Work Text:
We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. The big workman
Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe
All the evening, from his empty mug
With gleaming eye glanced towards us:
"I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely.
- C.S. Lewis
Notwithstanding the brochure, the landing of a helicopter at the Goat Gap Inn is seldom a welcome event.
When we heard the approaching whirr of blades Hamilton and I were on our second pint apiece, and he, true to form, was off on his favourite topic, which was the survivals of the Old Religion hidden in plain sight all over the Western World. Rumour in Merton had it that his autographed copy of The Witch Cult in Western Europe had been presented to him warm from the presses by the author on the day of publication.
The intrusion of the twentieth century upon our swappings of Green Men sightings in Breton churches caused us both to get up and move, somewhat creakily (we are neither of us as good men on the fells as we used to be, though Hamilton is a good decade or so older than me, and can just remember the fireworks for Armistice Night) towards the door.
It was true that the Inn boasted a flattened circle of coarse moorland grass dignified with the name of helipad, adorned with a painted H and fluttering orange windsock. But it was kept not for the benefit of moneyed aristocrats or the lieutenant-commanders of industry, although from time to time in the shooting season they dropped by, drank a pint or so, and vanished off into the sky.
They were the exceptions.
At the Goat Gap helicopters were primarily the preserve of the Armed Forces, or the rescue services, and neither meant good news.
This was a neighbourhood where mere absence of attention could be a fatal mistake.
There were warrens of water-riven tunnels deep in the ground on either side, and above those the barren, bleak, treacherous moors stretched to the horizon in every direction. Fogs existed to confuse, winds to chill to the bone, and thick black peat bogs to exhaust and ensnare.
But it was not merely foot travellers whom the hungry ground ate up. Even the billion dollar fighter planes which hurtled by a few hundred feet above the startled black cattle and the indifferent sheep, the scream of their engines rising even higher than the ceaseless keening of the perpetual wind, from time to time misjudged their distance from one hillside or another, and came down in flaming wreck. At which times helicopters would arrive, to gather and take away what was left of their own.
It was, in every sense, a location demanding respect. Which was frequently omitted. And, if so, the helicopters would come.
It was, as it turned out, a very odd little group who ducked their heads beneath the whirling blades and scuttled over to the hotel. They were led by an American; in his fifties or sixties, I suppose: well preserved, smooth, manicured, and altogether, I would allow, at least a Commodore of Industry. He looked at us and - I'm ashamed to say - past.
I recognized the second of the men who entered, of course. Martin grinned happily at me, which at least reassured me that, whatever the nature of the emergency - and he was tirelessly active in both the mountain and cave rescue services - it must, on this occasion, have had a favourable outcome.
In his wake trailed a most extraordinarily dressed collection of individuals. Over the decades I've been walking the high Cumbrian fells I've seen many permutations of walking attire - everything from full Alpine kit complete with ice-picks and crampons on Catbells in the height of August to stiletto heels and miniskirts at Easter on Striding Edge.
Most of these looked to be wearing academic robes - though not for any University or degree I could recognise - which were mud-stained, tattered and generally torn all to blazes. My initial assumption was this was a graduation prank gone horribly wrong.
Head of the gang was a hard-faced grey-haired matriarch (who looked as if she could have given my own grandmother best in a fight, which was saying quite a lot: the Suffields were a hardy bunch). If there was a college involved, she was surely the principal of it. There was a bunch of students; average, I’d have said, in the main. Two of them were being helped along, having self-evidently borne the brunt of whatever near-disaster had transpired. The healthiest and most self-assertive of the undergraduate contingent was a blond boy who clearly fancied himself as something of an aesthete or whatever they call themselves these days. Hamilton leaned over to pass on some salacious anecdote of Betjeman’s undergraduate absurdities, which, given their respective ages, had to be second-hand, but at least to do him credit as a raconteur had an authentic eye-witness freshness about it. Of course, he could not avoid enveloping me in a cloud of his noxious pipe-smoke as he did so – really, I do wish he’d take to cherrywood, or something at least with slightly less of an admixture of old sock.
And then, finishing up the rear of the party –
My jaw dropped.
Hamilton caught my eye.
“Well,” he said without bothering to lower his harsh, academic caw more than by a token amount, “you’d have been too young to hear Oswald Mosley address the Union?”
I nodded, but the question was rhetorical in any event; he was already plunging on.
“A remarkable demagogue but a sadly second-class brain. And, of course, the excuse for much adolescent buffoonery at the Union, which the men insisted on thinking of as the height of cutting wit. But what a wife! I said then I’d never see another one to touch Lady Diana Mosley, and I never have. Until today.”
He eyed the new arrival critically.
“And not unlike one of the Mitford girls, especially about the bone structure. Though I doubt they’d have been seen dead in sub-fusc. And hey, Suffield; given her what sort of college do you think could it possibly be?”
