Tributes to the Apple Tree Man
shadowed at the wassail by doppelgängers and crusaders
Two hundred town locals gather outside the 14th century stone barn where six women of various ages clad in polkadot vests and faux-flower tiaras wave multicoloured scarves in the air. A man cradles a concertina between his enormous palms like it’s a delicate animal and keys a tune, backed by fiddle players. It is dusk. I’m insufficiently layered, and the cold’s seeped through to my bones. My friend, who is visiting from London for the day, is fairing far better than me, wisely clad in thermals and woollen gloves and the like. She refers to herself, self-depreciatingly, as a DFL – a down from London – in recognition of her obvious outsider status at this thoroughly local, thoroughly West Country affair, an acronym likely familiar to city-dwellers who’ve dared day-trip to the rural ‘backwaters’ without taking precautions to disguise their urban mannerisms.
This is the town’s annual wassail, a traditional celebration in the cider-producing parts of England – most prominently, therefore, in the West Country – dating to the middle ages. During a wassail, cider is poured over the roots of the apple trees in the orchards and cider-drenched bread tied to the branches. Songs are sung about seeds and green leaves and so forth, accompanied by the banging of pots and pans, in an effort to scare off any evil spirits that might be hiding in the treetops. It’s particularly important to celebrate the largest, oldest tree, home to the Apple Tree Man, a vegetation deity whose health is coequal with the health of the orchard. It’s a fertility ritual, in essence, held to ensure a good harvest. This modern iteration of the wassail, however, has amalgamated a whole bunch of other weird-rural traditions – bagpipers, the Morris dancers we’re currently watching, and a Mummers Play, a kind of amateur folk theatre, the etymology of which – according to Wikipedia – comes from the Early New High German vermummen: to disguise oneself.
Gathered around a makeshift fire pit, watching the spinning ladies with their smiling flower-framed faces, a slightly off-key fiddle ringing out in the coming dark, the celebration is reminiscent of British folk horror, the festivities might pivot that way at any moment, a comparison so ready-to-hand that when my friend asks what happens at the end of the wassail I suggest that, as a DFL – that is, an outsider – she will be sacrificed to the flames inside a giant wicker man like in the film The Wicker Man, to which she replies that I am, in many respects, also a DFL and would be sacrificed too. When I rejoin that I’m from round ‘ere, I was born here, this ritual’s in my blood, my words, without meaning to, come out very deadpan, and the extent to which I’m joking or being serious is unclear to us both.
Then, standing at the edge of the crowd, we spot another pair of prospective DFLs, they stick out like sore thumbs, appear to have stepped right out of an Arket catalogue. What marks this pair of early-thirties millennials out, beyond their proclivity for Nordic minimalism, is their obvious trepidation: they’re keen to keep on the outskirts of proceedings, casting their eye over the folksy goings-on in a way that suggests a mix of nerviness, superciliousness and semi-ironic enjoyment, and I feel unjustifiable hostility toward them. I wonder if this pair are part of the great downshift my antisocial acquaintance the letting agent told me about, or perhaps, like me, they’re somewhere in-between, from here but no longer of here. In either case, encountering them at this wassail feels a bit like bumping into English tourists when travelling in a foreign country, and the ‘authenticity’ of your experience is punctured by the presence other compatriots, whose blatant spectatorship reminds you of your own. I scornfully imagine them telling their friends about the quaint weird little West Country tradition they barely partook in, maybe they’ll IG it, maybe they’ll even blog about it…
My friend and I shoulder our way to the front of the crowd, to put distance between ourselves and these prospective DFL doppelgängers, and to get a better view of the evening’s third activity, the Mummer’s Play. The central ‘mummers’ or ‘guisers’ are two men dressed as knights, one costumed in a purple and green suit of armour and plastered in dark purple body paint. The other is a slapstick crusader, in full patriotic regalia, the Cross of Saint George draped over his chainmail and painted on his face. It’s difficult to hear the rhymed script these guisers have devised, there’s too much ambient noise from the distracted audience, but the gist of it seems to be that the purple man – a ‘jabberwocky’, which is half-rhymed, at one point, I think, with ‘Tory’ – represents the forces of industrialisation, development, and capitalism. He shouts some couplets about his intent to cover the town – this town – in tarmac and factories and high-rise flats, and so forth. The crusader, meanwhile, decries this, proclaiming that the good people of the town – this town – are opposed to such capitalistic expansion, that they – we – understand, above all else, the importance and beauty of the birds and trees and fields.
