Introduction

Kineburn is the fictional name for my actual childhood home, Swinsty Hall, in the Washburn Valley, between Otley and Harrogate.  In the 17th century the housekeeper there was accused of witchcraft, along with a great many other women in the valley, by Edward Fairfax.  

Edward Fairfax was the half brother of Thomas, who had achieved very high office in the 17th century, but Edward was also well known and esteemed as a poet and translator.  His accusations against the ‘Timble Witches’ are written down in his book ‘Daemonologia’.  His daughters had strange hallucinations and went into trances and he believes these were caused by the witches. However, none of the women hanged for their alleged crimes.  Perhaps some of the supposed witchcraft in the valley was ergot poisoning, since one man is said to have lost a foot to gangrene within a day or two of having been touched by one of the women, but we do not know what caused the mass hysteria, really.  Certainly Fairfax was a very intelligent man and it seems odd he went in for such silliness. 

I changed the name of the Housekeeper as I wanted to protect her reputation.  I don’t mention the poet and translator by name in the story, likewise, as they are dead and can’t defend themselves.  I do libel all sorts of living people though.  So don’t grass me up. 

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Daemonologia.html?id=tU86FmOJpS4C&redir_esc=y

Chapter one

Oh! let us never, never doubt

What nobody is sure about! – Hilaire Belloc

Chapter One

Virginia woke suddenly from her dream. Someone had said something, clearly, in a deep, man’s voice, she knew it was part of the dream. But this sense of certain voices as external, and real, had been something she’d experienced since her childhood and she could never quite believe these voices were not the voice of God or some angel or other more dangerous spirit, even if the word or words they uttered were mundane.

Phoebe the beautiful, kind Swiss Shepherd was lying heavily across the bottom of the bed, still fast asleep and cutting off the blood supply to Virginia’s legs, so they too were fast asleep. Perhaps the voice had been warning her to get up and stamp about to cure the pins and needles. Suddenly the need to do so became urgent, so she heaved her legs from under Phoebe and flung her feet on the floor standing wobbly and stamping up and down on the ancient Turkey carpet, to get the blood flowing again. The turkey carpet was originally from Virginia’s childhood home. It had come from a sale in Bradford and had been wearing thin in parts when Virginia was a child. Now it had a fine coating of dog hair all over it. Virginia had not been in the mood for housework, lately.

Today was October the 31st, Virginia had been holding this day aloft in her imagination, since June. In the days of midsummer heat and the garden at its best, the days of the Kiftsgate rose on the Wellingtonia tree in full bloom sending its scent across the village, and the last of the sweet rocket, glowing ethereally in the fading evening light of 11 pm, wafting its heady perfume to the moths, in competition with the honeysuckle, Virginia had envisaged this day. Perhaps she’d been corny and stereotypical in her imaginings. The sort of woman her opponents would think typical of her age and background and educational limitations. But she had seen this day as a large horse-chestnut leaf, glowing yellow with a few raindrops on it, she’d seen it as blue sky between the fat fingers of the palmate leaf. She’d imagined it accompanied by crumpets made on the long, brass, extending toasting fork, over the open fire in the drawing room. She’d imagined those sooty crumpets washed down with a glass of Bateman’s ‘Victory’, the finest real ale in England, despite its being brewed in Lincolnshire rather than Yorkshire. The season might not be properly underway at the local butchers, but she’d also imagined it as a deep game pie, with game chips and redcurrant jelly, taken with the best of her homemade elderberry wine, poured from a crystal decanter. It should have been Brexit day, but for the third time that year it wasn’t. And Virginia was bloody mad.

A long chapter in which you get to know Virginia through her past and upbringing

At the beginning of 2016, New Year’s Day, in fact, Virginia had closed down her Facebook. She had known all her ‘friends’ would be voting the opposite way in the referendum and she couldn’t bear the thought of the six months of feeble arguments made by vaguely left wing know nothings, who until yesterday had not cared anything about how the EU Parliament operated, or what any of the supposed benefits of Britain’s membership were. She had not been reunited with any of her old school friends in the flesh, so she still imagined them as they were in their teens, all highlights and ‘Lady Di’ hairstyles. And this perhaps helped. If she’d seen them, grey, getting wrinkly and thick round the middle, she might have been tempted to think their arguments worth considering. As it was their drivel had the disadvantage of coming out of the childish mouths of more than thirty years ago, in her imagination, teenage mouths, which might at any moment break into a mindless song by Madonna or Lionel Ritchie.

Virginia knew she was a pompous and insufferable old bag, but she regarded this as a positive characteristic, rather than a flaw. When she was 14 her English teacher had told her that she was a harridan. When Virginia had told her mother, her mother had agreed.

Virginia was not against ignorant prejudice per se, Burke had regarded it as an important part of the democratic process, and Roger Scruton had explained this positive view of prejudice clearly and turned it into something admirable and virtuous. But the trouble was that the sort of irritating vaguely left, woolly minded women Virginia was acquainted with rejected the idea of natural prejudice as a sort of herd instinct which ensured safety, so why should Virginia allow them to make use of it? They believed their own prejudices were ‘reason’ and ‘enlightened thinking’ and ‘working things out in a sensible, rational way’. So they would attempt to make arguments, and these would be moronic and irritating. She would miss one or two other people she had somehow got to know through Facebook, without having ever met them in real life. But it was easier to imagine you liked people you had never met, than it was to imagine that people you had met long ago and had never really liked had turned into likeable people, with the passage of time.

The process of downloading all her data and photographs from Facebook had taken a while and given Virginia food for thought, so much had been recorded, seemingly in perpetuity, her every thought, her every typo. All those arguments with lefties, all the poems she’d written as a way to try to be different from her ‘friends’, who posted about their dull and boring lives, complete with selfies. So many versions of herself. That was the odd thing. The person she had pretended to be, in order to disguise the reality of who she was. The same old schoolgirl way of hiding her strange ideas and habits from her peers.

Of course Virginia had selfies too, hundreds of the damned things, all of which she had hated at the time and had wondered why she’d hated a few months later. But social media had made her anxious and obsessed with her appearance, she’d started starving herself the moment she opened her account, her blood pressure had become ridiculously low and her migraines more frequent. Still, selfies didn’t give the game away, nobody could see her political convictions or the malign intent in her face. Her thoughts had grown self-obsessive, but also she had started fixating on how much she disliked many of her ‘friends’ and fantasising about how she would disrupt their real lives, rather than just deleting them from her list of contacts.

And the fantasies had grown into mischief making, of the sort she had not properly indulged since her marriage. Virginia considered herself to be a witch, as her mother had, one of a long line of women with that gift, who had lived at Kineburn. And her mischief making had started to produce some small results, though nothing too serious, well only one incident, which might not have been Virginia after all.

But the end of the obsession with Facebook had not resulted in the end of compulsive obsessive behaviour with regard to the internet. Virginia had opened a Disqus account and ever since she had been carrying on lengthy political arguments in the comments sections under articles in the conservative press. But at least these were with people who wished to think about the political future, not just to cling to the idea of a benevolent bureaucracy, because they imagined their children might, at some point, like to go and work in Europe. Virginia liked these online communities, consisting of intelligent people she didn’t have to care about. Though she was rather too quick to curse politicians and other public figures in her posts, if these were also somehow kept in perpetuity as it seemed every key stroke could be, there must be nothing to link any funny business involving the unexpected demise of those unfortunate targets of Virginia’s ire, to her wishes expressed online.

Sometimes though Virginia liked to make a comment as part of a general conversation in the more popular editions, just to see how she fared among her fellow men and if her opinions were within the ‘normal range’ as it were. Often these occasions passed without incident, as Virginia was a fairly old fashioned conservative in most ways, but one day Virginia had discovered hers to be the most downvoted comment in the online edition of the Mail. It took Virginia days to get over this event, since she had not been actively trolling, far from it. She had merely recounted a true story, underneath a rather sad one about kangaroos. The story had featured a kangaroo husband, as it were, grieving over his kangaroo wife who had been killed in an RTA. Virginia had merely mentioned that only the previous week she had eaten kangaroo steaks for the first time, which she had bought at Lidl. She had described them briefly and explained how tender they had been and expressed sorrow at having broken the kangaroo-free habit of a lifetime so recently and vowed she would never have done it if she’d known kangaroo husbands grieved over their kangaroo wives. It was quite astonishing how mad several thousand people seemed to be about it.

Virginia had made a rookie error on the occasion of the Kangaroo steaks comment: she tried to justify her original remark, to explain it, to say her sorrow was heartfelt and genuine. This is what conservatives often did when progressives accused them of thought crimes. But Virginia was a beginner at this stage though she knew one must learn from one’s mistakes. After failing miserably to justify her remark by trying to explain her years of veganism, she realised it was all pointless. There was no defence, whatever the intention behind anyone’s remark was, that intention was irrelevant, communication had become not the responsibility of the communicator, but the responsibility of the communicatee, as it were. Once your remark had escaped your mouth or flown from your fingers, it no longer belonged to you. You could be made to own it as a mark of shame, you could be downvoted and insulted and held in contempt by the world for having made it, but you didn’t possess it in the sense that you could clarify it, the world owned what it meant. And if the world decided that what you had meant by your expression of sorrow over having eaten a kangaroo steak, was actually an expression of callous laughter at a male kangaroo grieving over his dead wife, then that is what you had intended to express. Let’s face it, in confessing to having tried a kangaroo steak once, you had, to all intents and purposes, pleaded guilty to having run the kangaroo over yourself.

The trouble with this new way of going on was that it did not lead to a ‘kinder gentler politics’ which was the supposed aim of the lefty liberal progressives, it led to people like Virginia taking entrenched positions and doubling down. Virginia had no intention of opening a kangaroo steak bar which served stir fried baby Koala and Eucalyptus leaves as a starter, and gave away pints of Castlemaine 4X with every meal, but were she to experience the same reaction to her unfortunate comment again, this would now be her reply.

Virginia had followed politics all her life. She remembered her mother shouting at the transistor radio, tuned to radio 4, in the kitchen of their cold, Elizabethan house, Kineburn, when she was three or four years old. Radio 4 had figured so

much in her early childhood, that one of the larger knots in one of the floorboards of the playroom had been named Pauline Bushnell, after the woman who read the news. Virginia could not remember her ‘reason’ for having named the knots in the floorboards. But with hindsight she recognised that her child-self had understood the power of naming things.

Virginia could remember her mother explaining what the coal strike was about in the early seventies, and why they were cold as a result, also about why there was no sugar as a consequence of secondary picketing, so that a cup of hot, sweet tea would not make up for the lack of heat being emitted from the Rayburn, currently burning damp sticks from the beech woods. These days Virginia assumed the real reason behind the lack of sugar was that her parents were often both skint and disorganised. But she recognised the determination in her mother, who’d been a teacher, to turn every chance conversation into an educational opportunity and means of inculcating political thought in her children.

As a child Virginia couldn’t really understand why her mother settled for merely cursing out loud the politicians on the radio. Her mother had long known her power to curse more effectively than that.

Virginia also remembered the first referendum on Common Market membership. The reason it had stuck in her head all this time, though she was only 5 when it took place, was because she associated it with her mother having a row with a real person, not just the radio. She didn’t care a fig for the real person, a writer, amateur musician, literary critic and historian, a friend of her father’s. But she cared for his dog, Toddy.

Toddy had been the first dog in Virginia’s life, cats had been around from the beginning, carted about under her arm, like bags, or chased on the orange Space Hopper. There had been the occasional toad, too, and frogs in abundance, gathered in buckets during the mating ‘piggy-back’ season. There had been mice, occasionally, mostly flea ridden and reluctant to play at ‘Hunca Munca’ in the dolls’ house, and at one time a Jackdaw, Jackie. But never a dog of her own. Not until her early teens, when Freddy had started to appear at about the same time as the onset of her migraines and Virginia had begun to wonder if she had inherited her mother’s gift.

