Time and the Hour

My husband's Uncle Bill Dilger was a watch and clockmaker-cum-repairer, and his workshop, a small back room in his Victorian Manchester home, was a fairy palace dedicated to Time. You walked through the door and found yourself immersed in a sussuration of soft ticking from walls crowded with clocks - mahogany-cased wall clocks with sober cream faces and slow-swinging brass pendulums; elaborately carved grandfathers looming up to the ceiling with their painted moons and suns and ships; busy gilt carriage clocks tick-tick-ticking away; great dark rustic cuckoo clocks with pine-cone weights and little half-open doors (family history proudly states that the Dilgers were one of the two Black Forest families which claim the invention of the cuckoo-clock); a Mickey Mouse clock with eyes that flicked from side to side; a clock with a ballerina who spun around on her pointed toe to the tune of the Blue Danube; an antique novelty clock shaped like a clockmaker holding a timepiece under his arm: big clocks, little clocks, old clocks and new clocks, clocks in the process of being mended, and clocks which would never work again, clocks ready to be claimed and clocks whose very owners, it seemed, had left them here long ago and vanished into time themselves.

In the middle of the small room, under a low-hanging, glass-shaded light, was Uncle Bill's wooden worktable, covered in small, intricate, shining parts - cogs and springs and watch-cases.  Those he wasn't currently working on would be protected from the dust by a collection of upturned crystal sherry-glasses whose stems had snapped. Everything gleamed.

We always tried to arrive just before noon.  Bill would welcome us and we would all crowd into his workshop, adults and children alike, and wait, breathless and smiling. There would be a strange whirring. Then the first shy chime. And then one after another every working clock in the room would clear its throat and strike.  Ding, ding, ding - dong, dong - bing, bing, bing - cuckoo, cuckoo - interrupting one another in a delightful, clashing crescendo and diminuendo of shrill and rapid and slow and mellow, till finally the last cuckoo ducked back in as the little doors whipped shut, and all that would be left was the constant tick-tick-ticking. It was something that could never fail to give pleasure.

Isaac Peabody - illustration by A.R. Whitear

Uncle Bill's clock room often used to remind me of Isaac Peabody's workshop in Elizabeth Goudge's novel 'The Dean's Watch' which is set in the 1870s in an unnamed fictional cathedral city which combines elements of both Wells and Ely.  Isaac is described as 'a round-shouldered little man with large feet and a great domed and wrinkled forehead. ...His eyes were very blue beneath their shaggy eyebrows and chronic indigestion had reddened the tip of his button nose.  His hands were red, shiny and knobbly, but steady and deft.'  As for his workshop:

The shop was so small and its bow window so crowded with clocks, all of them ticking, that the noise was almost deafening. It sounded like thousands of crickets chirping or bees buzzing, and was to Isaac the most satisfying sound in the world.

But old Isaac has a secret.  Brought up by a stern father in the fear of an angry God, he is terrified of the great cathedral, and even though he is fascinated by the Jaccomarchiadus (the mechanically-operated figure that strikes a bell on the outside of a clock) which adorns its tower, he is too afraid ever to go inside the cathedral and see the clock for himself:

The Jaccomarchiardus stood high in an alcove on the tower, not like most Jacks an anonymous figure, but Michael the Archangel himself.  He was lifesize and stood upright with spread wings... Below him, let into the wall, was a simple large dial with an hour hand only. Within the Cathedral, Isaac had been told there was a second clock with above it a platform where Michael on horseback fought with the dragon at each hour and conquered him. But not even his longing to see this smaller Michael could drag Isaac inside the terrible Cathedral. No one could understand his fear.  He could not entirely understand it himself.

Perhaps not.  But here is the dial on the outside north wall of Wells cathedral, and here - below - is the west entrance, and I think you can see that there is, or could be, something awe-inspiring, even terrible, about its beauty.  You might well feel a bit of an ant, approaching it as Isaac does through the small streets of his anonymous city: 'Like a fly crawling up a wall Isaac crawled up Angel Lane, scuttled across Worship Street, cowered beneath the Porta, got himself somehow across the moonlit expanse of the Cathedral green and then slowly mounted the flight of worn steps that led to the west door...'

