Teachers, like the past, can cast a long shadow. In my last year at primary school a teacher read us The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and introduced me to the work of Alan Garner and the mysterious (pre-WAG) world of Alderley Edge. I was so entranced by the story of Colin, Susan, Gowther Mossock, Cadellin Silverbrow and that company of knights sleeping in the heart of a hollow hill in Cheshire that I rushed out and read its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath.
Garner is a writer who has not had the credit he deserves. Partly because when he first came to public attention, with the publication of The Weirdstone in 1960, he was regarded as a poor man’s JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis, partly because he has not been a prolific writer, but mostly because he is a private man, who has suffered from manic depression for most of his life, who rarely gives interviews or attends book signings or turns up on the sofa of daytime TV.
He was born in his grandmother’s front room – “with the cord wrapped twice round my throat” – in 1934 and educated at Alderley Edge primary school, Manchester Grammar and Magdalen College, Oxford.
He did two years’ national service in the Royal Artillery, spent a short time as a researcher at Granada Television and then became a full time writer.
After Elidor, the third of his children’s fantasy books, he wrote The Owl Service, a quite different sort of novel, about Alison, Roger and Gwyn, inspired by that old Welsh legend in The Mabinogion about Lleu Llaw Gyffes, his wife Blodeuwedd and her lover Gronw Pebyr.
Then he wrote Red Shift (1973) with three interlinked present tense narratives set around the same hill, Mow Cop, in Roman Britain, the Civil War and contemporary times; Strandloper (1996) about a Cheshire bricklayer transported to Australia in 1801 who lived as an Aboriginal for 31 years; and Thursbitch (2003) in which the death of a packman called John Turner in the 18th century affects the relationship of Ian and Sal in the 21st.
Garner subtitled The Weirdstone “A Tale of Alderley” and prefaced his story of the Journey from Highmost Redmanhey with a three-page version of The Legend of Alderley. Now, 50 years later, he returns to that story in By Seven Firs and Goldenstone, the beautifully printed version of a paper given three years ago to the Temenos Academy, an educational charity which grew out of the journal launched by Kathleen Raine in 1980.
“If this is your land, where are your stories? With these words a tribal elder defended his people against the grasp of state officials in British Columbia. He invoked a uniquely human quality: our ability to derive a sense of belonging through oral tradition; to create relationships with place through story.”
Garner goes on to explain how his grandfather told him a story, about “a farmer living down Mobberley, and he has him a white mare, and he must go take this mare to sell at Macclesfield market.” Which he does, from Thieves’ Hole by Seven Firs and Goldenstone to Stormy Point and Saddlebole where there’s a rock, and a cave, “and it’s full of knights in armour, snoring, and their heads against a white horse each, except one.”
The Legend of Alderley, which Garner used to kick start his career as a writer with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, is a version of the myth of the sleeping hero.
But by examining the topography of this part of the Edge, by analysing the Old English place names, by understanding Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Iron Age culture, he explains how “in the Legend we are dealing not only with a physical but also with a spiritual topography.” Why did the farmer make the journey this way? “I found my answer in the land, because the land itself is a narrative. The reworking of oral tradition and the reworking of landscape go hand in hand; and the mare and the man are one.”
Alan Garner, as well as being a fine writer, is an excellent teacher, too.
