Sandlands (20 page)

‘The ancients?' Dorothy had queried, gently uncertain, through the candy-twist steam which rose from her punch.

Ivy had flourished an expansive arm, scattering buttery raindrops from her foil-wrapped potato. ‘Oh, yes. Epiphany is like all the Christian festivals – steeped in the lore of earlier faiths. Look at the Christmas tree itself, if it comes to that. Bringing evergreens indoors at the winter solstice and decorating them was very much a pagan custom. It was condemned in fact, by the Prophet Jeremiah.
Thus saith
the Lord: learn not the way of the heathen, for
the customs of the people are vain; for one cutteth
a tree out of the forest with the axe. They
deck it with silver and with gold.
But you have one here in the church porch every year. The tinsel is in a box in the vestry, underneath the offertory plates.'

She'd talked about forest fires, too, and how they were a natural and necessary part of the woodland ecosystem, removing dead materials, releasing nutrients back into the soil that have been locked up in mature plants and creating space for new growth. ‘You must surely have witnessed it on the common here,' she said.

Happily, however, the Epiphany Burning had not taken place on the common – which must be a tinderbox, even in January – but on the hill behind the churchyard. Willie Woolnough and the other bell-ringers set them on their way with a short set of changes (‘The ringing of bells,' said Ivy, ‘was known to the pre-Christians for the driving out of demons'), and the church porch spruce, denuded of its gaudy, idolatrous trappings, was borne in processional from the churchyard along the Holy-gate Path which led up Silly Hill.

Ivy had a theory about this, as well. ‘Its derivation is probably the same as that of “Silly Suffolk” – a corruption of the Old English “
selig
”, meaning holy or blessed. So Silly Hill is really Holy Hill. What better place for a religious celebration?'

Looking round at the faces of the Sunday school children, toasted in the fire's glow, Dorothy had no heart but to concur. Besides which, the bonfire performed a useful social function. Everyone in the village had a dead conifer to dispose of, and this had to be better than all that shredding, or a hundred trips to the tip.

 

* * *

 

Parochial Church Council of St Peter's
, Blaxhall

Minutes of a meeting held in the village hall
on Tuesday 26th January 2016 at 7.30 pm

 

Item
1: Candlemas celebrations

A budget was approved for the Candlemas
celebrations to be held on Sunday 7th February, including £
150 for candles and a £100 subsidy towards the cost
of the Wives' Feast. Those attending will also be asked
to bring either a sweet or a savoury dish, and
drinks as appropriate.

 

Dorothy removed her spectacles and gently pressed both eyelids with bunched fingertips, then waited for the sparkling to subside. Curious, she thought, how it was the Wives' Feast that had most keenly divided the meeting.

The Harvest Supper was always subsidised, as Sheila Mott had pointed out, and the annual Sunday school picnic.

‘But those events are open to all,' objected Martin Cowling, the church treasurer, ‘and not just one section of the congregation,' while Dorothy, seated beside Air Vice-Marshal Fitzpatrick, had distinctly heard him mutter the word ‘feminist' – though it wasn't something she'd ever heard him say about the Mothers' Union, whose speakers' expenses were regularly met and who had recently persuaded Martin to a new slide projector from eBay, when every other group in the parish just huddled round a laptop.

Dorothy's own doubts – not that they were exactly doubts; it was more just a faint, indistinct unease – were more what one might term doctrinal. Though you could hardly question Ivy's expertise on matters theological and historical. It was her specialist field, after all: the subject of her Cambridge PhD. They'd never marked Candlemas at St Peter's before to Dorothy's recollection, but it seemed irreproachably biblical when Ivy first explained it.

‘The name comes from the Gospel of Luke, when Simeon and Anna met the infant Jesus in the temple at the time of his consecration. Simeon's prophecy declared Jesus to be the light of the world. That's why we light the candles.
A light
for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your
people Israel
.'

But surely the fact that it fell halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox was rather less pertinent to the Church of England? It was natural that Ivy should take an interest, but that interest seemed at times to shade less towards that of the academic and more towards that of what Dorothy could only call an enthusiast.

