Phil Rickman: The Wine of Angels

Lucy Devenish was breathing like a bull over a gate as Mr Cassidy explained how the Powells had graciously agreed to let them have last year’s crop for the festival cider.

‘However, as the apple harvest in recent years has been somewhat limited, my ever-resourceful wife proposed that we might resort to the time-honoured method of arousing the, ah, temporarily dormant fecundity of the orchard.’

‘Pompous arsehole,’ Miss Devenish growled.

‘The happy tradition of wassailing’ – Mr Cassidy, looking as happy as the night and his thin, pale face would allow – ‘dates back, presumably, to pagan times, it being necessary to petition the gods in good time for spring. I am not myself particularly moved to call upon the services of those ancient deities, but I do believe that the good wishes of neighbours – symbolically expressed here tonight – will have a strongly beneficial effect on this once-supreme orchard, and on the festival ... and, indeed, on the fortunes of our village.’

‘Do you know how long they’ve lived here?’ Miss Devenish muttered. ‘One and a half years. Our village.’

‘Gerronwithit.’ A small, wiry man in a flat cap and a muffler bit down on his cigarette. Gomer Parry, Merrily remembered. Former digger-driver and contractor. Frost had turned his little round glasses into communion wafers. ‘All bloody hot air,’ Gomer mumbled. His plump wife – pink earmuffs – nudged him in the ribs.

Merrily glimpsed a smirk on the taut, patrician face of James Bull-Davies, of Upper Hall. He was passing a chromium flask to a blonde woman next to him. Very much next to him. She had a swig and giggled as she helped him stow the flask inside his sheepskin bomber-jacket, hungrily kneading his chest through his sweater.

Hence the smirk. Merrily pretended not to notice. Lesson five: Don’t offend anyone called Bull-Davies; the church would be rubble but for them.

‘With all this talk of paganism,’ Cassidy was saying, ‘it’s a pity we don’t at present have a parish priest to balance things up, but I’m assured a number of candidates for the living are being interviewed. And, indeed, the word is that one of them may even be in the village tonight.’

Oh no. Merrily shrank behind a lesser apple tree.

‘I don’t think I should say any more than that.’

Good.

‘And so, without further ado, I call upon James and his colleagues to check their cartridges or whatever they need to do. And let the wassailing—’

‘ One moment! ’

Miss Lucy Devenish had swept back her poncho like a veteran warrior from the Dark Ages and marched into the centre of the clearing.

‘You really don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you? This has always been a peaceful place, a place of seclusion. It is also virtually adjacent to the churchyard and is itself a burial place ...’

‘Miss Devenish—’

‘And there is absolutely no way at all that you can justify these frightful guns .’

‘Miss Devenish, we’ve been into all this before—’

‘And I’ll prove that. I’ll prove it to you. Because, you see, I have with me’ – Miss Devenish paused dramatically and held up the large book she’d been concealing under her poncho – ‘ Mrs Leather! ’

Ella Leather. The Folklore of Herefordshire, published 1912.

‘This ...’ Mr Cassidy rose up in the lamplight, ‘is inexcusable.’

‘Now. According to Mrs Leather, the custom of wassailing on Twelfth Night involved lighting fires in the fields – usually wheatfields, not apple orchards, for obvious reasons, but I shall let that pass – and there is no mention at all ... of the use of firearms.’

A few people started murmuring. Miss Devenish glared defiantly at Cassidy in the lamplight, clasping the old book to her chest.

‘Now just a minute!’ Mrs Caroline Cassidy had appeared behind an impatient frown. ‘Terrence ... torch!’ She had a large book as well.

Mr Cassidy directed the flashlight beam as his wife riffled through the pages.

‘OK, right,’ Caroline trilled. ‘ Collected Folk Customs of the British Isles, page one hundred and five. I quote: “It was customary for such members of the local yeomanry as possessed guns to assemble around the largest tree in the orchard, referred to as the Apple Tree Man, and to discharge their weapons into its topmost branches in the belief that this would drive away evil spirits and stimulate fertility.” There. ’

‘Where?’ demanded Miss Devenish.

‘I’ve just told you, Collected Folk Customs of the British Isles, by C. Alfred Churchman—’

‘I mean where abouts in the British Isles is this nonsense supposed to have been enacted?’

‘In the West of England, of course. Are we not—?’

‘ Precisely? ’ Miss Devenish tilted her head under its enormous cowboy hat. ‘ May one ask?’

‘Oh, this is utterly nonsensical.’ Mrs Cassidy getting increasingly shrill. ‘Everyone knew what we’d agreed.’

‘What we’d agreed? My dear Mrs Cassidy, if we had to do this, some of us might have preferred an innocent singalong over the wassail cup. As distinct from a remake of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.’

‘Oh, a singalong .’ Mrs Cassidy threw up her hands, appealing to the crowd. ‘How very spectacular.’

‘Certainly less insulting to the poor trees. Now, are you going to tell us where this dubious business with guns was last recorded, or not?’

Mrs Cassidy looked sulky and brushed at her designer ski-jacket. ‘Devonshire. But I don’t see that it matters.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’

‘Now, look here—’

‘Ladies!’ James Bull-Davies had stepped forward now, shotgun casually broken over an arm. ‘Look. Mindful as one must be of old customs, it really is awfully cold. Why don’t we proceed with the aspect we’re all agreed on and pour out this excellent cider ‘fore the damn stuff freezes over? Discuss it over a drink is what I’m suggesting.’

Recognizing the semi-military tone of the Old Squirearchy, even the Cassidys shut up. Bull-Davies bent over the cask and started filling the plastic tumblers himself. Merrily smelled the cider, sour and musty. She wondered where they’d got it from.

She found herself glancing at old Edgar Powell. His face like an old tobacco pouch and his eyes wide open, still looking her way. He wasn’t here tonight, old Edgar, wasn’t here at all.

Perhaps, wherever he was, that was a better place to be tonight.

‘Of course, we all know what all this is about,’ Miss Devenish told her in a very loud whisper. ‘These awful people – these Cassidys – they think the Powells could be terribly quaint and old-fashioned, with their ancient cider press and their old recipe, and they just want to turn them into a tourist sideshow. And Garrod Powell’s going along with it to keep the peace and just in case there’s a few quid to be made without too much work, and—’

‘Is that so bad for the village?’

‘Bad?’ Miss Devenish snorted. ‘The Cassidys’ll just turn honest cider into some horrible fizz in champagne bottles and sell it for a quite ridiculous price in their ghastly restaurant to awful people like themselves. When I was a gel, the farm labourers still used to receive gallons of Pharisee Red as part of their wages. It was the People’s drink. Do you see?’

‘My grandad used to say it was just a way of keeping them grossly underpaid and too drunk to notice,’ said Merrily.

‘Your grandad?’ Miss Devenish observing her shrewdly from under that hat, possibly putting two and two together. ‘Are you local, my dear?’