Epiblog for St Juthware's Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The weather has been finer, but colder. They keep saying on the weather forecast on the local TV that it’s going to be another mild day for November, but nobody told my bones, and they hum and sing and crackle to themselves sometimes, especially if I sit too long in one position or get too far away from the stove. I’m hopeful that this Quinine Sulphate stuff will help, if it ever gets here.

Matilda, too, has not been straying that far from the stove, and when she does go out in the garden, the black and brown and orange splodges of her fur match almost exactly the black and brown and orange splodges of the fallen leaves, so much so that if she lay down amongst them, you would be hard put to tell where the cat ended and the leaves began, or vice versa.

Last Sunday evening, for some reason best known to herself, Matilda was rubbing her chivvy-chin on the ornamental dog made of sheet metal and springs (it's an ornament, we got it from the garden centre, yonks ago, and it sits on the floor next to Zak’s armchair) Somehow, she got her collar caught on the curl at the end of its tail, spooked herself and tried to run off, of course the metal dog was now attached to her, and followed her, clattering across the carpet.

As she passed me, gathering speed in panic, doing a passable imitation of a “Skimmington Ride”, I grabbed for her and missed, but caught the dog, which had the effect of putting strain on the collar, - fortunately one of those safety ones that is designed to snap apart if the cat snags it on anything - which is exactly what happened. The dog was left in my hand, the collar went flying off to one side and Matilda disappeared out of the room. Later, she crept quietly back, minus collar, and once more resumed her place on the beddies at the side of the stove. I retrieved the various bits of the collar from the various dark corners where they had landed, and found that, in any case, she appeared to have also lost the little ID barrel bit that screws in place and holds the piece of paper that says “I am Matilda, I am microchipped” and gives her address. So that’s £1.98 she owes me, for starters, and we’ll have to get her a new one.

The saga of Elvis rumbles on. We’re now in detailed discussion about the type and style of fence that it would be necessary to put across the back of the garden before they will entrust Elvis the hound-dog into our care. To be fair, they are willing to offer us physical help in the form of what have been described as two brawny males, quote unquote, to put it up, once I have sourced the materials. And, to be even more fair, we were thinking about screening off the view across the back anyway, next Spring, because the mill down in the valley is going to be having some building work done and I thought it would be an opportune time to screen out their noise.

Having said that, though, it’s an extra thing to fit in and organise, that I wasn’t expecting to have to fit in and organise, at a time six weeks before Christmas when I have one new book at press, another going next week, and an “instant book” on Amazon to do ready for release this month also. That’s why, this week, I have been reduced to searching online for willow hurdles and willow screening rolls, fence posts and other such accoutrements, with my other leg. Given the limited time I can spare to deal with this, and the short days at this time of year, I’d be surprised if it gets sorted this side of Christmas, to be honest.

Other than that, nothing much seems to have happened this week. This is both a good thing, and a bad thing. Generally, in our lives, when “things” “happen”, this usually means bad things, unexpected things, costly things. So from that point of view, I should be glad of a quiet week. However, also this week, nothing “good” has happened either – I haven’t achieved much, despite spending all day and every day struggling with the same little knot of intractable problems, and my “to do” list looks pretty much the same at the end of the week as it did at the beginning. Deb has had a similar week, with some wins and some losses. The College has finally woken up to the fact that someone who lives in Stalybridge was teaching a class in Dewsbury for them, and someone who lives in Huddersfield was teaching a class in Stalybridge, and arranged a swop. At the same time, though, the Calderdale class looks like it is coming to an end, which will mean a net loss of £140 a month for her. Ouch. The Dewsbury class also brought its own sting in the tail.

To teach it, Debbie needed to mug up on a document that was allegedly available on the College’s “Staff Portal”. This has never worked properly for her when logging on from home, and on Friday afternoon this was no exception, as she wasted three and a half hours of her life that she will never get back, talking to various assistant factotums in IT support who eventually, painfully slowly, identified that it was a password issue. However, re-setting the password also proved to be about as quick and enjoyable as 18th-century dentistry (“I can’t reset it from here, I’m ILT, I’ll have to put you through to IT”) and once it was re-set, all it enabled her to do was to discover that the document she had been told was there, actually … wasn’t. “Shambles” is far too kind a word. How OFSTED ever awarded them a “2” escapes me, unless it was marks out of 100, and even then that would have been over-generous.

So, a week of very little achievement all round, and one which left me feeling tired and drained. I hate this time of year anyway, and this week was no different. We’re all in that long, dark tunnel that leads to 2013. Sometimes – many times, in fact, this week - I have felt like Jack Brotherhood in “A Perfect Spy” who got his medal “for sticking out dark nights, alone”.

And so we come to Sunday.

On this day (18th November) in 1105, Maginulfo was elected as the Antipope and took the name of Sylvester IV. I must admit I like the idea of an Antipope. Why not? Everything has its opposite – Christ and Antichrist, matter and anti-matter, pasta and antipasta. Seems almost natural to me. Anyway, eventually, Sylvester was persuaded to submit to the authority of the “real” Pope of the time, and, unusually for those days, was allowed to live out the remainder of his life in peace, without being hung, whipped, barbecued or crucified or having his head put on a spike in the name of religion. Which is unusually lenient, as persecution on religious grounds is much more the norm, then, as now.

