The Flight of the Golden Bird Read online

  To my darling Oliver Duncan

  Acknowledgements

  Research and writing of The Flight of the Golden Bird has been supported by an investment from Creative Scotland for professional development. Margaret Hubbard of Craigroyston Community High School first published the introductory text by Duncan Williamson in “Listen and Learn”, The Media Education Journal, Winter (XIII, 1992). Maurice Fleming’s article “Christmas with the Travellers”, in The Scots Magazine (December 1983), inspired this collection of seasonal tales. Flight

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  The Twelve Seasons

  Rabbit’s Tail

  The Hedgehog’s Race

  Hugh and the Angel

  The Flight of the Golden Bird

  The Nightingale

  The Boy and the Snake

  Spider and the Fly

  Lion and the Four Bulls

  The Twelve White Swans

  Freddy Far-off

  Princess and the Glass Hill

  The Steed and the Bell

  Cripple John

  Dog and the Manger

  The Hare and the Scarecrow

  The Henwife and Old Father Time

  Death in a Nut

  Glossary of Scottish Words

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Duncan Williamson (1928–2007) was one of Scotland’s Travelling People, born on the shores of Loch Fyne. He has been celebrated as the bearer of Scotland’s greatest national treasure, the richest trove of story and song in Europe. How Duncan came to be the custodian of such a valuable oral tradition is in itself a fascinating story. He explained:

  As Travelling People we were very poor. We didn’t have radio or television. Mother and Father could not read. They had no need to read, because our education came through stories and songs. You gathered round the campfire in the late evening and you were told stories that would last you through your life. They were never written down in any books. Some were very old, having been passed down by word of mouth through hundreds of generations.

  Stories were told to you as a matter of teaching. Because every particular story had its own lesson. Oh, there were many wonderful tales. There were tales for the small ones about animals, there were ghost tales, tales of witches, spirits, bogles, giants, ogres. Tales of farmers. Tales of everything that would teach you to grow up naturally in your own environment in life.

  Now my father would say, “Sit down there and listen carefully. Because by listening to this story you’re going to learn something that will teach you in life. And remember, carry the story with you all of your days. Because this story was told to me by my father.” And that’s why stories were so important to the Travelling People, even around Christmas time.

  Father would say, “Well, thank God this is Christmas Eve. Come doon beside me and I’ll tell you a story. Now remember, children, any toy I could buy – what’s the sense of buying you a toy when you’ll only break it! It’ll be destroyed in a couple of days. Even if I had the money to afford it. But this story will last you the entire time of your life.”

  My father told me a story when I was only five years old. Now that’s almost exactly sixty years ago. And I can remember that tale the way he told it to me, just the very way. I can visualise him sitting there by the fireside, a young man putting coals in his pipe, you know, smoking his pipe. And all the little kids gathered round the fire, he sitting there telling them a beautiful Christmas tale – which was far better to us now when I look back than anything he could have bought for us.

  And the old Travellers knew in their own minds that they were leaving something behind, a treasure that we could treasure their memory by. I mean, Travelling People didn’t need to go, when their old people died, buy a great granite tombstone and put it in a graveyard to remember them by. They didn’t need that. They had things that were more important: the beautiful stories told to them. And the moment they told that story over again, they could picture in their mind their father, their mother, their granny, their uncle who had told them the great story. The photo, the picture in their mind, would never die as long as the stories remained with them. And that’s what the old people left with us. Because they knew the same thing had happened to them when they were young. And that’s what made storytelling so wonderful.

  When we walked on the roads on a cold winter’s day and we were wet and tired and hungry, you know, travelling on, each carrying a part of our little bundle on our way, to help us when we got to a camping place at night – we were miserable and tired. But once the tents were up, the fires were kindling, we had a little to eat, got ourselves dried, then it was story time. The thought of everything else, the day’s torture, was gone till the next time again. After a good storytelling session everybody was happy. You know, it was great, magical! I’ve got many wonderful memories of my childhood. Life was really hard. Life was rough and we were very poor. But we were very happy, really happy as children.

  I think the happiness comes from the love and respect from parents to children and children to parents. That’s the most important thing of all, what really makes life happy for anyone, I would say. And that’s what our stories were told us for in the first beginning.

  The stories chosen for the present collection follow the solar year and mark the progress of its seasons according to Traveller tradition. Ancestral storytellers of the Travelling People knew the foundation for behaviour, their work and their love for family was a natural order. Again, Duncan explains:

  The Travelling children learned the crafts of their people, basketry and metal work, from the very earliest age, when they were able to sit next to their fathers and mothers. And as a child you grew up to revere Mother Nature, because Mother Nature was your primary teacher. She taught you how to collect berries, how to collect food. She grew animals and plants which supplied the materials for your making things. And Mother Nature gave you cures from herbs. The Travelling People were known for their cures and their healing powers, and it was because they preferred to stick to their own beliefs and ways of thinking that the settled community came to distrust them. They were different. For example, schools were not valued by the Travelling community. Instead, stories were told and retold and passed on. Stories were the education which gave you the lessons you needed to grow up to be a good person.

