Albion

Beltane

We didn’t realise until we hit the field
There were four hundred cozzers holding riot shields

Ian Dury and the Blockheads

Chainsaws, hard hats, criminal records,

razor wire and fear

P.A.I.N

A paraffin lamp, hung from a hook. When we’re moving, it swings and casts light in ellipses and spirals and spheres, charting the movement of planets. It smells primeval and warm in a way that electric light can’t, nor the cold blue light of torches. Diesel and wet wool, tobacco and fresh sweat, the smell of my carpenter father. But no Eastern kings ever come bearing gifts.

They sat around the campfires and waited for the dawn. See them gathered there, not just grained pointillist images in the tabloids, but in your mind. Kids and furry bearded men, brilliant young shining things with rattails wound round dirty fingers. Jugglers and druids and Merlins and Eves, blue jeans and steel toecaps. The middle class are there too, wearing a little more linen, better shoes, less tattoos, so it has ever been. But focus in, on sun warmed cider and those Kodak 400 muted pastels, blue-toned shadow. These people- and they are all my people- they can always make a party, even here in the still bleak and bare Spring, at the summit of an unfriendly hill. New life, they’ll say they’re celebrating, and hope. The triumph of the sun over the long darkness, the turning of the wheel. They’ll light their fires, but the wheel turns and what do they know? The wheel turns again and over again, rolls right over them.

Jenny is mad. But this is a place for madwomen.

She’s making something from soaked willow begged off a neighbour, and I know as soon as she’d got it off them she’ll have gone straight back to playing her Lady Macbeth: not many friends, and never for long. Siouxsie eyes. Married once, in her shitkickers and dungarees, pawned the rings, upped sticks and never again. Then, like us all, she chose the road. Her wet, thin hands shape the willow around her own waist, bending it into the soft flesh of her belly like she’s trying to push herself aside. Willow roots anywhere and will stubbornly grow, as thick as your neck or as thick as your finger. I’ve seen willow domes and thrones, living antler-leaved sculptures in the woods. Here though, it won’t grow for long. I tilt my head to try to decipher her work. I have to ask.

‘For protection’ she says tightly, fixing me with a side eye. But I still can’t quite understand what symbol she’s trying to create. It’s in great loops, bounding over the floor. It could be her own imagining, or something drawn from the wells of mysticism around us. We have symbols aplenty, Ankhs, Om’s, ornate triquetra, a dozen hands of Fatima, but here, against the green and blacks and drawn lines, we raise a jolly roger. Find your own meaning. Jenny’s strong hands weave a rough circle. A thin whip springs free from her hoops and slices at my arm, dropping kitten-soft buds. She clicks her tongue and stoops to pick it up, her bare feet leaving traces on the unfinished wood of the floor. As she shifts she hums something, deep in her throat. From his seat by the stove, Quatro picks the tune out of the lament before I can. The oak and the ivy. He pokes a final log through the door of the stove and closes the hatch, and as the air flows through and the flames catch like a gasp, he joins Jenny in song. He barely opens his mouth, but the richness of his voice pours out and fills our van like evening light. It’s exactly as it should be, somewhere between a romance and a mourning song. I pick up where he fumbles the words, an old, unfamiliar verse, and my pinched voice struggles into the air between them, singing for an alien land where the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree, do flourish at home in my own country. Jenny embarks on the final verse alone. I draw my feet up, rest my hand on Quatro’s brown arm and we sit comfortably for a moment, watching the muscles in Jenny’s neck move, the corners of her mouth rise and fall. It’s still but for the whispering of the stove. Jenny stares at the catching flames, willow gently uncurling around her.