Tempting as it was to wax lyrical on the subject, I thought about it briefly, then decided that whenever I write about the Pontiff, I always end up making jokes about inflatable Popes and I have done it all before, so this time, I cast about to find out what Saint’s day it was today. I was briefly excited to find it was St Anselm’s Day, but this seems to be a different St Anselm to the one who was Archbishop to William the Conqueror, was exiled twice, and who came up with, amongst other things, the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God. This was one of the first philosophical/theological tracts I read, at the age of 18, and I have struggled with it ever since. On the one hand, the Platonist in me wants to accept the idea that there must be an absolute good, a gold standard of good, which is God, against which all other good is measured, by degrees, whereas the moral relativist in me says that the same action which is “good” in one set of circumstances can be “bad” in another. The action in itself does not possess innate goodness or evil, it is the circumstances and the outcome which make it so.

From this flows all of my disenchantment with, and distance from, organised religion, which sits firmly on the premise that it is possible to have a unified code of good and moral actions which suits every circumstance, and, when enforced by strong-arm tactics of the “my God is righter than your God” variety, leads, on an individual level to much sadness and mental anguish, and on a larger level, to “religious” wars and persecutions. I cannot believe that God cares whether we believe that the wine becomes blood, for instance, yet people have gone to the stake for saying it either does, or doesn’t. I can’t believe that God, with everything he’s got on his plate, gives a stuff either way whether gay marriages are celebrated or not. All I know is that if I were God, there would be mornings when I would wake up, look at the world with all its bickering and hatred and missiles and tanks and rockets and poverty and hunger and homelessness, and cruelty, and babies dying every 7 seconds for want of clean water, and I would be very, very tempted either to smite the idiots who said they were doing all of this in my name, and/or set the snooze button on my heavenly alarm for another millennium or so.

But, as it turns out, that St Anselm’s feast day isn’t til April 21st – the arm wrestling with St Anselm will have to wait five months or so, then. So I ended up looking again, and I find that today is apparently St Juthwara’s day. She was a British virgin and martyr from Dorset who lived in the 6th century AD. The authorised hagiography says:

Her name is how she is known in Anglo-Saxon, apparently a corruption of the British Aud Wyry (meaning Aud the Virgin), the name by which she is known in Brittany. She was said to have been the sister of Paul Aurelian, Sidwell of Exeter and Wulvela but this is hotly debated.

St Wulvela is, of course, not to be confused with St Vuvuzela, the patron saint of South African football supporters.

John Capgrave [1393-1464] writing in Nova Legendia Angliae, says that Juthwara was a pious girl who fell victim to a jealous stepmother [shades of Cinderella] who often prayed and fasted and gave alms. After the death of her father, she began to suffer a pain in her chest. At this point the story becomes rather surreal, because the wicked stepmother recommends that Juthwara should apply a soft cheese to each breast, and then tells her own son, who was apparently called Bana, that Juthwara is pregnant. He feels Juthwara’s underclothes (with, or without her consent) and, unable to distinguish between lactation and Lymeswold, strikes off Juthwara’s head.

She, of course, immediately picked up her own head, a la St Osyth, and a spring of water appeared where she fell. The son repented, and founded a monastery. The site of these miraculous happenings was identified as Halstock, in Dorset, from the contemporary spelling of Halyngstoka, and in the summer of 2012, the parish church of St Mary acknowledged this link by adding St Juthware to its dedication. Rodney Legg, in “Legging it in Dorset”, writes:

The public house sign in the centre of Halstock used to show a Saxon lady carrying her head. ‘Ye Quiet Woman’, as she was in the time of landlord William Worley, is said to be Juthware – now called Judith – who was decapitated by her brother in Judith Field on a hill north of the village. Her martyrdom features in the Sherborne Missal, that remarkable illuminated manuscript, and the beheading of royal wife Anne Boleyn inspired the similarly named Silent Woman at Coldharbour near Wareham. Halstock’s hostelry, sadly, was delicensed in the 1990s.

After her death, Juthware’s remains were translated to Sherborne Abbey, where they continued to be venerated until the Dissolution. She is depicted in the Great East Window of Sherborne Abbey, in company with her sister Sidwell. Her traditional emblem is a round soft cheese and/or a sword, which is unsurprising, given the prominence which both objects held in her short and presumably unhappy life.

And what lessons am I supposed to draw from the life of St Juthware? Beware of confusing cheese with lactation, and keep away from sharp objects, I suppose. It is interesting, though, to note the parallels in the story with other martyrdoms and beheadings of a similar nature – you could almost come to believe that there was some lost original, some ur-version, now lost, some uber-myth, that underlies them all. Perhaps those scholars who say that behind all this Christian symbolism there lurks an earlier acknowledgement of the Celtic cult of the severed head may have a point, although I was thrown out of a tutorial at College for suggesting precisely that same thing about the beheading of Bertilak de Hautdesert in “Gawaine and the Greene Knight”. In the interests of preventing a similar tragedy to St Juthware’s ever happening again, maybe I need to take it upon myself to institute random bosom-examinations of nubile maidens for traces of dairy products. Who knows.