Although Toddy came only a few times a year to visit, his visits were wonderful. Virginia realised dogs were going to feel as necessary to her well-being and self-confidence, as other creatures seemed. Toddy was a black and white collie and a completely marvellous dog. His ability to leap gracefully over the high, dry stone walls to retrieve his rubber ball from a patch of nettles on the other side, without a care in the world, and bring it back to Virginia’s feet to be thrown again, never ceased to satisfy. Whatever happened, this man, who loved the Common Market and was going to vote ‘yes’, must not be driven away by her mother’s ranting in favour of sovereignty, the nation state and trade with Australia and New Zealand.

Virginia, seated on the low stone wall at the edge of the York stone path, beside a large fern, sprouting in it, examined the crusty pale grey lichen and Toddy’s blue-green ball, the colour of the spine of the Ladybird book ‘Rumplestiltskin’, and prayed, most earnestly, for the return of her father. Only with his return would the row end and her mother go back to peeling potatoes, apparently calmly, for the shepherd’s pie. Virginia’s mother often sat, thus, as her antecedent, Alison Carter, Kineburn’s housekeeper in the early 17th century probably had, in the same spot, escaping from the damp and cold that seeped through the flags of the north facing kitchen. Here one was warmed up again, on the ancient wooden bench beside the ‘Japonica’, in the thin sunshine where it fell on the central section of the south facing front of the house, under the transomed and mullioned windows. Sometimes Virginia’s mother was flushed with the heat of the sun, today she was pink with political anger.

It was as much to honour her late mother that Virginia had taken up the ‘Brexit’ cause so enthusiastically. The arguments she would make were the ones she imagined her mother would have approved.

Her mother had been a great supporter of Mrs Thatcher, and this of course was a tricky problem, since Britain owed its entry into Europe, partly to Maggie’s campaigning. But Maggie, the same age as Virginia’s mother, had also grown Eurosceptic pretty quickly and had fought for the rights of the country, putting it first and winning the rebate which had made Britain’s membership at least a little less onerous during those years of high unemployment and recession. Still, Maggie’s early enthusiasm for the Common Market was always dragged up by the more knowledgeable commentators with whom Virginia spent the day bickering online. So far, she had not indulged herself by using any of her powers on her Disqus opponents. Their arguing helped shape her own political arguments and without anyone to counter one’s ideas one could grow lazy. Besides which so many of these people used false names, she could not get a handle on them.

This business of Maggie having been so much in favour of the Common Market, and the way Virginia had to deal with this painful fact, caused her to realise that she was having to make her own ideas jump through hoops and twist and turn until they came out satisfactorily. She did not like admitting this, even to herself, because she knew it was what smug left wing types did, when faced with the contradictions in their own, woolly thinking, particularly with regard to the Labour Party’s long, principled opposition to the Common Market, EEC and so on. The realisation that she was going through the same cognitive motions as feeble minded ‘progressives’ sat uneasily with Virginia’s version of herself as a thinker with a more honest, straightforward and generally superior mind than these complicated, deluded ‘liberals’.

Virginia knew she was an old bag, but she liked to believe she was an honest old bag, on the whole. She believed her political opinions were based on her experiences and upbringing and bound up with the people she knew and part of her character. She could not believe that so many of her old friends, brought up in relative luxury, in the wealthiest houses and neighbourhoods, in the upmarket town where they’d gone to school, had become such rampant socialists out of any other instinct than contrariness. But then perhaps contrariness had been just the first step. The great difference between Conservatives and Liberals was the old ‘man, in general, not men in particular’ thing. Socialist ideology was always somehow beneficial for man in general, the great one size fits all, elastic waisted cor-blimey trousers ideology (though it didn’t live in a council flat so often, these days) but barely ever men, in particular. Except for the grasping, the crooked, the ones prepared to game whatever system had been imposed by the state in pursuit of one of these ideological goals. And this was true of the remain/leave divide too. Remainers were idealists, and yet at the same time they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Leavers knew all the practical faults with the EU and that the ideal of undivided Sovereignty was more important than all the airy-fairy ideals of the EU, which did not work. Virginia knew all the clichés too. But that was as much in the nature of being a conservative as being a cynic, a hypocrite and a woolly-minded idealist was in the nature of being a lefty.

All through the eighties Virginia had been a fan of Mrs Thatcher. She didn’t care about the high level of unemployment, or the end of nationalised industry, as her friends pretended to. She couldn’t be bothered with the problem of the riots, her existence was rural, it did not encompass ‘inner city’ living at any level. She regarded Socialists as being as silly as Rick from ‘The Young Ones’ and found it odd they did not regard themselves as a joke. How had being like that fictional, infantile, political caricature become the way that so many people had decided it was necessary to be, in real life?

Virginia had had a black friend at school, a huge girl from the children’s home, Shaz. Virginia wondered, with hindsight if she had been a lesbian. She had taken on the role of Virginia’s chief defender against the nasty girls in the lower streams in the years above. She had taken Virginia to her bus stop and had promised to ‘smack’ all the girls who had made Virginia’s school life miserable. Virginia had only been at the start of her journey of discovery into the extra-natural powers she had inherited, at this point. She was not yet capable of defending herself.

This one girl was the only example of a black person Virginia had to draw on, in her teens, and she didn’t imagine every member of her race was quite as marvellous as Shaz. Virginia closed her mind to the politics of the race riots for the most part, therefore, and the inner city, and did not allow them to influence her view of Conservative thinking.

Virginia met another, very beautiful black girl, in her early twenties. Virginia wondered with hindsight if she herself were perhaps a lesbian, so taken was she with this young woman, who was learning to type and ‘word process’ on the same course as Virginia. She was originally from the British Virgin Islands, which of course had a ‘nominative’ appeal. The woman, Rochelle, was married to a chap who was serving two, consecutive life sentences in a Florida prison for aggravated burglary with an Oozy automatic. Rochelle had two children and did not believe in keeping their father’s whereabouts a secret from them, despite the fact they were only three and four years old. Rochelle lived with her mother on a very rough council estate in Leeds, but on the morning after Mrs T was forced out of office, she came into the common room of the building where the typing course took place in tears and announced “I will never be able to put my little cross for Maggie, again.” Virginia knew then she had been right not to bother considering race, in relation to politics. People were just people and political opinions were not connected to levels of melatonin.

Virginia had found the other women on her typing course interesting too, though she considered them to be common. Virginia still made full use of the word common. It had been replaced with ‘chav’, and the Guardian had taken up the American term ‘poor, white trash’. Virginia hated both of these. They didn’t encompass any of the subtlety of ‘common’. It was possible to be poor and not common. Common did not denote poor. Virginia had also noticed that being common was not a result of upbringing, since some of the most common women one saw in the supermarkets, their tattooed flesh spilling out of too tight clothes, sometimes had graceful, sweet, good mannered children. One could be rich and common, like footballers and their wives, too. And of course, women like Virginia were not supposed to use the word anymore, it was bigoted and snobbish - yes of course it was, that was the point. Yet somehow it was acceptable for one’s political opponents to use these new, much worse words and phrases. Virginia, therefore put the word to good use in all her online trolling. Virginia considered one of the female MPs campaigning to be party leader, after Cameron’s resignation, to be ‘common’. She was certainly not a ‘chav’, or ‘poor, white trash’, but every English woman of Virginia’s age and background knew she was a little bit common: had she been a bit more common, they would have regarded her as ‘a breath of fresh air’.

None of the very common women on Virginia’s typing course, as far as she could recall, had been as fond of Maggie as Rochelle had been, but they were very funny and straightforward and sensible. Though some of the things they described were dreadful. Despite Virginia’s familiarity with some of the darker aspects of mischief making, and some of the things she had witnessed in dreams, she was still shocked. One of the women had claimed to have seen a snuff movie and another to have been to a sex show on the Costa del Sol, where a woman had inserted a whole bottle of Newcastle Brown into her vagina. Virginia did not dare to ask if the bottle had been empty, so she had had the horrid sensation of imagining the jagged, zig zag edge of the lid, tearing the internal flesh, which had caused her to cross her legs and moan out loud, making the other, cruder, older women laugh. Another of the women had been an agent for Anne Summers and brought her catalogue and sometimes her wares into the college as if they were Tupperware. Virginia realised she was both a puritan and a prude, but also felt there was something rather wonderful about these women who were not. She remembered the lessons she had learned about people in general, by talking to these particular women on her course, for many decades after she had forgotten whatever it was she had learned about ‘word processing’.

In her teens, Virginia had hated Scargill and the miners, feeling no sympathy for them, for they all had new cars. Her father had had to make his living as an artist and one of the things Virginia had often been bullied over was the ancient Rover 3.5 litre Coupé, which her father had driven. There had been times when they were relatively hard up, and he had needed to supplement his income by dealing in antiques. There had been one period, about the same time as the miner’s strike, or perhaps a little earlier, when things had been quite bad and some of the good furniture that had been a constant part of their lives, as long as Virginia could remember, had had to be sold. Often there had been a Volvo, belonging to an antique dealer outside Kineburn when Virginia returned home from school. She had started to dread the sight of a Volvo with a roof rack, knowing it probably signified the end of some lovely 18th century piece she had not known she had loved, until it was about to be taken away. When Virginia had first read ‘I Capture the Castle’ she had thought Dodie must have spied on her family, using their goings on as material and inspiration: their freezing cold, Elizabethan house, with the washing strung up between the beams in the undercroft kitchen, and their once famous father now finding it hard to make ends meet and selling their belongings. Still, at least antiques had been valued in those days, unlike at the present time.

With hindsight Virginia wasn’t sure about the way the Tories had dealt with heavy industry and mining, in her teens. As an adult she had moved from the cold, damp, miserable climate of North Yorkshire to a former mining country. And on reading the introduction to the Yorkshire editions of Arthur Mee’s ‘The King’s England’, the precursor to Pevsner, during her local history obsession, she had felt suddenly dreadfully sad at the thought of the huge loss of industry and productivity in the north, which had come about as a result of Thatcher’s reforms. Of course, the Labour Party had shut down more pits than the Tories, but if they had acted badly it was, Virginia felt, only to be expected. She wanted her own side’s behaviour to be exemplary and felt annoyed when there were things she could not defend.

Former mines were now golf courses, which seemed dreadfully insulting to the former miners; these days it wasn’t even tossers in Pringle jumpers and pale coloured trousers who strolled in bi-coloured brogues over what had been the place of honest, dreadful, life threatening toil for several generations of fathers. It was just tossers in hideous, modern sportswear. Virginia wasn’t sentimental, she’d read ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, but it almost seemed as if this ‘leisure industry’ which appeared to have taken over where the pits had been, by chance, or ‘market forces’ was actually planned, and a peculiar kind of cocking a snook, by ‘her side’ at the generations of men who’d voted Labour.

Many of the other mines were just shopping centres. Where the miners’ strike had begun at Cortonwood, there was the usual, drab out of town collection of mediocre stores, selling middle of the range and cheap clothing, DIY materials and groceries and so on. The big wages which the miners had received in recompense for their filthy jobs had been replaced with low ones for their daughters and granddaughters, who were now employed selling Asian made clothes, and Chinese made tools, which they didn’t really need, to each other, at lowish prices. At Castleford the mine had become a ski slope with all-year-round indoor snow. King Coal who had kept the north warm for several centuries had been drummed out of town and the Snow Queen and, ironically, all the energy that was required to keep her in existence had taken his place. That seemed the biggest insult of all. Every child knew the Snow Queen was no good and that old King Coal was a merry old soul. Who cared about spelling on such occasions? How many times in her own life had King Coal called Virginia to his glowing side to cheer her along and keep her muscles warm as she struggled through some bit of Bach partita, which required one to sound like fiddlers three?

