King John's Treasure

If you had a history teacher, like mine, with a fondness for bad puns, you will have been told that King John lost his treasure in the Wash, “and I don’t mean he left five pounds in his trousers pocket when he sent a pair to the laundry, mha, mha, mha.” But at least this, and the romance and mystery of the lost treasure, made me remember the story.

King John’s baggage train was lost on 12 October 1216 during an attempted crossing of the tidal estuary over the Wash. Magna Carta had been signed the year before, but by this time the barons were in revolt again, and had invited the Dauphin, Louis of France to invade and seize the throne. The country was in the throes of civil war. John devoted himself to pillaging the estates of those barons, and it must be said some bishops and abbots too, who opposed him. It is generally assumed that the loss included a vast hoard of precious objects from these plunderings and John's own treasury. They have never been found.

We know the exact date of the loss of the treasure because records of the time were thorough, thanks in part to the king’s own keen interest in administration. This was in contrast with his flamboyant but feckless brother and predecessor Richard, an absentee ruler who had spent much of the country’s money on crusades. John at least took an interest in his English realm, and not just in restoring its finances, for he also devoted a lot of time to hearing cases and dispensing justice. Yet his reputation has always been sinister: he was after all the scion of a line said to be descended from the devil.

There has not been all that much use in fiction of the curious story of the King's great loss. One notable example is an excellent novel for young adults, King John's Treasure (1954), by R.C. Sherriff, most known for his haunting World War I play, Journey's End (1928). In his book, two schoolboys resolve to discover the lost hoard, and there is a brisk, breathless plot with a quite plausible solution to the mystery of the treasure, which even includes the romantic idea of a secret line of succession to the throne.

But I was also interested in the local stories of the treasure, the folklore. There was, I soon found, a quite wonderful array of these tales. This remote corner of the country, where the furthest extremities of Norfolk and Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire meet, this land of lonely marshes reclaimed from the sea, is prolific in yarns. I began to make a sort of catalogue of all the places where people said the treasure might be, or had even, it was claimed, been glimpsed – though never actually produced. And in particular I began to wonder what exactly that treasure was...

'The Fifth Moon', the story that came from these wanderings and wonderings, is due to be published in late March from Sarob Press in From Ancient Ravens, a shared volume of long stories with John Howard and Ron Weighell.

Mark Valentine

The Desperate Art - John Rosenberg

“I entered the morning room, which I had had darkly furnished with heavy, carved chairs, a dark, immense table whose polished top stretched deep and vast (a night sea), and far, dim in a corner, an old harpsichord with a most sad voice. The stone floor, which had no rug, made footsteps ring hollow and mournful. My footsteps now tolled for my coming in….”

When I was browsing in Books, The Journal of the National Book League, no. 294, June-August 1955, I noticed a brief advertisement for a book called The Desperate Art by John Rosenberg. It was described as a first novel in “a distinguished style of writing, unusual yet not eccentric”. I thought to myself that if you have to deny a style is eccentric, then it very probably is, or at least will seem so to some: and so I sent for a copy.

The book is set in 1810 and at the outset we hear the voice of an impoverished baronet, hard-pressed by his creditors, including an old rival. He hopes his son, auburn Ion, delicate, melancholy, will save the house with an advantageous marriage. Thus far, this seems a most conventional plot, and the book’s dustjacket does not shirk that: “John Rosenberg has taken what may appear to be an old story for his novel.” But, it goes on, still I think rather struggling to convey the book’s particular quality, he “has created a novel of outstanding freshness and beauty, transforming the characters, the situations and the conclusion by the originality of his writing.”

I am not sure I shall do much better at trying to convey the book’s highly individual, mannered, obsidian prose. The nearest I can get is to suggest it is a form of modernist Gothick, or that it is has the oblique, glancing verve of Ronald Firbank melded with the neo-Romantic vision of Mervyn Peake. The passage quoted above is one of the more conventionally phrased in the book: much else is quicksilver. It is a book of pale hands, flickering fans, tall candles and cold mirrors, winter sunlight, bare trees, a sickle moon, carriage-rides by night.