‘Both the symbolism and the timing of Candlemas have continuities with an earlier pagan festival called Imbolc. It was one of the two great female fire festivals and sacred to Brigit, the maiden aspect of the triple goddess. The ancients told how Cailleach, who is the same goddess but in the form of an old crone, drank from the well of youth and was transformed into Brigit, her younger self.'

The rite of Imbolc, it seemed, was sacred to women and the power of the feminine principles of inspiration, illumination and prophecy – hence the candles. Hence, too, the modern Christian tradition of a feast for the women of the parish.

‘It is a time of fresh beginnings,' said Ivy with shining eyes, ‘and celebrates the renewal of the potency of the Earth Mother.'

It sounded to Dorothy dangerously like a fertility ritual – or a hen party. She caught a grunt from the Air Vice-Marshal, and some mumblings which sounded like ‘claptrap' and ‘women's lib'.

Replacing her spectacles, she refocused her eyes on the MacBook screen. Her bacon and mushroom quiche might do, perhaps – or maybe she'd take a three bean salad.

 

* * *

 

If it hadn't been Dorothy's week on the flower roster she wouldn't have been up at the church on a Wednesday morning, and if it hadn't been such a chilly morning she might never have paused to listen. She was on her way out to the compost heap with the dead crysanths and spent Oasis when she noticed the Sunday school children sitting cross-legged with clipboards around Ivy Paskall at the west end door, and it did seem a terribly cold morning for some of the smaller ones to be outside sketching. It was half-term, though, and the mums, she supposed, would be grateful for anything which got them out of the house.

‘The Green Man,' she heard Ivy telling her audience, ‘is a very old legend. Far older than the Bible stories we tell you on Sundays. It goes right back to really ancient times.'

‘Before Queen Victoria?' asked Alexander Marriott, whose parents sent him to the preparatory over at Brandeston.

‘Before the Victorians, before the Tudors, even before the Romans – way back before Jesus was born.'

Little Millie Dodds, who was barely four and really shouldn't be sitting on that damp gravel in February, squinted up at Ivy. ‘Before Christmas?'

Dorothy had never really noticed the Green Man before – if that's what the carving was supposed to be, that rather grotesque face emerging from stone foliage in the right-hand spandrel over the arch of the west door. And it did seem to her an odd choice of subject for the children's drawings, when there were plenty of nice saints inside the church where they would at least have kept their bottoms dry and their fingers a bit warmer. Dorothy herself had had a particular soft spot, as a little girl whose mind was prone to wander during sermons, for the somewhat bouffant Lamb of the World behind the altar in the tall east window.
Wool-gathering
, she thought, and permitted herself a moment's inner smile.

But Ivy, at least, was warming to her theme. ‘Lots of churches have kept the iconography – that means the signs and symbols and images – of the old pagan religions, which the people around here had all believed in before the missionaries came who told them about Jesus and converted them into Christians. The Green Man is one of those pagan symbols. He was a god of plants and nature, representing the cycle of life. He was part of what we call a “pantheist” tradition – the belief that God is in everything, all around us, in the natural world...'

Well, in that case, I suppose we're all pantheists, Dorothy told herself as she let herself back into the church with her empty vases. Didn't the Bible teach the immanence of God? And the bishop's last newsletter had featured an article about Christian duty and respect for the environment.

When she re-emerged half an hour later, her fresh arrangements complete, Dorothy couldn't help glancing again towards the west door. Should the children, she wondered, really be whirling round and round like that, their arms outstretched and faces tipped towards the sky, cackling with wild laughter, while Ivy, standing in the middle of the gyrating circle, stood with hands spread wide and raised aloft, emitting an undulating, crooning hum?

At least, though, all that spinning about would get the little ones warmed up.

 

* * *

 

The talk in the village hall came at the suggestion of the Rural Dean. ‘Such a waste to have Ivy here among us for this time and not share a little in her learning.'