‘Something happier now, Jen’, Quatro says. He looks straight into Jenny’s face and carefully draws out a smile. I lift down the bowlback mandolin. I know Quatro, and how he and Jenny balance the weather between them, storms and lashing tongues to gentle rains and clearing skies. At different times he’s told me his father was certainly Irish, then probably Italian, possibly Dutch -and never anything of his mother- but I know it was the middle of the country he was raised, near the Rollrights. As a true Southerner I can hear something of the shires in him, but whatever his blood, he’ll sing with Jenny whenever she’ll go for it. He sings on the road in the cab, right here in the belly of the wagon and he’ll whirl us about outside for everyone to see. I take up Quatro’s seat by the stove and play a finger and thumb melody. It’s Nancy Whiskey, or the Weaving Song, depending on how you came to know it. I learnt the violin part off Bagpuss, in a different life. But it’s Seven Gypsies that Quatro is demanding. Oh, how everyone loves that song, the travellers most of all. He launches into a thumping rendition before I can lift a finger to the strings. It’s better on fiddle, but our playing is moving Jenny’s feet, opening her face, lifting her brows. Jen gifts me a handful of bright, percussive claps, and a sharply controlled twirl of her skirt, and I can smell the heat coming from Quatro’s body, a smell of resin and something like tin, or solder. They move their bodies in a waltzing series of decisive turns and arrangements of their feet, alone in my company.

I found Jenny not so long after little one’s little self was born. Quatro drove them into town, an inevitable flurry of wailing and bumping, unbolted windows frantically slapping against the chassis. The van bears scars from that journey, a raw line of scraped off paint, the gearbox still groans from the battering it was given as Quatro heaved it round the narrow country bends. The birth was not the profound and spiritual bringing of life that Jenny had imagined. Her arrival at the hospital was met by a hurricane of stiff-aproned, blank faced nurses. They stole her away to a room, pushed on her belly, and her, blinded by the halogen glare, crossed her legs and cursed them ‘till Quatro came, van abandoned in an ambulance bay, unadmitted to the pristine room, shouting c’mon now girl from the door. So the story is told. Little one was born into chaos, into the tangle of his mother’s sunburnt limbs, hastily certified as Jenny’s and no one else’s.

We met in the North. A string of festivals and fairs through one summer, ending with Silver Moon, I think. I was trying to meditate in a meadow, but my mind kept composing a letter to my mother.

‘Here, take this’ says a dark-haired woman in a pair of indigo overalls, and hands me a limbless, swaddled thing. The gold at her wrists seems to light her skin from within. She swings herself up from the long grass and I take Little One from Jenny’s downstretched arms. He has quite a weight to him, and that unsettling double-jointedness that babies have. I hum a shy tune to quiet his grizzling. Jenny laughs at my scratching voice, she imitates a chicken’s cry.

‘Well, he doesn’t seem to mind’ I say, frowning, and cross his arms over his little chest. I collect him up into a bundle and move to hand him back, but Jenny waves him away, smiling.

‘Keep him then’, she says, and drapes her sling smoothly around my neck and under Little One, trapping my arms against his soft body. I sit in the long grass, Little One on my belly, held up by my knees. I tickle him with an ear of grass, held between my teeth, and I watch as Jen starts going at the firewood with a bowsaw. We fell together from then. Jen left her hated women’s circle that had taken her on while Quatro was on the Downs for work, and I moved into her van, learning to shift the bulk of it, how to pull into a potholed layby so smoothly that I didn’t wake either Jen or her Little One.

We were together, but we rarely travelled alone. Not since Jen’s arm was broken. We were roadside just the three of us, a year into travelling together, when they came to move us on. They woke us before light, gloved fists beating against the hull of the wagon in an off-kilter tattoo. Jen answers their call, awake and rising all at once in a sudden squalling fury that surprises even me, flying out at them, her lopsided dress baring one breast, with fingers stiffened and clawing into the face of a lean police officer that summits the back step. I sit, rooted in place with Little One on my lap and I don’t know what to do but watch as the two of them put hands on her. Jen is bent over the sideboard with her arm forced behind her back. She curses in a desperate voice that is not her own. One of the officers, the wiry sly one, he lifts her arm higher and higher, her hair tumbles down, her body crooks at an impossible angle and her fluttering fingers are pinned in the policeman’s gloved hand and nothing seems to move for a moment until- that’s how they like it- grunts the bastard, and the hideous muted crack of her arm silences us all.

They arrested her then, but let me take her the next day, from a station somewhere near Nottingham where the custody officer said I looked like a nice young girl and said something to Jen that made her good hand into a fist that did not soften for another sixty miles South. I was expecting one of Jen’s spells of bad weather then, but everything seemed the same.

