Tenderfoot

By J L M Morton

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

~ Toni Morrison 

The coneys scatter as I emerge from the woods and leap over the stile, white tails bouncing away across the field and disappearing into the warren at the margin. I follow the well-worn rope of dirt that marks Monarch’s Way and runs parallel to the Churn, the river I’m walking, wading, swimming and trespassing along from its source at Seven Springs to its confluence with the Thames at Cricklade. Without need of maps, I walk confidently, following trails laid down in the bones of my childhood when I rummaged through the Churn, netting minnows and sticklebacks, lifting stones to see what lurked beneath. In my mind’s eye I can see my mum in red beads and a tie-dye sundress, a bright day that I’m still chasing. Kek-kek-kek a moorhen calls, alarmed at my approach. 

The river runs smoothly over the summer reeds, through banks of forget-me-not, convolvulus and thistle. My brother, who lives a short way upriver, warned me off getting in the water here where agricultural run-off has left the Churn silted up, clogged with scraps of feedbag, dirty weeds and long tails of slime wagging in the current. I divert from the footpath, heading through the dung and dock, down to the cattle watering place and take the breeze block step over the barbed wire fence, into a corner of the water meadow. I head for the stretch of river I know best of all, but there is a man there with a black labrador throwing a stick for the dog in the water. He looks my way, startled to see me, as if I am the one who doesn’t belong. 

~ ~ ~

It was a white midwinter afternoon, rowan berries in the hedges incongruously colourful like flashing lights on a chemo stand. I was walking to see Dad, along familiar pathways, preparing myself to meet him, crossing the metal bridge above the dual carriageway — my old route to school. 

‘Is anything happening?’ The man with vertical hair dropped the question on the aisle between beds. 

There was a pause, a swimming up toward this human voice.  

‘About what?’ I replied.

‘I’ve been here a week and nothing’s happened,’ he held his pale palms out towards me. ‘I wouldn’t have come if I'd known.’

A clunk and the power cut out — electronic bleeps and blue gloom running on batteries. The gloaming fog at the window suddenly lightened, like milk being poured in a jar.  The nurses searched their desk with torch lights. Nobody panicked.  Nobody spoke. 

‘Haven’t seen paper chains like that since I was a boy,’ the man said. 

My cutting and glueing and looping was methodical, soothing, the shards of gold card falling into Dad’s blanketed lap.  I grasped the chains that I’d hung from the bedside lamp, a work in progress rustling through the silence.  

‘They’re for Christmas. Decorations.’

The man nodded and returned to the message on his phone. 

Dad’s cheeks were hollow as chambers, as if all of the skin on his body was being dragged into the ground. He tried to withhold his tears with a cough, but we had come too far then to lie.  We clasped one another's hands. The colour of his eyes reminded me of coastal stone, porous, constant, protective.

~ ~ ~

It is hard to explain how a person can live on in a landscape. How the lanes that you have driven to visit them and eat with them, to walk with them and care for them; how the locations of the houses they rented, the gardens they tended; how the ridges and hills and valleys that connected you become a new kind of vascular system that maps both the memory and presence of a body that has slipped from its human form and reassembled itself as field, stream, hare, copse. 

~ ~ ~

My stop-start pilgrimage along the river took me through places with cognate names related to the Churn: Ciren, Cerney, Corinium, a blue thread of language tugging me on. A carved votive relief with the word ‘CUDAE’ (‘to Cuda’) was turned up in 1690 along a tributary of the Churn. Cuda is one possible name for the mother goddess associated with local, pre-Roman rites and rituals of worship. A temple to the mother goddess was uncovered in 1889 in the Ashcroft area of Cirencester, including more stone reliefs, statues of goddesses and hooded guardian-protector figures (Genii cucullati) believed to bestow good health and abundance on the waterway. 

Often (but not always) depicted in triplicate, carrying bread and fruit, the mother goddesses are said to represent well-being, plenty, health and fertility. The significance of their threeness or triplism is unknown — referring perhaps to the three stages of life, the inexorability of time’s movement through past, present and future, the triple layered cosmos encompassing underworld, middle earth and the heavens. In the absence of certainty, what does seem clear is an idea of permeability and fluidity, where boundaries blur between ourselves and others and the bonds our kinship rise to the surface. In our anthropocentric world, rivers are far more alive than we often believe — something our ancestors seem to have understood very well. Women have known the power of water as the source of life and thus as a site of ritual for millennia. Gloucestershire’s Celtic and Romano-Celt deities — Sulis, Sulis Minerva, Cuda, the Sulevaie or Deae Matres, Rosmerta, Sabrina/Haffren/Severn — were all worshipped by water, be it thermal spring, brook, river.

