Thursday 24th May
Morwenstow – Boscastle – Bude
I had hoped that sleeping in the hut of a Victorian, opium-smoking priest – hewn into a cliff on the edge of the Celtic Sea, and lined with ship-wrecked timbers – would infuse my dreams with spiritually heroic visions. But the only dream I can recall is a dream about a twelve-year-old boy who was having some sort of seizure, and who was insistent that the best remedy was to have his head bashed against the wall.
Fuck, I’m slightly in shock recalling this dream. Not only does this level of violence obviously live within me, I can still feel some of its residue jangling around my nervous system. It’s hard to accept that there is a twelve-year-old boy within me who thinks he needs to have his head bashed against the wall in order to forestall his seizures. I can even feel slight bruises or knocks on my skull as I recall the dream, as if I’ve hit myself – or been hit – with knuckled fists.
But not only has the dream disturbed my emotional system, it’s also disturbing my self-image. Here I am trying to be a peaceful pilgrim, hankering after “proper” pilgrim dreams and direct divine contact, and here instead is head-smashing ferocity rising from my shadows and pissing on the piety party.
And yet there was such potency in the dream. Such power in the violence recommended. Such conviction in the twelve-year-old’s voice.
That’ll teach me for sleeping in National Trust properties without their permission.
I crawl out of my sleeping bag, dress, and go outside to shake off the lunacy of the night. Not a bad view, Reverend, not a bad view. The sea is deep sea blue, and the land I’m standing on crumbles and tumbles down to sharp, ship-wrecking rocks below. I imagine Hawker huddled here on a stormy night, wrapped in oilskins, with a well-protected lantern and perhaps a whisky flask full of brandy. But did he carry the lantern to warn ships away, or to scan the rocks for half-drowned sailors? And did other parishioners join him in these stormy vigils or was he a lone watchman? And how many sailors did he help rescue? And how many died in his arms?
And did he lug all this ship-wrecked timber up here all by himself? Or did he have some sort of loyal, handyman-sidekick? The vicarage gardener, perhaps? And was he just an occasional opium smoker, or did he have quite a Victorian habit? And did smoking really help him commune with God? And did, perhaps, he see angels?
Ah, I can feel myself being pulled into the gravitational orbit of the man. I bet he was good company at dinner, especially once the port got flowing.
Breakfasting back inside the hut, I begin reading the visitors’ book. There are some unpolished gems within:
Fuck, I’m slightly in shock recalling this dream. Not only does this level of violence obviously live within me, I can still feel some of its residue jangling around my nervous system. It’s hard to accept that there is a twelve-year-old boy within me who thinks he needs to have his head bashed against the wall in order to forestall his seizures. I can even feel slight bruises or knocks on my skull as I recall the dream, as if I’ve hit myself – or been hit – with knuckled fists.
But not only has the dream disturbed my emotional system, it’s also disturbing my self-image. Here I am trying to be a peaceful pilgrim, hankering after “proper” pilgrim dreams and direct divine contact, and here instead is head-smashing ferocity rising from my shadows and pissing on the piety party.
And yet there was such potency in the dream. Such power in the violence recommended. Such conviction in the twelve-year-old’s voice.
That’ll teach me for sleeping in National Trust properties without their permission.
I crawl out of my sleeping bag, dress, and go outside to shake off the lunacy of the night. Not a bad view, Reverend, not a bad view. The sea is deep sea blue, and the land I’m standing on crumbles and tumbles down to sharp, ship-wrecking rocks below. I imagine Hawker huddled here on a stormy night, wrapped in oilskins, with a well-protected lantern and perhaps a whisky flask full of brandy. But did he carry the lantern to warn ships away, or to scan the rocks for half-drowned sailors? And did other parishioners join him in these stormy vigils or was he a lone watchman? And how many sailors did he help rescue? And how many died in his arms?
And did he lug all this ship-wrecked timber up here all by himself? Or did he have some sort of loyal, handyman-sidekick? The vicarage gardener, perhaps? And was he just an occasional opium smoker, or did he have quite a Victorian habit? And did smoking really help him commune with God? And did, perhaps, he see angels?
Ah, I can feel myself being pulled into the gravitational orbit of the man. I bet he was good company at dinner, especially once the port got flowing.
Breakfasting back inside the hut, I begin reading the visitors’ book. There are some unpolished gems within:
There was a man called Hawker
He was a bit of a porker
He smoked a fucking corker
and went out in the water
Yours truly Nic S
The sea is as blue as a frooliccing pudel
I’m sitting in here and having a cuddle
A dog came by to have a look
So I sat and wrote in this book
Thomas age 7
The sheep graze as the sea gulls call
The waves splash on the pebbles
and the dog pines as Grandad
fiddles with his teeth
by Ivy Newton age 10
He was a bit of a porker
He smoked a fucking corker
and went out in the water
Yours truly Nic S
The sea is as blue as a frooliccing pudel
I’m sitting in here and having a cuddle
A dog came by to have a look
So I sat and wrote in this book
Thomas age 7
The sheep graze as the sea gulls call
The waves splash on the pebbles
and the dog pines as Grandad
fiddles with his teeth
by Ivy Newton age 10
The wood of the hut is saturated with graffiti, some inked, some scratched, some even chiselled – and if the depth of the grooves is a measure of the depth of the love, then DEREK LOVES DOREEN 1992 must still be going strong.
