Wylding Hall (2 page)

Chapter 2

Lesley

I rode down there with Julian. He had a rickety Morris Minor: there was barely room for me once he’d got his guitar and other gear into it. Everyone else went down in the van.

I’d heard Julian sing before, and of course I had the first Windhollow album. But we’d never properly met. Word on the street was, Julian Blake was the most beautiful guy anyone had ever set eyes on. Typically, I was going to be contrarian: I was determined to be unimpressed.

The truth is, I was very, very shy. I was only seventeen, remember. My mum and stepdad were American. They both died when I was fifteen, in a car accident. My biological father was from Yorkshire; he’d been married before he met my mother and already had a family. I was born here in London when he and my mum were still together, so I had dual citizenship. We used to come over for summer vacations. I got to be close with my older sister, so after the accident I came here to live with her in Rotherhithe.

I was a bad student, but I was a good singer. My dad was brilliant—he used to sing along with whatever was on the radio, but he also knew all these old English folk songs. I learned by listening to him, harmonizing. I just memorized whatever I could.

It was tough, coming to live here with my sister. People thought I was stuck-up because I was American. It was hard to make friends—I got pushed around a few times, but when I’d take a swing at them, I’d be the one got into trouble.

Eventually, I just stopped going to school, and I guess because of the whole American thing, no one followed up on me. Plus, it was the early nineteen seventies—there were kids squatting everywhere in London. I went out to Eel Pie Island and joined the commune there for a while. That’s when I started performing.

Julian was only a year older than me—fourteen months, to be exact—and he was cripplingly, almost pathologically shy. Much worse than I was.

Which of course I didn’t realize when I drove down with him to Wylding Hall. I thought
he
was stuck-up! He was from Hampstead. I was this blond hippie from Connecticut, even though I’d been in London for a year. I looked older than seventeen, so at first he thought I was putting him off for being younger than me.

I didn’t know that till Will told me. The two of them had grown up together. Will was almost like Julian’s interpreter—sometimes Julian was so shy, he’d just stand there right next to you and stare straight up into the sky for a quarter of an hour without saying a word. “Cloud Prince”: I wrote that about Julian. The boy with the sky in his eyes.

Jon

It’s true. When he was young, Julian was almost unearthly; he was so handsome, it was difficult for me at first to keep my eyes from him. Spooky beautiful. People thought he was gay, but he wasn’t. I
was the one who was gay, though I only came out after that summer at Wylding Hall.

Believe me, I would have known if I’d had a snowflake’s chance in hell with Julian, and there was just no way. I know, darling—you’re looking at me now thinking, No shit, Sherlock! But you wouldn’t have said that back then. I was a bit of a looker myself in those days.

Oh, right, you’ve seen the documentaries and all that on YouTube. Yes, I
was
wasted back there behind the drum kit. But kinda cute, right?

Julian was beautiful: those high cheekbones and all that dark hair flopping around his face. His skin was so pale you wanted to write on it like paper. And he had those amazing hands, big, big hands with long, long fingers. I used to watch him play guitar and just be hypnotized. He’d open his mouth and sing “Lost Tuesdays” or “Windhover Morn,” and I’d just be a puddle—really! Me! The drummer! I used to watch him and just dream—
pray
—not that he’d kiss me, but that he’d write a song about me.

But you know, it was like he could barely stand to be touched—he’d almost flinch if you came too close to him. Not just me—I was used to guys not wanting to be too close to other blokes—but everyone. I’m sure that’s what happened with Arianna; she thought they were in a relationship, and here he could barely stand to touch her. That’s why it was so strange about the girl.

If she had a name, I never knew it. She was the only girl—the only person—I ever saw Julian with, physically. Not that I was perving on them, that’s not what I mean; just that she was the only human creature I ever saw him willingly touch, or kiss. If in fact that’s what she was.

Ashton

It was me, Will, and Jonno in the van. We arrived around noon. I was driving—I was the only one had a license, besides Julian. What a bunch of fucking slackers. You take the A-31 to Farnham, then it’s pretty much nothing but winding lanes and little villages. Used to be, anyway. Heart of Hampshire,
Wind of the Willows
landscapes. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Probably all developed and paved over now; I’ve never had the heart to go back.

