A chapter in which Virginia does a bit of experimenting and draws some conclusions

The part of May’s speech that caused Virginia most concern, given the setting in which it was delivered was this:

“Our decision to leave the European Union is in no way a repudiation of this long

standing commitment. We may be leaving the European Union, but we are not leaving Europe.

Our resolve to draw on the full weight of our military, intelligence, diplomatic and development resources to lead international action, with our partners, on the issues that affect the security and prosperity of our peoples is unchanged.

Our commitment to the defence - and indeed the advance - of our shared values is undimmed.

Our determination to defend the stability, security and prosperity of our European neighbours and friends remains steadfast.”

Virginia had taken an interest in ’EU Defence Union’, partly because the only other middle aged woman in the village where Virginia lived, who was as mad keen on politics as Virginia herself, had put her on to it. This woman had been in the military and knew what was going on with PESCO. And partly Virginia had started following a YouTube Channel which kept its viewers up to date with all the wrangling behind the scenes with regard to defence. And which had pointed out that Cameron had promised to keep defence matters out of the negotiations on a new relationship with Europe.

Machiavelli had raised an army of Florentine Citizens, because he did not think mercenaries were loyal, or trustworthy. Virginia suspected the European Union wished to raise an army of ‘European Citizens’ and knowing that none of the generation of young snowflakes with EU flags painted on their gormless faces would volunteer to defend that anti-democratic bureaucracy with their lives, however much love they professed for it, Virginia suspected conscription would be the order of the day. Virginia also knew that Britain had decided to enmesh itself into this new system of European defence and security, even if it did not do so through a big treaty with that specific purpose. Machiavelli’s citizens had fought for a Florentine Militia, and a militia was being planned to deal with internal security in Europe. But citizens of Europe as May herself had almost said, were citizens of nowhere, and as such would be drafted to serve in distant parts of the continent, where they had no native, patriotic attachment. Florentines would not be sent to defend Pisa, but the EU militia might be put to work defending the Estonians from Russia, or the citizens of Seville might be sent to use rubber bullets at close range on the citizens of Stockholm, as a way of dealing with political unrest. It had long been known that when militia were expected to deal with unrest among their neighbours, they were less brutal, more empathetic, and more easily able to imagine themselves in the same position as those they had been sent to crush. When militia were sent to distant places to crush those whose way of life was utterly different to their own, they had no such compassion, they ‘just did their job’, making them more like the mercenaries Machiavelli distrusted. Virginia couldn’t decide if modern political leaders had more to teach Machiavelli than vice versa.

If only Virginia’s political sort were not so patriotic, they might begin to see through May’s words, but because so many of her fellows on the right really did think an independent Britain would once again lead the world in doing the right thing, standing alone, if necessary against all comers, Virginia believed they could not properly comprehend what May meant by: “Our determination to defend the stability, security and prosperity of our European neighbours and friends remains steadfast.”

Virginia imagined her fellow Tory and Kipper and other Leavers would be hypnotised by this statement into thinking all would be well. As far as Virginia understood matters, nothing could be further from the truth. Under May and the bastards in the civil service who really ran the country, Britain was about to hand over command and control of all defence forces, to a foreign power, that was Brussels. This act of treachery was going to go unpunished, because the opposition were useless and anyway agreed with the betrayal in principle and the otherwise vocal members of the ERG had been made to shut up about it.

Virginia did what she felt was her bit, online, but the more she talked about it, the more she was called a conspiracy theorist, even in the comments sections of the conservative press. Virginia began to feel lonely, a one-woman crusader against prejudiced, unthinking people, who had not Virginia’s nose for political trouble. Her own side seemed hostile, as if their love for party was far stronger than their love for principle. They were mostly men of course, which was part of the problem, they seemed to have a way of acting as if political parties were football teams which must be supported at all costs. And right-wing commentators didn’t seem to like women who tried to talk about military matters, either.

