The Last Will And Testament Of George Tutton

The last few weeks have not all been all about unpacking boxes and the trips to the tip, there’s been family stuff including my grandmother’s 118^th birthday party, a tradition that began in the year of her death, 25 years ago.  Not for the first time, this year’s gathering brought rediscovered treasure, this time in the form of my great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s will, which, like the pages torn from a bible plundered during the Bristol Riots of 1831, were found by my cousin, Pam, amongst the papers of my late uncle, Meric.

Here’s a transcript of its content:

I, George Tutton of Othery in the County of Somerset do make this my last Will. First I give & demise unto my Son Edward Tutton for his natural life all that my Orchat in Puddle lane and after his Death to my Grandson George Tutton the Son of Edward Tutton to him his heirs and asigns for ever. Allso I give unto Ann Sautell one half part of any Houshold furniture and ten Pounds to be paid by my Exetators hear in after meneted and all my Tools _ Allso I give to my Daughter Hannah Whellar the Sum of thirty Pounds to be paid by my Exeitors. Allso I give to my Daughter Bride Gent the Sum of thirty Pounds _ Allso I give to my Daughter Tammey Barrington the Sum of thirty Pounds all of Good and lawfull Money of Great Britton to be paid by my Exeitors hear in after mentioned with in twelve Month after my Decess _ Allso I give to my four Grandsons that is George Tutton Whellar George Gent George Tutton and George Tutton Son of Edward Tutton the Sum of one Ginuea to barre me to ye Grave _ Allso I give to my Grandsons George Gent and Charles Gent all my Waring appariel equally between them _ Allso I give to all my Grandchildren the Sum of one Shillinge each to be paid __________ immeadetly after my Decess_ Allso I give to my to Sons George Tutton and Thomas Tutton all those my five Acors called the Common in Sedgsmore equal between them subject to all my Legiets to sell or keep whitch they think fit _ and I do hearby appoint my to Sons Thomas and George Tutton to be my hole and sole Executrix_ In Witness hear of I set my hand and seal this third day of Aprial 1821 _ George Tutton ___________ Signed sealed published and declared by the Testator as and for his last Will and Testament in the presents of us who at his request in his presents and in the presents of each other have subscribed our names as Witness there to ___ Wm Tucker ______ Elizabeth Tucker ______ Thomas Tucker

This agrees with the Original      Willm Parfitt Depi Reg

Underneath my cousin has added our line of descent:

George Tutton b 1740 – Last Will and Testament               died 1821

Edward Tutton b 1779 – died 1856

George Tutton b 1803 – died 1867  bap St Michael, Othery

Charles Tutton b 1835 – died 1921

Fanny Tutton b 1870 – died 1948

William (Jack) John Hill b 1896 – died 1953

What delights me, though, is not so much the content, though his bequests – and the way they’ve been recorded – are beguiling.  It is the revelation that he and his family lived in Othery, one of my favourite places on the Levels.

I visited Othery in 2008, while researching places associated with the Pitchfork Rebellion of 1658.  Mostly, it's the name I love. The suffix Y means island and is found in other place names round here, like Muchelney and Athelney. This harks back to when the Levels were the Summerlands and flooded every winter.  The 'Other' bit is presumably a stop-gap appellation that stuck:  ‘oh, you know, that other bloody island'. There might even be a hint of 'they eat their babies there, they do' about it.  

During my visit, I went into St Michael’s Church – again, the dedication points to the rise in the height of the land – and noticed the fine Green Man with his tongue sticking out, and the sculpture of the Archangel Michael himself, saving a bird’s nest from the dragon’s clutches. What I didn’t know is that George Tutton’s grandson, another George and my great-great-great grandfather, had been baptised there in 1803 – and that when George the Elder had been born there, 60-odd years earlier – the carnage of Pitchfork Rebellion would still have been within living memory.

I'm going to have to go back now, with fresh eyes, knowing that this landscape that's enthralled me so long is part of me. 

Down Gypsy Patch Lane

For the last few weeks, even the seasons have been packed up into boxes – or have at least passed unnoticed in a frenzy of sorting and storing.  Except for when I’ve been to the local tip.

There are lots of things I love about our tip, viz:

·         It’s not really a tip, it’s a recycling centre which is a laudable and fine thing to be even if ‘M’off down the tip’ is a far more satisfying thing to yell to your co-habitees. (Sounds like hard work but really it's just an excuse for a break from lugging boxes about.)

·         You have to go down Gypsy Patch Lane to get there, which is probably one of the dullest thoroughfares I know but ye gods, it sounds romantic.

·         It also doubles as a Home of Rest for Garden Gnomes. There are loads of them crowding the verges and keeping each other company.

·         Each year it has a (literal) Christmas Grotto to rival anything the local mall can produce.   Which is as fine a marker of the changing season as my imagination can conjure.  One year someone will dump a real live Father Christmas and the dream will be complete.

The Names Of The Hare

Meet my house-warming present to my new home.  It’s a hare made by Brian Andrew in the traditional North Devon style of art pottery – that is, sgraffito on cream slip – and as such, sits comfortably amongst my collection of Barum ware.   Along with my witch and Coronis the crow, as felted by my friend, Jan Lane, she is the presiding spirit of this place.