Eventually, right at the end of the book, Isaac does manage to conquer his fear and enter the cathedral. And there it is, the other clock.

It was just as it had been described to him. Above the beautiful gilded clock face, with winged angels in the spandrels, was a canopied platform. To one side of it, Michael in gold armour sat his white horse, his lance in rest and his visor down. On the other side the dragon's head, blue and green with a crimson forked tongue, rose wickedly from a heap of scaly coils. They waited only for the striking of the bell to have at one another. It was a wonderful bit of work. ...And to think he had lived in the city all these years and had not seen it!

Here is the one at Wells.  It dates to the late 14th century. Around the dial you may just be able to make out the four angels in the corners, who hold the four cardinal winds.

 

On the hour, every hour, armoured knights ride around the platform you can see at the top, jousting with one another, while higher up the wall to one side, the Jack perches in his alcove, striking his bell.

After I had taken these pictures, one of the cathedral clergy came out and spoke to the gathered onlookers. He didn't preach, not in a specifically Christian way, but he did ask us to consider the value of time in our lives, and to make good use of it. It was a suitable message.  In Goudge's book, old Isaac makes friends with the great Dean of the cathedral, whose clocks he comes to wind. The Dean is a sick man, who knows he has not long to live.  He pays a visit to the clock-shop and listens to Isaac talking about horology:

He delighted in Isaac's lucid explanations and he delighted too in this experience of being shut in with all these ticking clocks. The sheltered lamplit shop was like the inside of a hive full of amiable bees. ... [The clocks] spoke to him with their honeyed tongues of this mystery of time, that they had a little tamed for men with their hands and voices and the the beat of their constant hearts and yet could never make less mysterious or dreadful for all their friendliness. How strange it was, thought the Dean, as one after another he took their busy little bodies into his hands, that soon he would know more about the mystery than they did themselves. 


Dear Uncle Bill was nothing like poor frightened Isaac, but a truly happy man and faithful Catholic who willed his best and favourite clock, the massive black grandfather which stood in his living room, to the Catholic Bishop of Salford. It was a typical gesture which I hope the Bishop appreciated, but I expect he did, as - just as Isaac does for the Dean - Bill used to go regularly to wind the Bishop's clocks.  Bill used to joke sometimes, that he didn't know what he'd do in heaven.  "I don't know what I'll do in heaven," he'd say in his soft Manchester accent, with a twinkle in his eye. "There's no clocks there!" He died at the age of ninety-plus, contented to the last, and would have both enjoyed and deserved the genuine epitaph that Elizabeth Goudge quotes at the beginning of 'The Dean's Watch':

Epitaph from Lydford Churchyard

Here lies in a horizontal position

The outside case of

George Routleigh, Watchmaker,

Whose abilities in that line were an honour

To his profession:

Integrity was the main-spring,

And prudence the regulator

Of all the actions of his life:

Humane, generous and liberal,

His hand never stopped

Till he had relieved distress;

So nicely regulated were all his movements

That he never went wrong

Except when set-a-going

By people

Who did not know his key;

Even then, he was easily

Set right again:

He had the art of disposing of his time

So well

That his hours glided away

In one continual round

Of pleasure and delight,

Till an unlucky minute put a period to

His existence;

He departed this life

November 14, 1802,

aged 57,

Wound up,

in hopes of being taken in hand

By his Maker,

And of being

Thoroughly cleaned, repaired and set-a-going

In the World to come.

Alice, Creator and Destroyer

I once read, I think in an essay by C.S. Lewis – that to have weird or unusual protagonists in a fantasy world was gilding the lily. Simply too much icing on a very fancy cake. And then he cited Alice as a good example of an ordinary child to whom strange things happen.  I’m not sure he was right.

