I promised you a story.

I promised you a story. Are you sitting comfortably?

A little background colour first. I grew up in social housing in a small market town called Olney during the 70′s. Back then it had a population of about 2 and a half thousand, and was situated in the heart of rural North Bucks, some 11 miles south of Northampton. I have vivid memories of fields of rapeseed, of playing all day on a disused overgrown railway line back in the day when kids could carry sheath knifes without risk of censure.

Olney is famous for a number of things… a pancake race that claimed a tradition going back to the 15th century CE, run by the women of the town every Shrove Tuesday. The “Olney Hymns”, written by John Newton (an ex-slave trader who converted to Christianity), that include the well known “Amazing Grace. The 18th century poet William Cowper. The town got its name from the Anglo-Saxon Ollanege, thought to mean Olla’s Island.

On the road out to Wellingborough, past the Castle pub, was a fetid algae covered pond which we children referred to as the “whirleypool”. Legend (at least amongst us kids) had it that the whirleypool was bottomless, and that it was connected by an underground stream that flowed beneath the High Street to the River Ouse, emerging behind the Church of St Peter and St Paul. Legend further had it that on certain nights the devil would ride out of the whirleypool in a carriage driven by headless horses. The Church was suppoosed to have been built on a different location, a field next to where it currently stands, but when the builders returned to their work in the morning everything was found to have been moved to its current location. After several abortive attempts to build the church in its intended spot, the conclusion was that it was somehow important to the “old religion” and that the devil himself was moving the stones, and work continued at the location that the church currently stands on.

Now, back then, I was a choirboy at the Church (which accounts for my enduring love of bells and smells, and a nicely crafted Nunc Dimitis). The graveyard was a truly evocative place. I recall giant angels with sad, lichen covered faces, and one head stone, old and faded, that seemed to have no writing on at all, only pictures with skeletons and other imagery of death and mortality.

John Newton was buried in the graveyard, in a fairly secluded corner. Among the tales we would tell each other as children there was one in particular, of Newton’s grave. The tales had it that if one was to approach the grave after sunset and stand on a certain spot, walk three times anticlockwise around the grave, close your eyes and turn three times anticlockwise on the spot to face out from the grave, the devil himself would appear!!

Just imagine the appeal such a story had to a pubescent boy with a fascination with mythology. So, after dark, I headed to the graveyard and approached Newton’s grave. I stood in the spot, and proceeded to walk around the grave three times, anticlockwise. After all, we knew that these we just stories, right? So why did my heart beat a little faster with each circuit of the grave?

I completed the three circuits, closed my eyes (heart really starting to pump now) and slowly turned on the spot, three times, anticlockwise.

I looked up… opened my eyes…

and inches away from my face was a bloody great gargoyle!

These are my stories. This is my land.