The Listening Voice 6

The Listening Voice The newsletter of the Equi-Phallic Alliance & Poetry Field Club Issue 6 / Messidor CCXIII “Neither Noddyland Nor Pogles Wood” LET’S RETURN TO THE OLD WAYS! Modern antiquarians are not interested in fashioned to talk about it now. Some say stones arranged in circles or in racial or she didn’t die, but still waits patiently - This way to Utopia cultural stereotypes. They have gone into trapped in childhood - making up stories. the time before memory where they have The “mesh of narrative” - the sum total of Society’s body was never found. After the fun with the prehistory of the self! Come on all the stories told - is a psychic landscape. holidays the other children pretended not to children, this way... This ground is more real to us than geology miss her. They seemed to forget that Society and the surfaces it underpins. We walk this Antisocial Behaviour - the new had ever existed. In her place, goody-goody ground - trapped within the given meanings, Community was creeping around their lycanthropy the rules of this or that - or we break the parents and teachers, repeating all of her The concept of Society had been getting meanings down and go into the underworld, lessons as if they were true. We all know into trouble for some time, then late one beneath the roots of language. There are what antisocial behaviour is, but who can evening - as the shadows lengthened across caverns - there is the hidden machinery of describe social behaviour? Was it really the playing fields - Society vanished on her the story and how it might be told - and little more than obedience? way home. The police couldn’t find her, echoing spaces, an emptiness. Somewhere neither alive nor dead (but Society had If we try to compare yesterday with today in the distance we can hear Society screaming. always got on their nerves). we find only idealised representations of Any day now we will be setting her free. redundant manners. We become trapped Cheeky though she was, and she was The land is all around us. It is the perfect between two versions of the absurd. It can always answering back, Society was never propaganda delivery system, a medium for seem that we are viewing the world through really bad. It’s a long time since Society mass alienation. Each narrative - each yesterday’s technologies, only to be disappeared, it seems quaint and old obvious “truth”, each separate narrative consumed by a sense of nostalgia for the layer - is a machine, buried in what we past. We want to go there. We do not know perceive as “nature”. Power creates the the way. But the old way still exists. narrative fictions that validate power and This is the road to Trumpton - not many there are flavours of the story to suit every people know this now - you turn left at political taste. Anyone who wants status and Camberwick Green. Utopia isn’t a fantasy, the recognition that implies must negate it’s a memory of what we did when we were those who don’t behave. This is the sadism young. The only meaningful revolution of everyday life. It draws us into the would be one enacted by children, for only narrative vortex called “adulthood”. then could technology and its products Fear & Loathing in Camberwick Green embody - rather than represent - play. In 1966 Gordon Murray brought us The adults can’t get it right. They have Camberwick Green as part of BBC television’s ruined everything. The mass murder of “Watch With Mother” series, then came adults is thus the ultimate expression of Trumpton in 1967 and Chigley in 1969. “Here Noddy says: don’t get angry children, childhood innocence. Let us arm the is a box, a musical box, wound up and ready get homicidal! children and loose them onto the streets! to play. But this box can hide a secret Great Goddess with her consort? They are inside. Can you guess what is in it today?” only Mum and Dad luvey. Now stop your nonsense and go to bed. And out of the box would rise the episode’s star character. The background would then The Trumpton Witch Trials appear and the story would begin. In November 1999 the UK press suddenly Camberwick Green was a small village near took an interest in the fate of all the Trumpton. As its name implies it was a green, Trumptonshire puppets, after Gordon surrounded by shops, including a fishmongers, Murray admitted that he had burned them bakers and post office. Nearby was Colley’s years ago. “I burnt them in a bonfire in my Mill, Pippin Fort and Jonathon Bell’s Farm. garden. I’d had them for some time after the Windy Miller lives at Colley’s Mill, which is transmissions had stopped. And various just outside Camberwick Green. The railway people had said “oh they’re old fashioned”, and they always were old fashioned