Virginia decided this nastiness by ‘her’ political side must have had something to do with Ken Clarke. She would have liked to blame it on Michael Hessletine, too since both those men were the ‘Remainer’ enemy now, but she knew that Tarzan had done a bit of good with regard to northern areas and had at least tried to repair a little of the damage or perhaps make amends for it and she wouldn’t get away with blaming all the old crap on him. Whenever possible Virginia just asserted as a ‘well known fact’ that it was Ken Clarke, who’d been partly responsible, in her online bickering, until it started to be accepted and she saw others repeating it.

This business with what the Tories had got wrong in the eighties gave Virginia more serious pause for thought. If she had been wrong to wholly endorse the Tory’s approach to industry, when it was happening, what if she were wrong to wholly endorse Brexit? What if the bastards on the other side had a point, should they be spared the fate she was planning for them? But Brexit, she decided was in a different category, for her sort it was not about economics, besides, prevarication and shades of grey were not the order of the day.

Perhaps after Brexit people would start to value old, well made, cabinet furniture again, as symbolic of the nation’s history and what we had done well. Virginia had been a collector all her adult life, starting in her teens at jumble sales and car boot sales and progressing to odd chairs at the auction houses. This was another reason to champion the Brexit cause, she had regarded all her possessions as ‘investments’ as a justification for indulging her hobby, just as her father had. During the Blair years, the ‘Cool Britannia’ idiocy had resulted in a fashion for modern, poorly made, but expensive rubbish and Cameron as the ‘heir to Blair’ had done nothing to encourage the real ‘conservative’ values which might have led to a growth in interest in traditional things. What a useless man Cameron had been. She had not been seriously tempted to make mischief, though. One couldn’t just indulge oneself willy-nilly with everyone whom one despised. He had suffered enough with his disabled son. Virginia’s son had sculpted two models of Cameron’s face in ‘Plastiroc’, as the basis for a latex mask he was making. The resemblance had been marvellous, her boy having inherited her father’s artistic skill. She could have made use of it for a little ‘voodoo’ of her own but resisted the temptation.

And without Cameron there would have been no referendum and no opportunity to correct the mess of the last forty years. No chance to try and put things right for Mummy.

Virginia knew one must try and see the good in everyone, but she had found it increasingly hard to see the good in certain politicians over the last three years and her thoughts about what should become of them often resembled the thoughts she’d had about her Facebook ‘friends’. The difference was that Virginia knew she could never really carry her fantasies about her old ‘friends’ to extremes, only cause a little pain and disruption. Something about who they’d been in their teens, when they were funny and full of hope prevented her from taking her murderous ideas any further. But she did not feel the same about the politicians, whom she had not known and could not imagine as ever having been anything but utter shits. Of course, some of them may have had children, who would be distraught at the suffering of their parents, but that, she could convince herself, was a price worth paying. Collateral. She was beginning to seem like a cold, hard Communist, even to herself.

A medium sized chapter that sets a scene

Now that she was properly awake, Virginia pulled back the green damask curtains. The shutters were not necessary now, and Virginia only really used them in the severe cold. The day itself was not as Virginia had imagined, the sky was the usual autumn mixture of soft duck egg blue-grey and smoky grey. Not the azure shade she’d had in mind. The particular shade she’d had in mind was more of a North Yorkshire hue. The particular shade the sky was in reality was specific to the neck of the woods in which Virginia currently resided. The grass was long and lumpy, the borders filled with the dried stalks of golden-rod, teasels, acanthus and even some of the tatty remains of the Onopordum Nervosum; Virginia had not bothered gardening over the autumn. She’d got more and more low spirited as the year had progressed and the prospect of the nation regaining its sovereignty had grown further and further away.

Phoebe jumped off the bed and came to lean against Virginia’s side, sending silent, telepathic sympathy to Virginia.

Virginia started to dress and wondered if there was a particular set of clothes which would be more suitable for committing murder in. Was it going to be murder, would she go the whole hog, or stop short, pull back, as she had before? In the end, Virginia simply pulled on what she had worn yesterday, a pleated wool, tweed skirt, which had belonged to her mother.  She stopped a moment, in proceedings, considering why she felt she needed to dress for the role at all. She wasn’t acting, her skills were the same, whatever clothes she wore. Still, she pulled on a v necked T shirt and her a black cashmere jumper, from a charity shop, which drained all the colour from her face and flung a full length teal coloured, mohair cardigan, which she’d bought at the vintage shop, on top; it made her eyes glow, cat-like. She rummaged in a drawer of an ancient mahogany chest on chest, for clean underwear and tights and shoved her feet into her old brown brogues. Lord knows what all the blonde, would-be Lady Dianas would make of her now, but since she had stopped Facebook, she hadn’t really given a damn about her appearance. After a while Virginia decided this rag bag assortment of ancient clobber was probably the most suitable attire. Slightly smelly, uncoordinated, every day, woolly garb, of this sort was exactly the kind that any reclusive old bag would have worn when causing trouble, down the centuries.

Phoebe bounded ahead of Virginia down the stairs, leaving white hairs and dust and soil on the dark stained, deal surface. The children had left for work and college long ago, the house was empty apart from the senile cat, who had started howling like a Siamese, demanding food for his round worms.

The kitchen was warm from the Aga, the ancient refectory table was covered in clutter, yesterday’s plates mixed up with treen fruit bowls, the two, huge arts and crafts, brass pricket stands, probably made for a Church altar, a bread board, a cheese board, the lazy Susan. The cups from last night’s final drink of cocoa were still in position, squatting fatly round the edges of the table, so many chamber pots, awaiting the ‘Inspector of the King’s Stool’. The dregs down the side of each cup made this fleeting thought more real in Virginia’s mind, so she whisked them into the dishwasher, upside down, where the cocoa was out of sight. The cat leaped up and stepped delicately between the crockery, keeping up his howling for breakfast. Catching sight of what looked like a grain of rice, sticking to his tail Virginia grabbed a piece of kitchen roll and removed it, quickly shoving the cat onto the floor with a deft motion, simultaneously. Whatever she liked to imagine her heritage to be, Virginia found it difficult to tolerate the more unhygienic aspects of the feline race.

Thinking of the cups arranged around the table reminded Virginia of the one occasion when her half-brother, on her mother’s side, had experienced the strange power of the spirits at work at Kineburn. He was twenty years Virginia’s senior and lived in the upstairs part of a south facing wing of the house. He was a cabinet maker and furniture restorer, the downstairs rooms he used as his workshops. The floor of his workshop was always strewn with shavings and splinters and the sandings of old and new furniture, it was this that had taught Virginia, in her childhood, the value of antiques as receptacles of other’s lives and hopes, containers of the particles of other ancient souls, who had used them and loved them.

Mostly the slivers were benevolent, allowing limited access, in dreams, to the ordinary pasts of ordinary people. But sometimes one found a sliver of something that had witnessed violence, brutality, or deep sadness. Perhaps a splinter from a wainscot chair, which had been the waiting place for a wife, whose drunk husband was violent on his return. Perhaps a shaving from an old half tester bed, where a woman and her baby had died in childbirth or of the fever, later. Once Virginia had entered these scenes from long finished lives by way of some sliver or shaving or even woodworm dust, she seemed able to enter those ancient lives again, without a key, always in dreams, which were not really dreams, and always in flight.

Virginia and her mother could never tell which piece of furniture in the workshop had opened the gateway to the strong spirit, which had physically moved several of the logs from the woodpile by the open fire to sit around the table, in her brother’s flat, in front of each unwashed plate, as if the logs were men, engaged in conversation.

Because Virginia’s brother was as fond of a spliff as the next ‘Baby Boomer’ they were never sure whether the arrangement was the work of his own hands or a real poltergeist. Whatever the truth, the effect had been rather disturbing. And her brother refrained a little in his drinking and smoking after that, for a time.

Phoebe was now running around the smaller 17th century gate-leg table, in the kitchen, widdershins, her usual way of asking for breakfast. Virginia dolloped out the tinned chunks in gravy into the grubby dog bowl and topped up the water. The gate-leg table was the only piece of furniture in the kitchen, which had lived with Virginia in her childhood home. Though it had not stood on the damp kitchen flags near the Rayburn, as it stood now on the grubby Indian slates by the Aga, but had been in the oak panelled solar, under the transomed and mullioned windows. There it had supported a carved oak bible box of a slightly later date and an art nouveau pewter vase in the form of three fishes, which had contained peeled honesty, which glowed like a collection of pearly moons in the southern brightness as it poured in through the leaded lights and stained glass, initialled, and dated 1627.

Virginia’s bible box was the oldest item, in her cluttered, unfitted kitchen. It stood on a coffer from Guernsey, carved with a monogram and coat of arms, which was 18th century. The coffer bore the Pilgrim shell and a helmet with an open visa, and various other symbols, but Virginia had failed in her attempts to authenticate it. The close proximity of so much Christian symbolism, the fact that the table had been in contact with a bible and the three fishes, one might have thought would be problematic, but Virginia had not found it so before. Virginia’s bible box was also initialled and dated 1641. The date was scratch carved, and Virginia was certain it was not a true date. Furniture before the restoration was barely ever dated. Perhaps the item was roughly contemporary with the date, even so it was 20 years at least older than the year Virginia wanted a connection with, 1621. This had been the year of the worst of the witchcraft and mischief making at Kineburn, when The Poet had accused Alison Carter and the other women of bewitching his daughters. Virginia was fairly sure her plan would work, unaided, but she thought if she could travel back in time to that period her own magic would have a stronger effect upon those whom she was intending to impose it. She wished there were one or two more ancient items left in her possession with a stronger link to that early date and to Kineburn.

The other items in the kitchen were 18th and 19th century, except for three late 17th century back-stools. Virginia had bought these in the summer, on eBay for 99p, from a couple who were emigrating, because they did not want to live in England post Brexit. Virginia considered whether the chairs, which had spent so much time in the possession of a family whose every political wish was entirely opposite to her own, might exert an equal and opposite reactionary force, to the one she was intending to exert herself. But after all, the chairs had been made during the time of William and Mary, they were born with the Declaration of Rights and The Coronation Oath Act, at the hands of a humble furniture maker, who would have been proud of his country and his new King and Queen upholding Magna Carta, these, Virginia decided, were Brexit voting chairs. She laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of her turn of thought and made herself a bowl of porridge.

Virginia was a Christian, as her forebears in this line had been. The former housekeeper and witch, Alison Carter had been Christened in the font at the village church, where Virginia had been Christened herself, though the church had burned down and been rebuilt, since Alison’s baptism. The Christianity didn’t seem to make all that much difference to the mischief making (despite her knowing the importance of naming things properly, Virginia didn’t like to call it anti Christianity.) Virginia was descended from Alison on her mother’s side. She had wanted to bring back the surname, Carter, and use it as a middle name for her daughters, but her husband had wanted a surname from his side too, so in the end they had agreed to have neither. Without the name her daughters would not necessarily lack the power, but as they grew up they were contemptuous of it anyway, having inherited their father’s rational, scientific mind.

Leaving the kitchen Virginia caught her hip against the old oak dresser. This too was William and Mary, vernacular, rough, but with the applied geometric mouldings that dated it to that era. Virginia was often struck by how odd a thing fashion was. This dresser was like the roughest, farm labourer’s daughter, dressed up in the fashion of the day. Country cabinet makers had dressed their furniture in the height of fashion, because the common country people they supplied would not have wished to appear behind the times. An image came to Virginia’s mind of the girl at the riding stables, her daughters had attended, This creature had dyed white hair, orange fake tan, leather trousers and drag queen eyebrows and lashings of black mascara, in Virginia’s memory she was standing next to the muck heap and turning the air blue as she joked with a farm hand. Virginia, by contrast only ever wished to appear behind the times. Yet without this habit of her fellow men, for wanting the latest thing, Virginia would not have been able to date any of her possessions, she relied on the vulgarity of mind that wanted to be fashionable in order to date and value her collection by its design. Yet old things were more beautiful, in other ways, than new ones, apart from their history, and the particles of souls that clung to them and other people’s lives they contained. They had been made with more love and care and skill, so that they were lovable and therefore such objects as to which one would wish to cling. In the future, Virginia wondered, would one be able to experience the past lives of others through fragments of MDF, flat pack furniture screwed together, which had been bought at Ikea or Argos.

