Martin's mum and the banshee

I've just learned of the death in September 2020 of Martin McKenna, a friend and colleague on many projects besides Mirabilis, including Warrior Kings and Frankenstein's Legions. I'm going to write at length about my memories of Martin, but that will take a while -- the term is over-used, but he was unique. In the meantime, I wanted to share something he told me which shows his love of the strange. He was no more superstitious or religious than I am, but we both enjoyed stories like this for the real magic in them. Not magic that's real in the way a table or chair are real, that is, but the much more vital and wonderful magic of the human imagination.

Over to Martin:

“This little story was told to me by my mother during a week’s holiday that she and I spent at South Foreland Lighthouse, a decommissioned light on the White Cliffs in Kent now run as a holiday cottage by The National Trust. We were there just before Christmas 2007. It wasn’t entirely ideal, as it turned out, because my elderly mum found the place a little too dark and isolated for her liking and she felt a bit uneasy at night-time, surrounded as we were by pitch blackness. This was my first surprise as I hadn’t expected her to be at all bothered by anything like that, having been born and brought up in darkest rural Ireland in the 1930s, and in fact had expected her, a country girl at heart, to enjoy escaping from London to the peace and quiet of this isolated bit of coast while being safe and cosy at the lighthouse; it really was a lovely spot for a quiet holiday, I thought. Added to this was the association the place had with my eldest brother, who had been stationed there during his career as a lighthouse-keeper.

“Trying to analyse why she sometimes felt unsettled in the place, we chatted about it one night in the lighthouse kitchen and our talk unexpectedly turned to the subject of ghosts. This was my next surprise because throughout my life my mum has always been sceptical about supernatural things, and would always derogate any talk of such stuff. She admitted that the stretch of coast where we were staying felt haunted to her - with its long history and hundreds of shipwrecks (‘All those drowned souls’) right on our doorstep as it were – and this was what made her uneasy at night. I was amazed, especially when she followed this by saying, ‘I’ve seen ghosts and things, when I was younger’. She was very matter-of-fact about this, and following my incredulous reaction of, ‘You have?! What like?’ she said simply, ‘Of course, Ireland’s full of that sort of thing; and I saw a Banshee’.

“Hearing this from my own mum was remarkable, as I’d never heard her talk about anything like this before, let alone the Banshee which is one of my favourite creatures from Irish folklore. This was bizarre! Of course I asked her to tell me everything about it.

“To set the scene a little, my mum grew up in County Monaghan in Ireland, in the sparsely-populated rural community of Aughaderry. The nearest actual town was (and probably still is) Aughnacloy over the border in Co. Tyrone. Her local community as she describes it was very scattered, with farms and houses dotted about over a wide area, sometimes a mile or more between neighbours. As a youngster, my mum was always riding about this and neighbouring townlands on her bike, out on various jobs and errands for her parents from their farm. My mum reckons when the following took place she was aged about 13 or 14, which would’ve made it 1942 or 1943. While WWII was raging elsewhere, my mum was away on the bogs encountering spooks.

“It was getting near dusk, and my mum was riding home on her bike (all the ghostly sightings she described to me – there were about three or four others – were witnessed from this mystery-machine bicycle). She was riding along one of the lonely back roads in the neighbouring town of Killabrone, behind the house of a guy called Paddy Traynor. My mum remembers that he was a farmer who lived alone, and was known to the local kids because he had an orchard with fantastic apples which they’d always be stealing. Paddy Traynor’s house was on the ‘main’ road (still only a minor country road), and directly behind the house was a field, and at the bottom of that was the road along which my mum was riding that evening.

“At the point where the road bordered Paddy Traynor’s field it climbed a steep hill, so my mum was walking her bike up it as she was accustomed to doing every time she took that road home. From the road she could see over a hedge directly into Paddy Traynor’s field, beyond which was his house. What my mum saw and heard then was very odd. There was a strange woman in a floor-length dress walking about in the field, and she was screaming. The woman was walking to and fro across the scrubby, muddy field endlessly screaming, and screaming. As my mum described it, “It was a terrible strange cry, not like a normal scream, more like a fox or something”.

“I asked her to describe the woman, and she said that she remembers the long skirt, and that her long hair was all tied back and ‘like straw’. But my mum couldn’t recall the woman’s face, or what sort of age she might’ve been; pointing out that that day was more than sixty years ago. Besides, my mum didn’t hang about; this screaming, pacing woman understandably frightened her, and without another soul anywhere in sight, she quickly hurried on up the hill to get away home. She left the woman behind her, screaming in the field in the dusk.

“When she got home she told her mother what she’d experienced, and her mum – my grandmother – very matter-of-factly said, “Oh, you saw the Banshee. That means someone soon is going to die”. Sure enough, within two or three days they heard the news of Paddy Traynor’s death.