There is another sense in which the book is unusual, in that it is told by ghosts. The baronet tells us in the first sentence that he is recollecting the events of one hundred and forty five years ago, ie from the date of the book to the year 1810: and later he remembers keenly a song his wife would sing: “For no grave ever/In quiet lies:/The human heart/Not so easily dies.” There are other narrators in the book, which is told in alternating chapters, and they also are haunted, by thwarted desires, doomed love.

The book’s note on the author tells us of a young American, born in New York, “who has made his home in England since 1953”, first for a year as a schoolmaster in Yorkshire, then as an editor for a publisher. It says he “has been writing continuously since the age of fourteen” and this, his first book, took him five years to write.

John Rosenberg went on to write a handful of other books: A Company of Strangers (Hogarth, 1959); Mirror and Knife (Hogarth, 1961); The Double Darkness (Hodder & Stoughton, 1967); The Savages (Michael Joseph, 1971); and Dorothy Richardson: The Genius They Forgot (Duckworth, 1973). I do not think any of his other fiction is quite like his first book.

The book is embellished by the fine Gothick drawings of Felix Kelly, an exquisite counterpart to the curious and delicate dark prose. I would certainly place The Desperate Art in the niche of the bookshelf kept for other strange fantasies of the Regency, alongside Robert Nichols’ Under the Yew and Hugh Edwards’ All Night At Mr Stanyhurst’s. It is a book that seems almost to have vanished from view, and yet I think it could become greatly admired, even if only by a few.

Mark Valentine

The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui - Affleck Gray

I recently found at a flea market in a nearby village an absorbing account of a Scottish legend. The Big Grey Man of Ben Macdhui by Affleck Gray (Aberdeen: Impulse Books, 1970) collates accounts of strange experiences on the slopes or summit of the second highest mountain in Britain. These tend to resolve into three sorts of encounter: hearing unexplained footsteps; seeing a very tall figure; and feeling an overwhelming sense of dread.

Affleck Gray’s book is an important study of the matter. However, it is chiefly arranged thematically by the type of experience reported, and also includes similar material from further afield. It also, in aiming to be comprehensive, does not distinguish between the differing qualities of the accounts.

There is some evidence, as Gray shows, of earlier folk-lore about a figure on the mountain, known in Gaelic as Am Fear Liath Mòr, but the first recorded account of the specific type of experience was given in 1925 by Professor Norman Collie, a distinguished scientist and climber. He was recalling what had happened to him some 34 years earlier: and it is a feature of many of the accounts that they are only told many years later.

The chronology I have compiled below lists encounters and reports in date order and includes only those in or near the Cairngorms, chiefly on Ben Macdhui itself. Only first hand accounts from named individuals are included.

1891 Professor Norman Collie, alone on Ben Macdhui, experiences a “crunch, crunch” sound behind him, not his own footsteps, and is “seized with terror”.

1904 Hugh D Welsh, climber, hears at the summit of MacDhui unexplained “slurring footsteps” and has “an eerie sensation of apprehension”

1914 George Duncan, advocate and mountaineer, sees “a tall figure in a black robe” that he identifies as the Devil, in September of “about 1914”. He reports his sighting in a letter to The Scotsman in 1941

1923 Dr Ernest A Baker tells in The Highlands With Rope and Rucksack (London: H F & G Witherby, 1923) of an “eerie feeling” on Ben Macdhui

1923 Norman G. Forbes hears a mysterious clanking noise while climbing with two companions. He has just been telling them a ghost story, and the sound puts them on edge. Forbes investigates and disturbs a pair of deer. He notes that the Cairngorms “have an uncanny power of inducing a feeling of eeriness.”

1925 Collie tells his experience to the AGM of the Cairngorm Club (November) and it is reported in the local press. The Aberdeen Press and Journal subsequently (December) publishes responses, including from Forbes (above), some sceptical, others offering explanations or similar experiences.