No? Well, that’s a mercy. But I still won’t be back.

I can still remember the first glimpse I had of Wylding Hall. There was no signpost, only a great boulder with the name carved on it—must have been five hundred years old. Absolutely ancient. The road between the hedgerows was so narrow that the branches poked in the windows on both sides, like they wanted to grab us. One scratched my cheek so badly it left a scar—see there? Fucking oak tree did that! I was bleeding all over the windscreen. It got infected, too.

So, we drove and drove, and drove and drove and drove, and finally the hedgerows dropped back so we could see where the woods had been cleared a bit, and you could see into the distance. Pastures, ancient field systems marked by stone walls—a thousand years old some of them, maybe older. There was a prehistoric barrow there as well, though we didn’t know that yet. I’m not superstitious, but Will is. He’s the one spends all his time at Cecil Sharp House, digging through the archives for old murder ballads—“The Hangman’s Kiss Upon My Cold Eyes”: he found that one. If he’d known there was a barrow a stone’s pitch from where we’d be sleeping, he would have stayed in Crouch End. What a fucking nutter. He’s the one started all those rumors.

Look, I love Will—I’ll kill anyone raises an eyebrow at him. But he’s taken every pill and smoked every spliff and drunk every pint ever laid in front of him. He’s done none of us any favors with his crazy theories. Same with Jonno. You can print that just as I spoke it.

Then what do
I
think happened? I don’t have a fucking clue, but I’m not afraid to say I don’t understand everything there is to know in this world.

She was the most beautiful young girl I’ve ever seen. I’ll say that, too. I’ve been married five times, and every one of them was a beautiful woman. But there was no one you ever saw looked like her. Looking at her made you want to claw your heart out, it ached so much. We all thought so, except for Les. I think she wanted to tear out the girl’s heart instead.

Tom

Wylding Hall was remote, but that was part of its charm. For me, anyway—I wanted them as far from London as possible. Even now, you can’t get a mobile signal out there. I don’t know how the new owners manage. Maybe they like it that way.

No distractions—that’s what I wanted for the band. They needed to recover from Arianna’s death. They were all traumatized to some degree, and Jon had just lost his mother to cancer. Just kids—they were all just kids, remember, especially Les. She’d been orphaned a few years earlier: lived with her alcoholic sister and her kids in some council flat in the East End before taking off to sleep rough in the streets. She’s a tough old soul, Lesley. Even then, as a girl, you could see it. She was tough as a nut.

Anyway, that was my cunning plan: to spirit them all away to remotest Hampshire, have them live together in a sort of musical commune and see what happens. I mean, people do that, right? Young people, and we were all young, it seems like the most wonderful thing in the world: off on your own, remaking the world, if you will. Sort of a utopian ideal. Hey, it was the seventies.

And it did bear fruit in that album, even if it took years for people to catch on. Progressive folk music was having its day in the sun, and Windhollow’s first album fit that model. But
Wylding Hall
changed the game for that kind of music, and everything that came after as well. I’m very proud of it, and I know the others are, too. Brilliant work—not a duff song in there.

Not that Windhollow’s first album was shabby. A few twee songs, like “Miss Marnie I Miss You” and “Another Fool in the Dark”—they hadn’t gotten their stride, and Will was still going for those fiddle-dee-dee arrangements; I hadn’t pounded that out of him yet.

And the band’s name, of course, I thought that was hopelessly twee. Windhollow Faire. Turns out that’s where Ashton pulled his first girl—someplace in Oxfordshire. I’ve always wondered if she ever made the connection. Whoever she was.

But that second album—it was all a sort of amazing chemistry. Alchemy, Julian called it. He was into all that kind of thing—magick with a
K
, astrology, god knows what else. Palmistry, reading the bumps on your head. Casting spells. He wanted the album itself to be a kind of spell. An enchantment. You’d listen to it and without knowing it, you’d be changed. “Ensorcelled.” That’s his word, not mine! Back then, Julian believed in that kind of thing.

