Something in the Air

By Merlin Cullinan

How do you survive when you are considered to be an outsider? You can try and fight and conquer and change ways, or you can try and find ways to fit in without changing your own beliefs and values.

In a world where many people have no time for the promises of old established religions, politicians and officials, they seek solace in other hopes and faiths, delivered by people with unofficial but often revered status. Here is a family, and a whole place, that serves to provide those who are missing solutions or opportunities with exactly what they need. For many these are believed to have worked for millennia, and will continue to survive around the whole world.

Here is where we witness the adventures of one extended family's many providers of alternative hope in a credulous cruel world. It embraces over two hundred and fifty years of magical, real and invented activity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781785071034

Book preview

Jonson)

Part One

Water

The Foreign Tide

1789. The Voyager Sees Opportunity in England.

When you stopped, the sharpness of the air subsided. Salt dried on your cheeks, and the sand lay there like a brown table-top, waiting for the sea to give it a wipe-over. Looking out and southwest, beyond the dunes and the biting marram grass, the sun picked out the blue peak of Anglesey, and spindling across to the northwest the sister rock behind Barrow-in-Furness stood its ground, two mythical pillars marking the edge, the faintest curvature of a grey horizon, and the breeze-blown underlay of the restless Irish Sea.

Few had taken in the panorama, even fewer the notions of ancient legends, the passing by of curious ships, Celtic wanderers. Only the smallest handful turned seawards for succour, preferring to keep their backs against the blows and cutting sand, the moody water an unsettling site for soon to be drowned souls and shipwrecks. Occasionally trinkets from adventurers with lost bearings or tired sails, others caught up in squalls of unforeseen strength, became the flotsam and jetsam, stage props, the short-term signatures of ephemeral treasures. Sometimes searchers for safety were lulled into putting faith into the luring lanterns of wreckers out on the cliffs, storm-tossed moths turning towards light and false warmth.

There were at least seven golden miles of sand, and these days more than just a few stink-filled cottages and red-faced old folk belying the life expectancy in much of what would come to be described as England’s green and pleasant land.

Anton Gluck had got there slowly. Tired of the growing aggression in Paris, and as usual troubled by his foreboding dreams of blood and cries, he had left happier memories of the city behind in early 1789, and returned to London and its differently seeded charms. But this time the place offered little enduring appeal to the seasoned voyager, its smoke dust still hanging in the air, shared with the cloying odours of horse and human detritus alike. His nose and foresight took him dreaming to opportunities of another kind.

Talks in taverns and gentle interrogations of loose tongued commercial travellers revealed growing optimism about opportunities in the north of that country, with its burgeoning trade out of Manchester, Liverpool, and all the spokes feeding the fattening Empire of Albion. He’d heard of a wild and almost detached place where Bonnie Prince Charlie had allegedly hidden out in plain view, so desolate and then unvisited was the region west of industrially rising Preston. More than that, its Catholic hideaways had sewn a small but solid network there. From journeys through Spain, the Papal States and their northern neighbours and France, Gluck had grown familiar with the power of Roman Catholic fantasies in Western Europe. He had benefited greatly from understanding the stickiness of the religious force that spun its tangled webs around folks, with its lurid tales, embroidered legacies of threats and damnation, curses that could only be cured through the guaranteed salvation of the One True Church and all who sailed in her. The joy of a rarely visited region would mean it would be full of suspicion and doubt, averse to change, replete with superstition and unchallenged practices passed down through tales and mimicked behaviour – in other words, my friend, a superb chance to mould a community of untrammelled locals into the arms of alternative richer ways of the world, away from the cloaked brains and bodies behind those firm, shaking hands, smiling faces, and shiny promising eyes. Here would be new portals to untapped worlds and conditions of resplendence. Gluck was nothing if not a Creator of scenes.

In Prussia and then the Latin countries and states, he had easily slipped on cities’ fashions like favourite slippers, and in numerous guises as a dealer in what some of you might say were desirable objects, had accumulated much knowledge about how styles and attitudes shifted, how tastes and desires could be fed, and how his extensive range of materials could be shaped and fashioned to meet the demands he was in turn fuelling. In his portfolio he carried ideas, visions, futures and dreams. He calculated he would make a good score in England, and sow the seeds of a forest of opportunities. The country in several parts was still looking dolefully in the mirror as it contemplated its recent family loss, its former thirteen American colonies, and eyed its new president, Mr Washington. England was to him, overall, despite London and the pockets of doom, finely poised. He felt it now reflected him and his position, equally poised from his birth on May 3rd 1743 between the arrivals on Earth in that same year of Thomas Jefferson on April 13th and a certain Jean-Paul Marat on May 24th.

