The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

Phil Rickman The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

They had gone a mile or two when they passed one of the night shepherds upon the moorlands, and they cried to him to know if he had seen the hunt. And the man, as the story goes, was so crazed with fear that he could scarce speak…

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

No record in cold print can give the reader an idea of the pleasure experienced in collecting the elusive material we call folk-lore from the living brains of men and women of whose lives it has formed an integral part. In some cases, with regard to superstitious beliefs, there is a deep reserve to be overcome; the more real the belief, the greater the difficulty… The folk of the Welsh districts are more superstitious, as a rule…

Ella Mary Leather, The Folk-lore of Herefordshire

Under Stanner in the Summer

Should have known, he really should. That morning, even though it was a fine morning, coming up to high summer, the whole valley was singing with unease.

‘Oh bugger,’ Jeremy Berrows said to Danny. ‘You seen that?’

Up on Stanner Rocks, knobs of stone poked out like weathered gargoyles on an old church, or ancient skulls browned by the earth, half-buried, with scrubby trees in their eye sockets. From one side, you could sometimes see a whole body of rock that Danny reckoned looked like the remains of a dead giant thrown back into the greenery encrusting the cliff face.

But Jeremy wasn’t looking up at Stanner — likely he blamed the rocks for taking Mary Morson away, though in Danny’s view the rocks done him a favour on that one. He was staring instead at the smoky firs across the valley, the dark trees that said, This is Wales now, boy, make no mistake.

‘What?’ Danny said.

‘Big black crow. Hovering.’

‘No, really?’

‘Just flew over real low. Then he come back, flew over again.’

‘Gotter hand it to these scavengers,’ Danny said. ‘Awful thorough.’

Bollocks, he was thinking. You could drive yourself daft, seeing signs everywhere — even if you were Jeremy Berrows, with ditchwater in your veins and the valley talking to you all your life.

Could see where the boy was coming from today, mind. Even without crows, everything visible in the west seemed like a warning about Wales, a stiffened finger under your nose. But when you actually crossed the Border into Wales, the countryside relaxed into the easy, light-coloured, sheep-shaved hills where Danny Thomas had been born and bred and still lived.

Still lived. Jesus, how had that happened?

Danny was grinning in dismay, rubbing his beard, and the boy glanced at him but Danny just shook his head and tramped on down the dewy field under the fresh-rinsed morning sky, not sure any more which side of the Border they were on, or if it mattered. He was a Welshman himself, he supposed, although the way he talked wasn’t recognizably Welsh either to real Welsh people or to the English whose country was within shouting distance, and all the shouting, from either side, done in near enough the same accent as his.

Confusing, really: if Danny was from the lighter, more English-looking country down the Radnor Valley, which was actually in Wales, then Jeremy, back here under the dark firs and the knuckles of Stanner Rocks, must be…

‘You English, then, Jeremy?’

‘Me?’ Jeremy glanced warily at Danny, instinctively patting his thigh for Flag, the sheepdog, to come close. ‘Dunno. Do it matter?’

‘Matters to some,’ Danny said, ‘so they tells me.’

It was real confusing hereabouts, mind. For instance, the little town a mile or so behind them was in England, despite being on the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke. Even so, with its narrow main street and its closed-in feel, it felt Welsh.

Kington: an anomaly.

This was Danny’s current favourite word. The naturalists he met in the pub used it about Stanner Rocks, said to be some of the oldest rocks in the country. Anomaly meant strange stuff going on, odd climatic things occurring up on the tops, resulting in plants that grew on Stanner and nowhere else in these islands. Local people rarely went up on the rocks these days, it being a National Nature Reserve protected by the Countryside Commission; mostly it was just the naturalists and a few tourists with permission.

But Mary Morson went up one day, and got a bit of a thing going with one of the naturalists and never come back to Jeremy Berrows, and mabbe the boy didn’t want reminding.

Boy. He must be late thirties now, but he had this fresh complexion, which was rare for a farmer. Most of them had skin like old brick — like Danny’s skin, in fact, what you could see of it between the grey beard and the seaweed hair. But it wasn’t only that; there was an innocence about Jeremy, and that was rare, too, in a farmer, especially a good one. Jeremy also had commitment, an intense… bonding was the word they used now, with this marginal ground. The kind of bonding that hinged on knowing that if the ash came out before the oak you were in for a soak, and that kind of stuff. Whatever you wanted to call it, it had drained out of Danny Thomas long ago, leaving a bleak old desert of regrets.

‘Down by there, it is.’ The boy was nodding his head towards the copse at the bottom of the field, where a bunch of fat lambs was gathering. ‘Other side of the ole conker tree. See him?’

They were up on a bit of a tump now, and you could see all of Jeremy’s ground, almost surrounded by the huge area owned by Sebbie Three Farms, the robber baron. And you could see the big, naked feet of the giant on the side of Stanner. Below the rock face was the main road where it turned into the Kington bypass, and a long yellow container lorry sailed past, like something out of a different time zone. Danny wondered if Jeremy even noticed the lorry — if all the boy saw wasn’t just grass and trees and the plumpening lambs and the hawthorn trees sprinkled with floury blossom.

And the intrusion. The vans that shouldn’t be there. Danny’s gaze followed a sheep track down to the bottom field, where he could make out a cool blue roof slashed by a blade of sunlight. But no movement down there, no noise.

‘Likely they won’t be up and about yet,’ he said. ‘Always stays up late, these folks, with the booze and the dope. And music. You year any music last night?’

Jeremy shook his head, and Danny looked wistfully away towards Hergest Ridge, a long arm pushing into Wales, made famous by Mike Oldfield when he named his second album after it. Mike Oldfield was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Kington: up on the Ridge with his kites and at home in his farmhouse with — the thought of it still made Danny Thomas catch his breath — twenty guitars.

Danny had three guitars in his stone barn: two acoustics and a Les Paul. He’d sold his classic Strat last Christmas. Broke his heart, but they needed a new stove, and Greta had gone without too long. And Mike Oldfield was long gone now, and Danny was left sitting in his stone barn, riffing into the night and counting all them lost opportunities to get out of farming for ever.

‘No music, no,’ Jeremy said. ‘They was prob’ly laying low the first night.’

‘You reckon?’

In Danny’s experience, laying low wasn’t what they did.

‘It’s where the ole crow was hovering,’ Jeremy said. ‘Direc’ly over that van.’