(A powerful story from the sub stack of my old high dorm monitor, Stoddard “Chip” Martin. He was editor of the school literary magazine Sage the year before I was. After high school, he went to Stanford and then moved to London where he has run a small literary press in London. I asked Chip’s permission to publish his story in Midnight Oil. He said of course. This made me feel good. More opportunity to get my old classmate’s new Substack writings out there. See link to his substack at the end of this story. John)
Joycean tropes maybe, but post-’60s London had its affect – transient blithe spirits, callow meets callous, exotic, entropic… whence?
The Bitter Withy
A SISTER’S TALE
It often surprised friends in Chelsea to hear how Maria had grown up in a terraced house in High Wycombe with no indoor ‘loo or hot water and only three rooms for a family of seven. Maria had a sense of the grand. Her reaction when small luxuries came her way was never ‘How lucky I am!’ but always ‘I’ve been wanting that’. It was a mystery too when she vanished. A story went round that she had borrowed some cash, flown to San Francisco and was living in a luxury flat overlooking the sea. Lucky Maria! One might suppose a fantasy had come true for her. But it was sister Eveline who had started the story, so no one could be quite sure.
Not until there was proof. That came one evening in late spring when a Roller smoothed up to the house in High Wycombe and Maria stepped out with a Californian in white suit and black shirt undone to the chest hairs. Eveline took a fancy and phoned all Maria’s friends to come down to inspect. The Boyfriend was some sort of pharmacist, she said; he had found a cure for depression. Later, brother Sean would write a letter suggesting that Maria’s bloke had made his pile hustling coke, but when Maria first appeared with him at the door in High Wycombe, the family was impressed, and with reason. Maria could order a Roller with chauffeur to wait in the road for her until pink dawn had dusted the clouds.
Before going back to that Other World she had fled to, Maria stayed for a week in a suite at the top of the Hilton, Park Lane. Truly grand! But then, it was sister Eveline who had started the story, so no one could be entirely sure. In fact, no one laid eyes on Maria again for many a moon once the Roller had smoothed off for a last time from High Wycombe. Nor, aside from what Eveline reported via Sean’s letters, did anyone hear anything more of Maria for yonks.
* * *
Not long after she had returned to San Francisco, brother Sean bought his ticket. Sean might have been a soldier-of-fortune in another era; he might have been some kind of hero in his own, had fortune continued to smile on him as it did at the moment he stepped off the plane. Taken for a member of a Merseyside pop group, he had a troop of oglers round him before he’d reached baggage claim. Indeed, within days of his entry into the flower-child City, Sean had more applicant lovers than he could have fantasized possible in a back lane of High Wycombe.
Lucky Sean! What frolicking! However, with puff-taking speed, his hair became lank and he found himself dossing down with a fey wilted daisy, angling to get pregnant. The daisy’s ‘family’, the Communal Dog, had been enthused to induct Sean at first – ‘Hey man, you seen that English dude?’ ‘They say he’s one a them whatsairname brothers.’ ‘Heard him on his axe yet?’ – and gave a room at the top of their Victorian on Haight Street where he slouched on a mattress telling tales of gigs at The Nag’s Head, Wycombe, The Odeon, Slough, and other ‘far out’ venues the Dog had never heard of. This went on for a time before it was woozily shown that Sean could manage no more than the same stale riff from ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ that every hip poseur could, and communal enthusiasm faded. But it was not Sean’s fabulation that brought events to a head, rather the fact that he failed to contribute to potable-smokable funds. Thus one sunshiny morning as he lounged with his mama gazing out a bay window through rose-colored beads, the head Dog barged in:
‘Man, you gotta get some bread, man. Gotta pay up, man, or split.’
Unlucky Sean!
Back in High Wycombe, Eveline read out his put-downs of Maria’s ‘middle class life-style’ and paeans to his own ‘hip-dude’ scene. ‘Makes it sound almost too good to be real!’ one or two hearers reflected, and indeed the sole hint that Sean’s existence was less than he hyped it to be came from another Californian, friend of a friend, who chanced down through High Wycombe in that phase.