Sheila had wondered about having her address a meeting of the Mothers' Union, since they were a couple of speakers short for their spring programme, but this time the gender equality lobby won the day – if it weren't too absurd to cast Martin Cowling and the Air Vice-Marshal in that guise. An open meeting was decided upon, which the whole congregation, and indeed the whole parish, was welcome to attend.

The village hall, if not exactly packed, was certainly less sparsely populated than Dorothy had seen it in many a month, especially considering the frosty roads and the rival attraction of a midweek football international on the television. Mainly women, then, in the audience after all. And it was lovely to see the Revd. Kimberley making a rare public appearance, having, as she explained to Dorothy, left baby Jasper with her husband and a bottle of expressed milk.

‘Pagan Suffolk and the Early Christians' was Ivy's title for the lecture, although she'd baulked at the use of that term when Sheila had suggested it for the posters.

‘Oh, I do hope it won't be like a lecture,' she said brightly. ‘I'm aiming for something much more open and participative. I hope there'll be plenty of questions and comments.'

Dorothy, who doubted how many questions the parishioners of St Peter's could muster on the subject of paganism – or that weren't the lurid sort about sheep's entrails and blood sacrifice – determined to do a little background reading herself beforehand, so that she at least would have something sensible to contribute. There were many present who were not attenders at church, and the pride of the PCC was at stake.

Ivy's opening text was therefore already familiar ground: the Christian conversion down in Kent of the seventh-century East Anglian king Raedwald. Diffidently, Dorothy put up her hand – ‘Isn't he the one they found in the burial ship over at Sutton Hoo?' – and was rewarded with, ‘So it's believed,' and an encouraging smile. She was perhaps a little more surprised to hear the speaker refer to ‘the new cult' of Christianity.

‘Raedwald and a portion of his followers certainly embraced the new faith,' Ivy informed them, ‘but it was very far from being the wholesale and uniform conversion of the Anglo-Saxon population which popular history tends to imply. In fact, we now know that in reality the two mythologies – the new religion and the old – survived very much in tandem.'

Mythologies?
Dorothy was on the point of raising her hand again, but Ivy by now was warming to her theme and the opportunity slid by.

‘When St Felix built his Christian monastery on the spit in the river Alde at Iken, it was as much surrounded by hostile theological waters as it was by physical ones. Raedwald's own wife, for example, continued in the old faith. According to Bede, she remained a heathen throughout her life, and when Raedwald built a church just up the road from here at Rendlesham it was in fact a dual-purpose temple, containing two altars, one Christian and one pagan.'

A scatter of nervous laughter greeted this revelation, while a wag at the back – not a churchgoer – called out something about barbarian hordes over Woodbridge way.

Ivy, unlaughing, surveyed the assembly with serene assurance. ‘Nor was it only Rendlesham,' she said. ‘There were pagan altars, we now believe, in many churches throughout East Anglia in what we think of as the post-Christian middle ages. The Druid's Stone at Bungay is thought to have been one such.' They seemed to be circling perilously close to sheep's entrails. ‘And what of our very own Blaxhall Stone? Its presence at Stone Farm has never been adequately explained. Such a large block of solid sandstone, in this area of light sandy soil with no indigenous rock. Could it also perhaps once have served as a pagan altar stone?'

‘It grew'd here, didn't 'un?' The display of uneven teeth suggested that old Wilf Dodds – more regular in the bar of the Ship than at St Peter's – was enjoying his evening. His reference was to local legend, which had it that the stone, when unearthed by a long-past ploughman, was no bigger than the man's two fists but had grown where it lay ever since.

Sitting next to Wilf was another of the Ship's habitués, a man whom Dorothy had never seen without his misshapen corduroy cap. George something, was it, or Jim? ‘Like one o' thun fairy toadstools.'

‘Whether it grew' – Ivy bestowed an indulgent smile on the two satirists – ‘or whether it was swept here by prehistoric glacial action, the theory of its ritual adoption and use seems equally tenable.'