The Labours of Hercules in Shropshire

Many thousands of years ago, around the time half of Britain was covered in ice, the River Severn flowed north, into the Dee estuary. But then, when the ice retreated, the god Zeus spoke to Hercules and said, “It is my desire that the Severn should now flow southwards. Take your club and beat out a new channel for the river”.

Hercules took his club and began his labour at the northern end of the new river-bed. But the god of the northern marshes, fearing that his wetlands would be drained, sent out his reed-girls to distract Hercules. And the reed-girls said, “Stop your work, Hercules, and come with us, and we will show you pleasures beyond imagining!” But Hercules answered, “Go away! Come back when I’ve finished!” and he continued with his work. But he was thinking so much about the beauty of the reed-girls that he beat out his channel shallower than he intended, so some of the wetlands survive to this day.

As Hercules worked further southwards, the river god, annoyed that he had not been consulted, sent river-nymphs to distract Hercules. The river-nymphs danced round Hercules and sang, “Stop your work, Hercules, and come with us, and we will show you pleasures beyond imagining!” But Hercules answered, “Go away! Come back when I’ve finished!” But he was so confused by the nymphs dancing in circles around him that he lost all sense of direction, and the course of the river-bed he was beating out, through where Shrewsbury now stands, instead of being a straight line, ran in great loops and meanders.

Hercules now reached a line of hills and began to beat a passage through them. But the god of the hills, foreseeing that men would come and cut down his trees to fire their furnaces, and blacken his rocks with their smoke, sent woodland dryads to distract Hercules. The dryads sang, “Leave your work, Hercules, and come with us, and we will show you pleasures beyond imagining!” But Hercules answered, “Go away! Comeback when I’ve finished!” But he was so eager to sample the pleasures that the dryads had promised that he stopped he work early, so that the Ironbridge Gorge was narrower than intended, and it remains a place of fierce and dangerous waters to this day.

At last Hercules finished his labours, and the Severn now flowed southwards in a new path. And Hercules went and sat down to rest in the Quarry gardens, and he called out, “Ho! Reed-girls and water-nymphs and tree-dryads! I’m finished at last! Where are the pleasures beyond imagining that you promised me?” But there was no answer, for they had all gone away. And Hercules in frustration smashed his club on the ground, causing a great pit which is now the Dingle gardens. But eventually he fell asleep, tired out by his labours.

The god of the River Severn saw him asleep and thought, “Now I’ll have my revenge! Reject the pleasures offered by my water-nymphs, did he? Not to mention the reed-girls and dryads too! I’ll place a curse on him so that he’ll never be able to enjoy such pleasures again!” And he cursed Hercules, but Hercules did not realize it till he awoke.

Men came and erected a statue of Hercules, which you can still see in the Quarry gardens. This angered the river-god, and he was angrier still when he realized that, thanks to the labours of Hercules, he now faced a very long and weary route to the sea. His anger continues to this day; and every few years he sends down a flood, which often fills the Quarry gardens and surrounds the statue of Hercules, but he has never managed to topple it. And if you go to the Quarry, you can still see Hercules, with his lion-skin and his mighty muscles and gigantic club – but if you look closely you will notice that, thanks to the river-god’s curse, he wears only an infeasibly tiny fig-leaf.