To this apparition Eveline took a slight fancy. She wouldn’t admit to it, nor that the fancy was more a hope, given that she was then twenty-five and hadn’t yet had a man ‘properly’; but more about Eveline shortly. According to this Californian, who stayed long enough in High Wycombe for Maria’s friends to come down from Chelsea to have a look (‘Rather odd, isn’t he?’ ‘Poufter, I suss’), Sean was now living on an old horsehair sofa in some town south of The City – i.e., nowhere.
‘A horsehair sofa!? What about the pregnant wife?’
‘Pregnant wife? What “pregnant wife”?’
The Californian recalled something about ‘a chick in the Haight’, maybe even ‘a bun in the over’, but his recall was dim. What was clear was that Sean was now kipping on horsehair and earning his bread by repairing old Rollers and Bentleys.
Old Rollers? – Sean, who’d complained like The Father about ‘the bloody rich’? Surely he wouldn’t have time for Rollers?
Well, the Californian drawled, he was rebuilding old choppers too, on the side. But the cat he worked for did mainly Rollers and Bentleys.
Choppers? – Sounded more like it. Everyone remembered Sean going to bike races, bashing his head in, getting scratched up – Sean the reckless. But then, with four older sisters and a mother who’d had to be sectioned, what did one expect?
* * *
Of the three sisters, two had married before The Mother’s demise. They had done well-ish – the first lived now in Wiltshire, the other in Surrey, and both, making families of their own, had not a dickey-bird to do with the house in High Wycombe any longer.
It was the middle child, Eveline, who had stayed home and labored – first for The Mother and, after she’d gone, The Father, who’d always been more frail than let on. Eveline had taken charge, the younger ones being feckless – when The Mother had ranted, Sean would slam the door; when The Father had fretted, Maria would turn up Radio Caroline. Whenever (and it was not often) good sister Eveline had asked these sibs for assistance, they’d had plans – Sean off to his races, Maria to Chelsea. Meanwhile, at home, the two escaped as completely as their elders – so completely that Eveline hardly saw them except on the odd morning when they lolled late in bed.
What did they escape to? She knew only that Maria had girlfriends and a male friend or two. She had seen Sean with a bird with hair bobbed, red lip-gloss and knee-high boots. She had wondered, but then, as she did, The Mother would summon her to a sickroom filled with phantom-knights on white chargers, distant vistas of castles in air, wounded lovers floating down from on high to whisk a fair damsel out of distress. And sometimes when half-hearing these flights, Eveline would half-imagine herself into the lives she envisaged Maria and Sean to be escaping to; and once or twice when The Mother was fantasticating her last, Eveline herself half-began to conceive, if only in some drifting remnant of thought, of some mythic entity floating down from on high to whisk her away from this family, this terrace, this dutiful life.
She rarely had visions when with The Father, who had no time for the fiction of The Mother’s sickroom. Under his regime, Eveline had pulled on overalls of a morning to go out, rain or shine, and tend to the flowers he sold in the market to keep them – Maria and Sean too, even if out of sight. Then a year after The Father had slumped down combating an invasion of nettles, Eveline was rewarded in a way she had never had the slyness to foresee. She of the five children became the sole heir to not only the garden, which one might argue she had earned, but also the house and, to general surprise, seven thousand quid The Father had managed to squirrel away.
Lucky Eveline! – Unlucky, in fact, had brother and sisters protested. But why should they have? What could any of them have wanted with a market-garden, a terraced house on a muddy lane in High Wycombe or even a mingy seven grand? The eldest were growing plump and county genteel in Wiltshire and Surrey, and Maria and Sean were now off to their dream-lives over there. So…
Lucky Eveline! No more delirium or duty thieving away her best years. Now she could lie in bed late and conjure her own fantasies. Now she could pull on overalls and clip the blooms as she liked, not as required. Now she could install an inside ‘loo with an ascot and modern gas-heating. A spare room even – maybe two.
