The Limits of Enchantment Read online

  The Limits Of Enchantment

  By Graham Joyce

  G&S Books

  The Limits Of Enchantment.

  Copyright © Graham Joyce 2003. All rights reserved.This E-book edition first published 2013

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Foreword © Graham Joyce 2013

  Graham Joyce is a multiple award winning author. He grew up in the mining village of Keresley near Coventry. In 1988 he quit his job as a youth officer and decamped to the Greek island of Lesbos, there to live in a beach shack with a colony of scorpions and to concentrate on writing. He sold his first novel while still in Greece and travelled in the Middle East on the proceeds. He is a winner of The World Fantasy Award; is five-times winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel; is twice winner of the French Grand Prix De L'Imaginaire; and was the winner of the American O Henry short story award in 2009. His website is: www.grahamjoyce.net.

  Novels by Graham Joyce:

  The Year Of The Ladybird

  Dreamside

  Dark Sister

  House Of Lost Dreams

  Requiem

  The Stormwatcher

  Leningrad Nights

  Indigo

  Smoking Poppy

  The Facts Of Life

  The Limits Of Enchantment

  Memoirs Of A Master Forger by William Heaney/ How To Make Friends With Demons

  The Silent Land

  Some Kind Of Fairy Tale

  Partial Eclipse & Other Short Stories

  (Children & Young Adult novels):

  Spiderbite

  TWOC

  Do The Creepy thing

  Three ways To Snog An Alien

  The Devil’s Ladder

  (Non-fiction):

  Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular

  Author’s Foreword

  One May day morning my wife Sue had been unable to sleep so she got up at the crack of dawn and went horse riding. She returned in an excited state and told me of a wonderful scene that she had witnessed. With the sun having just risen she was galloping across a field when four or five hares startled from cover. The extraordinary thing was that the hares didn’t run away from the galloping horse. They appeared to join in the gallop and ran alongside until at last they peeled away into the undergrowth. It was a magical experience and one which left a lasting impression.

  Sometime later Sue had a nasty riding accident which left her needing surgery to mend a badly broken arm. Recovery was difficult and long-term. When Christmas came along I had a chance to buy a bronze statue of a racing hare by the artist Lucy Kinsella. It was more than I could afford but the story of the galloping hares was so strong and somehow so significant that I went ahead on impulse and bought it for Sue. From that moment on the Hare seemed to become a family totem, with the statue occupying pride of place on the mantelpiece in the living room. Anyway Sue went on to make a good recovery.

  As I wrote on my website, one day while walking through the English countryside (on another beautiful May morning) Suzanne and I were trying to deal with the question of avoiding parenthood by default. That is to say, unless you make a decision yourselves, time passes and the decision is made for you in the negative. “Let your yes be yes and your no be no,” Sue said; or something very like that. I was trying hard to think what I wanted. I genuinely didn’t know my own mind. As I passed through a field gate a giant hare started from the grass between my feet. From nowhere, it seemed, from between my legs. Instructor of Freya, spirit of fertility, the now familiar hare. I admit that I am so stupid and non-rational that I have to surrender to any clear message from Nature arriving with such supernatural force that even a person of reason and intelligence might feel obliged to take notice. Within a year my daughter Ella was born, and two years later, my son Joseph. There are some signs you just can’t ignore and I am so passionately grateful to the hare for putting me on the right path.

  Later we saw an extraordinary painting by Angela Harding also of a hare (but this time much more abstract) featuring a little girl seemingly in conversation with a giant hare. This mysterious painting was partially inspirational for The Limits of Enchantment. The other inspiration was a local Easter ritual that takes place annually in the Midlands county of Leicestershire. The Hallaton hare pie scramble and bottle kicking to give it its full title is an ancient ritual with serious pagan overtones. Every Easter Monday a huge pie is baked by members of the community. Originally this pie contained hare meat although these days it is pork and beef. The pie is paraded through the village by a costumed figure and various bands, while villagers assemble on the church steps to receive the pie. The word “receive” suggests a genteel affair and it does commence in this fashion but in practice things can get out of hand and many in the crowd are pelted with the pie and gravy as they surge forward. It is considered good luck to catch some of the pie to eat.