One of Hawker’s verses is pinned to one of the walls:
They had their lodges in the wilderness,
Or built them cells beside the shadowy sea,
And there they dwelt with angels, like a dream:
So they unroll’d the volume of the Book,
And fill’d the fields of the Evangelist
With antique thoughts, that breathed of Paradise.
(from The Quest of the Sangraal)
I pack my bags, tidy the hut, and sit in meditation. But the meditation quickly derails and becomes a contemplation of last night’s disturbing dream. I’m guessing it’s a good thing that the violence within me is making itself known – better out than in, and all that – but it’s a sobering thing too. When I tune into that twelve-year-old boy right now, I sense a boy wanting to go absolutely ape shit – to take the place a-fucking-part. And the only way he can push this explosive desire back down is to batter himself – or have someone batter him. Bash and batter it all down, and then batten down the hatches. Fuck, it takes a lot of psychic self-violence – and life force – to shove that shit down below, and to keep it under lock and key. No wonder I can be so unkind to myself. Self-violence was built into my boarding school survival strategy. It was a genius survival strategy at the time, but, yowza, it sure don’t serve me now.
Reverend Hawker, I sure wouldn’t mind some of those antique thoughts that breathe of paradise right now, if that’s within your current range of peri-saintly powers.
Morwenstow’s parish church – dedicated to both Saint Morwenna and Saint John the Baptist – is tucked within its own shallow valley, hunkered down, its squat tower facing down any storms from the west. Just inside the church door is another properly chunky-wonky font with a carved rope around its middle – all, no doubt, roughly hewn by specialist chunky-wonky Saxon stonemasons – and on the opposite wall is a bright white ship’s figurehead – a kilted Caledonia, thistle-embossed shield held aloft, beatific head thrown back, sword in hand.
I sit down in one of the pews, and once again I’m taken back to my childhood church in Lincolnshire – the strange mix of peacefulness and coolness and gloom. The chancel is moody and dark, lit only by the sunlight coming through a small window, and protected by a heavy chancel screen. There’s peace in this place, but not much sense of joy.
Ah, joy – since mum died I’ve been so joyless.
I miss joy so much.
Tears are now welling and stinging the corners of my eyes, and grief has begun to gently rock my belly, for the thousandth time. I can’t quite put it into words, but there’s something about my mum’s dying and death that I don’t think I’ve let go of yet. I haven’t quite forgiven Life, or God, for giving her back to me and then taking her away. Some of this grief feels adult, but much of it feels childish.
Oh, I can picture her now, just two weeks before she died, and I spied that she had just enough energy to get into the car, and I drove her up to the village church to let her say her farewells. And then – oh it was so heart-breaking – I watched my mother, all skin and bones, clothes hanging off her, shuffle around the church saying her goodbyes. And then she went up to the altar where she used to preside, and I could see her lips muttering silent prayers. She always said that sharing the bread and wine with others was one of her greatest joys.
Oh, I’m in floods of tears now. I miss her so much. And that memory of her – all skin and bones – I really need to find a way of releasing that, because it haunts me still.
I can imagine the church door opening right now, and there she is, smiling kindly.
“Oh love,” she says. “Please don’t suffer any more.”
More weeping. I feel like I’ve wept a million tears these last five years. Oh, I’ve felt so, so lost without her.
Oh, my sweet and guarded and broken heart. May you know deep peace and deep joy. May you dare to open once again. I miss your openness. Life loses colour without your open presence.
Wow, I haven’t felt a wave of grief this deep and strong in quite a while.
Life, hold me close. Let this grief be released from my being. Let me learn to trust you again.
Deep breath. Wipe the tears from my eyes and cheeks. Squeeze and wipe the snotty tears from my nose. Give it a good blow. Rub my aching belly. Lightly tap my cheeks and forehead. Tap and smooth my scalp. Give my ear lobes a tug. Keep breathing, my son.
I sure wasn’t expecting this unravelling when I entered this place.
I little comforting mantra arises upon my lips: I am safe, I am connected, I am blessed, I am loved.
I say it out loud a dozen times or more, and feel my system beginning to settle.
I am safe.
I am connected.
I am blessed.
I am loved.
And now a sort of washed out peace has begun to percolate through my being – the one that settles after you’ve had a damn good sob. A lightness, and a tenderness, and a hint of grace. Oh, the vulnerability of the human heart.
Thanks, Saint Morwenna. Thanks, Saint John. Thanks, pink-hatted Reverend Hawker. Thanks, Divinity of this place. Thanks, Life. I obviously needed this medicine.
I pootle around the church and the churchyard, in a bit of a light-headed daze, reading this, reading that, sitting down here and sitting down there, picking up jigsaw pieces of information, and generally soaking up the man and the saints and the place, and letting any remnants of grief dissipate.
Not only did Hawker smoke opium, wear a pink hat, keep a pig as a pet, write poems, rescue and bury sailors, but he also founded the village school, was the originator of the modern Harvest Festival service, and wrote one of Cornwall’s unofficial national anthem – The Song Of The Western Men, aka Trelawny.
A good sword and a trusty hand!
A merry heart and true!
King James’s men shall understand
What Cornish lads can do!
And have they fixed the where and when?
And shall Trelawny die?
Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why!
