Authors: Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner
He jumped into them and nestled all soft against her neck and chin for a minute. “Good-bye, Minnie Mouse,” he said, “I must go back or she'll miss me from the collar of her grand coat. But remember
, when the time comes, if you want help in the witch's house, there'll always be meâor someone else.” And then he jumped down and scuttled off into the house, and they shut the door carefully after him.
They ran down the path and through the shrubbery; the spiky nasty evergreens tried to catch at them, but all they did was to tear a hole in Billy's coat, and then they were out in the road and standing under an ordinary street-lamp, and very sleepy. Billy's finger was still bleeding where Sasha Sable had bitten him, and neither of them had a hanky to tie it up, but he sucked it and said he was all right, and was a bit nice to Minnie, because now she was tired and crying a little and saying she'd never get home.
Still, they did get home all right, and not more than an hour later, for when they got down onto the main road again, what should they do but get a lift from a lorry that was going their way. Whether Sasha Sable had anything to do with that, I don't know. Most likely he hadn't; a lorry driver'll always give you a lift if you ask him nicely and he isn't being speeded up so that he daren't stopâand his boss isn't looking. When he put them down they'd only a quarter of an hour's walk home, but all the same Mr. and Mrs. Jones were in an awful state when they got back. They'd been round to the police and the hospital and everything and both of them burst out crying and hugging them, especially Mrs. Jones, she felt that bad about having turned them out earlier on. She was as pleased as pie when Minnie gave her the work-basket, and then the kids remembered about the lamp-shade and turned out their pockets, and sure enough, there were the Bank-notes, fivers and tenners, so that Mr. and Mrs. Jones couldn't hardly believe their eyes.
Then Billy and Minnie tried to explain all about their adventures, but no one believed them, no more than you do, I'll be bound. But all the same the Bank-notes were good enough. Only Mr. Jones, being a sensible man and not wanting it to get round to the P.A.C. man, took them over to his cousin who was an upholsterer in Walsall and he changed them for him, only taking a shilling in the pound which wasn't too bad. And Mrs. Jones paid up all her bills, and they both began to hold up their heads again with the neighbours, and altogether things took a turn for the better, as you might say. It ended with Mr. Jones moving over to Walsall and getting a job in the upholstery line with his cousin. Only he missed the allotment.
But how Billy and Minnie grew up, and how later on they went back to the witch's house, and how they and their friends killed the old witchâfor she was still going strongâand made things so that she could never come back again to Birmingham or anywhere else, that's another story and I haven't time to tell it you to-day.
BIRMINGHAM AND THE ALLIES
The Chinese fairies go by with a wavering graciousness
Curtseying to those who pass the State examinations.
Behind them the hoho birds droop from the classic rockeries,
Filling the proud minds of the wild poets with bursts of plumes,
Mozart liked wild strawberries with white wine in withy arbours,
Handel liked sprigged muslin with high heels. There exist also
Certain occurrences in the present, certain dispositions and persons:
Things common and well known and not difficult,
The boys listening to the music, the rain drops on the wind-screen,
New bread at evening, the Pole Star over Stirchley,
Tom Baxter, Walter Priest, Claud Ames and Harold Nash,
Sid Hines, Len Edwards, Ted Simmons, Leon Thompson, May Cooke.
The Chinese fairies respect learning, but have compassion on ignorance;
The minds of the fierce poets are set on a fresh mood;
European democracy in sprigged muslin is taking tea with Handel;
The boys are looking at the Pole Star, the tension is broken by the rain.
But there exists also Power,
And flags and cruelty and an increasing profit on evil,
The men with the large cheque-books and their laughing and ignorant women.
Handel and Mozart did not write music suitable for cheque-books,
Suitable for leaders in lime-light, suitable for stirring the passions
Of hate and cruelty.
They are no good to the men with the money. Nor are
Learning and compassion and poetry or the remote Pole Star. Nor yet
Democracy.·
Nor yet Tom Baxter, Sid Hines, May and Alf Cooke, Claud Ames,
Harold, Ted, Len, Ethel, Jo and Jack.
