The story of my returning
Frankly, just between ourselves, I’m ending up even worse than I started. My beginnings were pretty shabby. In fact, although I regard the past as mainly pre-political, even I’d have to admit that I was spawned as working class. I was born — and I repeat this for the benefit of my critics who continue to locate my historical self in various outlandish places — in South Cambridgeshire, in a one-bedroom bungalow. Rural suburbia, since we’re on the subject. They don’t make them like that any more in the countryside. People would refuse. Or if they were to build them, they’d balance them one upon the other next to regional centres and charge more for a prime site location. Or build them on so-called brownfield sites.
I’m repeating all this for the 100th time. After countless false endings I’m finally ending badly. It’s hard making a living in this country. They have you audition every hour, jumping around in front of supervisors, mad for points, waving certificates, when all along what really counts is personal charm. Just listen to the women. Public opinion. The more vapid, senseless and bigoted they are the better they rule together.
Individually, people guard their stupidities. But just mention it and they wave it back in your face as a kind of ingratitude. Together, all the citizens of the world gather up sense in the manner of an international team of diplomats lobbying support for a multi-national rapid-response force of indeterminate duration to ancient places without viable nation states. But do they brood and fret with the weight of responsibility? No. This enfeebled collective fritters away its hard-won intelligence, its sense of direction and long-term traditions of life. The image of mass squandering is breathtaking. Even now, in these late times, when images appear as things beside themselves and food — poisoned or deficient — is fed to the masses as to mere creatures. I shudder to qualify such cretinism with an account of it.
Everything, I repeat, everything, was stolen from me. Avengers, watchmen, broke into my place on Chesterton Road, overlooking the river, and carried everything off to Boot Sales held alternate Sundays at various Cambridgeshire aerodromes. They sold it all. I’m not exaggerating. I have proof. All my books and instruments! Everything! My furniture, my manuscripts. Not a sock or used-up biro left in the flat. Not a single sheet of budget toilet tissue. I hope they had a good laugh at my poverty, my soiled linen. My single-ply. My tuppeny-ha’penny abjection. These things can never happen? What about the European Court of Human Rights? I tell you again, it’s due process on the march. The inexorable historical trend goes straight up your arse.
But I’ve got to survive, economise on everything, including thought, and right away. Of course, I’m used to it. I’ve had my training. Celtic law, which precedes the Anglo-Saxon legal heritage. Druidic training. And I stuck it out in the middle of the Fens for five winters, nearly six, below freezing, sub-dead in a wrecked bungalow in the middle of a set-aside field without heat. Absolutely without heat. Pigs would have died of the cold. Six years of ice. And it cost me! The council deducted the rent from my benefits at source. Did me a big favour even letting me live there.
Just try living with Section 38 chasing you around. Pinned on your arse for everyone to see. I couldn’t sit down in a shop, or take time to read the latest news at convenient ATMs for cops shackling me and dragging me to secure units the entire length and breadth of my own region. Just you try.
Stop writing, they say. Relax. Give yourself a fighting chance. There’s thousands worse off than you. End the endless words, the sex magic, the activism, begin to contribute to the community. They have the gall to suggest that I give something back! I who have received nothing in return for the invisible gifts I have already bestowed on race and region.
Listen. My friend Eric has just died of TB. In this day and age! Poor Denise committed suicide before she could be carted off to the Big House again. Gary was so full of heroin there was barely room for his last breath to force itself out of his skinny corpse. And they say I have no business coming back. I was supposed to die in a secure hospital, under the chemical cosh. Or in a diseased shed fifteen miles further on from the arse-end of nowhere.
Oh, they attempted to track me down. Of course, it wasn’t difficult for them. But I made it as hard as possible. I live in secret, by the purifying code of East Anglian ritual. No words may describe it; it is transmitted over time through local knowledge. It will, no doubt, be the death of me.
I must hurry away before I am seen. But I’ve time enough to impart just a little more knowledge before I go. Now is the time for all East Anglians to recognise their bounden duty, and come to the aid of their region. Even as I write new ‘homes’ are being constructed on sacred land, but these will not last long. My land faces the swash of the North Sea. As the flood returns to embrace us, the relative heights — our gentle undulations — will become more apparent. And where shall we stand and think when, surrounded by fen and marsh, new housing estates cover the precious recovered earthen mounds?
