Contents
Introduction: Jiffy Bag
Erica Wagner
3
At the Edge
David Almond
9
The Cosmic Lighthouse: Alan Garner and Jodrell Bank
Teresa Anderson
15
The Full Moon Shopping Mall
Margaret Atwood
21
Reading Together, Reading Apart
John Burnside
27
In the Same Room at the Same Time
Susan Cooper
33
Where the Starlight Sings
Frank Cottrell-Boyce
37
The Still Foot of the Compass: Alan Garner’s Siblings
Amanda Craig
45
The Gatepost
Bob Cywinski
55
– Go, in the Form of a Bird
Maura Dooley
63
The Owl Service: Crossing the Threshold
Helen Dunmore
65
Possessions
Mark Edmonds
71
Of the Earth, Earthy . . .
Stephen Fry
79
Storytellers, Shapeshifters
Cornelia Funke
81
The World and the Worlds:
Some Musings and Two Book Reviews
Neil Gaiman
83
The Given
Elizabeth Garner
93
The Othering: Down from Oxford, finding my place
Joseph Garner
99
Mr Garner’s Reading Lesson
Ben Haggarty
107
The Sleeping King and the Body of the World
Nick Hennessey
115
Pockets
Dougald Hine
123
Alan Garner and Alan Turing: On the Road
Andrew Hodges
129
Alan to an Academic:
History and Mythology in Alan Garner’s Novels
Ronald Hutton
135
The Speaking of the Stones:
Two Things I Learned from Alan Garner
Paul Kingsnorth
141
Gripe Griffin
Olivia Laing
153
The Weirdstone of Talybont
Katherine Langrish
157
The Joining of the Song
Hugh Lupton
163
But Still We Walk
Helen Macdonald
175
The Edge: A Name Map
Robert Macfarlane
177
The Bull-roarer
Gregory Maguire
185
It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This
Bel Mooney
195
Unfinished Business
Richard Morris
201
From Calcutta to Cheshire
Neel Mukherjee
217
A Ghost Book: The ‘Stone Book’
Richard Ovenden
223
Beyond the Singularity
Neil Philip
235
‘An Oak Shovel . . . Roughly Used’
John Prag
243
Of Things and People
Francis Pryor
253
Alan Garner: Craftsmanship
Philip Pullman
261
Righteous Garner
Ali Smith
267
Feeding the Spark
Ian Thorpe
275
Quiet in Disquiet: The Owl Service
Salley Vickers
283
Here or There or Elsewhere
Elizabeth Wein
287
Alderley: For Alan Garner
Rowan Williams
293
The Cave of Wonders and the People of the West
Michael Wood 295
Alan Garner: a select bibliography
301
acknowledgements
303
supporters
305
A bottle of cold tea; bread and a half an onion. That was Father’s baggin. Mary emptied her apron of stones from the field and wrapped the baggin in a cloth.
The books arrived in rough grey sacks. We unloaded them and set them on a table across from my desk; at some point in the day I would open the Jiffy bags in which the books arrived. It was really my assistant’s job to open the books, but I liked to do it myself. It meant I got up from my chair, it meant I got to do something with my hands other than type – and it meant I really saw, however briefly, every book that had been sent to the literary editor of The Times, which I was, to my own astonishment. Later on, I’d stop being astonished, but just then – in 1999 – I was still surprised by the job I was doing. Because I was a woman, because I was young, but maybe most of all because I was American and my job description seemed about as English as you could get. But then I had always known – somehow – that I would end up in England, although I never understood why I knew that, or really why I felt it. I did know that it wasn’t anything to do with being literary editor of The Times, but here I was, all the same, opening envelopes stuffed with books one afternoon in the early spring.
The Stone Book Quartet was the title of the book which slid into my hands. It was by an author called Alan Garner, and it was published by an imprint of HarperCollins, Flamingo Modern Classics.
The hottest part of the day was on. Mother lay in bed under the rafters and the thatch, where the sun could send only blue light. She had picked stones in the field until she was too tired and had to rest.
I had never heard of Alan Garner. And however astonished I was to find myself behind the literary editor’s desk, I still reckoned that I should know of an author whose work was considered to be classic.
