Chapter 4: “To Wink In The Sunshine”
Hexham to Stonehenge
Jim was a big man with a big chin and a big smile and until two years ago he’d been a crack addict. Not the kind of crack addict who cowers in doorways and under bridges but a raver who over the decades had slid slowly and surely into it.
He was kind and warm and was great company. We turned off the A66 and plunged down the A1, listening to ‘Take it Easy’ by The Eagles on Classic Rock FM. We stopped for fuel, “Get anything you want,” he said, so I got a coffee.
He’d been a raver of the old school ilk and he had a deep Geordie accent. He cut his teeth in Newcastle’s dilapidated warehouses during the endless weekends of the Acid House 90s. He’d been at the first illegal rave when the police had shut it down and there’d been a beer fight, and he’d been to most of them since. There weren’t many cities he hadn’t partied in and there were no drugs he hadn’t done. When he stopped raving the drugs lingered on, mainly cocaine to start with and then crack.
He’d make his own crack, cooking the cocaine on a spoon. Then he’d scrape it into a rock and smoke it in a pipe. It was instant and more intense like that. More expensive too but then he’d always held down a job.
When his 50th birthday approached he realised it was all too much. “I was spending £2000 a month on it. I could have bought a house by then.” That was his biggest regret. Otherwise, he remembered the highs.
“What was the best rave you went to?”
“Ahhh there were loads,” he grinned as he took himself back to the craziness, the smokey rooms and throbbing beats, “Trouble is you don’t remember the best ones..!”
These days he gets just as much pleasure out in the countryside with his partner, sitting in a camper, watching a crackling fire and smoking a few joints. He hasn’t managed to get over those yet. “That’s what gets me up in the morning now,” he told me.
He dropped me on the A1 near Northallerton and I was taken on to Leeds by a guy called Dave. He was an abseiler by profession, specialising in inflatable plastic buildings like the Eden Project in Cornwall. He loved climbing but he got no thrills from being suspended up in the air like that, supported by ropes, harnesses, helmets and paperwork. What got him going was being on a sheer rock face, feeling its rough surface under his taught fingers and seeing the hard ground far below. He loved most of all to free climb, cut loose from the constraints of safety.
“Why?” I asked, bemused.
“Well,” he pondered, knowing I would never understand, “It sounds a bit cliche, but it’s exactly because you’re so close to death. When you’re up there the air tastes sweeter, the birdsong’s louder… It’s the most exhilarating thing you can do. You know that despite the risk, you’re in total control.”
I imagined with horror, clinging by my fingertips to a rock face. “And,” he continued, “you get a kick out of doing something you know everyone else thinks you’re totally mad to do.”
I thought of Kerouac, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…”
I stayed with a friend in Leeds and then went south. I was on my way to Stonehenge for the summer solstice, racing down the spine of the country through what Kenneth Grahame called the “furnace-lit midlands.” I skimmed through the landscape seeing none of it but the roadside. Motorways, to adapt another quote from Grahame, “annihilate the steadfast mystery of the horizon.” I can’t say I minded too much, I had to be there by sunset.
A few lifts down from Leeds and I found myself in a services outside Leicester. I’d made good time but had been waiting half an hour. I’d never had to wait longer than that. There was a parked car next to me and a woman in her 50s with a bleached blonde Mohican sitting on the verge, smoking a cigarette.
“What does ya mam think of you doing that?” She asked with a sympathetic laugh and a soft Geordie accent, “I can’t watch you standing there any longer! We’ll take ya down as far as Milton Keynes.”
We were waiting for her partner in the car to get off the phone before we could go.
“Ay, he’s lovely ‘e is. He’s proper lovely like. I love him so much.” She looked at the bald man behind the window dotingly, almost purring the words. “He’s been my rock he has.”
Her name was Annie and she was from Middlesborough. The man in the car was called Robbie. “He’s been through a lot ya know,” she whispered, “Seen his mates blown up ’n all. He was on two tours ya see. But I’ve been through a lot too.”
As we sat on the roadside, she smoked another cigarette and told me how she had nine children. The eldest she explained was 33. She listed the others’ ages but before she got to the last two, she paused and her smile faded. Then she told me they’d been killed in a fire four months before. “I managed to get all the others out,” she murmured, “but not them two.”
