when the yellow of the Oxford walls seems to shimmer where it is washed by the rays of the sinking sun, shadows float across the lawns, and windows flash like the revolving facets of some intellectual gem stirred by the currents of the mind – on the last day in May a sharp-sighted undergraduate noticed a tiny speck of scarlet in the zenith, directly over the pond in the centre of the Great Quad of Cardinal College.

A person who stares intently at a fixed point in the limitless expanse of the heavens quickly draws attention from passers by. A crowd soon gathered to watch the mote expand and flicker. It was a sultry day in the middle of examination season, and many were draped in academic robes: black, scarlet-and-blue, white-furred, ornately gilded, green with moss. The evening was a warm one, but only the boldest or meekest members of the congregation had chosen to remove their gowns and display themselves in the blinding whiteness of their rumpled shirtsleeves.

‘I expect it’s a meteor,’ observed a complacent astronomer.

‘Several thousand metres, I should say,’ corrected a deaf mathematician.

‘The Bomb has come,’ suggested a don wearing a dress which she had clearly put on back to front. ‘We shall have to postpone the guest dinner.’

Their curiosity was not intense. The day had been a dreamy one, undistinguished by powerful thoughts or high emotions. Punts had glided between willows to the accompaniment of guitars and sudden splashes. Those whom the gods had blessed with good looks or middle-aged shamelessness displayed their bodies in various shades of undress on the sun-soaked river margins. In the submarine coolness of the Examination Halls their less fortunate contemporaries sweated over theorems, theology and Thucydides, struggling not to be distracted by every scuffle, every cough, every rustle of the turning leaves of hidden dictionaries. These intellectual warriors watched the growing speck with comparative indifference. Their fingers were stained with the ink of immortal combat. After the battle of wits, when enough paper was used in a few hours to stock the College library twice over – an underwater forest of paper filled with parasitic scratchings, soon to be skimmed over by professors eager to return to their own scratchings, forests whose ultimate fate was to be pounded into pulp and recycled like the oceanic algae – after such titanic exertions a red ink-blot in the sky was of small importance in comparison with the red ink-blots that would pock the fateful leaves.

The sharp-sighted undergraduate who had first spotted the phenomenon moved to the edge of the small round pond and began to scatter breadcrumbs on the water, the remains of her dinner roll. The goldfish splashed and darted. A college porter – who wore a bowler hat to distinguish him from lesser employees of the college such as dons and principals – took the young woman gently by the arm and asked her to refrain, since the goldfish were well fed at regular intervals.

‘You see, miss,’ he explained, ‘if you feeds them a superfluity they swells and they swells till they is too monstrous uge for the pond. Then they thrashes their orrible tails and gnashes their orrible teeth and gobbles each other up, see, miss. Or else they bursts with an orrible pop and turns their poor stomachs to the sky, see, miss, God bless their tender arts.’

‘I have always understood,’ said the undergraduate, ‘that goldfish accommodated their growth to the limits of their environment. I mean, they grow no larger than their bowl or pond permits. I have heard, too, that they are sociable animals not in the least inclined to cannibalism; that they show signs of real affection to the human beings who feed them; and that they are capable of communicating with one another using an elaborate system based on touch and quasi-balletic choreography. Besides, they should be credited with an enviable philosophy; for what other creature would endure so narrow a confinement without chafing? A goldfish can live for forty years or more in a plain glass bowl with no other company than its meditations. Remarkable! Though as I said, the creatures are sociable, so it is kinder to give them friends in their enclosure.’

Here the don intervened, brushing past the porter with a flounce and drawing her doctoral gown more closely about her, as if to protect herself from the chill rising from the pond. ‘In the first place,’ she retorted, ‘there exist innumerable species which would as mindlessly submit to incarceration. And in the second, it is well known that the brain of the goldfish is so ineffectual that it forgets instantly each portion of the bowl as it swims by, so that in its imbecility each of those portions appears to be completely new terrain, and the universe it inhabits of a few fluid centilitres gives the impression of extending boundlessly in all directions. Impressive? Hardly.’

The undergraduate failed to wonder whether humankind might not suffer from the same delusion, because she was wondering instead how large a goldfish might grow given the bounds of the universe to swim about in. She therefore maintained a respectful silence as she returned her gaze to the meteor.

‘It’s getting larger,’ she pointed out.

‘How red it is!’ piped up a humble artist, much despised by his academic colleagues.

‘See where Christ’s blood streams from the what-do-you-call-it,’ recited an English Literature scholar, likewise snubbed.

‘It is an Unidentified Flying Object,’ declared a physicist, and adjusted his spectacles. At once everyone in the vicinity exclaimed ‘aha!’ as if they now knew exactly what the thing must be. Since it had grown in the last few seconds to the size of a cricket ball they could distinguish projections on either side like an aeroplane’s wings. It emitted the unrelenting bubbling noise of a proposition that refuses to be grasped. If the undergraduate squeezed her eyelids together slightly, applying pressure to her upraised eyeballs, she could even see what seemed to be bubbles emerging in a steady stream from a little hole in what she took to be the top.

For a while the full significance of the physicist’s pronouncement failed to sink in. But one whose brain was yet unclouded by toil or torpor, having spent the afternoon reading Archimedes in the bath, injected a sense of occasion by suddenly leaping onto the terrace that ran around the Great Quadrangle, pulling off his mortarboard and delivering the following oration in a tremulous but penetrating tenor voice.

‘OMG!’ he cried, ‘don’t you see what’s happening here? It’s a UFO! First Contact! The Arrival! From now on, humankind can no longer claim to be the sole intelligent life form in the universe! At last we are about to encounter our mental equals, our technological superiors if that UFO is anything to go by! The clash of two great minds on earth is witnessed with universal trepidation. How much more when race extends hand to race across the infinite reaches of the void? Gentlemen! Ladies! We must not let the college down!’