Tangier: a true story

My first-ever visit to Africa was extremely short, but with such a surrealist element to it that it has remained in my memory ever since. I had signed up for a tour of southern Spain, to Granada, Cordova and Seville (all richly deserving of a visit, but that’s another story), but included in the tour was a boat journey across to Tangier for an overnight stay.
We were under the guidance of Pedro, a middle-aged dyspeptic Spaniard with a very cynical and sarcastic attitude to Moroccans. He told us how essential it was to follow his instructions precisely. The first surprise came when he told us to collect our bags and prepare to disembark: the unexpected aspect of this being that the boat was clearly still some distance out from the harbour. But we obediently followed him to the exit doors, which were down in the belly of the ship, where all the luggage was stored.
But he was quite right, because a seething mass soon built up behind us, pushing and shoving to get to the front. In these situations, the British tradition is to form an orderly queue and wait patiently, which mean we lose out to nations who don’t observe these niceties, but fortunately our party contained a number of strong-minded American matrons who fought off any interlopers. Then finally we docked and the doors opened. The crowd surged forwards and found – nothing but a yawning gulf! There was no gangplank! After we had teetered on the brink for what seemed like ages, a gangplank was finally put in place, only for a mob of hairy stevedores to charge up it and fight their way in amongst the passengers in order to get at the luggage. Eventually just ONE passport official appeared, and insisted on looking at every page of each person’s passport before he would let them off, presumably to check that no-one had been visiting Israel. Thanks to Pedro’s experience, we weren’t held up too long, but other less fortunate people were still disembarking four hours later. There was more trouble a little while later, when a policeman asked to inspect the passports of one couple and promptly disappeared with them. Pedro was furious. “The next time a Moroccan policeman asks to see your passport”, he raged, “Tell him to push off! Tell him it is none of his business!” (Personally I wouldn’t like to try this tactic)
It was Ramadan, which meant no Moroccans were allowed to eat or drink during the hours of daylight, though this did not apply to tourists. Drinking no water during August must be a serious trial. Shortly before the official nightfall, when it was actually still daylight, the streets emptied and all the shops closed in preparation for the evening meal. We were warned not to go outside, since only criminals would be out on the streets at this time. So I went back to my hotel room, which overlooked a number of flat-roofed homes. I watched them all lay out the food on tables on the roof, and then I suppose there was a broadcast over the radio to say that it was now officially night-time, because all the families suddenly started to eat at precisely the same moment.
We were taken to Tetuan, a squalid little town where we saw people living in what appeared to be windowless cupboards opening onto the street. In the evening we were treated to a display of belly-dancing by a fat and unattractive woman, We had a local guide who took us round a tourist shop that dealt in sterling, and helped us bargain for goods. I found the bargaining custom very irritating. I watched one man in the party buy a leather purse, for which the asking price was £5, but was eventually beaten down to £2. Another tourist who was watching this transaction said, “I’d like one of those too”. The salesman promptly started at £5 again. I showed a passing interest in a rug, and was told the price was £80. I explained that since I only had £10 left, and he wasn’t going to let me have it for that, we should abandon the negotiations. He clearly thought I was a tough bargainer, and even when I left the shop he ran after me shouting, “Okay, £55!” I longed for British supermarkets and set prices.
There was a bar on the boat which took us back to Spain. As soon as we pulled out of port, many of the Moroccans at once went to the bar and started boozing, thus not only breaking the Ramadan fast but also the laws against drinking alcohol. Pedro snorted with contempt. “They think they’re safe on a Spanish ship! It’ll be full of secret police! They’ll all be locked up when they go home!”
All this was thirty years ago. No doubt things are different nowadays.

A Haunted Room

In the examination hall, the students

sit huddled over the desks, oblivious

of their surroundings. Only the bored invigilator

reads the columns of names

inscribed on the walls.

The school's war dead.

Endless lists of names. Besides each name

a date. As he walks around, he calculates

that at least a hundred did not live

to see their twenty-first birthday,

never knew adulthood; were no older

than the students below them. And he wonders:

had they foreseen this, would they still have gone?

And the students who now ignore them,

would they have gone too?

Jack Digby

Jack Digby's mother never gave him anything; not even a memory. All he knew about her was what he'd been told by Miss Harriet Livingston, the maiden aunt who had brought him up; and that was little enough. About his father he knew even less, for his aunt always avoided talking about him at all.
    He had been born in France, shortly before the outbreak of the war. He and the two sisters had been evacuated in great haste just ahead of the German invasion in 1940, but his father had never been seen again, and was entered as "lost; presumed killed". In the confusion Jack's birth certificate had been lost, which had caused him endless bureaucratic delays throughout his life. Then, before he was too young to understand it, his mother and Miss Livingston had had some kind of quarrel, as a result of which his mother had decamped forthwith to Canada and had never again made contact. Miss Livingston was most reluctant to speak about her at all.
   Although his aunt had always performed her duty towards him, Jack soon sensed that she didn't really like him at all: indeed, she rather resented him. It was a relief to both of them when he was packed off to boarding school, from which he duly progressed to university. Even in the holidays he came home no more than was necessary, preferring to stay with friends, or later to go travelling. It was on one of his foreign expeditions that he learnt that his aunt had died in an accident. The bulk of her estate went to charity. She left him some money, but no final message.
   While he was helping to clear out her house, he found an old photograph, tucked away and doubtless forgotten, beneath some yellowing newspaper in a cupboard. It showed two young ladies and a man, and was labelled on the back, in faded pencil, "Mary, Harri and Don". This set him thinking. "Harri" was clearly his aunt Harriet, probably in her twenties at the time; so was the other woman, Mary, who resembled her closely, his mother? In which case, was Don his father? He pondered the matter for a while; but then other concerns took over and filled his time: his work, and a family of his own. It was only many years later, when he had more leisure, that he rediscovered the photograph and sought to investigate his past.
   He researched in archives and genealogical websites. For his mother, he learned little that he did not know already, so he turned to his putative father, assuming that the man in the photograph was indeed Don Digby. Eventually he was able to meet a very aged lady who was Don's sister.
   She instantly identified the photo as being her brother. "So you're Don's son,are you?" she said. "He sent me a letter, you know, and told me he'd had a son; but then he was lost in the war. Oh well. You do look a bit like him. Yes, they often went on holiday together: him and Harriet and poor Mary".
   "Why do you say, 'Poor Mary'?"
   "Well,he wasn't at all kind to her. I shouldn't really say this, him being my brother; but it was all a very long time ago. Mary couldn't have any children, you know. He told me he'd realized he'd married the wrong sister. Me, I didn't like Harriet much"
    "But ...... Mary's my mother!"
    "Oh, no! Harriet was your mother. And of course, Mary was furious about it, poor girl. Didn't Harriet ever tell you? Now isn't just typical of her!"