actually. runs nearby. Windy makes home brew cider prehistory when he invented Wicca, his They were old fashioned from the word “go”. and whittles wood. When going into or out of “religion of the craft”. This is why Wicca is They had been used an awful lot you know so his windmill he amazingly always manages to such a childish religion and can only be I burnt them, together with the scenery.” miss the sails. Windy is rather old fashioned described using primary colours. It and very superstitious - he believes in institutionalises the childhood physical The Daily Telegraph of Wednesday 10th whistling for the wind, and touching a punishments, and associated sense of November carried an article: “The bonfire sweep’s collar for luck. He keeps a cow for powerlessness, endured by Gardner as a that did for Trumpton Fire Brigade”. The milk and free range chickens for eggs. He is boy. This was particularly intense because article carried a picture of Trumptonshire’s referred to as “Mr. Miller” on several Gardner never went to school and - the third Windy Miller, and a picture of Gordon occasions. On Sundays he burns witches. of five boys - he never really had a proper Murray with the caption “no regrets”. The Windy Miller, Windy Miller sharper than go on a nipple. smouldering corpse of a witch can be seen in the background, still attached to its stake. a thorn, Gardner’s claims about a New Forest witch Like a mouse he’s spry and nimble when coven are not only implausible, but they The following day, the Daily Telegraph he grinds the corn. make him implausible too. As a character he carried a follow up article: “Soldier escaped Like a bird he’ll watch the wind and is less realistic than the figures that emerged Camberwick Green bonfire”. It told how listen for the sound from the Trumpton clock tower. They are Gordon Murray’s daughter, Emma, gave one Which says he has the wind he needs to sacred - or “double” - puppets: they are of the Pippin Fort soldiers to a friend, Steve make the sails go round. “unreal” - being puppet representations of Fletcher, as a birthday present in 1986. This The circular imagery present in automatons - as opposed to the puppets of puppet, which now lives in a shoe box in Camberwick Green - firstly of the rotating “real” characters such as Windy Miller or Stamford (Lincs), may therefore be the only platform of the musical box, but also of the Gardner himself. In recent years the surviving citizen of Trumptonshire. mill - implies the cyclical pattern of the development of “eclectic paganism” has Gordon Murray created an alignment seasons. It is clear from the archetypal made worship of arbitrary authorities into an between the mythical “burning times” of the characters associated with Trumpton that the easy lifestyle option or “the pagan way of past and those of the future - As above, so inhabitants of Britain’s most hermetic life”. Children know this as “pretend”. It is a below? As before, so after! - and a neat way county were worshippers of both a Goddess very powerful magical tool and it is called for children to participate in a traditional and a God, each balanced in harmony as if “sympathetic magic” by the intellectual elite. community activity. Burning witches brings reminiscent of “the Old Religion”. Gardner recovered or pretended an early people of different generations together. The years hermeticism, a repressed tantrum. old ways are clearly the best. Every morning, the people of Trumpton take Calling it “the craft” he cast it like a spell, in their milk, open their shops and set out unleashing its power in a series of novels Yet more familiar symbols their wares. They do this with one eye on the and theatrical poses that impressed young The September 14th 1999 issue of the Daily town hall clock, and one ear too, for they and inexperienced “High Priestesses”. know that dead on the hour a slight rumble Mail included a letter by Gordon Murray, the from the recesses of the tower will announce During rituals Wiccans still mimic the Great Architect of Trumptonshire. A debate that pagan worship is about to begin. clunky movements of the automatons in the had developed in the letters page about the Trumpton clock tower. We played mummies True Location of Trumpton. He said: With a loud clonk the two doors on either and daddies in the woods when the moon “Camberwick Green, Trumpton and Chigley side of the clock face slide open. To the was full. But it all got very Freudian. The regular rhythm of a gay mechanical tune, are representative of real locations which the gilt figures of Sir Rufus and Lady de are one-and-a-half miles from each other in Trompe emerge and solemnly strike the an equidistant triangle.

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