Leaving Avalon
A personal history of a fictional island
I grew up a little under an hour’s drive away from Glastonbury, a small town in Somerset, that famous West Country county of dwindling cider orchards and Ministry of Defence bases. I visited many times as a child and teenager, often with my dad. We’d wander around the high street, drop by the esoteric booksellers, crystal vendors and health food shops, and climb the hill that rises above the town. Approaching Glastonbury from the north, along the Wells Road, this hill can be seen in the distance; the eye snags on the stone tower at its summit. Rising from an otherwise flat landscape, one’s first instinct is that the hill, with its smooth, whale-backed slope and terraced ridges, must be man-made. If it is dawn (and the weather is just right) a mist hangs above the surrounding fields, and the hill, perforating this mist, seems to hover in the sky, a mirage or visual glitch that severs its connection to the earth and reality entirely.
The hill, which climbs some five hundred feet above sea level, is known as the Glastonbury Tor (tor meaning ‘high rock’, likely cognate with either the Gaelic tòrr or the Old Welsh tẁrr). The tower at its summit, St. Michael’s, is the remnant of a fourteenth-century church which was destroyed in the aftermath of the Dissolution of 1539 (its abbot was subsequently hanged, drawn and quartered inside). The Tor is situated on the Somerset Levels, a vast low-lying coastal plain which once consisted of peat bogs, marshes and wetland, veined with rivers and streams. In the Middle Ages, serious land reclamation and drainage efforts were undertaken by local monasteries in order to make it suitable for agricultural use. But the Levels remained prone to flooding; a problem that persists today, despite modern efforts to mitigate it. Moving into our new, chaotic era of escalated precipitation, severe flooding has become more frequent. During such deluges, the Tor occasionally shifts into the past, resembles something that it had once been: an island.
An astonishing, contradictory medley of myth and superstition has been heaped upon this land-locked island over the millennia. One of the Tor’s foundational myths links it with Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail. Another suggests that the Tor is the Isle of Avalon, a location in Arthurian legend where the sword Excalibur was forged and the mystical enchantress, Morgan le Fay, was said to reside. Many of these Arthurian standards were created and perpetuated by Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his twelfth century Historia regum Britanniae, an influential work of literature that melded history, fiction and prophecy to spin a fantastical saga of Britain’s lineage. The Historia connected Britain with Troy, portrayed the Britons as triumphant conquerors, and promoted the progress of the Christian faith. Like Virgil’s Aeneid, Monmouth’s Historia imparts racial patriotism and fortified national identity by elevating the idea of ‘Britain’ to that unassailable realm of myth and divinity. But the Tor was not linked to the Isle of Avalon in the Historia; the monks of Glastonbury Abbey made that connection, claiming to have uncovered Arthur’s grave at the hill’s summit. This was, of course, nonsense: a pseudo-archeological discovery which aimed to attract wealthy pilgrims to the monastery, a myth dug up from the soil for financial gain.
Countless other, decidedly far-out myths and superstitions arose around Glastonbury Tor throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, carried by various waves of Western Esotericism, and continue to attract pilgrims and spiritually-minded visitors to this day. Among them, that the Tor is hollow and contains a dragon, crystal cavern or gateway to the afterlife; that the Tor is part of a terrestrial zodiac; that the Tor is a node on a Ley line and thereby conducts or channels ‘earth energies’. Whatever one’s opinion of such ideas, it can safely be said that this island is a site of enchanted thinking. The island is a fiction, or a haven for fictions. The stories and legends attributed to it bloom, flower and then putrefy; they leech into the earth and alter the environment. The resulting locale is neither real nor unreal, but an in-between place; an island that hovers in the imagination.
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My dad’s interest in Glastonbury’s latter-day lore was only superficial – he didn’t drink the New Age Kool Aid, so to speak – but his attraction to the Tor’s Arthurian associations was sincere. On our visits, he would namecheck King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, Merlin, and so on, always in a deep, self-mocking tone of voice that made light of these references while somehow conveying a degree of high seriousness, like a knowingly bad parody of Christopher Lee. I’m not sure what it was, exactly, about Arthurian legend that fascinated him. Maybe only that it promised to tincture the brute, violent reality of Britain’s Christian national identity and heritage with magic; to transform a land of gloomy Protestantism into a dreamscape. Such a transformation would no doubt appeal to a man who was an unequivocal atheist (‘Don’t worry,’ he said to me, in one of our last conversations, when he knew that he would soon die, ‘I’m not turning religious, or anything’) and yet who also felt a strong attachment to his identity as a ‘country boy’, which is to say, a countryman.