Virginia decided to wean herself off her online troll activity and went back to buying furniture. She added at least half a dozen items to her collection, almost by accident, by leaving low bids on things she didn’t need. Some of these items required collecting from the other end of the country and Virginia found these excursions a pleasant break from her reclusive existence at home. Driving down the A1 on brilliant mornings never failed to make Virginia fall in love with England again. The furthest she ventured as a rule was into Norfolk, but she’d made one journey to Essex for a chest on chest, another into Buckinghamshire for a scroll arm, regency sofa. She nearly always stopped to chat with the sellers of anything acquired on eBay. Some were just dealers, but often they were old people, downsizing, or worried that their relatives would just give their belongings to a charity shop when they died, not knowing their worth. One sad couple were old homosexuals, who knew, or thought they knew, that their younger brothers would burn their valuable collection of period oak furniture and prevent their nephews from inheriting it. That excursion did not cheer Virginia up, but she had spent time listening to the stories of their collections. They had no children but seemed to take pride in their antecedents instead, remembering which thing had been where in the house of some great aunt or grandparent. More than on any other occasion Virginia felt the urge to confide in them the secret of the slivers, the sandings or sawdust. But she had never known if those without her gift could experience the dreams. And she knew how silly such things would sound from the mouth of an otherwise school m’amish, middle aged woman.

Virginia usually exercised caution when experimenting on antiques she had newly acquired. But one evening a William IV, rosewood card table arrived, from Bristol, which Virginia had won for the princely sum of fourteen pounds. Carrying it into the drawing room, she caught her cardigan on a tiny piece of veneer, and it came off. She determined to put it under her pillow that night and see where it took her.

Since she’d lost the knowledge of how to fly she was not certain if she could still enter the past lives of her possessions, in her dreams. The nature of her migraines had begun to change lately, too. Sometimes she felt the great and sudden urge to sleep as a prodrome. And this could happen anywhere. Once she had begun to fall asleep while walking the dog. She had continued to walk and got herself home, but then the ‘great sleep’ had followed. The sleep which was like death in its total unconsciousness. When she arose from these ‘great sleeps’ as she thought of them, she had no memory. She knew that the time between her waking up and recollecting her past life and ‘coming back’ to herself must only in reality be a minute or two at the most. But just like near death experiences they seemed to last for eternity. So far, once the process of recollection had begun it had continued smoothly, but Virginia began to worry about glitches. And one time that voice she heard as outside herself had once asked “Who am I being at the moment? Oh yes, Virginia”.

So Virginia was keen to see if she could still go back in her dreams and see the lives of others. And she was keen to ascertain that her soul on re-entry after such an excursion would not let her down, not get stuck as a collection of particles in her bed and fail to answer correctly the question “who am I being at the moment?”

Virginia lay on her back, with the sliver of Brazilian rosewood veneer under her slightly too fat, feather pillow. Phoebe had not wanted to sleep on the regency chaise at the bottom of Virginia’s bed, perhaps suspecting Virginia might need her to be there to wake her out of the ‘great sleep’ later on. So Virginia was lying like a frog on a science lab bench, waiting to be dissected, with her legs either side of Phoebe, slightly bent at the knees and her pelvis flat against the mattress. Phoebe’s nose was resting on Virginia’s chest, she was very heavy, but her gentle breathing and warmth sent Virginia to sleep and with sleep came flight.

Flying in dreams was so real that Virginia had never really considered that she did not actually know how to fly. The sensation of taking off and mastering with ease the skill required to keep up the momentum was always joyful, as Virginia imagined it would be in reality. Time in dreams is not real time and Virginia could not judge how much of it had flown since she had commenced her own flight. But suddenly she emerged in an elegant, mid-18th century room, not particularly lavish, but comfortable and mostly furnished in the Regency taste. There was nothing that dated to before about 1825, which made Virginia consider it must be the house of a merchant whose wealth had been created at about the date of his furniture. Virginia was standing at the side of an alcove, next to a tall secretaire bookcase, made of Cuban mahogany and beautifully inlaid with Kingwood, satinwood and hare wood which formed the usual motifs of shells and roundels and stringing. A group of men was seated around what Virginia realised must be her recently acquired rosewood card table. She knew that object dated from sometime in the 1830’s so she surmised this was where she had landed. She had bought the table from a seller in Bristol, and after a while of listening to the men’s accents, she realised that this was where she was.