Old William was weaving in the end room. He had to weave enough cuts of silk for two markets, and his shuttle and loom rattled all the time, in the day and the night. He wasn’t old, but he was called Old William because he was deaf and hadn’t married. He was Father’s brother.
Silk for two markets: perhaps that was me, one market in London and the other in New York, where I had been born, the place I had left. Where did I belong? I didn’t know. I was a seeker. And yet the threads were being woven together. The book in my hands was not like any other book I had ever read, but it seemed familiar – more than familiar, for all it spoke of a world from which I could not have been more distant. Here was memory in object and in word, a deep familial, cultural history which was no artefact but a living thing. It was like listening to the tune of a song I had never known was always inside me.
I was mesmerised. I was very curious about this Garner person, too. So I decided I would interview Alan Garner. Surely this was one of the privileges of being the literary editor of The Times. Suffice to say, the interview came to pass, but it took some doing to make it happen, and looking back I am amazed that I managed to pull it off. Suffer fools gladly and Alan Garner are not five words you really want to yoke together. Was I a fool? Perhaps the right kind of fool, curious, ready to follow a river along a new course. I travelled to Cheshire, and was welcomed into the kitchen of the Garners’ home, Toad Hall; I walked through the Old Medicine House and sat in its chimney. I found a stone book and saw owls and flowers and flowers and owls. And perhaps I was lucky that I came to Alan’s work, and Alan, perfectly fresh; for what was ‘classic’ over here in Britain had never even made it to the United States. Up until fairly recently, books published for children didn’t jump across oceans in the way books published for adults did. Growing up, I read E. B. White, not C. S. Lewis. I saw pictures by Shel Silverstein and none by Judith Kerr. Please note I write ‘books published for children’, for the way in which an author’s books are published is, more often than not, out of the author’s hands – and one of the first things Alan ever said to me was this: ‘I feel instinctively that children’s writing can’t be literature. It is ghetto writing. C. S. Lewis said that if a book can only be enjoyed by children then it’s not a good book. I never considered myself a writer for children.’
As I kept following the bed of that strengthening stream I’d hear those ideas expressed again, from people such as David Almond (whose words you’ll find in the book you hold in your hands) and the late Maurice Sendak too. ‘To work “without waste and easily” is to know where and who you are,’ as archaeologist Mark Edmonds writes, quoting Alan, in his essay here. The work is what it wants to be. Other people can call it what they like. It is itself.
I had the privilege of learning that first-hand, walking with Alan and his wife Griselda through the ancient landscape of Alan’s books and of his life. Our friendship now is old and very dear, but I often think of its beginnings. We walked from Thieves’ Hole, by Seven Firs and Goldenstone; to Stormy Point and Saddle Bole. We followed Gawain’s trail down into Ludchurch, the words of the poem a map in my ear; and once, a dozen years ago, we went to Thursbitch, and I will tell you truly that I hope never to see that place again. Maybe you think I’m joking. I’m not.
And we went too just across the railway tracks to where the bowl of the Lovell Telescope tilted its ear at the sky. When we did I had with me a battered book: The Story of Jodrell Bank by Bernard Lovell, and on its flyleaf my late mother’s familiar hand: ‘Once more, with feeling . . . bought at Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 4 September, 1978’. I was eleven then, and my father had nearly driven off the road when he’d seen that huge white dish appear over the horizon. We were visitors from Manhattan travelling towards Manchester. We had no idea it was there. And here I was again with Alan and Griselda. Everything happens as it must. This book is called First Light thanks to Alan (‘I can be quite good at titles,’ he wrote to me, when I was at a loss) and in tribute in part to that great listener in the next field over from Toad Hall. All our contributors have listened to Alan Garner’s work, and have heard his stories – and through them, their own.