Glastonbury’s unavoidably alternative social fabric also resonated with another side of my dad – his engrained anti-authoritarianism and evergreen hatred of the right wing, which was, I remember, almost spiritual in its fervour. In his youth, he was a rocker-turned-punk-turned-post-punk acolyte; he wore a pin in his ear and drainpipe jeans ‘before they were cool’. The rebelliousness of spirit that I occasionally saw in him, growing up, must have only been a relic of what it once was, perhaps diminished by the responsibilities of adult life, the disappointments and crimes of New Labour, and merged – uncomfortably and incongruously – with his career as a secondary school teacher. Mostly, it found an outlet in music, which he liked to listen to very loudly while driving very fast. On those drives to Glastonbury, he’d play the same CDs on repeat, drumming the steering wheel: Caravan, Steely Dan, Echo and The Bunnymen, and Van Morrison; the cracked CD case of Avalon Sunset, with its cryptic cover art of a swan on a crepuscular lake, left a weird imprint on my childhood memory.
But if he was pulled to the Tor because it spoke to or rekindled this youthful nonconformism, this aspect of the place also seemed to repel him. His relationship to the town (or his appraisal of its pilgrims) was skewed. The tie-dyed, barefooted, wayfaring habitués of Glastonbury would frequently cause him to widen his eyes at me, or to arch an eyebrow; private, collusive signals that meant to convey prejudice and astonishment, that meant to say that he and I were different from them; that we were better than them. My dad had aspirations. He aspired to a certain lifestyle, a certain level of comfort. If British social class can be thought of as series of territories with volatile borders, I’d place my family on the very outer edges of the middle class: my dad wanted to migrate to the interior. I think that his frustration at being unable to do so clouded his kinder instincts, hardened into censoriousness. He was so quick to look down on others, on strangers, on anyone, a quality that was aspirational in itself, because it mimicked the behaviour of those in the interior: the very British, passive-aggressive incivility of the well-to-do, people who believe that the denigration and judgement of others is a canny investment, or a surety, the only thing mooring them in affluence.
My memories of those trips with him are impressionistic. I recall brief images – thrifting a copy of Ted Hughes’ Crow in one of the bookshops; neon-green slime in the stone watering trough in a field at the base of the hill; everything, in fact, very green and lush. I was seventeen the last time he and I climbed the Tor together. It was a little under two years before he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia, an aggressive and terrifyingly efficient illness which killed him just nine months later. I wonder if it was in him even then, whether those mutations were already beginning to accrue inside his marrow. With typical teenage solipsism, it didn’t occur to me that these excursions to the Tor were significant to him, and I was often moody, uncommunicative, harbouring private ideas and opinions that could not possibly (so I believed) be understood by others.
Or maybe I was irked by his aerobic fitness, the unblinking determination with which he climbed the Tor along its steepest gradient. As an athletically disinclined teenager (especially one who also wanted to be a poet) I would have rather wandered along at a dreamy tempo, or loafed in the grass, chasing castles in the air. My dad’s quintessential trait was meeting the outside world head-on. He seemed to take pleasure from punitive feats of outdoor endurance (daily long distance running in all weather) and astonishing stupidity (hiking in heatwaves without bringing water, because ‘it won’t take long’). Traits that, as an adult, I have come to acquire, too, and which astrology-minded friends have deemed ‘Aries behaviour’. I would ignore this astrological evaluation entirely, were it not for the cosmic coincidence that I was born on my dad’s birthday, and feel in my bones – or wish to believe – that this set my attitude to the world at a similar angle to his.
*
I found a photo of him, recently, standing near the top of Glastonbury Tor in amber light, holding me as a newborn. The lichen-specked St Michael’s Tower rises behind him. He’s wearing Wayfarers, a sweatshirt, jogging bottoms and boat shoes, the ensemble of a new father who can’t quite let go of the 1980s; who hasn’t quite let go of his youth. Sheep are dotted around him on the green slopes, like balls of cotton wool. In the background, where hill meets sky, there’s a curious, out of focus figure: a person dressed in white, evocative of a ghost or angel, whose indifferent incursion on this scene makes the photograph, somehow, seem so alive, rather than a too-perfect, uncannily cool portrait of a man who is no longer here. The figure in white arrests my attention – its ethereality lends a quickness to the image, turning it from a static relic into something stranger, something that still shimmers with a wonderful and inexplicable light.