How bloody typical! Thought Virginia, whoever it was that was the author of her life was some right-on, virtue signalling lefty, wanting to teach her a lesson about bloody slavery and the evils of capitalism. Why hadn’t she stopped to think? Where did she imagine a piece of veneer from a table acquired in Bristol and made during the reign of William IV would take her? She was so bloody cross she thought she might give the game away and appear to the chaps as herself, in her old white nightie, unbuttoned at the chest and the lace a little torn. A poor sort of creature she would no doubt look.

Virginia calmed herself down by ignoring the conversation of the merchants, for a time and had a philosophical argument with herself, as she was prone to do, about whom the author of her life might be. She was a Christian, so clearly, she knew it was God, and she thought she knew that God was also the original virtue signalling lefty. At least Jesus was. Dear old Jesus, she thought, like a male version of her favourite aunt, a dyed in the wool socialist, but kind and loving and endlessly generous. The most looked-forward-to relative. And in fairness to Jesus, there was nothing he disapproved of more than virtue signalling. She didn’t think He thought she hadn’t understood what a terrible thing the slave trade was, he wouldn’t be sending her here for such a basic lesson. And if He knew her innermost thoughts He must know Virginia could put forward a few patriotic arguments in favour of how the British had dealt with slaves, compared with the Ottomans, say. Some acts of inhumanity in history might be so dreadful that it was possible to ignore the fact that within those dreadful acts, there were still degrees or levels of dreadfulness. And Virginia did not like splitting hairs, even in arguments with herself, but, if you were a male slave ‘owned’ by a Britain, in the 18th or early 19th century, at least you got to keep your balls.

God, of course, had been a bit more intolerant back in the old BC days. The sort of chap who would sometimes up vote Virginia at The Spectator, or write, “Great comment!” The Church of England of course was cornily famous for being a bunch of ‘Guardian readers preaching to Telegraph readers’, and Virginia knew this. Nobody went to church to hear the gospel according to the Guardian, they just ignored that bit. As Virginia spent the rest of the week working hard as an online troll, she considered it her duty to abstain from political argument or thought on the Sabbath, so all the red/green nonsense spilling from the pulpit like strange slime in a children’s comic book, washed over Virginia and left no impression.

But it was Virginia herself who had made the decision to use her old skill to travel back in time using the piece of antique veneer like an amulet, and she could not claim ignorance of what the table was. Five years earlier she had bought another, similar, more locally and had given £350 for it, thinking it a bargain. She had known its date, its whereabouts and worth as an investment, should the antiques market ever pick up again. Her conscious mind had had all the evidence it needed in order to make a decision. She might have been wanting only to test her own ability, to see if she could still travel, but that was no excuse. Virginia knew from her years of obsessing about neurological research that the brain only informed the conscious mind of its decisions once it had taken them. Plainly this was the case now. Virginia must own her decision, stick with it and learn from it.

Virginia switched off her internal dialogue and began to listen in to the chaps around the table. Their conversation was incomprehensible to Virginia at first, but as more brandy was consumed it became more argumentative and aggressive in tone and Virginia got the sense of it. Of course, they were arguing about abolition and the effect it would have on trade. And of course, Virginia found herself horrified by the callous talk of the merchants who regarded the buying and selling of men as no different to the buying and selling of sugar or mahogany. One of the chaps had made a good deal of his money from mahogany, in the beginning. He had brought it back, using it as lumber in the hold of his slave ship.

Virginia had known this was the case, it was not a revelation. Mahogany had proved so popular and fashionable with the furniture makers, for its hardness and fineness which made it easy to carve and to highly polish that oak and walnut had been pushed completely out of fashion, and did not put in another appearance for another fifty years, when the Arts and Crafts crowd, had gone all ‘Little England’ and hippy, as Virginia’s political opponents would call it, were the movement beginning today.