Hamilton, I had to agree, had got something there. Somerville or Lady Margaret Hall did not produce dons who wore mud-stained academicals as though Schiaparelli had abandoned her entire philosophy and spent fourteen weeks form-fitting the darts herself, and who displayed the arrogant assurance of rank by summoning the entire staff of the pub with a faint inclination of one joint of her first finger, in order to bespeak all the available bedrooms for the walking wounded and for cleaning up purposes. With a practicality her appearance belied I also noted she took care to order a large, lavish and early lunch for her party and to earmark (to wash it down with) all that remained of the Pichon-Longueville bin-ends, which her enormous blue-violet eyes had evidently spotted on the wine-rack across a crowded bar. I cursed, silently. Hamilton and I had planned to make significant inroads into those bottles that evening, after our afternoon constitutional. The Bursar does his best, but the wine in college has deteriorated sadly since the cancerous spread of the comprehensive education system.
“Well,” I temporized, loathe to acknowledge that I was as baffled as he, “if we’d had more like her hammering at our gates, I can imagine the Fellows would have been a lot more receptive to the pressure on the College to accept women.” I paused. “I mean, even Waldegrave might have made something of an exception for someone like her.”
Hamilton snorted, his somewhat bushy white nasal hair fluttering like the pennants on Mount Badon as he did so.
“I sincerely doubt that. Waldegrave was notoriously so aggressive in his demonstration of his – ah – preferences that even Bowra used to brace back against the nearest wall when he entered the SCR. “
I had, regrettably, to concede his point. And then, dismissing the matter from his mind, Hamilton resumed the original discourse from the point we had left it off at the sound of the helicopter. While murmuring appropriate responses, I took another look at the group. They were still puzzling me.
The Commodore of Industry was yattering urgent instructions at Gatling gun speed into a mobile phone – that sort always do – and several of the students and Martin seemed to have vanished somewhere, presumably to repair the worst of the damage, for in truth they did seem to have been trampled by the All Black pack, and then subjected to the attentions of a herd of charging water buffalo.
The remainder of the party – the older woman, the striking blonde and one of the female students - had ensconsed themselves in a corner by the fireplace and, I noted resentfully, were making rapid and unladylike inroads into the first bottle of the Pichon-Longueville.
“Suffield! You aren’t paying attention!”
Guiltily, I turned back to Hamilton. My inattention had affronted him, I could tell; his voice had become even more forceful than a lifetime’s habit of lecturing and a mild case of deafness tended to make it. I apologized, profusely, and he snorted.
“I was asking for your views on this damnable nonsense being put about by the archaeologists. Strange discipline, that. Some good people, but no sense of context. Claim it’s a science and then lose sight of the values of intuition.”
The evils of archaeological investigation not fully informed by a detailed knowledge of the written sources and especially the linguistic clues is one of Hamilton’s pet hobby-horses, of course; it’s been a running joke in College since before the fall of Tobruk. I turned my attention back to the conversation.
“That will be the four- and five- goddess theories? Very interesting papers, those. Challenging. A lot to think about. Could well be something in it.”
I was tail-tweaking, of course. The notion that rather than being wedded irrevocably to the Triple Moon Goddess (as depicted in sculpture and votive offering, and immortalized, of course, by Graves) the Celtic world had worshipped a flexible pantheon of varying numbers struck at the very heart of Hamilton’s life’s work.
He spluttered emphatically.
“Poppycock! Those damnable rascals will say anything to up their published word count! I’m surprised any reputable journal stands for it. The review boards aren’t what they once were. Should have seen that pernicious, unscholarly nonsense for what it was long ago, if they had any backbone, and weren’t always so taken up with looking at what the American journals are publishing, like a lot of sheep! Sheep! Mere sensationalism and baseless theorizing. I tell you, Suffield, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. Anthropologically – socially – religiously the Celtic world worked by threes. The Mother was trifoliate. New moon – full moon – old moon. That’s how it always was. And that’s what came down and formed the tradition of witchcraft into modern history before it was driven underground by the church and the state!”
He brought his tankard – the Goat Gap keeps the pewter ones with our initials on behind the bar against our bi-annual visits – emphatically down on the table, so that some of the beer splashed out, landing on the hot hearth-stone with a decided hiss.
“Excuse me.”
The flat Lancashire voice came from the old woman at the next table; the one I had instinctively set down as the principal of her college. Hamilton revolved, slowly, on his stool to face her. He was, I knew, almost certainly floundering in the face of an address from this unexpected quarter.
I suppressed a smile. While lacking the determined misogyny of Waldegrave, Hamilton as a life-long bachelor is ill-equipped to deal with the female sex. And female academics are a particular bug-bear. College rumour has it that he’s been known publicly to quote Dr Johnson on the topic of women preachers, and substitute the word “lecturing”. At St Hilda’s High Table, no less, I believe.
