Folk Tale Is Always With Us...

The Wolf's Footprint, Susan Price

Years ago, when I wrote The Wolf's Footprint, I took the children being abandoned in a forest from
the beginning of Hansel and Gretel and added a pinch of Russian folklore: the idea that if you drink water from an animal's footprint, then you turn into that animal.

It's always been popular in schools -- indeed Kate Stilitz turned it into a musical. You can read about that here.

It continues to be my best-seller as an Indie book -- in the UK, the US, in Canada, Australia and Europe. If I knew what it was about the book that appeals so much, I'd put it into everything I write.

Its popularity decided me to spend 2018 in re-publishing some of my books for the same age-group of eight to ten.
Like The Wolf's Footprint, they're a mixture of original story-telling and folklore.

The three I managed to get done -- with the help of my illustrator, Andrew -- are:-

Odin's Monster

Master Thomas Katt and

The Bone Dog.

Odin's Monster, Susan Price

Odin's Monster is set further back in the past than the others: in the Viking Age. I based it loosely on the old Icelandic legend of 'Thorgeir's Bull.'

A witch with a grudge creates a monster and sends it against his enemy -- who happens to be the book's hero, Thord Cat.

The tension racks up as the monster drives away Thord's friends and family until only the old beggar woman, Bergthora, is left to keep him company as he waits for the monster 'to come horned' and kill him.

When I'm reading it in schools, I stop at the point where Thord says, "Now I shall have to find out what it is like to die," and say, "If you want to find out how it ends, you'll have to read the rest yourself."

In one school a teacher who'd been listening, chin in hand, startled me by crying out, "Oh no! You can't stop there!" (I think she was a good teacher.)

The book has illustrations by Andrew Price. The picture on the cover is one of them.

Master Thomas Kat, Susan Price

Master Thomas Katt is set in the Elizabethan Age but it's loosely based on an old Danish folk-story I came on when I was reading every book of obscure folk-lore I could find.

In the folk-tale, an old, childless couple become so besotted with their bull-calf that they take him to be educated by the local clergyman, so that he'll be better fitted to manage the farm when he inherits it.

The clergyman defrauds the old couple of all their money by pretending to educate their calf  -- but really, he kills the calf. And he gets away with it.

The lesson of the folk-tale seems to be: Fools deserve to be cheated. I didn't like this. I'd read that Elizabeth I said, "My laws shall ever protect the fools from the knaves." Perhaps it was this that gave me the idea of setting the book in Elizabeth's reign and making the Queen a character in it.

I changed the folk-tale. In my version, it's a kitten the old couple take to be educated -- and the Vicar doesn't get away with his villainy. He tells the old couple that their kitten has run away to sea and, years later, sends them on a wild goose chase (as he thinks) to the Miching Mouse Inn to meet 'Master Thomas Katt, just put in from the shores of Muscovy.' Master Katt, says the Vicar, is their kitten grown into a man.

When the poor old couple find the Miching Mouse, there really is a sea-captain named Thomas Katt and he takes up their cause and discovers that the Vicar has become the Queen's chaplain. Master Katt puts the case before the Queen, who is furious and wants to execute her chaplain forthwith. But Thomas Katt comes up with a better plan...

This book is illustrated too. Here's Master Tom Katt, just put in from Muscovy, listening to the tale of two strangers who think he is their kitten grown up.

It's the tale of a tom-kitten that grew to be a Tom Katt.

The Bone Dog, Susan Price

The Bone Dog has a contemporary setting but ideas from legend and folk-lore have still worked their way in.

Sarah longs for a pet but her parents won't let her have one because they are too expensive and messy. During the summer holidays Sarah goes, as usual, to stay with her grandmother and uncle Bryan who are, matter of factly, witches.

Her uncle promises to make her a pet that will never need to see the vet and won't need feeding. He does so by making her 'a bone dog' from an old fox fur collar belonging to his mother and a bone left over from a meal. He stitches the bone into the fur and brings the thing to life with suitable midnight ceremony.