Of course it’s true that many heroes and heroines in classic 20^th century fantasy are ‘ordinary’ – hobbits, for example; and Lewis’s own Pevensie children, and Alan Garner’s Colin and Susan in ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ and ‘The Moon of Gomrath’.  There’s a pleasure in seeing an ordinary person rise to the occasion, as when Bilbo Baggins turns out to be a very good burglar indeed, or when Frodo self-sacrificingly takes on the burden of the Ring. Tolkien must have seen many instances of ‘ordinary’ heroism in the trenches of World War I. 

And I’d agree that one does need to able to identify with characters in fantasy. For me, one of the difficulties of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is that apart from Titus and Fuschia there are too few characters for whom one can feel any empathy.  Although I love the setting and the descriptions of the immense castle and its strange ritual life, I become emotionally exhausted by Peake’s cast of grotesques.  Peake had, it’s fair to say, a line on the darker side of life.  And not coincidentally for this post, he illustrated the two Alice books.  Just look at his picture of Alice emerging out of the mirror into Looking-Glass Land, and compare it with Tenniel’s.

Tenniel’s Alice is barely halfway through the mirror.  She looks not at us, but around and down at the room with an expression of calm interest.   She is a little excited, perhaps, but not alarmed.  We don’t feel there in the room waiting for her: instead, we are looking through the window of the picture.  We can glimpse part of the room.  The grinning clock is strange but not threatening.  The room itself appears to be well lit.  In Tenniel’s drawing, Alice is firmly planted on the mantelshelf.  She has a chance to look around, and will jump down when she chooses.

 

Peake’s Alice appears through the misty glass like an apparition.  She looks straight into our eyes, as if we are the first thing she sees. Her face is very white, and so are her hands, outspread as if pressing through the glass, but also gesturing an ambiguous mixture of alarm and conjuration.  She is coming out of darkness, and there are no reflections to suggest what the looking glass room may contain – except us, for we are already there, waiting for her.  (We may not be friendly).  With one leg waving over the drop, she is about to fall off the mantelshelf into the room – for her position is precarious.

Even the 1951 Disney cartoon recognised the tough element in Alice’s character, and the latent terror in Wonderland.  They made her into a prim little cutie, but she still managed to stand up to the frightening Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter.  

So how ordinary is Alice, after all – is she really just an innocent and rather pedestrian Every-little-girl in a mad, mad world?  Or does she have her own brand of illogical weirdness with which to combat the weirdness she finds?  I think she does, and I think modern readers often miss it.  We look at the blonde hair, the hairband, the blue dress and the white pinafore, and forget her speculative, inventive mind, her impatience – and passages like this:

And once she had really frightened her old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Nurse!  Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena, and you’re a bone!” 

Compare that with George MacDonald’s heroine in ‘The Princess and The Goblin’. Can you imagine Princess Irene doing anything so bizarre? Irene is truthful and brave, but always a little lady – the Victorian gentleman’s ideal child. The adventures that happen to Irene are not of her own creation. But it’s Alice’s weird imaginings about what might be happening on the other side of the glass – that take her into Looking Glass Land at all. Alice is both a credibly strong-minded little girl – capable of losing her temper, of defending herself in the White Rabbit’s house by kicking Bill the lizard up the chimney – and a surreal philosopher, as some children are. She is the maker of her own imaginary worlds and when they get too chaotic, she ends them – amid considerable violence. 

“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”    

            At this the whole pack rose up into the air and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off…

(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.

            “And as for you,” she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen… “I’ll shake you into a kitten, that I will!” 

(Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass)

Tenniel’s illustrations catch the vivid threat and drama of the situation.  In Peake's, lit by three tall sinister candles, it looks as if Alice and the two Queens are being sucked into a black hole.  

Some books with dream endings can feel like a cheat. ‘And she woke up, and it was only a dream’ seems to negate all that has happened. But in the case of Alice, the dream settings are absolutely necessary. She has not strayed into a pre-existing Narnia like Lucy Pevensie.  She is the Alpha and Omega of her own fantasylands. She is, like dreaming Brahma, the creator and destroyer of worlds: and when she awakens from her dreams, it is utterly logical that Wonderland and Looking Glass Land will cease to be.   

