28th of Towin Day 1

Mercedes came from a crime and drug riddled, depressed, run down, extensive housing estate called Helton, but it was usually referred to as Helltown, where adult male unemployment was so close to totality as to make no difference. There were no longer any shops or even pubs in or near Helton. They’d had good trade, but had been broken into so often they could no longer buy insurance, and since there was no longer any profit to be had there, they had closed permanently and were now boarded up and mostly burnt out. Most of Helton’s residents continually whined nobody ever did anything for them, but even the relatively law abiding ones made no attempt to control the criminal and antisocial activities of their children.

Residents from elsewhere were too fearful to go there and would have nothing to do with its residents. The idea of giving a job to any one from Helton was considered to be ridiculous. The bus services had been discontinued years ago after drivers had repeatedly been assaulted for the money they’d taken, and the ambulance service and fire brigade were only prepared to enter the area with a heavy police escort after both had been petrol bombed with Molotov cocktails. After a midwife was raped and beaten nearly to death by a group of angry junkies when they discovered her medical bag contained no drugs but mostly cotton wool products, the district nurses and midwifes(1) no longer serviced the area. The police insisted they treated Helton just like any where else, but the public maintained they only ever went there in force with full anti-riot equipment.

It was a ghetto, a den of lawless violence, a place beyond the pale. Helton estate was not far from the middle of a small city whose citizens prided themselves on its historical status as a cathedral city, but it was in reality a small provincial market town which hadn’t had a functioning mart for decades, and its traditional industries, which had provided employment for a century and a half, had long gone. What commercial activity there was, both retail and industrial, had moved out to new so called enterprise sites a long way from the city centre, and they were inaccessible to its poorer inhabitants.

Mercedes lived with her mother, who had given birth to her a week before her fifteenth birthday, she had never known her father and had no siblings. She had been doing drugs, drink and sex since the age of twelve, and she’d had a contraceptive implant since the same age. She was grateful for the implant, for she knew her mother had terminated six pregnancies by the time she’d reached twenty.

The wealthier pupils at the school Mercedes attended who came from other areas of the city, referred to her and all the other children who lived in the same area as she as chavs.(2) Mercedes was a bit different from most of her peers. She wished to do something worthwhile with herself, but she had no idea what that could be. Mercedes had rarely gone to school because she had no concept education was a passport to opportunity, but when she had she’d only been interested in what her home economics teacher, Miss McVane, had to say.

Miss McVane was called Miss even though she was married with two children, and to Mercedes Miss was fascinating. She lived on a holding where she grew some of her own food, collected eggs from her hens, honey from her bees, raised a couple of pigs and stabled her horses. She owned none of the electronic communication devices, or any of the other digital devices, Mercedes’ peers regarded as absolutely essential and fundamental requirements of life. Unbelievably she claimed she didn’t even have a television. Miss McVane lived over forty miles away from school, and many of Mercedes’ peers had never been that far away from their homes.

Miss McVane maekt no secret of being amused by Mercedes’ peers being constantly in touch with each other, even though they had nothing to say. Miss McVane had told them about peccaries, animals that lived in the tropical rain forests of South America in groups called sounders. They constantly made noises that had no meaning other than, ‘I’m here’, purely so none of the sounder ever got lost in the heavy growth where they couldn’t see each other. She hadn’t told them that the peccary was the new world equivalent of the old world pig, which to her amusement Mercedes discovered years after she left school, but doubted any of her peers had discovered.

Miss came to work in a battered, old, four wheel drive pickup that she admitted was only on the road because her husband was a mechanical genius. The children had asked if her husband had a job too, and when told, “Yes he’s a self employed blacksmith and farrier,” had assumed black referred to his skin colour and he was from Africa. They’d had no idea what smith and farrier meant other than as surnames. What was most inexplicable of all was that she didn’t seem to care what any one thought of her or her chosen lifestyle. The children were always asking why didn’t she buy a new pickup, and were perplexed by Miss’ reply of, “What’s wrong with mine?”

Miss’ lifestyle was so different from anything Mercedes or her classmates had any concept of, and she lived so far away, at best she was regarded by most as a bit of a freak, and by many as an exotic alien who lived on a different planet. Mercedes was fascinated most of all by the happiness and contentment Miss McVane had with her life. The endless pursuit of the next expensive digital gadget, with ever more functionality that would remain unused didn’t exist for her. She loved her husband and children, and she’d only been married once, to the same man for over twenty years. This was so outside the experience of the girls some of them didn’t believe it.