Only 45 minutes from King’s Cross, an hour by motor. I curse the West Anglia Railway company and the Highways Agency, that they should import swarms to tread down the soft paths, ruin the ancient holy hills, and carry off the free air of my homeland.
Unthinkable though it seems, the East Anglian Path may not be strong enough to combat determined planners and their discontinuous suburban developments. Neither was it expected that global economics should concentrate its full power upon our hard-won soil. But consolation may yet await the adept and the novice alike. As the waters rise the East shall again become an unstable land, an uneconomic proposition. Lloegyr. Logres, as was. Perhaps hope may come to help us. Or I may be forced to move still further East; to the Christianised ‘centre’, my rival Norwich. I just don’t know.
As I ate my simple supper al fresco, I wrote in my mind, like my dreaming forebears. The people shall be organised in autonomous, self-sufficient, armed villages with total regression of technology. There will be no hunger, no industry, no pollution or electricity, no mass entertainment and no corruption, only the will of the people imposed at ever-more local levels. Men and women shall find fulfilment in their proper roles: the function of the male, being stronger, is to protect the female; the function of the female, in rearing the children, is to make the rules. Only in small villages, controlled by the unerring instinct for order of motherhood, can people build meaningful lives.
This, then, is the true pathway home. But unlike the fools who insist that in a Keltic Twilight all original Keltic culture migrated to the Atlantic seaboard, we must accept that the inhabitants of these Isles, the most ancient of races, the most Western of the Kelts, taught newcomers — Angles, Saxons, Friesians, Franks, Normans — how to enrich their lives through good living with the Great Mother. That is why the great henges still stand in the West, and in the North. Those mnemonic exemplars function still. If only we would shut up and listen. But older still are the lost wooden henges of Norfolk and Suffolk. And oldest of all are the lost standing stones of Fenland, which were erected and sank, regularly over the aeons, and were replaced as they vanished throughout the time of the earliest dwellers. Like giant, pan-temporal clocks. Of these there is no apparent trace. In misty, liminal Cambridgeshire, where geographical features are relative, ditches and hills speak the spaces inbetween — the only vestiges of the true language that remain to mark the changes.
Aside from hiding the site of Boodika’s last battle, which the historians choose to ignore — a place I am not yet ready to divulge — Cambridgeshire’s other hidden treasure is its status as the true heir of Druid culture, the spoken culture, written in the mind, suggested by the land. Druid letters grow and decay with the generations of men and beasts and plants. The Druid College at Cambridge was cut down but grew again. So will the war ditches of West Anglia once again mark the extent of our East Anglia. The way in — call it Icknield, or Dragon Path — will be the way out for all wrong-placers.
Once we accept that identity is organic, we are close to producing an indigenous folk radicalism, one that opposes the false and abstract internationalism of the traditional radicals, the old dishonoured Left. If we accept that, it is just a short step to the understanding that localism, even familialism, is the most natural progression for the human race. A sweeping movement, from authoritarian statism to autonomous armed rural communities, is all it would take.
Regionalism is the first step, which is why I make my journey to wake in Histon, the home village of the East of England Development Agency. My positive wanderings and vigils will prepare the way for a consciousness change in the weak minds of those who trade in mind-games built on business, not on the strong, solid ground of belonging.
An awareness of one’s blood and soil doesn’t have to carry fascistic overtones of racism and ethnic supremacy. The swastika is a thing of beauty, pregnant with meaning for those who would but look. Separatism and regional identity, the only bases for proud, distinct cultures, provide a potentially dynamic force to change social relationships forever in this old, old lovely land.
Multiculturalism is of course a by-product of international capitalism, and should be by-passed. But I do not propose anything as crude as repatriation. Only a crude state asset would suggest that my brand of anarcho-regionalism is a precursor of anything approaching ethnic cleansing, whatever that impoverished tabloid phrase means. It’s time for the black flag of anarchy to march in step with the red cross of St George and the three-crown banner of East Anglia. We oppose a Euro-superstate and our poetical creed is enriched by a mythical vision. We fight centralisation and the trend towards world government. Identity must be preserved at all costs, otherwise we are nothing.
Anglia, both East and West, is being flooded with outsiders, wrong-placers. I know in my heart that they, poor lambs, will themselves be flooded out during the time of the return to Anglia of the misty waters. The deregulated building industry has raised its flimsy stud partitions on the cheap, low flood-ground. We, of course, the true-placers will simply retrieve our stilts and grin wryly.
