I have a tale, it's a long one and if one doesn't mind the ramblings of someone reared in a household not usually conducive with a standard
family background, I'll tell it here. It does have a Road-Trip connection and it's written in my usual 'over-the-top' manner, so please forgive me.
Background.
My home-life was fine, we had beatings at times from my father and only when one of my four sisters or I had done something wrong, but
on the whole, I grew up in a normal working-class setting with the lack of money being the only concern. We were what one could reasonably
deem a happy family.
But one of the main influences of how I now perceive this reality was my mother, she seemed to regularly have access to a different existence
quite unlike the one we all take for granted. I was pragmatic about her bouts of 'seeing things' and her nightly awakenings to invisible figures
arriving the bedroom (our house had only two bedrooms and being a boy, had to sleep separate from my sisters and in my parents bedroom)
-and hounding my mother with supposedly strange consultations. To me, it became something 'normal'... something that just happens.
Many nights, I heard my father gruffly tell his wife to quiet-down as she avidly asked the unseen about their unheard proclamations.
"Yes he is, he's at the window" was one such comment that had me staring for hours at the paisley-patterned curtains long after my Ma had
gone back to sleep.
The other odd late-night broadcast was something about 'All The King's Men' a vague reference -I believed at the time, to a British soldier that
she'd encountered on a train during the Second World War. My mother once told me this man had befriended her and later attempted to strangle
her during the journey! How she escaped the clutches of this bastard remained unsaid, but I selfishly hoped he took a German bayonet for his
trespass.
Don't get me wrong, usually my mother behaved like the other gossiping women in my street and got along with anyone she came into contact
with. She brought up a family of five and a husband who used to spend all his wages on booze, but this was before the outraged world of the
decadent. What some call the internet!
Yet even with all her burdens and her occasional jaunts into a place only few get to peek at, I believe her spirit-access-Romany-heritage did
eventually have an effect on me, no matter how hard I attempted to ignore it.
(Travel tale, BIAD... do the travel tale, for heaven's sake!)
...........................................................................
Travel Story.
We'd been married for almost ten years when we decided we wanted children. We'd been working hard and were okay for money, the mortgage
was taking a good kicking from my wife's acumen with finance and yet, something we felt was missing in our lives. We'd jumped through the usual
hoops of trying to make a baby and even looked at adopting. Still, with the family curse that only one male can be produced in a generation, I began
to ponder on the weird madness that my mother would sometimes gibber during her nightly 'visitations'.
She'd once said her folks came from 'near Wales' and travelled north in a horse-drawn caravan along country lanes, away from the regular people
who lived in -what my mother called 'little boxes'. (No doubt, she'd absorbed the lyrics of Pete Seeger's ditty to describe her ancestors' dislike for
those who frowned at their roaming manner!) I recall she mentioned her Grandmother saying that during their journey, they ate potatoes for bread
and turnip for cheese, but why and what it really meant, is beyond me. However, I know that to fill their grumbling stomachs, stealing from farmers
fields and hen-houses wouldn't be beyond their own 'living-off-the-land' purview.
So, following some unknown calling -that undoubtedly had something to do with my mother's bizarre confessions, my ever-forgiving wife and I took
a week-long car-trip down to Wales to take a break from a want that had become a need. My undisclosed reason for agreeing to the vacation was
to see if I could 'tap-in' into the supposed magic of the odyssey that my ancestors had taken to produce me here in the this North-Eastern town.
Maybe something that only the crazies like my mater would possibly appreciate!
Under the guise of a well-earned holiday, we took in the awesome Caernarfon Castle and then crossed the Menai Strait to the Isle of Anglesey on
the famous suspension bridge designed by Thomas Telford. Yes, I was certainly enjoying myself, but staring out at the Irish Sea from the 'Island of
the Angles', I wondered if I too had contracted the eccentric disease of my parent and this was all just some silly phase of finally embracing maturity.
We chanced a visit to the beautiful coastal area of St. Bride's Bay and Broad Haven, where the Coombs family and some kids from Broad Haven
Primary school had supposedly witnessed odd Ufo-related goings-on with strange lights and other outlandish phenomena. Still, no alien came to
explain why we'd been designated child-less, although I did admire my better-half's toleration as I explained the Coombs' wild account!
At Portmeirion village -where the sixties TV series 'The Prisoner' was filmed, we walked around a architect's Mediterranean fantasy and soaked in
the weirdness of the place. We sat in a tiny prim-looking box-of-a-carriage and felt the wind in our hair on the fourteen mile-long Ffestiniog Railway
that runs through Snowdonia National Park and listened to the gasping struggles of the steam-engine that my mother swore her great-great uncle
George Stephenson had evolved into what we know today.
