The Fallen~Sparrow~Hawk;The Fallen~Sparrow~Hawk

The Fallen Sparrow- hawk

Mayday’s Eve 30^th April, 2002

We set off from the Doon around midday. Stuart at the wheel of his van, Damait and

Ishtar. First stop Monreith Estate which we drove through stopping only so I could

climb up to Mryton castle. The stones were used to build Monreith House for the

price of £2000 when the architect conned William Maxwell’s wife, (grandson of Sir

William, to replace the castle instead of extending it as was the intention. There is a fine

view of the White loch from the tower.

From Monreith we went to some ancient standing stones one of which had fallen

leaving two which had once formed part of a huge ring. The energy of the stones was

extremely strong smarting the hands on contact, waves and waves of energy fizzes

and pulsated around my own field.Unfortunately, we didn’t stay long enough for the full
top-up but it was good to feel the lay of the land.

We stopped off at Grahams for a cup of tea. Graham makes furniture out of wicker,

willow and ash. He also makes sculptures. He was working to dead-line to complete a

table for a client, so we headed for the Maxwell burial ground in Kirkmaiden-in-

fernis.

I was in search of Jolly’s grave, while Stuart was more fascinated by the tale which put
 kirkmaiden on the pilgrim’s  map before the Maxwell monopolised the energy. Medana was
 an Irish princess who converted to Christianity.

On Monreith bay, close under a steep, wooded slope, is one of the oldest churches in

Scotland, Kirkmaiden-in-fernis. Its origin is connected with the story of Medana, the

beautiful daughter of an Irish king. Among her many suitors there was a soldier- Miles

Nobilis-who was especially determined to win her. The princess, however, had

embraced the Christian faith and had secretly taken a vow of celibacy. Rendered by

her suitors persistence, she fled with two handmaids to Galloway and landed at Portankill

in The Thinns, a place which took its name from the chapel she built there, and led a

life of poverty and good works. One day she was startled by voices on the shore. Her

soldier rushed in and threw his arms around her. She slipped from his grasp and,
followed by her handmaidens, rushed into the surf and took refuge on a rock amid the

water. Her lover hastened after her; but before he could reach her the rock floated and

carried its precious burden across to Monreith bay, where Medana found a short-lived

peace. Her lover discovered her new place of retreat. When he came into sight the

lady promptly climbed a tree. “Why persecute me thus?” she exclaimed. “Those eyes

compel me,” her lover began, and before he could say more, she tore them out and

threw them at his feet, saying, “Take them then!” distracted, broken-hearted and

repentant, he went his own way. Medana came down from the tree and asked her

attendants for water to bathe her aching face. Just as she was being told there was

none at hand, a clear, healing stream broke out of the sloping ground where her eyes

had fallen. She washed with it and recovered her sight.

The chancel of the old church is the burial place of the Maxwells of Monreith. It has

been restored in the mid nineteenth century in the style of twelfth-century architecture, with a Norman arch and a round headed window.

In one of the nameless graves in the churchyard lies the body of Captain Thurot, a

French naval officer, who distinguished himself in the war between Britain and France in 1760.

Beyond the chapel’s consecrated ground whose boundary is marked by rusted iron

railings some two feet high, on a piece of flat earth, just before a precipitous drop to

the water, was exposed here and there a roughly hewn slab. On Jolly’s unmarked

grave, wings out-spread, lay the body of a fallen sparrow-hawk.

End.

The Fallen~Sparrow~Hawk; four Seasons in One Day

Four Seasons in One Day April 26 2002

The wind blusters around the caravan this morning and the wind turbine howls

healthily. Vans have turned the car park into a chaotic drive-in. we have new arrivals

in the form of Andy and his two sons Ryan and Kean. Jeff left with Alison for

Edinburgh and returned with a new van and his daughter. Alison returned after

nightfall with her purchase from the auction at Talamh. And there is Stuart’s van.

