You Can Take a Girl Out of Newport

One of the great joys in writing Belia was bringing early C18th Newport to life now overlaid by today’s modern and perhaps less attractive city. Far more attractive was its far future reincarnation of deep green meadows, forests and hills. 

 

The other great joy was creating characters. Rafe Sadler, innkeeper, highwayman and Rosie’s father was based upon a well known TV chef who I won’t name but for some, the description might suffice. The scene is Rosie alone in a storm-buffeted inn worrying about her father:

‘In her mind, Rafe Sadler stood behind her now, and she turned, trying to flesh a memory from air: A large, heavy-set man with piercing blue eyes and a smile that made the heart sing. She had seen it employed on both women and men, usually when he wanted something from them, a naughty-boy look and then the smile inviting you to share in his guilt. It worked every time, and Rosie had learned its secret from an early age.

Outside, the wind bellowed, buffeting the windows in long, drawn out wails. Occasionally rain splattered down chimney and hearth, and the stone inn shuddered and creaked, its several small movements putting her in mind of an old giant uneasy in his sleep.’

 

Other than faces and mannerisms observed in the street or on TV another great aid to character and setting is Pinterest. Rosie, for example may have originated as a visual composite of the pictures below but brought alive by her character and her 1710 coarse honesty. You can take a girl out of Newport.. . 

It was fun to transpose her to modern Newport and observe her reaction to buses, people talking to unseen headphones, flushing toilets, and coming to terms with a Rolling Stones T Shirt and jeans.

The real danger comes from that distant,  demon haunted future. 

The lake where Rosie spotted the first speck of parasitic moss on her body. It threatens to spread and consume her. 

Three engineered opals have been created. Two are in circulation, Rosie having acquired one of them. The third remains hidden. 

Belia

Demonic palace

For Belia and the demons, the three gems are vital. Whilst one opal allows restricted time travel, holding all three will allow complete ownership of time. In Abaddon’s words:

“We would have farmed your world through time, established our elites throughout your history, consuming but preserving what we fed upon.” 

“Instead of destroying our present and vanishing back through the fissure.” Belia spoke aloud unable to contain a new anxiety. “You will take me back with you.”

“You worry over nothing,” Abaddon’s tone smooth, reassuring, and convincingly firm. “We will find all three opals whatever the cost. We will hunt and destroy any who stand in our way.” 

Rosie, Jai and Rafe stand in their way.

Be Careful What You Wish For

You hear more and more the refrain that what we need is another Cromwell to sort out our perceived decline and sectarian divisions. The desire is understandable, but all I can say is, be careful what you wish for. The only small mercy is that ‘Great Men’ never emerge from wishes alone. I remember, at eighteen, being an ardent Leninist but knowing revolutions don’t work like that. Revolutions from the Left, Right, or any new future quantum angle come about whether wished for or not.  

Men with the historical significance of a Cromwell, a Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler or a Franco don’t come from nowhere. They emerge from war and profound social and economic breakdown. Such events may be inevitable but nothing you would actively wish for.

Ah but Cromwell was different. You can’t compare him to psychopaths like Stalin or Mao. He was English for God’s sake. ‘God’s Greatest Englishman.’ And you can’t compare the English civil war to the Russian Revolution. As a child I believed that. I believed the English civil war was romantic; ringlets and cloaks, fine leather boots, horses and swords, the ‘Devil-May-Cares’ against the ‘Kill-Joy-Puritans.’ 

The famous painting 'When did you last see your father?' The small boy quizzed by grim faced Puritans, all of them dressed in their Sunday best

In reality the conflict was deeply sectarian, passions ignited by hatred, religious divisions, corruption and economic hardship.

Both sides were guilty of dehumanising and despite established rules of conduct massacres became increasingly common.

At Shelford Manor near Nottingham 160 Royalist soldiers were slaughtered along with women and children. The Puritan attack was so frenzied because  they were fighting soldiers from the  Queen’s regiment— mostly European and every one of them Catholic. Foreign Catholics. A red rag to all right thinking Englishmen.  Think English Defence League vs a Bangladeshi Muslim detachment. Think Srebrenica.

Atrocities came from both sides. Bolton, fiercely puritanical held out against the dashing Prince Rupert, beating back four of his regiments. Rupert ordered a second attack led by the Earl of Derby. Fuelled by sectarian anger, the Royalists successfully stormed the walls and the results were bloody and brutal. 1,600 Puritans were slaughtered and the town plundered, its women raped. It’s worth noting that when Liverpool was attacked by Rupert, its soldiers decamped across the Mersey to Birkenhead. Wise men though lacking discernment. Birkenhead.