That would certainly be more entertaining, and possibly a more fruitful use of my time than what I have really got lined up for next week. More sticking out dark nights alone, when I am the only one awake in the fox-hole. There is an old saying that there are no atheists in fox-holes, and I would like to believe it is true, although Big G has been noticeable by his absence of late, if you see what I mean. Sometimes we all wonder if it really is just us, watching out on the perimeter, eyes straining forwards into the dark, and at those times all you can fall back on is the words of that well-known theological commentator, Mr Bruce Springsteen – “No retreat, Baby, no surrender.”

Epiblog for the Feast of St Martin

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, with Debbie stumbling through the Ofsted visitation like a shell-shocked zombie. In the end her classes were unvisited, uninspected, another instance of that truism which I have often pointed out in these pages that 98% of the things we worry about never happen anyway or if they do happen happen in a way which is totally different to how we imagined it would be. But telling Debbie not to worry about her teaching is like telling the sun not to rise, or the waves not to come in.

The weather continues to be mostly cold, dark and miserable, such brightness as there is usually being confined to a brief burst of golden brilliant, crisp morning sunlight, before the day then dips into dim, hazy cold and darkens to chilly night. Frowsting weather, weather for toasting crumpets by the fire, weather for hot soup, or tea with a nip of rum or brandy. Sadly, we have all of the above ingredients except for the rum and brandy.

One person who knows all about toasting by the fire is Matilda, who has spent a second week consisting of alternating between Kitty’s bed in the hearth, her cardboard box in the office, or the food bowl. She has shown no inclination whatsoever to want to go outside, the nearest she gets is sitting at the conservatory door watching the birds on the bird feeder. These often include small tits. [Google, are you listening?] Freddie and Zak have gone home again now, but before they went, they did get to meet Elvis, who came to carry out his home inspection, complete with Kerrie, his handler, on Friday.

The first thing he did was hoover up the leftover dry food in Zak and Freddie's dishes, then he polished off Matilda's leavings, then he went on a sniffathon, but he seemed to get on well with Freddie and Zak, and he went for an explore round the garden on a lead, and he sat on the settee by the stove, and allowed himself to be ear-furfled by all and sundry. Generally, he seemed happy enough though. Funnily enough, the fact that he looks a bit like Tig, which didn't seem to matter at all when we saw him in the kennel environment, was quite affecting when he was actually sitting here, in places where she used to sit.

Because Matilda was in her little box up in the office, asleep, for the duration of his visit, and we didn’t think it was a good idea either to wake her up specially or, even worse, to let Elvis go and wake her up specially, we let her sleep on, but we don’t really have any lasting concerns on that score: where he is now, Elvis lives with 13 cats, and by the time Zak and Freddie went home, Matilda had begun studiously ignoring them, so if she does the same with Elvis, and he’s indifferent to cats, we should be home and dry.

Friday was a busy day, and I didn’t get much done, what with tidying up ready for Elvis’s visit, then the visit itself, and before that, Bernard turned up out of the blue bearing some dried cornflowers and lavender for Debbie, and a copy of his niece’s book on Mirfield for me, which he is hoping we’ll be able to help sell through our web site. Still, it was good to see him again, however briefly. And by the end of Friday it was good, also, to all sit round our own fire again and give thanks that we’d all survived another week, more or less. As I write this, a complication has arisen over whether we can be allowed to take on Elvis, over the security or otherwise of our garden, and we’re now once more back to the negotiating stage over this new development. We shall see.

On Saturday morning, we decided that we had better get the tomato harvest in which didn’t take long because there are but two, only one of which is red. Anyway, we ate the ceremonial tomato, or rather Debbie did, sliced up on her breakfast crumpet, on top of some bruschetta topping. I can’t help but feel that, given all the care and attention that has been lavished on producing that one tomato over the summer, its passing should have been marked with more ceremony, perhaps being paraded around the Quad first on a silver salver by liveried footmen in tabards singing Latin graces. Anyway, there it was, gone.

Talking of ceremony, I also discovered on Saturday that we have a new Archbishop of Canterbury. The new Archbishop of Canterbury said he was amazed to be given the job, and his first reaction on hearing the news was “Oh No”. Well, given his views on gay marriage and the inevitable irrelevant infighting over the issue that will now proceed to rive the Church apart and stop it doing what it actually should be doing, that made two of us.

Saturday evening marked the eve of Remembrance Day and we found ourselves somehow watching the choir of military wives singing in the Albert Hall. I asked Debbie if she would consider joining a choir to sing about how much she was missing me if I was posted overseas. She replied that given my vast bulk, no one would post me anywhere, let alone overseas, because they wouldn’t be able to afford the postage or find a big enough box. So that told me.

Primarily, of course, today is Remembrance Sunday, and it falls, this year, actually on 11th November. As each year goes by, though, I find myself becoming more and more conflicted over the ideas behind this event. On the one hand, obviously I want to remember people like my Great Uncle Harry, of the Royal Field Artillery, who I never knew, gassed at Ypres in 1917 or Deb’s relatives William Evans of the Suffolk Regiment, died of wounds in 1915, or Jack Ross DFC, lost in his Hurricane over the Irish Sea in January 1942

But it also seems to me that a new agenda has been subtly grafted on to the arrangements, a veneer of the same sort of compulsory patriotism that marred the Olympics. The subtle pressure that says, in effect, that commemorating the fallen on Remembrance Day now comes “bundled” with the assumption that you are also supporting “Our Troops” and you are therefore, ipso facto, behind the current operations in Afghanistan.