Now, back here in the field, something’s changing in the air. An impatient breeze picks at our skin and a dark line of Maria’s are massing on the road, gathering like storm clouds and blocking our route onwards.

‘I have to make dinner’, Jenny says, ‘we’ll need to eat, then shift’.

Quatro nods. ‘We’ll not make it back to the 303 at this rate’, he agrees, casting a glance up to the top end of the field where trucks and tents are crammed at hasty angles, close as rows of council flats.

‘We might as well make a start on those potatoes, Jen’ he says. They’re par-cooked and wrapped in silver foil, piled in a dustbin in their dozens, and waiting for the solstice fire.

‘We’ll not make it out of this field’, I say.

‘Can you just go find the Little’, Jen grimaces. ‘Before Ken gets sick of him’.

Ken joined us at the end of last summer, as we passed through Yorkshire where he’d been with the miners at Orgreave, or so he says. I can’t imagine him tiring of Little One, who makes a faithful audience for a good story, but it’s now gone six o clock, and Ken, like us, will soon be off in search of pastures new. Any time past noon, he’s likely to be off in search of a drink. I pause at the van doors, one foot dangling over the step, pushing a fingertip through a rusted join in the metal. Quatro is nearly horizontal. He’s unfolded into a faded beach chair in front of the iron stove, skinning up on his own bare chest. He slings me a low-lidded wink, spits at the stove to test its heat. Jenny works grimly away at her willow. I watch it sizzle for a moment, then turn.

I turn away and across the field, past the free kitchen where Mags works her everyday magic and boils an everlasting cauldron of black, sweet tea, and past the bumblebee bus that is the convoy’s leader, a beacon from three miles back. I pass George the Hat and Lacey, who were trashed earlier this season, their truck’s back windows still all plexiglass and gaffer tape. I nod to the women’s bus, a double decker with narrow, gauzy bunks that was my first home back up in the midlands. Nina and dreadlocks John sit under their awning, shelling a pan of beans for hippy stew, and behind them is Ken’s wagon, the old ambulance with its rod of Asclepius covered over with a crudely daubed Cernunnos. But no Ken, and no Little One, raptly listening to Ken’s waffle. I begin a winding journey through the field, peering down between avenues of tents and van sides, stretching up on my toes to see over washing lines and tipi’s. I abruptly turn into a faceful of woodsmoke and on the wind comes a howling, an echo from the treetops.

free the fucking land comes the cry from the field.

a whisper of shoelaces pulled tight with stiffened fingers because we knew they were coming and they know we are coming here they come

something breaks, something shatters, and it is a voice stuttered by movement running

several voices joining a deep mournful creaking

an upheaval of earth turning over and over

an empty socket in the bared ground woven with cotton fingers of rot and the rich stink over and under and over

and the heavy descent of sunlight spilling like a rising tide, splashing faces and limbs pushing

falling

over and over again.

Little One’s dark eyes are somehow the brightest thing I can see, hollowing his face, a body curled into a wheel arch the body looks accidental a spiral in a circle but it is whole

I see it is whole and unbroken.

The body cries out, a wide mouthed yawn like a cat, and I cry back, with wordless gladness, tugging hard, too hard at a soft, boneless arm. I hear old Ken -Churchill’s troops are back again!– but away over the field we stumble, the sky pale behind the black of a canting horizon, the ground rising up beneath our feet. I find home, pick it out by instinct. I lift the warm weight of Jenny’s Little One up into my arms. A pricking in the panic-numbed flesh of my thigh, a knot of splintered willow lancing up. It was a tree of life, I realise. Jenny’s sculpture. Not for protection, but for rebirth, for connection. The branches fork into the soft turf at my feet, splintered at their joins.