Sitting on the back shelf, of the dresser, in the middle, above the little cupboard door with the ancient ironwork, was one item which Virginia had forgotten about. It was a large pewter plate, dating from about 1620 and it had been on display in the entrance hall at Kineburn, on top of a 17th century mule chest, before Virginia had brought it home, to its current position. This would do, this would serve her purpose. Virginia left the house via the back door, pushing her way past the velvet lined, William Morris curtain, which kept the draught out of the rest of the house when the cat flap was stuck, as it mostly was, in the open position, and made her way across the greenish York stone flags, to collect a metal file from the potting shed.

A very long chapter about the day after the referendum

On the morning of June 24th 2016, Virginia and her husband, Nick had seen the last few results come in on a live stream online. They hadn’t had a television since the birth of their third daughter in the late nineties.

Virginia could not quite believe her eyes, as the results came in, she did not have the prophetess’ skill, but it was true, so she flipped over to YouTube and found Nina Simone singing ‘Feeling Good’.

She danced round the bedroom, for the duration of the song, making un-sexy, sexy moves, still clad in her old fashioned, slightly tea stained, white cotton, full length night-gown, singing along and feeling more overwhelmed with joy than she had in decades.

She had decided to make kedgeree for breakfast with the very pricey kippers she’d bought from a very dodgy door to door salesman indeed. She’d bought them because he had told her he used to be a fisherman, and her sympathy had been aroused since the business with Bob Geldof. And besides he was huge and lacking his two front teeth and very determined.

Nobody really fancied the kedgeree, once it was prepared, though she served it from one of the 1920s ‘Bible Pattern’ Masons Ironstone tureens, onto the matching breakfast plates and made toast and marmalade and Yorkshire tea so that the whole service was put to use and looked right for the historic occasion. The sunshine poured in through the ten foot high, east facing sash windows, spilling over the top of the Regency sideboard and lighting up the joyous scene in the panelled dining room. The Today Programme was on, it had been banned for most of the campaign, but now Virginia and the children laughed at the mournful tones of the presenters and Cameron’s hissy fit resignation. Nick had left for work a little while ago. It was his penultimate day working for the firm in England. Next week he was going to start a new project on the Continent.

Later, after dozing and recovering a little of the sleep she had lost in watching the results, Virginia felt she wanted to go up to church. It was not straightforwardly a religious need to give thanks and praise. For one thing she believed God could hear her wherever she was (though somehow Virginia believed he turned a blind eye to her mischief making, provided she blamed it on the Devil and prayed for forgiveness afterwards, certainly she had not been made to pay for it yet, in any way). And also the dining room chimneypiece was constructed entirely from the 1686 altar (it was dated) of the village church. It had been ripped out of the church in the 1880s when the Lord of the Manor was the Church warden and wished to update the church and provide himself with some antique panelling, in the form of the old box pews. Virginia liked to imagine it was the previous occupant of her current property who had inspired Betjeman’s poem though she had no evidence for this. Virginia knew the power of that altar, it had made itself known to her on several occasions, including once when her youngest baby was only a few weeks old and her spirit had wandered far from her body, lying beneath it, and had found it difficult to return to her flesh unaided.

The church was at the top of the only little hill in the area and from the beautiful old graveyard one could see for miles across the whole of the Vale of York and to the Wolds in the East. Virginia just wanted to be there, smelling the elder scented balm, in the morning sunlight, breathing in The Peace, sensing the love wafting between the crooked, grey-green gravestones, listening to the rustling of the ancient yews, and watching the gentle nodding of the weeds as they danced in synchronicity with the ripening wheat which grew right up to the boundary hedge.

Virginia went out to her XK8 and lifted the lid of the boot. Virginia loved her car; she couldn’t afford an E Type but this was the next best thing. She knew it seemed funny to others, that such an old fuddy duddy as she was, in her dated clothes and with such old fashioned ideas should drive such a thing. A Morris Minor would probably have been more fitting, but Virginia liked good design and beautiful things and she couldn’t help it if she herself were neither well designed nor beautiful. She had made a playlist a week or two ago, on YouTube, which she’d called ‘Music for Brexit’. It had been made in hope, now she would listen to it in celebration. One of the children had downloaded it for her on to 6 CDs, which she now inserted into the stacking cd player. The music was wide ranging in taste and style, though all British. It started with Tomkins, “Above The Stars My Saviour Dwells” sung by the choir of Guildford Cathedral, under Barry Rose, and included many examples of early music sung by various choirs and artists including Alfred Deller. But there was also a good deal of Britten and Vaughan Williams and the first part of Finzi’s “Requiem Da Camera” a setting of John Masefield’s poem “August 1914”, which was rather too sad for the occasion. But Virginia had wanted to pay tribute as widely as possible, in her choice of music for this day, to all who had valued England.

Virginia fired up the engine and pressed the button to fold down the roof. Once it was down she switched on the stereo and the shuffle button and Alfred began to sing “Fairest Isle”. And when Alfred had finished there was a beautiful piece in a minor key, by an obscure composer her father had known at Cambridge, Guy Roberts. Virginia’s mother had certainly never intended to kill Guy. She was never absolutely sure that she had, he’d died of natural causes, as had all her victims. Virginia’s mother had been a great fan of Guy’s music, which had been tonal, pastoral and beautiful in an era of Avant Garde noise and she would never have done him harm intentionally. Only Virginia’s father had had this terrible habit of inviting all sorts of marvellous people to dinner, when the family was at its most hard up. He would announce what he’d done at breakfast and Virginia’s mother would be expected to whip up something palatable out of practically nothing, for their guests arriving that evening.

Virginia’s mother had had a dreadful struggle to find anything at all, on that occasion. She had cursed her guests with all the venom in her, not knowing who they were to be, up at the old quarry above the house, where her antecedent had been used to meet with her fellow weird sisters, one hand in an orifice of the face in the diabolical old tree. She had been forced to serve a dinner more or less of herbs, though she’d managed to persuade the nearest of the farmers to let her have a chicken. Besides that there were a few home grown spuds from the kitchen garden, a sluggy lettuce, a great many nasturtium leaves, marigold petals and lovage. “Better a dinner of herbs where lovage, than a stallen ox and hate therein”, she had used to joke. For pudding there was to be the last of the rhubarb, woody and well past its best, if it had ever had a best, from a shady corner of the kitchen garden. And this was to be sweetened with the last of the lumpy sugar from the upstairs kitchen sugar bowl and a bit of treacle, as the post office was closed for a day or two and there was no more in the house. The upstairs kitchen was always the last resort when it was necessary to go hunting for food, since the Formica kitchen cabinet, despite its comparative modernity, was often invaded by mice when the rest of the rooms were mice free. This was most troubling when one was hunting for tea and all there was was Darjeeling, or Lapsang Souchong, because one could not properly distinguish between the large black leaves and the dried droppings of the mice. Anyway, the rhubarb would be served with custard made from dried Marvel, or tinned Carnation.

Virginia dredged up the details of this murky episode and pondered on her mother’s bad tempered outbursts, which had caused her to throw caution to the wind with regard to her diabolic ability. It was odd how much self control she had over smaller curses, by comparison. It was also odd how the bad things so often came to the fore in one’s memory, even when they were prompted by beauty. Virginia’s mother had been loving and kind and really a much better person than Virginia was herself.

The music had moved on now, it was Ian Partridge singing Warlock’s setting of W.B Yeats’s “The Curlew”. She didn’t know why she had included this, really, she liked it in theory, more than in practice. But she remembered that Peter Warlock’s bastard was the Art historian Brian Sewell, who had been another friend of her father’s. And she began to wonder if he had been granted his final wish, to be made into tins of Pedigree Chum. Then she remembered the story of Warlock riding his motorbike naked around some Cotswold village with Elizabeth Poston, composer of “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree” riding pillion, also in the altogether, so by the time she was out on the main road, streaming past the last mile of hogweed, her joyous feeling of the early morning had returned.

On entering the churchyard she had found it to be full of people from the regular congregation, who kept it functioning, they were mowing and shearing on the south side, keeping it tidy and generally enjoying being good and useful on this glorious, sunny day. Virginia had a policy of never discussing politics with anyone, in the flesh. She made sure she followed this rule even more stringently with the congregation at church, by barely ever speaking to them at all, though she loved them. In fact she loved them all the more for not engaging with them. She never really got on with anyone in real life, though she was quite good at pretending to.

Virginia strolled around the edge of the graveyard, taking in the views of what would soon become Brexit Yorkshire, humming “Fairest Isle '' to herself. She wanted to dance among the trees and tombstones, but couldn’t while so many were there. In the distance, coming through the Lychgate she saw one of the regular ‘locum’ vicars. Were stand-in vicars’ locums? She couldn’t remember. She assumed, what with all the extra activity there must be going to be a wedding that day. What a marvellous date for an anniversary. She knew this vicar had a funny name, which she considered unsuitable for his profession, but it eluded her at first. She tested several in her mind, was it Denis, Lennie, Ronnie? Oh no, it was Trevor. What sort of a name was Trevor for a vicar? Or even a baby boy? Virginia began to imagine the elderly vicar’s young mother, with a crush on Trevor Howard. She must have seen him in “Brief Encounter” and fallen for his strong, silent manner and failure to make the most of his opportunity with Celia Johnson, when they were first alone. Perhaps she had wished Trevor’s father had failed to take his opportunity with her, the first time they were alone, then she would never have been up the duff, and never had to get married or go through labour. Perhaps that was why she had persuaded her son to take up religion? Perhaps she thought a vicar would be too well behaved to get anyone pregnant, or perhaps she’d hoped he would convert to Catholicism and take up the celibate life! Virginia remembered reading somewhere that Trevor Howard was actually a psychopath and so thick he didn’t understand the plot of “Brief Encounter”. It would have been terribly upsetting for Trevor’s mother and all those other women who’d fancied him so much they’d named their sons for him to discover this. Good job the information had only surfaced recently.

Breaking from her reverie and internal conversation Virginia walked back towards the bench by the church door. She sat down and bowed her head, for despite telling herself she was not coming up here to give thanks and praise, she had found that that was exactly what she felt compelled to do. She thanked God with all her heart for the referendum result, though she knew it didn’t really have anything to do with Him. And despite her own habits of mind and mischief making, she prayed for Jo Cox and her children. She prayed that a new, sensible Prime Minister would emerge, to guide the country through the time of upheaval ahead. Then she summoned Freddy and sent him dashing about the Graveyard like a mad thing, faster than any real dog could run, between the old graves and the new granite ones weaving in and out of the regimented rows and leaping over the garish pea gravel in the modern part of the cemetery. She saw several members of the congregation watch him dash past, uncertain if they had seen him or not, and shudder involuntarily. She didn’t wish to frighten anyone, least of all these good people. But just today she wanted to flex her supernatural muscles a bit, as a way of celebrating and releasing some of the tension she had built up over the last few weeks of campaigning, as she considered her endless online trolling to be.

When Freddy had finished his mad dash, Virginia returned to the car. She hadn’t bothered to put the roof back up when she parked, and Freddy leapt in over the top of the door, flopping down on the back seat. Virginia was glad she didn’t need to bother with a dog’s seat belt and all the fuss of settling Freddy. Phoebe hated trips out in the Jag, and her claws invariably marked the leather. But any minute now Freddy would vanish into it.

Virginia had experimented with Freddy, when he first began to appear, rather meanly. One night she had thought it funny to send him to her father’s wardrobe, where he set up a constant, cross barking, beneath the musty morning suits, dinner suits and old coats, so that her father was driven out of bed to find the stray dog that he was convinced he could hear. Her mother had found him in the grey light of early morning rummaging among his old clothes for the creature he was convinced was real. Virginia’s mother should have really guessed what was going on, but seemed to think Virginia’s father was sleepwalking and suffering an auditory hallucination. He had an important exhibition in the offing and had been working hard and late. The result of that episode was that Virginia’s father rested a little more, so with hindsight Virginia’s prank had done some good.