Roused by this exhortation the spectators raised their collective voice in a deafening babble of excitement. The don rushed off to fetch a deputation from the Senior Common Room, to greet their alien brethren with a suitable display of honorary degrees and peer-assessed publications. Graduates gathered together in a corner comparing notes on the languages and sign systems they could muster between them. Undergraduates scampered in and out of doors clutching cameras, bottles, musical instruments and little flags. The bustle was such as to bring many more undergraduates out into the sultry air, some clutching beer glasses, others binoculars, many with pens gripped between cramped fingers, several in dressing gowns having not yet risen with the setting sun. By the time the dons had assembled in gowns, hoods, mortar boards and white bow ties, the terrace that ran round the four walls of the quadrangle was packed with excited bodies. The grass by the pond lay empty, since that seemed the most likely spot for the spacecraft to land on.

‘I opes it don’t shrivel the grass with its orrible jets,’ commented the porter. ‘The staff only seeded it yesterday.’

At this moment a convoy of black limousines shot in through the front gate followed by a stream of military vehicles. The cavalcade screeched to a halt by the pond and emptied its occupants over the lawn. Camouflaged soldiers forced their way through the crowd towards staircase entrances and reappeared on the roof, waving automatic rifles and shouting into walkie talkies. Others positioned themselves in front of the throng to prevent it spilling into the arena. A corpulent figure squeezed itself out of one of the limousines and was recognised by a well-informed historian as the Secretary of State for Defence. An emotional don curtsied low to the ground. The artist struck up a rendition of ‘Land of my Fathers’ and was suppressed. All eyes strained upwards. All breaths were bated. All necks strained abominably. Heat throbbed over the compacted assembly.

‘I believe they think it’s going to land in the quad,’ whispered a geographer to her neighbour.

‘Do you think it’s dangerous?’ queried the English Literature scholar nervously.

‘I’m sure the Secretary of State for Defence wouldn’t be here if they thought so,’ answered a dubious politics graduate.

‘He’s an unpopular man,’ pronounced the Unclouded Brain. ‘Does anyone have a paper bag I could borrow?’

‘Hold onto your hats!’ cried a medical student. ‘Here it comes!’

With an insufferable roar the sky above the college rent asunder. The weltering heat became unbearable as the flames from the spacecraft’s rockets pierced the sultry air. The tips of the watchers’ hair was frazzled into tight, untidy knots, their breath whipped away, their robes, hoods, cuffs and tassels singed, windows blown in, flags set on fire, and the great red globe, the size of a hot air balloon, settled hugely down on the earth beside the pond, the tip of one wing compressing the roof of one of the cars.

Vapour eddied about its base, obscuring their vision. Everyone who possessed one raised a handkerchief to their eyes. The rest buried their streaming noses in a neighbour’s gown. An aged professor sat down and called for smelling salts. Flocks of birds wheeled screaming across the sky, then swept away towards the distant ocean. Gradually silence settled once more, as each observer composed themselves to examine the vessel.

It was a winged sphere with a flattened top and three stumpy legs like those on a Victorian cast iron bathtub. Its diameter was about ten metres, its colour a reddish orange, its texture smooth. To one side and a little underneath there was a small round hatch or door. As they watched, this irised open. All was dark within. No ladder descended to the blackened grass. The Secretary of State for Defence cleared his throat and edged a little closer to the ship, a little further from the safety of the gate and the street beyond. A military man with a lot of medals bent over and whispered something supportive in his ear.

In every tale of visitants from outer space there comes a moment of tense expectancy, when the onlookers stand and gape like so many frogs, unable to guess what will issue from the hole in the side of the spacecraft. The vapours disperse, the cameras hover, the last rays of the setting sun shoot horizontally across the darkening heavens, whose fragile glass dome has been suddenly breached like the rim of a bowl sinking into the sea. Suddenly all eyes are turned outwards from the surface of the planet. Suddenly the stars seem instinct with potential.

Three quarters of an hour had elapsed since the speck was first sighted. Philosophers pondered the alien thought processes that might explain the vessel’s shape and colour. Engineers calculated the resistance it must have encountered as it breached earth’s atmosphere at various velocities. The college principal thought of press releases. The sharp-sighted undergraduate thought of eggs. At long last something stirred in the darkness behind the hatch and a being began to emerge.

It did not walk on legs, nor swing on arms, nor hover on pinions. It did not wriggle on its belly, stalk like a jackdaw, hop like a rabbit. It floated through the air as if it were swimming. The first thing to float out of the hatch was a see-through helmet, of the kind that is favoured by human cosmonauts. The head inside was flat on both sides, with a toothless mouth and bulging eyes. The creature’s body swam parallel to the ground, the size of a cow, the shape of a leaf. It had fins on either side like the ship that carried it, and a vertical tail that served as a basic rudder. Its flanks were protected by scales of reddish gold. Between its highly flexible forefins it grasped a second sphere, this time transparent with a hole on top.

This second sphere was large and no doubt slippery, but the creature’s forefins clung to the sides as if fastened to the surface with a strong adhesive. The Secretary of State for Defence stood staring at it with his mouth hanging open, overawed by the being’s dexterity. The military man gave him a none-too-gentle nudge. The Secretary gave a start, licked his lips once or twice, and declaimed in a high-pitched wail:

‘On – ah – on behalf of Her Britannic Majesty’s government I bid you welcome to the United Kingdom on – ah – Planet Earth!’ Here he paused to mop his brow with the air of one who has tried to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity to a toddler who is eating a crunchy biscuit. He glanced round to seek help from the military man, but his former supporter was now crouching several metres away fingering the holster flap of his handgun and shouting into a walkie talkie. He clearly had his attention on other things. The Secretary sighed and cleared his throat again, wondering whether to continue.

The creature made no response. It was hovering under the spaceship, seemingly as uncertain about the next move as the Secretary. All at once it gave a flick of its tail and glided forwards towards the centre of the quadrangle. The Secretary backed away; the military man began shouting louder, though the instructions he was barking into the radio were either in code or symptomatic of a total loss of control over his tongue and larynx.

When it reached the pond the creature lowered its head and dipped its forequarters into the water, parting the lily pads. The action immersed the sphere it carried completely.

‘It’s drinking,’ conjectured a self-important zoologist.

‘We are but an oasis on some titanic voyage of discovery,’ murmured the English Literature scholar.