“I’m not an advocate of eavesdropping,” the old woman went on, “ but I couldn’t help overhearing what you were talking about, and it sounded very interesting. Fascinating, I’d say. And since I don’t doubt those silly-looking buggers who’ve claimed first dibs on the bathrooms will be keeping us waiting here until kingdom come given half a chance, I’d rather we were listening to something entertaining as not. And what you were talking about sounded entertaining, if nothing else. So I’d greatly appreciate some further enlightenment, if you wouldn‘t mind.”
We looked at each other. Hamilton, I could tell, was torn between affront at her presumption, amusement at her blunt expression of it, and excitement at even the outside chance of making another convert to his theories, from which the tides of history were daily ebbing, despite his stalwart rearguard defence.
The old woman pushed two clean glasses over in our direction. “Here,” she said, gesturing with the bottle, “I daresay you’d fancy a change from that beer. Specially as you seem to have spilt most of it.”
There was a moment’s pause. The tankards, truthfully, were running low, especially given what Hamilton in his extravagant gesture had wasted on the hearth-stone. And it was clear enough that this would be our only chance at the decent claret. The stunning blonde was not the sale-or-return type.
Hamilton cleared his throat.
“Thank you,” he said, inclining his glass towards the proffered bottle, “most appreciated. Well, how much background should I give you? I mean – I don’t know your own academic discipline, and I hardly want to be accused of teaching my –“
He paused, cleared his throat energetically, and continued after a slight pause with only a slightly more hectic flush over his already choleric complexion.
“Teaching anyone to suck eggs.”
The old lady eyed him sardonically, and the young student – who was a type one grew to recognise within one’s first term as a lecturer, the type who took the instruction to “read around the subject” as licence to come back with fourteen deeply problematic, impeccably researched tangents shooting off it in all directions, and an essay at least twice as long as the scheduled tutorial slot was equipped to cope with, leant forward eagerly, as though dying to interject. Hamilton – who knows the breed as well, if not better, than any Fellow of his seniority in any college in the University or out of it, quelled her effortlessly with a glance. The old lady shot him a look of – I like to feel – grudging respect.
“Assume it isn’t my field. I’m an engineer, by background and preference.”
“And practice, Emily. Don’t be modest, today of all days,” the blonde woman breathed. She had a voice composed of flame, smoke and honey. Had I been two decades younger, I fancy I’d have felt my bones dissolve purely from hearing it.
“Well,” Hamilton said, with a faintly triumphant note in his voice; the note of one who is too often silenced as a prosy bore, and a man past his time, but who now has heard his audience mount him on his hobby-horse and told him to ride where he wist.
The three strange women leaned towards him to listen. He visibly swelled with self-importance.
“Well,” he said again, “you have to realise that for the Celts the feminine principle was a three-fold principle, symbolized by the moon. The moon in her three phases of new – full – and a declining, wasting crescent.”
Hamilton raised his hand in an impressive gesture. “That three-in-one was the original Trinity, the true Trinity.”
He paused, momentarily, as though waiting for something.
I had heard him do this one in college. There was usually someone from Balliol who could be relied upon to interject a snide remark into the gap. This time, no-one obliging, Hamilton continued smoothly on.
“That symbolism carries on down into the coven. While Christian tradition – stubbornly adhering to the view that witchcraft equaled Satanism, and Satanism had to be an unclean imitation of Christian tradition – ascribed 13 as the number of the coven in mimicry of the numbers at the Last Supper, Celtic scholars knew better. For the Celtic matriarchal tradition a coven always had and must to have three members, and three members alone, each with their time-hallowed roles set in the petrified amber of immemorial ages. Those three who together and alone could form and perform the innermost mysteries were themselves the personifications of the Moon Goddess in each of her three aspects made flesh: the maiden, the mother, the crone.”
The flickering flames in the hearth struck sparks from the mystery beauty’s blonde coronet of hair. The student inclined her – slightly horsy – features towards Hamilton, as though trying to comprehend him better. The old lady smiled, slightly grimly, captured the bottle, and topped up everyone’s glasses.
Hamilton, satisfied by the rapt quality of the silence that he was having his usual effect – and, truly, even at his age it is hard to name a more compelling lecturer on his day and on his topic – moved on to expound his thesis.
I had heard it before, of course, and let my attention wander slightly, spiraling up with the pipe-smoke to the age-blackened oak beams, penetrating down into the glowing caverns of the wood-fire as it collapsed into glowing coals; shining through the clear red of the incomparable wine in our glasses, touching lightly upon the white hair and stern carved lines of the old woman, who suddenly seemed in direct descent from the Sibyls of Cumae – in days when the blonde woman would surely have sat on sea-wet rocks combing her hair to the dire peril of Odysseus and his men, and the horsy brunette came pounding across the plains from Scythia drawing bow besides her sisters for the defence of Troy.
And gradually Hamilton’s well-bred caw changed, and I began to hear the ghost of Ulster vowels behind his familiar cadences, and I was back by half a century, in a smoky room booked out by some college literary society or other, packed like sardines on hard oak backless benches and hearing a lion – an authentic, genuine lion and our own Oxofrd breed to boot, read his own song himself.
We were talking of Dragons, Tolkien and I