That is my story, and that’s why I am here, editing this tribute to Alan and his work. It’s being published by the wonderful Unbound because one of its founders, John Mitchinson, and his wife (one of Unbound’s editors) Rachael Kerr, have their own tales of connection to Alan and Griselda, one that goes back further than mine. But publishing with Unbound has brought a very special benefit: and that was to truly understand, as the funding for the book motored swiftly up toward 100 per cent, just how much Alan’s work meant to so many people. Whether subscribers pledged £10 or £100 or more, I heard stories of passionate attachment to Alan’s work. Some began at the beginning, with Alan’s first book, The Weirdstone of Brinsingamen. For some it was Red Shift, or Elidor or the dreaming voyage of Strandloper. Many mentioned The Voice that Thunders, his revelatory collection of essays which blends the analytical with the personal. But to each of these readers it was clear that Alan was speaking to them and to them alone: that is what every one of the contributors of this volume clearly feels too. ‘I believe the first feeling that overwhelmed me was one of being trusted,’ Stephen Fry writes of discovering Alan’s work. ‘At no stage did the writer of this story explain to me what I was supposed to feel, or what was the meaning of the story I was reading.’ Ali Smith recalls how Alan’s books alerted her to the possibilities of language when she was only a little girl: ‘I knew what “weird” meant, and what “stone” meant, but what did they mean together and how was it that putting those two words together like that made something somehow bigger than just the sum of what the two words meant separately?’
Alan Garner’s words make something very big indeed. They create worlds which connect – as you’ll discover in this volume – not only with the work of artists such as Ali Smith and Stephen Fry, but scientists, archaeologists, historians. I have always known that Alan Garner’s work touched many lives and crossed many disciplines: but with this collection I can demonstrate the real reach of his art and his thought. ‘A book, properly written, is an invitation to the reader to enter: to join with the writer in a creative act: the act of reading.’ So Alan writes in ‘Hard Cases’, one of the essays in The Voice that Thunders. All that is left for me to do is invite you to enter in.
I first met Alan Garner not on Alderley Edge but in the metropolis. He was there to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He used Byron’s pen to make his mark on the list of the finest authors writing in English over the last 200 years. His was a brief visit. He’d arrived that afternoon. The morning after, he was taking an early train back to his home. He told me to visit him there. I haven’t done so yet. But I’ve been there in his books, especially in The Stone Book.
Garner lives and works close to the Edge, and is neither metropolitan nor provincial. He’s closer to being parochial, in Patrick Kavanagh’s sense, never being ‘in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish’. But he’s more than that. He goes under the parish to fetch out stones, he cleans them, he inspects them, he shapes them with exquisite care, he turns them into steeples and into walls, he lifts them to the stars above. He turns the stones to words. He is the first of his line to use words not things. And within them, like Blake looking at a grain of sand, like the scientist looking into the atom or the cell, he finds the universe.
He hasn’t sought glory or acceptance. He doesn’t seek to be classified. ‘I’ve no interest,’ he says, ‘in being compared with other writers or their work.’ He doesn’t act from ego or even from will. He’s written few books, sometimes very slowly, sometimes with long gaps between. His work seems more to be an act of dedication and passionate acceptance. Finding himself uneasy in a culture in which ‘we sacrificed the numinous for our other greatness, the intellect,’ he turned back to the place where his family have lived and worked for generations. ‘The physical immobility of my family was my lifeline. My family is so rooted that it ignores social classification by others. On one square mile of Cheshire hillside, the Garners are.’ So Alan Garner is, as that signature on the RSL Fellowship scroll shows, as the name on his book covers show. But at the best of times, there’s no Alan Garner at all. ‘The feeling is less that I choose a myth than the myth chooses me; less that I write than that I am written.’ Of rereading passages from The Stone Book, he has said: ‘I ask myself who could possibly have written them, because “I” certainly didn’t.’