“This all struck me as remarkably odd, and I quizzed my mum for further details to help fill in the gaps. Most importantly, this strange screaming woman was a total stranger, and this was unheard of in that neighbourhood at that time – it’s not like she might’ve been some upset relative or neighbour of Paddy’s, or a traumatized survivor of a nearby accident or some such who’d wandered into Paddy’s field; or a patient who’d legged it from some nearby asylum. Folk really didn’t travel far, and outsiders were rarely if ever encountered in those days in that part of the country, apparently. My mum maintains that it was unheard of for strangers to just turn up in that neighbourhood without everyone else knowing, and no-one ever spoke of seeing any unfamiliar woman going about the place (screeching or otherwise), so no plausible scenario seems to explain this woman’s presence.

“Strangest of all of course is the coincidence of Paddy Traynor’s death, just a couple of days after this ‘Banshee’-like figure was in the man’s field outside his house. From what my mum remembers, Paddy Traynor lived alone, was aged around 40, and as far as she can recall died of natural causes.”

* * *

It's too early for the card below, which Martin titled "Harpy Christmas", but just this once let's waive the rules.
 

Death and the maiden over

Death, along with Jack Frost and the Moon and other entities of nature, in folktales appears in person - not the divine ruler of the realm of death, as in mythological stories, but the very embodied spirit of mortality. In Norwegian tales it's often a specific death, a given plague that is seen as an old woman going from village to village. Sometimes Death can be tricked - though usually not for long, and at great cost, for if folktales don't ultimately tell the starkest of truths then what are those stories for?

Italo Calvino was partial to Italian folktales, and the last story in his collection Fiabe Italiane is "Jump into my Sack", in which a crippled boy acquires a magic sack in which he briefly traps Death. There's no comeback, and he releases Death almost at once without prompting - just the sort of rough edge you expect in folktales.

Arthur Ransome's story "The Soldier and Death" is structurally much tidier. There the sack belongs to a Russian soldier who uses it to snare Death when she comes for the Tzar:

From that time on there was no dying in the world . There were births every day, and plenty of them, but nobody died. It was a poor time for doctors. And so it was for many years. Death had come to an end, and it was as if all men would live for ever. And all the time the little old woman, Death, tied up in a sack, unable to get about her business, was hanging from the top of a tall poplar tree away in the forest.

In time the soldier realizes the consequences of a world in which no-one dies, so he sets Death free. But she's thoroughly frightened and won't take him now, so he goes on to harrow Hell and finally meet a fate that is affecting, but far too authorial and elegant for me to believe that Ransome has presented this story just as he came across it in some woodland hut beside the samovar.

"The Soldier and Death" was published in 1920. Nineteen years later, the story put on new clothes in the form of On Borrowed Time, a movie with Lionel Barrymore as an old man who traps Death, now male, up an apple tree. He finally relents when his grandson falls trying to climb the tree and is paralyzed but unable to die. This version ends with Gramps and young Pud (sic) following Death up to a shining light in the sky. What can I say? Paul Osborn, the screenwriter, was perhaps not quite the storytelling genius Ransome was.

Early in 1962, in the pages of Amazing (Adult) Fantasy #9, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko revived the story as "The Man Who Captured Death" - a classic Lee/Ditko title, for sure. Death here looks like Bengt Ekerot and is caught in "an electronic ray". Beetles become immune to DDT and eat the crops; rats breed and infest the cities; antibiotics stop working; the incurably ill suffer but cannot die. So the old scientist who designed the ray turns it off: "You were right, grim one! No man may alter the mysterious scheme of things!" To which Death replies, "Thus has it ever been... Thus must it ever be..." Okay, still not on a par with Ransome. But it has Ditko drawing Death, and if anything could equal the dark brilliance of Russian folklore it's that.

Whether Death is stuck in a sack or a beam of light, good stories never die, especially when deadlines loom. And so we have a new spin on the story for television in the form of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I'm doubting that Death will actually be personified in this show, as that kind of concept belongs to fairytales and not to science fiction, but it will be interesting to see how the writers develop it. Because if Death is not a person, or at least a fantastic force of nature, then what process could systematically stop everyone dying throughout the world? In ten weeks we'll know.

In Mirabilis we have our own take on the story, "Death and the Maiden Over", in which Death arrives at Lord’s for the end of the cricket season. In a curious wager, he pads up and faces each of England’s fast bowlers. Until somebody can get him out, no-one in the world is to die. Finally, after a long afternoon that sees hospital wards filling up to capacity, W G Grace is called out of retirement and gets Death leg before wicket from his bath chair. Appropriate for a doctor, I think.

Do you want to climb the beanstalk?

A decade ago, a phone was still just a device you used to call somebody up. Then people in games and television started to take an interest. After all, here's a little gizmo stuffed with electronics that people carry everywhere. The developers started to think of what kind of games you could play on that - a route to the holy grail of casual gaming, then only dreamed of. Television folk noted the way that audiences were engaging with shows like Big Brother, their interest piqued probably not so much by the opportunity to create new and interesting formats as by the chance to milk more money from the viewers.

