I've
mentioned that when my present wife and I moved to Britain we settled
first in Somerset; more specifically in the town of Glastonbury.
There was nothing random or accidental about this, we had chosen the
destination after reading Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'Mists of Avalon' ,
an Arthurian fantasy novel set in and around that area.
Glastonbury,
for those of you who only associate the town with the gargantuan Folk
Festival of that name, is lousy with legends. Amid the ruins of
Glastonbury Abbey is a tomb reputed to have contained the bones of
Arthur and Guinevere.. Down at the end of one street, after you pass
by the shoe factory , is the Chalice Well Gardens, home of a natural
spring near which Joseph of Arimathea is rumored to have buried the
original cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper. Or it might have been
the Chalice of an altogether different and older legend, the mystical
object sought by Arthur's Knights, the Chalice of the Grail.
Beyond
the Gardens rises the roughly conical hill called 'The Tor' , crowned
by St. Michael's tower, all that is left of a small stone church that
once stood there. There's a great deal more but you get the general
idea.
We
had come to rent a cottage on the street with the shoe factory, sight
unseen; a lady with whom we had stayed on out first visit had sent us
a local paper with the ad when we were still in Manhattan making
plans. Imagine if you will our feelings when after a long and
uncomfortable plane journey followed by a train and a bus trip we
found said cottage- actually two smaller cottages combined into one,
both of them with a facade made out of plundered stones from the
ruins of the Abbey. Just a few minutes walk down the street was the
Chalice Well gardens, and when we walked through to the backyard,
there was the Tor, rising over the surrounding hills like a sentinel.
I
don't know if I can easily convey the sense of living in a dream
where everything seemed 'meant', fated, predestined. I was in my
forties, my wife fourteen years younger. We had no jobs, no work
permit, a six-month visa based on being respectively an artist and a
writer, and not much in the way of savings. The odd thing was, we fit
right in.
There
was of course a quotidian community, the butcher the baker the
candlestick maker, and an assortment of local farmers. When we began
to meet our neighbors, however, it became evident that there was a
sizable population of people like ourselves, people who had felt
drawn to this town, this place for a variety of reasons. We found
that it was common to speak of Glastonbury as though it was an
entity; people said that only certain people were able to stay, that
the 'energies' around Glastonbury made life unbearable for some and
impossible for others. There was no real Spiritual consensus- one
encountered anything from Indian mysticism to primitive Christianity
to outright Paganism, all tolerantly co-existing. Belief in
re-incarnation was common – it was a local joke that you could
shout 'Merlin' at the top of the High Street and take bets on how
many people turned around.
It
would be easy to characterize the Alternative community at that time-
the late 'Eighties – as a young Hippy enclave, but there were
elderly ladies and men who had settled in Glastonbury drawn by the
legends and history surrounding the Well and the Tor, and who viewed
the antics of the young with tolerant amusement. We met a few of them
when we began to visit Chalice Well gardens, and they made us welcome
as though we had been 'expected'. No one tried to proselytize or
convert us to their beliefs, and there was a general feeling that we
all were part of the same spiritual experience and it didn't matter
how one chose to express it.
What
made the difference was the Garden itself. Coming from America, and
especially Manhattan, we had no preparation for the special regard
the British have for growing things in the soil. All of the cottages
on our street had a back garden, and my totally urban wife whose
horticultural experience heretofore had been restricted to growing
pot in a window box, now found herself with an extensive bit of
English soil to cultivate. She threw herself into it with abandon,
and soon made friends with the Head Gardener at Chalice Well, who was
glad to share tips and plant samples. When he found that I was
looking for work 'off the books', he sent me to a local Landscape
firm who put me to work digging, weeding, and building ponds and
stone walls.( see banker mason)
Thus
we survived and found a home, and in due course the Great British
Government granted our appeal for Settled Status, along with
permission to work. Coincidentally, the Head Gardener decided to find
fresh fields to cultivate and I was offered his job, to be shared
with another chap. Let's call him Steve.
Steve
was from North Wales, a graduate of a horticultural college and hardheaded as only a
Welshman can be. He was quite bemused at first by the various sects
and cults who visited the Gardens; I'll never forget the look on his
face when about a dozen folks trooped in one day wearing white robes
with aluminum pyramids on their heads, chanting something
incomprehensible in unison.