You have been defeated once, and the next time
Less will be left you. And the hoho birds have been snared
To make hat plumage for the rich and ignorant women.
Between one nightmare and the next nightmare
We tum in our sleep, make certain dispositions:
It would be well to have definite contacts, there or here,
It would be well to consult the allies, to discuss tactics,
Before darkness falls again and the driving of the blind nightmares.
It is even possible that we might wake and find
We had made ourselves a day.
Breaking the nightmare with a great effort we may yet discover
The learned and compassionate fairies going by at daybreak,
We with the boys hearing the music, eating the new bread,
The dawn rain-fresh over Stirchley, and our friends with us waking.
We may discover we have been wise and wary,
Twisting defeat
Into a net for the men who snared the fairies.
We may have snared ourselves power.
And in the snaring changed it.
(King's NortonâAbbotsholme. Nov. 1935.)
SORIA MORIA CASTLE
(for G.D.H.C.)
About sunset, a castle had been constructed upon the sands; I had, in fact, a good deal to do with it myself. Shortly afterwards I had passed over the cardboard drawbridge and under the silver-paper portcullis, nor was it until the feathery and tinkling clang of the latter, falling into place with the utmost finality behind me, had aroused my hitherto bemused senses, that I began to ask myself whether, after all, I had been wise in the decision which it seemed certain I had but lately come to. It was by then, however, too late, and on the first bend of that sharp upward zigzag, cut, as I well remembered, with the larger blade of an old penknife, that I encountered the witch, with her skirts spread round her and her head bent over a half-knitted stocking of that curious dark murrey colour, as far removed from true purple as it is from clear red, which is the preferred underwear tint of all Unlikely Persons. She begged me to excuse her until she had finished the row of knitting, which, indeed, I was glad enough to do, since it gave me an excuse for considering my position, not of course that such consideration had any practical value at this juncture of affairs.
She then conducted me up the various flights of the zigzag, talking in such a manner that I could never be certain whether it would be more tactful of me to join in or not to appear to be listening. There would certainly have been a fine view from the upper flights of the zigzag, had the refocussing of my vision, consequent
upon the alteration of my scale of material standards, allowed of it; I must confess, also, that it became increasingly unpleasant to consider how much nearer, with each flight of the zigzag, we were approaching the mouth of the square entrance of the castle. The witch appeared to have guessed what I had in mind, for she turned to me and said in a most aggrieved voice: “If you hadn't decided to come to Soria Moria castle, you didn't need to have gone and built it!”
“But,” I said, “there were reasons against the Castle East of the Sun.” And I remembered for a moment with extreme distinctness the committee meeting in which we had all so tediously, and as I thought at the time, so needlessly, discussed the necessity for realism.
“Reasons!” she said, “you didn't think you were fit to be trusted with reasons, did you?” And she snorted at me, and tucked the knitting under one arm.
“No,” I said. “In a way that is so. But there were others.”
“More fools they,” said the witch; “as if they didn't know I can't get through more than one of you in a month, these days, what with my new false teeth and the times being what they are! Get along in with you!” And she suddenly and unexpectedly gave me the most unpleasant shove into the dark entrance of Soria Moria castle.
The facts as they appeared were quite incontrovertible and more displeasing than I can well express. The cauldron was hooked over a small fire on my left. It was quite beyond my power to look at what it contained or indeed to take any kind of direct glance at it, but the smell which arose from it was of so discouraging a nature that I began to find it very hard to stand upright,
nor was the very business-like triangular knife lying on the kitchen table any less unreassuring. For, although it seems for the first minute or two quite unthinkable that such things should be in any way connected with oneself, yet there was no possible way of escaping the conclusion that they were. It was only at this point that it began to dawn on me what kind of reality the committee had so guardedly referred to towards the end of our discussion, and as I observed the back of the witch ferreting about in her kitchen cupboard for certain herbs and accompaniments, I became filled with extreme indignation at the fact that reality was so astonishingly different at close quarters. Fortunately, this indignation was accompanied by the customary outpouring of secretion from the adrenal glands which, in their turn, re-affected the muscles and sinews of my back and legs to such a degree that I now resolved to accept nothing without the fiercest possible struggle.
