How to Be English (14 page)

THESE DAYS, FAIRIES
seem to be almost the preserve of Hollywood, or maybe some leprechaun-infested corner of Tralee. Alternatively, there is a sense maybe that they are some aspect of a hidden, fearsome Transylvanian creature of the night. Yet fairies were once so much part of the English psyche that the historian Ronald Hutton has called them the ‘British religion'.

It is hard to overestimate just how unfashionable fairies have become in the UK during the twentieth century. They had a good start thanks to the combined Edwardian talents of Arthur Rackham and J. M. Barrie.
Peter Pan
was first shown to rapturous applause in 1904. In fact, there is some evidence that fairies tend to enjoy their revivals at the turn of centuries (
A Midsummer Night's Dream
1595/6, Coleridge's ‘Songs of the Pixies' 1793, the film
The Fairy Tale
1997). But something about the whole Tinkerbell thing – the delicate femininity, the questionable childish sexuality – did not mix well with the century to come.

When Arthur Conan Doyle published his Cottingley fairy photographs in 1920 – the very obvious fakes made by two little girls in Yorkshire – they had the very opposite effect on later generations to the one he intended. One look at the dancing gnome, or the obvious brassieres, was enough to turn fairies into a laughing stock. In fact, one of the girls maintained until she died that they had faked the photographs because nobody believed them when they
had
seen fairies.

Seven years later, a retired naval communications pioneer, Sir Quentin Craufurd, founded the Fairy Investigation Society, designed to promote serious study. Over the years, it managed to attract a number of prominent supporters, including Walt Disney and the Battle of Britain supremo Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, whose career was not helped by his public expressions of belief. The Fairy Investigation Society went underground in the 1970s, from where it has only just emerged.

Despite all that, something has been going on out there to bring the hopelessly unfashionable back into fashion, subtly and below the radar of the chattering classes in London. There are now whole orchestras of people describing themselves as ‘fairy musicians'. There is a magazine, published in Maryland, called
Fairie
, and enough new fairy websites to fill pages of Google. There is even an American attempt to re-brand Midsummer's Day as ‘Fairy Day'. There is a globalised version of fairies under revival with a very distinctive style – dungeons and dragons by way of Botticelli – and its array of small businesses offering music, books and spells. Nor are all American either.

These are not the dark fairies you might read about in Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market'. This is more like a glittery and diaphanous branch of the New Age. We are talking optimistic, light-bearing fairies, bringing the natural world to life. ‘A man can't always
do
as he likes,' said John Ruskin in his Slade lecture ‘Fairyland' in 1893, ‘but he can always
fancy
what he likes.' For Ruskin, fairies were an antidote to grim reality. In a dull concrete world, which seems determined to engulf what remains of those woods and forests, some of us do long for a bit of magic.

But maybe we shouldn't wish for these things too fervently. You only have to read the descriptions in Cornish newspapers of the 1840s, of families battering or burning their children because they believed they were changelings – enchanted blocks of wood put there by fairies who had stolen the real child away – to realise that English fairies were not a source of delight; they were a source of terror. They were troublesome, amoral, capricious and dangerous and deep in the landscape, and people used to keep them at bay if they possibly could. If they ever found themselves amongst them, they were very careful not to dance with them or eat with them, for fear they would wake up a century hence.

Despite this, the modern English soul tends to follow Rudyard Kipling in
Puck of Pook's Hill
(1906), aware that the fairies are very ancient, aware that perhaps they should not have ‘broken the hills' quite so enthusiastically, but sensing also that their fairies are in some way a repository of a magical English tapestry of history. They are also careful not to recite
A Midsummer Night's Dream
three times on Old Midsummer's Day (24 June).

‘Oh,' cried Lizzie, ‘Laura, Laura,

You should not peep at goblin men.'

Lizzie cover'd up her eyes,

Cover'd close lest they should look;

Laura rear'd her glossy head,

And whisper'd like the restless brook:

‘Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,

Down the glen tramp little men.'

From ‘Goblin Market', Christina Rossetti (1830–94)

FOR GENERATIONS, THE
English averted their eyes from the peculiarities of Glastonbury Tor, the strange island crowned by the tower of St Michael's Church, jutting out of the Somerset Levels. It was too weird to be quite polite. It was also the site of the hanging, drawing and quartering of Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, and people tended just to leave it at that.

It has never been quite clear what the new spirit was that gripped the English in the 1960s, but it has made Glastonbury – with its half-forgotten, ruined abbey – the capital city of the New Age. Not quite the New Jerusalem, but a gentle English, mythic version of it. Partly this was a renewed fascination with King Arthur and the mythology of the nation, partly a reaction against the chimera of technological progress, partly a growing interest in non-mainstream spirituality. Whatever it was, from the calm of Chalice Well to the last vegetarian tea shop, Glastonbury is now the pulsating heart of something else. It is also the presiding genius of the annual, world-famous Glastonbury Festival.

The tor is at the centre of two important legends. The first is that this is where Joseph of Arimathea landed when he bought the crown of thorns and the Holy Grail – the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper – to these shores, and where legend has it he also brought Jesus as a boy (see Chapter 37). It is here where he buried his staff or the crown of thorns itself, and it grew into the Glastonbury Thorn, said to flower twice a year at Christmas and Easter, which eventually fell victim to a Puritan fanatic in the seventeenth century.

