For Love of the Land: or Ariadne’s Second Chance

By Andrea Sutton

Ariadne sets off one night with the cat. She feels broken by her son’s violence following the death of his violent father. Driving down the narrow lane to the Inn that takes pets, where she’ll stay till she decides what to do, she has a re-birth experience: sensations of chiffon scarves sliding from her shoulders over and over again.

At the bottom of the hill where the narrow lane opens into a triangle of green with three May trees on it directly opposite the Maytime Inn, she emerges feeling exhilarated and filled with an optimism she’d never experienced before. Or that is how it strikes her, but later she discovers that it was the way she’d felt for the first three years of her life with her mother when her schoolmaster father was away at the war.

Her journey from the city to the Cotswolds and then Wales turns into a journey into her past and her unconscious, taking in the Welsh hill community where she finds another schoolmaster. Her mother’s letters turn up, she goes on Ancestry and finally confronts the liberating truth. Then a young man notices her and draws her into an exciting but disturbing encounter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781803134628

Andrea Sutton

While on the psycho-analytic couch with Mrs. L. Veszy-Wagner, PhD., in London, Andrea Sutton took B.A.Hons in Russian, S.S.E.E.S. 1963, was an A.P.S.W.Trainee. then took Dipl.in Mental Health at LSE, 1968. She married into America, took courses in Psychology at American University, and received some Psycho-Analytic training from William Meissner, S.J.,M.D. and practised psychotherapy in Cambridge, Mass and Oxford, England. Her debut is based on her own life.

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Contents

FOR LOVE OF THE LAND

or Ariadne’s Second Chance

I

Tremymor

Ariadne came to the top of the drive, August Bank Holiday Monday afternoon, having driven up the coast and before that across country from England. It was hot, but up here in the foothills there was cooler fresher air. The appearance of the locality did not inspire: rickety sheep fences with barbed wire on top, no hedges, few trees. She parked the car on the single-track road and opened the aluminium gate. It swung back over mown grass.

As her feet touched the cool surface and carried her toward the dim-lit corridor between two rows of conifers receding downhill, she entered a different plane, a different world, the inner world where all things meet, one thing becomes another, and the spirit can emerge anew.

There were daises in the grass gleaming like stars in an emerald night, no sun penetrated the barriers of green needles. At the bottom of the drive one Scots pine appeared. It had four stems. And there was the house, below her, cut into the bank. The grass led on downhill into the shade of a sycamore tree and round the building onto a surface of grey stone chips, the back door and further along the front door, both facing west.

She couldn’t go in till the Agent arrived, but it was only the land that concerned her. There was a drystone wall with lower sections to sit on, but beyond it was the fence with barbed wire and the sheep gathering to inspect her. As many as twelve stood there silently, their ears pricked, their eyes alert. She looked out across the marsh to the long contour of the bare hill and the treed hill to the north, but the heat haze like pink chiffon filled the triangle between them and hid the Irish Sea, which she didn’t know was there. She recognised what had looked like a line-drawing in the Agent’s specification, with light pouring up from some unknown source. Her eye focused on the marsh lower down. Some threat might be there she thought and terrible ideas such as draining it came into her head. But then an expanse of lake appeared to her eye and streams of water flowing down to it.

She turned to her left and confronted the four-foot bole of an ash tree rising from the end of the wall. It was old, maybe as old as the house and had been coppiced for firewood many times. The branches rose from the edges of the bole, twenty feet high and close to that across and had been shaped by the wind, the gales. They were like the arms of some ancient witch, draped in black, haggard, wrinkled, tortured, the bony arms extending beyond her garb, huge hands the fingers splayed, distorted with arthritis, and twisted in fury as she shrieked at the wind. There were more but younger straight-trunked trees forming a line stretching down west. Her sons. They would keep the sun off the house.

The house comprised three buildings in a row going uphill. The first, the kitchen had been the cow-shed. The last was the hay barn. She imagined converting it and had to learn later how essential a barn is out in the wilds and how all she needed to do could be accomplished in the two-building house. Tacked onto the end of the barn was a small shed she took for a dog kennel, half hidden under the conifers that came down the drive and went all round the east and south of the house, leaving green algae on the windows. Later she learned it was the gunpowder shed. The quarry had been worked from her land which had double the acreage back then.

