To the River (9 page)

It was very still. Tyre tracks had wrenched the mud into waves, and over them the soft ripples of birdsong passed back and forth. Sometimes the lone walker feels that he is moving backwards in time, and sometimes that he stands at the threshold of a different world, though whether it is heaven or hell is anybody’s guess. The landscape hasn’t changed, not in any way that can be articulated, but a sense of strangeness seeps up from all around. At other times, it is what has been done to a landscape that curdles it, so it becomes a place in which one does not like to linger, for fear of something that cannot be expressed.

I had a dream as a child that I was going to hell. Judging from the bedroom in which I woke, pooled in sweat, I must have been six. We had just moved house for the fourth time and I was in my second year at the convent that had once, girls used to say, been the home of Hanging Judge Jeffries, whose bloody Assizes were notorious for their brutality. In the summer holidays the nuns used to come to our house to pick the grapes for their communion wine, and it seemed they’d picked also the lock to my dreams.

A child raised Catholic knows the world is not all it seems; knows that other realms exist above the clouds or thousands of miles beneath the floor. Though these beliefs may in their detail be discarded, the sense remains: that the earth is porous; that the eyes are not to be trusted. Flimsy, that’s how I was taught the earth is, straw-walled, so that one good huff will bring it down. The books I read as a child didn’t help. They were obsessed with Neverlands and Narnias, places reached by rabbit holes or wardrobes, by lingering near woods and rivers or plunging through a mirror. The notion of a world within our world, set deep, a world that can be entered only with difficulty by mortals, is not of course the sole possession of Catholicism, and nor does it belong exclusively to those escapist stories that Kenneth Grahame and his ilk used to spin in the innocent endless days before the First World War. There are older sources for these ideas, and in that spoiled wood they seemed very near.

The word
hell
comes from the Anglo-Saxon
helan
, meaning to hide; it is related to
hole
and
hollow
. Hel, the afterlife of the Norse, was a concealed place, as the land of the dead by its nature must be. Its analogy for the Greeks was Hades – which itself means unseen – and for the Romans Dis. Nor were these realms always freighted with connotations of punishment and damnation. The older hells seem closer to vast waiting rooms where the dead, unsleeping, bide their time.

Whatever names they go by, these places weren’t often visited by the living. Perhaps six or seven mortals made the journey to the underworld in classical mythology. Aeneas, the founder of Rome, went to visit his dead father, descending through the entrance in the marsh of Cumea. Odysseus, slick Odysseus, went only to the brink, sailing to the edge of Persephone’s realm and summoning the dead to visit him by the banks of the river Acheron. He wanted blind Tiresias to guide him home to Ithaca but the ghosts of heroes also came, drawn by the blood he poured, and he saw among them the hunter Orion driving a crowd of all the wild beasts he’d ever slain. Orpheus went down to reclaim Eurydice, who’d been bitten by a snake, and Hercules to steal the dog Cerberus, who guarded the gates to Hades. And then there was Psyche, who in order to win back her lover Eros had to carry out three tasks, the third of which was to bring home in a box some of the beauty of Proserpine, queen of the underworld.

The translation of this last story by Robert Graves offers helpful advice for finding one’s way into Hades, which is linked to the mortal realm by means of all sorts of riddling tunnels and shafts:

The famous Greek city of Lacedaemon is not far from here. Go there at once and ask to be directed to Taenarus, which is rather an out-of-the-way place to find. It’s on a peninsula to the south. Once you get there you’ll find one of the ventilation holes of the Underworld. Put your head through and you’ll see a road running downhill, but there’ll be no traffic on it. Climb through at once and the road will lead you straight to Pluto’s palace. But don’t forget to take with you two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water, one in each hand, and two coins in your mouth.

The two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water are sops for the dog Cerberus. Psyche is also told to refuse all offers of food except a piece of common bread, for eating in the underworld means you must never leave. It was this taboo that entrapped Prosperpine, whom the Greeks called Persephone or Kore. After being abducted by Hades – for the king is named after his realm – she ate three pomegranate seeds – but some say it was four and some five or six – and though she was allowed to return to the earth’s surface for the summer months, in winter she had to return as Hades’s consort. The high goddess Persephone, Odysseus called her, the Iron Queen.