Miss McVane had telt(3) them all repeatedly there was no way she was going to spend her hard earnt money to make them happy by buying the things they thought she should buy, she would spend it to make herself and her family happy. If they chose to spend their money to make others happy she pitied them for the fools she considered them to be.

By the time Mercedes had officially left school, with no qualifications and no idea of what she wished to, or even could, do, she was drifting, no more than a fallen leaf being blown down the gutters of fate by the random winds of her life. She was intelligent enough to realise the ways others lived as portrayed in the media, both entertainment and supposed reality, were probably not how any one lived. She still lived with her mother with whom she had nothing in common, but she was often out all night, not that her mother would have cared or even known since she was often out all night too. The life the girls she went to school with had was definitely not for her. She had no intention of being burdened with a family, and as that was the only way she knew of to have a place of her own to live in she resigned herself to living with her mother for the foreseeable future.

By the time she was twenty she could no longer be bothered with drugs and drink, and she only bothered with sex because it was something to do that cost next to nothing and could be indulged in without risk of infection, for condoms were free from the family planning clinic in the city. She had tried to find something to do, and she’d held a job in a retail outlet for two years till it closed.

She had been to the local colleges to see if they could help her, but they had nothing to offer someone with no qualifications that could help her to find a way out of a life that gave her nothing. She had also tried every branch of officialdom she could, and their response was even less helpful, it amounted to, “We are housing and feeding you. You are now an adult, and we no longer have any other responsibilities for or obligations to you.”

That she wished a different way of living she knew, but she knew of none other than that lived by Miss McVane, and she had no idea how to live like that, and any way it would require more money than she could even dream of having.

Some of the men in her peer group were in gaol for serious crimes, including rape and murder, and most of the rest had been in and out of gaol for every crime she could think of, from major fraud down to habitual petty criminality. The girls she had gone to school with she was starting to avoid, many had four children and some many more than that. All they did when she met them was complain regarding their children, their men, their neighbours, their lack of money, the things they wished and couldn’t buy, the criminality of the area, their endless list of complaints went on and on. The lifestyle they embraced was one of pregnancy leading to a place to live and financial handouts.

They lived with a series of short term boyfriends, or the same one till he beat them up for their handout money to buy drugs. They then applied for a court injunction against him to stay away from them and their children, and then they did it all over again. That their life was a cyclical downward spiral they couldn’t see, it was how the only life they knew of worked. There was never any consideration of working for anything, and even though they had never worked most of them were worn out and looked over forty by the time they were twenty-five. Mercedes knew moving away to a big city wouldn’t make her life any better, at least where she was she had sex to escape boredom, and not because she had to eat.

She began to feel alienated from those she had grown up with, and had started to read books from the local library as a way of experiencing second hand other ways of living. Then the library was torched, it closed and never reopened, and she no longer had any way to keep her mind healthy.

When Mercedes was twenty-eight her mother died from breast cancer, and after a struggle with the authorities lasting months, which at least gave her something to do, Mercedes managed to have the flat tenancy changed into her name. Most of her mother’s possessions were bought on hire purchase and had been repossessed, including the television, but by this time, Mercedes was so disconnected from the world she rarely did more than sit in the empty flat staring at nothing. She had tried to explain how she felt and why to her doctor, but he barely listened and told her she was suffering from depression. He’d prescribed her tablets saying, “These will help you to cope.”

There was nobody she wished to speak to, and nothing she wished to do. The tablets, when she took them, disconnected her even further from the world. Eventually, she stopped taking the tablets and could no longer be bothered to eat. She would have died, but for the chance visit of an old acquaintance who called an ambulance. She had been a patient in the psychiatric hospital for four months when she awoke on Castle.

The young woman shaking her gently by the arm was saying, “Come to the fire for the warmth.” She helped Mercedes to her feet and guided her to what Mercedes saw to her surprise was a large bonfire. The wind was howling and from time to time blew showers of sparks from the fire some distance which enabled her to see she was on a huge open plain with a forest may hap half a mile away. Every now and again the noise of the wind abated, and then Mercedes could hear sheep which explained the hundreds of pairs of eyes she could see twinkling from the firelight in the distance. Notwithstanding the dark, she could see by the light of the fire the young woman was wearing heavy clothing which looked warm but strange, and then she became aware of how cold she was.