Early in The Stone Book, young Mary is released from her father’s side and carries her candle deep into the mines beneath the hill. She finds that the dark and silent place is crowded with all that’s gone before: footprints that seem as fresh and sharp-edged as when they were first made; the outline of a hand that fits in hers; the figure of a bull, and beside that, her father’s maker’s mark. But it isn’t her father’s mark. It is the mark of their ancestral father. None of this will last forever. Mary’s purpose, like Garner’s, is to come back out and tell the tale of what’s been down there and is down there, to turn the places and the objects and the places into symbols, into words. ‘We pass it on . . . you’ll have to tell your lad, even if you can’t show him.’ And a single stone itself, like the dark and hidden place that it comes up from, tells of time. Her father has the craft, the stonecutter’s secret of how to crack the stone, to polish it: ‘It was black and full of light, and its heart was a golden, bursting sun.’ And it contains the remnant of ancient seas and ancient sea urchins and of questions that transcend the empty tales told by the parson in the parish. But they are religious, such sacramental moments of revelation that edge the character and the reader to the borders of mystery. ‘A true story is religious, as drama is religious . . . “religion” describes that area of human concern for, and involvement with, the question of our being within the cosmos.’
Each stone comes out from the dark and hidden spaces. Each stone must be valued. Some would cast them aside, and in the field they can seem a heap of dull and heavy things, but carefully chosen and opened and shaped they are shown to be unique. The best can be turned to walls, if they are hard enough, if they have enough of time in them, if the craftsman has the skill. ‘I’ll not put me name to it,’ says Grandfather of a stone that isn’t good enough. Stones are laid in careful lines like sentences, walls constructed like paragraphs, chapels like stories, homes like books. And so the words that are used are those that would often be discarded by others, unaware of their potency. They are words that speak with the lovely clicks and vowels and rhythms of the common tongue, each word set in place, in proper order, so poetry and music and power can be released. Just as his ancestors’ lifelong struggle was to turn the things of the earth into constructions of strength and grace, Garner’s has been to turn the words of the earth into such constructions, into art. ‘All my writing has been fuelled by the instinctive drive to speak with a true and Northern voice integrated with the language of literary fluency.’
Just as there is a hidden cave in the earth that can be explored, there is a secret cave in the sky. Young Robert climbs into it, the beautifully formed steeple, to where the birds are, and the birds accept him, and make space for him. Again, it is filled with the footprints of an invisible crowd that has entered here before. As the cave beneath fitted Mary, so this cave fits him. ‘He was wearing the steeple all the way to the earth.’ These burrowing, climbing, written children link the earth and sky. Just as in the earth, there is a maker’s mark. It is Robert’s own name, but of course it is also the name of the ancestor who worked here long before. A secret place, hardly ever seen, that some might consider to be unimportant to the whole structure. But it is a sacred space, and here, just as on the visible lovely outside of the steeple, the stone has been properly worked. ‘The stone was true though it would never be seen.’ So it is with the writer. Each word matters, no matter how obvious it might be, if the structure is truly to be a thing of beauty. The invisible matters. It vivifies everything we see.
Between the cave beneath and the cave above, there is another chamber: the dark forge, with the fire at its heart; a fire surrounded by tackle, presses, anvils, bellows, firebricks, hood; a fire that is tended and controlled; a thing of destructive potential turned to a centre of creation; a place where the apprentice is brought to learn creation’s ‘art, craft and mystery’. And all around these caves and chambers, the parish is operatic. It is filled with voices, with music, with rhythm, with things beautifully formed by human hand. The characters speak in lovely dialect. Their feet beat out tunes as they step across the earth. ‘Who-whoop!’ is called across the fields throughout the book. Looms rattle and swish. Hammers and chisels chick and clink. Songs accompany them, riddles and hymns and soldiers’ songs. The whetstones strike the scythes and bring out tunes. The men swing scythes in unison, ‘scythes and men like a big clock, back and to, back and to, across the hill they walked.’ Musical instruments are played: the ophicleide, the cornet. Even the cleaned and oiled barrel of a gun is turned into a pipe. Things made in the forge glint and shine: the horses’ shimmering bridles, the turning weathercocks. The importance of proper making is everywhere. Ordinary things are made to be extraordinary: the hammers and scythes themselves, the sledge, the horseshoes, milk cans, brass fenders. The gun, with its ‘catches, magazine, levers, bolt and barrel’. Things are precisely geared and balanced: the yard door and the long handle of the bellows, both of which can be moved with a single touch. The clock, with its wheels and cogs and pendulum, things that ‘Stop. Start. Day and night, for evermore, regular.’ Such things matter if the parish itself is to properly work, if the book that embodies it is to properly work. For the parish and the book must also embody the workings of the universe. ‘We’re going at that much of a rattle, the whole blooming earth, moon and stars, we need escapement to hold us together.’