I bet they belt that one out at the rugby matches.
There’s a stained glass window of Saint Morwenna holding in her hands a small model of the church, and besides the priest’s door in the Sanctuary is a painting of her giving a blessing to a kneeling priest or monk. Daughter to a Welsh queen called Gladwys and a king called Breachan, sister of Saint Nectan – and twenty-two other siblings – Morwenna “grew up wise, learned, and holy above her generation.” After serving as teacher and counsellor to the daughters of a Saxon king called Ethelwolf, he granted her a single wish. “Sir,” she replied – according to old Hawker – “there is a stately headland in far Cornwall, called Hennacliff, or the Raven’s Crag, that I have said in my vows, ‘Would to God that a font and altar might be built among the stones of yonder hill.’”
Legend has it that she built the first church all by herself, carrying each stone from the rocky beach on top of her saintly head, and a holy spring sprang from the place where she used to pause for breath and prayer.
In the graveyard there’s a bright white replica of the Caledonia figurehead, beneath which are buried the bodies of the Captain and crew of the Caledonia of Arbroth, which foundered upon the rocks in a storm in September 1842. And nearby there’s a tall granite cross, erected in memory of all the unidentified sailors buried there, bearing the simple, moving inscription: Unknown Yet Well Known.
I feel an itch on my inside thigh and discover a tick embedded in my skin, having a good long slurp of my innocent blood. I make the classic mistake of panicking and pulling the blighter out with my finger nails, but I can see I’ve left the head in there, and am going to have to give it a proper poke with a needle this evening. I don’t think this is Lyme Disease territory, but I know a couple of friends who’ve had the disease, and it’s no fun, especially if you don’t catch it early.
Twice I set out looking for the nearby holy well of Saint John the Baptist, and twice I end up in different private gardens. But on my third sortie I’m successful, only to find the door to its shrine-like little stone house padlocked shut. As ever, I’m sure the padlockers have their reasons, but it does feel like a real shame. Holy water, like grief, needs to flow free.
The nearby Vicarage – built for Hawker – features five very different chimneys, three of them based on churches he knew, and one based on the tower of Magdalen College, Oxford, which is presumably where he studied. That man definitely left an impression on this place. And Saint Morwenna definitely left an impression on him.
from Morwenna Statio
by the Reverend R.S. Hawker
My Saxon shrine, the only ground
Wherein this weary heart hath rest :
What years the birds of God hath found
Along they walls their sacred nest :
The storm – the blast – the tempest shock –
Have beat upon those walls in vain ;
She stands – a daughter of the rock –
The changeless God’s eternal fane.
I can still feel the after-effects of my recent outpouring of grief, but it’s time to pull myself together and get back on the road.
I have a breakfast coffee at some nearby tearooms, avail myself of their genteel toilet, and consider my options. St. Nectan’s Glen is a must, but I’ve also always wanted to visit the Museum of Witchcraft in nearby Boscastle. I’ve also promised some friends in Bude that if I was passing by I’d give them a call.
I’m not sure if visiting friends whilst on pilgrimage is allowed, or a good idea. I give them a call, anyway. And they say that they’d love to see me, and can pick me up after I’ve visited the Glen and the museum. The mention of a bath and gin and tonic seals the deal.
I am such a crap pilgrim. Forgive me, Lord. The hobgoblins and foul fiends know my price, and it turns out it ain’t much.
I shoulder my bags, and begin walking out of the village towards the A39. It’s a long, hot walk, and at times I wish I’d stayed in the village and hitched from there. The occasional car passes by, and I stick my thumb out, but I never have the sense that any of them are remotely interested in picking me up, and, besides, the lanes are narrow and there’s never anywhere obvious to pull over. But I manage to get into the country lane walking swing of things, tacking from one side to the other as I take the blind bends, and I find my imagination wondering further about the caterpillar and chrysalis and butterfly thing. Maybe I’m not even at the chrysalis stage? Maybe I’m just going through another round of caterpillar moulting? Fuck. Fuck. I want to be a butterfly! Or at least a hairy moth.
A car, unbidden, pulls over and asks me where I’m going. I show her Boscastle on the map, and she offers to take me some of the way. She rearranges her three sheep dogs, squeezes my bags in, and we’re off. And Rowena is a character and a half. She says she spent eight years living on Dartmoor in her car, with up to five dogs sharing her life.
“I don’t measure life by the scars I’ve got,” she says, “but by my ability to heal.”
“You sound quite resilient.”
“Oh, I don’t know about resilient – I’m just very stubborn.”
She flips her sun visor down to reveal a hand-drawn picture of a frog inside the beak of a lanky heron. “That’s my motto,” she says, and it takes me a couple of seconds to realise that the frog has its webbed hands around the bird’s narrow neck. And underneath this pictorial struggle, the words: Never give up!
She isn’t the most careful of drivers, sometimes almost veering off the road as she speaks, sometimes veering over the central line. “Don’t worry,” she says, reading my mind, “I’ve never had an accident.” Nonetheless, I try to make sure that the conversation doesn’t get too exciting, and I never hold her proffered eye contact for long, although she does seem to require quite a lot of eye contact. And every couple of miles she says that she’ll take me another couple of miles more, until we end up in Boscastle anyway, and say our fond farewells. By her own admission, her dogs are her main rasion d’être, and off she drives off in search of somewhere she can let them off their leads.