Then
there was the Well itself. It originated in a spring which fed into a
circular stone well closed with an iron grating and an elaborately
fashioned lid. From there it meandered through the garden, ending in
a waterfall at the far end which fell into an reddish hued double
pool in the shape of a Vesica Pisces. There were at the time various
theories as to why the water of the Chalice Well colored everything
it touched red, but it was Steve who sent off a sample to the nearest
laboratory which determined that the color was caused by algae
absorbing the high iron content. This did nothing to endear him to
the more fervent believers.
In
fact, working in the Chalice Well Gardens was akin to having a job in
a circus. The crowds see the glitter and the glamour while behind the
scenes are the roustabouts and trainers and the fellow who has to
clean up after the lions and elephants. Steve and I mowed the lawns,
pruned and planted the beds, and repaired paths and seating areas. At
this time I was also working as a stone carver in a local reclamation
yard ( see banker mason ) and one day the custodians of the Gardens
asked me to make a copy of a little stone angel, a corbel from the
old Abbey, which had once lived above a stone seat until stolen.
There was only an old black and white photo to work from, but I found
some stone the right size and made as exact a copy as I could,
treating the stone to give it a patina of age . Steve and I installed it and mortared it in place using some old
weathered stones we found to compliment it, and there it rests to
this day. It gave me an odd feeling to see the offerings of fruits and flowers people began to leave around it.
I
came to believe that the aura of Glastonbury was at least partly the
result of the concentrated belief of all the people who year after
year came in search of spiritual sustenance. After all, stone was
merely stone, water was just water – wasn't it logical that so
much belief concentrated in one place could by itself produce
something akin to an electric charge fed into a battery? That would
explain places like Lourdes, and indeed Chalice Well also had its
share of miraculous cures and visions. I had a photo someone had
taken of my Autistic son (see An American Story) age five and a half standing motionless
looking down into the opening of the Well.. Mind you, he was known up
and down the street as the little stranger who would enter your
house, take off his wellington boots without a word, go into your
bathroom and stand staring into the toilet bowl as it flushed with
the same rapt attention, but who was I to ruin the photographer's
holiday? Besides, there was something about the Gardens,
especially in the early morning before the crowds arrived, the way
one can feel walking into an empty cathedral, an air of hushed
expectancy, of energy held in check. The trouble was, it was an
energy that could be used in other ways.
As
gardeners one of our less enviable tasks was to scrub down the
reddish algae before enough accumulated to form a problem. It was,
among other things, extremely slippery. Once a month, even the Well
itself needed cleaning. We would raise the secret lid on the old
valve alongside, and with a gush of tinted water the Well would
empty, whereupon we unbolted the grating , lowered a ladder, and
climbed down. Alongside the circular chamber of the well itself was
an adjoining five sided chamber where the actual spring gushed forth,
quite a respectable flow of water. No one knew who had built it; it
could have been Roman for all I could tell. The legend was that once
the chamber had stood above ground, and that gradually the land had
raised around it. From doing landscaping work I knew that this was
possible, and the reason why archaeology involves so much digging. In
any case it was an eerie place, the walls dripping and the large
squared stones encrusted with mineral deposits. Then at the bottom of
the Well itself were the things people threw into the water.
Mostly
money , of course, and I have to admit that one of the perks of the
job was gathering up the coins, laboriously sorting and cleaning
them and taking them to the bank. We told each other that presumably
whatever spiritual blessing they represented had nothing to do with
the coins themselves. I suppose the same sort of thing takes place in
any public well or fountain after hours. But this was Chalice Well,
and sometimes there were...other things.
Steve,
the hardheaded rationalist, was nevertheless a Celt to the core, and
once when we brought up a black diamond faceted crystal he refused to
touch it. There were little figures, also, that had been abused in
various ways. It sounds like nothing to tell it; after all, they were
only dolls, but encountering one while delving through the slime in
the semi dark with the drip drip drip from the ferns overhead was
like encountering a venomous spider. Anything of this nature we
brought to the Guardians (that is what they were called) to be
'cleansed.' From time to time, we were told, a local Clergyman would
come and perform an exorcism at the Well. All this was quite matter
of fact, the way you'd call in a plumber to clear the drains.
Is
it always the case that when belief and faith are concentrated
in one place there is a dark side? I don't suppose anyone really
knows, but it seems likely. I do know that when the time came to
leave Glastonbury for Wales where we now live both my wife and I
heaved a sigh of relief.