Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

This went on for some days, Rosemary waking earlier and earlier because she couldn’t wait to get outside to be with her friends. One morning, she awoke especially early, for this was midsummer, and her friends were putting on a special concert. The birds started them off, the dawn chorus activating everything. And then, as the sun rose, the flowers began to open and as they opened they started to sing, and the trees joined in with their bass notes and the hills amplified their heartbeats like drums and by the time the sun was fully up, Rosemary could no longer hear separate voices, but only musical tones, which blended together until the whole of nature became one huge, magnificent orchestra.

And Rosemary started to wonder about the orchestra’s conductor. Who had composed the music, who had arranged it.

Of course, Rosemary’s mother came out of hospital, which she was very glad about, except that she had to go home to the city, which kind of mortified her. She at once caught a cold which turned into flu, and she was very miserable. One day, when she was a little better, to give her some air, her mother took her out to the dreary old park she’d been to a thousand times ... and, on the way there, Rosemary spotted a single dandelion growing out of a patch of earth around a street lamp, and the dandelion beamed up at her in recognition and she looked up over the rooftops to distant hills and could feel them ... breathing, inside her, and by the time they got to the park, well ...

And Rosemary realized everything had changed, for ever.

Jane looked up. ‘ She’d changed, of course. But you never say that.’

‘First rule of writing for children. Never lecture. Never let them think it’s a parable. Which of course’ – Lucy put down her duster – ‘ you know it isn’t.’

‘Shame there aren’t books like that for adults.’

‘Adults,’ said Lucy, ‘can read Traherne.’

‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘Right.’ Not a single customer had been in while she was reading; she wondered how Lucy kept this place going.

‘The story you’ve just read is, of course, an introduction to Traherne’s world. Traherne showed how higher consciousness is there for us all. I’ll give you some of his work to take home. Leave it lying about and hope your mother reads it. There’s so much she needs to know, if she’s going to surv— succeed here.’ Lucy snatched up her duster. ‘Now read the other one.’

In the little green orchard, there was an awesome hush.

In the little green orchard, it all became serious.

Rosemary again. A little older.

Her grandfather had died and she was spending the holidays with her grandmother, helping out on the farm, where it would soon be time to harvest the apples.

Rosemary had never been into the orchard before.

She was to discover that the orchard was the heart of everything.

LUCY SENT JANE to the village stores to buy a pound of apples. Any apples would do. Jane returned with three large Bramleys. The apples lay on the counter, the only living fruit in a shop devoted to artificial representations of it.

Lucy talked about apples. As the highest and purest and most magical of fruits. She talked of the golden apples of Greek myth. Of the mystical Avalon, the orchard where King Arthur had passed over. Of Eve.

And of the apple as the mystic heart of Herefordshire. The seventeenth-century diarist, John Evelyn, had written that ‘all Herefordshire has become, in a manner, but one entire orchard’, praising Lord Scudamore, who had improved and refined the cider apple, developing the famous Redstreak, from which the Ledwardine apple, the Pharisees Red, had been, in turn, created.

‘Why’s it called that?’ Jane asked.

Lucy smiled. When she did that, her cheeks seemed to take on the ruddier colours of the apples on the counter. She was wearing a long, green dress, her hair in this complicated bun. She must have really quite long hair, Jane realized. You could imagine her, in years gone by, striding the land with her hair blowing out parallel to the ground. Listening to the hills breathe. Believing everything was possible. Like some ancient, Celtic enchantress.

Jane was just blown away. Lucy was just, like, the coolest person she’d ever met.

‘Pay attention, Jane!’ Lucy snapped.

‘Sorry.’

‘Now.’ Lucy plucked a souvenir penknife from a rack. She selected an apple, laid it on a square of plain wrapping paper. ‘I’m going to cut it sideways. Have you ever done this before?’

Jane shook her head and Lucy pushed the point of the knife into the apple and sliced it in half.

‘There.’ She held out a half in the palm of each hand. ‘What do you see?’

Jane leaned over the counter. The green-white pulp was veined with thin green lines and dots which made a kind of wheel.

‘Count the spokes,’ Lucy said.

‘Five.’

‘It makes a five-pointed star, you see? Inside a circle. A pentagram.’

‘Oh, wow.’ Jane had read enough weird books involving pentagrams in her time.

‘Forget all this black magic nonsense. The pentagram’s a very ancient symbol of purification and of protection. And there’s one at the heart of every apple. That says something, doesn’t it?’

‘That’s like really amazing.’ She couldn’t stop looking at the little green veins. ‘Something really ordinary, like an apple.’

‘ Nothing is ordinary! Read Traherne.’

‘I’m going to.’

‘Least of all the apple,’ Lucy said sternly. ‘Let no one talk of the humble apple to me. ’

Jane looked around the shop and saw it with different eyes, like the storybook child, Rosemary, in the park. It was more than a little souvenir shop, it was a shrine. A temple. A temple to the apple.

‘You were going to tell me why it was called the Pharisees Red.’

‘No, I wasn’t,’ Lucy said.

‘All right, well, I asked you, didn’t I?’

‘That’s not the same thing.’

'Will you tell me? Like in the scribes and pharisees, all that stuff?’

‘Jane, you’re so ill-read.’ Lucy came out from behind the counter, pulled down a large, fat, soft-backed book. ‘Here, find out for yourself. Page forty-three.’

It was The Folklore of Herefordshire by Ella Mary Leather.

‘Published in 1912,’ Lucy said. ‘A formidable work of research and scholarship.’

On page forty-three, Jane found a sub-heading.

(5) Fairies

Although there are now but few persons living in

Herefordshire who believe in fairies, faith in their existence

must have been common enough with the folk of the last

generation. All the old people who can tell anything about

fairies do not call them fairies at all, but farises’; the word is

pronounced almost like Pharisees.

‘So you see, Jane, nothing too biblical about that.’

‘Oh, wow.’

‘Don’t keep saying that. It’s most annoying. Of course, people deny today that it’s anything to do with fairies, but people always deny fairies because the word itself has become such a term of ridicule.’

Jane looked at the matchstick-limbed, gossamer-winged things clinging to the rims of cups and plaques, perched on the tops of shelves, the edges of picture frames.

‘Nothing like those, Jane, I’m afraid. Those are the traditional forms that everybody knows, and if one is to create an impression of the spirit in nature, that’s the one people are normally prepared to accept, even as a joke. If one were to create an effigy of a real tree spirit, as they’re more often perceived by those able to, the customers would be disturbed and I’d have a reputation as something a good deal worse than a lunatic crone.’