There were also glimmerings of a countermove against the expanding industrialisation of that country. Yes, the sea would never be regarded in exactly the same way again soon, because instead of being looked upon by many only as a source of ferocity and death, which it would still be a master of, it would also come to be seen as a source for physical and mental inspiration and vitality, fecundity and renewability, not just the place for fish and the toilers of the sea. The sea was about to be romanced.

The role of landscape, its effects on memory and perception, were beginning to be captured in fresh ways by artists and writers alike, mirrors and lamps, and things once pushed into the background were becoming frontline sources for imagination and fulfilment. From daffodils to dew, mulberries to mountain tops, the kindling of a non-existent idealised past, arose the triumph of nostalgia over steam and grease, nature’s innocence, softening the grafting of labourers in mills and mines, interrupting the unwanted dreams of those working to enrich the latest generation of the lords of industry, slave labourers in different clothes, reaping the rewards of the harsh sentences they put down on those with few or no choices. What had been background, scenery, was about to come into a life of its own, transformed into a leading protagonist strutting across what was becoming in turn its own stage. Anton Gluck was determined to be a principal agent of change in this emerging set. He had no choice – he had obligations. The time, as always, had come again to meet him.

Ω

1790. Putting a toe in the water.

In this latest framework, Anton Gluck was, in essence, a lamp, not a mirror. He was the pathfinder, the one who shone the light for others to follow. It was in his, ahem, nature, for this to be the case. He was the necessary outsider whose following groups begrudged his independence, but whose future rested closely on that dependency. A compelling raconteur, he had tales to spare, and an endless supply of the coins of different realms, names to drop, and an assortment of interests too broad to write down, to list, to specify. When pressed in inns to give details on his sources, he would wittily protest the evening was always too early and inauspicious a time for serious matters, stressing that such affairs should be bedded until daylight, the more to let merriment enjoy the night air and new companionship. His accented quaint English lent him more allure. When pressed by those who still remembered his excuses in the morning, he would charm the air again, deflecting the moment and assuring his compatriots that all would be ascertainable at a time not too distant from now, a time which rarely came about.

Since most people enjoyed his company, if some particular individual tried to press the point, others would often step in to hush them down, saying give the man a chance, enjoy what he’s done for us already, and generally give signs that they already approved the continuing if elusive narrative of the sunnily disposed guest, and that only the churlish would continue to try to unravel the fabric of his tales at that juncture. He was, effectively, a brief life and soul, a bright candle at many a table. He drank with an affected lack of subtlety that disguised his actual small imbibements as his entourage slowly sank into their cups, all the less for most of them to remember days later. It was often Gluck’s largesse they were enjoying after all. If he didn’t speak much, he would often intrigue by entertaining small parties with intricate tricks, and his reputation would grow with each spell, or piece of magic, creating enviable deceptions. He had choices, and the time had come to make some.

That summer, arriving at the edge of the North West, the Lancashire coast, testing the ground for the new ventures, the inn of his principal choice accounted for £94.54 on wine in its summer season, and Anton Gluck contributed some £30.00 to that, cash and no questions directly asked, and make that another round for the gentlemen, if you please. Bonny and Bailey, early believers in the potential attraction of the wild natural place where the wind blew you no harm, were delighted with the presence of such generous if difficult to pin down customers in the lodgings they had worked hard to fashion and promote.

Whatever materials Anton drew on and could shape into magic, he based them on his ability to conjure visions from his own and others’ dreams, futures from insights, and ideas he sewed in the minds of curious men.

Ω

1879. Ninety years on. The thoughts of cold children.

What do you think about?

Rain.

Greyness.

The profile of the land shifts like a slow snake, if you had long enough to watch it, and the sea rolls over it relentlessly. Sometimes the sea’s own motion is curbed, disturbed in watery dreams, and it tosses and turns, throwing wet covers out over the shore, and wakes with a wizened temper.

When that sea gets up on the wrong side, you don’t want to be anywhere near it, they tell you. But sometimes it does some good, washing away the smells of skins, the clearing up of things not yet banned in what they call bye-laws, those things that are always and with increased frequency sent to try you. It throws curious dogs back on the land, and drowns their hapless owners; it plays games with the weary and the unwise, circling sandbanks like grey wolves waiting to take advantage of the unaware or lost; sometimes it lies on its own back, a giant waiting to be tickled by a ray of spring sunshine, unpredictable animalistic moods all, a wild collection of beasts no-one can really claim they own.

Today it keeps its own company, skulking out at the edge of the beach, unsure about the rising moon, waiting for the wind to bolster its eventual slaps, briny arm waves sounding its own theatrical applause, accompanied by signature howls and behind it scudding sulky clouds, stage curtains.