  The stories in this collection show a world that is drawn from the natural order of the seasons. But more than a simple alignment of subjects and events to periods of the year, the natural order in traditional story is seen to endorse and uphold the ethical foundation of human life; what it is to be a good person.

  “The Twelve Seasons” begins in winter darkness, the forest bereft of fruit and nuts and food. Survival is only possible by a moral imperative which will not tolerate greed or wickedness. The woodland elves control the twelve seasons, but they do more than that; they sustain virtue. Sweet and helpful Mary triumphs over unnatural adversity and lives happily ever after.

  In the stories that follow, light lengthens as bright mornings and a full moon herald spring, wakening wild animals to new life; rabbits, hares and hedgehogs become naturally active, finding a balance of wholesome diversity. Wit is rewarded while the proud fall.

  Then summer brings its fullness. Swallows arrive with their messages, the first nightingale sings, our dispirited golden bird is freed to join his mate. Strawberries, spiders and flies take over the gardens. Still, with the height of summer comes frightening reality; old age and cunning demand the death of weaker creatures in “Lion and the Four Bulls”. At the sun’s zenith man makes his gravest mistake: a chi
ld is sacrificed. “The Boy and the Snake” is a story with roots that stretch as far back as anything we can imagine in writing, to the Sanskrit Panchatantra. As part of this warm season’s ripening, humans acquire knowledge; young ones learn to add, collect and sift information through experience. Here are the well-loved stories of Jack, bringing the maturity of true love and nature home to the listener like no other. “Princess and the Glass Hill” is an excellent example of Mother’s youngest son, who may be lazy, a misfit, unruly and untidy, but always – by stamina and proper values – Jack comes out on top. Only a young man of moral worth can solve the problems and settle the disputes. Even Death must take a blow from the young son in “Death in a Nut”, when Jack decides to intervene, and save his mother from the old man with the scythe on his back.

  The back-end of the year, autumn, is represented by a story of major change in society. “The Steed and the Bell” describes clearly how law and order get established, how unforgivable wrong is punished. Following the humbled knight and his faithful steed, finally stabled, we face the winter again.

  Days cold and short, nights long and frigid put an end to life’s fullness, with the old and infirm at risk of dying. It is time for the coming of Spirit, and the Travelling People know well the meaning of this season. While the wealth of stories told by the Travelling People of Scotland are undoubtedly pagan and pre-Christian in form and content, a good many tales owe their depth and breadth of understanding to ancient Christian beliefs. Three stories in this collection pertain to Christmas: the deeply compassionate “Cripple John”; the birth of Christ through the eyes of the old collie in “Dog and the Manger”; and the joyous “The Hare and the Scarecrow”, a tribute to the poor, inanimate scarecrow, who makes all productive life possible on the farm. Leading us into the most important of all celebrations for the Travelling People of Scotland, the New Year, is “The Henwife and Old Father Time”. This story gives the assurance of life eternal, for Time – which makes you older – itself never dies. And as Duncan says, “Everyone looks forward to the New Year coming in. It is a new beginning.” Finally, “Death in a Nut” brings us back to the first month of the year, and affirms the cycle of seasonal life, in this very popular and most meaningful of all Traveller tales.

  Seven of the eighteen stories are published for the first time in this collection. Eleven others have been previously published: “The Twelve Seasons”, “The Boy and the Snake” and “Lion and the Four Bulls” from The Genie and the Fisherman (Cambridge University Press Schoolbooks, 1991); “Rabbit’s Tail” was a reading level two schoolbook from Cambridge University Press (1996); “The Hedgehog’s Race” first appeared in Mary Medlicott’s anthology Time for Telling (Kingfisher, 1991); “Dog and the Manger” and “The Hare and the Scarecrow” were published by Canongate in Tell Me a Story for Christmas (1987); Penguin published “Death in a Nut”, “The Twelve White Swans” and “The Henwife and Old Father Time” in A Thorn in the King’s Foot (1987); “The Steed and the Bell” is from Central Regional Council’s reading project for local Traveller children (1984).

  Linda Williamson

  The Twelve Seasons

  My father told me this story years and years ago when I was wee. I never saw it in a book or heard anyone before him telling it. Where he’d heard it, I don’t know.

  Many, many years ago, there was a woodcutter and his wife. They lived in the forest and they had one little girl. But by sheer bad luck the woodcutter’s wife took ill and she died, left the woodcutter to look after the small girl himself. He tried his best, took her with him everywhere he went, taught her whatever he knew and reared her up the best way he could till she was about eight or nine years old. Then he went and married again. And the woman he married had a daughter o’ her own. And he’d fetched her back with him to stay in the house.

  But the wee girl’s stepmother hated her, ye know, hated her terribly, and so did her stepsister. They made her, Mary was her name, do everything – all the work, everything. They really despised her. If there were a bad or a dirty chore to be done, miles to go for a message or milk or anything, Mary got the job o’ doing it. And she was a lovely little girl. And her stepsister was jealous o’ her.

