‘How are you getting on?’ said my landlady. ‘We can see the moor from our place, and every time I’ve looked at it lately it’s been shrouded in fog.’ ‘It has been foggy,’ I admitted. ‘Wet, too. And the pipes froze again.’ ‘Would you like to come wassailing?’ she said. ‘There’s nothing like a wassail to help you through a cold, wet February.’
So last weekend I went a-wassailing with my landlady. She’d said to bring a gun if I had one. If not, something noisy to frighten away the evil spirits. And it’ll probably be muddy, she said, so bring boots. I don’t have a gun. But I did have a pair of boots I wanted to try out. Army boots, used but as good as new; soles as thick as tractor tyres. Polishing up my new boots was how I’d been spending the foggy, wet evenings.
The wassail was at a smallholding in a village of thatched cob cottages. Around a hundred wassailers were assembled after dark around an alfresco bar where we knocked back beakers of ‘wassail cup’, which is mulled cider with herbs. After just two of these wassail cups my state of mind was altered fundamentally.
A procession then formed in a yard lit by flaming torches. Two gypsy caravans were parked side-by-side in this yard, their intricate scarlet-and-gold paintwork alive in the flickering flames. My bed for the night was in one of these, said my landlady, leading me up the wooden stairs. Inside, she pointed out the bed, in case I couldn’t guess, on a breast-high shelf at the far end. We stood for a moment in silent contemplation of this unusual but not unappealing sleeping place. If I made it that far, I must try to remember to collapse forwards and upwards rather than downwards, she advised.
We rejoined the procession behind a sinister group of men with blackened faces wearing tatterdemalion coats and top hats bristling with long feathers. These, I heard later, were Border Morris men, rough types with a fearsome reputation for clacking their sticks together with more violence than our gentler English Morris men.
Many among the procession were brandishing flaming torches, which lent drama to the affair. Our way was lit by lanterns on posts, and, to mark a sharp right-hand turn, by a wonderfully excessive bonfire from which some of the wassailers shrank. I took the opportunity to test my boots by strolling insouciantly across the glowing embers at the fire’s outer edge. My confidence in the insulating properties of the absurdly thick soles was not misplaced, either, and this small advantage I had over those wearing Wellingtons elated me more than perhaps it would have done had I led a fuller life.
We came to a sloping orchard with half a dozen bare-branched apple trees. We gathered around the nearest one, a sea of cider-happy faces in the torchlight, and chanted the wassail hymn, which stated our united wish that the tree would bloom well, and bear well hatfuls, capfuls, three-bushel bags full of apples and a little heap under the stairs. Then a young girl wearing a long white nightie and flowers in her hair was lifted up into the tree by her armpits and someone else came forward and set a slice of bread on fire and hung it from a branch in a little wire cage. The bread was an offering to the sacred robin, confided my landlady, and the maid with the flowers in her hair was this year’s Wassail Queen. Tradition demanded a virgin, she added. ‘I was one once,’ she said, ‘but it was a very long time ago.’ Then a man with a flat tweed cap stepped forward, presented a shotgun, and let fly at the upper branches of the tree. ‘To frighten away the evil spirits?’ I said. My landlady nodded gravely.
We went from one apple tree to the next, greeting each with the chant: ‘Old apple tree, we wassail thee!’ and subjected each to the same business with the hymn, the hoisted virgin, the flaming bread for the sacred robin, and the 12-bore. The night sky above us was perfectly clear, the Plough magnificent, and a brilliant moon, all but full, was rising above the treetops further up the valley.
When we’d wassailed every apple tree, everbody processed back to the yard for food, a mummers play, Old Time fiddle and banjo music and Appalachian dancing. I peeled off at the bonfire, however; ostensibly to warm my back and study the risen moon, but in reality to conduct further tests on my new boots in the hot embers, and after that among the shallows and rapids of a nearby stream.
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