She moved closer to the fire and like the others there absorbed the warmth in silence. Not more than five minutes had gone by, when a middle aegt(4) man gave her a heavy and warm coat and a hat which covered her ears and neck, both felt as if maekt(5) from the fur of an animal of some sort. He helped her to put the coat on, and using the capacious sleeves of the coat like a muff, she felt a lot warmer immediately. The man left her, and came back a few minutes later with a mug of a pleasant but unusual tasting liquid which he called leaf. “There will be a hot meal ready betimes and some shelter for you from the caltth(6) and the wind,” he telt her.

“This isn’t the hospital is it?” she asked him.

His response was puzzling, “I know not what that means, but whence you came you are not. This is Castle, and someone from the Master at arms office will explain all to you betimes.”

At one point a huge black and white dog came up to her which frightened her badly, but the dog seemed to be looking for something. It came up to her and licked her hand before pushing the side of its head gainst(7) her leg. No longer aflait(8) she petted the dog for a minute or two. She saw the dog’s ears lift as she too heard a sharp whistle and a girl’s voice shout, “Meg.” The dog ran off in the direction of the call leaving Mercedes a little more at ease with her situation than she had been since awakening.

It was becoming a little less dark by this time, but the light of the fire was still the major source of light, and Mercedes noticed a lot of others, as she had been, were being helped by the people with the strange clothing. There were children, and a few babies too, but they were being picked up, wrapped in blankets and immediately taken to what she thought she heard was called ‘Keep Infirmary’ which she presumed was the hospital at a town called Keep. There was a distressed woman seeking her baby. “I heard him crying,” was her constant plaint. The woman was eventually persuaded to go with some of the local women who were helping some older children and elderly persons to go to Keep Infirmary.

The locals, as she was now thinking of them, were arriving in considerable numbers now. They had lit a number of lamps, which she was surprised to see were old fashioned oil lamps with wicks and glass chimneys, such as she had seen pictures of in books and in antique shops on the television. She’s seen lots of them on ‘The Antiques Road Show’, a popular TV program. The locals were bringing in all kinds of things on horse drawn vehicles. She was surprised to see some of the locals who were working were only children. The vehicles were unloaded, and others arrived to take their place. A large tent was erected, which reminded Mercedes of a carnival marquee. They were urged to enter the tent and shelter from the caltth and wind, and she noticed there were braziers in the tent with fires burning wood and some black stuff that burnt giving off a great deal of heat with flickering luminous flames and an unfamiliar smell.

Much of the ground inside the tent was covered with heavy waterproof sheets, and there were a lot of persons sitting or lying down on them covered or wrapped in blankets. She was given another mug of leaf which tasted different from the first one, but still pleasant if unusual, and after drinking it she went outside again to see what was happening. Latrines were being dug, a catering facility had been set up in another big tent next to large piles of fuel wood and the black burning stuff, a huge tank was in the process of being pumped full of water from the nearby ice covered stream, and she could see the braeken(9) ice on the stream where the pipe for the pump went in was at least three inches thick.

The woman who was in charge of the cooking had ten or more assistants, and they were making the leaf drink and soup in huge cauldrons. Mercedes smiled as she remembered the name of the cooking vessels from her reading. She was taking more interest in life now than she had for a long time. She could see an animal carcase hanging from a wooden pole near to where a young woman was butchering a similar one into small cubes, which some of her assistants were removing as fast as she could produce them and putting them into some of the cauldrons along with all the bones which another woman was braeking(10) with the back edge of a heavy a cleaver whilst another next to her was chopping what Mercedes recognised as liver, heart, kidneys, what she presumed were lungs and a pile of other internal organs she had never seen before. The tables the food preparers were working on looked like span thick rings cut from trees at least four feet across supported on trestles maekt from tree branches. Another group were preparing vegetables, some of which she recognised and some of which she didn’t, which were going into the cauldrons too.

The sky was now becoming lighter, and she heard someone describe it as being firstlight. She noticed a lot of the big black and white dogs and realised from what they were doing they were sheep dogs. It was still bitterly cold, and everything that was not near a fire was thickly rimed with hoarfrost. She was urged to go back into the tent for something to eat. Trestle tables had been set up with plank benches, and she was given a wooden bowl full of thick, rich soup, or maybe stew she thought, and a wooden spoon too. The tastes were unfamiliar, but it was delicious, and for the first time in over a year she wished to eat. Watching others do it, she sucked the marrow out of her bones too to finish her bowl of soup, and was promptly asked if she wished another. She had just eaten more in one meal than she had for a long time, and she replied, “No thank you. I have been ill recently, and I can’t eat much at one go, but may I have some more in a little while?”

