text: Some time ago I was not much older than a boy, living deep enough in the countryside near the Kent Sussex border. It was a magical place for a child to be back then. My memories are all of the land, or mostly, it feels like. People and places on the land, if you understand me. Standing still or moving, but never vivid as the fields and forests and rivers in the background. Of course, the land wasn’t still either! The trees budded when the winter, and we never had such hard winters, passed and the clods of earth soften in the fields, it was a magical time. The naybellish time, as the old folks would say it, when the clods of earth, frozen up like a pebble beach would soften up like clay and the trees would be budding brightly from their dark winter bark, was like nothing else. The may bells, I think I remember the little girls would sing in some rhyme. The silly sorts of things that stay with you. Spring was a cruel too. Winter, you knew its hard sides and its soft. Biting, itching, cold or excitement of snow. You never know with Springtime. The low hot sun in your eyes and the ice crunching under your feet. Golden green seedlings treaded into mud or swallowed in the freezing mists. You could wake up and see a whole field turn brown one day to the next. But that was it. The yeartimes went by well enough and there was always some fate or festival to be had. When we were small, we, my mother and my older sisters, would go from village to village for them. Vicars and churchyards, tables of teas and sickly-sweet cakes that would make your face feel sticky. The young ones, especially the boys, would always sneak off behind the chapels, squeezing between walls and hedgerows, getting into scraps. Often enough, my poor mum would drag me home with a fat lip and mud caked into my jumper. That’s how boy were. There was no helping it. It must have been summer, with the earth hardened and the grass all dried and sharp. I was playing cricket or knocking a ball about and a boy I never much liked came walking up behind me with his head in the clouds. Well I smacked him as I drew back the bat. My lord. It was like walking up the stairs at night and reaching the top on step too early. Where there should have been resistance, there wasn’t. It felt like a twig breaking under your feet in soft mud. Well of course, after he bled all he was able, all the fingers pointed my way. Not seriously, mind you, but you can hardly say the boy who lost an eye and had his nose wiped across his face was at fault. No one held me to it, no one that didn’t mind me anyway at least. That was the way, you said the right things when you ought to say them. It was a beautiful place and a hard place too sometimes but you were part of it. It felt like we were spiralling through forward, getting older one summer at a time, telling the same stories, trying different things. That’s what eternity meant to me, not what the chaplain told us on a Sunday. These stories though, I don’t know where we even heard then from in particular, you always just knew. I loved them all. The twin sisters, the black dogs, the black cats. You don’t know what’s until you get talking to people from elsewhere. The tooth fairy always felt ridiculous to me, for instance, but the dragons in the wells, the hooded folk, the three deaths... Well the well dragons, Wyrms really, you need to imagine it like this: you’re a child in the summer and the sun is blazing on a sleepy day. You disappear into the fields. Its like hypnotism, with the swaying golden wheat and the dancing pools of shadows by the treeline. You come across a hillside, crumbled away showing a deep dark entrance. In the brightness of the day or the darkness of the night, you couldn’t see a thing. All of a sudden as you feel yourself being drawn near, something like the breath of cold stagnant air groans out over you and in that darkness, there are coal black eyes looking back at you. And yes, sure enough, the Romans mined this area for tin, as I suppose the Celts did before and the Jutes did after and whatever we called ourselves later on did too. And yes, the soil here is full of dark smooth stones, and in the ground water, in a shaft opened up by summer storm on a bright day would... dazzle. Yes. You don’t need to know something isn’t or probably isn’t true to feel it deep down. There was a young girl that crawled into one of these shafts, an old train tunnel, and she was found smashed to bits, presumably by the fall. That was before my time. I’m sure lots of the children that went missing or ran away across in the south, ended up like her but with no basset hound to sniff out the corpse. I swear I’ve seen some thing too sometimes. Felt sometimes for sure. It sounds daft to say but once, older than I should’ve been for a story like this, I was walking home from the pub. It was one of those long summer nights when the sun sets late so I went through the woods instead of the road up the hill. Well, I had maybe a bit more than I should have and it took longer than I thought. The sun started setting. It went so still when the wood doves stopped their cooing and it was just me then. I was maybe 17 or so and, whatever I felt, I wasn’t going show it even to myself! As it got darker, I slowed down minding out for roots and such on the path until eventually, it was black. I could hear sounds, little scraping sounds, rustling in the leaves and passed it off as an owl on the hunt. I kept walking with my hands out in front of me, feeling for the saplings. Saplings everywhere in that part. I became aware that the rustling was matching my own steps. I’d put my foot forwards and sometimes the leaves would make a sound a few feet back. Nonsense, I told myself, but kept ever so quiet. Then I started heard a twig snap, crisp and loud. I bolted upright not knowing what to do. I was like a statue on the outside but, inside, well... I had a bright idea all of a sudden and took out my cigarettes and a book of matches, I put on the show for no one of putting one in my mouth and drunkenly fumbling the match into the perfect position and then, strike. In front of me were eyes then a face, just a face it seemed in the darkness, level with my own. Fox like, somehow, its eyes like solid emerald. I jolted back and the match went out. I went back against the trunk of a tree and smacked the back of my head decently with the hands. I was there for what seemed like... I don’t know. Then I lit another match, this time getting my cigarette too, and nothing. Well, I laid off it for a while after that. It wasn’t that we were believers... it was just what we heard on Sunday was so abstract, you see. Then there was what we all knew by and by. When a fox catches a rabbit, it dies three times. When its caught, when its eaten, when its... passed out, as it were. And there’s life at every stage too. When its living, when its gives life to the fox, and when it gives life to the earth. I don’t mean to sound crude but there is something to it when you see a seedling popping out of shit in the brush. Then there were the stories about when the Celts used to do. Combeston, a place nearby, was one of them. Sacrifice. They, the druids, would take you by the neck, and garrotte you with a rope. When your eyes were bulging, they would force you on your knees with your head back and slice into you. A crowd would be there below this old stone where it happened, and they would be showered in the spray. Then another would take a hammer, or I heard sword too, and finish it. I don’t totally understand why they did it. Sacrifice. It’s such a Christian idea. I think its more of a demonstration or the spiral turning on. There was no here and hereafter... just a doorway you stand between. You spend most of your life facing one way, catching glimpses out of the corner of your eye but sometimes you can turn and, just for a moment, see what’s looking back at you.