The Woman in the Kitchen

This is a post I wrote a few months before my mother died, nine years ago now. It was (and is) a heartfelt one.

It's Mothering Sunday in England this weekend, and here is a drawing I made for my junior school teacher a very long time ago. We'd been asked to draw a picture of our kitchens. I don't remember if a portrait of one's mother was also required, but she was there (of course) and so I included her. I was ten and very proud of the likeness, although I remember her saying to me, 'Hmm, do you really think I look like that?'

Anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 70's will recognise this kitchen. There's the speckled red lino on the floor, with the rubbery seal stuck down over the join. There are the painted wooden cupboards, the wire rack over the oven, the aluminium pans, the wall-hooks from which to hang sieves and scissors and fish-slices, above all the state-of-the-art glass disc in the window, with cords you pulled to line up the ventilation holes. There's my mother's curled hair (she used rollers), the fact that she's wearing a dress, her heeled court shoes.

Truth to tell, perhaps this isn't such a good likeness of my mother, who was slim and attractive... but it's a pretty good record of our kitchen. If you opened the back door to the right, six stone steps would lead you down into a slanting asphalt yard and the back gate. If you rubbed the steam from the kitchen window, you could look right over the valley to the moors on the other side of Wharfedale.

As I write this, my mother is 91 and has been in hospital for weeks, having fallen and broken her hip. She isn't very well. What you can't see in this drawing I made - but perhaps it's implicit - is the love in that room. It was a happy, happy home, and she made it so. No amount of trouble I go to now can be too much to repay her for what she gave us.

Last autumn around the time of my birthday, my sister and I were poking around in one of those fascinating antiques arcades where you can find anything and everything from Lalique glass so expensive it isn't even priced (if you have to ask, you can't afford it) to chipped jugs and odd sherry glasses at 50 pence apiece. My sister had asked me to choose a birthday present. I looked at this and that, and then I found this anonymous watercolour.

I had to have it. This is my ten-year old picture, grown-up and made better. This is or might as well be, my mother in one or any of the places we lived during my childhood.  All that's wanting is some sign of the menagerie of cats, dogs, ducks, white mice etc, which went with us everywhere.

There is and was a lot more to my mother than housework (which she didn't much like). She sang in a wonderful, trained contralto voice, she wrote poetry, created wonderful gardens, had and has wit, spirit, a sense of humour and the most beautiful smile.  She was practical, too. I remember her with a blowtorch and scraper, stripping brown varnish off the bannisters. Once she rehung a sash window. But the housework was always there, part of life, part of every home. These old-fashioned kitchens are part of my memories. There she is, the woman in the kitchen, washing the dishes, peeling the potatoes.

I want her to come home. 

 

River Voices

 

RIVER VOICES

 

As I walked down by the river

Close by the sounding sea,

Up rose three water maidens

Who stretched white arms to me,

            ‘Come here, you lilting stranger

            Who whistles as sharp as tin,

            We’ll give you a bed, a crown for your head,

            And our hair to wrap you in.’

‘No thanks, my jacket’s good enough,

And my old black tarpaulin.’

 

Then ups the old green river-man,

‘Come Jerry my boy,’ says he,

‘There’s room for a bold young chap like you

Under the water free.

            I’ll make you lord of the river,

            Walking on silver sand,

            Fine liquor you’ll sup from a golden cup,

            And the fishes will kiss your hand.’

Says I, ‘Your advice is mighty nice,

But I reckon I’ll stay on land.’

 

The last of all to surface

Was my lost love Nancy Gray,

She was wearing the ring I gave to her

A year last quarter day.

            Her smile was bright as sunshine

            In spite of the tears she wept,

            With an infant pressed against her breast

            That looked as though it slept –

‘Leap in my lad, be no more sad...’

So I looked at her, and leapt.

      

© Katherine Langrish 2025

Picture credit:

Young Man on a Riverbank, Umberto Bocciano 1902, public domain: 

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/485556

The Ghost that spoke Gaelic

'An Incident at the Battle of Culloden' by David Morier, oil on canvas.

