Tess (13 page)

But it was Mary who left properly, later that day.

I shall tell you, while we stand by the font chiselled from Purbeck marble by the conquering Normans and we think of my mother as she was dipped in there to undergo the waves of her future womanhood: her ages as maiden, fruit-bearing woman and hag spilt out over her with the cup of holy water, all her previous incarnations swallowed up in the great might of the lords across the sea (for that is how it always was, in the story of women, a time of freedom and power, like the Celts, extinguished by the Romans: a period of independence and material prosperity such as the Saxon reign, trampled and overcome by the next wave of conquerors) – I shall tell you that the day my mother left the Mill and Tess took up her years of penance (two of them altogether) was the day our mother became a hag, a witch, a prophetess.

Never mind the windblown hut on West Bay where she scraped scallops and bearded mussels and pulled the bones from sole and plaice with their mournful eyes looking up above the orange mottle of their skin. Don't be taken in by family photographs which show our mother smiling, kerchief on her head, long, daily sharpened knife in her hand, door of the Dowles' beach shop open behind her and trays of fish in misty coats of ice. And don't listen to Betsy Dowle, when she says Mary was the perfect lodger, in the whitewashed B & B in Langton Herring, down the coast – always the first up in the morning, helping with the visitors' teas, putting a skillet on the big stove Betsy fed with fuel each night rather than go for the modern inventions.

Or if you do listen to her – or to Retty's memories of our mother as filtered down to the younger women in the village, remember there's more to life than what meets the eye. The life you are living is not the life you lead, as that great persecuted wit Oscar Wilde put it. In other words, look below the surface of any life and you see another running deeper and parallel, like a big fish under the waves. Look down into the life of Mary and you see the hag she was destined to become, as soon as she left the protection of husband and home. But don't be afraid – she is only one of a long line of such women, themselves persecuted because they saw the truth – and what lay ahead, sometimes, too.

We must go back to the very beginning. And then perhaps we shall begin to understand – how Mary knew of the fatal split mankind and womankind had inherited, from the thinking of Augustine – and Plato – and Marcus Aurelius, whose thinking makes for the foundation of the world in which we live: a world for white males, to be obeyed and respected by women, the ethnically ‘inferior' groups and the poor and dispossessed. We shall see how our mother, daughter of a long line of Ruined Maids, mother of another, ‘saw' the other life that runs under the surface constructed by the ruling culture. She ‘saw' as her foremothers had seen, since the first poets gave words to the special powers, the powers over life and death, no less, that were the preserve of women. So here we go.

The classical Fates may be old women but they are immortal old
women. When Adhelm, early Christian author in Saxon times of
De Virginitate
, uses the word ‘pythonissa', he is referring not to the priestess of Apollo's oracle at Delphi, but to the woman in Acts who ‘possessed a spirit of divination',
puellam habentem spiritum pythonem
, but was presumably mortal. Furies are as immortal as fiends. King Aelfred (a Saxon king who would have given happier conditions to our poor mother in that incarnation than the one she knew in the middle years of our fast-receding century) may not be sure in his translation of Boethius whether
Parcae
are Fates or Furies, but knows nevertheless that they are
gydene
, goddesses. And the two Old English words
wicce
and
haegtesse
which give us the modern derivatives ‘witch' and ‘hag' are both used by Anglo-Saxon scribes to translate on the one hand the mortal
pythonissa
and on the other the immortal Fates, the
Parcae
. The words cannot have meant anything as trivial and superficial as their modern equivalents.

Charms were used against elf-shot and
haegtesse-shot –

Out, spear; not in, spear
If there be in here any bit of iron,
The work of a
haegtesse
, it must melt.
If you were pierced in skin or pierced in flesh
Or pierced in blood or pierced in limb
May your life not be torn away …

In both Norse and Old English texts the idea occurs that to have power over runes may include some form of supernatural power. Tacitus records in his
Germania
that the
Germani
believed ‘there is in women an element of holiness and a gift of prophecy' … and the precarious survival in Anglo-Saxon of the word
Heahrune
, and that this is used of the biblical character possessing a spirit of divination – suggests that the concept of women who prophesy did come to these shores from Germany.