  But the older Mary began to get the more beautiful she got, and her father really adored her. Her stepmother was jealous of this, thought that her father wasn’t paying enough attention to his stepdaughter. So, both o’ them, the stepmother and the stepsister, made a plan that the sooner they got rid of Mary the better.

  So one night her father had been away in the forest. And the next morning he told them, “I’ll not be home tonight because I’ve too far to walk to cut wood. I’ll stay in the forest for the night and I’ll be home tomorrow.”

  It was in the month of January, the wintertime, and he says, “The dark, it’s too dark for me coming home from the forest. So there’s a little hut and I’ll stay there tonight. But look after Mary and see that she disna wander too far away.”

  “We’ll do that,” says his wife.

  But about four o’clock on that winter’s evening the stepmother and stepdaughter made a plan to send Mary out into the forest, to see would she get lost.

  Stepmother took a basket and she said, “Here, Mary, I’ve a job for ye. Get yer coat and go out in the forest. Get me some strawberries because I want to make a strawberry pie. And don’t come back till ye get them!”

  So Mary, being so kind and so tender, so nice-hearted and such a gentle little girl, she just naturally takes the basket, puts on her cape and walks out into the forest. Away she goes wandering through the forest. Anything to please her stepmother. So she walks on and walks on; it’s getting darker and darker. She wanders here and wanders there. She sits down on a log and she starts to cry. She knows within herself that it is a hopeless case looking for strawberries in the middle o’ winter.

  But she looks up and sees a fire, a great big fire, a bonfire blazing in the middle o’ the forest. And, feeling cold, she says to herself, “It disna matter who it is... it might be some nice kind person. And at least they would give me a heat at their fire. I’m awfae cold.”

  So she walks up, she gets near the fire. She looks... and there are twelve little men sitting round, twelve woodland elves all sitting round the fire, this great big fire.

  And this one jumps up to his feet, he looks round. “Come on, Mary,” he says, “ye’re welcome here! We’ve been expecting ye.”

  They took her in, put her sitting down beside the fire, tellt her to heat herself. They dried her cape, put it back on her.

  So this one he introduces all the rest: “Mary,” he says, “we are the twelve months of the year, and we are woodland elves. We stay in the forest and we’ve been watching ye since you were very, very small. But we never came near ye or never interfered. But now we see what yer stepmother’s trying to do on ye, it’s time we took a hand.”

  “Well,” said Mary, “my stepmother sent me into the forest to find strawberries, and I know it’s hopeless searching for strawberries in the middle o’ winter.”

  And this one standing up, he says, “July, this is something for you to do!”

  So this wee one by the fire – he stands up, says, “I’m July!”

  So January says, “Here, take Mary’s basket and get her some strawberries. You’re July; you can get strawberries.”

  “Sure,” says July, “I can get strawberries!” Away goes July. Within seconds he’s back with a lovely basket of strawberries.

  “Now,” says January, “take a coal from the fire and guide Mary back through the forest.”

  And all the twelve seasons, the twelve months o’ the year, bade her goodnight. July led her through the forest safely back to near her house, shaking this coal, making a light on the path the whole way. He bade goodnight to Mary and told her if she ever needed anything always come back again.

  So Mary goes, back she goes to the door. In she comes, shakes the snow off her cape. Her stepmother and her stepsister are surprised to see her.
They thought she was lost and etten in the forest wi’ wild animals. So the stepmother walks and looks in the basket. She sees the lovely basket of strawberries.

  She snaps them out of Mary’s hand, says, “Ye got the strawberries?”

  “Yes,” says Mary, “I got the strawberries.”

  So she took the strawberries and said nothing, see!

  That fared very well... Home came Mary’s daddy the next night. Mary never said anything about it.

  So the next night he said, “Look, I’ve a lot o’ work to do in the forest, and I’m going to stay away for three nights. It’ll be three nights before I come back the next time.” So early in the morning he kissed wee Mary goodbye. “Now,” he said, “be a good girl till I come home.”

  “I’ll be a good girl, Daddy,” she said.

  “And do everything,” he said, “yer mummy tells ye to do.”

  Away he went to his work. But Mary didna like her stepmother, because her stepmother and her stepsister didna like her.

  That night, just about as it was getting dark, the stepmother calls for Mary again. “Mary, I want you!”

  “What is it now, Mummy?” she said.

  “I want a basket of brambles, and you shall go and get them. And don’t come back till ye get them!”

  “Well,” says Mary, “I’ll go and try.”

  So away goes Mary with the basket through the forest. Now this time she knows where she’s going. So she wanders on and on and on, keeps to the same path and remembers the way that July took her, right down through the forest to this hollow. She sees the fire again. Up she goes. And like the first time, there sitting round the fire are the twelve months, the seasons.

  So up jumps January again. “Welcome to the fire, Mary!” he says. “We knew you were coming. What is it this time?”