Sarah teaches her pet tricks and treats it as a sophisticated toy -- until she discovers that she can see and hear what 'Reynardine' sees and hears. When she falls out with the girls next door, she uses her 'pet' to take revenge.

But the idea of a creature created from a bone and controlled by a witch comes from Icelandic legend. Icelandic witches were said to be able to create a 'milk carrier' from a human rib-bone. It would bowl off, end over end, to suckle milk from neighbours' cows and return to the witch with a cheery cry of, "My belly's full, Mummy!" It then vomited milk into a churn the witch had set ready. All very unsavoury. My bone dog is quite sinister but at least he doesn't run around up-chucking stolen milk all over the place.

Three books and all of them started with an idea drawn from folk-lore. I don't know where I'd be without my shelves of myths, legends and folk-lore.

Wishing you all a belated New Year - may it be prosperous. I hope your first-footer brought you plenty of cake, coal and whisky to see you through until this time 2020. (I think we may need it.)

Susan Price won the Carnegie medal for The Ghost Drum

and

The Guardian Award for The Sterkarm Handshake.

Her website, with reviews, writing tips, short stories and book extracts

is here.

The Devil Stood on Dudley's Keep...

Dudley Castle, Wikimedia, Trevman99

"The Devil stood on Dudley's keep

And far about Him gazed,

And said, 'I never more shall feel

At Hell's fierce flames amazed."

If I look across the valley from my house, I can see Dudley Castle on the opposite hill.

A former owner, John Dudley, was executed for trying to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne and as a child I used to be told that it was 'one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit.' Parliament's guns were set up where the present day Castlegate roundabout is, just by the 24-hour Tesco's. (It's a long way from the castle and gives you an idea of just how big a castle's outer baileys were.)

But the rhyme above refers to the period when industry came to the Black Country, the period from, roughly, 1760 to 1860: the Industrial Revolution.

My Scottish partner has just told me, flatly, that 'nobody knows where the "Black Country" is.' So I'll tell you. It isn't Birmingham. That overgrown village with too high an opinion of itself is to the south-east. 

The Black Country was an area of small towns and villages until Industry arrived -- and Industry arrived because of the district's geology. Dudley Castle is built of limestone and the 'Seven Sisters' caverns beneath it are quarried from limestone. Where the Black Country isn't limestone, it's basalt, streaked with rust from the iron in it. Alongside enormous quarries there were enormous 'marl-holes': holes from which marl, or clay had been dug. And through the Black Country ran the massive thirty-foot coal seam. It was said to be the only place in the world where ladders were needed to cut coal.

Cutting coal in 'the thick seam' -- Wikimedia, no restrictions

Clay to make bricks to build factories; iron-ore for smelting iron; limestone to act as a flux for the iron; and coal to fire the furnaces. All of it within a small region which meant little time and energy would be spent hauling raw materials over roads little better than dirt tracks. Once canals were dug -- and the Black Country has many 'cuts' or canals -- the iron and coal could be floated right up to the factory's own quay.

Within a short time, the Black Country became a place of brick-works, coal-mines and iron-works. Coal had been mined and iron worked in the district for centuries. Small, family run mines were common where the thirty-foot seam came close to the surface and 'Smethwick' means 'the town of the smiths.' There had always been back-yard nail and chain shops in Dudley, Oldbury and Cradley Heath. But these had been small-scale cottage-industries, worked as and when demand was there or when the work-shop owners felt like it. At other times, they tended their pigs, chickens or vegetable patch.

But the 'Revolution' meant more mines and deeper; more nail and chain shops, more foundries, more steel mills. There was a sudden steep increase in exploitation too. It was the kind of capitalist free-for-all that the Tories are itching to return us to, if they can only get rid of all that nannying red-tape from the EU: all that wimpy stuff about workers' rights and air and water purity.

There was none of that fuss-potting in the old Black Country. The Agricultural Revolution had forced people off the land:

'They hang the man and flog the woman

Who steals a goose from off the Common--

But leave the greater villain loose

Who steals the Common from the goose.'