So when our mother met us for fish and chips at West Bay, and before leaving the shop wiped her long knife on the side of the wooden block where she gutted and filleted fish; when she gave us an odd look and said she thought the land behind the West Bay Hotel would flood up one of these days soon, with the tides running
so high, we should have read the signs, we should have seen the pictures she was showing us.

A spear – the long knife old Mr Dowle gave to Mary. A body pierced in flesh … in blood … in limb …

Mary foresaw the murder. The Old English word for mother is
modor
. If we had been attuned to our mother once she became a
haegtesse
, living alone and seeing the future, we would have known to run away from our destiny as fast as our legs could carry us.

But we were in a dead world – a world that had been dead for millennia, and which the human race is fast making uninhabitable for humans. Bishop Aelfric, long after Bede's writings on Anglo-Saxon paganism (where pagan priests are mentioned, but never priestesses or prophetesses), writes in his homily ‘On Auguries' that people are such fools they will bring offerings to ‘earth-fast stone or tree or well-spring' and he jeers at the practice. These parts of our world have no attendant spirits, he says, they are ‘the dead stone and the dumb tree'. He scoffed at the various charms and amulets that were the grave-goods of an earlier period: the single beads, boars' tusks worn as pendants, crystal balls and cowrie shells found in the graves of women, who were healers, using the rock-crystal ball in particular to guard the family's health.

The belief that our trees and well-springs and earth-stones are no more than inanimate objects is with us today, and supports the violence and destruction with which we are cursed. We must return to save the healing and seeing powers of the
haegtesse
and give the world a chance to breathe and live.

As it was, we saw nothing on that windy day, Tess and I, when we went to visit our mother after school, in the time before the equinoctial tides brought all the water she saw in her dreams – and still more. We should have seen the spear she held up for a moment in front of us, as she asked Tess in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice whether she was still seeing Alec or not. A cloud may have thickened overhead and a drop, an augury of the water that was to sheet down, may have fallen on Tess's head and caused her to shiver, to pull up the collar of her coat.

No, she wasn't seeing Alec any more. He'd buggered off somewhere. And she couldn't care less, anyway.

We walked down past the little harbour and crossed the slatted wooden bridge to the fish and chip place. Tess was angry and withdrawn. She knew the world was punishing her – she knew the rules had been written for someone else, long ago; and, obscurely, she knew there wasn't much she could do about it.

Except, perhaps, what she did do a few years later, on the night the bunting was out along the streets at Bridport and the funfair was whooshing and whirling … What our mother showed us, but we didn't see …

– I'll have the egg and chips and peas, our mother Mary said to the waitress when she came up and we were sitting at the little plastic-topped table. I get sick of fish, working with it all day.

As it happened, the battle for Tess was fought out on two high ridges of land, grassy escarpments on either side of the deep hollow of land where we stand, in Beaminster. On one side, our mother's country, the Marshwood Vale, with its three high points – Lambert's Castle, Pilsdon Pen and Lewesdon, the two latter known as the cow and her calf, but the calf covered in a thick pelt of beech, red and rust in autumn, while Pilsdon is hairless, just a tonsure of bell heather on the crest and a great pile of cracked earth below, white from sun in that summer when the fight for Tess really began.

It must have been the summer of 1963 – but already I've forgotten to explain to you where the other side lies – because already my eyes are fixed on our mother's country and its three high points, and the ramparts, if you can so call the ditches that fall steeply from the sides of Lambert's Castle – again a castle only in name, in fact an Iron Age fort but ship-shaped and nearly as high as its neighbour
Pilsdon, at eight hundred and forty-two feet. My thoughts are there. Tess fell there for the last time. Or that's how our father saw it. But there was a good deal of strength on the other side, too – and rumour has it that he'll come back one day – Ralph Morgan, that is – and however old Tess may be, and him too, he's going to claim her for his own.