Even up here on a single trackway on a mountain and smelling burnt water, I worryingly found myself wondering if I'd strayed from my clandestine
hunt and then caught myself before my mother's idiocy came screaming back in to support my secret reason for being here. No... we were on holiday
and creating a lifeform does not involve some type of pilgrimage to earn such a physical event.
The weather kept fairly sunny until we visited a redundant slate mine and observed the horrible conditions the miners endured to chip the grey rock from
the ceilings of the cathedral-like caverns. Back on the surface -as the rain turned the piles of discarded shale even more drabber than they already were,
my dubious quest seemed to take on a similar mood to the cinereal surroundings of this forgotten excavation and my verve for a mystical answer began
to dilute and soak away. My mother was still alive at this point, but would she be able to assist me via the telephone without her daylight-avoiding spectral
mediators at hand to whisper fair counsel?
But alas, I ceded that adulthood does not tolerate children's unsullied imaginings and the dragon isn't always slain. I needed to grow-up.
...........................................................................
Eventually, we came to Monmouth in the southern area of Wales and decided to book in at a idiosyncratic leaning abode that offered Bed & Breakfast.
Agreeing that we would extend our holiday to take in Devon and Corwall, we looked forward to another week of eating Devonshire clotted-cream and
staring up Somerset's Wookey Hole.
That night in the little old lady's Bed & Breakfast was one of the weirdest times of my life and I'm sure if my Ma had been with us, she'd have taken
to it without a second glance. After all the niceties of being accepted to stay, consent on the rent of the spider-webbed-filled room and being told by
the classically-quaint landlady that she didn't lock the front-door until midnight, we went out to enjoy a nearby restaurant.
Remember, to myself from my young working-class background, this was all 'very posh' and I'd never imagined that I would grow up to be able to
-not only travel to far-off places on the other side of the world like Roswell New Mexico, but to even chow-down the 'fancy-pants-grub' that they
serve in these swanky places for folk who have money.
Yet, here I was sitting before multiple eating-irons, a flute of bubbly and having a bank account to pay for it!
Jeez-Louise, this adulthood-stuff is a lot better than... better than, and that was when I absently glanced at the children's section of the laminated
menu. It advertised an egg dish called 'Humpty-Dumpty'. The hair on the back of my neck raised as I mentally followed the old nursery-rhyme.
All The King's Men... my mother's sentinels must've been giggling up their ethereal cloak-sleeves.
We arrived back at the B&B to find the old woman playing ardently on her electric organ, yer' know... as most one-night boarders discover after
a nice meal! "Good evening" she mouthed over the gallant tune and with a smile and a nod, we raced-up the steep stairway to the safety of our
door-locked room.
That night, we saw comings-and-goings that -in the morning over our breakfast, forced my wife and I to jokingily suggest we'd been luck to escape
with our lives. We ate our bacon and eggs alone and yet, I had spied at least two other couples enter the bedrooms during the night.
"Have you others staying?" I dared to enquire as she poured us another cup of tea. "Oh no, just you-two" came the reply and we quickly settled our
bill and left. Getting into the car, we both agreed the Bates Motel had a sister that liked to reside on the River Monmow.
...........................................................................
Maybe some day I'll write about our time in the western peninsula of England, but for now, my main focus is on when we decided to turn back for
home, follow the meandering trek of my Romany forebearers -if you will. We aimed the car eastwards towards Salisbury in order to see the famous
collection of monolithic blocks of aggregate known as Stonehenge. My wife had already viewed them and I was excited to see what thousands of
others found so fascinating about this circle of sarcen and bluestone.
For myself, if there was any majick there, it eluded me. It was a strange place and the whole area smacked of long-lost ritual and a paganistic era
when nature held sway before science stole its crown. Still, I came away feeling cheated for some reason and just as I reached for the car-door,
the whole paradigm of the situation crashed down on me like a vengeful Monmouthshire landlady leaping from from her Hammond organ to acquire
the human meat that she would later baptise as bacon.
I had read it somewhere, it was another circle of standing stones... a lesser-known Neolithic place where my mother's long-ago whisperings made
sense. Grabbing the well-thumbed Collins Essential Road Atlas of Britain, I breathlessly searched for the route that would bring me face-to-face to
those metaphysical phantoms who'd trolled my mother for years and mocked me in the restaurant. My wife watched with concern as I mumbled to
myself and sought the road to Oxfordshire, somewhere on this page was my path to the Rollright Stones, a place where I was required to be.