The writer, Alan Garner, is at the heart of all this. He draws us, his readers, to his hill and he makes it real for us. He writes us down into the earth, climbs us into the steeple, leads us into the mysterious forge, causes us to see and hear the individual and gathered voices of his parish. He helps us touch the extraordinary ordinary objects, helps us experience the sacred places, the sacramental moments. He exposes the reality of the known world, and he leads us to the Edge, to something beyond the parish, beyond the stones, beyond the words, to something that is not the writer or the reader. And we are enthralled by this world made so very real, and by the mystery that lies within and all around it.
David Almond is the author of Skellig, The Savage, The Tightrope Walkers, A Song for Ella Grey and many other novels, stories and plays. His books are translated into almost 40 languages and are widely adapted for stage and screen. His major awards include the Carnegie Medal and the Hans Christian Andersen Award – the world’s most prestigious prize for children’s authors. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in Northumberland.
I work at Jodrell Bank. The Lovell Telescope, a huge white radio dish the height of Big Ben, towers over us here. As it turns and dips it is a constant reminder of our place in time and space.
It picks up radio waves rather than visible light. Radio waves that travel at the speed of light, for years (sometimes billions of years) across the cosmos to reach our receivers.
Alan Garner is our almost-neighbour. His house is separated from Jodrell Bank by a couple of fields and the train line between Manchester and Crewe. He’s an old friend, or a new friend, depending how you see it. It’s Alan’s fault that I used to mark invisible crosses on our washing machine every night when I was a little girl, so I feel that I’ve known him for a lot longer than he has me.
Jodrell Bank is the home of UK Radio Astronomy and, lately, the new headquarters of the great radio telescope of the future, the SKA. The site is a huge collaborative endeavour. Engineers, scientists, students and support staff, all toil like bees to achieve a common purpose – to work out what is out there in the skies – and to understand where we fit, on our tiny blue rocky planet, alone (so far) in the ungraspable vastness of space.
I say ungraspable – but of course, science knows a lot, and we can reel off many facts and numbers about our Universe:
It’s just under 14 billion years old; there are around 100 billion stars in our own galaxy (most of them with their own system of planets) and about 300 billion galaxies in the visible Universe. Our galaxy is around 100,000 light years (that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometres) across.
Almost all the hydrogen in the Universe was made in the Big Bang.
For those of you who are wearing gold rings – it’s interesting to consider that every atom of gold was made in an exploding star. And that many of the atoms in your body have been part of other bodies, other planets, other stars. Most of the matter in you is many billions of years old – you’re just a new configuration of it all.
And alongside the facts are the concepts. For example, sometimes, here, we talk in terms of ‘look back time’.
If light from a star takes eight minutes to reach us, we always see the star as it was eight minutes ago – a ‘look back time’ of eight minutes (our Sun is eight light minutes away). If it takes eight million years to reach us, we see it as it was eight million years ago. As I mentioned, some of the signals picked up by the Lovell Telescope have travelled for billions of years, at the speed of light, to get here. We are always looking back in time.
This produces some interesting intellectual gymnastics. The Crab Nebula is the (vaguely crab-shaped) cloud of dust and gas that blew out into space when a star was seen to explode by Chinese astronomers in 1054. It’s visible with a normal telescope.
Here at Jodrell Bank, we point our radio telescopes at the dark region left at the heart of the Crab when the star exploded. There, invisible to the eye, but ‘visible in the radio’, is the collapsed core of the exploded star, a pulsar, which spins around 30 times per second, producing regular ‘flashes’ of radio waves as it spins, like a cosmic lighthouse.
The mental gymnastics then begin, when we remember that the Crab Pulsar is around 7,000 light years away. When we observe it we are looking back in time, to see the pulsar as it was 7,000 years ago, following observations made by Chinese astronomers, who observed it exploding 960 years ago.
If he reads this, Alan will be laughing by now.
