Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘We needs to know, boy.’

‘Gimme a day or so to think about it.’

‘Can’t. C’mon, Danny, who’s it gonner harm?’

‘Me.’ Danny’s voice went thin. ‘I’m as guilty as any bugger, Gomer. It was me got Terry into it. Well... me and Coll.’

‘Dr Coll?’

‘ Me and Dr Coll,’ Danny says. ‘And the bloody era that promised us the earth. And here we all are nigh on forty year later and further in the shit.’

‘Stay there,’ Gomer said. ‘Don’t move.’

When Betty Thorogood started to cry, it turned everything around.

Until now, talking about a world she knew, she’d been cool and assured. The otherworldly – visions and gods and archetypes – did not scare her, any more than neuroses scared a psychologist. In the everyday world, implicated in the death of a harmless widow, Betty came apart.

‘I just wanted to help her. I was sorry for her... that’s all there was to it.’

Jane had moved her chair back, appalled. Witches don’t cry! Merrily leaned across the table, put a hand over Betty’s.

Betty parted her hair, peered at Merrily through her tears. ‘What if their tests show up something nasty in that potion I gave her? Something I didn’t put there.’

‘What are they going to find? Henbane? Deadly night-shade? Rat poison? He doesn’t need all that. He’s got natural causes, apparently hastened by her overreliance on you.’

‘I just don’t understand why she would stop taking the pills he’d prescribed. She thought he was wonderful. She thought...’ Betty’s eyes filled up again. ‘She thought everyone was wonderful. Everyone who tried to help her. The local people were so good . Because she was from Off, anyone local who didn’t actually spit on her front step seemed wonderful and caring. I was so sorry for her. And dying there, in her chair, in front of that lukewarm fire... Perhaps he is telling the truth. Perhaps poor, fuddled Mrs Wilshire thought my little herbal remedy, bottled under the moon, was some sort of cure-all.’

‘There’s an experienced nurse I know,’ Merrily said. ‘Perhaps I’ll give her a call.’

She stopped as Gomer returned. His glasses shone like twin torch-bulbs.

‘Come and talk to Danny, vicar.’

AS DANNY TALKED, the picture formed for Merrily in ragged, fluttering colours. Radnor Forest in the 1960s and 1970s: hippy paradise.

The flower children had wandered in from Off and settled in this border country in their hundreds because it was cheap and remote. They rented or even bought half-ruined cottages far from the roads. Thin boys in yellow trousers chopping wood from the hedges. Beautiful, long-haired girls in ankle-length medieval dresses fetching water from the well.

In spite of the electricity supply being at best intermittent, they brought the new music – why, The Incredible String Band even lived for a while near Llandegley towards the northwestern end of the Forest.

And the dope. The hippies also brought the dope.

The local people were amused rather than hostile – the hippies didn’t do any damage and they were always a talking point.

And for some – like Danny Thomas, dreamy, faraway farmer’s boy – this was what they’d been waiting for all their lives. When it was really happening Danny was good and ready; he figured he must’ve been born a hippy – growing up on Elvis, then the Beatles, popping purple hearts to groove all night and still be awake in time to milk the cows.

Merrily smiled.

And then cannabis. Danny had acquired his first joint at a dance in Llandod, with another to smoke in the top field after sunset. He did a bit of dealing for a while, but he was never much good at that and, besides, there was a much more reliable dealer emerging in the area. Better just to grow the stuff – nice, sheltered spot, in Bryncot Dingle – and then give it away. Danny was so excited by the dawning of this incredible new world that, by the summer of 1975, he was wanting to turn on the whole Forest.

‘Who was this “more reliable dealer”?’ Merrily asked. ‘Can I take a guess?’

Danny was talking freely now, his voice hoarse but liquid, like wet ash. Dr Coll had been the son of a surgeon at Hereford Hospital with a house in New Radnor. Still a medical student back then, in need of a few quid, like all your students. ‘Medical students always got their sources, ennit?’ Danny said.

‘He was a hippy, too?’

‘Lord, no. Dr Coll en’t never been a hippy, not even as a boy. Just a feller with a eye to a few quid. Course when he qualified as a doctor, that all come to an end. Gotter keep ’is nose clean. Or at least keep it lookin’ clean.’

And there would have been better ways of making money by then, Merrily thought. ‘What about Terry Penney? When did he appear?’ From what Betty had learned from Mrs Pottinger and from what Sophie had passed on to Merrily, Penney had emerged as a bright boy, but impressionable, and not too well-off. But what Danny was saying produced a different picture: Terry was an upper-middle-class radical with a posh, wealthy girlfriend who everyone thought was his wife, until she found life in Radnor seriously lacking and went back to the Smoke, leaving the vicar of Old Hindwell to grow his hair and smoke dope with the likes of Danny Thomas.

Terry, like Danny, was finding the times life-enhancing and life-changing. But Terry also saw it from a religious perspective: drugs opening the doors of perception, the gates of the soul. Terry was a fan of the seventeenth-century poet, Thomas Traherne, who had found secrets of the universe in Herefordshire meadows.

The dope had certainly elevated and coloured Terry’s faith in God. Today, perhaps he’d be all happy-clappy and singing-in-tongues, like Ellis, and perhaps the drugs would have represented a passing phase. But it was a never-ending inner journey, then. Terry and Danny would smoke dope, untroubled by the law and Danny discovered that he loved the whole world and Terry loved the world and God. Terry believed that the time was coming when all mankind would be herbally awakened to the splendour of the Lord.

Then Dr Coll brought the acid along.

Merrily nodded. Acid had been something different. Not just another drug, but the key to serious religious experience, a direct line to God. To Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, all those guys, LSD was the light on the road to Damascus, and anyone could get there.

So, one fine, warm day, Terry Penney and Danny Thomas and Dr Coll had found a shady corner of a Radnor Valley field, overlooking the Four Stones. They had their lumps of sugar and Dr Coll brought out the lysergic acid. An experiment, he said. He wouldn’t take any himself; he’d supervise, make sure they came to no harm.

Danny’s trip lasted for ever. Under the perfumed, satin sky, he went through whole lifetimes in one afternoon. He found that the Radnor Valley was in his blood... really in his blood – the whole landscape turning to liquid and jetting through his veins. When he looked at the inside of his wrist he could see through the skin and into that fast-flowing land. He was the land, he was the valley, he was the forest. He walked through the silken grass down to the Four Stones, which he now understood to hold the mind of the valley, and Dr Coll said afterwards he had to stop Danny beating his head on the prehistoric stones to get inside them because the stones knew the secret.

The Reverend Penney, meanwhile, came to believe he’d been granted access to the very kingdom of heaven.

He saw an angel, a giant angel with his feet astride the valley. Merrily imagined a great William Blake angel with the red sun in his wings and a raised sword which cleaved the hills.