We make inexorable progress towards a concept of human identity that goes beyond concerns about nation and race to the family and community, which is the backbone of the whole of humanity and creation. Each identity is autonomous and must be treated as an integral part of a healthy society. Come! To our homeland in its time of trial! Forward! Anglia arise!
This is the story of my returning. I made up my pack with bread, margarine, and good English apples. Then I left the filthy house in which I had been incarcerated. Its location must remain a secret for the time being, for if anyone were to find it before I could re-establish myself in another place they might, if they had knowledge of elder forces, gain power from scanning the prison that had bound me. Scraping together my leavings into witch-bundles would provide any Government Witchman with a source to track me down, control me. And then my spirit would be caught between places.
My exit from the Fenland bungalow was only possible because I had rid the foul dwelling of charms intended to impede my free movement. Within its walls, as I discovered by excavating the shoddy plaster walls, were carcasses of mice, many contorted horribly, possibly with sheer terror. Their tiny bodies had been mummified by air, and these amulets had been craftily arranged at intervals around the house. In the front garden I found teeth, possibly those of a horse. Whether they had been wrenched from its mouth while it still lived, or scattered after it had perished, I could not tell.
In the back plot was the body of a cat, hastily wrapped in fancy cloth and buried with grave goods: a flower, a pipe-cleaner figure of a man or woman, a stained photograph now unreadable. Every window was guarded by tiny, but cunningly located, insect bodies — spiders, woodlice, moths — each one retained a special meaning. All signs pointed to a grand scheme to prevent my leaving by means of magical apparatus. But I waited for the propitious time to destroy every last one of these emblems of official censure. And so I cleansed the place and made good my escape.
East Anglian dialect has many names for different kinds of pathways. Soft Paths may be ploughed periodically, but Hard Paths must never be dug up. I determined to walk to Cambridge shunning metalled roads and keeping to older trackways. Hard and Soft Paths. But I was careful to avoid magical routes. Through the East Anglian countryside run certain spirit paths, which are especially reserved for supernatural beings, whose names I am not prepared to reveal — true East Anglians will know their names already. With the way my luck has run recently I would most likely encounter unpredictable spirits. Even an adept of the East Anglian Path would be foolish to disturb the Old Ones.
So I walked to Cambridge following ancient furrowed tracks and I saw no one as I travelled on my way. In olden days men who chose the life of the road left signs in code for their fellows, to warn of harsh landowners or likely provisioners. But, as I expected, there were few secret signs left by travellers who had gone before, the craven minions of English Heritage and the Environment Agency had seen to that. No birds sung. The only company I encountered during my journey was a dog fox, who led me a full three miles before turning to hail me, before silently departing.
I came to town at the vernal equinox, Eostre, despite the best efforts of the curs of the Local Authority and the regional slaves of Westminster to prevent my arrival.
If bringing himself to spew forth seed in the confines of his cell, while imagining the return of the Old Gods to a fresh-flooded East Anglia, defines a man as obsessive, then I will happily admit to being obsessive. If cupping his hand to form a chalice to hold the generative liquid, then masticating it, forming a yeasty milk, and using this broth to compose secret letters, texts, treatises in the privacy of his own dwelling, means that a man is obsessive, then, yes, I am obsessive.
I am a mage, a digger, a prisoner, a freeman of Cambridgeshire. My true name is known only in the places I cherish. I was first born, as only a man can be, after which I was encrypted and deciphered in the slow oven of experience. A ley-finder, a farmer of sheep’s teeth, horse skulls, mummified cats.
Vapid planners of city streets and builders of rooming houses for the children of the elite cannot contain my perambulations. Drifting, circumventing, elipsing, all three modes of procession recreate elemental volution. The only satisfactory fashion in which to walk. Up Cambridge Mount at Dawn on the Shortest Day (Old Style), and then you’ll begin to understand. Via Queens Road — Boodika, not Victoria — through mist taken from source at Newnham.