He sits in his house, at a place he has occupied since 1957, the year that the Lovell Telescope first moved into operation, and watches the telescope from his windows. Sometimes he asks exactly what it is observing (he has been known to telephone the Jodrell Bank Control Room) and he writes in parallel with it as it works.
I read his early books – the Weirdstone series – as a child, books that he wrote as the telescope was tracking Soviet and American rockets in the early days of the space race.
As I grew older I found Red Shift – in which Alan holds place and people as anchors as time dislocates – and Elidor, in which he writes about a doorway which becomes a point of contact, a portal between worlds and through which the energy of a threat begins to leak. As he wrote, the Jodrell Bank telescopes scanned distant galaxies, observed pulsars and zoomed in on quasars. The dislocation of time and space permeates his work.
I finally met him for the first time around 10 years ago, here at Jodrell Bank.
One of my early heroes, he was circumspect at our first meeting. He sat and observed and listened for almost an hour, which was nerve-racking, to say the least. Since then he and his wife, Griselda, have often worked alongside us, helping us make explicit the fact that Jodrell Bank is a point of connection between many worlds. A site where people not only do science and create superb engineering, but also consider their place in the Universe, in time, in relation to others – a location where science is part of the human story, of culture as a whole and where the history of science elides with the history of humanity.
The first time I visited Alan and Griselda at home, I felt I recognised the house and the place. They both spoke eloquently of its history, of the people who had walked the floors, touched the walls, set fires, cooked and ate, lost things between floorboards, were born and died.
And one small thing was more shocking than any other. One thing made an electric connection between me and those people of other times, one that I still feel today.
When I was very young, anxious and religious (a heady combination), I invented my own secret way of warding off the threats of the outside world. Invoking what seemed the strongest source of protection I could find at the time, I would sneak around our bungalow in Durham every night, surreptitiously marking invisible crosses (I said I was religious) on door and window frames. It was superstition at its most basic level, a response to my fear of the unknown and my growing sense that the Universe was a lot bigger than I’d realised. I had a panic one night near Christmas when it dawned on me that I’d forgotten about our chimney. I had to creep out of bed when everyone else was asleep to make sure it was included in the protective ring so that nobody but Santa could get in.
As Alan showed me around his house, he pointed out marks scratched, centuries before, in the timbers around the ancient chimney.
He mentioned, casually, that these were in fact known as apotropaic marks, were intended to ward off evil and could be found all over the house, on window and door frames, as well as the chimney timbers. He pointed out crosses, scratched into the darkened wood, apparently unaware that the hairs were standing up on the back on my neck and that there was a rushing sound in my ears that made it hard for me to hear him speak. A memory was unfurling itself in my brain. Something I’d forgotten I’d forgotten, and a sign of the way that Alan’s writing connects with his readers.
In his book, Elidor, an ordinary suburban door becomes a connection between worlds, an entry point for a threat that leaks energy into even household appliances, animating them so that they run without being plugged in.
After reading it, I found myself including not only our fireplace and chimney, but also our Hotpoint Twin-Tub in my nightly round of cross marking. Other white goods worried me over subsequent months and soon I was creeping around each night marking not only windows and doors, but also anything electrical with my invisible apotropaic signs. I think I kept it up until we moved when I was 11.
I had forgotten the process – forgotten, even, that Elidor had such an impact on me – until I met Alan and was standing in his house. Alan’s immersion in the academic underpinning of his fables and narrative had led him to provoke something universal in me as a child. My own secretive, private invention is ‘a thing’: something I now hold in common with people from many cultures across the planet.
It’s a small example of the way that Alan has bridged worlds and times, anchoring them in places and in people, as the Lovell Telescope moves on its tracks, slipping between looking in different directions and back to different ages, every day.
Alan’s work is woven through with ours, and in 2012 he made that link explicit. Boneland, the concluding book of the Weirdstone series, locates Colin, its main protagonist, here at Jodrell Bank.
And as the eve of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Observatory approached, we launched our ‘Garner Lecture Series’ here with ‘Powsels and Thrums’, a lecture by Alan himself.
Alan has said that this will be his last public lecture (we will see, of course) but the lecture series will continue, interleaving with our astrophysics lectures, so that we bring these ideas to light, rehearsing and reinventing the links between worlds.