The Royalists were equally brutal at the village of Barthomley, a detachment led by Major Connaught surrounded a church where the villagers had fled, taking refuge in the steeple. Connaught promised them quarter. When the hapless villagers descended they realised their mistake:

‘…but when hee ha theim in his power, hee caused theim all to be stripped starke naked; And moste barbarouslie and contrary to the lawes of Armes, murthered, stabbed and cutt the Throates of xii of theim and wounded all the reste, leaving many of theim for Dead.’

Lord Byron, the Royalist commander at Chester thoroughly approved, writing to the Duke of Newcastle, ‘…the Rebels had possessed themselves of a Church at Bartumley, but wee presently beat them forth of it, and put them all to the sword; which I finde to be the best way to proceed with these kind of people, for mercy to them is cruelty…’

Hopton Castle, a Parliamentary stronghold in a Royalist area was commanded by Samuel Moore in control of 30 men. In 1664 the garrison was besieged by Sir Michael Woohouse with a royalist force of 500 men. After weeks of valiant fighting, Moore at last surrendered on agreed terms. As they marched out the garrison was massacred, the men bound together in pairs, their throats slit, their bodies tossed in the moat.

At the battle of Naseby, 12,000 Royalist troops faced 15,000 Parliamentarians led by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. Behind both armies were the baggage trains and women ‘camp followers.’ The battle began at 10 am. By 3.30 pm the king’s men were in full retreat leaving their ‘camp followers’ to the tender mercies of God’s Own Army. Protestant rage was unleashed on the hapless women, many of them Welsh. Confusing the Welsh language with that of the Irish, they massacred three to four hundred of them on the spot. Others were systematically  disfigured:

 ‘…the rest of the whores that attended that wicked army, are marked in the face of nose with a slash or a cut.’ It was a common punishment for ‘the whore’— the nose slit or sometimes cut off.

 I was so wrong as a child. The Civil War was no gentlemanly game, and the violence was immense. In England and Wales alone, a larger proportion of the population died than in the First World War. And don’t get the Irish started on their casualties when Cromwell went over there. What we need is a Cromwell. Maybe. Equally, be careful what you wish for.

 

I never read a book in America

I like every kind of book, though I draw the line at the poems of Alexander Pope. I still have fond childhood memories of Biggles, Bulldog Drummond, Sax Rohmer, and Roderic Graeme, whose collected Black Shirt stories I recently re-purchased on Kindle.

I particularly like old books; the language, their archaisms and rhythm. The language demands patience, something easier to say than attain in a world of instant gratification. There’s the initial struggle, like pushing a reluctant door into a dark and dusty room, until the author’s voice takes hold, and you find yourself in the mindscape of earlier centuries, and you become part of it. 

There’s real joy wandering through the world of Fenimore Cooper, the muscular, sometimes over-pious language transcending the limits of film. I remember reading Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond, struggling with it at first, until gradually drifting through deep-hedged lanes, cow parsley and wild roses. 

It was the same with Middlemarch, read when I was seventeen trying to impress my first girlfriend who went on to press Crime and Punishment into my hands, introduce me to Rachmaninov, and then moved on to a boy with better prospects.  

That’s the peculiar things about books, the significant ones at least. You remember who gave or suggested them, and you remember where it was you first read them. Middlemarch and the Brothers Karamazov I read in our freezing cold front parlour—the fire only put on when we had guests. 

I remember reading Romany Rye, Lavengro, and Rookwood in a sunny Uplands flat in Swansea, Joni Mitchel’s Blue playing in the background. 

 

 On a darker note, I remember reading Great Expectations in the middle of a break-up. The Brittany cycling holiday pre-booked and paid for, we cycled some distance apart and I read Great Expecations in a small tent alone. The irony didn’t escape me.  

I still have my James Bond paperbacks, Thunderball of especial significance. School-yard rumours that an obscure newsagent two and half miles away had copies in stock. (In pre-Amazon days you depended on such rumours along with a degree of commitment) After school and through pouring rain I cycled there and returned home late but triumphant, and wet.

Then there's my collection of 'Saint' paperbacks bought in competition with Billy Shaw, the son of our 

local chemist. Boys tend to be completist, and some like to hoard.