This is a “mission creep” too far, for me. While I regret the loss of life and admire their skill, professionalism and bravery, I do think in many ways our forces out there are just being used now as “professional targets” in an unwinnable war, to save the faces and the reputations of the politicians that put them in harm’s way in the first place, and who have the hypocritical gall to stand before the Cenotaph in Whitehall carrying wreaths.

I have never been particularly in favour of the Afghanistan war, the more so now it also involves indiscriminate loss of civilian life and drone attacks (increased tremendously during the Obama presidency). To do the job properly in Afghanistan would require massive resources and a garrison force in perpetuity, both of which the politicians (of all parties) know would be politically unpopular, indeed impossible, especially as it might involve increasing taxation to pay for something like that, in a time of austerity and defence cuts. So they send our troops into the valley of death in an unwinnable conflict, with shortages of equipment asking them to die in a vain attempt to impose “western values” on a country in the grip of violent medieval thugs who are quite happy to shoot a girl in the head just because she wants to go to school.

There is so much wrong with Afghanistan, and none of it can be solved with bullets and bombs. And these same politicians who ask our armed forces to carry out this mission impossible, when the soldiers and airmen come back, perhaps having lost a limb or having suffered other injuries, and they leave the service or are even, sometimes, made redundant, these same politicians leave it to charities to pick up the pieces, when people develop mental problems, suffer from stress, or even lose their livelihood and become homeless.

So no, I am afraid – I will wear my poppy, but I will wear it for my own reasons, and not because I am in favour of war in Afghanistan. In many ways, like Iraq, it was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and for all the wrong reasons. It is, in many ways, appropriate that poppies grow in Afghanistan, as they grew in Flanders almost a century ago, because our casualties there are being sacrificed in the same mindless way as the First World War soldiers were, and for similar vague hopes and aspirations. Lions led by donkeys, I am afraid.

I also tend to think, at this time of year, of my Dad and what his war experience would have been like. Physically, at any rate, he was lucky enough to come through the whole five years of struggle against Hitler unscathed, apart from the partial deafness (caused by the guns) which he suffered from for the remainder of his days. I think of what it must have been like for him, sitting up there on the cliffs at Fairlight with his ack-ack unit. Probably a bit like life in general, I suppose, long periods of relative inactivity and boredom, interspersed with a few seconds of blind panic, terror and danger.

I’ve actually done a certain amount of research around the subject, because I wanted to use the material in an as yet unfinished family history project, and there is actually a substantial body of stuff on the Hastings area in wartime, both official accounts, web sites compiled by amateur military historians and oral history and memoirs by people who were there at the time.

Although the pressure eased after the end of the Battle of Britain, when Hitler turned his attention eastwards to attack Russia, the south coast towns such as Hastings still remained very much in the danger zone for the remainder of the conflict.

A change of tactic occurred in March 1942 when fighter-bombers were modified to carry bombs. This resulted in what were called “tip-and-run” raids whereby, as the name suggests, the German fighter-bombers would sneak in fast and low, drop their bombs and then high-tail it back to France. The first tip-and-run raid on Hastings occurred on 17th May 1942 when four Messerschmidt 109s circled the town, machine-gunning the streets in the West Hill area. Twenty-eight year old Constance Ethel Torrance was killed when a bullet penetrated the window of her house, at 60 St George's Road. Formerly Constance Ethel Beale, she had been born in 1914 to Richard Beale and his wife Lydia, whose maiden name was Lydia Nice, and had married Jack Torrance in 1938.

It was on 17th October 1942 (which was also Granny Fenwick’s birthday – she would have been 55 that year) when Feldwebel Karl Hermann Niesel of Jagdgeschwader 26 set off in his Focke-Wulf 190 in a “tip and run” raid on Hastings. Sadly for Hermann, or “Uncle Hermann” as he was known by his family, he came to the attention of two Hawker Typhoons of No. 486 (New Zealand) Squadron. The following extract is from the combat report of P/O Thomas and Sgt Sames "A" Flight No.486 (NZ) Squadron (AIR50/160) and tells the brief, sad and unromantic story of his demise.

“P/O. G. G. Thomas (Yellow 1) and Sgt. A. N. Sames (Yellow 2) airborne 13.15 hours for Coastal Patrol Beachy Head - Dungeness. At 13.25 hours when flying East to West at 500 feet about half a mile inland they observed two FW 190s flying roughly NE over the sea at 20/30 feet and about one and a half miles ahead. Yellow 1 saw a bomb burst in the town[Hastings]. The enemy aircraft then turned port due South and out to sea where they split up, one flying SE at sea level and the other continuing South at about 20/30 feet followed by Yellow Section flying at 345/350 a.s.l. Yellow 1 opened fire at long range with several short bursts of cannon fire and noticed slashes in the sea short of the enemy aircraft which immediately started to weave.

Yellow Section closed to within 500 yards and enemy aircraft began a spiral weave. Yellow 1 opened fire again with several short bursts and observed strikes on the side of the fuselage. The enemy aircraft pulled up violently and then winged over to port and down to sea level right across Yellow 2's line of fire, then straightened out and climbed up slowly. Yellow 2 fired three more short bursts striking fuselage and engine.

