Notes from the Isle of Laev Part One: Lammas

By Prof. Ronald Vickery

Notes From The Isle of Laev, The Diary of Ronald Vickery: Emeritus Professor of Folklore & Mythology, All Hallows College, Oxbridge: Academic Journal or Folk-Horror Artefact? Part One: Lammas

An eight-part 'found-journal' documenting a folklorist's historical research into the religious life and calender customs of a small community living off the shores of Britain on the Isle of Laev: a liminal landscape. Its contents precede the forthcoming folk horror novel from author and folklorist Matilda Groves, 'The Orchard Girl'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326854003

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Notes From The Isle Of Laev, Part One: Lammas

Diary Content, Unless Otherwise Cited © 2016 Ronald Vickery c/o Matilda Groves

Cover Design © 2016 Matilda Groves

First Published By Blackportmanteau Press, November 2016

The Authors Reserve All Rights

Notes From The Isle of Laev: The Diary of Ronald Vickery; Emeritus Professor of Folklore & Mythology, All Hallows College, Oxbridge: Academic Journal or Folk-Horror Artefact?

Part One: Lammas

Who What Where Why

In Memory of Ronald Vickery: Emeritus Professor of Folklore and Mythology, All Hallows College, Oxbridge

I was nineteen years old when my grandfather died. I had just arrived at university. Forty years later I’m still haunting lecture halls albeit now as a professor. My grandfather would have been sixty-seven that winter, but there was not one hint of death in his bones. He was fighting fit and hungry for life. For his was a life lived well and full. He too had passed his days between the library shelves and cloisters. His life inspired my own, but his life is the better by far.

I earned my career as an academic through hard graft. But it will always be due in part to my fortunate position amidst the aspirational middle-classes. My family expected it of me and I accepted that. My years of bookish comfort would not have been possible, though, were it not for my grandfather. His life secured my privilege.

His title, as he told me in childhood, was the Emeritus Professor of Folklore and Mythology, All Hallows College, Oxbridge. Everyone in our family always addressed him as Professor Vickery. But he liked my title best: Grand-professor Ron.

He was a wise and witty raconteur. He filled my head with constant questions and thrilled my blood with adventures.

He was an unsung saint of the Spanish Civil War, patching broken bodies and feeding starving families. He farmed life into the fallow land that dying fathers couldn’t.

He was an untold hero of the Second World War, cracking enigmatic codes and crushing Nazis. He riddled hope free from darkness in a faceless game of chess.

But most of all, he was an unknown scholar, writing papers for himself and no one else. He thieved his education from the college libraries of Oxbridge. For he was never a true professor, he was a gardener.

He told me one day when we were alone. We were gathering tomatoes from his greenhouse. I was still a child.

‘I’m not a scholar, Matty,’ he said. ‘I made it all up. I’m sorry. Your nanna told me not to, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ve always known I could be, that’s the problem. I just never took my chance when it came. I was too scared. Never let your fears hold you back from being who you hope you are.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I was too confused to comfort him. I saw his guilt quite clear.

‘When I was your age, I won a scholarship to attend the grammar school. But I declined. I didn’t want to leave my friends. In many ways I’m glad I didn’t, I wouldn’t be who I am now if had, and you might never be here. But that doesn’t mean I’ve never wondered: what if? It was never dissatisfaction. It was all just curiosity. It’s maybe why I found my way to Oxbridge after all. I thought it’s where I might be in another life. The professor was only my alter ego, as I hope I might be his: a gardening fellow. We’re two sides of the same soul.’

‘And you hope he works at Hallows College, yes?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s right.’

I learned the subtle truths about Oxbridge colleges another day. It seems it was too difficult for him to confess to all at once. I never held a grudge, though. I guess I understood. I’d felt my grandfather’s enjoyment as he reveled in his daydreams. And in telling me his fantasies, I can now see how they became real for him. And who can say they never dream? Or even tell white lies?

But the real truths about my grandfather’s life are nothing to bring shame. The stories about bloody war and code breaking are genuine. All he ever claimed for himself was an education.