Lucky Eveline! but… endless dank winter, dark, solitary. She worked on renovations and turning the soil, but… not even The Father to complain to. She worked and she worked, but it offered no lift. Escape she began to long for – an exit… Whereto?
She re-read Maria’s letters, lively and catty. She re-read Sean’s gushing, self-pitying tones. She dreamed and she pondered. When would she go off to that sparkling Other World she had seen in the jewels of The Mother’s wild eyes? When might the earthy, yet kind Man for whom she was destined descend from on high to whisk her away?
Escape – yes!
The ‘real’ world came to annoy her. She pulled on her overalls less. She began to resent digging and, when the spring came, neglected her sewing once a week, twice… She set off then to Chelsea – to Maria’s old friends. (‘Rather a silly cow, isn’t she?’)(‘Rather countrified.’) (‘Rather a giggle.’) Three days a week, even four, she was up in town shopping, transforming. She had her hair done high and held with sequined berets. She drew on bright-ringed tights and mini-skirts from Biba, though her calves were still those of a laboring girl. She pulled striped jerseys tight over an earthy bust, this new Eveline, and her new friends – that is, Maria’s old ones – smirked as she stood in a pub at World’s End, downing shandies at first, then gin-and-tonics, and told tales about the slim-hipped lad, gentle, artistic, who would expire for her; about the mystery man all decked in furs who would crush her sturdy bones in his embrace.
* * *
No one of the sort visibly appeared in Eveline’s life – no man at all except the odd Californian, neither hero nor knight. But then, by summer’s end, her new friends found themselves being entertained with a different story, this having to do with an ultra-cool Farm. And not long before Christmas, those summoned for vegetarian nosh in High Wycombe were hearing speeches on Brotherhood from an Eveline further transformed – into what? A ‘hippy commune-ist’, mused cousin Patrick, recently come from Armagh. – Hippy? Communist? God and the monarch forbid! A mystic or some Jesus-freak? What had come over the girl
Rhapsodic letters from that pop-idol, soldier-of-fortune Sean, who had ‘found the Light’. He was living now in a commune, the commune, somewhere over there – Kentucky, Tennessee. Two hundred of ‘the world’s hippest human beings’, including an Eastern healer, a renowned poet, an entire rock band and a Leader suitably branded Lord Dove. The Farm was a ‘paradise of the New Age’, Sean’s missives reported: nobody fought, nobody swore, nobody slaughtered an animal, nobody did a thing for any purpose but Love, only LOVE. Everybody loved together, everybody slept together, everybody together, TOGETHER, under a rule of LOVE as laid down by Lord Dove, assisted by the Eastern healer, the renowned poet, the entire rock band and supported ostensibly by The Farm’s hemp harvestings, though mostly in truth by a cool mill inherited by said Dove, whose real name was Robbie Dovanian, scion of a prosperous vegetable-canning family from California’s central valley.
* * *
O, but Eveline was proud! Sean had found something – something that sounded, well… almost too good to be real.
Eveline was proud, and with reason, for once the giggles had faded, her new friends were intrigued. Too sophisticated not to seem skeptical, most of them still half-harbored a late counter-cultural dream that they too might ‘find The Light’ one fine day. Whether brother Sean had truly found it as he claimed was a question, yet Eveline read and reread his effusions as if Holy Writ.
Indeed, so busy was she with this, and trips to Chelsea, that the garden lay neglected. But then another piece of luck had come Eveline’s way – the aforesaid visitant from Northern Ireland. Now, some in her milieu would not be eager to boast of relations from the Emerald isle – The Mother had gone on about ‘hosts of the Sidhe’, but The Father had rarely avoided an aside re ‘ruddy Papists’, and Eveline had been divided as to whether to admit to a Celtic strain in the Family. Her doubts had waned only after the cousins from Armagh had had their pub bombed. Even The Father had turned his head to hear how wife’s people had their fortune blown sky high by ‘bloody Prots’ – it made for the sole lively chatter to pass his lips as he faded away on his deathbed.