The crusader is assisted in his sermonising by a third guiser, a woman in white face paint, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with an enormous CND symbol, whose role is a cross between hype woman and love interest, she screams from the crusader’s side nonsense words and yelps of encouragement, flailing her arms around, trying to rouse support from the audience. Inevitably, a battle ensues, and our crusader slays the purple man, whereupon a fourth guiser enters the scene: a very tall gentleman in yet more white face paint, carrying a briefcase on which the words ‘Dr. Compost’ are scrawled. This ghoulish Doc Compost mutters a mysterious incantation over the slain purple man, who is subsequently revivified. Smile writ large, eyes wide, the purple man claims to have seen things in his death-state, he travelled on wings above the green green fields of our green green land, it was beautiful, the earth is beautiful, nature is beautiful, he understands the error of his greedy polluting ways, and now his heart blooms with flowers and vines and birdsong tremolos in his ears forevermore…
Though this is merely some harmless amateur theatre, it’s difficult to ignore the way the script collapses its environmentalist message into an archetypal symbol of nationalism, the blonde-wigged crusader cast as custodian of our green and pleasant land, tasked with ousting the ‘purple’ threat, and how, spurred by the CND hype woman, we’re all encouraged to back him in his campaign. Difficult to ignore the false binary the script establishes between a perfect, pristine ‘rural’, and a polluted, populous ‘urban’, so neatly embodying the ‘myth functioning as memory’, identified by Raymond Williams, which haunts the English national mindset: the creation of an edenic pastoral imaginary, a before-time, a pure and untarnished Arcadia which is – for multifarious political and ideological ends – divested of the realities and conflicts of work and class that underpin actual rural life, and where the inextricable social connections between city and country are erased. One can trace versions of this myth-memory, argues Williams, back through the entire English canon. Coincidentally, not three miles from this stone barn is buried a Jacobean poet thoroughly from round ‘ere, Samuel Daniel, who was born, raised, and died in the county, and whose verse provides an early example of this phenomenon. Not myself a scholar of Jacobean poetry, I can’t tell if the double-negation is employed to ironic effect, satirising the very trend I’m talking about, though I doubt it:
O Happy, golden age!
Not for that rivers ran
With streams of milk, and honey dropped from trees;
Not that the earth did gage
Unto the husbandman
Her voluntary fruits, free without fees;
Not for no cold did freeze
Nor any cloud beguile
Th’eternal flowering spring
Wherein lived everything
And whereon th’heavens perpetually did smile:
Not for no ship had brought
From foreign shores or wars or wares ill-sought
At the close of the play, my friend and I seek a moment of respite by the fire pit, but before we can extract any warmth from its dwindling flames an elderly man with a megaphone, himself crowned with fake flowers, announces that it’s time for the ritual pouring of the cider, and he directs the crowd into an orderly line, which forms with peculiar speed. It’s pitch dark now, people are using their iPhones as torches, and we join the back of this unlikely procession, the crusader and his fellow guisers close at heel, marching slowly toward the muddy boundary of the orchard. The crowd is dense, we can’t see what’s going on, but the procuring and pouring of cider seems a process of bureaucratic sluggishness, all my extremities are numb, and I suggest that now’s the moment to decamp to the freehouse, fertility of the Apple Tree Man be damned, because I suspect most of these people will have the same idea and if we hang around until the end of the ceremony we won’t get a seat inside.
As we make our exit, the megaphoned foreman sets off a siren, announcing a one-minute ‘hullabaloo’ – the aforementioned clanging of pots and pans – and the crowd begins to roar. Suddenly worried that if we don’t involve ourselves in this final act we might incur the wrath of the evil woodland spirits, we spit words of enmity in the vague direction of the treetops, before racing to the pub. Not long after we arrive, successfully seated indoors, thawing out with two well-poured pints, who should walk in but the DFL doppelgängers. But they’re too late, the pub’s already packed, and after scouting for spare seats they’re forced to turn back into the cold night, to navigate the narrow alleyways that wend between the former woollen mills and factories, between the terraces of one-time workers’ cottages, the townhouses of long-dead, wealthy clothiers, and seek their libations elsewhere.