There’s lots of things I adore about this piece – her posture, her wildness, her ears, the way she looks as if she’s about to leap down off the sideboard and out into the back garden. But especially I love the way she is etched with hedges and fields, sheaves of wheat, a church, trees and the sun – because the hare is a creature whose mythology encompasses the whole landscape.

I’ve been wondering what to call name her and I think I’ve come up with a few possibilities, courtesy a fabulous old English poem, originally in middle English and here translated by Seamus Heaney.

The Names Of The Hare 

The man the hare has met

will never be the better for it

except he lay down on the land

what he carries in his hand –

be it staff or be it bow –

and bless him with his elbow

and come out with this litany

with devotion and sincerity

to speak the praises of the hare.

Then the man will better fare.

‘The hare, call him scotart,

big-fellow, bouchart,

the O’Hare, the jumper,

the rascal, the racer.

Beat-the-pad, white-face,

funk-the-ditch, shit-ass.

The wimount, the messer,

the skidaddler, the nibbler,

the ill-met, the slabber.

The quick-scut, the dew-flirt,

the grass-biter, the goibert,

the home-late, the do-the-dirt.

The starer, the wood-cat,

the purblind, the furze cat,

the skulker, the bleary-eyed,

the wall-eyed, the glance-aside

and also the hedge-springer.

The stubble-stag, the long lugs,

the stook-deer, the frisky legs,

the wild one, the skipper,

the hug-the-ground, the lurker,

the race-the-wind, the skiver,

the shag-the-hare, the hedge-squatter,

the dew-hammer, the dew-hopper,

the sit-tight, the grass-bounder,

the jig-foot, the earth-sitter,

the light-foot, the fern-sitter,

the kail-stag, the herb-cropper.

The creep-along, the sitter-still,

the pintail, the ring-the-hill,

the sudden start,

the shake-the-heart,

the belly-white,

the lambs-in-flight.

The gobshite, the gum-sucker,

the scare-the-man, the faith-breaker,

the snuff-the-ground, the baldy-skull

(his chief name is scoundrel).

The stag sprouting a suede horn,

the creature living in the corn,

the creature bearing all men’s scorn,

the creature no one dares name.’

When you have got all this said

then the hare’s strength has been laid.

Then you might go faring forth –

east and west and south and north,

wherever you’re inclined to go –

but only if you’re skilful too.

And now, Sir Hare, good-day to you.

God guide you to a how-d’ye-do

with me: come to me dead

in either onion broth or bread.

Seamus Heaney

Of Tennis Balls And Apple Trees

Four weeks in and still no internet at the new house - which might not be an entirely bad thing, as we've been able to settle in with minimal distraction. It already seems an age since these photos were taken, the morning after our arduous relocation.

In addition to this confrontation of boxes, there was also a damp garage, 4/5^ths full of boxes of books needing prompt evacuation.  (Oh, and the Ark of the Covenant in there somewhere too.)

How would we ever find anything ever again?

Enter Ted, who had watched our old home disappear into boxes and now explored these unfamiliar rooms, his head tilted upwards as he tried to make sense of this latest example of unfathomable behaviour on the part of the monkeys. 

Then, twenty-five seconds into this new existence, he leapt on one box amongst ten thousand and retrieved from its depths a tennis ball, thus restoring the balance of the entire Universe.  Well done, that dog. 

Later, Dru came by and kindly transported my grandmother’s apple tree*, dug up and lodging in my former neighbour’s back garden, to its new home, via in a wheelie bin on top of her Morris Traveller. And replanted it just before the single heavy frost of this winter so far.  Whereupon we repaired to Asda to buy some cider for wassailing, in the hope it will survive its transplanting. 

‘Here’s to thee, young apple tree,

That blooms well, bears well,

Hats full, caps full,

Three bushel bags full,

An’ all under one tree. Hurrah! Hurrah!’


*grown from seed from the last apples gathered from my grandmother's garden,  a couple of months after her death in 1991

In the Making : Artwork for Breadcrumbs

Amidst boxes and bubblewrap and visits to the solicitor to sign more forms and daily trips to Son the Younger's place of work to get more boxes and phone calls to removal firms and the Co-operative Insurance people and boxes and more bloody boxes, something exciting is growing.

Mindful of the need to draw a line between woman and tree, tree and woman, being lost in the forest and being the forest, Dru Marland picks up her pencil and brushes to create the artwork for my third poetry collection, Breadcrumbs, which will be published by Indigo Dreams in 2016 ...

A bit too suggestive?

Starting to take root now ...

Battered and boughed ...

Slow work, all them leaves ... 

Nearly there now ...

Myrrha ... Bella in the Wych-Elm ... Raggy Liddy

Inspiration : Map Reading For Beginners

One of the reasons why I keep this blog is as a Commonplace Book.  Writing posts about my jaunts with photos helps me to remember in detail where I've been, and if I'm lucky enough to come home with the promise of a poem in my pocket, it's a  useful tool for the writing of it, especially since a fair bit of time can elapse before the poem is ready to be written.  