Directly opposite is Sharon’s Place – a fish and chip shop with a bar in the garden, disguised as a bright blue beach hut. So I have veggie sausages, chips and mushy peas, all washed down with a pint of water and a bottle of Doombar. The sausages are Linda McCartney sausages – possibly the least inspiring veggie sausages ever created – but they’re a hundred times more palatable than yesterday’s vile veggie burger. Was that only yesterday? I still feel a little bit queasy, just at the thought.
I get out my journal and get scribbling.
I still feel quite washed out by the tears I shed in church this morning, but pleasantly lighter too. I really see how the grief around my mother’s death is tangled with an ancient grief at losing her when I was sent to boarding school – an old grief that has been trapped in my system for over forty years now. I can see – not in a conceptual way – why these last few years have been so fucking difficult: mum’s death broke open my traumatised system, and I’ve been reeling from, and dealing with, not just the natural grief of losing her from this life, but the rancid grief of my childhood – rancid because it’s been buried in my system all these years.
And maybe this unhealed traumatised system of mine is the main cause of me feeling so disconnected so much of the time?
But I don’t know. I’m constantly making up hypotheses to try and make me feel like I have a clue about what’s going on.
One of Hawker’s verses is pinned to one of the walls:
They had their lodges in the wilderness,
Or built them cells beside the shadowy sea,
And there they dwelt with angels, like a dream:
So they unroll’d the volume of the Book,
And fill’d the fields of the Evangelist
With antique thoughts, that breathed of Paradise.
(from The Quest of the Sangraal)
I pack my bags, tidy the hut, and sit in meditation. But the meditation quickly derails and becomes a contemplation of last night’s disturbing dream. I’m guessing it’s a good thing that the violence within me is making itself known – better out than in, and all that – but it’s a sobering thing too. When I tune into that twelve-year-old boy right now, I sense a boy wanting to go absolutely ape shit – to take the place a-fucking-part. And the only way he can push this explosive desire back down is to batter himself – or have someone batter him. Bash and batter it all down, and then batten down the hatches. Fuck, it takes a lot of psychic self-violence – and life force – to shove that shit down below, and to keep it under lock and key. No wonder I can be so unkind to myself. Self-violence was built into my boarding school survival strategy. It was a genius survival strategy at the time, but, yowza, it sure don’t serve me now.
Reverend Hawker, I sure wouldn’t mind some of those antique thoughts that breathe of paradise right now, if that’s within your current range of peri-saintly powers.
Morwenstow’s parish church – dedicated to both Saint Morwenna and Saint John the Baptist – is tucked within its own shallow valley, hunkered down, its squat tower facing down any storms from the west. Just inside the church door is another properly chunky-wonky font with a carved rope around its middle – all, no doubt, roughly hewn by specialist chunky-wonky Saxon stonemasons – and on the opposite wall is a bright white ship’s figurehead – a kilted Caledonia, thistle-embossed shield held aloft, beatific head thrown back, sword in hand.
I sit down in one of the pews, and once again I’m taken back to my childhood church in Lincolnshire – the strange mix of peacefulness and coolness and gloom. The chancel is moody and dark, lit only by the sunlight coming through a small window, and protected by a heavy chancel screen. There’s peace in this place, but not much sense of joy.
Ah, joy – since mum died I’ve been so joyless.
I miss joy so much.
Tears are now welling and stinging the corners of my eyes, and grief has begun to gently rock my belly, for the thousandth time. I can’t quite put it into words, but there’s something about my mum’s dying and death that I don’t think I’ve let go of yet. I haven’t quite forgiven Life, or God, for giving her back to me and then taking her away. Some of this grief feels adult, but much of it feels childish.
Oh, I can picture her now, just two weeks before she died, and I spied that she had just enough energy to get into the car, and I drove her up to the village church to let her say her farewells. And then – oh it was so heart-breaking – I watched my mother, all skin and bones, clothes hanging off her, shuffle around the church saying her goodbyes. And then she went up to the altar where she used to preside, and I could see her lips muttering silent prayers. She always said that sharing the bread and wine with others was one of her greatest joys.
Oh, I’m in floods of tears now. I miss her so much. And that memory of her – all skin and bones – I really need to find a way of releasing that, because it haunts me still.
I can imagine the church door opening right now, and there she is, smiling kindly.
“Oh love,” she says. “Please don’t suffer any more.”
More weeping. I feel like I’ve wept a million tears these last five years. Oh, I’ve felt so, so lost without her.
Oh, my sweet and guarded and broken heart. May you know deep peace and deep joy. May you dare to open once again. I miss your openness. Life loses colour without your open presence.
Wow, I haven’t felt a wave of grief this deep and strong in quite a while.
Life, hold me close. Let this grief be released from my being. Let me learn to trust you again.
Deep breath. Wipe the tears from my eyes and cheeks. Squeeze and wipe the snotty tears from my nose. Give it a good blow. Rub my aching belly. Lightly tap my cheeks and forehead. Tap and smooth my scalp. Give my ear lobes a tug. Keep breathing, my son.
I sure wasn’t expecting this unravelling when I entered this place.
I little comforting mantra arises upon my lips: I am safe, I am connected, I am blessed, I am loved.
I say it out loud a dozen times or more, and feel my system beginning to settle.
I am safe.