A group of men are moving through the field, moving in tandem like fingers to a fist. I see uniforms, steel buttons catching the light. I shift Little One to my hip. He’s too heavy to be held for long like this, but his arms are round my neck and his eyes are screwed shut, face tucked into my bicep. What he’ll do when I put him down I don’t know, so I heave him up, limping to the back step of the van. I stand him up on the floor and realise, too late, that it’s puddled with spilt paraffin, which shines slickly over a carpeting of broken glass. I snatch a glance over my shoulder and see faces coming into focus, the lopsided swagger of the policeman’s gait, counterbalanced by blackwood truncheons that dangle from crisp serge sleeves. Their shadows are cast long and distorted by the low sun. Little One hasn’t made a sound, though I heard a sickening crunch of glass under his muddy feet. I lift him gracelessly onto the driver’s side cot and turn to the open mouth of the doors. On an impulse, I slam them shut. There’s a sign in the windscreen, propped against the wheel. Abruptly, I flip it round to read. Children here. Don’t want trouble. It’s Jen’s wide, firm handwriting and reading it makes my stomach turn.

‘You’re back then’. I whirl around. Jen is sat very still in the cab, just a foot or so from me. Her short, dark hair is covered in a mist of glass and debris, the driver’s side window is gone. A daisy chain of bruises chase themselves up along her wrist. She turns her to me with her too-wide eyes.

‘They took him. They hit him on the head, and he said we didn’t want any trouble and they just hit him again’. Her voice is level. Jenny takes my hand and helps herself up to climb out of the cab, into the back of the van. The refrain of shouts and clattering rings across the field.

‘They arrested him right then and there?’ I ask, as Jen curls herself around Little One.

‘No arrest. Just took him. They would’ve had me too, but Quatro kicked up too much of a fuss. Took a whole group of them to drag him off’. Jenny starts squeezing fragments of glass from the soles of Little One’s feet, and he lets out a stoic whine. She rocks Little One, who accepts it silently, watching me pull down a couple of rough knit jumpers for Jen and me from the locker above them. The sage green for her, an ashy grey for me. I pull it on and feel like I’m growing, like my limbs and head and torso are distended, my lungs and stomach filling with air. I raise my head to look through the glassless window. They’re circling back around, coming across the field like a cloud of bluebottles now, swarming around and nearly over the nearest vehicles and tents and even over people, clinging on and dragging them to the ground. There’s something huge and mechanical hanging low in the air, and the walloping noise it makes is shaking what’s left of the glass from the frames.

‘Jen’. I say. ‘It’s worse than we thought’.

She looks. Ken’s head is just about visible in the sea of coppers, his front teeth an incomprehensible red mess. He thrashes like a dancing bear, anchored around the neck.

It was Byker Hill Ken taught me, a song written for rough, bellowing voices like his. That same summer I played theTailor and the Mouse so often for Jenny’s little one that others in the convoy started to come by to try and teach me something else. ‘There’s only so much hi diddle-um a man can take’, said Quatro, laughing, when the first musician came by to politely expand my repertoire. And so I was taught rounds and reels and Guthrie and Dylan. I sang about the fifteenth international brigade, how ordinary folks walked to Spain to fight Franco. So my education began. All I knew of music, before, was how to stand alone in the front room diligently scraping away to pages of dense notation, and stiff Sunday performances from the end of the dinner table. I didn’t know much more of people. I didn’t then know the joy of learning straight from another’s fingers and voice and brain, nor the joy of playing for people who will whoop and cheer and ululate, that will stamp their feet and swing each other round to a tempo all of their own. How they are shouting now.

When Ken sings, he raises his great square fist to the choruses –Byker Hill and Walker Shore, collier lads forevermore- but as I watch he disappears, laughing, into the crush, without a battlecry, drowning in a sea of black jacketed bodies. Looking across the field, we see people transcendent with abandon. Coppers and travellers, open-mouthed, mad horse-eyed faces. Two coppers and their long-haired captive dance a bizarre six-footed jig through the chaos, one of them puts his foot nearly through an acoustic guitar

and it’s nearly funny

because I’m laughing or something at least is bubbling out of me, something bilious rising in my chest. I watch as George the Hat is clubbed across the legs, he falters as he races across the field. He makes a grab for one of the little wire-haired puppies that he and Nina found, the other I see in her arms, she’s made it to the low end of the field but George is down again, the puppy rolls free of his hands and is twisting, bounding away.

When the truncheons beat again at the side of our van, we are ready.