 It’s why I can’t get rid of books, even those I may never read again. They each tell a story. 

Then there’re the books bought, but never read; harder to defend perhaps, unless like me you’re quietly convinced you have decades yet to live. Four years ago, I won a vicious bidding war in an auction and returned home with the collected works of Sir Walter Scott—twenty-two beautiful blue leather volumes and all for £32. I stroke them now and again, occasionally open a page at random and admire the quality of the paper or browse several evocative engravings before closing the book with a sigh. One day.

Walter Scott - still to be read

                                               A book at random, Quentin Durward

Gilded pages gleam a pale gold

Published in 1904, these editions boast thin, but pristine white pages and evocative engravings. Book porn. Mea culpa.

At this point, you may be wondering about the title of this piece—I never read a book in America.  You may be tempted to think it was some kind of snide and ill-informed comment on American culture. Far from it. The truth is that my year teaching in America was the culmination of a childhood dream. (Teaching not so much.) The experience of just living there meant I had no time to read! Escapism wasn’t called for. I had escaped. The weekend edition of the New York Times for which you needed some serious weight training and accept grey fingers from the ink, was more than enough.

When I am really old and perhaps blind, I’ll know where my books are shelved, and touch will bring back memories.

Belia

Yes, it is marketing time, which is much more difficult than writing and nowhere near as much fun, marginally better than toothache, especially for one as lazy as me.

Here goes.

Belia is a young adult novel and can be summed up in a sentence: an ex-highwayman and his daughter are cast into a demon haunted future, where they battle carnivorous moss, haunted forests, demons, and Belia—a witch out of time.

 

It is also a triple time-slip novel taking the reader from C18th Newport to the C21st and Newport in the far distant future. It also features the iconic Murenger pub, which plays a key part in events. Newport then enjoys a leading role and those fortunate to live there will recognise many landmarks both past and present—none though in that distant future, where the landscape is one of rolling hills and meadows.

 

For those who want more than a one sentence summary: …when in the winter of 1710, the highwayman Rafe Sadler steals an opal from a malignant woman of power, he is cast into the far future, an apparent ‘Golden Age,’ but one haunted by demons, and a dark secret acknowledged reluctantly and with pious guilt. This far future is a ‘paradise built on bones,’ the result of an engineered cull in a previously overpopulated and ravaged world—a world now threatened by demons.

Rafe’s daughter, Rosie, attempts to follow him but lands in twenty-first century Newport, where she meets a fellow time traveller—a refugee from that distant future. The three time periods play their part in the story as our heroes battle against carnivorous moss, demons, and Belia—a ‘witch’ out of time.

 

Though Belia is complete in itself, there is a sequel Tai-Lin which explores the same three time-periods, and takes us from an C18th America, a demon ravaged future, and the wilds of Tartary and Tibet. 

I hope you enjoy Belia, and Tai-Lin when it's released later this year..

City of the Beast

Aleister Crowley remains an enigma, for some a romantic, the last burning ember of revolt against Victorian conformity, for others, something more sinister, an ardent Satanist, for others again a deluded charlatan deftly deceiving the gullible.

He has long since become a literary commodity and figures in The Gift Trilogy largely because of his association with another who dabbled in the dark arts, Evan Morgan, Lord Tredegar. 

There is only one recorded account of a Crowley visit to Tredegar House, but there are rumours of other, longer visits when blood flowed in the cellars. 

I have no doubt that there are those who have sold their souls for fame, wealth and power, so it seems mighty strange that Crowley died an ailing addict in a Hastings boarding house. There is though, another way of looking at it. For the Christian ascetic or saint, material wealth means little in comparison to their communion with God. And so, it may prove with the practising Satanist, communion with the devil a reward in itself.

It’s a perspective that helped me in reading Phil Baker’s book, City of the Beast. The London of Aleister Crowley. On one level, the book is intensely depressing albeit with unexpected nuggets of gold. 

The book falls into the  psychogeography genre, detailing Crowley’s peripatetic life in London from grand hotels to every shabby bedsit that housed the great man.  It describes the restaurants and clubs he frequented and above all his sexual conquests. The man was obsessed, on the prowl night after night. It makes you wonder how much time he was able to indulge in ‘magic,’ though it helped that he was able to bring sex into it. The key was to focus on a profound need before and during ejaculation. So now you know. 

How did he attract so many women? It may have been his ‘sexual magic,’ a magnetic personality or, perhaps, his perfume: a concoction of musk and civet on a base of ambergris, which Crowley rubbed on his skin and into his eyebrows. ‘It gave him a sweetish smell and made horses whinny after him in the street.’