The elderly man who had asked her, much to her surprise, hugged her and said, “Of course you may, my dear, ask any of us. I am Spoonbill, and you are?”

“Mercedes,” she replied.

He nodded and said, “You stay warm, Mercedes.”

She watched as Spoonbill tipped her bones into a cooking brazier and handed the bowl and spoon to a boy for washing. She went outside again where the sky was a good bit lighter now and saw a huge castle dominating the skyline two maybe three miles away and was telt, “That be the Keep.” She noticed there were a number of the malevolent and violent men she had been avoiding all her life standing and spaeking(11) together in whispers. The expressions on their faces telt her everything there was to know about them, and she realised that, like her, they had arrived here, they were not locals. She hoped they had a good police force here, wherever she was.

The collection of tents looked more like a small village rather than a camp now, and she walked through it looking at everything she could see and having spaech(12) with as many locals as she could. Eventually she noticed a group of pregnant girls who she thought would be between fourteen and eighteen. She realised, from the little she had overheard of their conversation, before quickly walking off in the opposite direction, they were similar to the girls she had gone to school with.

By the time the sun had risen, she had realised wherever she was there was no background orange glow in the sky from street lighting and no background hum of traffic. It didn’t take her long to conclude the locals had no electricity and no vehicles other than horse drawn ones. The locals were all caring and kind, Spoonbill’s hug had brought tears to her eyes, and several of them had telt her a craft placement would be organised for her betimes, which she understood to mean employment. She had no idea what she could do here, but she was sure she would find something that would make her happy because this was real and the nearest thing she had ever come across to Miss McVane’s life.

She had also been telt she would find a personal placement, and though the exact details of what family, kin and clan entailed escaped her, she interpreted this as a grouping of the locals to which she would belong. She had been telt they would have a care to her, and she would of course have a care to them. It was like something out of a historical novel to her, but it was real and clearly the way life was lived here, and she found the idea comforting and at the same time exciting.

By now she was wondering if she had ever been ill, or whether it was everyone else she knew who was ill. The concept of a psychotic Earth, with just a handful of sane inhabitants, would have been all too frightening in its reality had she still been there. She had never felt saner in her life, and she was looking forward to learning more and belonging here, as all the locals had assured her was going to happen to all of them. All of them, she was telt, was nearly three hundred, but the details of everything would be explained at a meeting that afternoon.

She had noticed some of the differences in the language particularly concerning the time of day, forenoon meant what she had called morning, thisday was today, lastday was yesterday, nextday was tomorrow, betimes was a little puzzling but she assumed it meant soon or shortly. The word babe was uest,(13) not baby, the word order in sentences sometimes taekt(14) her a little time to make sense of, and the locals’ spaech sounded very old fashioned to her, but she was making efforts to modify her spaech to match that of the locals who she now knew referred to themselfs(15) as the Folk.

Notes on Word Usage

1 Midwifes, midwives.
2 Chav, a British pejorative term, whose derivation is contested, for, usually young, persons of lower class, of little education and taste, often of loutish, violent behaviour with ostentatious dress sense. One belief is that it is an acronym for Council Housed And Violent, i.e. those who live in state subsidised housing and are violent, as exemplified in the following, CAUTION!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUpfq_1eyeE
3 Telt, told.
4 Aeft, aged.
5 Maekt, made.
6 Caltth, cold a noun.
7 Gainst, against.
8 Aflait, afraid.
9 Braeken, broken.
10 Braeking, breaking.
11 Spaeking, speaking.
12 Spaech, speech.
13 Uest, used.
14 Taekt, took.
15 Themselfs, themselves.

Index of significant characters so far listed by Chapter

1 Introduction
2 Jacques de Saint d’Espéranche
3 The Folk and the Keep
4 Hwijje, Travisher, Will
5 Yew, Allan, Rowan,Siskin, Will, Thomas, Merle, Molly, Aaron, Gareth, Oak, Abigail, Milligan, Basil, Vinnek, Iris, Margæt, Gilla, Alsike, Alfalfa, Gibb, Happith, Kroïn, Mako, Pilot, Briar, Gosellyn, Gren, Hazel.
6 Chaunter, Waxwing, Flame, João, Clansaver, Irune, Ceël, Barroo, Campion, Limpet, Vlæna, Xera, Rook, Falcon, Cwm, Sanderling, Aldeia, catarina, coast, Elixabete,