A jet of flame burst from the starboard side of the engine, the hood was jettisoned and parts of the enemy aircraft fell away and it turned over and fell burning into the sea, disappearing immediately. In the meantime the other aircraft had escaped in the direction of France. Yellow Section returned to the English coast and on approaching Hastings at about 6/700 feet were fired upon by coastal guns without effect”

Yes, regarding the bit about the British coastal guns firing at their own planes, it was probably my Dad! He always used to tell me that they fired at it first, whatever it was, then looked it up afterwards.

Hermann Niesel was the youngest but one of seven children; he had five older sisters: Edith (1907), Johanna (1908), Herta (1910), Ruth (1911) and Irma (1912) and one younger brother Karlheinz (1920), who died 1922, two years old. Hermann Niesel was not married and had no children, he was betrothed to a girl called Hanni Kuhne. They intended to marry after the end of the war. Hanni was a Red Cross Sister during the hostilities.

Hermann’s progression in flying was probably typical of many young men in the Luftwaffe, learning at first with a glider on a gliding field near Hirschberg (now Jelenia Gora), and becoming a flight instructor for gliders by the beginning of 1934. Then he went into the Luftwaffe, and he was in the Spanish Civil War with the Condor Legion. After the war Silesia was given to Poland and the Niesels were relocated, like many more of the German population in Silesia.

I’ve given his story in some detail to show, I suppose, that, contrary to the cardboard cut-out “Squareheads” and “Huns” that filled the war films and comics of my childhood, he was a real person, and his loss in the English Channel, with no known grave, was no doubt mourned by other real people. True, he had just dropped a bomb on Hastings, and that also killed real people, just as we dropped bombs on Germany, because they had dropped them on us, and so on. Niesel’s attack hit Pevensey Road, Warrior Square, and St Columb’s Church, killing two civilians and wounding 16. And given the chance, no doubt he would have done to the pilots of those two Typhoons what they did to him. And meanwhile, down below on the cliffs, my Dad was busily trying to kill all of them, even the ones on his own side!

It just goes to point up the absurd tragedy of war. Here you have two people born within a year of each other, Constance Torrance and Hermann Niesel. You can almost imagine them growing up, falling in love; meanwhile, over the other side of the world, two young New Zealanders are growing up, learning to fly, and the chain of events, the skein of sequences, somehow contrives to bring them all to Hastings, 70 years ago, where Constance is struck one day by bullet fired through her window from a German plane on 17th May, and Hermann is brought down off the seafront by a stream of cannon shells on 17th October. Jack mourns for Constance and Hanni mourns for Hermann, and the people who knew and loved the civilians he killed mourn their dead, and you take all that pain and extrapolate it across all of the other losses and the mourning and you begin to question even the very basic premises that underlie it all, even though, admittedly the Second World War was, from our point of view, the nearest thing to a “just” war that we have experienced, because it was about more than merely curbing Germany’s territorial intentions, it was about stopping Hitler’s insane one-man mission to enslave the planet. But even so the waste, the waste…

The military theme continues with today’s saint, St Martin of Tours, or “Martinmas”. His feast day marked the time when the harvest was complete (well we did pick the only ripe tomato) and hiring fairs were held so that agricultural labourers could seek new posts for the following year.

St. Martin of Tours started out as a Roman soldier. He was baptized as an adult and became a monk. It is understood that he was a kind man who led a quiet and simple life. The most famous legend of his life is that he once cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar during a snowstorm, to save the beggar from dying of the cold. That night he dreamed that Jesus himself was wearing the piece of cloak he had given away. Martin heard Jesus say to the angels: "Here is Martin, the Roman soldier who is not baptised; he has clothed me."

From the late 4th century to the late Middle Ages, much of Europe, including the UK, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin's Day lasting for 40 days, and called "Quadragesima Sancti Martini", or "the forty days of St. Martin." On St. Martin's eve, people ate and drank very heartily for the last time before they started to fast. This period of fasting was later shortened and became what we now call “Advent”.

There are many weird and wacky customs associated with St Martin, including, historically, sacrificing cockerels in Ireland. Also in Ireland, no wheel of any kind was to turn on St. Martin's Day, because Martin was thrown into a mill stream and killed by the wheel and so it was judged to be not right to turn any kind of wheel on that day.

In some parts of the Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, children make their own lantern and go door to door with the lantern, and sing St. Martin songs, in exchange for sweets, a follow—on from the “Souling” for soul-cakes we talked about last week.

St Martin is also credited with a prominent role in spreading wine-making throughout the Touraine region and facilitating the planting of many vines. The Greek myth that Aristaeus first discovered the concept of pruning the vines after watching a goat eat some of the foliage has been somehow transferred to Martin. Martin is also credited with introducing the Chenin Blanc grape varietal, from which most of the white wine of western Touraine and Anjou is made. And very nice it is, too; before it became too expensive to buy, Touraine was one of my favourites.