We sat in silence for a while. “Sometimes I blame myself but Robbie says I shouldn’t. He’s been my rock he has.”
She changed the subject and soon the smile had returned to her eyes and she asked me all sorts of questions about my trip, my family and everything else. She asked if I was homeless. “I was homeless once,” she told me cheerfully, “For about 6 months it were. Walked out on me husband and had nothing. He was horrible he was. Now I always go down to the quayside in Newcastle and give them some money. I know how it feels, see.”
After she said that she looked at me maternally, saying, “Ahh go on let me give you a few tabs.” She fished out a £5 note. I tried to decline but she insisted saying it would make her feel much better. “There’s more ‘a life than just money,” she added knowingly, “Life’s too short.”
She looked back at Robbie in the car, they pulled faces at each other, sticking out their tongues and blowing kisses. “I love ‘im soo much!” she began again, looking at him as if they’d just fallen in love, “You see, it’s a bit naughty what we’re doin’…” she mouthed the last bit pointing at him, “coz he’s married!”
It turned out Robbie had a wife and two kids but before I could ask more the call was done and we were both hopping in the car. Robbie mentioned something about the Mussels from Brussels. I missed the context but it set Annie off in hysterics, “…ayyy the Mussels from Brussels like! I wooda worn his pube around me neck n’all! I wooda! He had a lovely lil’ bum!” She howled with laughter.
As we drove down the M1, they told me about their relationship, how they’d both grown up in one of the poorest parts of Middlesborough and how they’d not seen each other since then. “Last time I saw her,” Robbie beamed, “she was in nappies!”
Four weeks ago Annie had called him out of the blue. They met up yesterday and now they were running off together with a random bloke on their backseat.
Robbie worked in tech these days but he’d been in the army for many years and served on two tours. He still suffered from PTSD and would never normally have a stranger in the car because of it, “You have this one to thank for that!” They looked at each other and winked.
“You see,” he explained, “You’ve got to take opportunities in life. Take it from me I’ve died twice. That makes you realise what you’ve got and makes you realise what you’ve missed,” again he flashed a flirting glance at Annie who grinned back longingly.
I left the two lovers at a services somewhere near Northampton and continued on my way. I caught three more lifts to Stonehenge. In all, it took six rides and seven hours from Leeds and I was on Salisbury plain by 5 o’clock. Not bad I reckoned. The flaxen fields rolled gently into the distance and the famous stones stood wearily to attention, watched by the trickling A303 traffic. The midsummer sun was high and magnificent, alone in a cloudless sky. Fitting, given we were there to worship it
.
Five millennia ago, human society was changing. No longer were the neolithic people of Britain hunter-gathers but instead were beginning to adapt to a new agricultural way of life. Farming, even in its most primitive form, totally changed the way our neolithic ancestors understood the world, shifting their attention and devotions. The seasons, the weather and the elements began to have a religious significance as the harvest became life and death. Chief among these devotions was the sun.
Though we know Stonehenge was built to align perfectly with the two solstices little else is known about it. It became disused over 2000 years ago and its real purpose was lost to the ages. It wasn’t until the 17th century that people began to openly appreciate its significance again. William Stukely was one of those early appreciators and his romantic picture of Celts and Druids still lingers today: “[The druids] advanc’d their inquiries, under all disadvantages, to such heights, as should make our moderns asham’d, to wink in the sunshine of learning and religion.”
Like everyone since, Stukely and other early scholars projected their own ideas onto its mysterious canvas, claiming it was built by descendants of Abraham and that it stood for the Trinity. Later the Victorians, wracked with anxiety about the industrialising world, began to see it as a monument to a purer time when the English people were unsullied by greed and capitalism. It was they that began congregating to celebrate the solstices.
Today it means many things to many people and its mystery allows everyone to make the stones their own. Druids arrived with oak laurels, long robes and tall wooden staffs, their wild hair catching the evening sun. Hippies with psychedelic eyes came to feel a sacred energy channelled through the sarsens. Buddhist monks came to meditate on the fallen stones while young lads came to drink cans of lager and stay up all night.