 

This post first appeared on The History Girls blog
 

Scotland, 1749: just four years after the failed Jacobite rising and the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the clans at the Battle of Culloden. Reprisals had been severe; the wearing of kilt and tartan was forbidden; the rising was still fresh and sore in everyone’s minds and by no means necessarily still over. Messages (and money) flew between the Prince in exile and his loyal supporter Cluny MacPherson, in hiding on Ben Alder.

Into this volatile, still smouldering arena marched, in the summer of 1749, the newly married – and it has to be said, utterly and foolishly naïve – Sergeant Arthur Davies of ‘Guise’s Regiment’, heading over the mountains from Aberdeen to Dunrach in Braemar in charge of a patrol of eight private soldiers, for no more interesting purpose than to keep a general eye on the countryside.

This kind of countryside...

Sergeant Davies was a fine figure of a man, expensively but not at all sensibly dressed, considering what he was about. He carried on him a green silk purse containing his savings of fifteen and a half guineas; he wore a silver watch and two gold rings. There were silver buckles on his brogues, two dozen silver buttons on his striped ‘lute string’ waistcoat; he had a silk ribbon to tie his hair, and he wore a silver-laced hat. Thus attired he said goodbye to his wife – who never saw him again – and set off, encountering on the way one John Growar in Glenclunie, whom he told off for carrying a tartan coat. Shortly after this, the over-confident Sergeant left his men and went off over the hill, alone – to try and shoot a stag...

And he ‘vanished as if the fairies had taken him’. His men and his captain searched for four days, while rumours ran wild about the countryside that Davies had been killed by Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald. But no body was found…

Until the following year, in June 1750, a shepherd called Alexander MacPherson came to visit Donald Farquharson, the son of the man with whom Sergeant Davies had been lodging before his death. MacPherson, who was living in a shepherd’s hut or shieling up on the hills, complained that he ‘was greatly troubled by the ghost of Sergeant Davies’ who had appeared to him as a man dressed in blue and shown MacPherson where his bones lay. The ghost had also named and denounced his murderers – in fluent Gaelic, of which, in life, Sergeant Davies had of course not spoken a word… Farquharson accompanied MacPherson, and the bones were duly found in a peat-moss, about half a mile from the road the patrol had used, minus silver buckles and articles of value. The two men buried the bones on the spot where they lay, and kept quiet about it.

Of course, the story spread. Nevertheless it was not till three years later, in 1753, that Duncan Clerk and Alexander Bain Macdonald were arrested for the Sergeant’s murder on the testimony of his ghost. At the trial Isobel MacHardie who had shared shepherd MacPherson’s shieling during the summer of the ghost, swore that ‘she saw something naked come in at the door which frighted her so much she drew the clothes over her head. That when it appeared, it came in a bowing posture, and that next morning she asked MacPherson what it was, and he replied not to be afeared, it would not trouble them any more.’

Apart from the ghostly testimony, there was plenty of circumstantial evidence to convict the murderers. Clerk’s wife had been seen wearing Davies’ ring; after the murder Clerk had become suddenly rich. And a number of the Camerons later claimed to have witnessed the murder itself, at sunset, from a hollow on top of the hill: they never volunteered an explanation of what they themselves had been doing up there – doubtless engaged in the illicit business of smuggling gold from Cluny to the Prince.

Things looked black for the accused murderers. Yet a jury of Edinburgh tradesmen, moved by the sarcastic jokes of the defence, acquitted the prisoners. They could not take the ghost story seriously - not necessarily because it was a ghost: scepticism was on the rise, but ordinary people were still superstitious and the last Scottish prosecution for witchcraft had been only in 1727. But they could not believe in a ghost which had managed to learn Gaelic. 