These were stories from far away and very long ago. But our native folklore is full of odd echoes that suggest familiarity with the maps and mores of Hades, as if those ventilation shafts reached up through the caves and barrows of these damper islands too. There are thousands upon thousands of local ballads and tales that tell of the fair folk that lived under the hills, in the cold stone palaces they’d hived away like bees.

One such is Cherry of Zennor, which I first came across in a collection of essays by the poet Edward Thomas, who’d found it in
Popular Romances of the West of England
, a book of folktales collected by Robert Hunt in the mid-nineteenth century. Cherry of Zennor grew up in Cornwall, and at the age of sixteen she left her family to go into service and see something of life. After a day’s walking she reached the crossroads on the Lady Downs, which marked the limits of the world she knew. She plumped herself down on a stone by the roadside and, putting her head into her hands, began to sob with homesickness. When she dried her eyes she was surprised to see a gentleman coming towards her, for no one had been on the Downs before.

When he heard what she was about the gentleman told Cherry all sorts of things. He said he’d been recently widowed, and that he had one dear little boy. He lived but a short way off, down in the low countries, and if she went with him she’d have nothing to do but milk the cow and look after the baby. Cherry didn’t understand everything he said, for he spoke in a flowery way, but she decided to take the job.

They went together down a long sloping lane shaded with trees, so that the sun was barely visible. At length they came to a stream of clear dark water that ran across the road. Cherry didn’t know how she’d ford this brook, but the gentleman slipped an arm about her waist and scooped her up, so she wouldn’t wet her feet. After descending a little further, they reached his garden gate. A boy came running to meet them. He seemed about two or three, but there was a singular look about him and his eyes were very bright.

Her job was to rise at dawn and take the boy to a spring in the garden, wash him, and anoint his eyes with ointment. She was not, on any account, to touch her own eyes with it. Then Cherry was to call the cow and, having filled the bucket with milk, to draw a bowlful for the boy’s breakfast. After her ordinary work was done, the gentleman required Cherry to help him in the garden, picking the apples and pears and weeding the leeks and onions. Cherry and her master got on famously, and whenever she finished weeding a bed, her master would kiss her to show her how pleased he was. Cherry had everything the heart could desire, yet she wasn’t entirely happy. She’d decided it was the ointment that made the little boy’s eyes so bright, and she often thought he saw more than she did.

One morning she sent the boy to gather flowers in the garden, and taking a crumb of ointment, she put it in her eye. How it burned! She ran to the stream to wash away the smarting and there she saw at the bottom of the water hundreds of little people dancing, and there was her master, as small as the others, dancing with them and kissing the ladies as they passed. The master never showed himself above the water all day but at night he rode up to the house like the handsome gentleman she’d seen before.

The next day, he remained at home to pick fruit. Cherry was to help him, and when, as usual, he looked to kiss her, she slapped his face, and told him to kiss the little people with whom he’d danced under the stream. So he knew she’d taken the ointment. With much sorrow he told her she’d have to leave. He made her a bundle of fine clothes and then led her for miles on miles, all the time uphill, going through lanes and passageways. When they came at last to level ground, it was near daybreak. The gentleman kissed Cherry and said that if she behaved well, he would come sometimes to the Lady Downs to see her. Saying that, he turned away. The sun rose, and there was Cherry alone on a granite stone, without a soul to be seen for miles. She cried until she was tired, and then she went home to Trereen, where they thought she was her own ghost returned.

I didn’t know how old this story was, but some of its elements – the fairy ointment, the land beneath the ground – seemed familiar. The development of folk tales is much like that of roses; stories may be hybridised or grafted or pop up as sports far from their native place. Cherry’s ointment is a distant cousin of the juice Puck smears across the sleepers’ eyelids in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and I thought the story’s topology might have sprung from
Tom the Rhymer
, the classic underworld story, which goes back at least as far as the thirteenth century and is probably far older.