Why teenagers shouldn't necessarily be encouraged to write!

When I was about 17, a school friend and I spent some time trying to write a play. This was in the mid-1960s, the heyday of the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd”, led by the great Samuel Beckett and the now-sadly-forgotten N. F. Simpson, and our production was intended to be very much in that vein. The curtain would rise to reveal a nondescript middle-aged couple watching television. On one side of the stage there would be a staircase ascending into the darkness. It would become apparent that the couple had never ventured up these stairs, nor did they display any curiosity as to what might lie at the top. The audience would be able to hear, though not to see, what was being broadcast on the TV, which would be of a distinctly surrealist character, during which the couple would exchange desultory and inane dialogue.

Every so often, other people would enter the stage. They would be generic types; a policeman, a poet and so forth, and each of them would have a different motive for wanting to climb the stairs. The couple would, of course, ignore them.
So far, so good, you might think. They trouble was, we had no idea of what should happen next, let alone what denoument (if any) there should be. Now it’s all very well for the audience not to be sure what might be found at the top of the stairs (in fact, usually in this sort of play, they’d be no wiser at the finish than they were at the start), but surely the authors ought to have at least some notion of what it all meant? Was the staircase perhaps a religious allegory, or what? And we simply hadn’t a clue.

So in the end we gave up, and our play duly took its place in that great gallery of abandoned projects, known to some as “the round filing-cabinet”. It was to be joined there some months later by a very different, though equally derivative, aborted production; a play for Easter, to be entitled “The arrest of Jesus, as performed by the cast of Z Cars”. Looking back, I’m inclined to believe that this latter effort was rather better, but before people start to have thoughts about mercy-killing, I’ll end by saying that that is (or to be more exact, might have been) another story.

P.S. Thought for the day:- “Youthful vanity and dullness, determined to write, will almost certainly write in the dominant form of their epoch” (C. S. Lewis; “The Allegory of Love”).

Mow Cop: The False Tower

I could see from my bedroom window
a stone tower, stark,
on a rocky outcrop.
It was all of two hundred years old
built to give
the family in the big house
a romantic vista.

(Their money came from coal mines
but they liked to pretend
they were mediaeval)

Today the best view is from
the council estate
as is only right and proper:

"These are the children of the men
that hewed the coal
that raised the cash
that built the tower on Mow Cop".

The family is long gone
of the big house, nothing is left.
Only the folly remains.

The Shadow

Where am I? More to the point, who am I? I must approach this problem logically, scientifically.

I have just come to full consciousness, and I find I am standing in a wood. The sky above is black, and there is a moon, so it must be night-time. How did I get here? I have no idea.
   The moon is full, and I must have good night-vision, because I can see my way through the trees. There is a path, and I walk along it, since it must presumably lead somewhere. All around me I an hear the faint night-noises of the wood. I make as little noise as possible. I am interested to observe that, despite the darkness and my loneliness, I am not afraid. I suppose I can speak, but there is no point in doing so, since there is no-one to talk to. I wonder what language I would be speaking? I have no way of telling.

After I have walked for some time, the wood gives out, and I find myself on open grassland. There are signs of cultivation, so I must be near a human settlement. Some sheep are dozing on the grass: they see me and run away, bleating. I wait for a while, in case dogs or a shepherd may be roused and come to investigate. Nothing happens, and I resume my walk.
    Finally I can see a village. There is no-one in sight. What shall I do when I eventually meet someone? Should I knock on a door? Do I ask them where I am? Will they understand what I am saying? What if they attack a stranger who suddenly appears? I must go cautiously.
 
Ahead of me is a tall, blank wall. The moon is shining so brightly that it casts my shadow on it. Is that really me? those ears, that jaw?
     Now at last I understand. I am not a man. I am a werewolf.
   
           AAAAAAARRRRR!