  Yes, the things we do of an afternoon in the dark heart of the English Midlands.

  Later, strong men from the villages of Hallaton and Medbourne compete in a no-holds-barred scramble to fight for ‘the bottle’ (which is really a small barrel) to carry it between goal posts three miles apart. The goal posts are separated by fields, hedgerows and streams. Injuries are common in this full bloodied and hotly competed event. No one knows how old this ritual is but it is known that the Christian clergy tried to stamp out the frightful pagan practice in the eighteenth century. On that occasion someone daubed the church wall with the slogan NO PIE NO PARSON! The local parson got the message as was intended. The Hare Pie and Bottle Kicking Scramble went ahead.

  The hare of course is an ancient symbol of fertility. It is one of the few creatures on the planet that can conceive while it is already pregnant. It is a totem animal of the Goddess Oestre. Hare worship was common in Roman times and the Easter Monday festival at Hallaton appears to be a rump expression of an ancient pagan ritual; in the same way that chocolate Easter eggs and the Easter bunny are shadows of what was one time serious hare worship.

  So these are some of the background forces that inspired The Limits of Enchantment. I have long thought that if you roll back the concrete and iron that overlays the English industrial Midlands you will indeed get a glimpse of the dark heart of England. The Midlands is super-rich in folk lore, legend, ancient history, blood spilled and vibrant story. From Robin Hood to Lady Godiva; and from events like those at Hallaton to the ancient well dressings of Derbyshire: all within fifty miles of each other. Turn over a stone anywhere and myth and story exude from the ground. Meanwhile I wanted to write about a character whose life has barely been touched by the twentieth century and who lives according to a set of beliefs only barely obscured by this industrial overlay.

  I originally set the novel in the 1920’s. Then it quickly occurred to me that I only had to go back to the 1960’s to find people living lives that had been virtually unchanged for over a hundred years. Even though the Russians and Americans were involved in a space race, plenty of people in England were still living with outside toilets. Mammy and her adopted daughter Fern were two such characters.

  Mammy and Fern are midwives. They are also unlicensed and illegal abortionists. It wasn’t until 1966 that abortion was legalised in the United Kingdom. Before that girls and women relied on the services of people
like Mammy to help them in a crisis. Those who weren’t so lucky to have someone like Mammy had to rely on dangerous or careless practitioners. Though the price Mammy and people like her had to pay was to be somewhat isolated and feared by her community.

  Mammy has the knowledge of all the medicinal herbs that grow in the hedgerow. She is a witch although I never use that word once in the novel because of its ambivalent associations. In fact Mammy is a benevolent force. She is an outsider and her skills and knowledge make her a powerful threat to authority figures. People respect her but they are also afraid of her. Fern inherits all these powers but she has one foot in a much more modern society. The old ways are very strong in her. Her totem animal is the hare. She also comes to realise that, as an outsider, she has enemies in the community. Her fight is the fight of “the other” to establish her rightful place.

  Though I can't always get my friends to agree with me, I think this is one of my best novels. Although The Limits of Enchantment is set in the 1960s I hope that the novel has plenty to say about life in the twenty-first century.

  Graham Joyce

  June 2013

  Prologue

  If I could tell you this in a single sitting then you might believe all of it, even the strangest part. Even the part about what I found in the hedgerow. If I could unwind this story in a single spool, or peel it like an apple the way Mammy would with her penknife in one unbroken coil, juice a-glistening on the blade, then you might bite in without objection.

  But Mammy always said we have lost the art of Listening. She said we live in an age when everyone chatters and no one takes heed, and that, she said, is not a good time in which to live.