‘Fiddlesticks,’ snapped the Unclouded Brain. ‘What you see here is an act of self-abasement. This alien is obviously unintelligent, because it has shown not the slightest sign of curiosity, and curiosity is the first prerequisite of a rational life form. That and fear. This alien is either a remarkable bacterial growth which drifts through space, inside another growth shaped like a spaceship, as an amoeba drifts through a puddle. Or else it’s the equivalent of the dogs and monkeys which we humans sent into space in the experimental phase of extra-planetary travel, instead of hazarding one of our own superior species. Whichever it is, the creature is making a bow, having recognised the members of this college as its betters. How disappointing. I had hoped for a conversation worth recording.’

‘I suggest we catch it and perform a vivisection immediately,’ proposed the zoologist.

‘Everybody stand back!’ roared the military man with ribbons. ‘This could be an act of aggression. Any other suspicious movements and we’ll blast it into the stratosphere!’

At this the academics present fell silent, and gazed with renewed respect at the armoured flanks, impressed by the possibility that the creature might kill them. The soldiers shuffled their shiny boots and fumbled their gun stocks, impatient for action. Encouraged by the sound of boots on the ground behind him, the Secretary of State for Defence renewed his efforts at communication.

‘We are a peaceful nation,’ he asserted, running over in his mind the centuries of successful peacekeeping represented by the military man and his regiment. ‘If you surrender without resistance no harm will come to you or your vessel. We wish to establish friendly contact with other intelligent life forms across the universe. We are convinced that an exchange of knowledge will prove beneficial to both our species. If you understand me – ah – wag your tail.’

At this point the tail did wag, but for purely functional purposes. The creature slid backwards out of the pond and hovered with dripping helmet about three feet above the ground, still clutching the transparent sphere between its forefins. Inside the sphere the forms of goldfish could be discerned, hanging in the murky water.

At this the college porter took umbrage. His face went red, his bowler hat assumed a bullish stance on his lavishly-brylcreemed hair, and his eyebrows hid his eyes in a scowl that had been known to quell entire crews of muscular oarsmen. ‘Excuse me, sir or madam!’ he shouted. ‘Those are college property, those are! I’ll thank you to put them back in the college pond, you orrible thieving alibut, you!’

The halibut – if such it was – took no notice at all, but flicked its tail for a second time and shot over to the spaceship. The sudden movement startled the soldiers, so that six or seven of them emptied their guns at its vanishing hindquarters. The bullets bounced harmlessly off the hatch, which had irised shut behind the fish with astonishing speed. A zoologist, a physicist and a chemist began to struggle with the soldiers nearest them, the first to preserve the specimen intact, the second and third because they liked a bit of a scuffle. Within seconds the whole assembly was locked together in undignified combat, heaving, writhing, shrieking, biting and seething like a swarm of eels. Gowns were torn, hats hurled, books battered and knuckles rapped. In the meantime a gush of vapour obscured the base of the spherical spacecraft once again. Bullets burst on the reddish-orange carapace, their flashes combining with the flames that surged from hidden rockets underneath. The resultant reddish-orange glare cast enormous shadows on the walls of the quadrangle, transforming the ancient seat of learning into an apocalyptic vision. The grass caught fire and let off sparks, more windows blew in, a howling arose as of a million souls in torment, and the force of the blast as the ship took off knocked the furious company flat.

The sun had almost set. Only from the college bell tower – where the sharp-sighted undergraduate had taken refuge – could be seen a sliver of yellow, like the rim of a giant goldfish bowl disappearing beneath the waves of the distant ocean.

Two Poems: A Penny for your Thoughts

The little man who sweeps the roads
Once dropped a penny down a grille.
At that appalling tragedy
He sat and wept, and sits there still

And rocks his body back and forth
While tears like small abandoned loads
Well out between his fingertips
And wash the litter off the roads.

King Sam spent all his money in a vain attempt to wheedle
A dehydrated camel through the eyepiece of a needle.
Eventually, dying at the age of eighty-seven
In a poor but pious hermitage, the monarch went to heaven.

The Mountain Orchestra

When the villagers began the long toil up the mountainside they carried their houses on their backs like hermit crabs. Hampers, boxes, handbags, cupboards, tables and chairs seemed to have developed spindly legs and a taste for exercise, reeling along from bend to bend of the well-worn path as their owners struggled to outpace the bandits of Bist and Flumm, with their well-known thirst for gold and blood and delicate china. Half-way up the first steep slope the bandits caught them – as Granny Small had said they would – and at once the villagers let fall their burdens to protect their bodies. Chairs, kettles and mattresses rolled away down the spongy slope to fetch up against rocks or tumble into the burn. Soon the burn’s irregular staircase of ice-rimmed pools began to sprout long wavering strings of pale pink weed wherever the villagers’ blood spilled into it in rivulets and gobbets.

They had driven off the first attack and were about to retrieve their bundles when the old man called out: ‘Let them lie. It’s not often you get the excuse to throw out old rubbish. There’ll be better things on the other side of the mountain!’ So they left their kettles and mattresses littering the hillside, to act as an informal open-air reception room for sheep and wrens, and resumed their climb. But the little girl had already guessed that the old man had not been talking about pots and pans. In the attack he had received an ugly gash in the side from a bandit’s curtle-axe, and his feeble attempt to ward it off had resulted only in the smashing of the last of the Rebus violins. For a little while after that the old man had sat on a pile of sheep-droppings with blood and water soaking his trousers and let a tear roll down each cheek in tribute to the instrument. The little girl thought they must be carefully regulated tears, since he had always said you should allow two tears for every sad occasion: one for sorrow at your loss, the other for joy at the gift of life that allowed you to weep despite your losses.

He left the violin on the slope along with his favourite whisky glass – now smashed – and the mortal remains of Granny Small. The oldest woman in the village had died as she said she would, not of a curtle-axe wound but of a heart attack brought on by trying to brain a bandit with a lump of granite. For a long time as they climbed her thin shrill voice kept chattering on at them to hurry up; they were quite relieved when it died away, drifting off like a cricket’s chorus on a mountain breeze.