I have become close to Stuart since his arrival several days ago. First of all, it was
the relief to have another man to hang out with, though this man had a very real
side, a messed up, boisterous and a no-nonsense-get-on-and-do-things side; an absolute enthusiasm for other people and life. He has an avid curiosity for local history and has begun reading my library book, Highways and byways in Galloway and Carrick to me. I stopped him every now and

again to ask questions. He’s read to me a couple of times, once in my caravan.

He is not gay having three daughters with three different women. He is a sensitive

soul and is having a hard time with the mother of his daughters. There is

love, but it sounds a very destructive relationship involving violence. I can see how

drink might turn Stewart belligerent and add to his innate bullish nature.

Capricorn gets on with his Taurus sign, and Tiger, which I am, gets on with Horse.

It was Stuart who persuaded me not to high-tail it back to London. Taken to the brink

by the return of Jeff, the Dagda, aka Kurtz/Quixote and his tyrannical ways, (which he

hasn’t lost), I had the notion I would find emotional solace down south. Stuart simply

said, “If I was gay, I think it would be ideal for you”. This was in a pub in Wigton

with hours to go before I was due to step on a bus bound for London.
I admitted it was what I needed at the Doon, companionship and there and

then, we established our friendship when Suggs’ It Must be Love, Love, Love came on

the duke box. We said it would be better without the sexual side and agreed deep

friendship and agreed that sexual, emotional involvement only spoiled things.

The leaves are beginning to fall unfurl. Brett has been digging up new potato patches;

the seeds in their trays have sprouted seedlings. The slash and burn fires have ceased,

and since my arrival we have acquired four hens, one cockerel and a pot-bellied pig.

children are in abundance; Jack and Evey have playmates in Kean and Ryan and

Jeff’s daughter Ishtar. Damnait and Jeff’s boy pushes wheeled toys, and Ruby, Alison

and Brett’s youngest, grinds her four teeth together in her carry chair.

The Fallen~Sparrow~Hawk;Notice; Goats and Pigs

Notice: Goats and Pigs, April 25, 2002

I hereby give notice that I cannot permit tenants to keep goats and pigs in their farm houses the mischief done to fixtures and fittings by these awful beasts is incalculable. Not least, the awful stench inhaled when my sheriff calls to collect due tithes is appalling and shall not be tolerated.

Tenants found keeping them after this notice will be subject themselves to my displeasure. Eviction shall immediately ensue without further notice or warning.

By order of the honourable

Lord Laurence Waldran

Lord of the Manor

This notice, a genuine enamel affair was discovered when Jeff, Stuart and myself were on our way to collect Napoleon, and copied by me on our return to the Machars.

Our arrival found Alison tearful in the car park. The appearance

of an un-quorum pig exasperated her patience with the increasingly volatile Jeff, heretofore referred to as The Dagda.

The arrival of Vicky, Kevin and Mark from Talamh formed an instant team to carry pig and cage to a designated terrace very close to the Doon.

The team of porters were made up of Stuart, Kevin, Brett, Mark and me.  Two ash poles were put through the cage and secured as handles as those on a sedan chair or the type used to transport the statue of the Virgin Mary in many Spanish festivals. Our passenger was nothing holier than our new acquisition, Napoleon.

The cage weighed a ton and, heaved up on four shoulders, we edged ourselves forward along the rough path past the gardens, staggering and stumbling under our load. Feet sunk deeper into mud than ever before under our charge. Weight redistributed regularly on the wandering whim of the pig. We developed a rota system whereby one rested while four changed places and shoulders, as yard by grunting yard we edged our way towards Napoleon’s new paradise.

New paths had to be cleared, branches hacked away and the bridge made secure by additional planks. Damnait, with Ishtar (her one year old boy) walked ahead singing a vague Irish air.

Over a plateau of bracken and finally Napoleon was home. Four hours to cover a distance which normally took twenty minutes. It took a while to erect the solar panel charged electric fence, in the meantime, the women arrived with a picnic and the children in tow and we all ate while Napoleon slept or cowered in his cage. The fence erected, he was released into his new home.