So Eveline was sure of herself when she regaled guests with the story. And she had living proof of it once cousin Paddy had come to High Wycombe. Lucky Eveline! and not just for tale-corroborating reasons. Suddenly the garden was being looked after. Indeed, one late winter morning as she ventured forth she discovered that planting had been done without her lifting a finger. She had not had to labor but her work was finished! She did not have to worry about working any longer – cousin Patrick had come to High Wycombe.
Ahem – what did he want here, some pertly asked: escape from The Troubles? to see the great British world? Never mind motives, Eveline retorted: the garden was being looked after. And how nice it was too to have a servant, even if, as time passed, some of his asides struck one as too clever by half. To have a servant – yes. Eveline was soon thinking of her cousin as fixed to her by some kind of indenture. As vegetarian nosh for her town friends grew more frequent and ‘weekends in the country’ (never mind that it was a suburb), she found herself asking, expecting, even demanding that Paddy serve and wash up as well as tend to the garden and do the marketing.
She herself no longer had time for such things, being off two/three nights a week, days too, up to Chelsea, imbibing spirits, partying, seeking – what? Eveline, the flash new sophisticate – she could return home now at sunrise, crash into bed and wake up at midday, groggy, hung over. He could brew coffee, dole out aspirin and scold like an Irish mum with a wayward spouse. All of this Eveline accepted with waxing hauteur. And on Sunday afternoons when her new actor friends came down and the Irish jokes started – they told them with such accents, she’d split her seams – the gentle sighs of her cousin could hardly be heard through the din… Thus Eveline with Cousin Padriac.
* * *
Now it happened on one of these jolly occasions that Eveline began to regale all with a tale of the loss of her virginity. For some time she had amused friends with fantasies on the topic, but this was more sensational. Black satin sheets, suite at the Playboy Club, a wild and enthralling mystery-man liberating her out of all bonds of the past… No one had the slightest idea of who she was on about. No one had ever seen her with much of a man, let alone this demon lover; and frankly, besides being amused, most of them were more than a touch dubious.
He was a rock hero, Eveline hinted – he was the elder member of that duo who had dropped out of the scene to ‘go underground’… One person, disbelieving, laughed in her face. Another told her to stop being a ‘daft cow’. A third suggested she was being taken for a ride by some ‘flash hustler’. Meanwhile, cousin Pat observed from behind a cupped hand that, if she kept telling porkies, Eveline herself might be transported into ‘the land of the loonies’ one day.
None of these uncharitable observations had the slightest effect on the tale-teller. Off she traipsed every night – up to The King’s Road, she’d report on returning at dawn. The Playboy Club, black satin, demon-saint of a spear-man… If one dared to chuckle, she would shoot out a basilisk glare. Indeed, Eveline sparkled these days with such assured inspiration that the scoffers began to shift into wonder if she hadn’t actually finally found something or someone extraordinary.
It was around this time – we were heading for summer – that Sean appeared at the door of the house in High Wycombe.
Then, shortly after, Maria turned up.
What a surprise to see these prodigals again! Home precipitously from their dream lives? Ahem…
Scant explanation. Much speculation. It was difficult, seeing Sean, hair scraggy and cheeks gaunt, to imagine his existence over there had been as ideal as made out. Nor was it easy to imagine much better of Maria, mascara thick and shape now more like Eveline’s than Eveline’s own – a plump simulacrum of the lissom dolly-bird that had stepped out of a Roller many bright moons ago. Rumors went round, old hints were remembered – what Sean had written about Maria’s boyfriend; what a Californian had said about Sean kipping on floors. But Maria confessed to nothing about being let down by her bloke, and Sean breathed not a word about being kicked out of grace. The two of them merely sat in the front room in High Wycombe awaiting who-knew-what, each proclaiming, if asked, that he or she would soon be going back over there – that great Life still beckoned. Nor did either seem at all intrigued by Eveline’s latest, though Eveline herself remained high on excitement – brimful of the topic and eager for approval, not least from lively Maria and the brother who had ‘found the light’.