Leo and I were working in that unmapped border country between games and TV. We got to go to lots of meetings and conferences where people would get excited by ARGs and ways of delivering content as a finger buffet across multiple media. Where there are no maps, dragomans grow sleek and fat. Nowadays you'll hear the word "convergence" less and the words "curate" and "transmedia" more; otherwise those conferences haven't much changed in the intervening ten years.

As Leo and I were not equipped with the lavish budget that broadcasters give to the people who jaw-jaw, we had to focus on rather more modest goals than setting up a citywide game funnelling attention towards a reality TV show. One of the technologies we looked at was WAP. Crude by the standards of a modern smartphone, the phones back then allowed text and very simple graphics. "Aha!" we thought. "Gamebooks."

We realized that the sub-sub-Tolkien brand of fantasy popularized in the gamebooks of the 1980s were not going to grab a broad, casual, all-ages market. Instead we focussed on various types of family entertainment. One of our projects was Tell Me A Story, a series of mother-&-me interactive stories on a phone. Say you miss the bus, it's raining, and you have to wait twenty minutes for the next one. Twenty minutes - that's a yawning infinite gulf of boredom to a preschool child. These WAP gamebooks gave you an interactive fairytale that you could read to your kids, helping them with the choices - none of which was ever a wrong choice, of course. The pleasure of interacting was to see where the story would spin off to.

You can see how one of our Tell Me A Story gamebooks would have worked over on the Fabled Lands blog. As fairytales are such archetypal story forms, and most of us learn our storytelling grammar from them, kicking in a bit of interactivity seems to make a lot of sense. Now that we're into the era of apps, I'm thinking that Leo and I ought really to get back to this project. Um, just as soon as we finish the remaining 540 pages of Mirabilis, that is.

Princes, kings and heroes

“It’s usual in these stories,” David Fickling reminded me, “for the hero to be marked out by destiny. Often he’s a prince, for example.”

I didn’t want either Jack or Estelle to be predestined for greatness, preferring instead to explore the idea that the hour (or year, in this case) produces the man (and woman). On the other hand, I wanted Mirabilis to be commissioned for The DFC so I probably tried to get away with a noncommittal “Um.”

The heroes of fairytales are often royal, a shorthand for them being the sons of gods as they are in myths, because if you take a scion of royal blood and have him brought up in a woodsman’s hut you’ve got immediate rooting interest. The tension in such a gross disturbance of natural law means that the story practically tells itself, unfolding nicely until the lad sits at last on the throne that was always meant for him.

That seems too easy though. I would’ve preferred it if Arthur was not born to draw that sword, had been just a clever peasant who rose to the occasion. People who crown themselves, as Napoleon knew, create a more lasting myth. Likewise when Don Blake saw the inscription: “Whoever wields this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor” it seemed to say that an ordinary man could achieve greatness. It was only later that we found out he’d been Thor all along.

Leaving aside the X-Men, for whom destiny was in the double helix, most of the old Marvel heroes had heroism thrust upon them and had to grow into the part. Peter Parker may have been the archetypal orphan, but there was nothing special about him until the spider bit his hand. That’s what I liked, but it seems from Wiki that they since retconned it:

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski began writing The Amazing Spider-Man with #471. Two issues later, Peter Parker, now employed as a teacher at his old high school, meets the enigmatic Ezekiel, who possesses similar spider powers and suggests that Parker having gained such abilities might not have been a fluke - that Parker has a connection to a totemic spider spirit.

Totemic spider spirit..? Ugh. Just, ugh.

Princes in fairytales embody the archetypal hero in rejuvenated form. “His greatest virtue is intuition,” says J.E. Cirlot (A Dictionary of Symbols) and who can doubt it: Arthur handing Excalibur to Uryens, Alexander taming Bucephalus, Luke deciding to just go with the Force. Each shows that, whatever wise gray heads may think, youth is stronger for not knowing what’s impossible.

Yet maybe the facile storytelling trick of having your hero royally born to greatness is wearing thin with today’s sophisticated audiences. Harry Potter, who appears at first to have everything including the birthmark, turns out merely to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, his special seal of greatness being earned not by birth but by accident and the magic of a mother's love. Likewise Lyra in His Dark Materials - despite being a Moses-like foundling, and having the requisite exceptional upbringing, she is after all just an ordinary girl. Her personality, not her pedigree, is what makes her special.

That’s how I think of both Jack and Estelle: exceptional but no more exceptional than anyone else might be. You will find little nods throughout the Mirabilis story in the direction of a kind of kingship. I won’t give any spoilers here, except to say that they all tie in to the question of whether one can be born heroic or must struggle with one’s self-birth as a hero. Neither Jack nor Estelle has any midichlorians (ugh, again) in the blood, no royal birthmarks, no prophecy to make their greatness a simple matter of jumping through hoops. In the end, we're all princes if we want to be.