Still, him and Les were in the throes of an affair, even if it was mostly one-sided. Made me miss my girlfriend, Nancy. Jonno — well, I wasn’t sure what Jonno got up to. He didn’t tell the rest of us he was gay till that autumn. I’m pretty sure he told me some story about a girl back in Chelsea.
But I missed Nancy terribly. Spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself in my room, playing mournful songs.
That particular day, I decided to really feel sorry for myself and tromped off to the pub. Took the better part of an hour to get there on foot, and I was thirsty when I arrived. Had a pint of good ale, sat off by myself. There were only a few geezers there, and they left me alone. Fine by me.
After a while, I got a second pint and was starting on a third when I decided to take a slash. Heading back from the bog, I noticed several photos on the wall. Old photographs, black and white, cheap frames. The kind of thing you see in every pub in England — the local rugby team, or someone’s brother with the goalie from Manchester United, or the great granddad of the proprietor.
But these were different. At first I thought they were very old, early nineteen hundreds, maybe even older. Because of the subject matter. All that time I spent at Cecil Sharp House, poring through their archives and old books — well, I recognized these photos. Not the exact photos, but the subject matter.
They showed a group of boys in ragamuffin finery — old frockcoats too big for them, knee-high boots or soft leather shoes, top hats or workmen’s caps stuck with sprigs of ivy and evergreen. It was wintertime, a few inches of snow on the ground. One of the photos showed the boys knocking at the door of a cottage. In another, they stood all in a row, each of them holding what looked like a walking stick, and staring at the camera with that strange grim look you see in old photos. Like they’d been told, “Whatever you do, don’t smile.” The last photograph, they stood atop a little hill in a half-circle.
You’re thinking, So what?
Well, here’s the thing: in every photo, one boy held what looked like a cage covered with more greenery. It wasn’t a proper cage, though, but two hoops made of stripped willow branches, placed one inside the other, then strung with ivy and holly. Something was suspended from the spot where the two branches crossed at the top. I could barely make it out in the picture that showed them at the cottage door, but it showed more clearly in the other two.
In the first photo — the one taken on the hill — the cage was empty, and it sat at the feet of the smallest boy. In the second photo, where they stood all together with the trees behind them, the same boy had the willow cage, held out in front of him as though it were a lantern. This was more of a close-up, so I could see what was hung inside the willow round: a dead bird, strung up by one foot. Not a grouse or partridge or pheasant, something you might hunt to eat, but a tiny bird, so small that it wouldn’t make more than a mouthful.
But they weren’t going to eat it. I knew because I’d seen pictures of the same sort of thing at Cecil Sharp House. All the sport was in the hunting, and then the door-to-door in the village, displaying the dead bird and singing.
Away to the wood, says Dick to John,
Away to the woods, says every one!
And what do ye there, ye merry men?
We hunt to the death the wicked witch-wren.
It’s an ancient carol, sung on the day after Christmas — Boxing Day, St. Stephen’s Day. You don’t celebrate it here in the United States.
But way back when those photos were taken, all the boys and men of a village would walk out armed with cudgels and harry the wrens out of the underbrush, then club them out of the air. Wrens don’t fly very high.
Yes, I know, it sounds barbaric. It is barbaric. But this was the only time you were allowed to kill a wren — all sorts of terrible things happen if you kill it out of season. I think in some places it might even have been illegal.
Once upon a time, they did this all across the British Isles, England and Ireland, and Scotland and Wales. There are all kinds of songs about it—“The Cutty Wren,” that’s the one I just sang, and “Please to see the King.” Christmas carols, but they’re really quite ancient songs. You’d kill your wren, then parade it around the village. It represented the old year sacrificed so that the new year could rise from its ashes.
That’s how some of the songs go. Others say that the wren’s a wicked creature, a fairy woman. You still see the wren on Christmas cards here in England, though everyone’s forgotten what it represents. It’s all a bit Wicker Man. And the name of the pub — that should have been a clue, right?
Well, I was terribly excited by this discovery. From what I’d read, the wren hunt had died out everywhere except the Isle of Man, and even there it’s been turned into a tourist holiday, like the Padstow Hobby Horse.
Yet the photos in the pub were all dated 1947. Even if the ritual hadn’t been performed a single time since then, it was the most recent survival of the wren hunt in England that I’d ever heard of.
I walked over to ask the barman what he knew about it. Not a thing, he said; he was from Canterbury and had only moved to the village after he married a local girl. He told me to ask some of the old timers.
You can imagine how that went down. They just took one look at me and turned away laughing or scowling. I knew better than to keep on at them, so I finished my pint and walked home. I mentioned the photos to Ashton and Les, but they hadn’t noticed them. Next time I was at the pub, they were gone. Barman said the geezer who’d hung them there wanted them back.
Like I said, that should have made me think twice. But it didn’t.
Tom
Ashton was worried I’d be ticked off about them singing down at the pub. To be honest, I was a bit annoyed. Windhollow wasn’t so well-known then, nothing like now — can you imagine the scene today, if they’d suddenly show up at your local and just started playing?
But people did know them, certainly in London they did, and there was probably the odd hippie living in a caravan somewhere in Hampshire who might have heard about it and invited his friends down.
I just didn’t want them to be distracted. The songs that ended up on the Wylding Hall album — those songs were already starting to come together. I was afraid word would get out and there’d be a bunch of hippies that would crash at Wylding Hall and that would be the end of it.
And yes, I was concerned about Julian, that he’d meet up with bad companions and smoke himself into oblivion. He was whip-smart, but somewhat of a social and emotional innocent. You could see it pained him to talk to people he didn’t know — he was a publicist’s nightmare — and that acute shyness could come off as arrogance, especially in someone so good-looking.
Have you ever noticed how we accord special privileges, almost magical powers, to people who are beautiful? Particularly if they’re beautiful and talented, like Julian. I have no idea what happened, him and that girl. I never met her, but that’s what I mean by bad companions. Not to blame someone I never met — for all I know, she might have been as much of an innocent a Julian. Probably she was. I’m very curious as to what they’ll find when they dig up that long barrow.
Jon
We only played the pub a few times that summer. When Tom found out, he made a point of sending us more dosh, so we wouldn’t be tempted to do it too often. I enjoyed it, but he was right — people were picking up on it, that we’d played at the Wren. God knows how they found out — there were no mobiles or Internet. The village barely had telephone service. I think you’d have been better off sending messages by carrier pigeon. Perhaps that’s what they did.