The subtle divisions of the ancient City of Cambridge are not immediately revealed here atop the great mound of Cynta, navel of the Fens. But they become apparent on further inspection of the relationships between River, Mount, and Paths, the remaining nodes and forms of ancient sacred intersections. Paths, or roads as planners insist on calling new metalled routes for freight and human cargoes, make furrows in the land. But for too long older paths have been terminated or over-ridden by ugly foreign transport chains. These days, paths are created and given epithets that dissemble. Such redesignations go against East Anglian spirituality and seek to obliterate forever the elder network of pure straight and curly paths, which are, as it were, written.
In former times, paths led from spring to spring and rivers were paths in themselves. Therefore bridges are sacred. Making a crossing-place is a doubling of the local significance of water. Can you not see that the path that leads to the Mound, in crossing the path of shiny water, creates a division? On Cambridge Mound, the mount of Cynta, the River appears fixed. From the River, the Mound appears to move. These twinned, localised anomalies may never be resolved. This is just one of the many hidden reasons why the Druid College was established here by the elder British on the River Cam — or Cwm — named for its winding, and re-established in the 14th century. At the same that time elder carvings at Wandlebury were copied into the chalk under Royston, as a necessary counterbalance to the centrist all-England omphalos of Oxenford.
Of course, the place is double-named: Cwm and Cynta. And Cymry and Cambridge are both derived from the Brythonic “Combrogi”, which means “inhabitants of the same country”.
Centres are decided having first constructed the outskirts. Truly, the centre is to be found nearer to home. And if the blue and red triangles are lopped from the wretched Hanoverian flag, then we’ll see the centre moving still further towards the East. The Victorian East Anglian flag is a brave one, but it serves only as a homage to the Wulfingas, the upstarts, and as such cannot satiate a true East Anglian. Pictures of three crowns on a shield cannot become the thing itself. Know only that the first two crowns are destroyed, but the last of the three awaits my metal-detector and hasty trowel.
Youths emerged noisily from nightclubs and the houses of friends, amid the traffic, to sweep up the slopes of the holy hill to might smoke reefer and chill-out. I do not blame them. The place was often my refuge in more lonely times.
I silently left the ancient rise, noticing as I departed one preternatural boy separating the leaves of his cigarette papers with filthy brown fingers. I saw the blank, ductile grin of the ancient Roman brutes who put the Druid College to the sword and carried off men and boys as hairy courtesans for degenerate senators and to light the stadia of Gaul. Human torches, their fat bubbling louder than their sobs and sighs for home.
And when they were done, the Romans set to work recasting hills as shelters for Mithraic blood-gargling, recoding paths and rivers as trade-routes, using stone where wood had once gone softly. Rashly mimicking and totally misunderstanding the silent alphabetising of the soft, fenny parts by East Anglian Drwyds.
This night is ruined. I must hurry away before I’m recognized. But I will remember the lad’s face. Roman steel. And yet there is a flash of Angle, or perhaps an older set of features. A genetic re-run of the small fast earthworkers chased off by Keltic smiths? Perhaps. Maybe we see a slight rebirth, a coming forth of tribal characters to make good the spoil of Roman, Norman, European. Can miscegenation ever be put right? This question and other mysteries like it are the work of a lifetime.
A hurt young man, some 30 years ago, I crossed Mill Road Bridge as a diesel train passed beneath and everything trembled. I halted and turned to watch the carriages rock side to side as they were dragged out of town. There was no way I could go back. When I left my father’s house I took only the essentials. The keepsakes I left behind were suddenly worthless to me.
It was past 11:00, a bell chimed the quarter. I’d walked without consciousness and found myself on Parker’s Piece in drizzle sparkling from the light of Reality Checkpoint. I turned up the collar of my jacket to ward off the worst of the fine rain and cantered to a shop doorway. There was shouting coming from somewhere and two taxis pulled up at the main entrance to the University Arms Hotel.
I sat on my bag and watched the drivers as they watched the door for their fares and rolled a single skinner with tea-leaf sized remnants of Old Holborn and a match-head of hash. There was now a fine sleet and the air was growing colder still.
I ached for the ancient past. I dashed through town to the summit of the Mound, Mons Pubis Cantabrigensis. On the way I was abused and designated “cunt”. I was ready to become anything, take any shape. Atop the mound, I heard sounds of chanting rising from the Market Square. And somewhere an invisible man was softly whistling “A Scottish Soldier”.