At one point the little girl and the old man took a rest on a tumbledown wall and looked back the way they had come. A feather of smoke unfurled from the village by the lake and the little girl fancied she could smell the scent of wood-ash on the wind. ‘Well, at least the houses are getting fumigated,’ the old man said; but the little girl was already shedding a good many more than the two small tears he recommended. They just kept welling out of her head like a burn from the side of a rain-drenched mountain. She finally stopped crying from sheer surprise that her head could be so full of water.

A little higher up they reached a stretch of level ground where the mountain path lost all definition in the sheep-cropped turf. At once the fog dropped down on them with what might have been a silent shout of laughter. Within seconds droplets formed in the girl’s brown hair and gleamed like eyes in the old man’s bristling eyebrows. Hills and mountain-ranges of fog rushed past at enormous speed, driven on by a wind that cut their flesh to the bone. The villagers forgot their fear that the bandits would follow them; instead they trembled because the ground beneath their feet was getting narrower, and the crags dropped into nothingness on either side. The wind tried to pluck them from the mountainside like an oystercatcher pecking at the shell of a stubborn mussel.

The little girl trembled with the rest but for a different reason. She was afraid of the Beast that lived among the mountains and left stories like bloody limbs littering the slopes for miles around. The old man patted her cheek and assured her that the Beast was far too large to bother with prey as insignificant as little girls. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘it’s fast asleep. Can’t you hear it snoring like the waves on a far-off shore?’ The little girl nodded but kept looking behind her uneasily. She could hear the waves on the shore whenever the wind dropped, but they sounded nothing at all like a monster snoring.

All the same, she was glad of the old man’s aimless prattle as he leaned on her shoulder. Although his weight was sometimes painful, she felt as though he were pulling her up the mountain instead of the other way round. ‘All my life I’ve wanted to visit these mountains,’ he panted. ‘It took an attack of bandits to get me up, and it’ll take a band of angels to get me down.’ By the time they reached the bottom of a slope of scree that swept up before them like a frozen wave into a foggy void, the rest of the villagers had disappeared. ‘You’re my guardian angel,’ the old man said, but it was he who pointed out where the little girl should set her feet. He seemed so sure of the way that it came as no surprise when they found themselves at the mouth of a cave, peering into the darkness to make sure there were no Beasts inside. At last they crawled through the narrow entrance, and at once the shriek of the wind dropped down to a whisper, as suddenly as if a door had shut behind them. From then on they only heard it from time to time, wailing disconsolately outside as if bereft of prey.

The cave seemed to run deep into the mountainside. At every movement echoes scuttled off and vanished into the stone entrails of the earth. But the roof was so low that the old man had crawled only a few yards before his head struck rock and he collapsed. He lay on his back as he had fallen, his head propped against the wall, his hands palm upwards by his sides. Every so often a breath escaped him in a little feather of smoke. The little girl curled up in the crook of his arm and busied herself with trying to forget about the Beast. Together they waited for night to enter the cave.

After a while the old man noticed that there was another old man lying beside him, whose breath likewise came in little feathers of smoke. He wore a tail-coat with fraying cuffs and a dirty white tie, and his face was as pale as his shirt-front except for a hint of yellow in the cheeks. The old man saw at once that the stranger was as sick as himself. He gave a chuckle at their shared predicament, then winced at the pain in his injured side.

‘We make a fine pair, I must say,’ he observed.

‘Eh?’ said the stranger, contorting his body to see who had spoken. ‘What’s that? Who’s there?’

‘Can’t you see me?’ asked the old man.

‘Indeed not,’ said the stranger. ‘You’re too strong, too alive. You’ll have to be a good deal closer to death’s door than that before I can see you.’

‘Is this better?’ asked the old man, moving a little closer to death’s door.

‘Yes, much,’ said the stranger, and twisted round to look at him closely. He had very bright eyes in deep sockets, as though he hadn’t eaten for a hundred and fifty-seven years and would stop at nothing for a scrap to feed on.

‘What’s that at your elbow, all wrapped up?’ he asked, nodding at the bundle.

‘It’s the ghost of my violin,’ replied the old man. ‘A genuine Rebus. I was clumsy enough to break it in a recent scuffle.’

‘That’s not all you broke, is it?’ the stranger said with a glance at the old man’s wound and a nasty grin. To his own surprise the old man felt insulted that such a sorry specimen should criticize the state of his body. It had served him for many years and he suddenly had a nostalgic affection for its failing organs. But before he could retort the stranger gave a sudden groan and started to writhe like an angry snake. It seemed he was trying to raise himself on one elbow.

‘So you’re a musician?’ the stranger gasped when at last he succeeded. ‘What a stroke of luck! I’ve been waiting for one of those for many years. You see, I too am a musician. My name is Colossus Retch. I expect you’ve heard of me.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Retch,’ said the old man. ‘We don’t hear much about modern music in the village by the lake. It’ll be different, I expect, when we reach the other side of the mountain.’

‘That’s DOCTOR Retch,’ the stranger snapped, ‘and my music is NOT modern.’

The old man didn’t hear him, because the little girl had sat up at the sound of voices and asked him who he was talking to. He said no-one and gave her a smile, which she put away at once and kept in a secret place for the rest of her life. She gave him a dazzling smile of her own in return, then took out an old linen handkerchief and started to wipe the blood from his forehead with gentle strokes.

The gentle movement drove everything else out of the old man’s mind. He had just managed to doze off when something buzzed in his ear and woke him up. It sounded like ‘A temporary pause’.

‘I beg your pardon?’ he murmured.

‘Nothing,’ said the little girl, still wiping.

‘I said, O tempora, O mors,’ the stranger said. He too had sat up and was looking much more sprightly. From nowhere he produced a large earthenware jug and poured himself a cup of something that emitted huge gushes of steam. A spicy fragrance filled the cave. Even the little girl felt the warmth invade her nostrils, steal down the back of her throat and invade her lungs, whence it spread throughout her body. The old man’s mouth began to water, and went on watering till he feared he would begin to drool.

‘Sorry I can’t let you have any,’ said the stranger. ‘This is Spirituous Liquor, strictly forbidden to anyone under the age of death.’ He sat back with an exaggerated sigh of contentment which brought back all the old man’s initial loathing of him. For a while all that could be heard were his appreciative slurps and the rumbling of the old man’s belly.