1926 Hugh D Welsh recounts to the Press and Journal (January) experiences of ghostly music frequently heard while camping in the Cairngorms

1928 Joan Grant, later a writer on reincarnation, hears the pounding of hooves from an invisible but malign being, and experiences panic and terror. She reports this in her book Time Out of Mind (London: Arthur Barker, 1956)

1930 In her book The Secret of Spey (Edinburgh: R Grant & Son, 1930), Wendy Wood recounts that she heard a loud unnatural voice, and footsteps behind her, and succumbed to terror

1937 Donald Stewart, stalker, after listening with friends to a BBC radio broadcast about the Big Grey Man, which he discounts, hears unexplained footsteps in his lodge

1940 R Macdonald Robertson, folklorist, hears on Macdhui a “crunch, crunch”, “the footsteps of a heavy man”, as recounted in More Highland Folktales (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. 1964)

1942 Syd Scroggie, soldier and climber, sees a tall figure which left no footprints and “merged with the…blackness”, causing him unease and making him hasten from the scene

1943 Alexander Tewnion, mountaineer and naturalist, hears footsteps and sees “a strange shape”. He fires at it with his revolver. He recounts his experience in The Scotsman (June 1958).

1945 Peter Densham, a mountaineer and rescue worker, hears “a crunching noise” and is “overcome by a feeling of apprehension”

1948 Richard Frere, a climber, writes in Open Air, a magazine, about his sense of “a Prescence, utterly abstract but intensely real” and hears “an intensely high singing note”

The figure of the Big Grey Man has been linked, especially in studies of the paranormal, to similar unknown mountain humanoids elsewhere in the world, such as the Yeti. On the other hand, an explanation has been suggested relating to the natural phenomenon of the Brocken Spectre.

But this survey of the first hand accounts shows that most of the reports are not predominantly visual: it is the footsteps and strong feeling of trepidation that are most to the fore. The subtlety of the haunting and the effect on the protagonist, a strong sense of inexplicable dread, place the accounts in similar terrain to the literary ghost story.

Mark Valentine

The Two Early Novels of Phyllis Paul

Phyllis Paul (1903-1973) published eleven novels, two in 1933-34, and nine others between 1949 and 1967.  Her first novel was We Are Spoiled, published by Martin Secker of London in July 1933. It was followed ten months later in May 1934 by The Children Triumphant. Paul later felt her first two novels were of a different type than those she wrote afterwards, but they have many core similarities.

 

London: Martin Secker, 1933

We Are Spoiled is the story of the childhood and adulthood of several children brought up in Hammersing in slightly-rural England. The children include Christian Lauria, his two cousins Nancy and Louise Cloud, and neighbours Barbara Morrison and, most importantly, Jael Lingard. Jael is the central figure—an imaginative girl whose life is under the control of a Mr. Llewellyn (how he became guardian to Jael is never made clear), a distant and depraved figure who takes Jael to his life in Paris, where treats her quite openly as a cynical experiment. Though Llewellyn is a thorough rake, he is beyond sexual interest in Jael, yet he makes her take a vow of chastity. Another figure involved in the drama is Llewellyn’s son Hallam. Some years pass and Jael returns to Hammersing, now under the leash of Hallam. Old friendships, loyalties and rivalries are reignited, and the effects of growing up are shown to have taken a heavy toll on most of the children, leading in the end to madness in one case, and death in another. The underlying theme of the book is probably best expressed by Jael, who thinks: “was there any reason why life should not become quite unbearable? Considering that by the progress of its mental development humanity was enlarging its capacity for suffering, then why should not life become quite unbearable, not merely to the individual, but to the race? Why should not humanity at length utterly reject the curse of life and die away, another scrapped experiment in ‘evolution’? . . . But the mind of humanity showed signs of sickness. It was not the mind of a child at all, but a clever, self-conscious mind, tormented, and growing sicker every day” (pp. 238-239).

New York: William Morrow, 1934

To find such attitudes expressed in a first novel is unusual, but the book is especially worth reading not for such modern cynicism, nor for the characters (who are not always convincing), but for the unusually assured prose style and deft wit. The reader is pulled into the narrative by the very first sentence:

The Laurias came to Hammersing heath in the very bleakest of springs, and Mrs. Lauria, her urban spirit altogether failing at the sight of the place, went upstairs a few days after the removal with the suitable last words, “I am going to rest,” and lay down and died. (p. 7)

This odd but fresh style continues throughout the rest of the book. While there is nothing of the fantastic about the story, the manner of its telling and its moods are fairly gripping and enchant the reader. As the Times Literary Supplement noted, while “many effective chords are struck, it is not easy to discern a dominating harmony. There is music here, angelic or devilish, but hardly earthly” (6 July 1933).