Returning from her putative nights in mauve satin, she would sprawl out in the front room as she thought a grand dame should and regale them:
‘He’s going to make a new album soon, all love songs to me… He’s going to take me to Istanbul and the Far East, maybe even America one day too!’
On she went with gaudy vistas – the sum of what had come to her since that ‘loss of virginity’ moment – until she’d arrived at shores quite remote from what seemed any realizable destiny. Brother and sister merely gazed out the window. Then Cousin Pat would come home from the market, place a pint in Sean’s hand and rehearse some amusing vignette of his day. He’d tell another and, whether from beer, a drollness of accent or just relief that some song other than Eveline’s was being sung, Sean would start to grin. And Maria would study the face of this quaint Irish relation and, hearing an echo of Family, begin smiling too. And the result in the end was that it was only Eveline, sprawled on her new Deco settee, who was not entirely amused.
She ignored quips Paddy tossed at her lightly – great ladies are not teased by servants. She waved a hand blithely when he mentioned the garden – her factotum could take care of that. Finally, unsprawling, she would go off for an evening – to what? Ah, but that remained veiled. No one would see the lover, nor even learn his alias, for rock heroes must have their stage names, mustn’t they?
* * *
Shrouded by this cover, Eveline’s life came to seem strange – too strange finally. Even the curious started rolling eyes when she would sprawl out to tell tales. Then one afternoon in high summer as she was regaling, Sean interrupted. He’d been thinking, he said. He wanted to go back to San Fran. He’d mulled it over and now he was sure. There was only one way for him: re-find his woman and child, make a family and turn himself into ‘an honest man’. So he asked Eveline if she could spare any dosh.
‘Oh,’ she responded, ‘I’ve been thinking about getting married too. Getting married, going off, settling down…’
Yes, but what about a bi’ of cold cash?
The grand dame could not refuse. A wave of the hand – boon granted. (How fortunes can change! she might have reflected, but didn’t.) ‘Have as much as you like.’
How much could that be?
‘As much as you need. A thousand? Two?’
Sean glanced at Maria. Maria’s eyes widened.
Then one evening approaching the onset of autumn, Paddy came in from the garden to speak of Armagh. Reconstruction of the pub had at last been completed. The Family would need help with land-lording.
‘Oh,’ Eveline mused. ‘Leaving then, are you?’ – A relief, she imagined. She was bored with the servant; and there was Maria. And one could feel freer having friends down for the weekend without ‘the IRA’ about.
‘What’ll ye do for the Garden, if I go?’ Cousin P prudently wondered.
‘Season’s over, isn’t it? One can leave it for now. One doesn’t have the time for it, does one?’ In the following breath, Eveline declared, ‘I’m going to have a party’ and went on to describe the gorgeous occasion envisaged.
Patrick listened.
Maria interrupted. ‘Shouldn’t you pay Pat for all the work he’s done first?’
‘It’s not much of importance,’ the cousin interposed swiftly, glancing purposely at his sudden partisan.
But Maria insisted. ‘You should, you know,’ she moralized to Eveline.
The latter said haughtily. ‘Of course. How much does he need?’
Giving a remarkably exact account of Patrick’s services to date, Maria demanded a thousand quid on his behalf.
Eveline waved a few fingers – boon granted – and continued to go on about her party as well as a matter only she could shed light on: whether he would be there.
* * *
So Sean departed, and then Patrick, and finally only Maria was around to greet the shortening days, and silence crept back into the house at High Wycombe
A hint came again of a loneliness that had hung around like damp dishrags when The Father had gone, and Eveline didn’t sprawl quite so blithely over her new-ish settee. She seemed a bit nervy now, a bit over-inspired as she nattered away on her sole topic: The Party. The garden had vanished entirely from mind: when Maria asked what she was planning to do about it, Eveline failed to answer or would toss out, ‘O really! One cahn’t be bothered with that now‘. On occasion she even blurted obscurely, ‘It doesn’t matter – I’ll be going off too quite soon.’