People poured into the Black Country from surrounding English counties, from Wales and from Ireland. They came to a place where there were no laws against child labour: children worked in factories and were lowered into mines on the end of a rope, to spend all day down there, in the dark, o be hauled up again after dark had fallen. Many fell to their deaths or were brained by objects falling from above. There were no safety rules, no guards on machinery, no minimum wage, no welfare -- not even something as inadequate as Universal Credit.

Great mechanical hammers pounded day and night, 'wildfire' burst out above ground from ill-kept mines, and a dense dark cloud of smoke and soot obscured daylight. It's said that, at night, the red glow from the foundries and forges reflected off the underside of this cloud of smoke.  

"The Devil stood on Dudley's keep

And far about Him gazed,

And said, 'I never more shall feel

At Hell's fierce flames amazed."

The old Black Country was Hell on earth for most.

 It's the setting of my book, The Ghost Wife.

The book was partly inspired by the Dudley Devil. His name was Theophilius Dunn and he was born in Netherton, a village near the town of Dudley, in 1790. He made a living as a witch, telling fortunes and 'finding things lost.' He was called 'Devil' because, like 'cunning man,' it  was a name for a witch. He was known locally as 'Owd Offie.'

He was supposed to have been such an accomplished witch that 'great personages' came in carriages from as far away as Scotland to consult him. Despite such claims, he seems to have been the usual con-artist, doing business at all the local 'Wakes' or fairs, from a tent decorated with occult symbols. He sold charms and potions.

Theophilius Dunn hanged himself in 1851, at the age of 61. One story has it that he foretold the day of his own death. When that day came, finding himself in good health, he was so annoyed at the thought that one of his predictions wouldn't come true, he made sure it did.

My devil comes to a sticky end too, though not by hanging and I'd like to make it clear that my devil, though inspired by Dunn, is not intended to be a portrait of him. My devil, Amadeus Warley, is far more wicked. And, of course, has genuine supernatural powers.

 Another of the characters, Rattle, goes to visit the Devil and has to walk through the town of Dudley (called 'Dudham' in the book) through its streets of slum dwellings, where blood and guts were washed downhill from the market-place beneath the castle walls. The narrow streets were often blocked with refuse, including human waste. A din of hammers rings out on all sides. Dudley was a nailing town.

Rattle is a 'pit bonk wench' -- a girl who usually works on the pit banks, loading coal onto carts, or carting away waste earth and rock to the 'pit bonks.' In my childhood, if a girl or woman was untidy or grubby, they were accused of 'looking like a pit-bonk wench.' The chains of figures cut out of newspaper to amuse children were always called 'pit-bonk wenches.' That, or 'brickle wenches' who were very similar wenches who worked in brick yards.

Pit bonk wenches

 
The pit bonk wenches you did not mess with. They were muscular and they came mob-handed. Old photographs usually show them dressed in skirts, bonnets and big boots and grimy as anyone would be who worked loading coal all day. I think they'd dressed in their best for these photos, though, as the tales I was told as a child always described them as wearing an old flat cap that had once belonged to a male relative and often one of his old jackets too. Sometimes a shawl or sack was draped around the head and shoulders with the flat cap on top. And a pipe in the corner of the mouth.

I've never seen photos of them wearing trousers but they did. They often rode astride on the horses that pulled the carts and were climbing on and off carts all day. It was easier to wear trousers.

The Ghost Wife herself is not inspired by the Black Country at all. She stems from my reading of sinister Icelandic folk-tales about 'followers' -- a kind of ghost which attaches itself to a particular family and follows them relentlessly through generations. This is usually said to have happened because of a curse inflicted by a witch. The witch -- who was as often male as female -- created the ghost by murdering some luckless beggar and then sends the ghost against his or her enemy, to torment them or spy on them.

In the book a 'Methody' farming family had a rather less religious ancestor who drowned a beggar girl in order to create for himself a witch's familiar. The witch died -- but his familiar continues to haunt the farm-house and attaches herself to some unfortunate young man in every generation. As the Dudham Devil remarks, the classical writers would have called her a succubus.

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