 

London: Martin Secker, 1934

The Children Triumphant begins in December 1917 in the fictional hamlet of Rushmile in Kent. It tells the story of two girls, Edith Coventry and “Jemmy” [Jemima] Lacey. Edith’s father had been well-paid doing aircraft industry work for a period during the war, and the money allowed Edith to get some education.  Her friend Jemmy was not so fortunate, and both seem unlikely to marry owing to the shortage of men after the War.  Edith is soon further burdened by the death of her step-mother, after which she must raise three younger step-siblings by herself, as well as care for her father.  Edith never warms to the children, and believes “they were born to be stoned” (p. 57).  Jemmy is a curious character who seems to love Edith in a more than merely friendly way (though lesbianism is never stated), professing that she is uninterested in marrying and hopes to move away sometime with Edith.  Edith, on the other hand, grows into a cold and incommunicative woman.  She ends up surprising Jemma by marrying above her station.  Her husband, Arnold Race, is the older brother of Harriet with whom Edith had become slightly acquainted when attending school as a girl.  Jemma feels abandoned, but Edith is described (in phrases typical of Phyllis Paul) as looking “like a person in love with her own damnation” (p. 218), and it is noted that “the blaze of feeling she had had for him [her husband] at first had burnt itself out in a few weeks” (p. 221).  Eventually Arnold comes to understand Edith’s “startling disregard of other people’s feelings” (p. 252), and when, against Edith’s will yet with her consent, he brings home to raise the young orphaned son of his dead friend, the results turn tragic, as Edith feels trapped again in an impossible situation as she had been before.

An Ad from The Observer, 24 June 1934

Comparing The Children Triumphant to its impressive and self-assured predecessor, it seems a slight step downward in quality. The structure is halting and uncertain, particularly in the first half of the book, while in the second half both the writing and the narrative flow are much more carefully worked out.  One wonders, then, if The Children Triumphant, might actually have been the first novel Paul wrote, even though it was published second, for some of its flaws seem typical of an author finding their way in the process of composing a novel. Whether this is true we will likely never know. Still, the book was well-received on publication, with the Times Literary Supplement noting that “Miss Paul writes with an icicle, in a fine and distinguished way that is quite her own, concerned with a misfit in life . . . the effect is sombre, impressive, moving” (31 May 1934); and Graham Greene in the Spectator noted that Paul has “a serious claim to be judged as an artist” (14 June 1934).  It would be fifteen years before Paul published her next novel. 

NB: This text reworks a “Late Review” of We Are Spoiled that originally appeared in Wormwood no. 22 (May 2014).  The review of The Children Triumphant has not been previously published.

Mars Movies, and Sherlock Holmes and the Gnostic Gospels

Wormwood and Faunus contributor Thos. Kent Miller has a few recent books that deserve some notice.

First is Mars in the Movies: A History, published by McFarland as an oversize trade paperback in November.  Basically it's a personal account of something around one hundred films that have something to do with Mars.  This ranges chronologically from A Trip to Mars (1910), through The Martian (2015), though the entries in the book are for the most part not arranged chronologically.  It covers high quality entries such as Quatermass and the Pit (1967), and terrible ones such as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964).  Some cartoons are covered, including the first (and later) appearances of Marvin the Martian in Bugs Bunny's Haredevil Hare (1948). I've enjoyed reading up on films that I've seen, as well as learning of new titles to look out for (and ones I should probably avoid).  Ordering information here.

Also, the three volumes of Miller's trilogy about Sherlock Holmes and his interest in the Gnostic Gospels have been combined into one volume titled Sherlock Holmes in the Fullness of Time.  Read more about it here.

 

'Taliessin Reborn' - Anne Ridler

‘Taliessin Reborn’ is a poem in three sections by Anne Ridler, first published in Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1942) and later in her collection The Nine Bright Shiners (1943). It was influenced by the first of two long Arthurian narrative poems of Charles Williams, Taliessin Through Logres (1938), continued in The Region of the Summer Stars (1944), which she may well have seen in manuscript.

In my late teens and early twenties I searched for books about the mystical elements in the Arthurian stories, and these two titles alone were enough to beguile my imagination. They suggested journeys in strange domains of the spirit.

