BELTANE

IMBOLC 2019

Snowdrop melts into glass-crisp swirl.
Spring stutters
Under silver tresses
Of birch. Leant
Against the flaking bark,
Chilblain wrinkled,
Old one stoops
Arthritic with her
Dowager's hump,
Cradling the bridal bursting
In her lap,
Where the edge of thaw
Stains daylight
With its fluttering storms
Of crocus and inclemency.

She lifts her aged fingers
To the tent's sagged roof
To shed the snowfall
While she croons
Songs of weasel and of hare.
Earth's scald of inner friction
Too far beneath to warm
This refugee, this home-lost.
From temporary kitchens,
Soup pans
Nourish with blessings
Ladled into her bowl,
Whose simmering surface
Reflects the face of an angel.

In her arms, the youthful shoot
Still sheathed in silence,
Stirs and hears the lapwing
Curling and kiting
Through the wheeling wafers
Of persisting winter.

MILK MAIDS AND BELLS OF BLUE

MILK MAIDS - the white version of HYACINTHOIDES HISPANICA, the SPANISH BLUEBELL

When I was little, I used to love finding white bluebells.

Bit of an oxymoron, but you know what I mean!

Now they're considered relatively rare. The native kind, at least, though in my childhood in South Yorkshire in the Sixties, I remember them as a treasure we would come across in some shady spot under the trees every year.

MILK MAIDS - WHITE BLUEBELLS IN WICKERSLEY WOOD

"Milk Maids," we called them in our family. A name passed down to me from my maternal grandfather who loved to ramble through the hilly landscape on the edges of the Peak District from his home in Norton Lees in Sheffield. For this quiet man, as for me, the realm of nature was a magical escape from the mundane, full of secret delights and familiar faces.

Milk Maids. The name made me think of nursery rhymes, bucolic bliss, young lasses carrying yokes across their shoulders, milk churns bumping at their hips as they went skipping through meadows knee deep in spring lambs gambolling and vaulting to celebrate a sunshiny May Day just like today.

Milky Maidens! My imagination melted them into the backdrop of countryside joy I discovered every time I stepped out from my back door in the Dearne Valley.

The invasive Spanish bluebell (Hyacinthoides hispanica), often cultivated in gardens, commonly has white individuals dancing among the throngs of cerulean and lapis lazuli bells. Our UK native bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) on the other hand, admit fewer of these albino beauties to their flock.

I may know more facts about bluebells now than I did back in the day as a little girl just beginning to meet the wonders of the world.

But nothing can replace that early exhilaration of meeting the Milk Maids in the shadowy vales of home.

I feel especially blessed this year. I have a bevy of Milk Maids growing under my Cherry Tree.

Yes, they're Spanish, not native.

They are exotic Iberian Milk Maids who whisper in continental tongues.

But they make my heart smile anyway.

BELLS BOTH WHITE AND BLUE, WICKERSLEY WOOD, SOUTH YORKSHIRE

Goatsucker Harvest: "So, what's a Goatsucker, when it's at home?"

Nightjar, Goatsucker, or Fern-Owl, Caprimulgus europaeus (Lithograph from Painting by J G Keulemans in 'Coloured Figures of the birds of the British  Islands 1885-1897) 

"Why "Goatsucker Harvest"?"

"Such an intriguing title - can't wait to read it!"

"What's a Goatsucker, when it's at home?"

"I've got to ask....'Goatsucker Harvest'... very unusual to say the least, where did it come from!!!!???"

This question's the one I get asked the most when people hear the title of my novel.

So here's the lowdown!

The honest answer is the title itself is straight out of my imagination. I love what it makes me think and feel, about a dusky world out on the peatlands and lowland moors near my ancestral home in South Yorkshire, where the Nightjars fly, chirring their unearthly song and clapping their wings in the twlight, laying their eggs in the summer under the full moon.

I wonder if anyone else recalls a local programme on TV a few years ago in Yorkshire, with Look North weatherman, Paul Hudson, flying in a microlite to discover the The Seven Natural Wonders of Yorkshire & Lincolnshire ? Paul explored local treasures like Malham Cove, Hornsea Mere, Spurn Point and the bird-thronged cliffs at Flamborough (setting for my next novel, "The Clockwork Climmer.").

But what caught my imagination most of all, was his visit to Thorne & Hatfield Moors, part of the Humberhead Levels and the largest area of lowland peat bog in Britain. There Paul was shown how it is possible to stand very still on the Moors in the dusk of evening, clapping your hands above your head, to imitate the sound of the Nightjar's wing-claps. If you are very fortunate, a real life Nightjar will come out of the gloom and fly over your head, emitting its eerie, almost other-worldly cry, so distinctive and unlike any other local bird.

Nightjars chirring at dusk in this YouTube video

That image stuck with me,  finding its way into the story, mixed with so many other ideas from the years I'd spent walking the land around Thorne, Hatfield Woodhouse, Stainforth, Fishlake, Moorends, Auckley, Blaxton, Finningley and that part of Doncaster that in places, seems to have an alien microclimate and history all of its own. I'd always been fascinated not just by the lives of my own ancestors in these parts, but by the geography, history, flora and fauna of the places they had called home.

So this inspired the setting for "Goatsucker Harvest", with Bram a central figure, unlocking the mysteries of these hidden worlds with his sensitivity and family connections as marshman, decoyman and pinder near Turbary Nab (in the real world, Fishlake Nab was an anchor for the imaginary topography of the landscapes painted in the novel). Bram alone has the local knowledge of the wildfowl, plants and earth secrets with which Thirza becomes involved.

European Nightjar from the Crossley ID Guide Britain & Europe

The Nightjar has many folk names, including Goatsucker, because people used to think its nocturnal habits included sucking the udders of goats dry in the night. The milk connection is also echoed in one of its other nicknames "Churn-Owl", or "Fern Owl" for its chosen habitat among the bracken. The Nightjar features in the book in several forms, both real and mechanical. It becomes significant as the story unfolds. The atmosphere of the book will draw you into this uncanny world as soon as you set foot there.

I also interwove the other understanding of "Goatsucker" into my tale. In folklore originating in the Americas, there is belief in sightings of a strange monstrous creature, the size of a small bear, that is supposed, according to various reports, to have the habit of attacking livestock and sucking their blood. Events in the book raise the hackles of the inhabitants of Turbary Nab, wondering whether such things might be true.

So, that's Goatsucker. But "Harvest"?

I chose "Harvest," as the novel's action leads up to a dramatic climax that happens on the day of the village harvest festival in early October. Harvest also refers to the way in which seeds sown, actions and intentions for good or ill, flower and fruit into a harvest of consequences, cause and effect, a final outcome for the different characters. Often quite a different "harvest" from the one they anticipated or hoped for.

Goatsucker Harvest.

But when the sickle falls, will the reaping be relief or regret?

Corn field near Thorne Moors