Tess (7 page)

Can she see you? In the blurred blue of her eyes she can see you, perhaps – lifting a spoon to eat egg and ‘soldiers' of bread and butter (made by me to tempt you here, Ella, for your next story or lesson).

You're awake, little Tess, in this room with the low ceiling at the end with the log fire, and the millwheel in the middle, and the great white stone keeping the door into the garden securely closed against the beginning of the equinoctial gales.

And as you're awake, and history lessons must start as fairy tales – as you will discover in your time – I'll tell you of my mother, your great-grandmother – and about the foremother of Ella, too: the first Tess.

Stay with me, as those runaway children dance down the road to the swings and the roundabouts of West Bay. Hear how the beliefs of an extraordinary and brave woman – and the punishment she received for them – led her to end this particular day. But be grateful for her. As I have said, our mother went to the beginning of time, to the roots of women's poetry and myth, to the origins of the lies they had for so long been told; and she was before her time in doing so. But without her – and without other pioneers like her – we would still be as unfocused in our way of seeing things as an infant – as Baby Tess.

I didn't know then – indeed I couldn't know until much later – that the stories told by my mother were warnings really: coded messages passed from the lips of one woman to another down the generations and in need of constant repetition in case the old stories were forgotten.

But the worst of it was that two men – the Brothers Grimm – listened to these old tales told by mothers to their daughters; and they decided to record them for posterity.

For a male posterity, of course. How could we have a posterity when we have no past?

Like the tapestries, embroideries and patchworks which carried the message of our anonymous love or suffering, the oral tradition of telling stories was our great, unsigned charter.

And, like the earth before the balance was thrown out by the rise of the phallocentric culture, the stories we told were equally about the bravery, and the hardships, and the love and growing up of female and male children alike.

But the Brothers Grimm could understand only the tales of courage and manliness and chivalry on the part of the boys. The girls were relegated to virtues – Patient Griselda; or sheer physical beauty – Sleeping Beauty; Beauty and the Beast. Always we must read that our heroine is a Beauty.

Would it have been better for my mother to have left these tales in their patriarchal form – frightening, but somehow not quite real, or convincing (to little girls and women, at least)? Good for interpretation by Freudian male analysts – but not for us?

No, she would not have done better, definitely not.

But the truth, like the truth about women, is far from reassuring or anodyne.

Men have professed through the centuries that they are ‘terrified of women'. They have clothed us in fragrance and exquisite gentleness and pink and white colouring to hide the primeval truth they know very well lies in us. The blood and the birth-pain and the milk and the sex-juice that in Eastern cultures is called ‘chi', giver of energy, and the tears. They are afraid of us – and so were the Brothers Grimm. They preferred us to remain silent on the subject of ourselves. Yet my mother did try to present a balanced picture: to read one story from the coloured picture books and to tell the next from the store of words that lies in all women: and, as all women know, the story won't end well.

My mother tried to teach us that the story can end well, if we see the way and we keep our strength and courage. It was immensely hard for her to do: and I can understand her suffering – and the retribution of the shocked and angry world – only years after she has died.

At the same time, she has no more died than the first Tess who lived on this western shore. The Tess who, too, lived by telling and hearing and not by the male structure of the written word. Like that first Tess, of the Celtic people, who lived and fought here as brave as any warrior, my mother believed that death was only the midpoint way of life.

And so do I believe that. And next time, I say to the infant Tess as Ella half leans, half sits on my lap (she's too old for a fairy tale, she thinks: but none of us ever are), is now: your time has come and the cycle of unhappiness and imbalance must finally be broken.

Like the sea, I will say the same song over and over, until your unformed mind shapes like a rock worn by the rising and falling of my tales.

– You see, my mother says.

And I do see her, as I sit here on this wild night, with the wind whistling already higher in the chimney than it has dared to go all summer, and the first of the leaves of the fig tree blown off and scampering the length of the stone-flagged terrace.

I see her, Ella, as we sit on this lip of worn stone, some four hundred years old, that juts into the room of the Old Mill.

She encouraged Tess to see herself as a free spirit. And then put all that blame she carried around with her straight onto Tess when we were ‘naughty'.

Our poor mother. She was only trying.

I see her there, at the end of the room where the very last part of it goes under the oak staircase – when our father opened out the first floor of the Mill it just came to be there: it was a broom cupboard once, I suppose. It's dark there and the light goes in strands like silk – or wool – as it comes down through the open slats of the old staircase.

She's spinning, I say to Ella. She told us about the loom.

And I tell Ella that it was my mother who said we must recoup
our powers, that we were spinsters all, that the female side of the family tree is known as the distaff side because spinning was the work of women; and that we must spin a new tapestry on our looms.

Our mother tells us this on a snowy, cold night in January – when we are very young, when we haven't even yet danced away to the freedom of the fair – and our father is out somewhere in the flat salty marshes of the Fleet, trying to help swans frozen to icy lumps under the mantle of snow.

Did I see then that my mother was a spinster, whether she was married or not?

Did I see that her exclusion from my father's life only mirrored the situation of a million wives, living on the periphery of their husbands' lives, jobs, ‘hobbies'?

Perhaps I did, for when my mother sighed and stood up and went to take down the decorations from the little Christmas tree by the fireplace, I knew somehow that another year was starting for her: another year almost impossibly difficult to bear, with the days of the Lord of Misrule done with for another twelvemonth and the normal structures of daily life returned.