To Virginia this association of early, Cuban mahogany furniture with slavery was, if anything, more of a reason to value it. And those rainforest trees would not regrow to their eighteenth-century size for another 500 years, that was a green reason to value it. And the lives of the slaves who had travelled in the same ship’s hold as the timber were inextricably bound up with that timber. Perhaps particles of souls left on board when their corpses were thrown overboard had even clung to and been embedded in the timber, so the furniture must always be highly prized. That was a kind of hippy, superstitious, mumbo jumbo reason to prize it. And for some reason it came as a shock to Virginia, that this reason was hers, her superstition, her mumbo jumbo, her inner hippy. Then there was the capitalist reason, which was that cabinet makers and furniture sellers had made a good living out of it and been able to feed and clothe their families. And a hundred years later, poor artists like her father had been able to buy it when it was out of fashion and sell it when it was back in, feeding and clothing his family too. But no doubt it would soon be regarded as abhorrent, by the politically correct. Students at Oxford and Cambridge would soon start demanding mahogany furniture be burned.

As she had expected, Virginia had found it very difficult to wake up after her surreal visit to Bristol circa 1835. Phoebe had given up watching over her at some point in the night and returned to the chaise. When she finally surfaced it was nearly 11 am. The rise to consciousness took the same form as it had on several other occasions, there was nothing, no ability to think in words, no images. Then there was a single word: blue, as Virginia found the first name in her vocabulary and applied it correctly to the colour of the bedroom wall on which her eyes seemed to be fixed. Recollection then came in its usual form, first she recalled her parents and siblings as they were in infancy and childhood, then Kineburn, with particular details of the stained glass, the quality of the light as it came through the south facing windows on mornings of indoor frost, the rough places in the flagged floor, the taste of the Duke of Argyll’s Tea Plant leaves and its orange berries, the smell of the camomile and water mint by the water, and then, after what seemed to be a great pause in proceedings came the strange sensation of shock as she recalled her marriage, her house, her children. Then she was back, fumbling for her varifocals and iPad, ready to start her perusal of the online editions.

There wasn’t all that much to get worked up about in the morning papers, which was always a great disappointment to Virginia. Getting het up about some abuse or other, of power, by the state, usually kept her warm and distracted as she pottered through her household chores. But there was nothing to really get her teeth into.

She would have to ponder the big philosophical question and the one about the nature of ‘the great sleep’.

As Virginia walked along by the side of the tidal river, calm as a mill pond in the late morning light, with Phoebe bounding ahead, she considered the first of these problems. She tackled them, as she tackled everything, by speaking rather patronisingly to herself, beginning with first principles. She had spent too long teaching the children at home and her mother had spent too long teaching primary school children. She could not prevent her internal voice being a mixture of bossy mummy and teacher.

So what was Virginia supposed to make of it? If these strange dreams were meant to inform her waking life, what lesson was she being taught, obliquely? Did it have to be a lesson? She hadn’t really considered her childhood dreams to be lessons, yet she had learnt from them, such things as: stay away from Jimmy Saville, especially if he’s out jogging when you’re on your own in the woods. Animals and adolescents aren’t much different. Being a farmer’s wife can be a bit dull, and the teacakes in the cafe by the river have improved enormously in texture, in the last twenty years. Drunk men were to be avoided and certainly not waited up for. Child birth was bloody hard work and a bit dangerous, whatever they said in those awful, French natural childbirth books with their hideous, graphic illustrations and photographs, and post-natal psychopathy was a very serious and dangerous condition indeed.

Virginia supposed the lesson her rational mind would learn and that her rational children would wish her to learn was that, as she already knew, partly from her reading of so much neuroscience, one could not invent new places in dreams. You could only visit places you had seen or visited and taken in, visually. (Virginia had visited Bristol when she was teaching the children at home and had decided to tour as many British cities and cathedrals and so on as possible, for educational purposes.) Similarly, you could not discover new facts, you just dredged up things you knew that you hadn’t thought about much, because something in your conscience, wanted you to mull it over again. It didn’t matter if you called that need to think about something your subconscious, your intellect, or God or the Devil, whether you believed the need was entirely self-driven or came from some force in the universe. The desire to give the thing its correct name must not get in the way of acting with one’s conscious mind to discover what it was that niggled your unconscious one. But then, if one did not know what lesson to draw, if one could make multiple arguments for and against how could you know whether it was God or the Devil that was driving you?