Anne Ridler describes her poem as “a supplement” to the Charles Williams cycle, and in its phrasings and its modernist response to myth, it also echoes the work of T S Eliot, particularly in ‘The Waste Land’. Written in war-time, when the fate of Britain was still in the balance, it is in one sense a consolation for the times and a call to the continuing resonance of ancient archetypes. But it is not limited to its particular historic moment.

The first section of her poem depicts a country that has sometimes been glimpsed by those on the coast, “Moving from the horizon”, “sea-coming”, over the waves, heading for the shore. But it can never be fully seen: "...in the bright and blinding mist of its approaching/It disappeared from sight.”

In the second section we learn that the country “had long been visible” inland too, for those who could see, sometimes from towers, sometimes from hill-tops: “Some thought it a mirage and looked no more”. Others, however, recognised it for what it was: “the real map of England”, a spiritual and symbolic chart of which the Arthurian myths are only a dim remembrance (“jumble for poets, play for children, a spring of endless ink for scholars, and still lacked full meaning”).

The third and final part brings the poem to the then present day: “So it was time that we saw it again,/And remembered that our footsteps echo in another world.” That need had been met, the poem suggests, by certain poems (those of Williams are meant but not named), “the mesh that drew the loud myth so close”. They cannot alone in themselves bring the great domain into being: “If any art could change us, or the strangeness of a myth/We should have altered long ago.” But because of them the presence of the kingdom is stronger among us, an “Invisible Knight”, a “holy ghost” even during a time of “seemingly wasteful and unforgivable pain.” And the poem concludes with a note of defiance and affirmation.

This symbol and idea is also seen in Mary Butts’ vision of the Grail as a descent upon a tract of land, felt, known, if not fully seen, and in the glimpses of paradise in Arthur Machen’s stories such as ‘The Holy Things’, ‘A Fragment of Life’, ‘Opening the Door’ and ‘N’, as well as in the Grail novels The Secret Glory and The Great Return.

And, to make now a great descent, as Machen once remarked, the idea has also been haunting my own recent stories.

Not so long ago, I contributed a long story, not quite a novella, to Romances of the White Day (Sarob, 2015), alongside fine stories by John Howard and Ron Weighell. ‘Except Seven’, my piece, begins with a phrase from Anne Ridler’s poem: ‘Our footsteps echo in another world’, and it might be said the poem haunts the whole story. The work was inspired by a journey through certain quiet roads of the English-Welsh borderland, which led to an old stone church sheltering inside it a Roman altar to an otherwise unknown god.

There was another element that went into it, allusively, which was the idea of a ‘lineage of the Grail-Keepers’. I did not know then, but have since found, that in the ancient Welsh Triads, so wonderfully researched and translated by Rachel Bromwich, there is one that speaks of a ‘lineage of the saints’ in Britain, the first of whom is Joseph of Arimathea – a very early appearance of this tradition. But the particular focus of the story is that mysterious, never to be unravelled, poem by Taliessin, ‘The Spoils of Annwn’, and so the tale makes its own dim, shaded way alongside the ideas in ‘Taliessin Reborn’.

In the following year, I contributed another long story to a second shared volume with John and Ron, Pagan Triptych (Sarob, 2016). This, too, is haunted by Anne Ridler’s poem. ‘The Fig Garden’ includes a character who wants to catalogue and conserve places where, again as Machen put it, ‘the veil is thin’ between the worlds. “The real map of England would be worth reading, don’t you think?” suggests Anthony Scamander. The first five words are a phrase from the poem.

The main burden of the story, though, is to indicate the utter otherness of any world impinging upon our own. Scamander says: “We know that there are other realities and that sometimes they overlap with where we are here. We don’t know and can’t understand why they do this. But one thing seems fairly clear. Potentially every single thing we do here has a resonance somewhere else, in ways we simply cannot grasp. And it isn’t necessarily anything to do with whatever is considered virtuous here, or the reverse. We just don’t know the rules. Awful really, isn’t it?”

There is a subtly strange passage in the journals of Mary Butts, when she was living at Sennen, in the far west of Cornwall. She talks about Sancreed, a village not far from her, as a place prepared for the presence of the Grail. She senses that something powerful is struggling to be born there. This jolted me when I read it, because I still carried the remembrance of when I walked there one hot day in my twenties, and felt, and could not forget, a definite sense of otherness. And another mystical author, Ithell Colquhoun,in her The Living Stones of Land’s End, had also noticed this. “It is difficult to describe the subdued weirdness of Brane,” (a hamlet next to Sancreed) she says, and devotes several pages to its strangeness.