I met others who came, it seemed, just to grumble about how much better it was in the old days when there were no security guards, burger vans and most the heinously of all, no portaloos. “I just feel soooo sorry for the youth of today. They’re not allowed to have any fun…”
Having got there early I was one of the first to walk among the stones, something allowed by English Heritage only at the solstices. The crowds grew steadily bigger as the evening progressed and while it was still quiet, the druids performed their midsummer ceremonies. We stood in a circle and held hands, chanting melodically, before a druid held his hands to the sky and made peace blessings to the cardinal points.
A woman with a drum began a song and soon a few hundred people had joined in a captivating canon, “One by one everyone comes to remember we’re heeaaaling the world one heart at a time…”
There were wedding ceremonies too, both real and symbolic. I regretted not stepping forward to fill the role of Lord of Midsummer, not to be married to the Lady of Midsummer but simply for the title. The bloke who did gave an impassioned speech about how well the British look after their heritage monuments compared to his native Iraq, before adding, swaying slightly in his tie-dye shirt, “I’m sorry, I’m absolutely fucked!”
There was a real wedding, or hand binding as they’re called, between two men who held each other tightly and kissed under their oak laurels, witnessed by a reverent crowd. Then they and their friends rolled around on the floor in the pagan tradition. They all smelt strongly of musk and one wore a t-shirt that said “queer love is revolution.”
Most of the druids, dressed up in their full regalia retained a sense of humour about the whole thing. (The more serious druids no doubt are found at the smaller stone circles, away from the crowds and portaloos.) They gave short explanations about the henge and its components. “This,” cried a druid called Chris holding up his staff, “Is the Heel stone. Today we understand this is the most important stone here. The sun rises just to its left and it’s likely the whole site was built around it. But back in the 80s before they knew that, people used to nip behind it for a quick dump!” It suddenly dawned on me why the old hippies were grumbling about the portaloos earlier…
My friend Frank arrived as it got dark and as the shortest night of the year advanced the mood among the sarsens changed. At all times there was a crowd filling the stone circle. People climbed on the fallen sarsens and some even lay on the very top lintels, which annoyed the more pious druids. At the crowd’s nucleus was a drum circle, shrouded in smoke, beating a rumbling tattoo as the few thousand onlookers watched entranced. Occasionally everyone would break into a trilling ululation. We joined the mass and were steadily sucked closer to the middle. There was a single drum, a meter wide, being played by six or seven wild-eyed people, cavorting to their own rhythm. Frank and I made it to the drum’s edge and joined in.
At first Frank didn’t really get the point, “I don’t know how people do this for hours,” he wondered as we began. Nevertheless, we played on and the beat swirled up above the crowd of shadowy faces and echoed among the towering monoliths. The hands of the drummers whipped up and down and the taught skin trembled. A thin crescent moon peered in under the lintels to listen. When we left, slipping out of the trance, we realised we’d played non-stop for nearly two hours.
The night was cold and a mist rose on the plain. A Buddhist monk, playing the accordion grew a sizeable following chanting Hare Krishna, circling the stones. We circled with his cult-like band of revellers singing wildly for a long while before we broke out of that trance too and went to gather in the centre. We waited for well over an hour as the sky behind the heel stone steadily became a lighter shade of dark and began to betray the first tints of colour. It was a propitious year, we’d been told by an astronomer, as it was the first in hundreds that for all the last four equinoxes and solstices there had been clear skies.
Eventually, a thin red disk could be seen through the mist and the waiting crowd began to ululate wildly over the drums. The sun processed upwards like a monarch on their coronation day, dressed in clouded purple robes. Light rays, ending their long journey from the burning sun itself rushed into the circle and collided with the huge monoliths turning them a pale pink. There was a few moments of awe-struck reverence as the crowd, glowing in the morning light, admired the perfect framing of the sun between the sarsens.
Then someone behind us started playing techno through a megaphone which eventually elicited a “shut the fuck up” from an angry reveller, and we decided to go back to Frank’s car and sleep, content that the midsummer night had been everything we’d hoped it would.
More great stuff! Interesting rides youre getting. Maybe intersperse some boring rides to give perspective or maybe ur lucky and don't get them! I was at stonehenge in 1984 and wrote about it in walking the great North line which you can get at a library or on ebay for about 2 quid!