  And while I offer you my story unbroken, like the apple peel, it hangs by a fibre at every turn of the knife. When you come to know the nature of the teller of this tale you may have good reason to doubt both. You may suspect the balance of my mind and you may condemn my position. You may start to disbelieve.

  Perhaps I once was mad. Briefly. Perhaps that much is true. And this, in an age where we no longer have the patience to listen, may cause you to break off, to give up on me, to turn away. A young woman has so little of interest to offer, after all. A young woman of unsteady temper, even less.

  What they did to Mammy they tried to do to me. They released the dogs. And when it comes to telling how it was done, I only ask this: when doubt wrinkles your brow; when incomprehension clouds your eyes; when distaste rests like a rank fog on your lips, then think how we few have held our tongues for so long. How we have choked back the truth. How we have burned in our hearts rather than risk the telling. And when you feel most far from me, then at that moment listen hard. Not to your thoughts, which will mislead you, nor to your heart, which will lie, but to the voice behind the voice, and trust the tale and not the teller.

  1

  Mammy pressed her ear to Gwen’s distended pink pot and everyone in the room had to hush up. That was Gwen of course, ready to split like a fruit, and Mammy also of course, and Gwen’s friend Clarrie who stood with her arms folded and a ciggie between her lips and a stick of ash hanging over the bed, and me. And we all listened.

  ‘Make it easier if you told me, Mammy,’ Gwen said, but Mammy flapped an arm through the air, hush-up, and pressed her ear closer to the spot she’d shown me just north-north-west of Gwen’s navel.

  Mammy straightened her back and turned away from Gwen. ‘Can’t tell.’

  ‘I know you can!’ Gwen protested, running her chafed hands over her own massive belly. ‘You’d a looked me in the eye. So now I know.’

  ‘She knows, right enough,’ Clarrie croaked without removing the ciggie from her mouth, and then a tiny cough made the stick of ash just miss the bed. ‘Old Mammy Cullen knows.’

  Mammy did know, but wouldn’t let on. ‘Let’s see what nature give us and be glad,’ Mammy always said.

  But Gwen wasn’t having that. ‘Oh Mammy, if I just knew I could relax and this one would be out and it’s not as if it will be any less loved either way.’

  Gwen had four brawling and bawling red-cheeked boys and desperately wanted a little girl to put a bit o’ balance in the house. Mammy would listen and was usually right but she was not infallible so she never liked to say.

  At last Clarrie took the cigarette out of her mouth. She expertly nipped the lighted end between a finger and a thumb callused from the canning factory and dropped the stub in her apron pocket. ‘Let the girl have a listen,’ she said.

  My hand flew up, as it always did in these moments, to the three iron hairgrips pinning my hair at the temple. Gwen mouthed at me like a fish, go on. Mammy wrinkled her nose and motioned me towards Gwen’s swollen mound. I put my ear to the spot and listened hard. Then I got up and because the other two were hard at watching my lips I touched my left earlobe.

  ‘She thinks it’s a girl and I do, too,’ Mammy said, and Gwen started blubbing.

  ‘But she ain’t said a word!’ Clarrie protested.

  Mammy was more interested in scolding Gwen. ‘Now look at you, filling up! And where you going to be if I’m wrong?’

  ‘You ain’t never wrong Mammy, they all say! Thank you, Mammy! Thank you so much! Oh I could die happy!’

  ‘Die? You ain’t going to die! And I’m offen wrong about it. Offen.’

  ‘She never said a bloody word!’ Clarrie complained again, lighting up another Craven A and looking at me.

  No, but we had our own way of speaking, and just as I’d touched my left earlobe I’d looked at Mammy for a response because I knew we’d both heard trouble. Mammy wiped her forefingers together, just the once, to confirm the difficulty I’d picked up in the heartbeat. Flat. Trouble. Oh dear for everyone, and I’m going to stay calm now Fern, stay calm.