I quickly brought myself to orgasm, kneeling back-arched, and spent my seed freely in the dark night wind, cursing the minions who sought to repress my desires. Exhibitionism is just a word used to curtail the natural power of the Keltic male.
I admit that the next few hours are a blank. When the meandering course of memory had run, the crossing-place forded in time and space, I came to myself and became aroused once more. You can liken this process to the small weir and lock at Lammas Land, where I suddenly found myself, and the extent of which I walked, before sitting and listening to the cows. The lock is filled to match the level of the higher of the two stretches of water. The remainder spills over the weir. So my mind caught up with events.
I revelled in my restraint and sat and listened to the town, grinning. The wood pigeons calling softly. The voices of other people sitting at the riverside rose in contrast to my own mind and the lulling rush of water over the weir.
The echoes of shouts reverberated around the high stone walls that embanked the slow river through town, and there were further splashes and laughter. Two kids walked past, hands in each other’s back pockets, carefully avoiding the cow pats as they snogged on the hoof, brushing away flies in the afternoon heat.
So, on the Eve of St Peter, the appropriate time for my vigil, my long absence from family burning in my head, I crept along the ancient soft green paths that characterise the dwelling places of the fen edge. I’d trodden softly, totally invisible, because of my mastery of the East Anglian Path, to all but a handful of domestic cats who, having sensed me, avoided me.
I danced from coppice to wood, from Rec to grassy verge, across the villages in between me and my goal, to wake in the grounds of Histon Church. Before long I was standing in the purple shadow of a proud East Anglian yew, the granddaughter, perhaps, of the old lady who guarded this site during the Middle Ages, and perhaps a cousin of the bright-leaved rowan or holly or oak who brooded over the Roman invasion. In this place I was to glimpse the way ahead.
It was through Histon that Boodika passed to trap the legions of Rome on the fen edge and destroy them. And through crooked Histon’s streets Hereward crept on raids into Norman-controlled territories. Histon is a spiritual point of intersection, a liminal place, like all Cambridgeshire places.
Some local historians still maintain that hills called Bel-something, including Bell Hill, on which Histon Church squats, and the many Belsar’s Hills — however they are styled — stem from the Norman war against Hereward the Wake, when King William II set up artificial mounds as forts, or platforms for signal fires.
Of course, the Norman bandits failed to capture Hereward, the famous invisible East Anglian patriot, but they won the war and tried to rename the land. So local mounds of significance were reinvented as symbols of Norman might, and were often later remembered as symbols of grotesque oppression. These hills and mounds were not a Norman invention, they were here long before the bastard Scandinavians from northern France intermarried with the stronger Kelto-Scandinavians who were here before them.
Some mounds have churches on them, from which timid local historians infer the transportation of church bells. They—those dim property-minded localists, and Victorian Vicars buoying up their schismatic faith—claim that these were hills up which the bells toiled before they tolled in towers across England. Let me speak softly, for it is night and I shall not irk the gentle moon. Bel was, and remains, the God of the Sun. In our lands, the hills aren’t high, but they are as near as we can get to Him.
Outsiders sneer at the very idea of Fenland hills. But I say that landscape features rising ten feet above the surrounding area, an area that only just rises above sea level, must be taken seriously as navigation points, or as significant places in themselves. These tumuli are, surely, relatively as significant as a barrow on any piece of hilly Downland. They were markers of habitation and mind in a landscape of mist and water. As standing stones on certain Scottish islands look out onto open sea, and may be said to beckon sailors or Old Gods home, so the mounds of Cambridgeshire look out on fen and flood. So I am beckoned.
In the early dawn, under the cover of soft, blue darkness, I shall creep into Vision Park on Station Road, Impington, Histon’s smaller neighbour. My own vision is clear. In the form of the otter, who claims both water and land as his natural dwelling, I shall find the building housing the East of England Development Agency and burst its seams with secret cursing, so that regional government cannot be contained within the bricks laid down by Whitehall.
After my precious work is done, I may disappear immediately. If, however, my present form holds true, and the paths open to receive me once more, I shall travel out of the land I love into exile. For no one shall ever know what I have done for East Anglia.
Till now I have acted impulsively, as it were hypnotised by the matter in hand. I have not slept since my vision came. And I must never tell, for dreams and thoughts can be caught in flight, and if that happened it would put out the eyes of my vision. And if my work is written, it certainly shall not
Neil Palmer, 2003
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.