But if that were true, then what of her childhood dreams, had the furniture which had provided the means by which she had entered scenes from the long past lives of the dead really all belonged in properties she had visited in reality? The wainscot chair, had it ever been in the little oak panelled parlour where she had seen it occupied by the tired and frightened young woman and later by her drunk and violent husband? Or was the oak parlour just the newly restored one up in the house on the moor, which she had visited for a whole class birthday tea? The father of the girl whose birthday it was had been a publican, in the market town, Virginia remembered. The family had plenty of money, the hall was being made comfortable and luxurious, it was losing its character, but Virginia saw with hindsight this might not have been an entirely bad thing.

Virginia found the hormones of anxiety were rising as she found a logical explanation that dispensed with the need for magic, mystery, oddness and dashed what had been so much part of her identity to pieces.

So she considered the question of what the political lesson might be that the ‘author of her life’ might wish her to learn. Slavery had been abolished, it was an evil trade and the government had in the end put the good of humanity before economic impact. This had been the right thing to do. Trade and economics were not as important as doing what was right and Christian. Individual businesses and households might suffer the consequences of the state’s decision and the tradesman who served and sold to them would suffer as a result, some would go under, but the principle was established, there was such a thing as a greater good and business and economics should not be taken into consideration on these occasions.

But to use such an argument about British Sovereignty would seem in poor taste. Why was Sovereignty a ‘greater good’ in the same way abolition of slavery was? Virginia didn’t mind the insults hurled at her by her fellow online trolls, mostly, but she couldn’t bear to think of making an argument which was not quite the thing. Besides, so many on her side believed in globalisation and world trade and championed sovereignty and independence because of the wider business opportunities it would open up. Virginia did not give a monkey’s for global business opportunities, but she did not wish to do battle on two fronts. Perhaps it was not Sovereignty, independence and the Constitution which were the greater good, after all, but democracy. Yes, democracy was a principle that the people had fought for, over centuries. The Levellers, whom the Poet’s half-brother had done for, had believed in it, all that time ago. The people of the nation were proud of their long tradition of fighting for it. And had regarded it as part of their freedom. The fight for the black vote in The States had been seen as following on from the abolition of slavery. In Britain universal suffrage had been almost seen as the pinnacle of our civilisation.

But then democracy could result in bad and harmful decisions being made, by governments on behalf of those who had voted for them, which were not for the good of humanity. And in truth this had only really happened in Europe. In Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and even for a time in France dictatorial or militaristic utter bastards had first got a grip on power because of democracy, but not in Britain. And Brexit certainly was not like this, we hadn’t voted for a would-be dictator, we had voted to bring the decisions about who made the laws which governed our lives closer to home. The people of Britain had never voted to bring back slavery, we had our Christian consciences and our benevolent prejudice. Where Brexit was concerned we had simply voted to bring about the end of a particular relationship our country had with a bureaucratic institution.

Continental European states had decided democracy had its limits, because of their own experiences, they had convinced themselves they were not quite capable of calling the shots and decided to look to Plato and the Philosopher Kings. They wanted some grown-ups in charge who the children couldn’t boss about. Britain had resisted this for a long time, but as the economy became stagnant and gripped by socialism the Tories started to fear that the kind of mess Denis Healey had made of things was going to be the pattern of things for decades. They wanted some grown-ups to stop the lefties. The left held out against this, the demos were not the children, the idea of democracy was not an idea about appointing the right sort of grown-ups, who were not Denis Healey. Democracy was about people choosing who made the laws that governed their lives, because they were their lives. The ‘First Past The Post’ system was imperfect, but it was better than passing the choice to an entirely unelected elite abroad. But then came Thatcherism and as Maggie seemed endlessly popular the left abolished their principled opposition to the EEC and decided it would be better if the Socialist Philosopher Kings could overrule Thatcher, from afar. Things had come full circle; two wrongs had been used to attempt to make a right. Democracy could get stuffed.