After some time Colossus Retch began to speak again. ‘Let me tell you about myself,’ he suggested. ‘Or at least about my posthumous self. You wouldn’t care to hear the details of my earthly life. Decidedly sordid, I’m afraid!’

He took another sip of the liquor. As he did so the old man saw his teeth flash in one of those grins that seemed to signal some private amusement, forever barred to the uninitiated such as the old man and the little girl. All at once the old man felt certain that if he let the stranger continue he would find himself trapped, forced to repeat some mechanical motion over and over again in the eerie solitude of the mountains. He opened his mouth in an attempt to protest, but his tongue remained frozen to the roof of his mouth as if rendered useless by some numbing potion or poisonous gas.

‘For a hundred and fifty-seven years,’ the stranger said, ‘I have had the honour of being the conductor of the Mountain Orchestra. I see your eyes light up in recognition –’ (they had done nothing of the kind) ‘– as well they might. The Mountain Orchestra, you exclaim, that melodious muster of master musicians, that band of lonely virtuosi collectively conjoined in their determination to subdue the chaos of this savage world with the staves of harmony! Believe it or not, before my time they were no more harmonious than a roomful of angry gibbons. Some of them couldn’t read music, some of them held their instruments upside down, not one of them could tie a bow tie without assistance or fasten a cufflink. But with time and patience and liberal lashings of raw talent I managed to shape them against all odds into a passable resemblance of a real live orchestra. The Mountain Orchestra, my friend, was shaped from my posthumous blood and sweat and tears, I say this without exaggeration. You may congratulate me if you like.’ And the stranger blew his nose on the filthy sleeve of his tail-coat.

At this point a gust of wind blundered into the cave and buffeted its way from wall to wall. A burst of music seemed to be released each time it struck a surface. The old man shivered and turned towards the entrance, laying his hand on the head of the girl which had slowly drooped until it was resting on his knee. Outside, the fog still glowed with a greenish light as it always does for an hour or so after the sun has set. With a start the old man saw that the Mountain Orchestra had taken its seats in the void beyond: rank on rank of see-through musicians fading away into the foggy distance. Each musician had indistinct features, but they held their heads at a certain angle that conveyed a sense of implacable resolution in the teeth of adversity. Each musician was smartly attired in evening dress made of mist and cobwebs.

The old man found his voice again. ‘Do you have repertoire?’ he asked weakly.

The stranger gave a modest cough. ‘We do indeed,’ he answered. ‘A repertoire curated by myself in response to the special needs and challenges of our orchestral purpose. Most of what we play is music,’ he went on, nodding his head as he warmed to his subject, ‘although alas it has not always been recognised as such. Winds, fogs, planetary movements, ghost sonatas; anything insubstantial really. Water music is a speciality; our performances of burns, brooks, becks, and the ripples on highland lochans are justly celebrated. You may know the Incoming Tide by Moonlight? An old composition of my own, I’m happy to say. But my time with the Mountain Orchestra draws to a close. I am looking beyond, so to speak, to new horizons and fresh challenges: spiritual compositions for the most part, though I may try my hand at nullity, loss and irremediable absence. And here you are, a fiddler emerging out of the fog as if by Divine Decree, perfectly qualified to fill the vacancy. How would you like to be my successor? How would you like, my friend, to lead the Mountain Orchestra in my place? Does the prospect thrill you?’

While he discussed his music the stranger’s face had taken on a wistful air. The lines of suffering scored on his brow had disappeared and his large eyes swam like mountain pools in the wake of a storm. But now he leaned forward with disconcerting suddenness and resumed his expression of wolfish hunger. His teeth and eyes were almost too bright to look at. The old man would have recoiled if he had been able to move his body as well as his head.

‘Well now,’ he said in alarm. ‘I’ll need to know a good deal more about the job before I accept it. What’s the pay like? Who do we play for? What are the perks?’

‘The pay,’ the stranger repeated scornfully. ‘The perks. Let me see. A weekly wage in pain and frustration, a lamentable lack of understanding from the general public, all the Spirituous Liquor you can drink and a captive audience. Will that do?’

‘I’ve known worse deals,’ the old man observed. ‘A captive audience, you say. Who are they?’

‘I’d have thought you’d know all about that, since you’re such an expert on the Beast,’ the stranger said. ‘The audience is here. You’re in one of its ears.’

The old man gave a start which woke the girl from a dream about animated furniture. He soothed her by stroking her hair while every nerve in his body strained to detect some other sign of life inside the cave. The stranger’s voice droned on regardless.

‘Yours will be one of the highest and loneliest destinies in the profession. Night and day, year in and year out, the Mountain Orchestra delivers performances of genius to no other audience than the Beast of the Martoc Mountains. As you know, the Beast has lain dormant under these mountains for many centuries. Your job will be to make sure it goes on sleeping undisturbed.’

‘I haven’t accepted yet,’ the old man interposed. ‘It doesn’t sound like much of a challenge to me. You mean to say that the Mountain Orchestra acts as a kind of musical rattle to keep an oversized baby quiet?’

‘That’s not what I mean at all,’ snarled the impresario. ‘You clearly haven’t grasped the seriousness of the situation. Once not so long ago the Beast almost woke up; it opened one eye and breathed out through one of its nostrils. That was what brought about the Age of Ash. It happened because my predecessor’s fingers got so numb he dropped the baton in Loch Tothel. I trust you’re not prone to numbness in the fingers? He spent seven hours trying to fish it out with a piece of string tied round a stone. Eventually it was brought to him by the Tothel Carp, but by then the damage was done. Not a living thing was left on the surface of the earth within five hundred miles of the Martoc Mountains: nothing but ash and bone and a few charred twigs. When he saw what he’d done my predecessor went mad and impaled himself on Cardothen Crag. You can still hear his shrieks when the wind blows north-north-west.’

The old man listened, but he could no longer hear the wind. He could not even hear the little girl’s breathing or feel her warmth against his ribs. Unobtrusively the stranger’s voice had carried him onto another plane of existence. The painful squeaks and wails as the Mountain Orchestra tuned their instruments made the stone floor beneath his fingertips vibrate.