Some argue satanism too narrowly defines Crowley, but it’s undeniable he shared key Luciferian qualities: over-weening pride, deceit and manipulation. His most well-known dictum, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Every man and every woman is a star. Love is the law, love under will. For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.’

His reference to ‘love under will’ is far from wholesome or pure.

He was, for example sexually attracted to black women but showed nothing but contempt for their ethnicity, each of them listed in his diary: ‘Phyllis. The poor zebu (a type of humped cow) …quite upset when I pointed out that her chief charm was her musky nigger stench.’

He was a merciless sponger talking quite viciously about his various benefactors behind their backs. He referred to one Australian benefactor as an ‘imbecile hag’ and as the ‘Wailing Wombat of Wagga Wagga.’

He was outraged by the idea of state pensions. They discouraged ‘honest ambition,’ increased taxation, and took away from what should be spent on military defence. He wanted the death penalty to be extended to cover lesser crimes and championed the expulsion of ethnic minorities. 

Pride, an almost childish conceit, dominated his life along with food, drink and drugs.

The writer Maurice Richardson met Crowley at the French Pub in Dean Street, the great occultist smelling of ether having just drunk half a pint of the stuff. Asked what he wanted to drink, Crowley opted for a triple absinthe, followed by two more triple absinthes before setting off for a gargantuan lunch at L’Escargot. 

On another occasion, ‘After a few large vodkas (he enjoyed) lobster bisque, roast duck, and a runny Brie, washed down with several litres of Chianti followed by Cyprus brandy.

And talking about drugs, his diary extols  the virtues of heroin, comparing it to: “…thirteen masturbations, a menstruation orgy, a five-man buggery competition, sixteen rapes of assorted quadrupeds … and a pot of marmalade thrown in.”

Marmalade!

Despite a life of drugs, alcohol and every kind of excess, he achieved the quite respectable age of 72 before dying in the obscurity of a Hastings boarding house. The year December 1947, the month and year I was born – a good enough reason to reject reincarnation.

Accounts of his final words vary, which is par for the course with Crowley: 

I am perplexed.

 Satan get out. 

Sometimes I hate myself.

Whatever he thought of himself at these final moments, I suspect he may have been 'cancelled' today. Then again, maybe not.

For those interested enough to read a more sympathetic analysis of Crowley I can offer this.

 

Pershore

The Abbey is dated to the reign of King Edgar in the early C10th, though likely founded upon an earlier C7th  monastery. It had a tempestuous history, in its time buffeted by earthquake, fire, the depredations of malicious dukes and kings. Duke Alphere was a ferocious predator but met a timely end and a horrible death: ‘being eaten by vermin.’ His son, Odda restored what his father had plundered and vowed to remain a virgin lest a son of his should prove guilty of similar crimes. He lived a saintly life and on his death in 1056 was rewarded with a mention in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and burial within the Abbey. For much of the Middle Ages, the abbey largely prospered, though not without its ups and downs. Then, in 1539 the accusations of a disgruntled cleric gave Thomas Cromwell the excuse to close it down and pension off the remaining monks. 

Little is left of the original abbey, much of it collapsed or cannibalised in the years following the Reformation. In 1913 two large flying buttresses were added to strengthen an almost collapsing west wall.

The Chancel. The altar is largely obscured by temporary seating for a choral performance.

Note the ‘ploughshare’ vaulting, so called because of their resemblance to the medieval plough. 

Note the stone carved roof boss above, one of many, all originally brightly coloured until the Victorians cleaned them.

The stained-glass windows were installed by the Victorians in 1870. One shows the history of the abbey from Saxon to Victorian times.

The baptismal font is carved with images of the twelve apostles. It was rescued from a garden in 1921 long after the Victorians had discarded it in favour of a spanking new alternative. 

The Crusader’s Tomb is thought to be that of Sir William de Harley, a local knight who held  land from the abbey and fought in the crusades. He is famous amongst military armour experts because the carving shows three buckles in his right armpit that fastened his back and breast plates together. It is the only known carving in England that illustrates this feature, and it is wonderful to think there are military tomb obsessives who would have noted and recorded it. Equally wonderful that medieval craftsmen would have paid such attention to detail.

The two tombs are of the local wealthy Hazelwood family, who dominated the area from the  C16th to C18th 

And as for Pershore