The Fallen~Sparrow~Hawk; Napoleon

Napoleon

It was one step forward then two steps back then sudden leaps forward, then absolute sudden stand-stills, that describes my relationship with the Dagda aka Jeff. His tyranny could, I hoped for a moment, be due to a Scottish accent grafted on to a northern Irish one the barking manner of which people in Belfast speak; Ian paisley could make the words ‘Thank you’ sound like an insult…and yet Jeff looks like a western Christmas-card Jesus.

Stewart, who I like immensely, said, while taking me to Wigtown in his van so I could get a bus ticket to London, that he too had taken on a low-impact, environmental project and had, consequently become so fanatical with tunnel-vision that anyone who did not measure up to the ideal was summarily dismissed. Though the information gave me insight, it didn’t help. Nevertheless I didn’t go to London and fabulous things were accomplished like, for example, yesterday.

We, Stewart, Jeff (Dagda) and myself went to another community off the upper lowland walk, Ayrshire on an errand to fetch a yurt and ended up with a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig; a male boar, black and named (pending meeting) Napoleon, after George Orwell’s porcine character in Animal Farm.

A cage was improvised from pliant fence wire and a square metal cage. The openings were covered with the wire. The cage in the back of Stewart’s van; we had only to catch the pig. Neither Jeff nor I had caught a pig before. Stewart flatly refused to be involved.

“I’ll get the head, you get the back end”, I was volunteered. My adrenaline level went up; there was an unknown quantity in strength getting suspicious in an extremely filthy pen. Jeff was trying to bond with it by offering the pig half an avocado pear, my lunch; it wasn’t working. I thought Jeff was going to evoke the mighty heroes of Irish myth and legend in order to deal with the mighty energy of the pig, but I detected fear in his voice; adrenaline surge.

When I jumped into the pen, Jeff stood crest-fallen with the avocado. My movement made the pig run into an inner pen then run out again and the race began.

Liz, owner of the pig, suggested, from the other side of the gate that Jeff , “throw himself on the animal, wrestle it to the ground, then clamp its head”, and that someone else, (me), grapple hold of its hind quarters. Without the plank, jutting out, perpendicularly from one of the sides, into which the pig got stuck after a long drawn out chase, which involved  high-pitched nightmarish squeals, and Jeff barking like a mad man in his grimy plus-fours and old tweed poncho, (which Liz suggested he throw over the animal) – we might never have caught the him.

So, trapped a second time, we seized the opportunity, Jeff  straddled the neck, head-on, and with the squealing reaching a terrifying pitch, Jeff, in full rant, I felt, at everything  else on the planet; the whole becoming a shouting match between the pig and Jeff.

“I’ve got the legs! I’ve got the legs!” I shouted.

The pig, now in an embrace, we lifted it out of the pen and step by pig-squealing-Jeff-ranting-audience-encouraging-step we forced it into the cage where it quickly settled on to the bed of straw provided.

Jeff and I huffed and puffed as though we’d fought a Minotaur, (each others Minotaur more like).

We were to have taken the female but given her position in the pen with two others and the ordeal we’d had with Napoleon, we decided our good fortune began ended with one. And anyway, Liz, the owner, had become extremely fond of her girls.

The Fallen~Sparrow~Hawk; The Dagda

The Dagda,

Hubris has arrived in the form of Jeff. He is a tightly drawn muscle of intolerance; his anger and impatience very close to the surface. The founder of the Doon of May, he behaves more like a cantankerous slave owner. He has the imperious features of a Rasmussen or Thesiger, with bright clear blue eyes, large firm slightly hooked nose, a pale green tartan poncho, a green tartan waistcoat above green plus fours and an array of amulets around his neck; he carries a cane. His tone can be extremely dismissive, he raged at me about soap being used on his favourite cast iron pot, and the rain-gathering system not working. When he rounded on me again for some other perceived incompetence I told him that I was not his whipping boy and to change his tone. He swings between Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s heart of Darkness and Don Quixote but resemble the Dagda.

