8 minute read

A GARDEN OF SOLACE

Julia Skelhorn, Sherborne Scribblers

Harriet threw open the French windows and stepped onto the terrace to admire her garden. The late afternoon sun was still hot and the sound of bees in the herbaceous border throbbed in the sultry air. Blowsy Victorian roses bloomed in every shape, size and hue, creating a shimmering sea of colour, their scent floating across the garden on the warm air. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. The sound of the telephone disturbed her thoughts and she reluctantly made her way indoors.

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‘Harriet McKenzie,’ she answered.

‘Nancy Pollitt here,’ came the response. ‘We haven’t spoken before.’ Harriet felt uneasy. ’Your name and telephone number were on a cleaner’s work list,’ Nancy continued. She gave the cleaner’s name.

‘Yes, Abigail Harris was my cleaner. She came for several months, then didn’t turn up one morning. No message to say why.’

‘I’m the owner of the girl’s rooms,’ Nancy told her, ‘above the stationery office on Bold Street. I’m afraid she died, in a tragic accident.’

Harriet grabbed a kitchen chair and lowered herself slowly. ‘How terrible!’ she exclaimed, searching for more words. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You’ll probably get a call from a clergyman with the details,’ the woman added. ‘He’s trying to trace family but so far, nothing has come forward. He won’t seek to involve you. It’s just that nothing appears to be known about the girl, little more than her name. He’s contacting everyone on her list. There was money in a drawer you see, enough for a small funeral.’

‘I see. Well thank you for ringing. I will await the clergyman’s call. Do you have his name?’

‘I think he said Fothergill.’

Harriet carried her cup of tea out to the terrace. Looking down the garden, she could visualise the poor girl. Always took her coffee break in the same spot and sat in the wicker chair in the dappled shade of the silver birch tree. Abigail Harris was not the kind of person to talk about herself so it wasn’t a surprise that little was known about her. She’d been a good worker. Better than most. It had crossed Harriet’s mind several times that it seemed strange she should be a cleaner. She wondered whether the girl had fallen on hard times. Or was she just lonely or perhaps, very private? Having been widowed for several years, Harriet understood how easy it was to feel lonely.

The following morning, doing her stint at the charity shop, Harriet couldn’t get Abigail Harris out of her mind. Sorting books that had recently been left, she put aside a copy of War Horse to read to the old men at the day centre. She arranged for shoes and garments, of no use to anyone, to be disposed of and listened to Mrs Chesham bringing her up to date with her husband’s angina medication. Rather than taking the short bus ride home, she walked across The Common, wondering when she would hear from the clergyman and on arriving home, put down her bag, opened the back door and looked down her garden. But the spectre of Abigail Harris was nowhere in the garden where she’d so often been urged to sit in the sun for her coffee, to pick the lily of the valley when it was profuse, and paperwhite narcissus before they drooped.

The call from Canon Fothergill came just after lunch.

‘The pedestrian light had changed to red,’ the clergyman told her. ‘The girl had gone on, unlike everyone else and a van unavoidably hit her. Onlookers said it looked as though she had planned it.’ Harriet gasped.

‘I’m sorry to distress you, Mrs McKenzie.’ She took details of the date and time of the funeral and noted the address of the church.

‘I will be there,’ she told Canon Fothergill.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That will hopefully make five or six of us.’

Feeling distressed, Harriet donned her gardening gloves and tidied a herbaceous border. She picked the best of the deep red dahlias and plunged them in water in the kitchen, then returned to the garden and sat in the wicker chair under the silver birch tree. Suddenly, a tiny spotted, scarlet dome on black legs crawled across the back of her hand towards the curl of her little finger. Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home; your house is on fire, your children are gone. She must have nodded off and woke with a shiver. The air was now chilly, a signal that summer was almost over.

Her thoughts immediately turned to Abigail Harris. Somewhere, she thought, between childhood and death, the girl’s life hadn’t been worth living, her whole world blown away like feathers on the wind. Had she sought solace from her loneliness in this garden, where comice pears would soon fall and lacy hydrangeas decorated faded brick walls?

Harriet wept, and through the blur of tears, the beauty that existed in her garden was lost in distortion. Dabbing her eyes, she watched it return, becoming again resplendent. But that afternoon, it seemed all wrong rather than beautiful. It appeared to be a mockery.

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Anthony Sattin

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World Richard Hopton, Sherborne Literary Society

It is a historiographic cliché that history is written by the victors but is equally true that it is predominantly written by settled people, that is, not by the nomadic. Anthony Sattin’s new book is an attempt to rectify this omission by tracing the history of the nomadic peoples. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote that ‘nomads have no history; they only have a geography’ but it would be more accurate to say that their history is missing from more conventional accounts of the past. It is, as Sattin puts it, ‘the shadow side of our story’, one which is difficult to tell as nomads by their very nature ‘left scarce evidence of their passage through the world’. Nomads tread lightly, leaving few records or ruins.