Because of this element of being thankful for the fruits of the earth, and its association with the end of harvest and preparations for winter, St. Martin's Feast is much like the American Thanksgiving (celebrated on the 4th Thursday in November) a celebration of the earth's bounty. Because it also comes before the penitential season of Advent, it is seen as a mini "carne vale", with all the attendant feasting and bonfires. As at Michaelmas on 29 September, goose is eaten in most places (the goose is a symbol for St. Martin himself. It is said that as he was hiding from the people who wanted to make him Bishop, a honking goose gave away his hiding spot). I can only assume the same method was employed when picking the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

In many countries, including Germany, Martinmas celebrations begin at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of this eleventh day of the eleventh month. Bonfires are built, and children carry lanterns in the streets after dark, singing songs for which they are rewarded with candy. Many of these associations are obviously graftings of pre-Christian pagan ceremonies or events, and the result is a curious mixture now, where the pagans have surrendered the Martinmas Bonfires to the Christians, who have in turn rendered them up to Guy Fawkes, and the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month has now been appropriated as the formula for the Armistice.

In some regions of Germany, the traditional sweet of Martinmas is "Martinshörnchen", a pastry shaped in the form of a croissant, which recalls both the hooves of St. Martin's horse and, by being the half of a pretzel, the division of his cloak with the beggar. Another widespread custom in Germany is bonfires on St. Martin's eve, called "Martinsfeuer." In recent years, the processions that accompany those fires have been spread over almost a fortnight before Martinmas, but previously, the Rhine River valley, for example, would be lined with fires on the eve of Martinamas.

Sadly, that is not the only time the Rhine Valley has been lined with fires, there were quite a few, less happy occasions between 1939 and 1945 when it was ablaze from end – see also under Coventry, Rotterdam, Hull, the East End of London, Hamburg, and, finally, Dresden. I wonder whether Hermann Niesel ever ate Martinshornschen, or watched Martinsfeuer.

So, anyway, today I have been mostly meditating on the futility of war, which ought to be a no-brainer. Well it is a no-brainer, all meditation is. Am I against war? When you look at the absurdities of it, the random evil of it, yes, as a concept, I conclude I am, apart from, perhaps, the need to stop another Hitler or to defend our country against unprovoked aggression, but for me, the latter stops at the White Cliffs of Dover, and doesn’t extend to misguided foreign adventurism that comes with a heavy price tag.

Maybe St Martin, paring off half of his cloak and giving it to a frozen beggar, could be a paradigm for a new kind of armed forces, more emergency services than armed services. God knows, with all the freak weather happening all over the world, there is a need for it. War is a failure of the political process, and the people who are stopping us beating the swords into ploughshares and stopping us clothing the beggars and feeding the hungry are not the soldiers. By and large, our soldiers, sailors and airmen did, and continue to do, their best. They’ve proved, by and large, to be as humane as possible in Afghanistan when dealing with wounded opponents or allies, at a terrible cost sometimes, when the injured ally turns out to be not injured at all, and not an ally.

I don’t begrudge the soldiers, sailors and airmen their Remembrance Day, and I don’t blame them. I blame the politicians.

Epiblog for the Feast of St Birstan

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one of my least favourite weeks in the whole calendar, given that it contains both Halloween and the start of November, my least favourite month in the whole calendar. Its only redeeming feature, as a week, being that it also contains half term, so at least Debbie has not had to venture out in the cold and the frost to far flung exotic places such as Stalybridge. That pleasure is still to resume, next week. The weather forecast for any places where we did want to go, however, was so poohey that we abandoned the idea of getting off in the camper, full stop. The only good thing that can be said about last week is that no-one has pulled the door handle off…yet.

The squirrels are conspicuous by their absence, Brenda and Freda seem to have gone to ground, though there are still a few birds hanging around the bird feeder and the table on the decking, especially small tits. [I have emphasised that particular species in a shameless attempt to entice Google’s web crawler spider program to pick up the words for when people type them into search engines, and potentially increase dramatically the number of readers of this blog. Many of them will, of course, go away disappointed, but it’s the hits that count.]

Things will resume next week with a vengeance, in fact, because Ofsted are now threatening to visit the college, which has thrown the whole college admin staff into a flat panic, as they may well have to actually do something to justify their existence, which will be a new experience for many of them. Deb is hoping that Ofsted will largely bypass her; she can’t really envisage them setting off mob-handed to the sort of run-down tin sheds on Godforsaken housing estates to provide “Outreach” in the hinterland that education forgot, just on the offchance of catching her out without a risk assessment or something.

Nevertheless, just in case, she has been boning up on all of this stuff which everybody on the staff is supposed to carry round in their heads with them at all times, including personal evacuation plans for students with mobility problems and ethnic diversity training manuals. She was bemoaning the latter in a phone call to Granny only yesterday, who replied “Never mind, at least it will earn you some brownie points.” I don’t think she’s really got the hang of this diversity idea, somehow. [Before you all email in to tell me, I know that the “brownie” in brownie points refers to small girl scouts rather than any supposed ethnic origin, but why pass up the opportunity for a feeble and possibly tastelessly offensive joke at my Mother-in-Law’s expense? And, let’s face it, I could have made a joke about my having a “personal evacuation plan” featuring Senna Pods. But I spared you that one.]

The animals don’t like the weather any more than I do. Zak and Freddie have been disputing the ownership of Zak’s armchair. While Zak vacates it temporarily to snaffle Freddie’s breakfast (or whatever he has left of it) Freddie nips in behind him and jumps up into the chair. This morning, it was so cold that Zak got back into the armchair regardless of the fact that Freddie was already in it, and after a degree of shuffling round and settling down, they reached an accommodation that allowed them to share their body-warmth to maximum effect.