  But Gwen was right in that she relaxed immediately and within half an hour after Mammy’s pronouncement that little baby girl was inching her way out. But where we all wanted to see her boxing the air with her tiny pink fists, something was wrong. The baby had the cord around her neck like a noose, and you could tell she was starved of oxygen. Mammy got her fingers between neck and cord and quickly freed her, but there was nothing.

  ‘She’s flat,’ I said to Mammy in an underbreath, not wanting Gwen to hear.

  But Clarrie sensed something and stepped round to look. Taking her ciggie from between her lips she blurted, ‘But she’s so blue!’

  ‘Blue?’ said Gwen.

  ‘Stand aside and shut it,’ Mammy said sharply to Clarrie. The baby was all out now, but limp. Mammy flicked its feet hard. Then she slapped it. ‘Sucker,’ she said to me, but softly. I rummaged in Mammy’s bag and I found the fine-bore length of rubber tube and handed it to her.

  ‘Is it all right? Tell me it’s all right, Mammy,’ Gwen was saying, so I attended to her bleeding with swabs, more to distract her so that Mammy could do whatever she could. Mammy laid the baby down and stuck the tube down its throat and sucked hard. She spat into a bowl. Mammy slapped again, but the blue thing was still flat. Lifeless. Nothing.

  There was no hiding it. Clarrie had gone silent now, and Gwen was paralysed and I felt the flush of fear travel between us, and we all looked to Mammy. But Mammy seemed to be listening hard, and not at the baby but at the window. Her head was cocked slightly.

  ‘Bucket of cold water, Fern, quick as you can. Use the rainwater barrel. Cold.’

  I didn’t need telling twice. I raced downstairs, grabbed the nearest bowl to hand and filled it with icy water from the rainwater tub outside and brought it back to the room. I knew what Mammy wanted, but Clarrie said, ‘They don’t do that any more. It’ll ketch pneumonia.’

  Mammy ignored Clarrie and plunged the baby into the cold water. She held it under and brought it up again. Then she plunged it under again. ‘Linseed meal Clarrie, go and get me some, sharpish. And you Fern, gold dust.’

  Clarrie was gone for the linseed but before I left the room I heard a tiny cough, like the spluttering of the water pump when you primed it. The baby coughed.
It made a tiny gasp. ‘Don’t dawdle now Fern.’

  I had to go down to Gwen’s pantry and rummage about for mustard seed, which Mammy called ‘gold dust’. I ground up the seed in a mortar and pestle I found in the kitchen. Before I’d finished Clarrie – who lived in the next house – was back with her linseed meal. I took it from her and I made the wet poultice and then took it back up to the room.

  Gwen had the baby with her now, wrapped tight in a towel. Mammy inspected my poultice, took the baby back from Gwen and unwrapped the towel. She smeared the yellow poultice all over the baby’s back, then wrapped her in the towel again before handing her back to her mother. ‘She’ll not get pneumonia,’ Mammy said pointedly, looking hard at Clarrie.

  ‘Oh Mammy!’ Gwen said. ‘It’s the little girl I wanted. Will she be all right?’

  Well even though the danger had passed, Mammy would never say anything would be all right because she told me nature was imperfect; but she was wise enough to know she had to behave now as if it would be. ‘Write her down,’ Mammy said to me. ‘Write down her time and her weight. Write down as Gwen has had a healthy little girl.’

  Mammy’s precision in these things was her one concession to the bureaucrats who exiled her from her true calling. Though she herself couldn’t read or write, and claimed to see no point in the practice, she was proud that I could. It was her way of showing to the other women that we, too, could keep records if records there must be. So I took out my notebook and I wrote: To Gwen Harding, daughter, eight pounds nine ounces, sixteen minutes past four p.m., 4th February 1966. And as an extra flourish of my own I wrote Full moon baby.

  Gwen was lost in the moment of new motherhood. Her friend Clarrie was happy again, too. She puffed away at the fresh ciggie wedged between her teeth, manufacturing a new stick of ash. ‘They say as you’re always right Mammy. And you was right about that lickle gal, too.’