Andrew Lang, in whose ‘Book of Dreams and Ghosts’ I came across this tale, adds a postscript sent to him by a friend: the words of an old lady, ‘a native of Braemar’, who ‘left the district when about twenty years old and who has never been back’. Lang’s friend had asked her whether she had ever heard anything about the Sergeant’s murder, and when she denied it, he told her the story as it was known to him. When he had finished she broke out:

“That isn’t the way of it at all, for… a forebear of my own saw it. He had gone out to try and get a stag, and had his gun and a deerhound with him. He saw the men on the hill doing something, and thinking they had got a deer, he went towards them. When he got near them, the hound began to run on in front of him, and at that minute he saw what it was they had. He called to the dog, and turned to run away, but saw at once he had made a mistake, for he had called their attention to himself, and a shot was fired after him, which wounded the dog. He then ran home as fast as he could…”

But at this point, the old lady ‘became conscious she was telling the story,’ and clammed up. No more could be got out of her.

What a tangled skein of loyalties and hatreds, of secret activities in the heather, of rebellion and politics, of a murder where the whole countryside knew straight away who’d done it, but wouldn’t or dared not say  – of a ghost’s evidence, and of poor, foolish Sergeant Davies in the middle of the Highlands, only four years after the ’45, behaving as though it was an adventure playground through which he could strut in his finery and shoot stags... 

And how ironic that the very ghost story which brought the murder to light – almost certainly devised by Alexander MacPherson in order to denounce the murderers without bringing unwelcome attention upon himself – seemed so incredible to a Lowlands jury that they would not convict.

 

 
Photo credit: 
Glen Clunie & Clunie Water, the road from Braemar
© Copyright Nigel Corby

Samuel Pepys & FOMO

 

On 26^th December 1662, twenty-nine year old Samuel Pepys met his friend Mr Battersby, who recommended ‘a new book of Drollery in verse called Hudibras.’ Eager to keep up with the newest thing, Pepys dashed out and bought the first volume for the considerable sum of two shillings and sixpence. But he was disappointed. ‘When I came to read it, it is so silly an abuse of the Presbyter-Knight going to the wars, that I am ashamed of it; and by and by meeting at Mr Townsend’s at dinner, I sold it to him for 18d’. And that was the loss of a whole shilling!

 

'Hudibras' is a mock epic by Samuel Butler which makes satirical fun of the Puritans and Presbyterians who had so lately held power in England. It tells of Sir Hudibras, a stupid and arrogant knight-errant on whom the poet lavishes absurd amounts of praise. The book was a huge success, with pirated copies and spurious continuations springing up even before the author could bring out the second and third parts. With Pepys, however, it completely misfired. He failed to see what was so funny about it. 

By February 1663 though, Pepys was having second thoughts and rather regretted his decision. Since everyone else praised the book so highly, perhaps he had been too hasty in getting rid of it? Off he went, ‘To a bookseller’s on the Strand and bought Hudibras again, it being certainly some ill humour to be so set against that which all the world cries up to be an example of wit – for which I am resolved once again to read him and see whether I can find it out or no.’

Perhaps buying the book for a second time made him determined to persist, but it didn’t make the task of wading through it any less of a chore. And now he became more cautious.  Nine months later, on 28 November, he walked through St Paul’s Churchyard, famous for its bookstalls, ‘and there looked upon the second part of Hudibras; which I buy not, but borrow to read, to see if it be as good as the first, which the world cries so mightily up, though I have tried by twice or three times reading to bring myself to think it witty…’

 

Bookstalls (on the left) within Old St Pauls

 

But borrowing it made no difference either to his opinion of the book or to his obvious desire that – somehow, anyhow – he might learn to like what everyone else liked.   

For on December 10^th, having decided to spend the immense sum of three pounds upon books, he went back to the booksellers ‘and found myself at a great loss what to choose.’ His real temptation was to buy plays, but he could never quite rid himself of the feeling that plays were somehow rather sinful, so at last… ‘I chose Dr Fuller’s Worthys, the Cabbala or collection of Letters of State – and a little book, Delices de Hollande, with another little book or two, all of good use or serious pleasure, and Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest Fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies.’

So by now, Pepys has bought Hudibras three times – even though he simply cannot get on with it. This goes to show how success breeds success, of course. Hands up who bought the latest block-busting thriller just to discover what all the fuss was about? 