Teresa Anderson is Director of the University of Manchester’s Discovery Centre at Jodrell Bank. A physicist by training, she also has a doctorate in electrical engineering – and now works on the boundaries between science and culture, welcoming over 160,000 people to Jodrell Bank each year. The Centre runs an eclectic programme: including education sessions that attract 18,000 school visitors per year; the ‘Live from Jodrell Bank’ science-music festivals; the ‘Lovell Lecture’ series (on the latest in astrophysics research) and the ‘Garner Lecture’ series (launched by Alan Garner in 2015).
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, say two or three weeks as the news flies, in the vast but horizontal city of Toronto, there was a mother who loved to shop in shopping malls. She would get so caught up in shopping that she would forget the time, and would be late for dinner; so her two children, Krystal and Kyle, had become very good at cooking hot dogs and macaroni and cheese, so they would not go hungry. Their father was in the Futures market and was easily distracted, and never noticed what was going on, so it was no good asking him anything about cooking.
One day the mother wandered into a shopping mall she had never seen before. It was called the Full Moon Mall. You will not be very surprised when I tell you that it was in fact the night of the full moon, but the mother was not attuned to the phases of the moon.
Inside this mall there were a lot of cheese shops, butcher shops, shoe shops, and fur shops. The mother wandered here and there, looking at this and that. She was very taken with a fur shop, so she went inside and tried on fur coats. The saleslady had a long nose, sharp claws, pointed teeth, and reddish eyes; she kept urging the mother to try on yet another coat, and saying how fine they looked on her. And indeed they did look fine.
But then the full moon rose, and all of a sudden the mother saw that the saleslady was not a human woman, but a large, fierce raccoon. With a scream she ran for the door, but the raccoon was there before her, and turned the key in the lock. ‘You have been trying on our skins,’ growled the raccoon, ‘and turn about is fair play. So now I will try on yours.’ Then the raccoon killed the mother, peeled off her skin, and put it on. It fitted quite well, except for the tail, which had to be stuffed inside; nor could the sharp teeth and claws and the reddish eyes be disguised. Over the mother’s skin she put on the mother’s clothes, and if you hadn’t been paying close attention you wouldn’t have known the difference.
With the help of the other animals in the Full Moon Mall – for all of the shops were run by animals, who sold things made from themselves, because why pay the middleman – the raccoon stashed the mother inside the freezer of the butcher’s shop, to eat later. All the animals locked up their shops and went out the main door of the mall, and the raccoon went out last, for she was the CEO, and locked the door behind her with her magic Full Moon key.
She placed the key inside the mother’s handbag, so as not to lose it, since there was only one key, and without it she would have to stay in her raccoon shape all the time, wandering around in alleyways, which would not be so delightful as the Full Moon Mall. Then she found the mother’s address and house keys and car keys inside the purse, and got into the mother’s car in the parking lot, and drove to the mother’s house, being careful not to run over any of her fellow raccoons along the way.
Krystal and Kyle were making macaroni and cheese and hot dogs for dinner.
‘Hi kids,’ growled the raccoon. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘What’s wrong with your voice?’ said Kyle.
‘Where’d you get that manicure? Cool!’ said Krystal.
The family sat down to dinner. The father, who was thinking about pork bellies, did not notice anything unusual, except that his wife’s bum seemed to have grown quite large – this was because of the tail – but Krystal and Kyle found it peculiar when the mother took her hot dog over to the sink and washed it, and then stuck her head down into the macaroni dish to lick it clean. ‘Got any eggs?’ she growled then. For there is nothing raccoons like better than fresh eggs.
‘No,’ said Krystal. ‘You were supposed to buy some, remember? At the shopping mall.’
‘Oh,’ said the raccoon. ‘Got any frogs?’
‘Kyle,’ whispered Krystal. ‘Don’t say anything out loud, but that’s not our mother.’
‘It’s not?’
‘No. It’s a raccoon.’
‘Don’t be a goof,’ said Kyle. But then he looked hard, and right enough, their mother’s teeth were never that pointy.