The electric arc lamps shivered, new arrivals making the drizzle glow like trout skin, making the ambient light take on a silver-diluted grey, and they dreamt of a future in the warm company of millions of multi-coloured illuminants, bulbs. The drizzle turned to rain and for those keen observers of the gradations of precipitation, the more than 100,000 who had come to see the night turned to day, the water continued to disrespect clothes, finding its cold irritating way between skin and layers of cotton and wool, eventually clammy, ushering promenaders back behind sodden painted doors.

Artificial sunshine had arrived.

A year later you would be able to see it from the comfort of another arrival, the landau, from the Rhenish Palatinate city namesake that would become the fashionable way to promenade without using your legs. The eastern parts of Europe found much to fascinate itself with in the growing town. It wouldn’t be the last time the place featured in now unified German interests.

Ω

1880’s. Slip out on the tide. Wave Power.

The point was, as Anton fathomed all that time ago, oh yes it was, the water. Here from behind the rain-stained windows of the hotel it was the grey stuff out there that still counted for much. Desire was rising quickly now like the wind. For some collective reason you may now guess at it had finally been decided by the majority that the sea was no longer the province only of fishermen and pirates, the Navy and privateers, but a force you now had to commune with physically. The sea was something you had to touch, and allow to contact you, intimately.

Under the elaborate pretensions that constituted moral rectitude, such an encounter with the large floating mass required extensive preparation and supervision. There was no way that salt water could be immersed in through some Eden-like innocence. No, it must be approached through cautious contrivances – bathing huts on wheels that could be drawn into the liquid, the better to hide any accidental revelations of pale flesh. This was especially true for the female versions of skin, sparing the blushes of young and old alike, and aimed at dampening the ardour of lusty males, equally young and old, as if cold water and salt-lashing winds couldn’t quite manage that on their own.

To counter the hawk-like vision and wily ways of fornicatingly-minded men, a distance of one hundred yards had been decreed as a necessary interval to be maintained between the ladies’ bathing machines and any contraptions devised by men. Oh, and to be on the safe side of managing a population explosion, bathing times were also separated for the sexes, in case some desperately driven daredevil decided a long underwater swim might enhance his chances of securing proximity to the bathing beauties. In those times such a desire could only be generated in the male of the species. Taking to the bitterly cold sea water became a ritual the bath-loving Romans would have found puzzling first, and amusing second. It took some time to finesse.

But Anton’s insight almost a hundred years ago hadn’t been simply about taking to the waters. His insight had been focused on the taking of the waters, something he had seen taken to elaborate levels of ritual and desire on the continent. Before the new-found interest in harmonising the body’s seventy per cent water content with that of the Irish Sea, an earlier habit had been successfully fostered, at least for long enough to make something substantial out of it – partaking of the waters orally. This salty elixir wasn’t designed for rare external stimulation alone. After eons, it was now going to have a new life as something to be drunk, and we are not talking teaspoonfuls here. Over a two-week sojourn, no less than twenty five gallons of the stuff was supposed to find its way inside you and through you. It would be many more years before the co-mingling in the water of other visitors’ by-products added a new aspect to the through element of the function, and a rather more rapid response to the measure of progress than expectation would have led one to believe. In the first place, the experimental phase, opportunity and genius profitably conjoined.

Some of the wealthy might have been confident enough to sample the water in its raw state even in the days before Gluck, but plenty others were seduced by the temptation to demonstrate their wisdom and superiority through taking the waters in novel ways. After all, the country had been littered for centuries with Holy Wells, and now it was another’s turn. The judicious word was that no way was better than that offered through Doctor Durkheim’s proprietary filtered water with its further life-enhancing tincture of charcoal – water and carbon in concord with our essentially similar selves. To ensure the appropriateness of the compound, and to secure its premier position, labelled bottles, in dark apothecary glass, were accompanied by a pamphlet testifying to its virtues, guaranteeing the further exclusion at this stage of the hoi polloi from its exclusivity. At a shilling a bottle, it seemed foolish to the well-endowed to waver from trying the life-prolonging, heart-strengthening, mentally invigorating water, endorsed by no less an authority than the Prussian doctor who had officiated over the quality and effectiveness of the spa waters of Baden-Baden (he claimed), and Bath, where none of the offerings matched the exquisite acquired taste and originality of the brilliant addition of natural charcoal to the pure water of the Irish Sea. Gluck played the role of Doctor Durkheim to perfection.