The next trick Virginia tried with Freddy was worse than the first. She sent him to sit on her mother’s chest in the middle of the night. She did it twice, on both occasions after they had had a row over something and nothing. Again, Virginia’s mother should have recognised the black dog, but she assumed, due to her age and weight and high blood pressure that it was angina and booked herself in to see her doctor. She was duly diagnosed and put on Beta Blockers, so Virginia thought, in the long run, her little acts of nastiness with her familiar had been turned into something positive.

As she fired the engine up the wonderful voices of Lynne Dawson and Ian Bostridge came out of the stereo, singing “As Steals The Morn Upon The Night”, Handel’s setting of two poems by John Milton. How happy would Milton have been today? “Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live” thought Virginia. Virginia had recruited Milton for the Brexit side. But he had also been in favour of England becoming a Republic; would he have wanted to see a return to the indivisible sovereignty of the nation state, instead of the ‘pooled’ sovereignty in which the ‘Remainers’ believed? It was tricky dragging historic figures in to support one’s modern causes. Virginia wasn’t sure if the poet, Alison Carter’s accuser, had known Milton. She had walked with the poet in her dreams, down beside the rock strewn stream through the valley. Sometimes he had appeared at her side as she came down from the Packhorse Bridge, as she was walking back home, appearing out of nowhere, like Freddy did. Sometimes he appeared where the way broadened out, where the moss covered rocks sat among the red-gold sand and gorse, just about where Turner had stopped and painted. “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” thought Virginia. At this spot was another hall, of the late 17th or early 18th century, which looked like a town-house, in the middle of a field, it had been inhabited by Carters, during Virginia’s childhood, but Virginia’s mother had never let her distant relatives know they were related. Virginia and the poet had sometimes spoken, in these dreams, but it was always him quizzing her about Alison, whom he seemed to think was her mother. She could not imagine asking him about Milton, or whether his views on Monarchy and the Constitution were the same as his better known half brother’s, which might have given Virginia a clue to his modern, political ideas. His half brother had lived so much later into the seventeenth century and his political thought had developed and altered during a much more turbulent period, when he had held high office. Both brothers had certainly been of interest to Milton, poetically, and politically, but this did not mean that they had met. Oh dear it didn’t do to go into these historical and political rabbit warrens, not when one didn’t have the internet to hand.

Instead, Virginia thought of her print of Milton as a child, which hung in her drawing room.. She liked to fancy that she bore a resemblance to him, her hair had been more golden, her eyes were green, but there was something of the same intelligent, straightforward, analytical gaze, she flattered herself. So far there were no signs that Virginia had inherited her father’s glaucoma. She wondered about going blind in the 17th century, as poor Milton had. She had once seen a 17th century prosthetic eyeball.

Of course everyone knew of the power of the evil eye; the maker of this prosthesis seemed to have set out to show it was possible to make its antithesis. The very act of wishing to provide a face, which had lost its beautiful, blue-green eye, was an act of love in itself. And all the love and care with which this object had been constructed had warded off the evil which, Virginia did not doubt, would have otherwise surrounded, then resided in it. The object was constructed from bone. It resembled nothing so much as a miniature yo-yo, being two hemispheres, joined together, or more likely carved from the solid, so that the groove which would have been the place where the yo-yo’s string was wound provided a definite place at which the back part of the eyeball fitted into the eye socket, leaving the front part visible. Virginia imagined pushing the object into her empty eye socket and rearranging the floppy eyelid and surrounding flesh around it for the first time. Would it need to be ducked under the brow ridge a bit, to get past it? Would a sort of screwing motion have been necessary to line up the iris properly with the real thing. Would it be possible to walk about all day with it positioned lopsided, and go about one’s marketing, and that nobody would tell you, out of tact, until your children got home?

The eyes, it was said, perhaps rather cornily, were the windows of the soul. Although the 17th century prosthetic eyeball was manufactured, inanimate, a thing without a soul, one might have thought, in fact it was the window of the soul of the kind man who’d made it. It gazed upon the world, serenely and benevolently but did not see. It was blind, itself, yet conveyed to others the inner thoughts of another person, which was what people wanted when they looked into another’s eyes. It was an I as well as an eye, as Roger Scruton had explained eyes were, but this was also a singular object, an 'it' and yet still a first person singular.

Virginia remembered that Gordon Brown had a prosthetic eyeball. She wondered if the person who had made it had managed to endow it with any of the dourness, bad temper and general Scots misery which infected his soul? These days were such items mass produced so that they would appear to be soulless?

Handel was easier to find a place for on the leave/remain spectrum, Virginia decided. He would have been pro EU, and yet the music of that fat, German homosexual was possibly Virginia’s favourite music of all. It was not Europe or European culture she disliked, contrary to what had been asserted by the other side.

Virginia’s father, in one of his buying phases, had acquired the Snetzler chamber organ of 1740, which had been used in the first performance of The Messiah. There was documentation showing it had been shipped from Dublin, which corresponded with the dates. The case dated from later in the 18th century. The organ belonged to a former auctioneer and collector, a tall, thin Scot, with high cheekbones and beautiful, pale blue, watery eyes. He had been well into his eighties when he brought the instrument down and stayed a little while with them, while he assembled it. At this time the family had become vegetarian. Virginia’s mother had decided that as they spent so much time having to make do with vegetables they may as well pretend it was intentional. So when the old chap came to stay he was subject to the same lentil soup with shredded savoy cabbage and pearl barley that the rest of the family ate. Every night, as he was sleeping in the room next to Virginia, and sharing the same bathroom, she heard his interminable noises, on, or over the loo. She could never tell whether he was retching or shitting. But it was dreadful to think what her mother’s cooking was doing to the poor old chap’s inside.

The bathroom next to Virginia’s bedroom had come about as the result of one of Virginia’s mother’s outbursts. The first of them, in fact. Virginia’s mother had known of the ‘goings on’ of her distant relative from the first week or two of moving to Kineburn. The story of the ‘Kineburn Witches’ was well known in the valley. Her father had found a copy of the poet’s written accusation in a second hand bookshop in the market town a few miles away, and her mother had begun her experiments up at the quarry fairly shortly after that. The house had no indoor sanitation, and Virginia’s mother was expecting Virginia. It was bad enough having to cope with the lack of mains electricity, the fact that the water came directly from a stream in the woods. But having to use the Elsan chemical loo, and to empty it, felt like too much. So her parents had applied for permission to install a couple of bathrooms and two loos upstairs and down. The permission was not forthcoming, the house being a grade ii* listed building.

How strange it all was, how Virginia wished for officials of the sort her mother had murdered now. Men who would stand firm and not allow the desecration of old properties for the sake of modern convenience. These days anything went, even plastic windows. But back then, not so, hence Virginia’s mother’s outburst.

Of course murder was too strong a word. There was no physical contact, no poisoning, no assassination. Only witchcraft, which of course was not real. Only calling on darkness, only calling on her sisters’ ancient power, up at the quarry, in the dead of night, beside the old tree with the gnarled face and obscene Bosch like orifices, only these pretend things. And yet news of the poor sod’s death came within a day or two of that first session. A heart attack. News of the approval of their application came a week or two after that, when a new chap, who believed historic buildings should not be museums took over.

The other chaps Virginia’s mother had done in were more deserving of their end. Though again the cause of death was always natural. Mostly they were gallery owners or art dealers who had let Virginia’s father down in some way. There had been the pancreatic cancer which had finished off an absolute bitch of a man in the art department at the local polytechnic where her father had had to humble himself to take a job when times were hard and most of the good furniture had been sold. And an art historian friend of a friend whom Virginia’s mother was convinced was a double agent. But his end may have come about by a different means. Then there was the rather funny time when Virginia’s mother had become convinced one of the neighbours, who’d moved into a nearby barn conversion was the Yorkshire Ripper. The police had not taken Virginia’s mother’s allegation seriously and so she had used her own means to bring his murderous spree to an end. Only of course it didn’t, because it wasn’t him.

After the fourth night of the old organ builder and auctioneer’s retching/diarrhoea Virginia told her mother about what had occurred on the previous three and for the first time she started to wonder about her mother’s ability. Why could she only cause harm? Why did her skills not encompass ‘wise woman’ type ways with soothing herbs? Virginia knew she was no better herself. She had taken Feverfew for her migraines, in a sandwich made from her mother’s dense, wholemeal bread. It had given some relief, but she had found she had no instinct for which other herbs to try. Her mother believed in modern medicine, not herbal humbug.

The only really successful experiment Virginia had carried out in this line was on her allergies to rabbits. The cats often brought baby ones in from the fields and they were so cute Virginia who had been a surprisingly soppy child, found she could not allow them to be mauled to death. Yet her eyes swelled up like red balloons, even if she only touched the rabbits for a moment. She was in the habit of taking antihistamine, therefore, but had noticed they worked almost instantaneously. She surmised that their effect was psychosomatic or placebo. And determined next time she would take a raisin to cure the inflammation, instead. This she did and it worked just as well as the antihistamine. Was it still a placebo effect, if one knew the ‘medicine’ was pretend? Virginia wasn’t sure. Neither was she sure that her power over her own body wasn’t just the same power she had inherited from her mother and antecedents, yet why then could she not cure her migraines? She could not persuade anyone else to try her remedy for allergies, so convinced were her friends and family that their own conditions were much more real and severe than Virginia’s. After a while Virginia was able to take back control of her allergy by passing herself an invisible raisin, and pretending it was an antihistamine. Perhaps this was why the idea of taking back control was such a powerful one, for Virginia; she understood the power of the idea of taking back control over the body politic, because she understood the power of the idea of taking back control over the body, even if that idea was swallowing an invisible cure. This was all getting too silly.

Virginia switched the cd off, for a bit and found herself comparing the voices of the two tenor Ians, Bost and Part - ridge. She knew that technically the former was the better singer, but she found him a bit cold and sometimes thought he sounded like a vegan. Part. on the other hand wasn’t really a tenor, more of a baritone who was pretending. But he sounded warm and fat and kind and civilised, in the way she just about remembered men used to be, when she was a child. Her father had known him, too, back in the day, perhaps he was the actual nice man she thought she remembered all nice men being. Oh God! Her mother hadn’t done him in too, had she? No, she was fairly sure he was still alive. But how difficult it was to keep track of who was alive and who was dead, these days. So many people one had thought long dead turned out to be still alive, and vice versa. Virginia remembered how she had felt on discovering Deanna Durbin had only just died, a few years ago, and remembered how she had pondered producing an “I Can’t Believe You Weren’t Dead Already” card. Should it have been ‘You’, or They or ‘He’ or ‘She’, with ‘Wasn’t’? ‘You’ implied the spirit of the ancient corpse would be reading the words. Once you were over a century old, your offspring might actually be dead already and addressing the joke on the card to grandchildren or great grandchildren would be callous: ‘In Sympathy, Can’t Believe She Wasn’t Dead Already’. Enough Already!

Virginia reached home, tired and happy, and was greeted enthusiastically by Phoebe, who seemed to have decided to overlook Virginia’s having gone out without her, if Virginia would play with her ball, which she duly did, on the lawn, beside the borders of sweet rocket, the Fruhlingsgold and Rosarie de l’Hay and the huge clumps of Sarah Bernhardt peonies. And since she hadn’t been able to dance among the graves and ancient trees, she did a crazy dance about the lawn, while simultaneously impersonating Hinge or was it Bracket singing ‘We’ll gather Lilacs’, in which performance Nick discovered her, on his return from work., music and happy activity was how Virginia recollected that historic day

A very short chapter

Virginia found the metal file she needed in a drawer of an old utility chest that had belonged to her mother and had served as a tool chest for the last 18 months. She took it inside, found a clean envelope and took down the pewter plate. She wouldn’t need much for her work, just enough to take her back in spirit, to where she could meet Alison and the others, and seek their help.