I am connected.
I am blessed.
I am loved.
And now a sort of washed out peace has begun to percolate through my being – the one that settles after you’ve had a damn good sob. A lightness, and a tenderness, and a hint of grace. Oh, the vulnerability of the human heart.
Thanks, Saint Morwenna. Thanks, Saint John. Thanks, pink-hatted Reverend Hawker. Thanks, Divinity of this place. Thanks, Life. I obviously needed this medicine.
I pootle around the church and the churchyard, in a bit of a light-headed daze, reading this, reading that, sitting down here and sitting down there, picking up jigsaw pieces of information, and generally soaking up the man and the saints and the place, and letting any remnants of grief dissipate.
Not only did Hawker smoke opium, wear a pink hat, keep a pig as a pet, write poems, rescue and bury sailors, but he also founded the village school, was the originator of the modern Harvest Festival service, and wrote one of Cornwall’s unofficial national anthem – The Song Of The Western Men, aka Trelawny.
A good sword and a trusty hand!
A merry heart and true!
King James’s men shall understand
What Cornish lads can do!
And have they fixed the where and when?
And shall Trelawny die?
Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why!
I bet they belt that one out at the rugby matches.
There’s a stained glass window of Saint Morwenna holding in her hands a small model of the church, and besides the priest’s door in the Sanctuary is a painting of her giving a blessing to a kneeling priest or monk. Daughter to a Welsh queen called Gladwys and a king called Breachan, sister of Saint Nectan – and twenty-two other siblings – Morwenna “grew up wise, learned, and holy above her generation.” After serving as teacher and counsellor to the daughters of a Saxon king called Ethelwolf, he granted her a single wish. “Sir,” she replied – according to old Hawker – “there is a stately headland in far Cornwall, called Hennacliff, or the Raven’s Crag, that I have said in my vows, ‘Would to God that a font and altar might be built among the stones of yonder hill.’”
Legend has it that she built the first church all by herself, carrying each stone from the rocky beach on top of her saintly head, and a holy spring sprang from the place where she used to pause for breath and prayer.
In the graveyard there’s a bright white replica of the Caledonia figurehead, beneath which are buried the bodies of the Captain and crew of the Caledonia of Arbroth, which foundered upon the rocks in a storm in September 1842. And nearby there’s a tall granite cross, erected in memory of all the unidentified sailors buried there, bearing the simple, moving inscription: Unknown Yet Well Known.
I feel an itch on my inside thigh and discover a tick embedded in my skin, having a good long slurp of my innocent blood. I make the classic mistake of panicking and pulling the blighter out with my finger nails, but I can see I’ve left the head in there, and am going to have to give it a proper poke with a needle this evening. I don’t think this is Lyme Disease territory, but I know a couple of friends who’ve had the disease, and it’s no fun, especially if you don’t catch it early.
Twice I set out looking for the nearby holy well of Saint John the Baptist, and twice I end up in different private gardens. But on my third sortie I’m successful, only to find the door to its shrine-like little stone house padlocked shut. As ever, I’m sure the padlockers have their reasons, but it does feel like a real shame. Holy water, like grief, needs to flow free.
The nearby Vicarage – built for Hawker – features five very different chimneys, three of them based on churches he knew, and one based on the tower of Magdalen College, Oxford, which is presumably where he studied. That man definitely left an impression on this place. And Saint Morwenna definitely left an impression on him.
from Morwenna Statio
by the Reverend R.S. Hawker
My Saxon shrine, the only ground
Wherein this weary heart hath rest :
What years the birds of God hath found
Along they walls their sacred nest :
The storm – the blast – the tempest shock –
Have beat upon those walls in vain ;
She stands – a daughter of the rock –
The changeless God’s eternal fane.
I can still feel the after-effects of my recent outpouring of grief, but it’s time to pull myself together and get back on the road.
I have a breakfast coffee at some nearby tearooms, avail myself of their genteel toilet, and consider my options. St. Nectan’s Glen is a must, but I’ve also always wanted to visit the Museum of Witchcraft in nearby Boscastle. I’ve also promised some friends in Bude that if I was passing by I’d give them a call.
I’m not sure if visiting friends whilst on pilgrimage is allowed, or a good idea. I give them a call, anyway. And they say that they’d love to see me, and can pick me up after I’ve visited the Glen and the museum. The mention of a bath and gin and tonic seals the deal.
I am such a crap pilgrim. Forgive me, Lord. The hobgoblins and foul fiends know my price, and it turns out it ain’t much.
I shoulder my bags, and begin walking out of the village towards the A39. It’s a long, hot walk, and at times I wish I’d stayed in the village and hitched from there. The occasional car passes by, and I stick my thumb out, but I never have the sense that any of them are remotely interested in picking me up, and, besides, the lanes are narrow and there’s never anywhere obvious to pull over. But I manage to get into the country lane walking swing of things, tacking from one side to the other as I take the blind bends, and I find my imagination wondering further about the caterpillar and chrysalis and butterfly thing. Maybe I’m not even at the chrysalis stage? Maybe I’m just going through another round of caterpillar moulting? Fuck. Fuck. I want to be a butterfly! Or at least a hairy moth.
A car, unbidden, pulls over and asks me where I’m going. I show her Boscastle on the map, and she offers to take me some of the way. She rearranges her three sheep dogs, squeezes my bags in, and we’re off. And Rowena is a character and a half. She says she spent eight years living on Dartmoor in her car, with up to five dogs sharing her life.