‘My own posthumous career has been more successful,’ observed the stranger, and his eyes took on the wistful expression they held when he talked about his art. ‘I began my reign as conductor with a simple funeral march for all the lost souls. You know the sort of thing, a lot of cold stars and blowing dust, nothing too complex for my newly-trained musicians. Little by little we progressed to something more complex: a green bud here or there pushing out of the ashes, a solitary bird sitting on a dead branch. Cellos and bassoons hinted at stirrings in the earth as it quickened towards new life. Piccolos monitored the movements of approaching rainclouds. I’ll never forget the moment when we launched into a fully-fledged allegro maestoso to celebrate the rebirth of Spring. Since then – well, to tell the truth I’ve never recaptured that moment of glory. The triumphal march of returning life was the overture, as I see it now, for my career’s decline and fall. We’ve had our ups and downs since then, wrong notes, fluffed passages, entire compositions played out of tune or back to front. And I’ve been getting very tired in recent years. I’m sorry for what happened to your lakeside village; I fell asleep at about the seventeen millionth bar of the Peace Pavane and the Beast must have twitched in its sleep. I woke up in the cave this morning, so stiff I couldn’t move a muscle. Fortunately the Mountain Orchestra has filled the gap with some courageous improvisation, despite their lack of experience in such matters. Nevertheless, I think the time has come when I must cede my baton to my successor. And here you are, ready and waiting to step onto the podium at the moment of need. The question is: will you take up the challenge?’

The stranger’s voice had got steadily fainter as he talked. When the old man looked at him again he saw to his horror that his legs had vanished from the knees downwards and his eyes had lost their light. He seemed to be gazing at some scene beyond the cave wall. The old man watched and listened intently, hoping for some clue as to what that scene might be. All he could see, however, was darkness, all he could hear the flutter of his heart, the steady breathing of the little girl, the murmur of the blood-tide in his eardrums. Or was it the clatter of cutlery on silver plates and the murmur of voices against a background of gentle music, somewhere deep in the heart of the mountain? For a moment he could not tell.

‘Wait, wait!’ he cried in panic. ‘I’m not qualified at all! I’m only a humble violinist! Shouldn’t the conductor of the Mountain Orchestra be a celebrated musician like yourself?’

The stranger gave a ghost of his nasty grin. ‘Don’t kid yourself,’ he said. ‘I was no celebrated musician in my lifetime. I hung around at street corners turning the handle of a barrel organ and leering horribly at passers by. They would pay to make me stop leering. Sordid, I tell you! No, the Beast can’t tell an orchestra from a one man band. There’s nothing to worry about. Conducting’s easy; it’s merely a question of bobbing up and down with a little white stick to keep the musicians awake. Anything more is just a matter of pride. Start with something nice and simple like the grass growing, daylight filtering into the cave, or fish asleep in a forgotten pool at the mountain’s roots. You’ll have moved on to thunderstorms and the dawn chorus before you know it. And how about throwing in a violin fantasia from time to time seeing you’re a fiddle player? Everyone loves the screech of the highest note on a G string.’ And he leered again, even as his body was disappearing right up to his lapels.

‘Wait, wait!’ the old man cried again. ‘How can I be sure the Beast will stay asleep? And who are you anyway? How do I know you’re telling the truth?’

‘You can’t; you don’t,’ said the former conductor of the Mountain Orchestra. ‘And now goodbye. I’m due a hundred and fifty-seven years’ back payment of Eternal Reward.’ With that he vanished completely. For a moment it was as if a curtain of rock had been twitched aside. A colourful ball of jazz music bounced through the cave and out into the night, followed by a rich smell of roast meat and a mechanical canary. For the last time the old man called out, ‘Wait!’, but the cry only emphasized its own futility. He did not doubt that Dr Colossus Retch had already taken his first mouthful of everlasting soup.

‘It’s all right, I’m not going anywhere,’ said the little girl, waking up at the sound of his voice and taking his right hand. ‘But it’s so cold in here I think we’ll die.’

In the feeble light of a mountain dawn, the old man tried to examine her cheeks and pale cracked lips for signs of hypothermia, but soon he found that his aching eyes would not focus on her face. In fact he could see the front row of the Mountain Orchestra through her chest. She was fading from his sight, and other things in the cave were becoming visible. A carpet of luminous weeds decorated the floor, a curious chair stood in one corner, and Granny Small, about the size of a shrimp, was peering at him from a nook in the ceiling. He noticed a slender white stick on the carpet by his violin and flexed his right hand, ready to pick it up. Even as he rejoiced in the flow of blood to the fingertips he was aware that for the little girl they remained as cold and still as granite.

‘You won’t die, my dear,’ he told her, making a determined effort to use his tongue instead of his mind. ‘But I must go. I’ve just been offered a job with the Mountain Orchestra; an important job which begins at once; I really can’t say no. You’ll be musician for the village now. You’ll be magnificent.’

‘Me?’ cried the little girl. ‘But I’m not good enough! I don’t play anything!’

‘You’ve got your voice,’ the old man pointed out, ‘and you know all the songs. Will you sing to me now?’

The little girl couldn’t hear what he said, but she decided to sing for him anyway, partly because she thought he would like it, partly to see if her voice would do instead of a violin, and partly to stop herself thinking about the Beast, which had started to prey on her thoughts again as soon as she woke. That was how she pictured the scene years later: herself kneeling by the old man’s side with his hand in hers, music trailing out of her mouth in a silver thread as long and strong as a piece of twine spun by Granny Small. As the thread got longer it grew in size, bouncing off the walls deep down inside the tunnel at the back of the cave, lengthening and thickening until it became a clashing chain of notes, both sweet and harsh, as though the mountain itself were singing. After a while she stopped because the sound had started to scare her, but it continued to ring in the caves of her ears for a long time after.