Tom the Rhymer, who is sometimes called True Thomas or elsewhere Tam Lin, met the Queen of Elfland on Huntlie Banks and was taken by her to her own land far beneath the soil, from where he returned many years later with the gift of second sight. There are many versions of True Thomas’s tale and they bleed into one another and overlap, but the world he entered would be as recognisable to Odysseus as it would be to Cherry of Zennor. There’s that stream she crossed on her way to the lowlands, though here it has grown more fearsome by far than the river Styx: ‘For forty days and forty nights he wade thro red blade to the knee, and he saw neither sun nor moon, but heard the roaring of the sea.’ Further on there’s a garden green, where fruit grows that must not be picked ‘for a’ the plagues that are in hell light on the fruit of this countrie’. And can Thomas leave? Not of his own free will he can’t, and nor may he open his mouth, ‘for gin ae word you should chance to speak, you will neer get back to your ain countrie’.

The day hung open on its hinge. The sound I had heard was neither chainsaws nor flies; it was a pair of red tractors out cutting the hay. I could see them now through the trees. One cut and one gathered; one built the windrows and the other bobbed them dry. A whole village would once have cut these fields, and now there were two men, their faces turned from one another, the cut grass shooting out, the cut grass raking in. As I crossed where they worked I caught the sweet, sickening smell of coumarins lifting from the hay. It struck me that I had not spoken more than a couple of sentences all day.
Gin ae word you should
chance to speak, you will neer get back to your ain countrie
.

What country was I walking in, what age? Across the hedge there was a perfect Tudor manor, three storeys high, with two great brick chimneys standing as tall as a man above the stone roof. As I got closer I saw the house was hemmed in by caravans and that the road was thick with dust. There were no people, just the empty vans, ranks of them, and the house that stood as silently as if it were circled by snow.

The light was falling unimpeded now, in sheets and glancing blows. I wanted, like Laurie Lee, to stagger into a village and be revived by a flagon of wine. Instead, I tramped through the dust, dodging blue-black dragonflies, and crossed the A275 by the temporary lights. Just before Sheffield Park Bridge the path ducked through a hedge into a spreading meadow of thigh-high grasses. And there was the Ouse, all of a tumble, the sun skating off it in panes of light. It was a proper river now, passing between banks made impassable by a wild profusion of mugwort, nettles and Himalayan balsam. On the far side a dog rose had scrambled its way along the branches of an elder, and the little faded roses grew intertwined with flat creamy umbels that smelled precisely of June. The water was opaque and so full of sediment it looked like liquid mud. Its surface caught and distorted the shadows of the plants and beneath them the castellated reflections of clouds slowly shuddered by.

I dropped down beneath an ash tree. My hair was wet at the nape, and my back was soaked with sweat. What a multitude of mirrors there are in the world! Each blade of grass seemed to catch the sun and toss it back to the sky. Big white clouds were pressing overhead and beneath them crossed electric blue damselflies, always in pairs and sometimes glued into a wincing knot. After a while, my brain cooled down. I sat up and drank some water and ate a slice of cheese. As I chewed, a movement at the field’s edge caught my eye. A wave of golden air was working its way down the meadow, wheeling as it went. It moved like smoke, a persistent, particulate cloud made up of flakes of tumbled gold. Pollen. It was June; too late for alder and hazel, too late for willow. I weighed up the options: nettle or dock, plantain, oilseed rape or – but it was less likely – pine. A pollen grain is identified by its architecture and ornamentation; it can be porous or furrowed, smooth or spiked. Plantain pollen is covered in verrucas; the pollen of golden rod bristles all over like a miniaturised pineapple. Echinate is the technical term for this latter design, meaning prickly, from
echinos
, the Greek for hedgehog.

Pollen is designed to drift. The tiny grains – hundreds of thousands in a single pinch – often have air sacs to help them float, as waterwings buoy a swimmer. These grains can travel great distances. In 2006 residents in East Anglia and Lincolnshire reported a pollen that covered cars and could be tasted on the air. It had come across the North Sea from Scandinavia and was seen on satellite pictures as a vast cloud:
a yellow-green plume sweeping the coast
, as the BBC report put it. Scientists identified it as birch pollen, the product of a wet April and sunny May in Denmark, though crop fires in western Russia may have contributed to the dust.