“I don’t measure life by the scars I’ve got,” she says, “but by my ability to heal.”
“You sound quite resilient.”
“Oh, I don’t know about resilient – I’m just very stubborn.”
She flips her sun visor down to reveal a hand-drawn picture of a frog inside the beak of a lanky heron. “That’s my motto,” she says, and it takes me a couple of seconds to realise that the frog has its webbed hands around the bird’s narrow neck. And underneath this pictorial struggle, the words: Never give up!
She isn’t the most careful of drivers, sometimes almost veering off the road as she speaks, sometimes veering over the central line. “Don’t worry,” she says, reading my mind, “I’ve never had an accident.” Nonetheless, I try to make sure that the conversation doesn’t get too exciting, and I never hold her proffered eye contact for long, although she does seem to require quite a lot of eye contact. And every couple of miles she says that she’ll take me another couple of miles more, until we end up in Boscastle anyway, and say our fond farewells. By her own admission, her dogs are her main rasion d’être, and off she drives off in search of somewhere she can let them off their leads.
Directly opposite is Sharon’s Place – a fish and chip shop with a bar in the garden, disguised as a bright blue beach hut. So I have veggie sausages, chips and mushy peas, all washed down with a pint of water and a bottle of Doombar. The sausages are Linda McCartney sausages – possibly the least inspiring veggie sausages ever created – but they’re a hundred times more palatable than yesterday’s vile veggie burger. Was that only yesterday? I still feel a little bit queasy, just at the thought.
I get out my journal and get scribbling.
I still feel quite washed out by the tears I shed in church this morning, but pleasantly lighter too. I really see how the grief around my mother’s death is tangled with an ancient grief at losing her when I was sent to boarding school – an old grief that has been trapped in my system for over forty years now. I can see – not in a conceptual way – why these last few years have been so fucking difficult: mum’s death broke open my traumatised system, and I’ve been reeling from, and dealing with, not just the natural grief of losing her from this life, but the rancid grief of my childhood – rancid because it’s been buried in my system all these years.
And maybe this unhealed traumatised system of mine is the main cause of me feeling so disconnected so much of the time?
But I don’t know. I’m constantly making up hypotheses to try and make me feel like I have a clue about what’s going on.
For its tiny size, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic sure packs a hefty punch. The creation of film-maker Cecil Williamson – who in the 1930s was hired by MI6 to investigate Nazi occultism – the Museum originally opened in an old windmill on the Isle of Man in the late 40s, found its way to Boscastle in 1960, was sold on in 1996, flooded in the great floods of 2004, and gifted to the Director of the Museum of British Folklore in 2013. “People with children of a sensitive disposition,” reads an old museum notice, complete with a picture of a witch turning a child into a toad, “are warned that some of the exhibits are controversial.”
There are sections on herbs and healing, persecution and torture, spells and charms, fortune telling and divination, occultism and Freemasonry, Goddess worship and Christian magic, and even a life-size model of a wise woman’s cottage, stuffed cats and all. There are mirrors in which to catch the rays of the sun, brooms on which to ride into subtle worlds, knives and sickles with which to cut herbs, cups in which to read tea leaf fortunes, wax dolls in which to stick pins, a two-headed pig in a bottle, witch bottles, witch balls, palmistry hands, mandrake roots, amulets, chalices, crystals, hagstones, and even human skulls and bones.
Mother Shipton is here alongside Joan of Arc, the Virgin Mary, Lilith, Hecate, Diana, Isis, Ishtar, Epona, Bride, Bridget, Morrigan, Hare Woman, and even good Old Meg. Aleister Crowley is also here, alongside Tam O’Shanter, Baphomet, Pan, Cernunnos, the Green Man, and horny Old Nick himself. Not forgetting the fey world of elementals and elves, fairies and sprites, piskies and pixies, goblins and ghouls and gnomes.
There’s even, quite appropriately, a section of the Museum devoted to witchcraft of the sea. I learn that sailors used to carry children’s cauls, in the belief that anyone who carried one would never die by drowning. That fishermen used to put holed coins in their cork floats – in exchange for a generous catch. And that witches used to sell the wind to both sailors and fishermen in the form of a rope with three charmed knots, which could be untied when required.
It’s a proper cornucopia of a museum, pressed down and overflowing. And if it all gets too much then there are even a couple of glass spirit houses, in which pesky spirits can be kept amused.
I remember the first time I ever came across modern witchcraft in the flesh. Up until then I didn’t really know of its existence. I was eighteen, still quite evangelical, and at my first ever Glastonbury. Given that the only other festival I’d ever experienced was Greenbelt, my eyes and jaw and mind were all agog. A friend suggested we go to a sweat lodge in the Green Field. I didn’t have a clue what a sweat lodge was, but it sounded whacky enough. We met at the appointed time, at a muddy mouth to an underground chamber. Which we had to crawl through. Naked. At this point I was already beginning to have my Christian doubts. It was hot and dark and slippery and claustrophobic down there, and I was squeezed in next to various other naked, slippery bodies. Oh my. And then the sweat lodge began, and I realised I was slap, bang in the middle of a Goddess-worshipping pagan ritual. This was awkward. But part of me was also intrigued. The ceremony was divided into four quarters. At the beginning of each quarter water was splashed onto hot rocks, and the place filled up with a billowing wave of pore-swelling steam. During one of the quarters we gave thanks, and during another we were invited to say out loud something that we wanted to release. I haven’t got the foggiest what I said in any of the quarters, but I do remember, ten or fifteen minutes into the ceremony, having a strange realisation. The earnestness of the praying voices... the melody and intonation... this was just like one of my Christian prayer meetings, except everyone was addressing the Mother Goddess rather than God the Father. And we were all underground, in the dark, and naked. But everyone was praying with the same sort of reverence and devotion. Were we actually praying to different Gods altogether, or were we praying to the same God, but using different names and genders? It was a theologically dizzying experience.