– Tomorrow is the sixth of January, St Distaff's Day, she said. The distaff is the staff from which the flax is drawn in spinning. And spinning is women's work. So it means that holiday-time is over.

Did I understand? Tess pretended she did. She glanced upwards and said in a tone of mock prayer: St Catherine, grant us our wish. And she recited the spell to get a husband:

St Catherine, St Catherine, oh lend me thine aid
And grant that I niver may die an eld maid.
Send me a husband, answer my plea,
A
good
one, St Catherine,
But arn-a-one better than
Narn-a-one, St Catherine.

But my mother frowned. The ruins of the little chapel on the hill above us were too important to her, I think, to be taken lightly. The saint, patron saint of spinsters, had, she said, often visited
her in her dreams and told her to be brave and stay young.

Even then, my mother was beginning to show symptoms of what we would now call a ‘female malady' – female because it has been induced by no virus or ascertainable indisposition of the mind, but by the imbalance of living in a world where a woman's rights and true expression are denied to her.

Today, those suffering from my mother's disease are given lithium, learning at least that a mineral, a part of living rock, can help the wild mood swings of a being denied her own humanity.

Like a pendulum broken loose from the stifling confines of a grandfather clock, your great-grandmother, Baby Tess, in the last years of the mid-century – while the world built itself up from the last war, and exploded its nuclear devices in ‘trials' that killed and maimed – our mother Mary Hewitt told us her strange stories.

The good people of Nasebury thought her mad.

But it was the truth she told that they couldn't bear. Only Retty Priddle's mother didn't mind her little girl coming to tea with us.

Maybe, to understand my mother, you had to know what it was to be born in that most remote and tucked-away of places – and even now it's as easy to lose yourself there as in the days of Thomas Hardy. (Hardy loved the Marshwood Vale. On his way there he walked Tess down the hill from Toller Down to Beaminster, and had her walk back in thin pumps when her boots were stolen. He found the dying mistletoe that marked her tragic wedding night at the station at Evershot.)

So, Ella and little Tess, I'll tell you, as the history books tell it, about the land my mother came from – as well as your foremothers who first settled here.

This hilltop, the highest in the country, is crowned by an oval fort of some three hectares. The defence consists of two lines of rampart and ditch with a counterscarp, broken by entrances at the northern corner and halfway along the southwest side. There are pillow mounds and possible barrows inside the hill fort.

Excavations between 1964 and 1971 revealed a number of circular wooden-hut foundations in the centre of the fort. One of the huts may have been a gold-worker's shop, since a crucible with traces of gold on it was found. These huts were replaced during the first century B.C. by an unusual large rectangular wooden building with an open courtyard at the centre. It was at least thirty-two metres long and each wing was not less than two metres wide. From the footing trenches it was impossible to decide how the building had looked or what its function had been, but one might suggest a cult centre as a possibility. When the building had ceased to function, its foundations were covered with a low mound of earth, traces of which can still be seen on the surface today. Cobblestones were laid
at the centre of the enclosure and there the excavators found the head of a Roman ballista bolt.

From Pilsdon Pen, a walk can be made down to the sea to join the coast path from Lyme Regis or Bridport, the walk taking in the rim of the vale, then descending into and crossing it to reach its chief village, Whitchurch Canonicorum. The first village passed is Bettiscombe.

At Bettiscombe Manor lived the last members of the Pinney family, who had rented their other house nearby to Wordsworth. The wealth of the family was based on West Indian plantations set up by an early member, Azariah Pinney, who escaped to Nevis when being sought as a rebel follower of the Duke of Monmouth. It was a descendant of Azariah who resettled here in Dorset. With him from Nevis he brought the skull of a Negro slave, a man who had been called Bettiscombe when he worked on the plantation. The skull was not thought to be the most pleasant of furniture by other owners of the manor and was buried in the churchyard. From the grave came frightening screams, and the house was filled with strange and terrifying sounds. The skull was retrieved and several other graves were tried, but always with the same result. Finally it was thrown into a pond in the hope that the water would lay the spirit. But the noises in the house continued and the owners had to borrow a boat and rake the pond to retrieve the skull. It was replaced in the house and the spirit silenced again. The skull is still there, as it always was, but the legends that have grown up around it have multiplied … the less romantic maintain that it was retrieved from a burial mound on Pilsdon Pen and is of a young woman from the Bronze or Iron Age. If it was a woman, then she was confined here, perhaps even walled up, until her death. There is no adequate way finally to silence the screaming skull of Bettiscombe.

(NOTE: a Professor of Human and Comparative Anatomy, Royal College of Surgeons, confirmed recently that it was indeed the skull of a female aged between twenty-five and thirty years ‘probably dug from some barrow on a west Dorset hill'.)

From Pilsdon Pen you can look nine hundred and seven feet down – and across the Marshwood Vale to the sea.

As my mother told the story, I saw Tess (it was always Tess, as
I've said, who was the Beauty of these tales) stride across the hills from wooded Lewesdon to our bald, heather-covered fort. And on, over the flat-topped hills to the sea.

How could we care about the story of Beauty and the Beast, read to us in a polite voice by my mother from the Walter Crane book in the Mill, when we knew Tess could go in her iron shoes along all the southern coastal hills as far as Maiden Castle, the most famous and impregnable of the hill forts, and wake her prince with a resounding kiss?