3
Porridge is my Aunt Beck’s answer to everything. The morning after my initiation proved to be such a complete failure, she gave me porridge with cream and honey – an unheard-of luxury in our little stone house – and I was almost too upset to enjoy it. I sat shivering and my teeth chattered, as much with misery as with cold, and pushed the stuff about with my spoon, until Aunt Beck wrapped me in a big fluffy plaid and told me sharply that it was not the end of the world.
“Or not yet,” she added. “And your pigtail is almost in the honey.”
This made me sit up a little. Yesterday I had washed my hair in cold spring water full of herbs – washed all over in it as well – and it was not an experience I wanted to repeat. I had gone without food too all day before that dreadful washing, with the result that I felt damp and chilly all over, and tender as a snail’s horns, when the time came for me to go down into the Place. And I hadn’t got any drier or warmer as the night went on.
The Place, you see, is like a deep trench in the ground lined with slabs of stone with more stone slabs atop of it covered with turf. You slide down a leafy ramp to get into it and Aunt Beck pulls another stone slab across the entrance to shut you in. Then you sit there in nothing but a linen petticoat waiting for something to happen – or, failing that, for morning. There is nothing to smell but stone and damp and distant turf, nothing to feel but cold – particularly underneath you as you sit – and nothing to see but darkness.
You are supposed to have visions, or at least to be visited by your guardian animal. All the women of my family have gone down into the Place when they were twelve years old and the moon was right, and most of them seem to have had the most interesting time. My mother saw a line of princes walking slowly past her, all silvery and pale and crowned with gold circlets. I remember her telling me before she died. Aunt Beck seems to have seen a whole menagerie of animals – all the lithe kind like snakes, lizards, greyhounds and running deer, which strikes me as typical – and, in addition, she says, all the charms and lore she had ever learned fell into place in her head, into a marvellous, sensible pattern. She has been a tremendously powerful magic-maker ever since.
Nothing like that happened to me. Nothing happened at all.
No, I tell a lie. I messed it up. And I didn’t dare tell Aunt Beck. I sat there and I sat there with my arms wrapped around my knees, trying to keep warm and trying not to notice the numb cold seeping up from the hard corners of my bones that I was sitting on, and trying above all not to be scared silly about what was going to happen. The worst and most frightening thing was being shut in underground. I didn’t dare move because I was sure I would find that the side had moved inwards and the stone roof had moved down. I just sat, shivering. A lot of the time I had my eyes squeezed shut, but some of the time I forced myself to open my eyes. I was afraid that the visions would come and I wouldn’t see them because my eyes were shut.
And you know how your eyes play tricks in the dark? After a long, long time, probably at least one eternity, I thought that there was a light coming into the Place from somewhere. And I thought, Bless my soul, it’s morning! Aunt Beck must have overslept and forgotten to come and let me out at dawn! This was because I seemed to have sat there for such hours that I was positive it must be nearly lunchtime by then. So I scrambled myself around in the faint light, scraping one elbow and bumping both knees, until I was facing the ramp. The faint light did, honestly, seem to be coming in round the edges of the stone slab Aunt Beck had heaved across at the top.
That was enough to put me into a true panic. I raced up that leafy slope on my hands and knees and tried to draw the slab aside. When it wouldn’t budge, I screamed at it to open and let me out! At once! And I heaved at it like a mad thing.
Rather to my surprise, it slid across quite easily then and I shot out of the Place like a rabbit. There I reared up on my knees more astonished than ever. It was bright moonlight. The full moon was riding high and small and almost golden, casting frosty whiteness on every clump of heather and every rock and making a silver cube of our small house just down the hill. I could see the mountains for miles in one direction and in the other the silver-dark line of the sea. It was so moon-quiet that I could actually hear the sea. It was making that small secret sound you hear inside a seashell. And it was as cold out there as if the whiteness on the heather was really the frost it looked like.
I gave a great shudder of cold and shame as I looked up at the moon again. From the height of it I could see it was the middle of the night still. I had only been inside the Place for three hours at the most. And I couldn’t possibly have seen the moon from inside. It was in the wrong part of the sky.
At this it came to me that the pale light I’d seen in there had really been the start of a vision. I had made an awful mistake and interrupted it. The idea so frightened me that I plunged back down inside and seized the stone slab and heaved mightily and pulled it across the opening anyhow, before I slid right back down to the stone floor and crouched there desperately.
“Oh, please come back!” I said to the vision. “I’ll be good. I won’t move an inch now.”
But nothing else happened. It seemed quite dark in the Place and much warmer now, out of the wind, but though I crouched there for hours with my eyes wide open I never saw another thing.
In the dawn, when I heard Aunt Beck drawing back the slab, I gave a great start of terror, because I was sure she would notice that the stone had been moved. But it was still half dark and I suppose it was the last thing she expected. Anyway, she did not seem to see anything unusual. Besides, she says I was fast asleep. She had to slide down beside me and shake my shoulder. But I heard her do that. I feel so deceitful. And such a failure.
“Well, Aileen,” she said as she helped me