...........................................................................
"Put some money in the little box as we leave" my wife said as she glanced over at me striding out the impossible count. Legend as it that a Witch
deemed the Rollright Stones could not be counted correctly due to her majick. There are rumoured to be 72 stones in the circle, but the old tale
dictates that ‘No one shall live who counts the stones three times and finds the number the same’.
Nodding at the instruction from my Missus, I squinted in concentration as I stepped onwards and then quickly screwed-up my computation.
The Witch had won this round and turning to make towards the car, the logical side of my brain nudged my spirit and kindly reminded me that my
life wasn't a movie and Tangerine Dream hadn't created the backing music. Sure, we can wish for the days when magic solves the dilemma and
wonders are daily held in awe, but reality is reality and no matter how much love one may have for their parents, the ground still hurts when you
hit it and nobody gets out alive.
Maybe the old cackling bitch was a girlfriend of the ghostly apparitions that tormented my family's sleep -I amiably thought, but crossing the clipped
grass in the stone-circle, I was reminded that the unnamed spellbinder had also been involved in something intriguing more than a puzzling summing
of chunks of oolitic limestone.
It was said that when the Witch encountered an Iron Age king and his men marching over Rollright Hill, to save herself from the constant ridicules
of the company, she informed the king that if he could see the local village of Long Compton after seven strides then she would make him ruler of
all England. Placing his best foot forward, the hopeful overlord strode to the top of the Rollright hill and confident that the Witch's prize would be
an easy one to claim. But as he walked towards his assumed destiny, the wily wizard-ess spoke again and the land began to move.
“Rise up stick, and stand still stone,
For King of England thou shalt be none;
As Long Compton thou ne’er didst see
Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be”
This unknown wannabe-king never made it and the village in the spell remained unseen. Now, that failed monarch and his companions stare blankly
out across the arable fields and surrounding trees of a scene not as sexy as Stonehenge. Stone monoliths all them, the King and The King's Men.
...........................................................................
The piece of rock I took from the circle was in my pocket just over nine months later when I watched my son being born and now it resides in a place
of secrecy. There is Majick out there on the highways and byways, an enchantment linked solely to the individual experiencing it. Maybe others can tell
their tales of travel, after all... true magic is in the telling.
family background, I'll tell it here. It does have a Road-Trip connection and it's written in my usual 'over-the-top' manner, so please forgive me.
Background.
My home-life was fine, we had beatings at times from my father and only when one of my four sisters or I had done something wrong, but
on the whole, I grew up in a normal working-class setting with the lack of money being the only concern. We were what one could reasonably
deem a happy family.
But one of the main influences of how I now perceive this reality was my mother, she seemed to regularly have access to a different existence
quite unlike the one we all take for granted. I was pragmatic about her bouts of 'seeing things' and her nightly awakenings to invisible figures
arriving the bedroom (our house had only two bedrooms and being a boy, had to sleep separate from my sisters and in my parents bedroom)
-and hounding my mother with supposedly strange consultations. To me, it became something 'normal'... something that just happens.
Many nights, I heard my father gruffly tell his wife to quiet-down as she avidly asked the unseen about their unheard proclamations.
"Yes he is, he's at the window" was one such comment that had me staring for hours at the paisley-patterned curtains long after my Ma had
gone back to sleep.
The other odd late-night broadcast was something about 'All The King's Men' a vague reference -I believed at the time, to a British soldier that
she'd encountered on a train during the Second World War. My mother once told me this man had befriended her and later attempted to strangle
her during the journey! How she escaped the clutches of this bastard remained unsaid, but I selfishly hoped he took a German bayonet for his
trespass.
Don't get me wrong, usually my mother behaved like the other gossiping women in my street and got along with anyone she came into contact
with. She brought up a family of five and a husband who used to spend all his wages on booze, but this was before the outraged world of the
decadent. What some call the internet!
Yet even with all her burdens and her occasional jaunts into a place only few get to peek at, I believe her spirit-access-Romany-heritage did
eventually have an effect on me, no matter how hard I attempted to ignore it.
(Travel tale, BIAD... do the travel tale, for heaven's sake!)
...........................................................................
Travel Story.
We'd been married for almost ten years when we decided we wanted children. We'd been working hard and were okay for money, the mortgage
was taking a good kicking from my wife's acumen with finance and yet, something we felt was missing in our lives. We'd jumped through the usual
hoops of trying to make a baby and even looked at adopting. Still, with the family curse that only one male can be produced in a generation, I began
to ponder on the weird madness that my mother would sometimes gibber during her nightly 'visitations'.
