The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [118]
‘I’d better head…um, back where I’m staying,’ I say. ‘So…er, goodbye. Have a nice time with Fergus.’
‘Goodbye,’ he says. ‘Goddess go with you.’ He holds me with his eyes a moment longer, like he’s memorizing the look of me, then sets off briskly up the hill, the dog at his heels. I walk back to the gate, and watch them until they eventually disappear between the tall stones guarding the entrance to the barrow, wondering what it is about him that still feels so hauntingly familiar.
PART FIVE
Earth Magic
One of the ideas about ancient religion that gained currency in the 1930s was that of the Great Goddess, a female deity believed to be common to all primitive cultures, the embodiment of fertility so essential in agricultural societies, and the prototype for later divinities such as Demeter or Isis, or the triple goddesses of Celtic folklore–Maiden, Mother, Hag. Archaeologists produced as evidence big-bellied and breasted figurines from digs in the Near East; Margaret Murray’s claims about witch cults and Robert Graves’s book The White Goddess seemed to add body and blood to the theory.
Alas, like most simple and pleasing theories that claim to explain everything, it turned out to be wrong or, at least, unproven and unprovable. (Keiller was one of the first, incidentally, to debunk Murray’s research into witch trials and prove that she had twisted the evidence to fit her thesis.) The big-bellied figurines may or may not have been goddesses. But the idea of the Goddess had caught the popular imagination, and has since proved difficult to shift, particularly among modern pagans.
Dr Martin Ekwall,
A Turning Circle: The Ritual Year at Avebury,
Hackpen Press
CHAPTER 29
1941
Mam was terrible thin when I went to see her and Dad in Devizes. I’d taken her eggs from the hens at the Lodge, and a bit of extra butter I’d laid hands on.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ she said, with a weak smile. ‘Keep ‘em for yourself–you’re a growing girl, Frances, you need ‘em more ‘n me.’
‘I should have,’ I said. ‘Look at you, Mam. I swear there’s less of you every time I come. Dad working you too hard, is he?’
‘It’s only the Change,’ she said. ‘Some women get fat, some thin down. I’m one of the scrawny old birds.’
She was barely thirty-nine. But I didn’t understand then–or didn’t want to know–how young that was for the menopause. It was a relief to have something to explain the way she looked.
‘How’s Davey?’ she asked. ‘And the village?’ We’d finished Saturday tea and I was at the kitchen table while Mam dried the crocks. She wouldn’t let me help, said I was a guest now, not a skivvy.
‘Oh, Davey’s doing fine,’ I said. Letters came regular from Scotland, where he was in the thick of his navigation training. ‘But I don’t see much of anyone in Avebury. I’m hardly there, working long hours at the hospital. I’m thinking maybe I should find a room in Swindon. It’d be easier all round.’ Especially now Davey was gone. There was no one to drive me home if I missed the last bus.
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said Mam. Her hand slipped, and a couple of spoons dropped with a clatter on the draining-board. ‘I’d worry terrible about you in the air raids.’
‘Swindon hasn’t had much. I’d be safe as…’ Well, no one could say houses were safe any more. But there’d been hardly any bombing there. Bristol was getting it bad night after night, and we all knew what was happening to London, but there was probably as much chance of a bomb landing on me in Avebury as there was in Swindon. More, maybe–the base at Yatesbury was only a mile or two off, and the countryside was full of dozens of little out-of-the-way airfields, as well as Starfish and Q-sites begging the bombers to dump on them. Still, I wasn’t going to explain that to Mam: she worried enough as it was. I took out my cigarettes and looked round for an ashtray.
Mam