Opposite the hay barn was the pig-shed backed onto the cesspit and below the cesspit a dell, where bonfires had been had. Steps led down so she walked to the barbed wire and looked over. Four feet below, a ewe was leaning against the hedge bank in the shade of a small, gnarled hawthorn tree. As she looked over, the ewe looked up at her and she saw straight down into the great dark brown eyes. The ewe didn’t move or seem to blink. Ariadne stood motionless. Something transpired. All doubt had gone. Forget the imagined threat from the marsh. This was to be her final home, away from the world, to make something beautiful of it and to slowly make sense of all she’d ever felt or experienced and come to be at peace with it.

II

Springwater 1968

There were difficult memories to deal with. Her husband had died of leukaemia in America in his thirties, looking like an inmate of Belsen and provided with a wig. They hadn’t got along; they’d split up and she’d tried to bring up their son on her own. He couldn’t rid himself of the sense he’d taken her from his father because she preferred him. He couldn’t find himself away from her. He had times when he hated her and hit her or smashed things. He felt angry at school in spite of being praised for his work. He got himself expelled time after time. The talents that might have saved him made him feel guilty.

Her father had opposed the marriage. They’d met in London, got engaged on the phone after he’d gone back. He’d bought her a return ticket to visit him in San Francisco before getting married in the summer in England. She’d come home with an amethyst ring. Her father had hoped they’d fall out. He refused to give her away. He was Chairman of the Humanist Society. He was opposed to all clerics. He said he would have to give her hand to the priest. He couldn’t do it. In addition, he did not want her to live in America.

I will never set foot in that country, he said.

He was anti-American. She’d gone on the Aldermaston marches with him. She’d read Russian and been to Russia. All his idea, though she loved Russia too.

The confrontation took place in the Long Room sitting face to face in one of the diamond-paned windows, under the great oak beams. She had never told him of her beliefs. He had not had her, nor her sister baptised. Now she’d done it. He couldn’t process that she had kept it hidden all her life.

You must think I’ll go to hell, he said.

Useless to explain that she didn’t. Did she even believe in an afterlife? She’d never thought about it. But then the worst thing and she remembered that later.

You’ll be all alone as on a rock in a raging sea, and I’ll be far away and unable to help you.

She had never ever turned to him for help. Her mother was the person she went to, but the misery was plain on his face.

You were the same about Vanessa, she went on, not letting his emotions influence her. You objected to her marriage in a registry office. You just don’t want your daughters to marry! You want them all to yourself!

This was the first time in her life, as far as she could recall then, that anger had taken hold of her and put words in her mouth. She was a quiet, almost inarticulate person. What she’d had in mind was the bath-times when she was little and when her sister was little, and her niece was little. In fact, it was back then, when she was maybe four, that fury had first led her to yell at her father:

I’ll flo’ you in the pond!

Did he remember? A wave of fury rushed through her now, a lifetime of buttoned-down fury bursting out.

You’re a narcissistic shit! she said.

At that moment, her mother looked in. She spoke quietly to him from the door.

You MUST give her away, she said and left.

He said there was one way he could do it. Almost certainly her mother had gone over it with him before this talk and that’s what they’d agreed. Which was that he could do it if his friend, the Lutheran pastor, founder of the local Samaritans, would officiate. That was arranged later, but the next morning walking from his study in the garden to the back door he dropped dead of a cerebral aneurism.

Her sister phoned her with the news. She’d gone back to London the night before. Her sister, seven years older, always treated her as a fool and a nutcase. She saw the fact she’d gone into analysis and stuck with it for seven years as confirmation. She made a song and dance about Ariadne’s supposed vulnerability to the landlady, who took the call and fetched Ariadne to the main house. But the sister was the one who proved unable to cope with his death. She skipped the funeral, came late to the reception at the house and came drunk. She stood in the kitchen looking up the lane.

I refuse to believe he’s dead, she said in her stage quavery voice. He’ll come down the road any minute.

She left.

Ariadne went down to live with her mother. It was June. Wonderful weather. She got work helping in the kitchen of wealthy people and her mother drove her to and from. Why not stay there? Cancel the wedding. Her mother needed her and with her father gone the atmosphere was relaxed. A different path far from ambition. Into that mood an aristocratic Lady dropped the offer of a paid position, to live as her daughter and help her entertain guests. She lived near the station and was willing for Ariadne to go up to London for sessions three times a week. After days of obsessional doubting and arguing with herself, she decided to stick to the path already mapped out and although she couldn’t help wondering how her life would have gone had she chosen to live as that Lady’s daughter and although there was so much agony in America, there were experiences there that she valued having had and which at this point outweighed the pain. Anyway, who’s to say she wouldn’t have met pain on that other path?