It would be nice to record that Pepys finally managed to enjoy his purchase, but I fear he never did. At any rate, the last reference he makes to Hudibras is in his diary entry for January 27^th, 1664. ‘At noon to the Coffee-house, where I sat with Sir William Petty, who is methinks one of the most rational men that I ever heard speak, having all his notions the most distinct and clear; among other things saying that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world – Religio Medici, Osbourne’s Advice to a Son, and Hudibras.’

And there we are left: Pepys makes no further comment. But can’t you just sense him scratching his head? If, like me, you have ever bought a best-selling novel that everyone seems to praise but which you found impossible to finish – perhaps you will spare him a thought.

 

 

More about the Billy Blin'

 

A book called ‘The Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song’ edited by R.H. Cromek and published 1810, contains this “Account of Billy Blin'" with some entertaining stories. 

"This is another name for the Scotch Brownies, a class of solitary beings, living in the hollows of trees, and recesses of old ruinous castles. They are described as being small of stature, covered with short curly hair, with brown matted locks, and a brown mantle which reached to the knee, with a hood of the same colour. They were particularly attached to families eminent for their ancestry and virtue; and have lived, according to tradition’s ‘undoubted mouth’, for several hundreds of years in the same family, doing the drudgery of a menial servant.

"But though very trustworthy servants, they were somewhat coy in their manner of doing their work:– when the threaves of corn [this is 25 sheaves gathered in ‘shocks’] were counted out they remained unthrashen [unthreshed]; at other times, however great the quantity, it was finished by the crowing of the first cock. Mellers of corn [grain ready to be sent to the mill] would be dried, ground and sifted, with such exquisite nicety, that the finest flour of the meal could not be found strewed or lost.

"The Brownie would then come into the farm-hall and stretch itself out by the chimney, sweaty, dusty and fatigued. It would take up the pluff – a piece of bored boar-tree [elder] for blowing up the fire and, stirring out the red embers, turn itself till it was rested and dried. A choice bowl of sweet cream, with combs of honey, was set in an accessible place:– this was given as its hire; and it was willing to be bribed, though none durst avow the intention of the gift. When offered meat or drink, the Brownie instantly departed, bewailing and lamenting itself, as  if unwilling to leave a place so long its habitation, from which nothing but the superior power of fate could sever it.

"A thrifty good wife, having made a web of linsey-woolsey, sewed a well-lined mantle and a comfortable hood for her trusty Brownie. She laid it down in one of his favourite haunts and cried to him to array himself. Being commissioned by the gods to relieve mankind under the drudgery of original sin, he was forbidden to accept of wages or bribes. He instantly departed, bemoaning himself in a rhyme, which tradition has faithfully preserved:

A new mantle and a new hood! –

Poor Brownie! ye’ll ne’er do mair gude.

"The prosperity of the family seemed to depend on them, and was at their disposal. A place called Liethin Hall, in Dumfies-shire, was the herefitary dwelling of a noted Brownie. He had lived there, as he once communicated in confidence to an old woman, for three hundred years. He appeared only once to each new master, and indeeed seldom shewed more than his hand to anyone. On the decease of a beloved master, he was heard to make moan, and would not partake of his wonted delicacies for many days. The heir of the land arrived from foreign parts and took possession of his father’s inheritance. The faithful Brownie shewed himself and proffered homage. The spruce Laird was offended to see such a famine-faced, wrinkled domestic, and ordered him meat and drink, with a new suit of clean livery. The Brownie departed, repeating loud and frequently these ruin-boding lines:

Ca’, cuttie, ca!

A’ the luck of Liethin Ha’

Gangs wi’ me to Bodsbeck Ha’.

"Liethin Ha’ was, in a few years, in ruins, and ‘bonnie Bodsbeck’ flourished under the luck-bringing patronage of the Brownie.