As the witch turned round I said to her, “I am not going into your cauldron!” She did not answer but proceeded to look at me in a curiously fixed and horrible way, as though she were seeing me, my own highly important and cossetted self, as so many pounds of meat. At the same time saliva dripped from her lower lip and from what I could not help recollecting were her new false teeth. This look almost succeeded in reducing me to my former condition of complete discouragement, and had I not made a sudden move, it would certainly have done so. However, I snatched up the triangular knife from the table and threatened her with it. The witch's look immediately lost some of its disgusting impersonality, and she made a sign with two fingers at the knife, which promptly lighted at the tip and, being apparently
made of magnesium or some similar metal or alloy, flared up blindingly as I dropped it between myself and the cauldron, and threw one hand up over my eyes. When I could see again, the witch's back was towards me once more, and she was muttering to herself. When she turned she had three small objects in her hand. “Well, if you won't go into the cauldron,” she said, and her voice broke off into mutters of “Most annoying, most annoying,” and she held out her hand towards me: “You may choose whichever you like.”
“I don't see why I should!” I said, almost crying with anger and misery at the idea of being compelled to touch and accept any one of these three ambiguous little objects. At the same time, however, I did see, only too clearly, that there was no possibility of evasion, nor, for that matter, of prolonging the affair indefinitely by any argument. The light in the cave was none of the best, especially as the entrance had, as might have been expected, crumbled inwards immediately after the vibration of our tread had unsettled the sand particles of which it was, after all, composed. There was no telling where any one of the three choices would carry me. I chose at random the middle one of the three objects, which was no other than a grain of common wheat.
Immediately three sensations overwhelmed me: a sensation of shrinking, a sensation of hardening and a sensation of darkening. They were not in any way painful and yet they concealed a profound tension, as though from shrinking and hardening I must needs burst forth into sudden softness, and as though my present darkness must collapse into a starred rent. So for a time I waited, with no sense of place in any world or passage of any measurable period of days or months. Only the tension slowly increased until
it became apparent that the constriction was about to yield to some violent and now localised pressure. My whole self was become intent on a growing point, and soon enough the constriction and darkness which had been part of me for so long were parted, and I knew my white and tender root had begun to feel downwards through a different darkness and a hardness unexpectedly creviced for the forcing of ways; soon afterwards, too, my upper growing point had begun its struggle through fissures in a yielding hardness with an extension of special feeling to the phototropic cell-cluster now hourly expecting the dazzle of reward. I had by this almost forgotten the hardness and tension of the safe grain life, but my rapidly separating growing-points were a-tingle with ever-present danger. What horrors of drought or rotting wetness, above all of blind, remorseless, chewing mouths! And yet my growth was momently attaining a toughness which could outface all.
And now the upper shoot had pierced into a gratification of warm light; the cell layers spread and flattened to receive gifts. Green grains of chlorophyll had appeared in my upper layers, immediately specialising my vaguely rampant growth into the delightful pattern of a sun-needing plant; while below my pale busy fibres sucked up a constant stream of success from the dark earth which anchored me. As I grew I began to be aware that I was not alone. With the drawing-out of sun and rain my green leaves overlapped the leaves of my neighbours, catching from them a delicate tingle of response. Nor, in the warm days and cool nights of early summer could any of the wheatfield have been less than utterly satisfied with the tender and neighbourly response of stem to stem, the effortless rippling and stretching as the breezes
tossed us, the effortless breathing in and out in our daily and nightly rhythm, our age-old vegetable ordering of the gaseous elements that gently blanket the ever-living world. Effortless too, the stooping under warm rain that slithered down our stems to our matted and neighbourly rootlets. Effortless, the shaking off of the shining drops; effortless our constant growth, supported and supporting, one by the other. And by now each was aware, in its own midst, and in the midst of its neighbours in the uncounted community of the harvest field, of that for which all was a preparation. Tenderest leaflets now unfolded from our green grain spikes, plumed with the delicate pale grass flowers, stigmas as yet half uncoiling and unaware, stamens with the light gold burden of half ripe pollen grains.