She gently swept the grey filings into the envelope and sealed it. Then she made a snap decision. She would go over to Kineburn, go up to the quarry and do the job properly. She could leave Phoebe with her married daughter and then she wouldn’t have to worry about her barking and growling at Freddy. She felt she would be able to summon up all her deepest antipathy towards those she regarded as her enemies, if she were in the right place. And of course, today was not just “Should Have Been Brexit Day”, it was Halloween.

An extraordinarily long chapter which has a bit about prosthetic penises in it

They came from shortlists, well designed,

To fill the House with just their kind,

The lesbians with butch, cropped hair,

The Tory ladies dressed with care,

The deeply spoken, and the squeaky,

They came from Ramsgate and Auld Reekie,

Harridans and cold, hard bores,

With steely eyes, pugnacious jaws.

Their politics were much the same

They thought alike, shared every aim,

They crowded round the centre ground

And dished out dull, bland bites of sound,

Their minds were empty, speeches hollow,

Ambition led, ideas could follow,

And yet they rarely ever did.

And they would never make a bid

In favour of less government

Because they were a regiment

Of bossy sisters who loved rules

And took the demos for dumb fools.

They spat at liberty and swore

To do away with common law,

Because they did not understand

The history of our ancient land

And thought a web of regulation

Would much enhance this once great nation.

They didn't know that less was more

And mould grows from a single spore.

After the euphoria of June 24th the cold reality set in. The mess of choosing the new leader of the Tory Party, the endless struggle by the media to understand what had hit them, followed by the patronising talking down of the result and the people who had brought it about. Virginia and the rest of the seventeen point four million were racists, apparently. Yet she knew instinctively Rochelle would have voted Brexit. The Shaz she had known in her teens, probably would not have been arsed to vote at all. Was ‘arsed’ an expression in common parlance in the eighties, in England, Virginia wondered? It certainly wasn’t one found in polite conversation, which was mostly what Virginia had been used to at that time.

Virginia still had faith in politics and democracy at this point. She barely felt any need to try anything serious of her own. When Theresa May looked likely to be chosen as the next Prime Minister Virginia’s heart sank, but she didn’t resort to witchcraft. Perhaps it seemed too likely that Theresa might retaliate in kind. And, after all she had prayed to God to send them someone suitable, and she had to trust His judgement, though it seemed as if He had played a rather mean joke in sending Theresa. Virginia contented herself with sharing bitchy articles by Gerald Warner on Disqus. Certainly, Gerald was the only person who had seen right from the start the kind of creature May was. He seemed to be almost the only one who had not been deceived into thinking she was the next Maggie and as such, the right woman for the job. Virginia believed Boris, as a Brexiteer should have had the job.

Virginia was not mad keen on Boris. She couldn’t admire a man who’d made pregnant women abort the babies he had made. But Virginia had a theory about leadership. She believed it was a biological quality, unrelated to politics at a fairly profound level. It was a quality that all our fellow apes would recognize. Various gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and monkeys would probably have elected Churchill, Maggie and Blair and they would not have needed to know anything about their ideas. And they would almost certainly elect Boris. But only silly humans would elect May, Cameron, Major, Brown, Callaghan and so on.

On the other hand Corbyn was a rogue male who had survived for years on his own in the Trotskyist wilderness. Was he a Trot? Virginia could never remember the difference between the ‘People’s Front of Judea’ and the other lot, he was an old leftie of some sort. A rogue male could easily depose a bloodied female and take over a tribe with its consent. The rogue male who has lived through the wilderness years unharmed has demonstrated his instincts for survival as well as the quality of his genetic material. The other quality that an aged Trot espousing a 19th century ideology has, counter intuitively, is conservatism. His ideas may be ‘progressive’ but they are well known, much tried, old hat sort of ‘progressive’ ideas. Take renationalising the railways, for example. The idea of a nationalised railway system brings to mind images of steam trains and the 1970’s film of The Railway Children, a time of happy, kindly, socialist station masters, like Perks and guards in smart uniforms, and women with cut glass accents as well as images of Red Robbo. English people were used to taking the rough with the smooth, they would take Red Robbo with Jenny Agutter. The desire to take them was a conservative one, not a socialist one, however much nationalisation was a socialist principle.

The only time Virginia felt really tempted to use her ancient skill was when Gove stabbed Boris in the back, politically. That day was the one on which Virginia came very close indeed to sending some evil spirit to do Gove in, literally, but invisibly, bringing an end to both his career and existence. Recollecting this was difficult for Virginia. It was another reminder that she had inherited her mother’s impulsiveness and wrong judgement alongside her ability, though she had stepped back and restrained herself, in the end.

She had liked Gove before this. His education reforms had been the subject over which Virginia had lost more ‘friends’ than any other, back in the days of Facebook rows. It felt almost personal that Gove had betrayed her over her choice for PM, when she had defended him with so much vigour and enthusiasm. God it was difficult. When they were all bastards really how could one choose which ones might not deserve to live?

All this political turmoil coincided with Nick leaving to live on the continent. Virginia and Nick knew their love was strong, or weak enough to withstand the separation, and he would be coming home for the weekends once or twice a month. Virginia knew she must not become even more solitary and peculiar than she already was, there was nothing less attractive than a lonely, menopausal witch, for one thing. And for another, knowing that her skills had increased during adolescence she was expecting them to develop further over the coming years, but during the menopause they might go haywire. She had already lost her ability to fly in dreams, which was devastating as it had always seemed connected with her other ability, since that often required her soul to leave her body. She didn’t want to ‘go wrong’ or lose control, she might end up trying to bump people off left, right and centre. She needed to relax a bit.

In November there was trouble again, this time at the High Court. Virginia watched segments of the second trial online. The Judges didn’t half fancy themselves. Virginia believed in judgmentalism, because she believed that the ability to judge things correctly, or to the best of one’s ability was the pinnacle of what made human beings God’s special creatures, above the beasts. But she also believed in prejudice and trusted instinctive prejudice first. She could be persuaded by argument, but only up to a point, after which she snapped back, like an elastic band to her original prejudiced position. It was important to be like this in a democracy, because you didn’t have enough information to hand to make your choices in an entirely informed way. And if you thought you did you were kidding yourself and were likely to be exploited by ‘fact checkers’ and people who ostensibly railed against fake news, while lying by omission, like the BBC. Anyway, Virginia was divided in her mind as to whether judges were entitled to be arrogant, because of their high levels of intellect and whether they should receive the vast amounts of money they did for their work, or whether they should all be volunteers. Money had a way of clouding judgement and love of vast quantities of it always involved devilry of some sort. And arrogance that derived from thinking you ‘were worth it’ and tossing your woolly wig about was not the innocent sort of arrogance one might develop as a result of thinking you were intellectually brilliant.

The case brought by Gina Miller caused Virginia much difficulty, she so much wanted to bring about the end of that woman’s interference, but what if she had a point? Virginia did not trust May, any more than Miller did, the enemy of her enemy need not be her friend, but neither did she need to regard her with so much more antipathy. If Theresa were really the creature Gerald described, then she could not be trusted to negotiate on behalf of people like Virginia. If the approval of the agreement had to be spread between the 680 MPs at least May would not be able to hide anything really outrageous. Virginia succeeded in reigning in her murderous instinct and when, eventually, parliament passed, with a large majority, the legislation which allowed the Government to trigger Article 50, Virginia realised that Miller had done the Brexiteers a favour. Once again, she breathed a sigh of relief that she had left politics to take its course and had not intervened.

Virginia had not wanted her country to bother with the Article 50 process at all. She believed that it was only necessary to repeal the 1972 European Union Act, a unilateral act, which would not require any shenanigans, and would cease to allow European law to become statute automatically. This was the sort of straight forward, sovereign way of going on that Virginia would have admired. All this palaver with Article 50 was allowing the other side to dictate terms. The very idea of it made Virginia’s blood boil.

Virginia was aware that she was a bit mad, of course. Not least because her adult children told her so, every few days. Virginia had only known one really mad person, in childhood. And when she compared herself, she knew her own condition was mild. This woman had been a great friend of her mother’s, an artist with manic depression. Only Pat had never seemed to be depressed, only manic. And her mania was mostly glorious. The first time Virginia experienced it she was rather frightened of it. Pat had turned up at Kineburn, having hitched a lift with a poor young man, who must have been almost terrified out of his own wits. She was dressed in the garb her husband so accurately named ‘Ethnic Tat’, which added to the mad effect On arrival she had announced she was going to be their housekeeper and cook, having decided that cooking and housekeeping for her own family, in her own large, 17th century house was not quite as interesting as doing it for someone else. In truth of course she simply fancied Virginia’s father, as many women of a certain age did. Pat’s husband referred to these ‘femmes d'un certain âge’, which included his wife, as ‘The Post-Menopausal Fan Club’. Virginia had been used to their silliness in childhood and vowed that however batty she became herself, as a woman of a certain age, her battiness would not take the pathetic form of fawning over a man.

On her first mad visit Pat had cooked them a meal, a reasonable vegetable stew, as a basis, but then she had arranged a huge, uncooked Cumberland sausage in each bowl, with a pair of raw, home grown beetroot, complete with muddy roots, on each side of it. Of course, Virginia and her sisters had not understood the symbolism. But it was many years before Virginia could fancy a sausage and she was well into her forties before she began to enjoy beetroot again. After the strange meal their mother had taken Virginia and her sisters round to their half-brother’s flat, where he had taught them how to play draughts, a very suitable game for such an old house. Later on, they had been allowed to peep out of the window and watch the men in white coats take Pat away. At the time Virginia had been glad the men in white coats had taken the nasty woman away. Now she thought it dreadful that a person could lose their liberty because they had arranged a few raw sausages and unwashed beetroot straight from the garden, suggestively and frightened three little girls. When she thought of it out of the blue it made Virginia catch her breath and her throat constrict. How far away might she be herself, from being sectioned at any given time, if her mischief making got out of hand and began to bear serious fruit.

Virginia lying awake in the black velvet of the early hours, before the second sleep, one morning considered the history of misogyny. The history of locking up women who were a nuisance was a long one. Conservatives could regard it as pretty much a universal tradition and therefore one which was probably worth preserving. This was why it was important not to be a conservative in all things. The Poet and his sort had made their accusations against Alison Carter and her sort. And women who were not called witches and tried and put to death for their crimes were often called whores. Sometimes they were called both. Women who were raped and had babies outside wedlock had been shut up in loony bins and had become institutionalised well into the 20th century. Television and radio programmes had been made as late as the mid nineteen nineties in which women were interviewed who had been incarcerated after reporting rape or incest in the nineteen twenties, thirties or forties. They had been given strong medication, lobotomies, ECT which had subdued their spirits, dulled their brains and slowed their speech.

The benefit of being a conservative though, was that eventually liberal thought became so well established itself that it became conservative thought by default. The good old liberals and progressives and Christians had campaigned so long against misogyny that finding misogyny abhorrent was now accepted as traditional by conservatives. And yet state sanctioned misogyny still went on. And oddly it was the liberals and progressives who were keenest to turn a blind eye to it where it was a result of the behaviour of conservative men from other cultural and religious backgrounds against the usual working-class English women. Or even when it was against the wives, daughters and nieces of these men themselves, women were always further down the pecking order, even in protected groups. These men, whose antecedents had not lived on the island before the mid twentieth century could not, therefore, be expected to sign up to the mid to late twentieth century progressive/liberal revolution.