Matilda, meanwhile, has been spending most of her time curled up and sleeping on Kitty’s old bin-bag/beanbag of paper shreddings in the hearth, on which we have spread out her new crocheted blanket from her Auntie Maisie, and she seems duly appreciative of this. In the last 24 hours the only time she has moved from it has been to visit the food dish.

It has been pointed out to me by several people that I have sort of introduced Elvis into proceedings without either relating any of his history or indeed continuing the story by telling what happened when we went to meet him, so please allow me to rectify that omission. Elvis was a stray who was rescued from the side of a road in Cyprus, where he was living – or rather slowly dying – by scavenging. He had the lungworm infection very badly, and there is no doubt in my mind that his life was saved by those selfless saints of Cyprus Pride, June and Michael. Shipped back to England, Elvis racked up an £1800 vet bill, and his life hung in the balance for many months, but he pulled through, albeit at the loss of some of his lung mass. He will be susceptible to kennel cough for the remainder of his days. Nobody really knows how old he is.

The journey to the kennels at Ferrybridge was a horrendous one, of the sort I used to hate when driving. I was very glad Debbie was at the wheel. Mile after mile of roadworks along the M62, 50mph average speed restriction, and heavy traffic bunched together in rain and spray, all the way. Eventually the impressive bulk of Ferrybridge’s cooling towers indicated that it was time to turn off, and despite following the directions provided to the letter, we drove past the kennels twice, once from each direction, reasoning [incorrectly, as it turned out] that this couldn’t possibly be the entrance.

Once we got there, the staff were very welcoming and even produced a cup of steaming coffee for me! They also produced Elvis, who jumped up into the camper van and started sniffing around. Kerrie, who is in charge of him, and indeed, seemingly the whole establishment, says that, because of his background history as a one-time scavenger, Elvis is still very food-motivated and may not know when to stop eating. Debbie cast a meaningful glance in my direction. She thinks that, like Nigella, I am one of those people whose mission in life is to fatten up those around me so that I don’t stand out so much. [I wonder if Nigella has problems with scavenging, and her husband catches her with her head in the bin and has to shout “Oi! Nigella! No! Get back on the Stairmaster!”]

In the same way that Bruce Springsteen is a perfectly ordinary American with someone else’s shoulders, Elvis is a perfectly ordinary little dog with Fred Basset’s ears. Still, despite his slightly odd external appearance, and his extensive [and expensive] medical history, we warmed to him, and I think the feeling was mutual. We are being inspected this coming Friday to see if we come up to the exacting standard necessary for re-homing a dog. Given our well-ordered and entirely conventional household, what could possibly go wrong?

That was at the very start of the week, of course, and since then it has gone downhill, as I said. I’ve not been that well, either, physically, I mean, I think I had a tinge of flu. Well, a tinge of something, anyway. The age of “shivery” is not yet dead. The weather kept the would-be trick or treaters away on Wednesday, though, and so far it’s been so quiet on the firework front, that I am wondering whether it’s another sign of the times. The people currently in Parliament have finally triumphed over the man who wanted to blow it up, by wrecking the economy to the extent that nobody can afford fireworks any more. Meanwhile, I sat clutching a hot-water bottle, gritted my teeth, and got on with the stuff I absolutely positively had to do – anything else is next week’s problem.

Talking of Parliament, our postal voting forms turned up for the Police Commissioner elections during the week, and I filled mine in. Debbie was initially going to chuck hers on the back of the fire, until I reminded her of all those racehorses that had thrown themselves under suffragettes just so she could exercise her democratic right as her own person, and not merely as my chattel or appendage. Personally I don’t have a lot of time for the idea of the Police Commissioner as a concept. I view it as part of the general political gimmickery that despoils the simple, classical symmetry of our constitutional structure, along with devolved assemblies, regional assemblies, elected mayors, MEPs, and all the other useless claptrap which merely provides extra costly layers of bureaucracy and potential conflicts of interest.

Nevertheless, despite my misgivings, it is obviously going to happen anyway, so I wrote to all four of the people who are standing in this area asking them about their stance and policy on animal mistreatment and wildlife crime. Not one of them has replied, or even attempted to contact me by either phone or email. It is no wonder people feel disenfranchised, cut off, apathetic and cynical when we have would-be politicians like these. In the end I voted for the independent candidate, for several reasons, one being that he has a very silly name, secondly he was once a serving police officer, which is more than you can say for the others, and finally, the fact he is an independent allows me to vote without my vote being seen as a proxy endorsement of the Junta or the feeble opposition. Debbie looked in vain for a UKIP or a Green to vote for, so her form may well have ended up burnt to a crisp, suffragettes or no suffragettes, and in fact, sometimes, deliberately not voting can in itself be a political act.