He was too young to fight in the Great War, but he wanted to play his part. On the land at home, he learned to farm each morning before school. In many ways, I believe, he loved this grassroots education much more than any other. I think he would have disliked the life I lead, stuck between my study and the lecture halls. He preferred to read and learn outdoors in the college grounds he nourished, with borrowed books advised to him by his friends amongst the college fellows.

His colleagues mocked him for his airs and graces, but he was too happy for their comments to bother him. He was never once aloof, but he was wiser nonetheless.

Before his life as an erudite gardener, though, he was a young romantic man. Between his years of farming his homeland and fighting against Spanish tyranny, he toured France on a bicycle. He left home armed with a poet’s heart, a pocketful of vocab, and a knapsack of books. He soon found familiar work and learned how to tend to walled gardens of flowers. And from cultivating flowers he graduated into nourishing fruitful orchards. It was whilst working in the vineyard of a grand provincial home that the young romantic met the beautiful girl who would later become my grandmother: the vigneron’s daughter.

As it is with all great love stories, though, it was not as simple as all that. With her wealth and his lack, her father forbade their union and banished my grandfather from his estate. The professor returned to England heartbroken. But with his newfound skills, he soon secured work as a gardener between the Colleges of Oxbridge. And so, in his private hours, his private studies began.

His heart ached, yes, but it was not beyond repair.

‘Imbibe the wisdom of books, Matty,’ he advised. ‘And you’ll soon grow strong and kind.’

The libraries nourished his loving will and when his heart had returned to strength he saw what he must do. Never one to give up on a dream, the professor wrote to his girl in France and the estranged lovers embarked on a correspondence that lasted many years. During that time, with the aid of his hallowed libraries, my grandfather learned to speak French just as well as my grandmother could speak English.

They wrote through art deco’s decadence and the harrowing great depression, through the bloody campaign that destroyed the Spanish Republic, until Europe’s darkest hour tolled from Berlin.

My grandmother’s family fled to England at the outbreak of the Second World War. The two young lovers found each other soon after. The professor was still a humble gardener, and the girl was still of privileged wealth, but her father no longer wished to stand between them. They married before the first blitzkrieg fell, and my mother was born the following year.

My grandfather, now too old to fight, remained an Oxbridge gardener. He no longer lived in the college grounds, though. His beautiful French wife and he bought a delicate cottage near the Gog Magog Hills. Although she could have provided for them both for life, my grandfather would not part from his precious libraries and cloisters. He often said, ‘their hallowed pages were like rich mulch for the hungered mind.’

Nor did any of the Oxbridge fellows wish to see him leave. He was as familiar to them as the winter ghosts of King’s College. One day they honoured his intellect with an onerous request for help. A Cambridge professor of Classics, who often needed my grandfather to complete his cryptic crosswords, invited him to work on the Enigma machine.

‘They told me,’ my grandfather said: ‘You’ve got just the kind of mind we need to help us crush the Nazi’s, Vickery. So I told him what I thought too: any mind of any kind can be any kind of mind, given will and time. The learned fellow smiled at me and replied: Be that as it may, Ron, we don’t have time and need you now, so follow me, please, if you will? We won the war, of course, but whether he remembers my advice I’ll never know.’

My grandfather was an ambitious man, but one blessed with modesty. His contributions at Bletchley were invaluable, but he declined acknowledgment of his efforts. ‘It was just something I had to do, Matty. I never needed a medal or my name scored in marble. I only wanted to take your grandmother back to France one day. That was my reward.'

It would be a few years before the two sweethearts returned to the roots of their Gallic romance, but they were in no rush. They had my mother to care for, and my grandfather had his many books and gardens between Oxbridge.

In the years after the war, he began the work he had postponed so long for experience instead; a wise decision I envy him for. He had read a wide range of disciplines during his years between Oxbridge, but the area of study he found most rewarding was the one he honored himself his doctorate in: folklore and mythology. I believe this field spoke to him more than most because his first lessons beyond the schoolhouse came from working in arable land. He had brushed shoulders with agrarian folk and watched them express their lives in balance to the seasons they saw expressed in their fields, orchards, and gardens.