He let slip that he had himself voluntarily sectioned and the diagnosis of his ailment was, ‘A psychotic need to save the planet’... well, I wish I’d known before; ‘fool’s paradise’ springs to mind. But it is not easy to write Jeff off as a tyrannical (read colonial) environmental pied-piper. He has created a beautiful space out of his fevered mind, and may be intolerant with anyone he perceives falls short of his ideas and ideals; these people he terms ‘gormless’ (without sky), and although he doesn’t pick any one out for this insult, at the first meeting since his return, we are all made to feel we might qualify.

It does take a certain amount of vision to leave a full-time job as a suited computer analyst  and don the nomad’s garb and adopt a low-impact life-style. A lot has indeed been established in the four years he has been here, but I don’t think his idealism should lead to bad-tempered remarks as though he and he alone knows and the rest of us are incompetents. This is a trifle unfair, he has the conviction of his beliefs, and he does not suffer fools lightly.

My gripe is he has been off wandering for five months living in Spain and everyone else has kept things going and yet he strides in and lays down the law, as though we were under his employ. An interesting study; A mad man; he says he is the re-incarnation of an old angry Irishman. 

The fallen~Sparrow~hawk; The dance of the Flaming Arseholes

The dance of the Flaming Arseholes     April 19, 2002

Jeff returned, the Dagda, in long beard and poncho. He immediately surveyed his domain, the progress of tree growth, clearings, new planting and general condition of the place of which he was the founder. Jeff  had been driven back from Beneficio, a similar community in Spain, by Stewart. His arrival coincided with that of Tanya and Billy and Hazel. Jeff went off to be reunited with Damnait, a reunion that began to take on a comical air when they kept missing each other.

The evening found Tanya, Stewart, Billy, Alison and myself on the Bog Myrtle and spliffs. Once the talk had moved from plants to foxes to lambs, (tail-docking) talk of other communities, horses, workhorses and their ability to drag twenty feet logs to build the cabin, hares, hounds and the prices they fetch, chickens and especially Alison’s new five hens and one cock; willow and the suppleness of its branches for basket weaving, a conversation, in short, bursting with abundance, the toil of spring, for the abundance in summer.

After Tanya and Alison retired Stewart and Billy found a mutual love of sailing, Billy  having sailed on many fishing boats off the West Coast including the fated Solway Harvester, about which he said, “There were three decks and the sleeping cabins were right at the bottom, so before you knew you had rolled over, it was too late. The boys were found in their beds”. It was surmised that the boat could have been hit by a container.  “It, the Solway harvester, is lying in the Isle of Whithorn (or beyond) and you can see by the dent in its side, something barrel-like hit it, you ken”. Billy also said “A good seaman can’t swim, and a good skipper doesn’t swim. Doesn’t want to, will do anything not to get the lifeboats out and get his feet wet, you ken”. It turned out that Stewart and Billy had drunk on the same boat off the west of Mallaig and Elgin and seen the northern lights.

Stewart was overjoyed that he had finally met another man who had actually not only seen, but participated in the ‘Dance of the Flaming Arseholes’. A ritual which takes the form of a rolled up newspaper stuffed between the bum-cheeks with the other end set alight. These flaming cockatoos, drunk I may add, danced about on a wooden ship, (this caused me hilarity). The one to keep going to the last wins. Many have received severe burns playing the Dance of the Flaming Arseholes.

This story was told by Billy at the end of anecdotes about the initiation rites of young new recruits on boats. “One has his leg tied to a big rubber tire and is told to wear it in case he goes overboard; it will keep him afloat, as a good sailor can’t swim; the tire will drag him straight down, which is better. The new recruit drags a tire around for days, you ken”

Another initiation finds the new recruit attached to the bow of the ship to shout out obstacles through the mist, meanwhile the crew are below having a laugh surrounded by remote tracking radar; they speed the boat up to twenty knots until the poor soul is screaming his head off.

Billy talked of the Jollys. I told him I wanted to go drinking in Dunragit. He confirmed they were good boxers though rough. One pub in the middle of the high street was okay to go to while the other two were rough, “you ken”.