A woman is now walking around the museum telling us it’s closing soon. I dilly dally a bit and am the last to leave. Oh, I’m suddenly so glad for the fresh, open air. It was very rich and very dense in there, and a little disturbing too – I think part of me still recoils at the occult. I feel like I need a good Quaker meeting to exorcise my aura. I’d like to come back another time and give the museum a whole day, with a couple of breaks for a breather, and a friend to debrief with.
I hitch out of Boscastle and get dropped off by the A39. When I phone my friends in Bude to say that I’m on my way, turns out they are already on the road looking for me – and Sal is chuckling about having just met “a woman who said you were quite crafty.” I give them my coordinates, and sit down on my rucksack, taking in the evening sun. A fellow hitcher appears – I remember seeing him walking up the hill – a handsome and well-weathered Polish man called Matthew, and we get chatting and sharing food, and by the time my friends arrive it seems the right thing to invite him to join us. I check in with Sal and Ryan before offering him an official invite – fortunately, they’re the kind of people who are happy to invite friendly-looking waifs and strays to stay. I’m guessing Matthew is the stray and I’m the waif, but I don’t actually know what a waif is.
Turns out Sal and Ryan have been on a funny little mission to find me – they even bumped into Rowena at St Nectan’s Glen, and she’d told them that I’d gone to the museum. “She said you were very crafty,” says Sal, “because you didn’t share any information about yourself. And then when we got to the museum, they said an old grey-haired man with a rucksack had just left. So we knew you weren’t far away.”
I can tell Sal is enjoying relaying these descriptions to my ego’s self-image department. A crafty, old, grey-haired man. Whatever happened to my original innocence, my youthful looks and my mid-80s freely flowing golden mullet?
We drive to their cottage near Bude, and settle down to beer, food, and good natter in their delightfully magical garden.
Matthew is a quiet man with deep, penetrating eyes that seem simultaneously lost and found. Originally a mechanic from Poland, he says he began questioning his life, and life itself, and somehow – he skips the details – got washed up in Bristol, street homeless.
“I got into drinking, you know, and Bristol is quite a heavy scene. Then I lived in a cave, you know, near bridge – the suspension bridge. For nearly two years. But it came time for me to leave. You know. And here I am. Maybe a pilgrim like you. Only twenty days.”
I ask him where he’s heading, but he says he doesn’t know. He’s travelling without direction, without a map, and without any money. He’s basically living on faith, charity and occasional scavenging. He mentions a daughter back in Poland, and I get the feeling he’s trying to transform into a father who could look his daughter in the eyes, apologise, and have something good to offer her. His rucksack is enviably light – just a sleeping bag and tarp, which acts as a groundsheet on dry nights and as a cover on rainy ones. He seems a natural mystic to me, in the moment, totally dependent, sometimes hungry – “But I have taught my mind to overcome hunger” – and sometimes full. I feel like a bit of a bourgeois day-tripper in comparison. He washes his socks, put them on the washing line, and beds down for the night in Sal’s art studio.
I get the guest bed and have a good long soak in the bath. Then I disinfect a needle and try digging that dead tick head out of my thigh. Surgery is definitely not my calling, neither major nor minor. Fortunately, I can hear fresh virgin sheets calling out my name, and all is forgiven...
There are sections on herbs and healing, persecution and torture, spells and charms, fortune telling and divination, occultism and Freemasonry, Goddess worship and Christian magic, and even a life-size model of a wise woman’s cottage, stuffed cats and all. There are mirrors in which to catch the rays of the sun, brooms on which to ride into subtle worlds, knives and sickles with which to cut herbs, cups in which to read tea leaf fortunes, wax dolls in which to stick pins, a two-headed pig in a bottle, witch bottles, witch balls, palmistry hands, mandrake roots, amulets, chalices, crystals, hagstones, and even human skulls and bones.
Mother Shipton is here alongside Joan of Arc, the Virgin Mary, Lilith, Hecate, Diana, Isis, Ishtar, Epona, Bride, Bridget, Morrigan, Hare Woman, and even good Old Meg. Aleister Crowley is also here, alongside Tam O’Shanter, Baphomet, Pan, Cernunnos, the Green Man, and horny Old Nick himself. Not forgetting the fey world of elementals and elves, fairies and sprites, piskies and pixies, goblins and ghouls and gnomes.
There’s even, quite appropriately, a section of the Museum devoted to witchcraft of the sea. I learn that sailors used to carry children’s cauls, in the belief that anyone who carried one would never die by drowning. That fishermen used to put holed coins in their cork floats – in exchange for a generous catch. And that witches used to sell the wind to both sailors and fishermen in the form of a rope with three charmed knots, which could be untied when required.