The disadvantage of being a liberal and progressive was that once one’s views became established and ‘old hat’ they became conservative and then had to be rejected and swept away. This had happened to the campaign against misogyny and feminism. The dyed in the wool Tories now thought equal rights for women were, on the whole, a good idea, so it was necessary for the progressives to find new ways of deriding this old-fashioned nonsense. Of course, the new way could not be an old way, at least not where it pertained to members of the majority population. So, the whole trans thing had taken a grip. Now women could not request that matters might be arranged so as to allow a level playing field, based on adjusting the level, to take into consideration basic biology, because being female was not a matter of biology. Men could have babies and menstruate, and women could have big dicks and hairy chests. And if lesbians suffered vaginismus when forced into sexual activity with one of these well-hung dames, then their cunts were cramping and contracting out of sheer, bloody minded transphobic hysteria. And if they were just worried, they might suffer such a physical reaction and were making a fuss about an imagined worst-case scenario, then that just proved the Ancient Greeks had been right, cis women sometimes did have wombs in their skulls, instead of brains. Thank God for transwomen to redress the balance. Just get over it!

Virginia turned over and tried to doze off again. Phoebe came to join her, and she stroked her long nose and kissed it gently. But once one’s mind had got hold of an interesting topic it seemed necessary to keep pondering.

Certain varieties of men, with certain religious beliefs were free to compel their wives to cover themselves up entirely, in black. They were free to regard them as less than equal before the law. They were free to forcibly marry them off, forcibly mutilate them in childhood, forcibly prevent them from undertaking paid work, free to beat (and even murder them, if they did it overseas.) Such special sorts of men, such others, such outsiders, could not be expected to live by the progressive rules the liberals had devised to keep the majority ethnicity conservatives decent, because that would be racist. And of course if they abused young, working class, white women and children and others, well such women had been used to it through all their existence, all the history of their class, is not their personal history, at the hands of their superiors, as maids as mill workers and housekeepers and as mad witches. It’s just culture innit! And anyway there are no such things as ordinary, biological women, if you don’t want to be abused, identify as a man, or a ‘Powerful Woman’.

A ‘Powerful Woman’ was an MP, particularly a childless one or a butch lesbian, she was a woman of colour who married a very rich man, or a Democratic President, she was a film star or celebrity who screwed her way to the best roles, a woman who had smashed through the glass ceiling after compulsory requirements had been put in place to ensure a level playing field and equal opportunities, but who liked to pretend she hadn’t got where she was today by anything other than her own merit. ‘Powerful Women’ had never given a flying fuck about ordinary women, the wife of the Poet had not cared for the threat of hanging that had hung over the women in valley, after the Poet made his accusations, as the freezing fog had used to hang in winter, for weeks on end. There had not been a real sisterhood in the days of the weird sisters, any more than there was one now, between Amal Clooney, Mrs May and the thousands of girls who’d been raped in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, Manchester, Sheffield, Oxford, Hull, Derby and so on.

All the lefty liberal crap was argued for with reason and philosophy of a sort. The extreme conclusions which the liberal, progressive left drew were conclusions they reached after lengthy debate.

As Burke’s ideas about prejudice had to be brushed aside, because Burke‘s ideas became conservative ideas over time, then prejudice had to be regarded as absolutely abhorrent. No matter that it was natural for certain prejudices to exist, the prejudice of a mother in favour of her own baby and vice versa, for example, prejudice was wrong in itself, so it must be stamped out.

The Soviets had tried this stamping out of basic prejudice on mothers and babies, getting women into the workplace, field or factory while the babies were left in nurseries to be looked after by other women. The non-Communist west had taken up this idea, too. Because prejudice bad. Why should society be organised in favour of literally ‘know nothing’ babies? And economic growth good. Everyone must be a worker.

So men and women were no different, except women couldn’t be bin men or work in road gangs, tarmacking the motorways and flinging bollards onto lorries in the face of oncoming traffic travelling at speeds of fifty miles an hour. Because such things were beneath a woman’s dignity.

But if women and men were literally the same then why keep up the pretence that they were different? A woman who thought she was a man and a man who thought he was a woman, on the one hand was expressing a truth because men and women were no different according to the central tenet of feminist, liberal philosophy. On the other hand they were contradicting the truth of no difference by declaring the difference to be so profound that the physical reality of being a man, that is having a thick waist, facial hair narrow hips, a deep voice, no breasts must be brought about, through hormones and surgery (apparently a passable prick could be crafted from a bit of bicep and bingo wing.) And the physical realities of being female in males, could be brought about similarly.

Virginia paused in her philosophical rant to compare the desire to construct a prosthetic penis, with the desire to construct a prosthetic eyeball, in the mind of the creator. A prosthetic private part was the opposite to a prosthetic window to the soul, however much it might be said a man thought with his prick, and that perhaps his soul resided there. Virginia could not imagine a woman suddenly thinking about sex every verse end however many hormones she swallowed, sex was not really complicated enough to take up a woman’s thoughts, unless one went in for role play and even then a woman would have to devise a very thorough character for herself, with a significant history in order for it to provide satisfactory food for sustained thought. In fact, the only time women did not think was during sexual intercourse. It was a holiday from wittering to oneself. Suddenly starting up an internal dialogue was fatal. Shut the fuck up.

A surgeon who wished to satisfy a trans man’s needs to seem like a biological man firstly had to believe that physical appearance could and should be made to match the way a person wished to be understood. Virginia did not agree with this point of view. And surely the prosthetic penis would be almost as useless as the prosthetic eye in terms of sexual function, that wasn’t quite what she meant, don’t start imagining a prosthetic eyeball put to any other use, it would be unhygienic. Virginia wasn’t sure about the prosthetic penis on the urinary tract front, presumably the real thing was made to connect to some central, artificial tube that was lined with some impermeable membrane so urine could not infect the real flesh of the prosthesis. She would have to read it up. Only reading up about such things seemed voyeuristic. It was a pity that in adulthood there was no equivalent of the Jane type girl, who would take one look at you and divine that there were still certain matters to do with other people’s sex lives you didn’t quite get. Of course, there was the internet, but that involved making permanent keystrokes, which could be used in evidence against you, if you didn’t know what you were about. And trying to find out what a prosthetic willy was for was terribly childish and would be like looking for rude passages in novels and when you found them still not really understanding them. That was one of the great mysteries of the world: understanding things in words was not understanding them yet putting things into words was the only way we had of explaining them. Virginia would never understand the need for a biological female to have a prosthetic penis, however much she read up on the subject. Was the prosthetic penis provided so a trans man looked like a cis man in his pants or at the urinal, or was it to be used like the real thing? Dildos had existed since the upper Palaeolithic period, apparently, which seemed appropriate, called ‘bâton de commandment’. If Virginia ever decided to become a trans man, that is what she would call her prosthesis. The first dildos were made of stone, tar, wood, bone, ivory, limestone and teeth. Perhaps the maker of the 17th century bone eyeball had also crafted dildos. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a penis, as they say in the prosthetics trade. Anyway, both the modern plastic surgeon and the 17th century eyeball maker were interested in what it was to seem perfectly human to other humans, in the physical sense, and seeming was of course part of being perfectly human, even if not a major part.

All the while it must also be argued that a person who considered themselves to be a woman or a man, without any desire to take on the physical characteristics of a man or a woman, must be allowed, not only to declare themselves to be whatever it was they had decided upon, but that everyone else must go along with that decision and address them and respond to them accordingly and with a straight face, because this decision was not a symptom of mental illness and one must be good mannered in one’s personal interactions. This was reasonable, because the idea of how we wish to be regarded must belong to us and not to the rest of society and not the state. It was the opposite of the new position with regard to verbal communication, which no longer belonged to the communicator, but to the receiver of the communication to interpret as they chose, however wildly. The receiver of visual information communicated by the physical attributes of another’s body must not be so impertinent as to draw any conclusions from that physical, biological information, they must wait for the person to inform them of how they wished to be understood, how they wished to seem even if they did not seem as they wished to the person required to do the seeming.

So how were the progressives going to square these various circles? And how would the arguments shake down between Conservatives and the left? Conservatives were no longer conservatives. Small c conservatives would simply keep their thoughts to themselves and muddle along as well as they could, trying to abide by the hundreds of new rules the progressive children dreamed up every day (all the while pretending there were no rules and rules were all essentially bad.). It seemed that Conservatives were in favour of biological and physical representations of the human form. The Government thought it was a marvellous idea for anyone who wished, even very small children, to start taking steps towards altering their physical appearance in order to make it resemble the physical appearance of the sex they wished to be. In other words, wishing to seem to be the opposite sex was not going to be enough in the eyes of the Tories, you had to go at least part of the hog. So now, in order to achieve the great goal of ever increasing economic growth a woman could give birth, put her baby into a nursery, go back to full time work and when that anxious, institutionalised baby got to four or five it could decide it wanted to be a member of the opposite sex. When it got to about ten years old it could take hormones to prevent its balls dropping, its voice breaking or its periods starting. And a little while later it could then start the surgical journey that would lead to its physical appearance matching more closely, though never entirely, the way it wished to seem. Everyone would be happy; everyone could tell at a glance which pronoun to use. A whole new market would be opened up for plastic surgery and hormones and the previously small market aimed at transvestites which produced and sold dresses for women of six foot and over and size thirteen stilettos, or suits for men of five foot with thirty six inch hips would increase exponentially.

The progressives however thought this was a cop out. Of-course anyone who wanted the surgery should be allowed it, free on the NHS, no questions asked, as much or as little as they liked. But they had also decided that those who wished to seem to be members of the opposite sex without making any attempt at appearances must be allowed to declare themselves to be that thing they wished to seem.

On the whole Virginia preferred this argument, theoretically. It was more rational within the limitations of reason itself and within the boundaries of its own context. If men and women were the same, except with regards to dustbins and tarmac, then it made sense to say a man who was pretending to be a woman or vice versa must be regarded as whatever they declared since it was to all intents and purposes, according to the new logic of sameness and equality, an immaterial declaration, yet one which, for some crazy reason, was important to the person themselves. Since Virginia was a conservative she did not think the state had the right to require anyone to jump through a surgical hoop in order to prove a philosophical preference, especially when the state itself had pronounced that preference or difference to be non-existent, in order to pursue goals of economic growth, unheard of in the days when women were mothers who stayed at home for the purposes of child rearing.

Also if people could just pretend to be what they liked then there would be no reason for children who might have grown out of their ‘gender dysphoria’ to undergo irreversible treatment.

The argument against this ‘self-identification’ was made in terms of the need for female only spaces. These arguments were true: rapists, misogynists and paedophiles could, under the new rules, enter women’s changing rooms at the baths, or in clothes stores. They could enter women’s shelters or hostels or hospital wards, they could demand smear tests and to be imprisoned in women’s prisons. This was not acceptable to conservative thinkers. So, a Great British compromise must be reached. A person must be allowed to identify as whatever they wished, as long as that identification did not have any negative or harmful effect on any other person. That was the basis of Liberty itself, the kind of Liberty that became conservatism over time, not the new, progressive, dictatorial sort.

So men who were pretending to be women, or self-declaring, as that pretence must henceforth be known (so as to avoid hurt feelings) could not be imprisoned in women’s prisons, could not enter women’s changing facilities or other ‘women only’ facilities or demand smear tests and so on. The reason for enforcing these rules would not be old fashioned, conservative nonsense about protecting women. It would not be because there was any difference between men and women - it would be because some women were convinced that there was a difference between them and men. And if the people who wished to seem to be members of the opposite sex must be acknowledged to be members of that sex, then it must, by dint of the same logic, be acknowledged that that sex existed at least in some people’s minds and that those who wished to appear members of it, because they were ‘born into it’, must be allowed to pretend they did not wish to be harmed as a result of the inferior physical strength with which that imagined characteristic somehow truly endowed them.

By means of this complex philosophy, one could also provide the age old excuse for allowing misogyny to continue within Islam. All one needed to do was to insert a couple of extra steps in the justification chain. Certain protected religions/cultures did not believe that there was such a thing as the secular state. In fact Christianity was the only religion which encompassed the idea of the Seculum, Christianity had invented it, in fact. In England, Henry the eighth at the insistence or on the advice of Cromwell had taken this idea one logical step further. (Even back in those days progressive men, who wished to sweep the old order away, justified the longings of their dicks with philosophical and theological discussions.) In order to establish the Church of England, so that Henry could ignore the Pope and marry Anne Boleyn, he had pointed out that Christ had come as subject. The state could do what it liked and in Henry’s day the Monarch was the state, to a large extent. Anyway, the result was that although the Church of England was the established church it was not the state exactly, even though the Queen was its head. There were things which were secular which the state might involve itself with and things which belonged to other, non-established religions, which the state might choose to keep its nose out of, since freedom of religious thought of subjects was also a long established principle within the nation state.

