Here Be Wolves

And so to Chesterblade in the Mendip Hills for lunch with our friends, Sara Butler (a poet), Bob (a potter) and Tess (a Parson Russell terrier). 

Look, a church. But first a walk up the narrow lanes to the local iron age hill fort, Small Down Camp.

Though not before a pause at the nearby dew pond, across which a brisk wind was flitting. 

As soon as we got up onto the top of the hill, we realised that the wind was more than brisk. In fact, it had put its teeth in, and they were bloody great fangs. It was wolfish.

The hill fort is impressive but quite small, so it doesn't take too long to beat the bounds. 

We headed for the trig point.

Chesterblade and beyond from the trig point

View over to Glastonbury Tor, eight miles away

Looking over towards Bath

After a while, it looked as if it might rain so we decided to return to the village.

It was much more sheltered down in the lane.

My first primroses of the year

Looking back at the hill fort, we saw it had taken on the appearance of a great ship.

While Bob and Tess popped into the cottage to put the dinner on, Sara, the Northerner and I wandered over the road to the tiny Church of St Mary the Virgin (which is actually a Norman chapel) to have a bit of a fossick.

The etymology of the placename Chesterblade is interesting. Obviously, the Chester- bit comes from castra, which is Latin for camp or stronghold. The -blade has all sorts of suppositions attached to it. The one I favour is that it's from Bladji, meaning 'of the wolf'. 

The bellcote

And here he is in the South Nave doorway.

And here beneath the North-East Nave coping. Look at this magnificence! Chesterblade is definitely the Stronghold of the Wolf! 

I thought this might be the fate of Robb Stark in reverse: a (dire)wolf with a human head, but apparently it's the Lamb of God, this carved on the South-East Nave coping. Hmmm. 

There's also a rather desolate Virgin Mary above the South Nave door ...

... and this face that looks like a bad doodle.

Inside, the Church is compact and bijou ... 

... and a bit dusty or ghostly, depending on your point of view. 

The font is Norman. 

The panelling is Jacobean.

The yew tree looks like a menorah.

And lunch was delicious, and the road home happy.

Light on the Severn

It was an unpromising day so we went down to the Severn, because if anywhere can make a dull sky interesting, it's the winds and currents of that river.

Well, hopefully.

We parked at Cake Pill Gout, which more or less marks the boundaries of Aust Warth to the north and Northwick Warth to the south. Strange name for a little stream. I wonder if the first part is to do with the sticky qualities of the mud.

Larks were singing - my first of the year - and behind us it was beautiful ... 

... ahead, towards the new bridge, not so much. 

The rain looked mostly like it was On Their Side but anyone who knows the estuary knows how quickly this can change. 

This was pretty much a joining up walk, from Cake Pill Gout to Chestle Pill, from the old bridge (more or less) to the new, from Old Passage to New Passage. 

At first, I thought these two white blobs might be the pair of egrets I'd seen up on Littleton Warth the other week, but closer study revealed them to be swans.   

Chestle Pill, advancing through the trees

A bit murker today than the last time I was here, in September 2015.

It was still beautiful, though, and I really like Chestle Pill at low tide, the way it snakes through the mud. I like the thought that it's still there when covered by the tide.

We were now at New Passage. The ferry crossing is believed to have been in operation from 1630, with a hiatus between 1645 and 1718. There's a tale that during the Civil Wars, King Charles was chased across the river from Portskewett on the opposite bank.

The pursuing Roundheads were drowned after being landed at low tide on the English Stones, in the middle of the river, by the boatmen, after which Cromwell ordered the ferries to cease operation.

The new bridge is now built over the Stones, which act as a foundation.

New Passage's other claim to fame - possibly slightly less glamorous than Old Passage's Bob Dylan-related one - is that John and Charles Wesley journeyed to Wales and Ireland during the 18th century from this point. 

Apparently, Charles had narrow escape in 1743 when the boat he was on almost foundered during a storm.  

Lo! He comes with clouds descending

The sky seemed to be suggesting it was time to be getting back. 