It’s a proper cornucopia of a museum, pressed down and overflowing. And if it all gets too much then there are even a couple of glass spirit houses, in which pesky spirits can be kept amused.
I remember the first time I ever came across modern witchcraft in the flesh. Up until then I didn’t really know of its existence. I was eighteen, still quite evangelical, and at my first ever Glastonbury. Given that the only other festival I’d ever experienced was Greenbelt, my eyes and jaw and mind were all agog. A friend suggested we go to a sweat lodge in the Green Field. I didn’t have a clue what a sweat lodge was, but it sounded whacky enough. We met at the appointed time, at a muddy mouth to an underground chamber. Which we had to crawl through. Naked. At this point I was already beginning to have my Christian doubts. It was hot and dark and slippery and claustrophobic down there, and I was squeezed in next to various other naked, slippery bodies. Oh my. And then the sweat lodge began, and I realised I was slap, bang in the middle of a Goddess-worshipping pagan ritual. This was awkward. But part of me was also intrigued. The ceremony was divided into four quarters. At the beginning of each quarter water was splashed onto hot rocks, and the place filled up with a billowing wave of pore-swelling steam. During one of the quarters we gave thanks, and during another we were invited to say out loud something that we wanted to release. I haven’t got the foggiest what I said in any of the quarters, but I do remember, ten or fifteen minutes into the ceremony, having a strange realisation. The earnestness of the praying voices... the melody and intonation... this was just like one of my Christian prayer meetings, except everyone was addressing the Mother Goddess rather than God the Father. And we were all underground, in the dark, and naked. But everyone was praying with the same sort of reverence and devotion. Were we actually praying to different Gods altogether, or were we praying to the same God, but using different names and genders? It was a theologically dizzying experience.
A woman is now walking around the museum telling us it’s closing soon. I dilly dally a bit and am the last to leave. Oh, I’m suddenly so glad for the fresh, open air. It was very rich and very dense in there, and a little disturbing too – I think part of me still recoils at the occult. I feel like I need a good Quaker meeting to exorcise my aura. I’d like to come back another time and give the museum a whole day, with a couple of breaks for a breather, and a friend to debrief with.
I hitch out of Boscastle and get dropped off by the A39. When I phone my friends in Bude to say that I’m on my way, turns out they are already on the road looking for me – and Sal is chuckling about having just met “a woman who said you were quite crafty.” I give them my coordinates, and sit down on my rucksack, taking in the evening sun. A fellow hitcher appears – I remember seeing him walking up the hill – a handsome and well-weathered Polish man called Matthew, and we get chatting and sharing food, and by the time my friends arrive it seems the right thing to invite him to join us. I check in with Sal and Ryan before offering him an official invite – fortunately, they’re the kind of people who are happy to invite friendly-looking waifs and strays to stay. I’m guessing Matthew is the stray and I’m the waif, but I don’t actually know what a waif is.
Turns out Sal and Ryan have been on a funny little mission to find me – they even bumped into Rowena at St Nectan’s Glen, and she’d told them that I’d gone to the museum. “She said you were very crafty,” says Sal, “because you didn’t share any information about yourself. And then when we got to the museum, they said an old grey-haired man with a rucksack had just left. So we knew you weren’t far away.”
I can tell Sal is enjoying relaying these descriptions to my ego’s self-image department. A crafty, old, grey-haired man. Whatever happened to my original innocence, my youthful looks and my mid-80s freely flowing golden mullet?
We drive to their cottage near Bude, and settle down to beer, food, and good natter in their delightfully magical garden.
Matthew is a quiet man with deep, penetrating eyes that seem simultaneously lost and found. Originally a mechanic from Poland, he says he began questioning his life, and life itself, and somehow – he skips the details – got washed up in Bristol, street homeless.
“I got into drinking, you know, and Bristol is quite a heavy scene. Then I lived in a cave, you know, near bridge – the suspension bridge. For nearly two years. But it came time for me to leave. You know. And here I am. Maybe a pilgrim like you. Only twenty days.”
I ask him where he’s heading, but he says he doesn’t know. He’s travelling without direction, without a map, and without any money. He’s basically living on faith, charity and occasional scavenging. He mentions a daughter back in Poland, and I get the feeling he’s trying to transform into a father who could look his daughter in the eyes, apologise, and have something good to offer her. His rucksack is enviably light – just a sleeping bag and tarp, which acts as a groundsheet on dry nights and as a cover on rainy ones. He seems a natural mystic to me, in the moment, totally dependent, sometimes hungry – “But I have taught my mind to overcome hunger” – and sometimes full. I feel like a bit of a bourgeois day-tripper in comparison. He washes his socks, put them on the washing line, and beds down for the night in Sal’s art studio.
I get the guest bed and have a good long soak in the bath. Then I disinfect a needle and try digging that dead tick head out of my thigh. Surgery is definitely not my calling, neither major nor minor. Fortunately, I can hear fresh virgin sheets calling out my name, and all is forgiven...
Sometimes a Man
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house
dies there, inside the dishes and the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
towards that same church, which he forgot.
(translated by Robert Bly)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house
dies there, inside the dishes and the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
towards that same church, which he forgot.
(translated by Robert Bly)