Stewart asked what my particular interest in the slave was. It is not the first time I’ve been asked. It is a question any reader will ask. Being mixed-race and being brought up, and having expressed mainly the white side, I am asking myself my feeling towards and about my black heritage and slavery.

Stewart was under the impression that I straightened my hair;  as it is the Jollys who, reputedly, shave or straighten their light-coloured frizz, or indeed, have taken to wearing wigs. I do not have light frizzy hair but loose curly hair, taking after my English maternal grandfather. My European features make me look Mediterranean, Brazilian or North African.

My interest? It has become a JOURNEY OF COLOUR. A journey of  a mixed race man back to part of his roots. The roots that is the racist killing of his, and racial subjugation, however subtle of his brothers and sisters. Moral; avoid the error of ever denying of one’s own origins. This is my story. It needs to be told, not in fiction but as it is unfolding. Are they, the descendants of Jolly, still in these times, ashamed of their black heritage? (I know that Irma, the jolie laide perniciously directed me towards the Jolly story.) It is a ‘stigma’ they have carried for an inordinate amount of time, over two centuries long; black people have not only been in Britain in our cities and in the countryside since the 1950s, they have been here for centuries, more than we know have a trace by now.

A part of me descends from slavery. It is a sad as it is but a part of me as much as my Irish heritage and its painful legacy. Can I really experience being black? Plastic paddy, bogus black; not black enough; olive skin, light brown, I am in between (I have been lynched by whites and mugged by blacks) and by knowing and owning my that part of my African history gives me a confidence that can transcends race to stand up against those who seek to denigrate those of African descent.

So, Jolly, a slave, who fell in love with a local girl, siring great-, great-, great-, great- grand children still living in the same community after over two hundred years.

The Fallen~Sparrow~Hawk

Obscurantism versus evolution or The old ways versus the new. April 18, 2002

“Just to think, it took four hours to prepare and just ten minutes to finish”. Alison said staring at her empty plate with a look of bewildered exhaustion. They, Alison, Brett and their three children had just returned from the south of England visiting relatives who lived, unlike themselves, in brick dwellings in which everything was at the flick of a switch. i.e.: wood-chopping replaced by a flick on the central-heating; switch!  Washing day to washing machine, load wash; five minutes; switch! Scraping pots and pans reduced to loading dishwasher; switch! Wood-burning stove to cooker and enough leisure time to lounge in front of the television; switch, or even take a full-time job to pay for it all; switch off.

You see the thing is all the switchflicking has to be paid for; there are unseen hands chopping the proverbial wood to feed the national grid; there are unseen water-gatherers, food-gatherers, clothes-scrubbers, stove-feeders, entertainers and boredom-breakers, nature-filmers and, with the proviso of disproportionate profit, they must all receive a promissory note of payment, they can use as currency in a promissory world.

At the Doon one is working for oneself. It is a job that has to be done. If the wood store goes down there is no fuel to cook and no heat in winter. This becomes immediately apparent and, like it or not, it has to be done. The same goes for water-collecting, laundry, planting and gathering the whole day taken up with tasks necessary for living.

Before the slow rise of the on-the-flick-of-a-switch consumer society there was no perceived choice. You either had slaves or servants or relied on the division of labour; the husband went out and toiled and the wife stayed home with the kids and cleaned and cooked all day. The idea of lying around all day, as Jane Austen’s characters do, was completely foreign to such women, (working class I mean).

So, the evolutionary urge to improve upon inventions; the hoe to the tractor; salt-storage to the fridge; water-collection to the stand-pipe and so on.

People live longer, they have an easier way of life; rent, gas, electricity, council tax and food bills paid; then follows a life of ease. Self-sustaining; wind turbine/generator, endless wood fuel, inexhaustible water supply, food from the ground; potatoes, celery, lettuce, onions, berries, herbs, broccoli, Spring onions, pulses; milk from goats, bread from the stove. What for money?

Of course everything takes that thing the modern world has managed to…manage; over manage, - time. ‘There are only so many minutes in a day’.