Eira

Dear Reader,

What have I been writing recently? Well, as the famous X factor contestant once said - nothing. I’m lazy at the moment.

Well not nothing - my book draft’s going as well as can be whilst I’m living a life bubbled to the brim (heady, foaming with energy like a pint of Japanese beer). Just I can’t share that with any of you when it’s in a state of first-draft catastrophe. So instead, as Winter rolls in I thought I’d sit myself down and get something written on the blog. I hope you like this, but even if not I hope you stay warm! It’s been dastardly out West, so I’m told - but hey, that’s home. Just hoping the T1C bus gets me back in time for Christmas. Here in Cardiff, I’ve not been hit with much more than a brisk chill on beautiful powder-crisp mornings... and sloshings of climate anxiety… 

To keep my thought-beasts at bay in syncopated, sporadic moments spent by myself I've flipped through some pages of old Ceredigion folktales, and have decided to finally put my Children's Literature MPhil to good use and write a bedtime story. Just like all good tales, it rhymes, is best told by a fireplace, and embraces the good old British tradition of folk horror (only a pinch, don’t want to be greedy!). This is a story inspired by Welsh socio-political history, countryside murders, and an old tale from Ciliau Aeron about a scorned woman transforming into a hare, luring men to their deaths in the Wild West Wastelands.

... Quite frankly, slay.

I hope you’re sitting comfortably.

All my stars,

Char x

Eira

There’s spirits in these hills, you know.

They disappear in mist and snow

Their fur and footsteps melt right in

Amongst the backdrops of the bryn.

And ‘tis not often mortal eyes

once seeing make it out alive

Today there’s talk of traveller's woe

A tollman-victim. Came John Doe

to promenade through Pennant's streams

It made the local locals beam

To tell me of his strange demise

So listen closely, close your eyes

So in my tales telling you 

Do not see her.

Do not view

The girl he saw whilst passing by

our village,

She who caught his eye.

With lips like blood and skin like snow.

Black eyes reflecting depths below

- Crowblack eyes to match that hair

(Fishboat-bobbing, Thomas fare)

A waxy voice to haunt his dreams,

A scratching, smiling, soul that bleeds.

Born of conflict, Cymru's child

Plain yet pretty, homely-wild 

She shouts but doesn't speak his tongue

(his schooling hereby comes undone,

– they don't teach Welsh in English schools.

Consonant clusters, fricative fools).

But still he reads between the lines

To understand the most unkind

Sentiments in what she speaks 

Her anger bubbles up and peaks

Contralto tines of Welsh chagrin

She's Celtic cross - cross at him!

And all his kind for crossing hers.

Of history he is unaware

Instead he’s dumbstruck in her spell.

As she storms off he cannot tell

if he's in love or terrified

In contemplation, on he strides.

It's striding thus he spies a hare,

Down Ciliau Aeron way he stares 

Amongst the bramble and the broom,

its whiteness gleaming in the gloom.

But this creature, being seen

Melted softly like a dream

away from dumbstruck Angle's sight.

He followed her into the night.

But moonglow magic's soon undone –

He snapped a twig!

The race begun!

She sprung with ease through the briar and bush

That pricked him cruelly as he pushed

 through wooded webs, in snowy plight

The man did bleed, crossed red on white.

Sanguine kisses dyed the night.

He heard her laugh and banged his head

On bough or beast, and in his dread

Thrashed he with great unmanly might

Until ahead he spied a light!

Not born of moon,

But waxing some -

at candle's cue

His fear undone!

A cottage yonder, holly'ed door

The warmth of cawl and scent of lore

The man rushed forth, knocked for his life

Met he the face of a blacksmith's wife.

My friend (Mrs Jones, who told me this tale)

Recounted his countenance as ghoulishly pale.

Once inside he demanded she clean all his cuts,

And sat in her chair whilst forgetting his luck.

He asked her for soup, which she brought to His Grace

(Though she spat in it first - in place of his face

In revenge for his acts and the acts of his peers

Those who'd taken her iaith, flooded lands with her tears).

He told her his interest in her diocese's

treasures and stories. 'So dear would you please

Lend me some light to enlighten this tale

of a mythical hare, so pretty, so pale'.

Now in the limelight is where Mrs Jones truly thrives

And this old wife's tales keep cultures alive.

So she hushed the lord close and corralled him to still

And to stare at the fire, keeping silence until

Her story began of a spirit so small

It could thread through a needle - without squeezing at all

An old animagus who wanders this land,

Protecting our people, it halts any hand

Of a man who might try to do this place harm

“She was born in this valley - and lived on that farm!

You can see through the snow, now all shambles and shame

See that ramshackle place? Bitter Orchard's its name.

For bitter are apples you'll find in its wake

And bitter in history, that miserable place

T’wonce housed a healer with raven black hair

Not a drop of blood in her, her skin was so fair

She'd say she knew faeries who tended the plot,

- Which is fine when you're pretty, but wrong when you're not.

The girl lacked a fine face, all furrows and frowns

So was branded a witch in the land up and down

Made scapegoat by fools who oft witches maligned.

But if curses you give, then it's curses you find.

So she unchurned their butter and poxed all their sheep.

turned into a hare and hip-hopped through their sleep.

Whilst in waking made potions to cure the diseases

that plague country people, she stopped all the sneezes

and sniffles and woe then hotfooted it home

to her lover, her husband, her cariad, her own.

But there was a curse which she failed to spy

She was cursed with a man who’d a wandering eye.

So he wandered and wondered and left the girl scorned.

Turfed her off of the turf where she'd lived and been born!

Her bitterness grew till its poison took root

Till it tainted the grass and the farm and its fruit

And its master soon came to regret his misdeeds

As he gagged on his food, and spilled his last seed.

Both of their deaths came along with the snow

The man couldn't stomach the crops he could grow

So he died of starvation, and the register shows

That she died a beggar… in the cold. All alone”.

(Mrs Jones stopped a spell as she let out a sigh.

In that moment of silence her guest wondered why

He'd started to feel cast over his eye

a d r o w s i n e s s s n e a k i l y b e c k o n i n g n i g h ).

Mrs Jones took a breath, winking out at the snow

"or at least that's how the history goes

But the truth to this tale we'll never know

- that girl died a hundred years ago".

As hidden a hist'ry as our tollman's fate 

She finished her tale, he finished his plate.

Mrs Jones has sworn that he bid her goodbye

- And why would my friend have a reason to lie?

(Apart from to tourists, she's been known to give

them an overblown story. But we all need to live.

And smithings not bringing the money it did.

Since they shut off our coal, and buried our kids.

So a bit of hyperbole you'll surely forgive).

In the morning they found him: some children at play

stooging smugglers down by the river that day.

First they spotted his boots dangling over the bed.

His laces all frosted, hair matted and red

Like the rock he'd smacked on the fall with his head

Tripping over the pebbles at midnight he bled

All out, all alone,

until he was dead.

Some say the hare may have laid out in wait

Turning over the stones, disrupting his gait

Till an unlucky tumble delivered his fate

Head over heels with a spirit - bit pathetic I'd say.

But the tourists respond to it better this way.

I dare say it helps their guilt keep at bay

Justice for suffering their ancestors made

From Westminster towers, in a land far away

So if you come here and choose to believe She

played on his foolish tourishtic fetishities.

That a hare can undo a whole headful of grief

Then I would advise you'd best listen to me.

Before leaving tonight, my friend, understand

All the bitterness under the skin of this land.

And if by moonlight you see a hare or a hand

You'd best run for your life - if living’s your plan.’