That is the first legend. The second is that Glastonbury Tor marks the entrance to the world of Faerie, the Avalon where King Arthur was taken to be healed of his wounds and where his coffin and bones were found by monks in 1170, and buried in state by Edward I a century later. This is the source of the idea of the ‘Once and Future King' (
Rex quondam, rexque futurus
), because that was the inscription said to have been found in Arthur's tomb.

There are other legends. One idea, introduced by the mystic writer Katharine Maltwood, is that the Tor is the heart of a giant zodiac built into the hedgerows over the Glastonbury area. The slight difficulty is that the area surrounding the Tor was under water, and navigable, during the period Maltwood said it was etched out.

Either way, Glastonbury itself has begun to come back to life over the past generation, thanks to very English individuals like Wellesley Tudor Pole, the founder of Chalice Well Gardens, and the man Winston Churchill asked to organise a psychic barrier against the invading Nazis in 1940. There is a mind-expanding quality to the place, and clues about the true nature of England if we could but discern them. But this may be an over-romantic view – there are certainly those among the English who would happily build a bypass to the A303 slap through the middle.

There is on the confines of western Britain a certain royal island, called in the ancient speech Glastonia, marked out by broad boundaries, girt round with waters rich in fish and with still-flowing rivers, fitted for many uses of human indigence, and dedicated to the most sacred of deities.

St Augustine of Canterbury

WILLIAM BLAKE WAS
an English mystic, a misunderstood poet and a maverick artist. He also claimed a privileged ability to glimpse other worlds. He saw an angel in a tree in Peckham Rye, of all places. He saw his brother's soul leaving his body on his deathbed, clapping its hands with joy. He was haunted by peculiar apparitions, like the ghost of a flea. And he also believed he conversed at night with the great, dead poets and artists of England.

The year 1804 marked a series of breakthroughs in industrial Britain, such as Richard Trevithick's first steam locomotive and gas lighting at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Sometime that year – we don't know when – there he was, sitting in his cramped room in South Molton Street near Oxford Street in London, now the haunt of fashion houses and hairdressers with extraordinary prices, penning the words for the poem we know as ‘Jerusalem'.

The poem included its famous admonition to build ‘Jerusalem / In England's green and pleasant land'. Unsure what to do with it, he slipped it some years later into the long poem ‘Milton' that he believed he had taken down in dictation, not just from Milton himself, but from a range of other giants from beyond the grave, at the rate of up to thirty lines at a time, ‘even against my will'.

It was an exhausting and painful process, and he found himself forced to scribble pages of fantasy in the middle of the night, time after time, while his wife Catherine got up and sat with him motionless to support him in his own mental fight.

Where do you see these people, asked one acquaintance a little sceptically? ‘Here, madam,' said Blake, tapping his forehead.

‘Jerusalem' has become one of the best-known poems in the English language, transformed into a soaring patriotic anthem with music by Sir Hubert Parry. It is still sung by socialists and conservatives alike, partly because the words are obscure enough to satisfy everybody, partly because the tune is stirring enough to have emerged as an alternative national anthem. So patriotic, in fact, that it was banned recently from St Paul's Cathedral on the grounds that it is too nationalistic, which wasn't really what Blake meant.

The poem which begins ‘And did those feet in ancient time' refers to a legend that Jesus himself had come to England as a boy. Like Milton, Blake thought that God had reserved England for special work for the world, to lead the world out of rationalism to a new age of imagination and truth. His next long poem was also called ‘Jerusalem' and he had another go at it:

And now our time returns again:

Our souls exult, & London's towers

Receive the Lamb of God to dwell

In England's green & pleasant bowers.

Blake was almost incomprehensible to his contemporaries. The Poet Laureate Robert Southey called him ‘a decided madman'. It wasn't for another century that ‘Jerusalem', and its attack on the ‘dark satanic mills' would be dusted down and rehabilitated for a new use – to inspire people to dedicate the war effort, during the First World War, to something more high-minded.

The song was borrowed by the Christian socialist campaigner Stewart Headlam and used across the front of his journal
Church Reformer
, and it was this which brought what was otherwise rather an obscure verse to people's attention. From there, it came to be noticed by the high-minded movement Fight for Right, launched by the explorer Sir Francis Younghusband in 1915. The Poet Laureate Robert Bridges was searching for some kind of song to be sung at their rally at Queen's Hall in London on 28 March the following year, where he was giving the opening address, and sent the words of ‘Jerusalem' to his friend Sir Hubert Parry. Parry wrote the music in one day (10 March 1916) and gave it to the organist Walford Davies, who was conducting the choirs at the same rally. Parry pointed speechlessly to the notes of ‘O, clouds unfold!' as somehow expressing something that was hugely important to him. The tune brought the house down.

Fight for Right unravelled in 1917 in in-fighting between the jingoists and the idealists, but one of the people at the rally a year before had been the pioneer feminist Millicent Fawcett. She wanted a song for her rally in 1918 to celebrate women finally winning the vote, and even persuaded Parry to conduct it (a few weeks before he died). It has been associated with women's causes, and the Women's Institute in particular, ever since.