With this in mind, I thought I might occasionally post finished poems with their associated photos, and a brief description about how they came about. 

 Map Reading For Beginners


 The bulk of the title poem of my second collection, Map Reading for Beginners, was inspired in the first instance by this picture of the remote Church of St Ishow at Partrishow, high on a hill above the Grwyne Fawr valley in Powys.  As soon as I saw it, in January 2013, I asked the artist, Dru Marland, if we could go there and she agreed we could.  

I came back from our jaunt that day knowing I had to write about the place.  My starting point was a pair of ravens we'd heard chatting in the empty sky a fair while before we'd seen them rolling overhead - a happy encounter for me as they also inspired a sequence of three poems called Speaking Raven (also the same collection).  Before long the fox and hare from Dru's picture had made their way in too, as did the holy well below the Church, which has miraculous tales of healing attached to it.  


But then images from other places which evoke similar feelings in me came crowding in.  The sat nav relegated to the boot is a  reference to a trip I made from Taunton with another friend, back in 2008, following our noses with no idea of where we were headed until we ran out of land at Porlock, and drove along the coast to Watchet.   The tunnelling lanes are therefore those of Somerset, and also Devon, both my ancestral home 'where the story first began'. 

The snake is also from Devon, the pregnant she-adder I encountered on Meldon Hill on Dartmoor in 2009, who also inspired a poem (Ophidiophobia) in the same collection ... 

... or maybe it was the snakelet I spotted with my partner near Scorhill Stone Circle, on our first trip to the moor together in 2013, which turns up in yet another poem, The Seventh Sign.

Meanwhile, the fractal dreams carved by beetles date from another, earlier jaunt, this one in my home city, Bristol. I'd gone up to the Downs, again with Dru, for an afternoon stroll and a glimpse of the newly installed goats in the Avon Gorge, only to find myself clambering down the steep side to the Portway at the bottom in her wake ... and surviving!

All these elements were drawn together into the poem and subsequently the cover of the collection, drawn by Dru.  As in the poem, the buried Saint Ishow has become a poet with wild strawberries (a nod to the poem of the same name) and primroses growing from her hair.  Best of all, the flowering garlic in the shape of The Plough. Just gorgeous. 

Here's the poem:

 

Map Reading For Beginners

Put the sat nav in the boot
Follow your own arterial route

the tunnelling lanes that take you down
to where the stories first began,

where fox and hare listen in bracken,
ravens chat across the silence of the sky.

In the moss-dark holy well
a nadder bites its stripy tail,

completes the circle.
Your turquoise tracery of veins

espaliered branches
mapping skin,

a buried poet
with a fruit tree growing through her,

whose fractal dreams are carved
by beetles under bark.

©Deborah Harvey 2014

Map Reading for Beginners is published by Indigo Dreams and available from their website (and Amazon and good independent bookshops).

Bob Dylan at Cardiff Motorpoint Arena, 29th October 2015

My problem with big, big gigs is that I get so star-struck I tend to miss the entire first half.  'See that man over there?' my brain repeats, again and again. 'That's Leonard Cohen/David Bowie/Lou Reed, that is.'  Only in this instance, it was Bob.    

 
A familiar figure with blue hair squeezed between the seats a few rows in front of us - Snoozy, late of the Arnolfini bookshop. 

'SNOOOOZEEEE!' we called, as one. She turned, startled. 'Oh,' she said. 'What are you doing here?' 

Probably the same as you, we thought. And as Cerys Matthews, who was being escorted around the venue in a white fedora, just like Bob's. 
 
And then He was on stage and my brain duly dribbled out through my ears, so here's a review written by my companion, who is possibly the biggest Dylan fan in the world:
 

Bob Dylan and his band took to the stage promptly at 7.30pm. There was no support act to sit patiently through, the lights went down, the band started to play, the lights came up, and there, centre stage, was his Bobness himself, dressed like a Mississippi riverboat gambler, his five piece band all wore red lounge suits. The opening song was Times Have Changed which Dylan wrote especially for the film The Wonder Boys. It's a wonderful opener, the band were playing like forked lightning and Dylan's voice sounded great. I wondered what the next song would be ... 

And here's the thing... Dylan's been recording since the 1960s began, he's recorded well over 40 albums and written some of the most influential, outstanding songs in the history of contemporary music. His influence is huge. Those who like his music (and I appreciate there are those who don't) usually love it with a passion and the relationships they have with the songs might be compared with old, deep and beautiful friendships ... I wondered what the next song would be ... You know he won't play all your personal favourites but you really hope he'll play some of them but when many of those songs are over 30 years old, what are the chances? Bob Dylan himself clearly wants to play more contemporary songs, and he does, and it's exciting and dramatic... but still, when he plays a real classic, beloved song like Tangled Up In Blue, from the incomparable Blood On The Tracks album, the audience are on their feet and raising the roof of the Cardiff Motorpoint Arena.

I'm not complaining. It was a unique and mesmerising experience that I hope I'll never forget. When the concert finished, I couldn't speak for the wonder of it until I was out into the autumn night. And then I couldn't stop talking about it ... I wished he'd played Mr Tambourine Man, mind.