The photograph also testifies to the presence of its photographer: in the image, the shadow of the photographer, my mother, falls upwards across the grass, inclining towards me and my dad. When I asked her about this photo, hoping for more context, she didn’t really remember taking it. She even suggested that the baby, half-hidden behind a sling and wrapped in several layers, might be my sister rather than me. Worried that I was disappointed by this, she quickly recanted, feigned a moment of revelation, and declared that it was me after all, she was sure. But of course she wasn’t. The photograph has become unfastened from the moment in time which it captured. It has become unattached from the memory of its photographer, and the memories of the subjects it depicts. It is an incomplete or partial document, an incomplete or partial history, and in its gaps and absences I am free to invent and cultivate my own story about its origins and imbue it with as much or as little significance as I wish.
*
I went back to the Tor last summer for the first time in sixteen years. The double decker from Bristol, so like a passenger ferry with its lumbering bulk, bobbed and jostled on the ninety-minute journey. The road curved past Apple Tree Glamping; a billboard advertising the Lancelot Estate Agent sale-by-auction of 250 acres; a bungalow whose front porch was stacked with stone statuettes of dragons, buddhas, caricatures of Confucius. The roadside trees were in verdure (oaks, elms and willow, many choked by ivy) and as the bus neared Glastonbury, the Tor and its tower flickered in and out of sight, disappearing and reappearing through curtains of leaves.
A quick roam around the high street suggested that not all that much had changed. Only, I sensed a latent edginess, the kind that swells in humid English summers just before a storm breaks. Everything felt slightly peculiar. A vintage shop was offering fifty percent off its fifty percent off sale. At the bottom of the high street, a dozen or so people, decorated in spirals and streaks of body paint, danced as a white guy played Bob Marley on a fuzzy, electro-acoustic guitar. Beside them, there was an enormous inflatable cube, its PVC material patterned with the iconic strings of neon ‘code’ seen in The Matrix films. On each face of this cube, iPads had been crudely attached, their screens showing an icon of a red pill. Occasionally, a passerby approached the cube and tapped the pill on the screen. The guitarist played ‘Get Up, Stand Up’. I headed for the Tor.
At the base of the Tor are two natural sacred springs, both of which are said to have magical properties. A Victorian well house covers one of these springs and has been transformed into a place of spiritual worship. Realising that I had never actually been inside on any of my prior visits, I stopped in en route to the hill. In the dank, dripping interior, I found a group of women in white gowns, garlanded with flowers, bathing and chanting in the central pool. Thick white candles had been placed around the edge of this stone basin, some so knotted with bulbs of melted, hardened wax as to resemble ghostly tree stumps. Knowing nothing about this ceremony, I had no particular opinion on it, but I felt my presence there was its own statement: I was a spectator, which made these sermonising, bathing women a spectacle. It was hot by the sacred spring. The air felt extremely close. I watched for another minute, and then exited.
I climbed the Tor along the steep gradient. At the summit, I lay down in the grass, ate an apple, and looked out across the Levels. The greyish, overcast sky and green fields merged into one another. Sheep drifted across a pasture at least a mile distant, like surreal tadpoles in a shallow pond. There were a number of tourists at the top of the Tor, picnicking and taking photographs of the views and tower. I overheard snatches of Chinese and French, and the frontiering registers of American-English. A middle-aged man in beads and outsize hemp clothing spoke at two young, fairycore women about universal consciousness and Gaia and so on. As the women made moves to leave, he insisted on an embrace. They capitulated, and he held on several beats too long, utilising the innocuous, impotent guise of male spirituality as an expedient to cop a feel, like a cult leader will leverage power through misogyny by first labelling it ‘love’. The women hurried away. The rain broke. I pitched the apple core over the edge and left.
The descent from the Tor – if one descends along the gentler incline of its southern slope – is inlaid with large stone steps. As I walked down them in the drizzle, I felt a twinge in my knee, and had to stop for a moment to stretch. And then I experienced a very clear memory. I remembered, on our visits, how my dad would always complain that these steps were awkwardly spaced; too large for one stride and yet not large enough to comfortably accommodate two, such that descending them forced an odd canter that put a strain on his knees. These complaints, I recalled, seemed to grow in intensity with each visit, as if every trip to the Tor was a lesson in the corrosiveness of time – its attritional quality – how it wears out and fatigues the body.
My adolescence, I remembered, felt so marshy and vast – it was something I had to crawl out from or else perish in – and yet my dad, traipsing down this side of the island, made adult life seem intensely pressurised, something brittle and liable to break, something that rushed towards an end. Recalling this, I was struck with another realisation; I am the age he was, in that photograph, when he stood at the summit with his child in his arms. And I had the eerie impression that as I lurched down the stone steps I was passing in front of him, I was passing in front of a point in his life, like two planets in transit, and that when I reached the base of the island I would no longer recognise where I was, but would be so happy that I had come.