‘Agriculture and horticulture are meditations on mortality, Matty,’ my grandfather explained. ‘Each year in spring we sigh with relief as we leave winter for another year; you’ve made it: you’re still alive. And one sees that sigh reflected in the natural world. Spring blooms into summer's glut, and in autumn, we take stock through the harvest to survive the bitter winter. For then, as the life force wanes, we look inwards and enter our own period of hibernation for the soul. If done right, you’ll revive in spring anew, and strong. Until of course, we reach our final winter of the heart.’

My grandfather was the right age when the hippy movement surfaced in the middle-sixties. He was old enough to see through the trappings of would-be-mystic-wannabes but still young enough to enjoy its pleasures. He felt privileged to see the beginnings of a change for good in his lifetime and was sad to see it fail because, as he saw it, the wrong people praised it for the wrong reasons.

‘Precious few found Gaia, Matty,’ he would say. ‘The others only found themselves, not themselves alongside others.’

But I digress. Before the inevitable failure of the summer-of-love, my grandfather enjoyed his most diligent period of intellectualism. Based on his years of research He began composing his own papers on folklore and mythology. But having had no formal training in academic writing, his friends the fellows found his style naïve. They dismissed it as another charming expression of character from their eccentric friend, the gardener.

My grandfather, I am sure, would have felt the pinch of humility from their arrogant summations. Although modest in many ways, he was proud of his knowledge. And I can find no reason why he should not have been. For if you ever have the chance read his papers, naïve as they are, you will find true insight amidst his informal manner. The fellows only saw flaws.

Hurt as my grandfather was, he remained focused in his efforts and continued writing his theories. But he did so with their critique in mind. As the years progressed his style distilled until at last a Historian at Oxford asked if he might keep a hold of his paper for a little longer. Impressed by my grandfather’s progress, he asked if he might read some more work soon. My grandfather was only too happy to oblige. He had got their attention at last.

The interest in my grandfather’s work grew from a patronizing curiosity into a sincere fascination. And from this, respect soon followed. The approved professors of folklore and mythology from Oxbridge requested to meet with him. They presented him with an offer of scholarship in thanks for the time served tending to their gardens, and in acknowledgment of the true genius his work displayed. For without proper accreditation, his work would remain excluded from professional publications. Written by a layman, it was an easy target for criticism and ridicule. Such is the condescension of academia.

‘I turned them down,’ he said. ‘They wanted me to shed my habits, learn to fit their mold. They wanted me to abandon who I was, who I am.’

‘But I thought you regretted your decision as a boy?’ I asked.

‘I never said I regretted it, I only confessed I often wondered what if. I knew I could be a professor if I wanted to be. I knew my work was just as potent with wisdom as anything I’d read in their libraries. But I didn’t need a piece of parchment paper to confirm it. I confirm it every day by being me.

‘To accept their offer would be to deny who I am. And I’m as happy with who I am now as I was then. I found my education my way. That matters more than any institutional honour. I was happy to keep writing my papers in the style I thought fitted my ideas best, and continue working on a book I have in mind. They were fair flummoxed by my rejection, but I think a few of them understood. I had my garden to do my thinking in, and perhaps they were jealous of that odd privilege I had over them.

‘I’ll never know because I never asked. It would only have been rude. But this doesn’t mean it was right that I lied to you when you were a child. That will always be wrong, and I will always be sorry.’

Those were the last words he spoke to me. Words of inspiration for before I went to university: never forget who I am. I cannot say for certain if I have always heeded his advice well, but I do know I have always tried my best. And I am certain wherever he is resting now, no matter how close I may have stayed between, or how far I may have strayed from the fine black lines of my soul, he is watching me still, and proud of my life.

Halfway through my freshman’s Michaelmas term, my mother wrote to me to inform that my grandfather had died: a car crash on his way home from his Oxbridge gardens. The other driver was drunk. He lived.

His funeral took place in King’s College Chapel, his body interned in Cambridge. The attendees neared a hundred. My grandfather was a hero and a friend to many people besides me, but I am sure I am the only one left alive who remembers him.

As dictated by his last will and testament, the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge divided my grandfather's papers among themselves in much the same fashion as team captains pick players during games lessons at school. I often wonder if this was his last little joke against the Oxbridge notion of grandeur: we are not so different at heart. For there was bickering over who got what and who accepted the unpopular leftovers.