The old man stood up with a sigh and stretched till his backbone cracked. Then he strode to the mouth of the cave with determined strides. He found he was wearing the stranger’s tail-coat with the fraying cuffs and the musty smell. It was too small for him, but now he remembered it hadn’t fit the stranger either. Underneath he still wore his own shirt, stiff with sweat and blood. ‘They could at least have provided a clean white shirt-front,’ he told himself irritably.

Before going out he took one look behind him to make sure he had left some suitable remains to keep the little girl company. He was shocked at how ill the corpse looked. The little girl had dropped off back to sleep in the crook of its arm.

With some difficulty he clambered up on his rostrum; each leg seemed to sink through each step to the height of his knee. By the time he reached the top he was submerged in fog to hip level and still sinking; at this rate, he thought, he would vanish into the abyss before he’d had a chance to lift the baton for the very first time. But then a flurry of clapping broke out among the violins, taken up with ghostly enthusiasm by the rest of the players. He rose a little, then rose some more when the cellists cheered. The old man graced them with a small, stiff bow, and when he straightened found that his feet were firmly planted on the boards of the rostrum. He struck the top with his little white stick to test its solidity. It gave out a satisfying clack, and the musicians’ eyes opened wide in anticipation. He smiled encouragingly – for his own sake as much as for theirs – and raised the baton.

‘Now then, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’

The little girl didn’t notice that the old man had died until the villagers found her curled up beside him the following morning. They buried him under a pile of rocks near the mouth of the cave. Then they walked on over the mountain, carrying the little girl with them on a worn-out armchair and accompanied all the way by a wicked wind. They found many things on the other side: things Granny Small had led them to expect and things she hadn’t mentioned; wanderings in woods and rests by rivers; cities full of noise and pain and the bright clean city where they made their home. By that time the little girl had grown up into a tall strong woman and her voice had grown to the size and strength of the mountain voice she had heard in the cave when she sang to the old man. Old and young men vied for her hand, and a musician won it.

But years later the woman wandered out into the city gardens and up onto the ramparts. As the fog rose out of the woods her mind wandered away to the distant mountains. She had often told the story of the old man’s death, sometimes taking out the smile he had given her, polishing it on her skirt and passing it round among her listeners. With the passing time she embroidered the story as he would have done himself. She insisted that he was still making music in the mountains, conducting a ghostly assembly of musicians called the Mountain Orchestra, who played till their bones ached and their insubstantial heads rang to make sure that the Beast stayed fast asleep. She said that if you listened hard enough you could sometimes hear soaring above the strains of the mountain wind and the chattering burns the silver thread of melody spun by the last of the Rebus violins. She prayed that the old man was not prone to numbness in the fingers.

One thing she had recently added to the story. Was it not possible, she would ask, that with time and the Orchestra’s diligent playing the nature of the Beast would begin to change? That the baroque musical architecture which she knew the old man favoured would enter its skull and impose a gentler structure on its savagery? Was it foolish to hope that next time the Beast stirred in its sleep it wouldn’t reduce the forests and villages to ash, but would instead murmur one of the Mountain Orchestra’s melodies back at them, as the mountain had done on the night she sang the old man out of this life and into the next?

The night laid cold dark hands on the woman’s face, and she let a carefully regulated tear roll down each cheek. One for sorrow, one for joy.

Stained Glass Windows in the West

Please click on each picture to get a better view!

The theme for Folklore Thursday this week is the folklore of our local places; and it coincides with the installation of three stained glass windows in the bay window of our flat in Glasgow’s West End. The windows are a family effort. My wife Kirsty thought of them, asked the makers of our windows if they were possible and made suggestions for details they might include. My grown-up children, Boo and Grace, designed two of the windows while I designed the third. And they represent local folklore in two ways: first because they reference Glasgow’s folklore by incorporating themes from a poem that’s become the city’s emblem; and secondly because they contain references to family folklore, that is, knowledge that only our family have and which we will read in the windows every time we look at them. It struck me, when I noticed Folklore Thursday’s theme, that the windows had something interesting to say about it, so I decided to write a blog post about them.

The poem, as all Glaswegians know, goes something like this:

Here is the bird that never flew
Here is the tree that never grew
Here is the bell that never rang
Here is the fish that never swam.

It refers to a series of miracles worked by Kentigern, patron saint of Glasgow, who acquired the name Mungo when he was ordained a priest at the Monastery of St Serf in the gorgeous town of Culross on the Firth of Forth. The bird was a robin, a pet of Mungo’s mentor, St Serf, which was killed by one of the young man’s fellow priests in training, who promptly laid the blame for its death on Mungo. Mungo took the bird in his hands and prayed, whereupon the robin came to life and flew to its master, chirping sweetly. The tree is usually depicted as an oak tree, though according to Glasgow City Council’s website it was originally a hazel. Mungo was left in charge of the fire in the monastery’s refectory or dining room, but he fell asleep and it went out – put out, it seems, by those malicious fellow seminarians. When he woke up Mungo took a bunch of hazel twigs in his hands, prayed over them until they burst into flames, and used them to rekindle the fire. The bell, it would seem, is just a bell, though it may have been given to St Mungo by the Pope. But the fish has a longer story. To quote the City Council’s website:

The fish with a ring in its mouth is a salmon and the ring was a present from Hydderch Hael, King of Cadzow, to his Queen Languoreth.

The Queen gave the ring to a knight and the King, suspecting an intrigue, took it from him while he slept during a hunting party and threw it into the River Clyde. On returning home, the King demanded the ring and threatened Languoreth with death if she could not produce it. The Queen appealed to the knight who, of course, could not help and then confessed to St Mungo who sent one of his monks to fish in the river, instructing him to bring back the first fish caught. This was done and St Mungo extracted the ring from its mouth. The scene is represented on the counter seal of Bishop Wyschard, made about 1271.

The story of the fish, with its link to the Clyde, presumably dates from St Mungo’s time in Glasgow, where he founded a church on the site now occupied by the Cathedral. The site of the city was chosen by a couple of oxen pulling a cart containing the corpse of a holy man named Fergus; Mungo instructed the obedient beasts to take the body wherever God told them to, and they duly made their way to the proper location. All this happened in the sixth century, but the stories of St Mungo are commemorated in the city’s crest, which it acquired in the nineteenth century.

