Abide With Me

In the southwestern corner of the country there is a range of limestone hills. In the valley of these hills is a place called Cheddar, which is noted for its gorge, its cheese, its cider and its caverns. It is the place where a temporarily lost clergyman, caught in a fierce rainstorm, sought shelter in the mouth of a cave. Here, waiting it all out, he wrote the hymn, Abide With Me. There are those who dispute this last fact, but it is just boring enough to be quite true. It is true.

City people, just fifteen miles distant, scorn the locals. They say they are inbred and hold Wicker Man festivals at midsummer. This is just ridiculous enough to be quite false. It is false. They are simply farming folk with fickle internet and reliable cars. And certainly, since the time this story begins, more and more of these city dwellers have made it their home.

In an ugly little estate built in the years after the war, there lived a woman called Jeryl. It is, of course, a ridiculous name. Jeryl’s mother, a strange and distracted creature, believed that she had read the name once in connection with high society - perhaps in the magazines they kept in the hairdressers on Yeo Street. It was meant, she said, as a female derivative of Gerald, although no one in the family had ever been called that. Perhaps it was someone she once thought herself in love with. Either way, Jeryl was stuck with it.

She had lived nowhere else but this ugly house, which she strived to keep clean and tidy even though there was no one much left to appreciate it. Her only child had moved to Australia and sent endless invitations to her, but she could not stand the heat and she could not stand the spiders and she found it unsettling that everyone clung to the shore with the great, forbidding wilderness at their backs: this void that was barely filled, like a monk’s tonsure. All fringe.

It would be forlornly romantic to assume that Jeryl’s husband was dead. It would explain her shiftless existence and the wistful glances she stole into the distance, at the trees on the top of the gorge. These moments of disassociation were becoming more frequent; so much so that there were times when she turned over the bedcovers at night and could not remember what she had done all day.

No, Jeryl's husband was not dead or even despised. He had simply met another woman with whom he was happier, and she doesn't begrudge him that. They live in the city now, although they appear to spend most of their time cruising. Jeryl has often wondered where he gets his money from, but this isn’t about him. It’s not really very much about her either.

It’s about a boy called Ben.

Midsummer, 1965

It had been a notably cold spring and early summer, with rain and then more of it. Cold gusts whipped across the hills and found their outlet in the fissures of the rock, where it whipped off hats and sent discarded newspapers to spread their news further abroad. But the dozen or so fifteen-year-olds who struggled with their cider up Jacob’s Ladder, (a tall swoop of 274 wooded steps which led up to the top of the gorge), paid no heed to it. The weather was always different up there.

They were gathered to honour a long tradition: the lighting of a bonfire to herald midsummer and the shortest night. And even though it was unduly dark for the time of year, the wind stopped whipping when they reached the top and laid out the kindling and shook the matchboxes.

The swinging ‘60s and Beatlemania, Carnaby Street and miniskirts, had not passed them by entirely. It was just difficult to experience through their black and white TVs. So this tribe were just a little naive, perhaps endearingly so, and were still just young enough to tell English and Celtic folk stories around the fire they had lit. But folk tales are hardly ever satisfying, and so each year there was an embellishment, and then another, until they came to resemble horror stories. The fairies and the elves were largely forgotten in favour of demons, witches and mindless psychopaths whose motives, (beyond having disappointing mothers), were always unclear. Urban myths were spread, where headless horseman caused vehicles to crash in Goblin Coombe, or more prosaically, a cannibal lunatic had escaped from the asylum and was roaming the hills as they spoke.

Each kid had a story to tell. Some of the girls still tried to resurrect the creatures of myth; the winged fairies and the bad elves, but their usefulness as fables, as guidance for the conduct of a good and just society, were no match against the monsters of gratuitous violence.

And then it was Ben’s turn. He was the last of them to narrate, and although there was some hand-holding and a little kissing going on the shadows, most eyes were upon him. He told the story of Gelert, a Welsh legend about an Irish wolfhound. The story goes that Llewellyn the Great had a grand estate in north-east Wales where he liked to go hunting with his faithful dog by his side. But one morning, as he was mounting up, he called Gelert to heel but the dog seemed reluctant to go, his brown eyes watchful and elsewhere. The prince shrugged it off and went about his killing business on the heath. When he returned he went immediately to check on his one-year-old child, a boy, a gift from God after years of disappointment. Gelert approached him in the child’s bedchamber and greeted him with a friendly wag of the tale and a grin of excited greeting. But the dog was covered in blood, and when Llewellyn saw that the infant’s crib was empty, he drew his sword and killed his faithful dog. No more than seconds later, after the hound was gasping his last and looking up at his owner in confusion, he heard the infant cry from beneath the crib. By his side was a great wolf they had been hunting for many moons, dead and bloodied. The moral of the tale, said Ben, was not to draw hasty conclusions. It was Gelert who had saved the child from the wolf and Gelert who had paid the price.