This is Pilning Wetland, which was created in 2011, when the old military firing range was converted into the freshwater pools. They're very popular with visiting birds and binocular-toting birders. 

The rain was approaching. 

We hurried. I slipped and landed on my arse in the mud. (Admittedly a more comfortable landing than the marble grave slab hidden in snow last month.)

Chinook

Cake Pill Gout

I'm not good at winter, especially the bit between Christmas and the end of February, when it can be hard to tell whether the days are getting longer, but the light on the Severn always makes things brighter.  

Spending fairy gold

I’m so used to the idea, or first line, of a poem coming to me while I’m in the bath that I usually take a notebook and a biro into the bathroom with me. Maybe it’s to do with the neither-here-nor-there driftiness of wallowing in warm bubbles while staring at the ceiling, now graced by spotlights in the approximate shape of the Plough, a whim indulged when the house was rewired. What’s more unusual, for me at least, is an entire, somewhat water-blotched poem materialising, via divine dictation. On the few occasions this has happened, I’ve learnt to regard the apparently finished article with suspicion. It’s not a trustworthy creature.

The sensible option is to put such poems to one side and rework them later, but when it happened last October, I ignored my  own advice and spent my fairy gold before it could turn into dead leaves, packing it off to seek its fortune in the 2018 Plough Prize Short Poem Competition. I figured that when it came nowhere, I’d decide whether it was worth polishing up or fit only for compost. I was not a little stunned, then, to learn the poem I'd called 'Oystercatchers' had won first prize.

And consternated. For some reason unknown to me, the poem came with an epigraph, namely the famous first line from ‘L’étranger’ by Albert Camus: Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Which is not quite as notorious as the second line, but even so, how would this play with my 90-year-old mother, should someone unhelpfully provide her with a translation? Possibly not well.

I decided to work out where the poem might have come from. I recalled that when it arrived, I'd just had a sequence of poems based on four paintings by Leonora Carrington accepted for publication. The Giantess, who is depicted arriving on an alien shore in an echo of Botticelli's scallop-born Venus, is definitely still hanging about in this poem, with the wayfaring geese flying from her opened cloak transmuted, for some reason, into eponymous oystercatchers; and spookily, she was referenced by the judge, Pascale Petit, in her thoughtful, intuitive report. 

But what about Meursault, Camus' emotionally detached protagonist. How does he fit in?

Bath water. A warm sea. A glaring, African sun. It's been 40 years since I read 'L'étranger’. What, exactly, was the link between Meursault's mother's death and his subsequent, murderous behaviour? How true is his conviction that he was sentenced to death for not crying at his mother's funeral, rather than for murdering an Arab on the beach? 

Is this 'betrayal' his real crime, as far as the society that sits in judgment of him is concerned? 

I started thinking about when my grandmother died 28 years ago: the feeling that the ensuing generations had all shuffled one step forward towards death. I and my (many) cousins were no longer ‘the youngsters’. Some of us were already parents, myself included, and our children were taking our former place in the junior rankings. Meanwhile, our parents had unceremoniously become the old ones. And now, all these years later, they’re the ones who are dying, among them my father. I already have the sense of disembarking in a strange land.

Is it only when you’re parentless that you finally stop being a child and become your true self? I think so, even when family relationships are relentlessly uncomplicated, or contact with a parent is minimal. Perhaps my poem is suggesting this.

Whatever, when it does happen, I promise I won’t drive down to Severn Beach and shoot someone on the bleak and muddy foreshore.

Oystercatchers

‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte’

                           ‘L’étranger’, Albert Camus                             

One day

the day she’s been waiting for will come

and she’ll take these words with her to the sea

unzip her coat, pull open her ribcage

let them fly as purposely

as oystercatchers

pulling the strings of the sky

and tide

lifting the weight from each blood cell

giving her permission       


©Deborah Harvey 2019



'Oystercatchers' will be published in my forthcoming collection from Indigo Dreams, entitled 'The Shadow Factory'