It took only minutes in the evenings to ride beyond the small groupings of houses to fill the barrels with seawater, to be decanted into bottles later, charcoal dust from the nightly fires sprinkled into the salty liquid, the equivalent amount of brushing a finger along a piece of burnt wood and licking it afterwards. Numbered labels vouched for limited and more valuable supplies. What’s more, you couldn’t simply purchase the elixir. No, you had to go and see Doctor Durkheim at one of his fancy addresses in attendance, by appointment, where he permitted audience, and where, if you met the criteria, you were flourishingly prescribed a quantity, money up front. The certificates in Germanic gothic lettering testified further to the doctor’s impeccable credentials, framed and contained in his black portmanteau, should anyone still be curious enough to seek corroboration of the verbal claims of his or the elixir’s efficacy. The price and the provenance kept cheap-skates away. For the truly committed, Anton would arrange deliveries of the fabled water to their residencies at home inland, driving up repeat business and the challenges of a short season, and spreading the word.

Of the takers, the water’s work was often challenged by the equally wholesome intake of ales, wine and port, as the hostelries’ evening tallies of drinks totted up. As this pastime was better than the boredom of venturing out into the summer evening’s rain again, the reputation of the healing water grew.

Generous commissions to one or two well-placed locals also enjoying the apparent longevity conferred on them by the local climate and the uplifting liquid naturally enhanced the appeal of the water to those from smoky inland towns seeking to improve their lot after their industrial existences ground them down through each repetitive year.

Here was a chance to make money without being tied to a well, a cave, a spring, a saint, or a miracle. There was only the wide expanse of the free and generous sea, the air skirting above it and the sands that held his secrets engrained. One of Anton’s sons would continue as a pioneer in exploiting the opportunities identified for him in the nascent naïve place, fertile for fabrications and fabulations. He would be a latter-day Cunning Man. He was one of what would become many, and spread the word. One of the fables of good fortune that would become Blackpool was being given birth – its waters had broken. The wave had been generated.

Ω

1795. High and low tides. Back and forth.

Anton Gluck had passed on intimations from other dreams, drawn from earlier wells, of conquering skies, touching stars and seeing particles of the minutest kind. Some spelled out peaceful paths, others pain and death in never before seen ferocity and numbers. Evasion and adaptation were never simple choices.

He had begun to create a stage for certain members of the Family to populate and parade upon safely for a while. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be able to share the limelight with them for long. This was the way. But he could never foretell his own immediate future. Informed guessing was his only way. Was that a blessing or a curse?

Ω

1798. Winding clocks. New springs and beginnings.

Nine years after the start of what came to be known as the French Revolution, things were their usual mess in that pesky place loosely grouped together as Europe. Some diminutive Corsican now had it upon him that he was due greater entitlement in the region, and while he was battling away on the Eastern parts of his aspired-to territory, areas of England were swept with fear about the prospect of a Napoleonic invasion, and money was being lavishly spent on defending the kingdom’s coastline from such audacity. Soon, more people who were foddered for the British Army and Navy would be summoned to serve, and those not ordered to defend the home turf would be despatched to fight for the principals and principles of King and Country from the banks of the Nile all the way back to the fields just south of Brussels, a dozen years after the French decided to declare war on the island. The sadness of parting and the high chance this would be a one-way trip for many was not lost on the distant regional populace. Songs were emerging and passed on to mark the events and the potential tragedy, couples torn apart for vague causes and patriotic declamations, the false promises of riches and respect on return for foot soldiers, and the unmentionable fact that survivors would be called to arms several times again before the little French soldier met his defining Waterloo.

On the very edge of the west coast of Lancashire, few then ventured to call on the spread-out locals to commit to the flag and the honour of defending the realm, so the quiet land behind the sands continued to be gently nourished by the untouched and by well-to-do visitors seeking rest and recuperation from toiling over their supervision of the production of uniforms and arms for the rest of Britain’s finest. Blackpool then was where you went to forget realities, not where you went to remember them, and it began to attract civilian foreign legions whose mission was to ensure this process of revitalisation was oiled with the smooth passing of wealth and savings into the hands of fresh and intriguing mental and physical saviours.

What a blessed place it was.

People sought out forms of salvation and renewal there, and its reputation spread, more and more wanting the attractions of escapism and hope the place sought to offer. Numbers of visitors escalated. It would soon be time to introduce members of the Family to their next series of futures, and the makings of fresh fortunes.

Ω

The bloody mists of time and trysts.