But you know, given the influence and power that album’s had over the years, I can almost believe it, especially when you consider the shit storm of bad luck when it was first released.

Chapter 3

Will

The house was a glorious wreck. Like some drunken grande dame who’s lost everything except the clothes and jewels she’s wearing and refuses to leave the after-party. I’ve known a few of those girls.

It wasn’t immense. It wasn’t Hogwarts or Manderley or Downton Abbey. But it was big and sprawling, and it was ancient. The oldest parts were pre-Norman—by “parts,” I mean a few ruined brick walls out by the garden. Julian said there’d been an ancient Bronze Age settlement on the grounds, and he would know—that was Julian’s thing: arcane knowledge. A lot of it was total bollocks, crystal pendulums and incense and tarot cards, all that crap he was into back then.

Ashton gives me such a goddamned hard time—he thinks I’m superstitious. And okay, yes, I’ll touch wood, and I won’t name the Scottish play in a theater. But mostly I’m just respectful of old ways. I believe things for a reason, and in the old days they
did
things for a reason. And if you don’t understand why—well, you might end up opening a few doors better left closed. That’s all.

Julian never met a door he didn’t try to open. He was quite knowledgeable about prehistory—studied at Cambridge for two terms. A very bright lad; you can understand why everyone makes such a fuss about his surname. I don’t know if he’d researched Wylding Hall and that part of Hampshire before we arrived, or if he found some old book in the library, or what.

But he was the one knew its history. From the moment we arrived, he seemed to know his way around the house. “This is the Tudor Wing, this part’s Norman, this was added after the Civil War, this is the crap Victorian addition.” He just swanned in and began showing us around like he’d grown up there.

It was very odd, I have to say. I even asked him, have you been here before? He just shook his head and said, “No.” He could just tell, he said.

That’s why it’s so strange that he didn’t know about the barrow—the superstitions and whatnot. I don’t know how he found it—if it was on the ordnance survey or he simply came upon it during one of his jaunts in the wood. The rest of us never knew it existed—we scarcely left the house some days, practicing. But Julian was always wandering off in the middle of the night or before the rest of us woke. He was always an early riser; when we were boys he’d be up before dawn.

“The best part of the day,” he’d say. “Before it’s had a chance to get broken.” But everything gets broken eventually.

Tom

The oldest extant parts of the house were Tudor. An entire small Elizabethan-era manor tucked off to the back, surrounded by yew trees. Very lovely but dark—the trees were hundreds and hundreds of years old and overshadowed everything. A thousand years, maybe. Do trees live to be that old? You reached that part of the house by a narrow passage, very dim, with oak paneling. There was a long, narrow hall with a minstrel’s gallery, stone flags on the floor. On the upper floors, there were any number of rooms. I couldn’t tell you how many, because I only had a very cursory look when the estate agent showed me around. But what I saw was marvelous. Lovely carved paneling, small leaded windows. Beautiful National Heritage stuff. But very dark—not a lot of windows, and most of them deeply set into the walls.

Nobody slept in the oldest part of the house, though Les says she thinks that’s where Julian and the girl went that first night, before going to his room. And Les was kind of stalking them, so she’d know. I suspect they wanted privacy, off on their own where no one could hear them. Julian—so well-mannered, quite gallant. Old-fashioned. I’m sure he thought he was doing the others a favor, quietly disappearing into the shadows with his lady-love. But it had the opposite effect, as such things do, especially when you’re young and living in close quarters. It made everyone suspicious. A real daisy chain: everyone in love with the wrong person! The only ones who got what they wanted were Julian and the girl. I can’t think of a single commune from those days that survived. All those utopias undone by sexual rivalry, and who didn’t do the washing up!

So no, everyone pretty much stayed in the main part of Wylding Hall, which was more like a farmhouse and quite lovely. Slate floors, a high-ceilinged, whitewashed central hall with the original oak beams and fireplace, windows that looked out across the overgrown lawns to the Downs and woods beyond. That became the rehearsal room. They’d all meet there whenever they woke and stay there all night, sometimes, playing. Electricity had been brought in after the war. It hadn’t been updated and was a bit dicey, but it did for the amps and guitars. Down the hall was an enormous old kitchen with an ancient gas cooker, a long trestle table, mismatched chairs. Gas refrigerator that wobbled whenever you opened it. I’d checked everything out before I rented it to make sure it worked. Which it did, barely.

