Elizabeth Hand - Wylding Hall

Which sounded sensible enough to me.

“It’s just up here,” he said after a few minutes. We walked more slowly now. He no longer seemed excited, not reluctant, exactly, but slightly hesitant. I wondered if he was sorry that he’d decided to share his secret with me.

Ahead of us, the woods thinned out. There was a copse of alders, odd I thought — alders usually grow near water, and I hadn’t seen any streams or ponds since we’d started. Alders and hazel and rowan. As we drew nearer, I saw that they were arranged in a long oval, and in the center of the oval was a mound — a long barrow. Like a gigantic egg half-buried in the earth, maybe twenty feet long and eight feet high, all overgrown with ferns and wildflowers. Julian stopped a few yards away and gazed up at it.

“Here it is,” he said softly.

He turned and held out his hand. And that was unheard of for Julian — the one thing I knew about him, other than that he was supposed to be a brilliant musician, was that he didn’t like to be touched. I flattered myself by thinking maybe he fancied me. Uh oh , I thought, now there’ll be trouble with Will and Lesley both .

I took his hand and clambered up after him. Almost immediately I regretted it — the mound was much steeper than it appeared. From ground level, it seemed barely taller than the trees, and some of the bigger ones, oaks and beech, towered above it.

Yet the instant I began climbing, I started to slide backwards. My long skirt made it worse. It took two or three tries before I got any momentum, and if Julian hadn’t been holding on to me, I don’t think I could have done it. The turf was ankle-high, very soft but slick as glass, with bluebells and narcissus peeking out of it, even though the season for bluebells was long gone. The grass smelled sweet where we crushed it, and everywhere wrens darted out from their nests in the brush. There must have been a hundred of them. Wrens don’t fly very high, so they skimmed all around us, singing then disappearing into the tangle underfoot. I’ve never seen so many birds.

It took a good five minutes to reach the top. When we did, I was so out of breath, I couldn’t say a word. Julian immediately let go of my hand.

“Look at this!” He sounded giddy, spinning in a circle with his arms out. “You can see for miles!”

I looked around and gasped.

Everywhere I turned, there was the countryside. Fields and woods and roadways, villages like clusters of acorns and green hills vanishing off into the clouds, with here and there a church spire, all beneath a sky bright as bluebells. I could see ancient field systems clearer than I ever had, and to the west, another mound like this one, with people standing on it. Then I realized they weren’t people, but a stone circle, or trees.

And closer than that, like a mirage, Wylding Hall’s towers rose above the greenery, all golden in the sun.

Yet it was impossible that I could see any of this from where we stood. The mound wasn’t that high. A wood surrounded it. Beyond that there were more woods that hid the village. I looked for those trees I’d seen, the ring of alders and rowan and hazel.

And yes, there they were, but now they were below us: I looked down on a canopy of leaves.

I turned to Julian. “This is crazy.”

He laughed. “I know.”

“Was there something in that tea you made?”

“Of course not!” He walked to the edge of the mound, the narrow end of the egg, crouched down and stared out across the woods and fields to the hill with the standing stones. “Not that I know of, anyway.”

“What is it, then? An optical illusion? A mirage?”

Julian shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t care, either. Does it really matter? Isn’t it enough that it’s all there, and we can see it?”

I should have been more frightened; that came later. It was just too lovely to be scared. Pale green butterflies the size of my thumbnail fed in the bluebells and filled the air like snow. I was afraid I’d step on them, but they seemed to sense where my foot would fall and flew off before it touched the ground. I watched a skylark circle up and up until it disappeared into the blue. Everywhere, little wrens rustled in the grass.

We must have stayed there for an hour. I don’t think we spoke another word to each other. Julian remained where he was, staring out into the blue. I walked the perimeter of the mound, then crossed it back and forth. Quartering it. At one point I sat in the grass and searched around, looking for rocks, a flint or coin — the kind of thing you read about people discovering in old burial mounds.

I didn’t find anything. I thought of the farmer who’d given me a ride and wondered if he ever ploughed up ancient coins, or anything else. I’m certain he must have. I wish now I’d gone over to his place and asked him, but of course I would never have dreamed of doing such a thing when I was twenty. Given what they’re finding there now at the dig, it might have been useful knowledge.

Finally, Julian scrambled back to his feet. He stood for a few more minutes and I could hear him singing under his breath; the same two verses, it sounded like, though I couldn’t make out any words. Chanting, almost. I was just learning my craft then, otherwise I might have been more alarmed. Cognizant, at any rate, that he was up to something and in way over his head.

“We’d better go,” he said at last, and turned to me. He looked … different. Calm, but also expectant. “I have a song I want to get down. I want to go over it with Ashton before we begin rehearsing it.”

And that was the end of it. He scrambled back down the hill — no holding hands this time. I had to call out to him to wait for me before he raced off into the woods. It was easier going down than up. Julian waited for me at the edge of the copse, looking very impatient.

I turned to gaze back at the mound. It was no higher than it had first appeared. I saw an old oak tree that absolutely towered above it.

“Come on,” said Julian.

Without waiting for me, he strode back into the woods. It was only that afternoon, when I went to take a bath, that I found one of those tiny green butterflies had gotten trapped in the folds of my long skirt.

“Look at you,” I said, shaking it free, and watched it flutter off into the house.

Ashton

Tom was an incredibly innovative producer. He didn’t just manage his bands — he produced their albums as well. He was one of the first who had a mobile recording unit, which meant a band didn’t have to go into London to lay down tracks in a studio. The studio could come to you. It was an old delivery lorry that he’d gutted and tricked up with recording decks, tape players, and playback machines and amplifiers. It was absolutely state-of-the-art for the time. Richard Branson had one as well — he’d just bought Shipton Manor and was setting up what became the Virgin Records studio. He got the idea for all of that from us and Tom.

Now, of course, everyone has his own mobile unit, in your laptop or iPhone or whatever. But in those days you were tied to a studio, unless you were fortunate enough to have someone like Tom Haring, who could drive the rig down to Hampshire. And thank god he did, because otherwise there would have been no Wylding Hall album, no record whatsoever of what we did that summer.

See, those were never intended to be anything but rough cuts. Tom came down on a lark; he’d just finished kitting out the lorry, and he wanted to show it off. Give it a test drive, on the road and with all of us. Course it wasn’t on the road much. I think it got about ten miles to the gallon.

I’m not sure who had the idea that we should record outdoors. Jonno? That was the day Billy Thomas was there with his camera, so maybe it was him. Whoever it was, it turned out to be a brilliant idea. We dragged all our instruments out into what used to be the garden. It was all overgrown: flowers everywhere, roses twining up the stone walls and trees covered with wisteria, a carpet of yellow cowslips. Flowers out of season, Lesley said, but they looked wonderful. It all smelled of roses and hashish — Julian broke out his magic box. Grass knee-high and butterflies and grasshoppers dancing through the air. Birds swooping back and forth, and a goshawk circling overhead. It was heaven.