Things such as gardens no longer seemed reality to her, only Chelsea at night, every night, and endless planning for The Party. More and more mindless of all that lay around her, she hardly noticed the way that Maria was sloping about fingering this and that in the cupboards – family items – saying to Eveline as she did so that she had quite ‘taken a fancy’ to whatever it was. She could have what she wanted, Eveline replied, waving a hand. She never asked what her sister planned to do with the booty.
Eveline… If only she’d been awake of a morning to collect the mail, she might have noted postmarks from County Armagh. If only she’d kept some slyness about her, she might have spotted a plot laid and promises made. A new dream had indeed arrived for her sister – of a country life, domesticity, family and even perhaps excitements of a different kind, with a modicum of danger. Eveline! She was guileless and so wholly unprepared for the day when Maria had ‘borrowed’ the last two grand from what The Father had squirreled away and vanished herself once again.
* * *
There were those who might say that this departure cut a last bond with what she would dismiss as ‘the real world’. But the truth was that Maria had never been much of an influence for reality on Eveline, nor had Eveline ever been bound to our so-called ‘real’ world so tightly, thus it was virtually meaningless to use the hackneyed phrase. It was equally meaningless for others to contend that she had ‘gone mad’ finally – after all, which of them really gave much of a toss about her mental state? the gentrified sisters? the brother half a globe away.
The truth of Eveline’s case once the fair-weathered no longer pattered down to High Wycombe remains veiled. The Party never took place, and only she knew why – she must have called it off, if it had ever been on. The trips up to Chelsea abated and with them tales of love-knights – again only she could offer a reason.
Another cold winter passed. Fewer and fewer mentioned the house in High Wycombe and, so far as is told, its occupant hardly ventured forth.
Spring came, sewing season. The garden lay bare, and what was Eveline up to? Had anyone heard of her since…? Could anyone say if she were living or…?
Shortly after Easter, cousin Patrick, perhaps alone curious, crossed the sea and made a pilgrimage. And what did he find on turning up in High Wycombe? Eveline a supple shade of her old earthy self. Eveline posed by a window gazing out through stringed beads – the late Mother’s colored-glass rosary. Eveline next to the hearth regaling of her latest passion – a tale of a wounded lover; of a newly discovered, or perhaps fortuitously re-discovered, savior-hero: the Lord Jesus Christ.
He knew all about gardens, she assured dubious Patrick when he asked if she might be needing a hand with hers. Everything would be tended to perfectly now, Eveline stated, since one had at last ‘found the Light’.
Subscribe to Stoddard’s Substack
‘Error is all in the not done/All in the diffidence that faltered.’ So, writer, from the beginning…
_________________________________
The Bitter Withy Lyrics
As I fell out on a bright holiday
Small hail from the sky did fall
Our Saviour asked his mother dear
If he might go and play at ball
“At ball? At ball? My own dear son?
It’s time that you were gone
And don’t let me hear any mischief
At night when you come home.”
So it’s up the hill, and down the hill
Our sweet young Saviour run
Until he met three rich young lords
“Good morning” to each one
“Good morn”, “good morn”, “good morn”
Said they, “Good morning” then said He
“And which one of you three rich young lords
Will play at the ball with me?”
“Ah, we’re all lords’ and ladies’ sons
Born in a bower and hall
And you are nought but a poor maid’s child
Born in an ox’s stall”
“If I am nought but a poor maid’s child
Born in a ox’s stall
I’ll make you believe at your latter end
I’m an angel above you all”
So he made a bridge of beams of the sun
And over the river ran he
And after him ran these rich young lords
And drowned they all three
Then it’s up the hill, and it’s down the hill
Three rich young mothers run
Crying “Mary Mild, fetch home her child
For ours he’s drowned each one.”
So Mary Mild fetched home her child
And laid him across her knee
And with a handful of withy twigs
She gave him lashes three
“Ah bitter withy. Ah bitter withy
That causes me to smart,”
And the withy shall be very first tree
To perish at the heart