When you hear Family, it covers a spectrum of blood-linked folks with different names and backgrounds, different lifestyles and accommodation, different views and challenges. In the beginning there was no owned land to defend and cultivate, no core castles or palatial homes to protect, no long-tied interests to hang onto. All that would come later. What skills were there were all portable, adaptable to place and circumstance, passed on and down to all the willing and able, all except those with the Gift, who learned their crafts under cloaks of codes and secrecy, and couldn’t spread their sacred words to those who didn’t also share a large part of it. On a mainland Europe where the Gluck line of the Family had tired of diminishing options to live an unfettered life, Anton had thought France offered the least set of challenges when he was a young man looking to build a future, despite his premonitions, but the ramping up of long-constrained frustrations with the ancient regime was happening at an even faster rate than he had surmised it would, so England began to look promising in ways he hadn’t considered in depth before. Yet he still ventured in and out of the Gallic lands, novelties and temptations drawing him to offerings on every shore, in ports from Marseille to Bordeaux to Rouen, as well as intriguing places between. By 1768, he had a French-born son, and by 1792 this scion was looking after the distant dependant family from the temporary sanctuary of Andorra. If the word came through that an alternative cold northern climate was the new destination, the nominated Family representative would collect them all together and make the move when he got the signal that the time was finally right. When others asked questions about their absent father, Pietr Gluck, named for his Polish ancestors, was always the first to tell them not to question their father’s wisdom or actions, and that the way things were was best for them all. The challenges didn’t last long, and a quiet public acquiescence would fall on the heads of most of the other followers, young and old. He didn’t know when the word would actually come, only that it would, and whatever was said, he would comply with it. That still left the unsure and the fractious to their own thoughts. He also knew that characteristics couldn’t be permanently tamed, and there would always be silent dissenters and dropouts over time, those wanting an easier life, a lazy existence, no change, or those forever seeking to fulfil their own impossible dreams. Like Anton, Pietr also knew fulfilment lay in the granting of wishes to others on their terms, and with their own money. He wasn’t a visionary based on foresight, but he knew how to keep the Family alive with the money whose flow he could generally manage.

Ω

The Light of Your Life.

Before and in Anton Gluck’s era, people in general had plenty to worry about. Threats to existence could not be counted on the fingers and thumbs of simply two hands, and they were also close to most, like shadows that suddenly turned into real figures. The head of the Family’s view was that there was always money to be made from novelty, from taking away a little fear of the unknown, of unwanted change. The Church had taken a big share of the hope business for centuries, but there were still areas they couldn’t get a handle on. They couldn’t fully stop people from seeking alternative advice through the effects of their own superstition, ignorance or desire. You could sell them ideas the frock-coated men kept trying to kill, and you could sell them objects too, like bands to stop evil forces from burning your brain, or stealing your soul, metals to ward off ailments and ill-meaning spirits.

That was how Anton had come to test and then capitalise on Blackpool’s free bounty, with bands, and now with bottled water a solution to all kinds of inland-borne conditions, physical and mental. The signs had been there before he arrived. He had heard about the silversmith who had visited this Fylde coast, as it was called, in 1787 and claimed any sight problems he had arrived with had been cleared in this special place, perfectly recovered. Building on nature looked like a good way forward. The trick, if there was one, was in making sure you could measure accurately the time lapse between initial amazement and desire, usage, and the gradual or sometimes sudden diminishing of interest and enthusiasm. Getting out too soon could mean big losses, but failing to detect the oncoming winter of a cycle could be even more troublesome, with people bringing things back to you, or getting aggressive about results not meeting expectations, or a total lack of them. The secret was to pull out just as large numbers tried to ride the wave, following the lately perceived trend, the fashion, the rumours, and before prices tumbled - in short, to move on again, like some spiritual grazer, or introduce another novelty. Being nomadic was the rationalisation of a lifestyle, not the driver of one.

For Anton, there were plenty of things that raised alarms, and his senses were keen. He had the gift of Vision, a sometimes dangerous element of the overall Gift. For a regularly mobile life unbounded by local perspectives, his heightened consciousness was very revealing. He knew of fears that were lining up for the future, unknown to most – fear of flying, fear of bombs dropped from the air, fear of nuclear annihilation, even if he couldn’t articulate them in new-coined expressions, but before those, fears of growing mass persecution that triggered thoughts about what could be done about it all, and what could not.

Whatever you feel about the stars, and human nature, they don’t always reveal heart-warming stories, and who wants to buy those that aren’t? For Anton, most people looking for the treasures within secrets only wanted the light from them, not the darkness. They often failed to work out that the light followed the dark first. Others had their own way of dealing with this problem, and he saw that the Methodists had already begun to mark out the whole area of his new residence as somewhere ripe for their own burgeoning enthusiasm. They would drive business towards him unwittingly, but they could also be a vocal and vociferous dampener on his plans. He would