There was a toilet room and a bath downstairs, and upstairs a number of bedrooms—seven, I think, in that wing. The furnishings were rather sparse, but everyone had a bed. Some of the rooms had a desk; some had a wardrobe or chest of drawers. One had a great, huge chair that was almost a throne—Jonno took that one. Julian’s room had a proper desk looking out a window, with a beautiful view of the Downs to the west.

That’s where he wrote “Windhover Morn”—you can see the photograph on the gatefold sleeve of his desk, with his notebook and that mess of music sheets and pens and pencils and his guitar on the bed. Such a beautiful view that was.

Ashton

My favorite part of the house was definitely the rehearsal room. That’s where everything came down. We’d wander in by ones and twos; everyone was usually up before noon. Then we’d jam or listen to whatever song Les or Julian had been working on. Some days, we’d get so caught up in playing that we’d forget to eat. Didn’t forget to drink, especially Will. We had all our equipment set up in there: little PA system and all our guitars. Will’s mandolin and sitar and god knows what. He even taught himself to play the viole de gambols, a true sign of a man with too much time on his hands. Jonno’s drum kit. There was a beat-up old upright piano pushed into a corner. First thing we did was drag that out into the room. Julian used to play it: “Greensleeves” and John Dowland, songs that weren’t composed for piano, but Julian played beautifully.

And you know, that piano was tuned perfectly. From the very beginning, I thought that was weird. Had someone come in to tune it? That would have been extremely odd, considering that absolutely nothing else had been done to the house to keep it up.

There were other weird things, too. Like the house always smelled of woodsmoke—fresh woodsmoke, like someone had a fire going in it somewhere. We’d been warned against doing that, as the chimneys hadn’t been cleaned in decades. At any rate, it was summer and far too warm for a fire. We’d open windows, burn joss sticks—no matter what we did, it still smelled of woodsmoke. The rehearsal room less so than the rest of the house.

And there was the Bird Room: this little corner room in the back of the house, near the old wing. Not much bigger than a closet, with an eyebrow window high up, facing west. I was looking for a loo early one morning, just a few days after we arrived. Will always took forever in the loo, and I got tired of waiting. I think that’s where he taught himself to play the fucking viole.

None of us had really explored the place yet, so I wandered down this back corridor in my stocking feet, trying doors to see if I could find a toilet. The knobs were hard to turn, and a few were locked, so I never did see what was inside. But most opened onto empty rooms, or rooms filled with old furniture mashed up against the walls, or just piled on top of each other. Carven tables, chairs, wardrobes, settles—it was like
Antiques Roadshow
gone mad. Finally, I reached the end of the hall, and there was just one door left that I hadn’t tried.

It opened right up. I barely touched the knob, but it turned like it was greased. I stepped in and immediately covered my mouth with my sleeve. The air smelled bad—truly foul. Not like a dead mouse or rat, not really like anything dead at all. Not like a clogged drain, either. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever encountered. It smelled
thick
, like I was breathing in some kind of vapor: marsh gas or something like that, though I’ve spent time in the Fens and I’ve never smelled something like that, not even close.

For a moment I thought I’d be sick, but I fought it off. I was wearing a bandanna—I had long hair then—so I covered my face with that. The room wasn’t empty, but I couldn’t clearly see what was there, just dark things sort of heaped on the floor. Rolled-up carpets, I thought—there were old oriental carpets everywhere. There was only a single small window high up in the far wall, all covered with dust and cobwebs, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust.

It wasn’t rolled-up carpets on the floor. It was birds, hundreds of birds, maybe thousands. I yelped and jumped backwards and bashed myself against the door. But the birds didn’t move.

They were all dead. Little birds, wrens or sparrows—I didn’t know from birds. These were tiny, small enough to fit in your hand, and brown, with twisted tiny black claws, all piled atop each other like they’d been shoveled there. Some of them—a lot of them—were missing their beaks.

