Free Blood on the Wood by Gillian Linscott Page A

me pleadingly, as if I were deliberately making things more difficult for him.
    â€˜You can’t believe the … the beastliness out there. Oh look, do you mind if we walk? I honestly find it hard to think about it, let alone talk.’
    His problems were the last thing I wanted, but there was no escaping. We turned and walked along the track and the thing came out disjointedly, sometimes in a torrent, sometimes with long gaps between the words.
    â€˜I’d been wandering around the Berkshire Downs and bits of Wiltshire, collecting folk-songs. There’s a treasury of them. It’s the one hope for British music, tapping into this tradition that’s been neglected for centuries and there’s so little time left. Most of it’s just hanging on in the heads of old men and women who won’t be here in a year or two…’
    â€˜Yes, I’ve heard about it. Can we come back to Daisy Smith?’
    â€˜It’s about Daisy Smith. I’m trying to explain how this started. I’d picked up a rumour that there was a singing pub just over the Wiltshire border on the Marlborough Downs. So I decided to drop everything and get over there before some other collector got wind of it. They can be a competitive lot, folk-song collectors. Would you believe Percy Grainger actually hid under an old woman’s bed to get a tune she was singing to her granddaughter? She wouldn’t…’
    â€˜Can we keep to your story?’
    â€˜Look, it is the story. I’m just trying to make you understand. Anyway, I found the pub, rough place in a village of about ten houses, and it was a goldmine. Two completely uncollected songs and three variants of known songs just in the first evening. So there I was, buying beer and tobacco as fast as I could get the money out of my pocket to keep them singing. There was one man in particular, rough farming type in his thirties, leading the singing. That was something in itself. Usually it’ll be some old gaffer in his seventies or eighties. Luke Fardel, the man’s name was. Trouble was, he sank so much of my beer he got fighting drunk and the landlord slung him out. I was sure there were more songs in him if only I could get at them, so I stayed the night in the pub. Next evening, there he was again but by now he’s done some thinking and realises his songs may be worth money. He says he’s got his old dad bedridden back home with a head full of songs – forgotten everything else but remembered the songs. So he suggested I should come home with him, which I did.’
    Daniel took a deep breath that turned into a long sigh.
    â€˜And that’s how I met Daisy. Tell me, have you ever seen poverty?’
    â€˜Yes, of course I have.’
    â€˜I don’t mean just threadbare clothes and not much food on the table. I mean real, foul-smelling, pig-like poverty.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Well, I hadn’t. Oh, I thought I knew about it. I’d read the books and the newspaper articles, heard the speeches, even made the speeches sometimes. But this was the first time it had really hit me. This … this hovel of a place with the thatch falling off, a midden up against the wall, flies everywhere and the smell … and so many children, all ages, dressed in rags with their backsides hanging out and a scrawny woman with her dress open and a baby sucking at … oh God, I shouldn’t be saying this to you.’
    â€˜Don’t worry, I know.’
    â€˜It was like a foreign country. And in the middle of it all, this toothless yellow-skinned old man on a bed, the father I was supposed to be getting the folk-songs from, only he couldn’t remember them and Fardel, his son, got impatient with the old man and … and, actually hit him in the face, hit his own father to try and make him remember. Now, I’m as keen on collecting as the next man but I couldn’t have this so I told the brute to stop.