By this time the raccoon mother had shoved her head into the refrigerator and was gobbling up some grapes. ‘What’ll we do?’ said Kyle. ‘Where’s our real mother?’
‘We need to get that animal out of our house,’ said Krystal. ‘She’ll rip everything to shreds, and maybe us, too!’
‘And make her tell us where she’s hidden our mother,’ said Kyle.
‘Run like the wind to the corner store,’ said Krystal, ‘and buy a dozen eggs.’ She looked inside her mother’s handbag for some money, and what should be in there but a strange-looking key. ‘This might come in useful,’ said Krystal to herself, and she slipped it into her pocket.
Kyle ran like the wind to the corner store, and was back in a flash with a dozen eggs, extra large, organic. Krystal, meanwhile, had armed herself with a baseball bat. The raccoon mother had thrown a lot of things out of the refrigerator onto the floor, and was helping herself to a pound of butter.
‘You’re not our real mother,’ said Kyle and Krystal together, in their loudest voices.
The raccoon mother wiped the butter from her whiskers, which by this time were poking through her skin. ‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘Whoop-de-do, clever of you. So what? I like it here.’
‘We’ll trade,’ said Krystal. ‘Give us our real mother back and you can have a dozen eggs, extra large, organic!’
‘No deal,’ said the raccoon mother. ‘Here I am and here I stand, with all you have at my command.’
Krystal knew that once anyone started rhyming it was best to reply in the same way, so she said, ‘Very well then, we shall see; and by the way, I’ve got your key!’
‘My key!’ shrieked the raccoon. For without the key she could never get back into the Full Moon Shopping Mall, and would have to stay in her raccoon shape all the time. She dropped to all fours and advanced on the children, teeth bared, but Kyle waved the baseball bat and she backed off.
‘Now, take us to our mother spit-spot,’ said Krystal, ‘or I’m flushing this key down the toilet.’
So the raccoon mother drove the children to the Full Moon Shopping Mall, and Krystal used the key to unlock the front door, and then the door to the butcher’s shop, and there was their mother, hanging up on a hook without her skin. She didn’t look very healthy at all. But when the raccoon peeled off the mother’s skin and slid the mother back into it, she came to life again, and once she had all her clothes back on she was as good as new. ‘My goodness, children,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I lost track of the time!’
‘What else is new?’ said Krystal. ‘Don’t you know you got skinned? Go outside and get into the car, and wait for us there. It’s important!’ So the mother did.
Krystal broke all the extra large organic eggs into a bowl and set it on the floor. The raccoon lapped them up with pleasure. While it was doing that, Krystal slipped the key to Kyle. ‘Run like the wind,’ she said, ‘and hide the key in a trash bin. Then get into the car. Fast!’ So Kyle ran like the wind.
The raccoon finished the eggs, and stood up on its hind legs. It was indeed a very large raccoon. ‘Now,’ it growled, ‘my key, my key! It belongs to me! Then we will see what we will see!’ Its eyes were redder than ever, and Krystal knew that, since raccoons are no respecters of deals, once it had the key it would surely jump on her and bite her to death.
She stood on her tiptoes, ready to run. ‘Your key is hidden in a bin. When you find it, you will win, and can always get back in,’ said Krystal. She scooted out the door with the raccoon right behind her, snarling with rage. But the car was ready and waiting, with Kyle and the mother inside, and Krystal hopped into it, and they sped away, back to their house. And the mother was never late for dinner again.
And that is why, from that day to this, you will see the urban raccoons in the vast but horizontal city of Toronto tipping over trash bins and rummaging through the trash inside them: they are looking for the key to the Full Moon Shopping Mall. And if they ever find it, take my advice: don’t go in. Or you too may find that you’ve been skinned.
Snip, snap, my thread is spun, but other tales have just begun.
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. In addition to the classic The Handmaid’s Tale, her novels include Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin – winner of the 2000 Booker Prize – and the MaddAddam trilogy: Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. She is the winner of many awards, which, in addition to the Booker, include the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, France’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Italy’s Premio Mondello and, in 2014, the Orion Book Award for Fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the title of Companion of Literature by The Royal Society of Literature. Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto, Canada.