Have you ever seen a bird without its beak? Horrible, just tiny dead eyes and a hole in its face.

I whirled around to get into back into the hall and something stabbed my foot—I thought I’d stepped on a nail, it hurt like hell but I didn’t stop, slammed the door behind me and hobbled fast as I could to the main hall. Will had finally gotten out of the loo by then, so I went inside and locked the door. Last thing I wanted was for Will to see how worked up I was. I never told him or anyone else.

My foot was bleeding hard, but when I pulled off my sock, it wasn’t a nail stuck there but a bird’s beak, black and no bigger than a thorn. It must’ve taken me five minutes to work it out of my foot. How the hell it could have gotten in so deep, I have no idea—it slid right through my sock. I stanched the cut best I could, tore up a wash towel and washed it, and still it bled. I still have a scar there. See?

Lesley

My room was next to Julian’s. It was a lovely room. I had a beautiful four-poster bed, and Tom had bought some very nice bed linens for me at Portabello Road: beautiful old French linen sheets and a pillowcase. There was also a big wardrobe and a
very
large mirror. Because I was the girl, I suppose.

I loved it—it was by far the best room I’d ever lived in. Still is, probably. I’d sit in that big bed and write songs all day long. When we weren’t playing together, I mean. I was reading a lot of poetry—John Clare, Rimbaud, and Verlaine. Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. There weren’t a lot of women songwriters then.

I was determined to change that.

The boys were down the hall: Will and Ashton and Jonno—Jonno, I remember, had the most ridiculous throne in his bedroom; he’d just lounge in it and listen to the same King Crimson record over and over again on his stereo. For, like,
three hours
at a stretch. Then he’d come down and grab something to eat, and we’d all play together in the big room.

Jon

It’s true. I think I was stoned twenty out of twenty four hours back then. Me and Will. Ashton was more of a boozer; him and Les would go off to the pub some days. They were the only ones got to know the locals.

Will

No, I don’t drink anymore. I’ve been sober for thirty-seven years now, longer than you’ve been alive. Back then, I could pack it away. Occupational hazard of the folksinger in those days. Rock and rollers, too. Les, she still does—you can see that on her face. Don’t print that. She has her reasons.

A typical day? Hmm, hard to say. I’m not sure if a typical day would start with the day or with the night. Night, probably.

All right: for the purposes of the documentary, I’ll say day. Julian would be up at daybreak no matter how little sleep he’d got, but the rest of us rose a bit later, say nine or ten. That sounds early to you? Well, youngster, it felt that way to me, too!

But there was a feeling we all had that we were in a magic place, and we wanted to make the most of it. And we were young, so our powers of recovery were remarkable. We could drink all night, smoke till the house was spinning, do the odd bit of windowpane or blotter, busk at the pub if we needed a bit of ready cash for groceries, and still pop up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and hop down to the living room, strap on our mighty axes, and get to work.

Still—“typical day”?

I don’t think those were typical days. Truly. They were halcyon days.

What does that mean? It’s from a myth told by Ovid. Alcyone is the original name—the daughter of the wind god. Her lover Ceyx was a king and the son of the morning star. Against Alcyone’s wishes, he set sail on a long journey across the sea. A terrible storm rose up, and he was drowned, along with everyone on board his ship. Weeks later, Alcyone discovered his body washed up on shore, and her grief was so great, she drowned herself.

But the gods took pity on her—on both of them—and turned them into birds. Kingfishers. So every summer there’s six or seven days of perfect calm, perfect sun. They call those halcyon days, in memory of Alcyone.

That’s how we lived at Wylding Hall: kingfisher days and golden nights. There was an enchantment on us; you can hear it in the music on the record. But the magic on that record is only a shadow of what we experienced then, playing together.

Yeah, okay, “shadow” doesn’t really work, does it? Mixing metaphors.

An echo—that’s what you hear on the album. An echo of what we created when we were all in that room together, Julian and Les and Ashton and me, mad Jon bashing away at his drum kit and the sun in those great windows like they were gold, not glass. We’d play for hours, until Julian broke a string or Tom rang on the phone. We’d all take a break for a slash or a smoke, and then back to it.