Each of the windows in the bay window contains elements of St Mungo’s legend: a bird, a fish – though not with a ring in its mouth – a tree, a bell – and in Gracie’s window you can see all four. But these emblems share space with elements of family lore which only we four would recognise. Boo, for instance, tells me he was inspired by ‘the Kelvin walkway and urban wildlife/fay’ – the walkway being the path beside the River Kelvin which has been thronged with walkers since the first lockdown. For his bird he chose the heron we see so often at the weir near the ruins of the old Flint Mill, while the dark green strips on either side of the main picture contain dark creatures which may or may not be shadowy West End foxes, of the kind that used to live in the gloomy spaces under Hillhead Primary School on Gibson Street. The steeple in the distance invokes the steeples on the Great Western Road, one of which – the steeple of George Gilbert Scott’s Episcopalian Cathedral of St Mary – you can see from our bay window, though the one in the picture looks more like the steeple of Lansdowne Parish Church, now Webster’s Theatre and Bar, where Boo once worked in the Box Office. Boo also thought of the University steeple when he discussed it with me; and the rural landscape invoked for me our many trips to the hilly country north of the city. There’s a frog in a pane in the bottom left hand corner and a toad in the bottom right; Boo is always picking up frogs and toads, most recently I think in the wildlife garden at Glasgow Uni. The sun and the moon share the sky with the heron, and to me the sun looks like the shell of a whelk, of the kind Boo was always gathering on the seashore as a child. But the heron dominates, because the heron is ours, a personal family friend who stands on guard at the side of the weir, hoping no doubt to snap up one of the salmon you used to see leaping up it in spring – though I haven’t seen the salmon leaping for several years, and can only hope the tall grey knight isn’t going hungry.

My window, which is on the left as you face the bay from outside, has a robin in it as if in deference to Mungo. But it was Kirsty who asked me to put it there, because in our family robins have come to represent lost loved ones, who come back in the form of a bird to keep an eye on the children and friends they left behind. The bell is the bell of St Patrick, and as I was painting it I thought of the time not long after I first came to Glasgow when I cycled along the Forth and Clyde Canal till I came to a place whose name I didn’t know. Fortunately I met an old woman on the towpath and was able to ask her where I was; and she answered, like an old woman in a fairy tale, ‘You’re in Old Kilpatrick. You’ll always remember the name because it’s where St Patrick was born’. She was right, too: I’ve always remembered the name, and the association with St Patrick, and the old woman, and that bike ride in fine weather. The decorations round the edges of the window are based on the Book of Kells, which may or may not have been made on Iona; and as I drew them into the picture I remembered another picture I drew and painted long ago for a family friend, which showed St Patrick sitting under an old Irish cross with his favourite wolfhound lying beside him. That picture too had decorative themes from the Book of Kells, and the wolfhound in it was modeled on our dog Gelert, the largest and sweetest-natured dog I’ve known. The hill in the background is Dumgoyne in the Campsie Fells, up which I once walked carrying Boo in a backpack. And the strange yellow creature in the tree is a cat-bird fairy demon. I know you’ve heard about them, and now you know exactly what they look like, and where to look for them next time you’re standing by a twisted oak.

Gracie’s picture is the most allusive of all. It shows a flying fish, of course; and she chose this kind of fish to commemorate a family holiday in Mallorca, when we saw the miraculous airborne creatures skimming across the waves ahead of the boat that was taking us to a swimming spot in a secluded part of the island, where much smaller, sea-bound fishes nibbled our toes. The fish is surrounded by water because this is Gracie’s favourite element, and also the element of her Zodiac sign, Scorpio. Hidden in the middle panel at the bottom is the Angelic tune symbol from Cassandra Clare’s Shadow Hunter universe, of which the Mortal Instruments book series is one. Grace is a manic reader of thick tomes and enormous book series, and Cassandra Clare and Leigh Bardugo are just two of the writers she’s obsessed with. St Mungo’s signs are all over the place in her window, from the rings at the four corners – four of them plain, four of them with jewels – to the oak trees in the side panels, the bells and the stylised wings of birds. Oak trees, by the way, are personal things to us as well as to Glasgow; outside our window stand the only oak trees planted in the street, the last to get their leaves in spring, the last to lose them in autumn. When their leaves come out in a few weeks’ time you’ll be able to see real oak leaves dancing behind the painted ones.

I suppose the point I’m making in this post is that folklore of a quite specific kind is present in all cohabiting communities, and that we all have objects and pictures that evoke for us things that no one else could ever guess at. What we read, where we’ve been, the things that have happened to us, weave themselves together into stories which get told and retold down the years, until they get lost among fresh skeins of story woven by new generations. Old stories reappear among the new ones, as St Mungo’s does in our pictures, and lend continuity to the narratives we’re part of. And for us, the window painters, fantastic stories (fairy tales, the novels of Cassandra Clare, invented supernatural fauna, the lives of Celtic saints) infuse our local landscape with light, so that we see the fantastic through it, and the tiny details of tree and bird, fish and water, grow magical as a result, capable of coming to life in strange new ways at different times of the day or night.

The greatest miracle of our windows, though, is how they were constructed by a master craftsman using our paintings as a map or blueprint. That’s something only we and the glazier can really appreciate: the amount of trouble he took to select the right textures for the glass he was using in each panel, the thought he gave to the question of how to translate the texture of pen and ink or brushstroke to the glass’s surface, the little inventive touches like a piece of red glass stuck on behind to make the robin’s red breast, the oak leaves created by scraping away the paint from the side panels in Boo’s window. We got the measurements for the middle window slightly wrong, and the glazier had to find ways to make Gracie’s design fit the space precisely. His name is Colin Stevenson, of Stevenson Stained Glass, and he worked on the windows in the evenings from December to late March, after the working day was supposed to be over. The love he put into this process has made itself part of the story they tell, and we’ll think of it every time we look at them.

That’s our contribution to Folklore Thursday’s theme for 25 March 2021, folklore of local places.

January 2021

The weight of the world is on our shoulders.
Our weight is on the world’s shoulders.
The world waits for us to take on the weight we should shoulder
Before the world shoulders us and our weight aside.