She'd once said her folks came from 'near Wales' and travelled north in a horse-drawn caravan along country lanes, away from the regular people
who lived in -what my mother called 'little boxes'. (No doubt, she'd absorbed the lyrics of Pete Seeger's ditty to describe her ancestors' dislike for
those who frowned at their roaming manner!) I recall she mentioned her Grandmother saying that during their journey, they ate potatoes for bread
and turnip for cheese, but why and what it really meant, is beyond me. However, I know that to fill their grumbling stomachs, stealing from farmers
fields and hen-houses wouldn't be beyond their own 'living-off-the-land' purview.
So, following some unknown calling -that undoubtedly had something to do with my mother's bizarre confessions, my ever-forgiving wife and I took
a week-long car-trip down to Wales to take a break from a want that had become a need. My undisclosed reason for agreeing to the vacation was
to see if I could 'tap-in' into the supposed magic of the odyssey that my ancestors had taken to produce me here in the this North-Eastern town.
Maybe something that only the crazies like my mater would possibly appreciate!
Under the guise of a well-earned holiday, we took in the awesome Caernarfon Castle and then crossed the Menai Strait to the Isle of Anglesey on
the famous suspension bridge designed by Thomas Telford. Yes, I was certainly enjoying myself, but staring out at the Irish Sea from the 'Island of
the Angles', I wondered if I too had contracted the eccentric disease of my parent and this was all just some silly phase of finally embracing maturity.
We chanced a visit to the beautiful coastal area of St. Bride's Bay and Broad Haven, where the Coombs family and some kids from Broad Haven
Primary school had supposedly witnessed odd Ufo-related goings-on with strange lights and other outlandish phenomena. Still, no alien came to
explain why we'd been designated child-less, although I did admire my better-half's toleration as I explained the Coombs' wild account!
At Portmeirion village -where the sixties TV series 'The Prisoner' was filmed, we walked around a architect's Mediterranean fantasy and soaked in
the weirdness of the place. We sat in a tiny prim-looking box-of-a-carriage and felt the wind in our hair on the fourteen mile-long Ffestiniog Railway
that runs through Snowdonia National Park and listened to the gasping struggles of the steam-engine that my mother swore her great-great uncle
George Stephenson had evolved into what we know today.
Even up here on a single trackway on a mountain and smelling burnt water, I worryingly found myself wondering if I'd strayed from my clandestine
hunt and then caught myself before my mother's idiocy came screaming back in to support my secret reason for being here. No... we were on holiday
and creating a lifeform does not involve some type of pilgrimage to earn such a physical event.
The weather kept fairly sunny until we visited a redundant slate mine and observed the horrible conditions the miners endured to chip the grey rock from
the ceilings of the cathedral-like caverns. Back on the surface -as the rain turned the piles of discarded shale even more drabber than they already were,
my dubious quest seemed to take on a similar mood to the cinereal surroundings of this forgotten excavation and my verve for a mystical answer began
to dilute and soak away. My mother was still alive at this point, but would she be able to assist me via the telephone without her daylight-avoiding spectral
mediators at hand to whisper fair counsel?
But alas, I ceded that adulthood does not tolerate children's unsullied imaginings and the dragon isn't always slain. I needed to grow-up.
...........................................................................
Eventually, we came to Monmouth in the southern area of Wales and decided to book in at a idiosyncratic leaning abode that offered Bed & Breakfast.
Agreeing that we would extend our holiday to take in Devon and Corwall, we looked forward to another week of eating Devonshire clotted-cream and
staring up Somerset's Wookey Hole.
That night in the little old lady's Bed & Breakfast was one of the weirdest times of my life and I'm sure if my Ma had been with us, she'd have taken
to it without a second glance. After all the niceties of being accepted to stay, consent on the rent of the spider-webbed-filled room and being told by
the classically-quaint landlady that she didn't lock the front-door until midnight, we went out to enjoy a nearby restaurant.
Remember, to myself from my young working-class background, this was all 'very posh' and I'd never imagined that I would grow up to be able to
-not only travel to far-off places on the other side of the world like Roswell New Mexico, but to even chow-down the 'fancy-pants-grub' that they
serve in these swanky places for folk who have money.
Yet, here I was sitting before multiple eating-irons, a flute of bubbly and having a bank account to pay for it!
Jeez-Louise, this adulthood-stuff is a lot better than... better than, and that was when I absently glanced at the children's section of the laminated
menu. It advertised an egg dish called 'Humpty-Dumpty'. The hair on the back of my neck raised as I mentally followed the old nursery-rhyme.