It didn’t occur to her back then that living with her mother with her father gone was exactly how it had been for the first three years of her life, three years ended by his return which had led to horrible upsets in her mother, which she was taught to deal with and fetch the GP, and to her being told by her father to do stuff a child shouldn’t do and was her mother’s part. It didn’t occur to her analyst either. There were elements of that history her mother had kept hidden, from herself too probably. It wasn’t until she discovered her mother’s ancestry and old letters in recent years, that she was able to see how things fit together and how her sense of self had failed to separate out.

All this is relevant in so far as she had a second opportunity to opt out of the path given to her by her father and that time, she took it and it led directly to her discovery of the magical place described at the beginning of this account.

III

Oxford 1994

She’d returned to England, divorced and widowed, her mother had died leaving her the property and her piano, a Steinway, she’d set herself up in private practice in Oxford and saw patients at the house twice a week. Her son was in sheltered accommodation in town. He’d told her there were moments he really wanted to kill her and relied on her to get out of the way in time. He’d show up while she was seeing a patient. He’d go quietly round the back and never interrupted, but it put her on edge and in dread of a time he might interrupt and then the patient would be upset. It took her weeks to make up her mind to go. Then she took a couple of weeks off seeing patients and only told them she’d moved after she’d arranged everything. They simply drove out to her new quarters.

It was probably May, her birth month, that she put Panda in his basket, a bag of clothes on the back seat and drove off at ten at night to the motel almost next door. There she sat phoning till she found a place that had special quarters for people with a pet. It was the Maytime Inn in Astall. In the morning they set off west along the dual carriageway. Shortly before Burford they turned off and started rolling down the narrow lane between high hedges lined with cow parsley. The scent wafted round her head through the open window as the sound of traffic vanished. Looking back, it resembled the feeling of going down the narrow corridor between the two rows of conifers. As she drove along, hedges rushing by, she had the sensation of chiffon scarves sliding from her shoulders, over and over again. At the bottom of the hill, she came out into the space with the three May trees on a triangle of green, immediately opposite The Maytime Inn. She was aware of having had an extraordinary experience. She felt re-born with an underlying sense of optimism she hadn’t or could not recall having had before. That is how she put it then, but now she knew it was the feeling she’d had for the first three years of her life with her mother, when her father wasn’t there. Getting off the path set by her father must have brought her back in touch with it.

IV

Astall

Astall was a village still largely owned by the Big House, set on the hill above the cottages on the low ground, and whose elderly male occupant had never married and lived under his deceased mother’s strictures. He hadn’t the right to sell anything. He let the cottages to people in return for ten hours of house-cleaning a week or for help on his land. A few properties had been sold to the sheep farmer who worked the land along the Windrush. One of these was the cow-man’s former lodging, round the corner from the inn along a cobbled lane. These were cottages built by wealthy wool merchants, beautifully built in Cotswold stone, with elegant four paned window-frames. The floors were slabs of Cotswold stone through which the Windrush rose on occasion. The stairs were wooden steps spiralling up, fanning out from the newel post, filled in with risers, hugged by the plastered stone wall. Upstairs there were dark floorboards. To get to the loo in the bathroom downstairs, across the huge kitchen, required one to descend via this spiral.

She had not been at the inn for a week, debating whether to buy the old School House that was on the market and deciding the garden would be inadequate, when the cowman’s cottage became available to rent. She and Panda moved in with her mother’s Steinway. It had survived decades at Springwater where the long narrow floorboards had become fluted from the damp and had had to be replaced. Now, it coped with the vast heat from the stove and the proximity of the Windrush water at its feet. This little sitting room which she painted shellfish yellow, managed to hold the two-seater blue-checked sofa, the matching chair, the black stove between them in the inglenook and the chamber-music sized piano. There she saw patients.

The kitchen had a solid fuel Rayburn which she learned to use. There was a huge barn that she filled with local logs and bags of coal. There were no streetlights. People had door lamps. There was no shop and no bus. She was the 45th resident. It was a different world. A world resembling the world she’d been born into where central heating was unknown, there was no TV, where the people living near-by were people you spoke to, and where water occasionally came into the house. She absolutely loved that house. She painted the whole upstairs shell-fish yellow which went with