This was what was beginning to really rankle. We had had the referendum, we had voted in huge numbers and given the government the answer to the question it had asked. Then we had had the election, and 80% of the population had voted for parties which said they would uphold the referendum result and deliver Britain’s independence, but since May had not got a working majority, she had decided it was necessary to ignore democracy and start placating industry. We were to have a ‘Transition Period’, now, as if business hadn’t had long enough notice. Virginia wondered idly what their pronouns would be after the ‘Transition Period’ had ended, but her imagination gave out.

Virginia stood and watched the seagulls for a while, swirling white as the wind turbines over the water, and a black gannet perched on the trunk of a dead tree hanging its wings up to dry, and listened to the whistling widgeon. She began to contemplate the more personal of her problems - what to do about the sleep thing? Was she experiencing something like the Poet’s daughter had experienced? The Poet’s descriptions of these experiences made them sound much more severe, but he was a creative man with an active imagination. Were their dreams the same experiences as she had had, which the Poet had described as trances? His descriptions of his daughter recounting conversations while in her trances, noting them down and then asking her what she had dreamt, and her recounting the same conversations, was odd. It had been sufficient for the Poet, a highly intelligent and well-regarded man to make his famous accusation. Because Nick was working on the continent, she could not ask him whether she reported the conversations she overheard out loud or ask him to take notes. Since she believed she had inherited the family trouble-making skill, she did not like to think she had been exhibiting the same symptoms as the victims of witchcraft. But would it not make more sense, since she was trying to argue rationally, for her to have something like the same neurological problem, as the poet’s daughters, if that problem were the result of something in the water supply, say, or the soil?

The Poet though might have made the whole thing up, or made part of it up. His children may have had some illness, they may have rambled in their sleep and have spoken of people they knew, even if the Poet had thought they did not know some of the people they named. Virginia, thinking back to her own childhood, remembered how the local children sought out other, less local children, cycling five or six miles distance to seek out new friends, whizzing up and down the hills, caring nothing for their steepness, or for ‘bad men’. Virginia imagined it was ever thus, the children her mother had called ‘gutter snipes’ had always been keen on gallivanting and making new friends. So Virginia thought the Poet’s daughters might easily have been acquainted with the types of people the Poet thought they did not and probably should not have known.

A great deal of the Poet’s accusation might also have been an exercise in translation. He may just have translated the names as ones which appeared as local to his own home as a bit of idle mischief making of his own. A bit of 17th century trolling, in fact. But then it had got rather more serious, the constable and his own half-brother, the justice had become involved. And he knew full well the punishment for witchcraft was hanging. And why would he have falsely accused the 17th century housekeeper at Kineburn, had he owed the master of the place money? That man had been a money lender, that was well known, for he had famously foreclosed on the mortgage of the man who had built Kineburn. Or did he just disapprove of money lending as a Christian? Yet surely this had been looked into, and ruled out.

The unconscious ‘great sleep’ seemed to have been part of Virginia’s childhood, because she entered into it after playing in her brother’s workshop, among the sawdust and splinters; she had travelled and flown during these times and often woken up with a wet bed, having been so deeply unconscious. At other times she had walked in her sleep, through the long corridor, opening the heavy, pegged oak door, firstly of the corridor, then of her parent’s room, where she had lain down beside her mother. In adolescence with the start of the migraines, and the appearance of Freddy, the dreams had seemed to occur in a different part of sleep. She had had no trouble waking from them until recently, when she was pre-menopausal, and she had forgotten how to fly. So, hormones seemed also to be involved.

And what of Freddy, could one hallucinate a dog, in one’s loneliness and isolation. Had he been around when she was teaching all four children at home and doing her weekly, open house days for other home educators in the county and round about?