That autumn, I sat alone in the Winstone Centre at Cirencester’s Corinium Museum in the presence of a two thousand year old limestone fragment from a mother goddess statue. Kindled by my river pilgrimage, an interest in Romano-Celt mother goddesses drew me to the Museum, a thin place of residue and revelation.  I handled the weight of it, felt the surfaces with my fingertips, and saw up close the fragments of fossil and sparkling quartz held within the oolitic limestone. The head and body of the mother were missing — unknown whether deliberately desecrated by Christians or ravaged by time — but it was still possible to make out the heavy draping of fabric over the leg and the shape of the foot. The stone was marked by cuts and certain paler areas where the surface had worn away from the touch of pilgrims and worshippers. There was an embodied energy in the figure that it was hard not to respond to.

More mother goddess votives are held in the glass cabinet upstairs at the Museum. Some are small enough to hold in the hand, others carved from large blocks with varying degrees of definition. Each time I went there I noticed a different aspect of the stones — a carving mark here, a detail on a figure there. I took some photographs with my phone and was taken aback by how the camera automatically framed the faces of the mothers, as if they were real. As if they were reaching into my world from the past.

Max Weber said Western modernity involved the ‘progressive disenchantment of the world’ and spoke of the eclipse of magical and animistic beliefs surrounding nature as part of a wider process of ‘rationalisation.’ Yet here it felt as if a process of secular re-enchantment — augmented by subcultures of interest in ‘neoancient’ practices and folk revivalism — was reversing that trend, helping me to reclaim a forgotten sense of wonder, and with it a resolve to nurture our stricken blue, brown and green spaces back to good health.

This discovery of the mother goddesses came when I was looking for belonging in the river. I found kinship and a sense of family that could somehow endure mortality. Symbolic of my own need for better health after a diagnosis of a chronic condition that’ll live with me forever, the mothers offered a nurturing, therapeutic presence. They remind us to be good ancestors, to honour those who have come before while embodying our deep love for our human and nonhuman kin in the present and those who are yet to come — the triplism of our inheritance, all that we create, all that we will pass on.

~ ~ ~

I walk away from the stranger with his labrador and on to the next meander. To feel the water on my skin, the limestone underfoot, I take off my shoes and walk along the riverbed. Midsummer brambles have rampaged through the trees on the bank and sent out thorny runners that hang over the water, shaded by ash and the budding hawthorn haws. Cocooned by this soundproofing vegetation, it can feel along these stretches of river as if I am tunnelling into an almost psychedelic state: a state that opens up vistas of detail and intensity, my visual field pixelating into geometric shapes and fractals, the body dissolving. In that state when consciousness seems to shift, I often wonder if I am experiencing the river, or if the river is experiencing me. The mundane materialism of workaday reality is swept away on the flow of the Churn, gently shifting and revealing new angles and ways of seeing.

But this evening, my experience is abruptly curtailed. I snag my foot on a string of barbed wire bisecting the river that marks the boundaries of land ownership. If you’re by, in or on a river in England, there’s a 97% chance you’re trespassing on someone’s land, as I am; and I know I’m no longer welcome. I wince at the sharp heat of the gash oozing deep red blood from my skin, made tender and swollen by thrombosis. The anticoagulant medication I am taking slows any clotting and means I bleed more profusely than is usual - an urgent reminder to stop. I am poor at self-care. Reluctantly, I am learning to attend to my needs, to know when I need to opt for rest and stillness instead of following this curious impulse to keep moving, keep journeying along the Churn. To learn the lesson of the goddesses and mother myself, to reach for repair and endurance through all that lies ahead. 

I look for a break in the trees on the bank and haul myself up onto the field to find my way back to the footpath on the far side of the water meadow. I wade through the long, matted grass and sedge, disturbing flocks of ethereal white plume moths as I go. At the distant edge of the meadow, crows skitter in and out of the treetops as they settle down to roost, their shrill caws sounding out, calling one another home. 

J L M MORTON is a writer, producer, mother and celebrant based in Gloucestershire. Find her online at www.jlmmorton.com.

Art by Kat Nisbet