"They possessed all the adventurous and chivalrous gallantry of crusading knighthood, but in devotion to their ladies they left Errantry itself far behind. Their services were really useful. In the accidental encounters of their fair mistresses with noble outlaws in woods, and princes in disguise, – when the kind ladies had nothing to show for their courtsey but a comb of gold or a fillet of hair, – the faithful Brownie restored the noble wooer; laid the lovers on their bridal bed, declared their lineage, and reconciled all parties. He followed his dear mistress through life with the same kindly solicitude; for, when the ‘mother’s trying hour was nigh’, with the most laudable promptitude he environed her with the ‘cannie dames’ ere the wish for their assistance was half-formed in her mind.

"One of them, in the olden times, lived with Maxwell, Laird of Dalswinton, doing ten men’s work and keeping the servants awake at nights with the noisy dirling [clatter] of its elfin flail. The Laird’s daughter, says tradition, was the comeliest dame in all the holms of Nithsdale. To her the Brownie was much attached: he assisted her in love-intrigue, conveying her from her high tower-chamber to the trysting-thorn in the woods, and back again with such light-heeled celerity that neither bird, dog nor servant awoke.

"He undressed her for the matrimonial bed, and served her so handmaiden-like that her female attendant had nothing to do, not daring even to finger her mistress’s apparel, lest she should provoke the Brownie’s resentment. When the pangs of the mother seized his beloved lady, a servant was ordered to fetch the ‘cannie wife’ who lived across the Nith. The night was dark as a December night could be; and the wind was heavy among the groves of oak. The Brownie, enraged at the loitering serving-man, wrapped himself in his lady’s fur cloak and, though the Nith was foaming high-flood, his steed, impelled by supernatural spur and whip, passed it like an arrow. Seating the dame behind him, he took the deep water back again to  the amazement of the worthy woman, who beheld the red waves tumbling around her, yet the steed’s foot-locks were dry.  – ‘Ride nae by the auld pool,’ quo’ she, ‘lest we should meet wi’ Brownie.’ – He replied, ‘Fear nae, dame, ye’ve met a’ the Brownies ye will meet.’ – Placing her down at the hall gate, he hastened to the stable, where the servant lad was just pulling on his boots; he unbuckled the bridle from his steed and gave him a most afflicting drubbing.

"This was about the new-modelling times of the Reformation; and a priest, more zealous than wise, exhorted the Laird to have this Imp of Heathendom baptised; to which he, in an evil hour, consented, and the worthy reforming saint concealed himself in the barn, to surprise the Brownie at his work. He appeared like a little wrinkled, ancient man and began his nightly moil. The priest leapt from his ambush and dashed the baptismal water in his face, solemnly repeating the set form of the Christian rite. The poor Brownie set up a frightful and agonising yell and instantly vanished, never to return.

"The Brownie, though of a docile disposition, was not without its pranks and merriment. The Abbey-lands, in the parish of New Abbey, were the residence of a very sportive one. He loved to be, betimes, somewhat mischievous. – Two lassies, having made a fine bowlful of buttered brose [oatmeal gruel], had taken it into the byre to sup, while it was yet dark. In the haste of concealment they had brought but one spoon, so they placed the bowl between them and took a spoonful by turns. ‘I hae got but three sups,’ cried the one, ‘an’ it’s done!’ ‘It’s a’ done, indeed,’ cried the other. ‘Ha, ha!’ laughed a third voice, ‘Brownie has gotten the maist o’t.’ He had judiciously placed himself between them and got the spoon twice for their once.

"The Brownie does not seem to have loved the gay and gaudy attire in which his twin-brothers, the fairies, arrayed themselves: his chief delight was in the tender delicacies of food. Knuckled [kneaded] cakes made of meal, warm from the mill, haurned [roasted] on the decayed embers of the fire, and smeared with honey, were his favourite hire; and they were carefully laid so that he might accidentally find them.  – It is still a common phrase, when a child gets a little eatable present, ‘there’s a piece wad please a Brownie.’ "

[ Read my previous post on the Billy Blin':  https://steelthistles.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-billy-blin-scottish-brownie.html ]

Picture Credits

Lob Lie By the Fire, by Dorothy P Lathrop: illustration to 'Down-a-down-derry,' Fairy Poems by Walter de la Mare 1922

Nis or Tomten Laughing at a Cat, by Theodor Kittelsen 1892