'For the rest of Llewellyn's life,' Ben finished, 'the prince was stricken with remorse, and ordered a grand grave to be dug for his faithful hound. The hamlet was renamed Beddgelert, which was Welsh for Gelert's Grave.'

And then Ben sat down, relieved that his part was over.

It was silent on the hill, until a boy called Nobby stood up with his fists in balls of fury and shouted, ‘Ben, you’re a cunt! NOBODY kills a dog in a story! You’re a fucking freak! Your mother’s a drunk, your father’s a kiddy-fiddler and nobody likes you. Get it? Fucking nobody!’

And Ben, he stood up, white as a ghost, and reminded them that it was just a story. It wasn’t true. It was a fable about minding yourself until you came to your senses. But nobody would listen, including Jeryl. They hounded him from the spot with the feral pack instinct that teenagers so easily adopt, telling him he was ugly and useless and that he fucked his sister. And they laughed long and loud until the daylight cleared away and these children made their way home, outdoing each other all the way on what a wanker Ben was, even though he was just a lonely kid who told a story that didn’t sit too well with the rest.

They found him the next morning hanging from an elm tree just a hundred yards away from the campfire. The thin rope was already there from a kids’ game where they swung from one rock to another. During the inquest the local librarian made it known that it had once been the local gibbet.

It was as if all the forces had collided. It was rumoured that during this shortest of nights, the dawn was so quick to arrive that it arrested the elves and the fairies in their usual business and made them whisper and taunt the poor boy on the hill. That all the mischievous sprites hounded Ben and coerced him do something he would not have done in his right mind.

It was the children who said all this. They never once admitted that they had been the likely cause. But his family, good people, good heartbroken people, saw through them all.

*****

All the kids from that night left the area just as soon as they could. Only Jeryl remained. Jeryl, who had a crush on Ben and could never, in all the subsequent years, understand why she joined the baying mob on that night. They had even kissed behind the village hall and exchanged shy promises about ‘going steady.’ It was the single event which marked the rest of her dreary life. She would never forgive herself, had never once tried to come to terms, to live comfortably within her own skin. She did not ask to be absolved but to be punished, and it was this, ultimately, that drove her husband away.

No one really knew why Ben had done it. Not his parents, not his sister, not his teachers. They could never understand why he had not just stormed off and gone home to his loving family to lick his wounds. He was a little reserved, perhaps, but in all other respects he had seemed content.

Perhaps he just felt that all the stories he would ever tell after that would be the wrong ones.

*****

Jeryl is seventy-five now. Each year, for sixty years, she has climbed up Jacob’s Ladder on midsummer’s night and defied the falling angels. But she’s weary now and there’s an ache in her side she doesn’t need explaining. Out of breath, she stands where the campfire once was, (as she always does). It is still scorched. It has never gone away. The elves, the fairies, the giants, the goblins, the revenant ghosts, the burden of folklore, must insist upon this unnatural ring in the ground. It is a scorched reminder of what may happen if you ignore the wisdom of fable.

She walked towards the elm tree and looked out at the peaks on the landscape. In the distance the city lights shone. So close, and yet few there will be feeling midsummer, not like they do up here on the tops. They will already be planning their Halloween costumes, a festival of gore, perhaps unaware of the early dawn and how much it unsettles our unseen friends on this longest of days.

She lay down slowly and lit a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked in decades, but it seemed unimportant now. When the smoke burned down to her lungs she coughed just once, closing her eyes. She didn’t ever come to imagine Ben swinging there. She just wanted to feel his presence, simply to say sorry. Her arthritic hands clutched the straggling grass and the exposed roots of the gallows tree, and as her watch alerted her that midnight had come, she drifted into a painless and rather beautiful sleep.

She was found in the morning by a dog walker who later told a pub audience that he had never imagined coming across such a happy corpse. He told them that an intricate garland of wild flowers crowned her grey head and that although he scanned around for where they might have come from, he could find nothing like them nearby.

No one could explain the flowers. The local expert in botany was certain that many of them had died out centuries before and simply could not understand how they had risen from their extinction, or how they stayed so fresh and vibrant for weeks after the old woman’s death.

Jeryl would have felt gratified to note that the nature of her passing provoked more interest than the manner of her living.