Fat chance, I say! Wherever Tess may be, it's no place for a gentleman like Sir Ralph – as he must have been since the death of his father several decades now – to go courting.

For Tess is either in a madhouse, like the house where our mother heard the voices and dreamt the dreams of all her past lives and incarnations – or she's in gaol for the murder of a man they never could find. And I don't see Ralph Morgan, for all the polite manners he doubtless still displays, going to a lunatic asylum or a prison to find a wife. He wanted Tess, to show off her spectacular beauty – he wanted to take her to London and show off those dark looks – and he liked to tease her that she had no Anglo-Saxon blood in her at all.

– You'd have been known as a Welshwoman, Ralph said, when he came to the Mill and took Tess down to Dorchester for a bite of lunch and then back along the coast, to turn inland and go to his estates high up at Mapperton. We'd have used you as a slave.

Of course, he was only joking. Our father, who was never there when Ralph threw out these jests – and he called me the little Goose Girl, too – Watch out, Tess, she'll take your lover off you one day, he used to say, which only made me feel all the plainer and made Tess lower her eyes in embarrassment – our father looked with cautious approval on this courtship. And why shouldn't he? What a relief after Alec, you might say.

But Alec lay in wait in the little market town where we now stand outside the church (it's growing late and Evensong has just begun and I must carry you home, to Chesil Beach and Ella who'll be wanting her tea). Alec lay in the shadow of Mapperton – of Sir Joseph Morgan's estates, on a high ridge of land above Beaminster. These were the contestants in the battle for Tess: the land of our mother's Marshwood Vale, rich, deep-laned, wooded dairy land
with the three giants slumbering over it – and the high, windswept land of his rival, Ralph Morgan. Mapperton versus Lambert's Castle. And even during that time of Tess going out with the young man from the Big House, the Jacobean manor house with its dramatic vertical garden that drops a sheer hundred feet to stone pools where water-lilies float in fetid water, I knew somehow that the real battle in Tess's life would be between our mother's need for her to find herself (as our mother had done so tragically late in life, sacrificing all her beauty years to our father and to ‘madness') – and Tess's own urgent rush towards self-destruction, violence, self-immolation and all the other treats in store for young women in a world where the natural balance of things has not been restored.

Our mother knew that Ralph Morgan, dull though he might be, was still preferable to Alec, whose wild ways would only bring Tess to her knees and leave her there, wiping the floor, mopping up the mess of broken home, screaming baby, money taken from the Co-op and off he's flown. Neither of our parents was worldly – but they knew that the icy indifference a man of Ralph's class will show his wife (for he will always love his dogs and horses more) was at least a form of freedom. Life with Alec would be slavery.

If Tess had been a Welsh slave girl, as Ralph, with his stuck-up voice and his terrible tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows and his E-type Jaguar liked to tease her – she would, paradoxically, have been less enslaved by marriage to the lord of Mapperton than to Alec, whose father was an engine driver and his mother a charlady at Parnham House a mile outside Beaminster, getting a lift there and back from the lady of the house. Tess would be ‘freer' with Ralph.

But what a choice! When you're older, Baby Tess, you'll ask why Tess couldn't have got an interesting job, looked out for herself in the big world.

Well, you saw her neglect her education – and you saw that our father never really had any expectations for daughters to make good in a man's world. They were there to marry the right man, procreate, bake. And our mother fell into the millrace, remember, and they took her away as the other lives came up out of that dark, swirling water to claim her … So what chance did we have? And
how many other girls' lives have been, and still are, dictated by such circumstances, one way or another?

Countless millions, is the answer. Just look at the stone memorial here, on the wall outside St Mary's Church in Beaminster – and see how many families had children that died in infancy. Look at the suffering, the endless struggle of life. Of so many families – all sons and daughters lost before the age of thirty. Just because people live longer now, don't think that everything is solved, for us and maybe even our mothers. It isn't … we have to fight to make the earth whole for all of us together.