All The King's Men... my mother's sentinels must've been giggling up their ethereal cloak-sleeves.
We arrived back at the B&B to find the old woman playing ardently on her electric organ, yer' know... as most one-night boarders discover after
a nice meal! "Good evening" she mouthed over the gallant tune and with a smile and a nod, we raced-up the steep stairway to the safety of our
door-locked room.
That night, we saw comings-and-goings that -in the morning over our breakfast, forced my wife and I to jokingily suggest we'd been luck to escape
with our lives. We ate our bacon and eggs alone and yet, I had spied at least two other couples enter the bedrooms during the night.
"Have you others staying?" I dared to enquire as she poured us another cup of tea. "Oh no, just you-two" came the reply and we quickly settled our
bill and left. Getting into the car, we both agreed the Bates Motel had a sister that liked to reside on the River Monmow.
...........................................................................
Maybe some day I'll write about our time in the western peninsula of England, but for now, my main focus is on when we decided to turn back for
home, follow the meandering trek of my Romany forebearers -if you will. We aimed the car eastwards towards Salisbury in order to see the famous
collection of monolithic blocks of aggregate known as Stonehenge. My wife had already viewed them and I was excited to see what thousands of
others found so fascinating about this circle of sarcen and bluestone.
For myself, if there was any majick there, it eluded me. It was a strange place and the whole area smacked of long-lost ritual and a paganistic era
when nature held sway before science stole its crown. Still, I came away feeling cheated for some reason and just as I reached for the car-door,
the whole paradigm of the situation crashed down on me like a vengeful Monmouthshire landlady leaping from from her Hammond organ to acquire
the human meat that she would later baptise as bacon.
I had read it somewhere, it was another circle of standing stones... a lesser-known Neolithic place where my mother's long-ago whisperings made
sense. Grabbing the well-thumbed Collins Essential Road Atlas of Britain, I breathlessly searched for the route that would bring me face-to-face to
those metaphysical phantoms who'd trolled my mother for years and mocked me in the restaurant. My wife watched with concern as I mumbled to
myself and sought the road to Oxfordshire, somewhere on this page was my path to the Rollright Stones, a place where I was required to be.
...........................................................................
"Put some money in the little box as we leave" my wife said as she glanced over at me striding out the impossible count. Legend as it that a Witch
deemed the Rollright Stones could not be counted correctly due to her majick. There are rumoured to be 72 stones in the circle, but the old tale
dictates that ‘No one shall live who counts the stones three times and finds the number the same’.
Nodding at the instruction from my Missus, I squinted in concentration as I stepped onwards and then quickly screwed-up my computation.
The Witch had won this round and turning to make towards the car, the logical side of my brain nudged my spirit and kindly reminded me that my
life wasn't a movie and Tangerine Dream hadn't created the backing music. Sure, we can wish for the days when magic solves the dilemma and
wonders are daily held in awe, but reality is reality and no matter how much love one may have for their parents, the ground still hurts when you
hit it and nobody gets out alive.
Maybe the old cackling bitch was a girlfriend of the ghostly apparitions that tormented my family's sleep -I amiably thought, but crossing the clipped
grass in the stone-circle, I was reminded that the unnamed spellbinder had also been involved in something intriguing more than a puzzling summing
of chunks of oolitic limestone.
It was said that when the Witch encountered an Iron Age king and his men marching over Rollright Hill, to save herself from the constant ridicules
of the company, she informed the king that if he could see the local village of Long Compton after seven strides then she would make him ruler of
all England. Placing his best foot forward, the hopeful overlord strode to the top of the Rollright hill and confident that the Witch's prize would be
an easy one to claim. But as he walked towards his assumed destiny, the wily wizard-ess spoke again and the land began to move.
“Rise up stick, and stand still stone,
For King of England thou shalt be none;
As Long Compton thou ne’er didst see
Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be”
This unknown wannabe-king never made it and the village in the spell remained unseen. Now, that failed monarch and his companions stare blankly
out across the arable fields and surrounding trees of a scene not as sexy as Stonehenge. Stone monoliths all them, the King and The King's Men.
...........................................................................
The piece of rock I took from the circle was in my pocket just over nine months later when I watched my son being born and now it resides in a place
of secrecy. There is Majick out there on the highways and byways, an enchantment linked solely to the individual experiencing it. Maybe others can tell
their tales of travel, after all... true magic is in the telling.
Edith Head Gives Good Wardrobe.