Had she been happy at that time, or just busy? Did they amount to the same thing, in the end? Virginia thought about that period of her life for a time, what had she been thinking, letting other people’s awful children run wild in her lovely old house, among her antiques? Was Fate or God or ‘The Author Of Her Life’ teaching her something about the nature or course of society at large? Each week a group of dungaree and ethnic tat clad hippy women with free flowing hair and free hanging boobs had descended on Virginia and her own offspring at Virginia’s invitation.

Each week these hippy women had sat gossiping in the garden or the kitchen and allowed their hideous, barbarian offspring to run wild about the house. The favourite pastime of these small devils was inventing games with unknowable rules and forcing the better mannered, meeker children to abide by them, while ensuring they didn’t have to abide by them themselves and that nobody but themselves knew what they were. The way they ensured this was by not thinking them up until they became necessary in order to prevent another child getting the upper hand in some way. Some of these open house days passed off relatively peacefully, but there were many colourful incidents which Virginia could bring to mind as metaphors for the way society and the old rules of conduct were breaking down. There’d been the day they had invented the game with the plastic cups, which had involved setting them alight on the end of sticks, pokers and extending toasting forks, in the drawing room, chasing each other, dropping molten plastic on the huge 19th century silk, country house carpet. And the rule had been that the boy who’d invented the game was allowed to escape ‘off ground’ but none of the others could. Then there’d been the day when the game had been that Virginia’s son had had to barricade himself in his bedroom while the barbarian hordes attacked his door with every tool in the potting shed. Virginia hadn’t taken in the more complex rules of that game, the main one was simply that her son was not allowed any tool with which to defend himself against hoes, spades, forks and other sundry items. Then there’d been the scythe game in which the other children had taken it in turns to swing a small scythe about near her son’s face while keeping up a conversation about Doctor Who, and he had had to jump out of the way, just in the nick of time, but keep chattering on about Daleks. Why in God’s name hadn’t Virginia put a stop to it all, before it had all got so out of hand?

Virginia had been a coward, for one thing, she didn’t think it was up to her to discipline other people’s children, if their parents didn’t believe discipline served any purpose. She had thought these other hippy women might be allowing their children to develop a huge amount of self-confidence, by bullying other people’s children and probably wished her son could develop a similar attitude which would help him in life better than gentleness and timidity. She thought all the rules the state had imposed on home educating parents about socialisation were ones which must be obeyed, because as a conservative she believed in obeying the rules. The fact that allowing these days of socialisation meant she was complying with a rule though, did not mean that the children were. They might be meeting other children, but only for the purposes of testing their strength and generally acting like apes in a leadership contest.

And when in the modern world were the adults going to take charge again? Not the adults in Europe, not the Philosopher Kings, but the adult conservatives in the general population, who did not seek the adulation of the lefty liberal children. When were the children going to stop setting the agenda, pretending there were no rules one minute and thousands of complex, unknowable rules the next, which they would invent at the drop of a hat, when it became necessary to stop decent people getting the upper hand or winning what they were entitled to win under the rules as they had been when the game started?

Virginia decided she didn’t really like rational thinking. It made it very difficult to come down on one side or another, apart from anything else. Where politics was concerned, how could one hold fast to that which was good, if one could argue oneself out of believing things were straightforwardly good or bad, and one was forever finding oneself “on the one hand this and the other hand that-ing”? Yet it was ‘enlightenment’ reasoning that drove people to come to mad conclusions, because they considered themselves to be taking logical thought to its natural end point. History provided several examples of this, such as the decimalisation of everything, which the French had come up with, at the height of their revolutionary madness. We were not all reason, reason could lead to ridiculous extremes, just as non-reason could. It was good to be firm and seek answers, but part of the answer was myth and story and tradition and human - and more importantly local- habit and culture. And what was more local than the tradition of one’s childhood home, one’s forebears, one’s valley. The Poet had described the dark practices as ancient ones in that place, at the time of writing his accusation.

Virginia’s idea about her inherited skill being entirely imaginary and part of the neurological condition which had caused her childhood and now her middle-aged strangeness, was depressing. She needed to believe her powers were genuine, however crazy that made her seem, because otherwise she was just a dull, lonely old bag, with a slow growing benign tumour, perhaps, or an affliction caused by lead poisoning, say.