As well as containing Halloween and All Saints Day, which I always recall from my schooldays because we invariably sang “For all the saints, who from their labours rest” which is a great hymn, this week also brought All Souls’ Day, or, as some cultures have it, the Day of the Dead. Personally, I don’t have much trouble recalling the dead, and I think of them every day, especially at a time of the year such as this one, when the membrane between this world and the other is sometimes demonstrably thin. I often feel like Henry Vaughan, lamenting that

“They are all gone into the world of light
And I alone sit ling’ring here…”

From a folklore point of view, however, All Souls’ Day is interesting because of the tradition of “souling”, which was essentially semi-organised, semi-institutionalised begging, where gangs of urchins would go from house to house singing their “souling” songs and wishing the well being and continued existence of everyone in the house for another year, in return for some small dole of meat, drink or money. A bit like trick or treat, but without the trick.

Several “souling” songs have been collected, and the best known one is probably “Soul Cake” which has been recorded by artists as diverse as The Watersons (good version, but monotonous and scary) and Sting (bad, very bad.)

“A soul, a soul a soul cake
Please good missus, a soul cake
An apple a pear a plum or a cherry
Or any good thing to make us merry
One for Peter, One for Paul
One for him who made us all…”

My own favourite is the Edgmond Mens’ Souling Song, collected in Shropshire and performed, inter alia, by John Kirkpatrick and Sue Harris:

‘The streets they are gotten dark, dirty and cold,
We are come a-souling, this night we’ll make bold,
We are come a-souling as well doth appear,
And all that we soul for is ale and strong beer’.

Shropshire archives has the following on its web site, drawing on the work of both Roy Palmer and Charlotte Burne:

In Pulverbatch , it is thought that the last person to keep this custom going was a Mary Ward, who died in 1853 (at the age of 101). In Hopton, Mrs Gill had soul-cakes made in her house for the souling-children until her death in 1884. In 1938, Phyllis Crawford pointed out that at Wem the ‘souling cake’ had died away, but in villages near Oswestry at around the same time, including West Felton and Llynclys, children still visited local houses. Lillian Hayward stated: ‘The soul cakes are, I believe, no longer made, but nuts, sweets, and apples are put ready for them’.

The folklore site, Mother Nature Network, takes up the story:

What is known is that by the 8th century, soul cakes were given to beggars (soulers) who would say prayers for the dead on All Souls' Eve. And the price? One soul saved per cake. In other places they were given to wandering mummers, the costumed predecessors of buskers, as they entertained on Halloween. Today's trick-or-treaters are thought to be their descendants, and soul cakes are thought to be the first treats for tricks. These days, soul cakes are generally presented as a small round cake, variously spiced, often studded across the top with a cross of currants. They are part scone, part biscuit, part teacake — and a sweet little treat harkening back to the times when souls roamed this realm and Halloween was truly a haunted night.

That sounds a little early for me, and I wonder if it's a typo for 18th Century. Anyway, I suppose I should be thankful that, dire as things are at present in many ways, I’m not yet reduced to begging. I am sitting here in front of a relatively warm stove and there is food in the house. It’s a day for counting blessings, I guess. Mind you, speaking as a scavenger, those Soul Cakes look like a very good way of saving souls…

Today is also the feast of St Birstan. It is also the feast of St Charles Borromeo, a much more well-known and conventional saint, who, despite being related to the Medicis, allotted most of his income to charity, forbade himself all luxury and imposed severe penances upon himself. He sacrificed wealth, high honours, esteem and influence to become poor. During the plague and famine of 1576, in Italy, he tried to feed 60,000 to 70,000 people daily. To do this he borrowed large sums of money that required years to repay. Whereas the civil authorities fled at the height of the plague, he stayed in the city, where he ministered to the sick and the dying, helping those in want. Worn out, he died at the age of only 46.

Fascinating as St Charles Borromeo is, however, I have decided to write about Birstan instead on the Police Commissioner principle, that he has the sillier name. In fact, St Birstan’s name is not altogether decided – in some accounts he appears as Brinstan, and with a little more effort, some culinary help, and less time spent praying, could have invented chutney 900 years before Richard Branson. Bring out the Brinstan! Birstan succeeded to the See of Winchester on the resignation of St Frithestan in May 931AD. Appropriately enough in a week which contains All Souls’ Day, Birstan, “a man of exceptional piety and charity”, was devoted to prayers for the dead and also did his best to help the poor, founding the Hospital of St John, adjoining St Swithun’s Bridge in Winchester. A Norman Chapel replaced the original in the Broadway and St. Birstan's image can still be seen in the stained glass there today. He managed to combine his interest in prayer and the dead rather neatly, by dying whilst at prayer in 934AD, after only three years as Bishop.

He is best known, apparently, for an incident which occurred some years after his death. Some time at the end of the 10th century, the Bishop of Winchester, St. Aethelwold, visited the graveyard of the Old Minster (Saxon Cathedral) at Winchester, where he was shocked to find himself being addressed by the spirit of St. Birstan, thus:

"I am Birstan, former Bishop of this town" and pointing with his right hand, "This is Birinus, who first preached here," and with his left, "This is Swithun, particular patron of this church and city".

St. Aethelwold was so impressed that he reinstated the veneration of the saint as an equal to both the better known Birinus and Swithun, though he was never much known outside Hampshire. Well, maybe all that will change now, especially if my ploy with Google comes off. In the meantime, I daresay the coming week will, potentially, give me plenty of cause to employ my own personal evacuation plan, as we struggle on in our attempts to climb out of the mire, and avoid having to go a-souling!

And no, this is not me. Nice hat, though!