If it was a joke, it backfired. It resulted in a travesty to his memory. No concise collection of his work exists anywhere. I once asked if I might see his papers. I last read them when he was alive. I have never been able to find them at Oxbridge. After all the bitter arguing over a man who they once considered a whimsical figure becoming to the character of their campus, his life’s work is now forgotten. The papers lie uncatalogued in the special collection departments of the Oxbridge libraries. For all intents and purposes, they are lost.

For the budding archivists reading this, there is a challenge waiting for you in Oxbridge: gather my grandfather’s legacy and do right by it. I have not the right kind of mind for such an arduous task, no matter what my grandfather might have said contrariwise.

It could be that this was his final joke: to become a piece of mythos and legend himself, sought by curious biblio-archeologists for decades after. It feels befitting for a man who flirted with discovering an alternative vision of himself – for the mere sake of it, remember – to then allow the inevitable effect of hearsay and rumour to escalate his history into something other. He lies as lie waiting for the cleansing of truth. His passion was discovering the truth behind folklore and traditional customs, and now he has memorialized his life as an opaque fable hidden under history.

All that I have been able to save of his work is a stash of journals and diaries I inherited after my mother’s death last year. As far I know, they remained in his black portmanteau in my mother’s attic since my grandmother’s passing. My mother never mentioned them, and I never saw her reading them. His death was a violent grief she never recovered from.

It is the words from those long-forgotten pages that I will present to you on this website over next year: the jigsaw pieces of his ‘book he had in mind.’ Other than such things as his watches and a wireless radio, those pages are all I have left as proof of his life. I have no next in line to follow me, no cousins left to speak of. I am the last of my branch of the Groves. This is why I have set up this site: to archive my grandfather’s work.

Without further interest in his words, they will become lost forever within the catacombs of special collections. I know they will be safe there, but they will never read or written about. And when I die, there will be no one who will know why those pages are significant. All scholars have an ephemeral form of immortality through their work. My grandfather risks losing this chance

I will admit, though, that a little stubborn pride on his part does lie at the root of this problem. But it is a flaw I cannot help but admire him for. Because no matter how academia may have judged his amateur endeavors, I know without his sure-headed diligence, his curiosity, and his kindness, I would not be where I am today. I owe it to his fading legacy to let his words live on.

I suppose what will follow over the course this next year was what he may have considered his magnum opus: the jeweled mistletoe berry upon his thorny crown. But instead, in it’s current form, is more like a fledgling swan song.

On a stylistic note, the opportunity of equivalent dates is too good to ignore. His diary begins on Monday, August 1st, following a calendar identical to 2016. I propose to update his diary entries as if we are reading them on the same evening that he wrote them. This is where the real interest begins. I have no knowledge of what year he made these records. The journals have no cover binding, and the pages are dated as days only.

A quick spot of research suggests the years 1960, or 1932. But I don’t remember him leaving for a year when I was three. He was a permanent fixture in my life for as long as I knew him. And 1932 would have meant leaving the garden’s of Oxbridge not long after he had joined them. As adventurous and free-willed as he was, he was also a conscientious worker. Also, my grandmother is mentioned as his wife, and the implication from his ability to help with the farm is that he is somewhat older.

These facts force the question: is the diary real? I have no answer to this. They record a year of his life on an island that seems to be false: the Isle of Laev. When I first read the diaries, I assumed he chose a pseudonym for an island off of our coasts to conceal its identity and privacy. But this has never gelled well with my knowledge of his sensibilities as a folklorist. It is important to discern the difference between geographical cultures: to know what stems from where, to know what traditions have died, and to ascertain which ones still remain. To keep the island's identity secret is to contradict everything he held high and true. And yet it appears he did.

My other theory makes more sense, but I’d rather not believe it: that he wrote it as whimsy; as a false record of a lost idyll he longed all life to visit. There is no answer known. You must decide your own truth.

The first entry in this the archive details my grandfather’s intentions for the diary. Whichever way you choose to interpret his words throughout its reading and come completion, his initial statement of purpose will no doubt affect your final understanding.

I will have a separate