But as Christianity was the only religion that acknowledged a separation between the secular and the religious life, then it was not possible, while acknowledging the religious freedom of non-Christian subjects, to impose ideas the state had about how people should go on, if such ideas were in direct contradiction of a religious law. ( At least where airy fairy things like gender identity might be concerned, they could interfere in order to inculcate correct thinking on such things as the joys of sodomy, because telling small children about the joys of sodomy was one of the founding principles of progressivism and was the highest ranking of all the top trumps.) So the excuse could be made that if it was against Islamic law to pretend to be a person of the opposite sex, because that would give women an excuse to let their hair loose, show their faces or legs, undertake paid work, marry whomsoever they pleased and so on, then Muslims must be free to prevent their own kind from identifying as members of the opposite sex. Since it was part of their religion to believe that women were inferior, they must be allowed to carry on in that belief and treat their women accordingly. Similarly, any transgender Muslim man must be ostracised or worse, for wishing to pretend to be a member of the inferior sex and thereby degrading himself and his family. Though not amongst the wider, secular or Christian population.

So to recap: a man could identify as a woman or vice versa, there were no such things as men or ordinary biological women. Because some men might only be claiming to be women so that they could do women harm, even though there were no such things as ordinary biological women, these men who said they were ordinary women (thereby acknowledging that women existed, at least as states of mind) should be prevented by law from entering ordinary women’s safe spaces, because although being female was only a state of mind, it was a state of mind which came with a whole load of physically inferior characteristics. People who thought of themselves as ordinary women being generally smaller and weaker than people who considered themselves to be men, which made them vulnerable. The state had a duty to protect the vulnerable. The state however, could not protect the vulnerable who were governed by a set of religious laws which took precedent in their lives over secular ones, because religion trumped the state, where that religion was not Christianity, firstly by not acknowledging the concept of the secular at all and secondly by being the religion of a minority which itself required it to have special status and protection, since minorities were vulnerable. Therefore Muslims could go on regarding women as inferior before the law and acting according to ancient misogynistic principles, if they damn well liked, and this dispensation applied not only to the way they treated the ‘so called women’ who followed Sharia law, but to the way it treated non-Muslim ‘so called women’ whom they wished to use as whores, because if these women chose to believe there was such a thing as woman, well they had better understand all the territory and baggage that went with that, including misogyny, violence, and being treated as a whore.

What, Virginia? Did I hear you suggest Christ’s second great commandment, to love our neighbours as ourselves, was a simpler approach? How dare you, you ignorant Christian bigot! Did the enlightenment pass you by? We come to our conclusions and design our laws based on reason. There is no other God and his spirit is rationality, his son is The Logical Conclusion and he commands not that we love our neighbours as ourselves, but that we merely tolerate them as an intellectual exercise.

Nobody said modern life had to be straightforward. One has to have the most amazingly complex intellect to be a left wing progressive.

Virginia’s mother and Pat had been totally telepathic. It was odd that Virginia’s mother had absolutely no control over Pat She knew when she would ring up, even in the middle of the night and she knew when she was about to turn up out of the blue in a manic state. It was as if Pat were a migraine, Virginia thought. One simply knew when she was ‘developing’ and by the time one knew it, there was nothing to be done to stop it.

Other episodes of Pat’s madness which Virginia knew about could still make Virginia laugh out loud and were merely normal human fantasies carried to extremes. Virginia’s favourite was the time Pat, so sick of turning up at the photo processing shop and finding her snaps were not ready, despite having paid extra for the ‘Next Day’ service, went back with an air pistol and threatened to shoot the staff, if they didn’t hand the photos over. Another time she had become so sick of her prissy, Yuppie neighbours who lived in the other half of her old house, that one morning in mid-summer she had risen early, put up three trestle tables outside their part of the property and piled them high with all the nasty old, plastic tat she had hoarded over the last thirty years or so and erected a large sign that she had painted: Car Boot Sale.

Virginia knew she was not in Pat’s league. She also knew her political instincts were usually quite good. She knew when her political thinking was in line with other people’s, however different the rest of her thinking was, particularly with regard to kangaroos. And knowing she was mad helped her not to be quite as mad as she could be. But she could not desist from reading the news all day, every day. She no longer bothered with Radio 4 and she didn’t miss it. She just flipped between different online editions of the conservative press and started to feel irritable when there was no new news. Or when the new news was tame. The desire for extreme events as justification for drawing extreme conclusions bubbled under the surface. It was only because Virginia knew the state was always expecting people like Virginia to take to the streets with their pitchforks that she managed to temper the comments she made. She had a horror of satisfying anyone else’s stereotype, though she knew that she did. She read the comment pieces in the Telegraph and devoured every article in the Spectator. She began watching political videos on YouTube, where previously she had only sought out music. All day she bickered and got cross. She lived for up-votes on her comments and felt despair when none were forthcoming. It was getting almost as bad as the Facebook days.

Virginia had always been peculiar. She knew she was different when she was a child and the dreams had started when she’d got dust and sawdust and bits of wood on her clothes from playing in her brother’s workshop and had begun to experience these episodes which were extracts from the long gone lives of others. The other children at school knew she was a witch, of course. It never occurred to them to pretend otherwise. Treating Virginia as something other than a witch would have been, to her straightforward, honest, broad Yorkshire classmates, like pretending a dog was a chicken, it simply couldn’t be done. They didn’t bully her over it, they suspected she had ways of getting back at them that they might find unpleasant. They just accepted it and kept her at a safe distance.

Virginia had had one friend at school, one with whom she was still in touch. She had been one of several daughters of a tenant farmer who worked a terribly desolate, bleak and windswept bit of moor, a mile or two above Kineburn. This girl had explained the facts of life to Virginia, in clear terms and also provided her with a basic vocabulary of swear words and slang words pertaining to the sexual act, for which Virginia had been grateful. She had also, on one bitterly cold, raw afternoon in early March, shown Virginia the container from the Elsan lavatory, which was waiting to be emptied. Virginia was not quite sure, with hindsight why this event had been so momentous, but it had been. Somehow acquainting yourself with the vast size of the stool of a human adult was like acquainting yourself with the infinity of the universe. It was much more profound than discovering the facts of life.

Virginia had also always been obsessive, too. There was the naming of things that started when she was six or seven. Not just the knots in the floorboards, but the knots in the ceiling, which were the undersides of the floorboards of the room above. Virginia and her sisters shared a large jar of marbles and these were all given girls’ names and Virginia had to remember these correctly. Her teenage obsessions were more predictable, mostly being concerned with clothes, collecting vintage items in vast quantities. She had known that vintage fabric contained the same particles of souls and extracts of past lives that antique furniture did, for at least as long. She and her sisters each had a rag rug beside their beds to keep the chill from their feet when they got up and dressed after their morning tea. They had a habit of ‘looking for sparkly bits’, which involved pulling out the lurex, Crimplene, rectangular scraps hidden among the more mundane pieces which made up the overall pattern of the rug. The rugs were woven by Mrs Carter who lived down the valley, so of course Virginia had not been sure, at first, whether their particular properties were connected to the family skill, or whether all scraps of fabric could transport one in the same way, if one had the particular skill oneself. The scraps in Mrs Carter’s rag rugs mostly just took one back to boring days of thirty years ago, at the Cattle Auction in the nearby market town, and tea and toasted teacakes in the cafe by the side of the river, after the auction had ended. Once one of the sparkly bits had taken Virginia to a dance in town, where the young, but unmistakable Jimmy Saville was canoodling with a girl barely out of puberty. Another time when Virginia was much too young to know what it was she looked upon, she had found a couple having it off in the sheep pens, at the cattle mart, and woken up as she instinctively fled the scene.

The only really dreadful thing that Virginia had experienced as a result of her collecting vintage clothes was related to a pair of 1950s evening gloves. She had acquired these at the ‘Save The Children’ charity shop in another, more up market town. This shop had a lot of little drawers at the back, and with permission from one of the fierce old women who were the guardians of all the town’s charity shops, one was allowed to rummage through them, they were full of gloves and lace hankies and buttons. Virginia had been pretending she was a Goth when she bought the gloves. They were very long, black satin, coming well over the elbows and would, she had thought at the time, be cool to wear at ‘Libra’s, the sleazy, mouldy, punky nightclub next to the theatre, which Virginia was in the habit of frequenting at that time. In the evening she had put the gloves away on one of the shelves of her wardrobe. That night she was more frightened by what she witnessed in her transportation into the past, than she had been on any other occasion. The gloves had belonged to a woman with postnatal psychopathy who had murdered her baby. Virginia stood, with Freddy at her side, his hackles raised, watching as the mad bitch performed the hideous act, powerless to intervene. When the child, it must have been about 6 weeks old, was dead and limp in its mother’s arms Virginia saw the woman lift aside a piece of the skirting board and push the tiny corpse into the space between where two struts came down to the floorboards and below where the laths for the plaster began. On coming round from that episode, Virginia found she had soiled herself, so scared had she been. After a 3 am bath she burnt the gloves in the Rayburn, which still had a few embers in from the night before, though her mother was in the habit of lighting it afresh each day.

Later on it was Art Deco pottery, which became Virginia’s obsession. It was fashionable, more generally at the time and so sought after and expensive. Virginia could not afford to break it as an experiment, to see where it took her soul at night. Whole, it certainly did not seem to give up any of its secrets. She suspected that, as even the costliest pieces of Bizarre Ware had once been available at Woolworths, they would mostly lead to dull snapshots of dull suburbia.

Then there’d been collecting LPs and listening to music. She almost wore her records of David Oistrakh and Jascha Heifetz out. Plants had taken over once she had a garden of her own. Every day was spent pouring over the fat, yellow ‘Plant Finder’ in search of the rare and unusual. Nick, who was working all the hours God sent during the week, was dispatched on long journeys to the other end of the country at the weekends, in order to collect things Virginia had ordered, since they could not be got more locally. When the children were old enough Virginia’s obsession became teaching the children at home and she found she wanted to know all the thinking on education, the libertarian approach versus the formal, and her children became her guinea pigs. Then there was all the local history and the history of her own house into which to delve. There was a painting phase, when Virginia took up portraiture, believing she must have inherited something from her father, not just her mother’s strangeness. She took up writing poetry too, almost always in form. Then there was the constant searching for interesting historic property, Virginia spent hours indulging this hobby, scrolling and clicking, sometimes viewing in the real world. Virginia had even had a longstanding obsession with neuroscience, reading all the popular works on the subject she could get her hands on, in the hope it would give her some insight into her inherited oddness. The antique collecting had been a constant throughout her adult life, but as antiques became cheaper the compulsion to buy became more desperate and the house more and more cluttered. And politics too kept her shouting at Radio 4, until she took up Facebook.

Quite early on Virginia had realised that the obsessions kept the other oddness at bay. She could avoid entering the lives of other people at night, in childhood, if she had tired her mind out naming all the hundreds of marbles in the girls’ school correctly, or if she’d walked around the house accurately identifying the knots by their names. Virginia had sometimes wondered if she were on the autistic spectrum, she didn’t wish to consult anyone about it, but she thought on the whole that her need to pretend almost all inanimate things were people with specific characteristics, suggested she was rather on the opposite, extreme female end of things. Marbles would have bored her to death, had they not been bitchy schoolgirls in particular colours of clothes. Yet still, the naming of them was ritualistic, warding off the dangers that sometimes lurked in sleep.

The interest in politics was not of this mind-numbing kind though, and did not have the same effect. Rather the opposite.