We should not over-rarefy the place. It is still fully in our usual world. Indeed, I was amused and delighted to find, when I consulted a book about its local history, that it was chiefly known for its inhabitants' keen interest in pigs, and in cricket: both very excellent things. Even so, to take only one instance, its church has a carved rood screen of distinctly interesting mythic figures. There is to come a story, not in the series of longer pieces but standing at an angle to them, in which I try to explore some element of the mysteries of Sancreed, and these figures make their appearance.

There is also to be, if all goes well, a third longer story, not yet ready to be announced. This one does not consciously contain a quotation from Anne Ridler’s poem, nor is it quite so clearly linked to her themes there. But they still do haunt the writing, and throughout the tale, though they are never directly cited, there are echoes of the last words of her beautiful and mysterious poem: “nothing in the end is lost.”

Mark Valentine

Jessie Douglas Kerruish

Jessie Douglas Kerruish (1884-1949) is best known for her splendid occult detective and werewolf yarn The Undying Monster (1922). She had earlier won a prize leading to publication of her first major book, Miss Haroun-Al-Raschid (1917) and was the author of other fantasy-inflected fiction.

There does not seem to be very much biographical information about her, but some time ago I found a couple of interesting references from an online version of the 1916 issue of a journal devoted to Manx history. This was ‘Mannin, a Journal of Matters Past and Present relating to Mann (sic). Published by Yn Cheshaght Gailckagh, the Manx Language Society.Editor: Miss Sophia Morrison. Printer: L. G. Meyer, Douglas.’ The two notes give some insight into the Manx origins of her family, and the inspiration behind her fiction.

The first was an editorial note:

“Miss Jessie Douglas Kerruish (see correspondence p. 433) writes an interesting little note on her own life in The Weekly Tale-Teller (January 8th). Miss Kerruish is the daughter of Captain Kerruish; her family, she says, have been travellers and sea-farers. She herself was born at Seaton Carew in Durham, and was brought up ‘on the smuggler and slaver tales, wrecks and legends of witches, warlocks, ghosts, submerged forests and sea-swallowed lands that colour the mental atmosphere of the wild North Coast.’ She served her apprenticeship to literature by writing for Stead’s Books for the Bairns and The Weekly Tale-Teller introduced her to a grown up audience.”

The correspondence from her was as follows:

“MANNIN has quite opened a new world to me, for I had no idea of how the Manx abroad kept so closely in touch through your Society, or how strenuously the Society is preserving everything connected with Mann that it can save. As to the paper itself, it is admirable, both as to its form and contents. We are very much interested in the paper by Mr. Kerruish, of Cleveland, Ohio, some of our people emigrated to America about that time (1827) and later.

You ask to what branches of the Kerruishes I belong. To one of the too numerous to mention, I fear! My father died when I was a girl, and all that I recollect of his family information was that he came from Lonan, and that his grandfather protected John Wesley from a hostile mob and entertained him during his stay on the Island. Some one ought to write about John Wesley and the Island — and might link it up with smuggling.

Your remarks about smuggling amused me very much; down here they used to be great runners — see Kipling. They were rather more open about it than at most places ; and an anecdote is cherished to the effect that the clerk waited on the parson one Sunday with the announcement, ‘There won’t be no service on Sunday, sir, there’s no room for the people, the church is full of brandy and the pulpit full of tea.’”

The reference to "down here" is to Sussex, where she had made her home, and where The Undying Monster is set. Jessie Douglas Kerruish died at Hove in 1949. As the above brief letter shows, she seems to have had a spirited and vivid character, reflected in her exuberant books.

Image: Furrowed Middlebrow blog.

Epiphany at Seacliff - Brian Lavelle

“A singular way to ensure you have the Scottish coastline to yourself is to venture there on a wet and windswept weekday at ‘just the worst time of the year’; more so if you visit a part of the shore of which few are aware…”

A wonderfully evocative account of a wintry visit to a remote, ruin-haunted shore, by Edinburgh sound and place explorer Brian Lavelle, with reflections on Epiphany and the lore of the magi, and an encounter made chillier still by memories of “'Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad'”.

Image: © Brian Lavelle 2017