The book opens in Turkey at the site of Gobekli Tepe (‘Potbelly Hill’ in English) where in the tenth millennium BC nomads built a complex of religious monuments, 7,000 years before the Pyramids and Stonehenge. Cutting, transporting, and erecting the immense blocks of stone was an operation which would have required a large, willing workforce and a huge amount of organisation. It is significant that the people who built Gobekli Tepe were ‘hunters and gatherers, wanderers, unsettled’ as it demonstrates that the agents of change could include people who lived on the move. In Sattin’s view, this is important as it shows that nomad history is as crucial to our understanding of our past as the history of settled people.

It was the development of farming which opened the divide between settled and nomadic peoples. The biblical myth of Cain and Abel is a dramatisation of the conflict between settled farmers and nomadic pastoralists: Cain was the farmer but God preferred Abel the pastoralist’s offerings of ‘the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof.’ It may be this choice riled Cain to the extent that he killed his brother.

The first cities were built in Mesopotamia, the fertile land between Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The earliest-known city site is at Uruk, on the banks of the Euphrates, to the south of Baghdad which began to take shape in the fifth millennium BC. Henceforward, the divide between settled peoples and nomads would be a permanent feature of human society but not an impenetrable barrier. It is a central contention of Sattin’s book that ‘nomads have always been at least half of the human story and have made essential contributions to the march of what many historians have traditionally called civilization.’ In the second century BC when the Romans had defeated Carthage and become masters of the Mediterranean, and the Han emperor Wu dominated China, the nomads controlled an area larger and more powerful than either of the two settled empires.

Many centuries earlier the nomads of the Eurasian steppes had learned to ride the horse, something Sattin characterises as ‘the equine revolution’. In time, the wagon came into being and then the chariot, which changed the nature of warfare. These revolutionary developments are wholly attributable to the nomadic peoples of the steppes.

At the heart of Nomads are the sections dealing with the great nomadic empires, starting with the Medes and their successors, the Persians, five hundred years before Christ. The Persians built Persepolis, one of the wonders of the ancient world, despite them not being a settled, city-dwelling people; it was a place of ritual, ‘a tent in stone’ and ‘as such a fitting monument to nomad power.’ It was the nomadic Huns who hastened the end of the Roman Empire while the rise of Arab Muslim power in the seventh century AD ‘transformed the existing world order’. Within a century of Mohammed’s death in 632, the Roman Empire had been reduced to a rump consisting of Constantinople and its Balkan hinterland while the Arab hegemony extended from the Indus Valley to the Atlantic Ocean. As Sattin observes, the most striking thing about the new empire was not its size, but that it had been won by desert people, by nomads, whose habit of movement led to speedy conquests. These conquests brought their own problems, principally the conundrum of how to balance the nomadic traditions with the need for a capital city for a widespread empire. Ultimately, the problem was never resolved: as the Arabs shed their nomadic traditions and the vital energy - the asabiyyawhich had made them such a force gradually dissipated in the ease of city life.

Probably the most famous nomad ruler of all was Genghis Khan, a ruler generally portrayed in Western history as a bloodthirsty warlord. Settled historians, writes Sattin, ‘have tended to focus on the number of people the Mongol khans killed, not the advances and advantages that came from the pax Mongolia.’ Tamburlaine the Great’s empire was, despite its great cities of Samarkand and others, essentially nomadic. Babur, who established Mughal power in northern India in the early sixteenth century was rooted in the nomadic tradition. The Ottoman Empire which dominated the Near East from early modern times until the end of the First World War was nomadic in its origins.

By the seventeenth century nomad power was in eclipse, overcome by the rise of European maritime power and the new intellectual ideas spreading across Europe. But this should not blind us to the historical importance of the nomadic peoples and their empires, as this book makes clear. In their time, the nomadic, Mongol empires did change the world.

Anthony Sattin will be appearing at the Sherborne Travel Writing Festival, 14th-16th April. For tickets and information visit sherbornetravelwritingfestival.com

Muntanya is an independent trekking and outdoors shop offering clothing and equipment from major suppliers.

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Suppliers of both new and pre-loved vinyl, official t-shirts, merchandise and memorabilia. Come visit and “Try before you buy”. The Beat & Track, The Old Shambles, South Street, Sherborne, DT9 3LN

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ACROSS

1. Part of a pedestal (4)

3. Pertaining to education (8)

9. Matured (7)

10. Type of herring (5)

11. Disturbance; act of meddling (12)

14. Add together (3)

16. Falls to the ground (5)

17. Cereal grain (3)

18. Intolerable (12)

21. Quantitative relation between two amounts (5)

22. Type of photographic shot (5-2)

23. Showering with liquid (8)

24. Mocks (4)

Down

1. Least clean (8)

2. Repository (5)

4. Partly digested animal food (3)

5. Exemption from a rule (12)

6. Country in northwestern Africa (7)

7. Call to mind (4)

8. Preliminary (12)

12. Run away with a lover (5)

13. Tries (8)

15. Imaginary scary creature (7)

19. Short high-pitched tone (5)

20. Large periods of time (4)

22. Argument against something (3)

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