1970s, page 6 of 15

The Spring on the Mountain, first published in 1973, was Judy Allen’s first novel. It evidently had some success because, after being published by Jonathan Cape, it was brought out by the Children’s Book Club (run by Foyles) in 1974, and then as a Puffin paperback in 1977. Like her second novel, The Stones of the Moon (which I looked at a few mewsings back), it takes some traditional YA elements (city kids spending their holidays in the country get tangled up in a mystery) and brings them in contact with early-70s concerns, such as Earth-mysteries, sacred sites, and the oppressive influence of the past.

A trio of twelve-year-olds, Emma, Michael and Peter, are spending the end of their school holidays at the cottage of Mr and Mrs Myers. Mr Myers has recently retired from a city job to live on the interest from his savings in “a large cottage in a high moorland valley”, and his wife has decided to earn a little extra (and, perhaps, stave off boredom) by taking in children for the holidays. Emma, Michael and Peter haven’t met before, and are, it seems, from quite different backgrounds (though we only learn about Peter’s, that I recall, and then only that he has a “blunt Yorkshire manner”), and at first they fail to gel. But they go for a walk, and soon get introduced to some local mysteries: there’s a lane with a sort of dark-feeling, maybe-haunted corner, and beyond that, over the moor, reached by a straight path, a single mountain that Peter instantly decides he wants to climb.

The trio are introduced to a local old woman, Mrs White, who provides some no-nonsense explanations about lingering energies and powers within the earth. For the haunted lane, there’s this:

“At some time… fear has been felt at that place, very, very strongly. No one knows what the cause of the fear was, and it doesn’t really matter. That’s gone long ago. But the emotion itself has become trapped and repeats itself in an endless cycle.”

And for the mountain, Mrs White says that its remarkably straight approach is known as:

“…Arthur’s Way. That’s because some people an exceedingly long time ago had the idea that the Holy Grail was hidden at the top and that Arthur’s knights would have come this way in search of it.”

But Mrs White, it turns out, has had her own direct experience of the strangeness of the mountain. Years ago, she climbed it and found a spring which had a magically rejuvenative effect (“I was refreshed beyond all possible expectation. I felt more alive, more awake.”), and since then she’s always meant to return and divert the spring so it joins the river flowing into the local village, so everyone can feel the benefit. She, though, has got old — or perhaps some force is preventing her from being able to climb the mountain — so when she learns Peter, Michael and Emma are interested in going up, she persuades them to have a go at finding the spring and diverting it at the source.

Michael is established early on as being a sceptic as far as earth-energies and the like go, saying “I believe what my eyes tell me” — whereupon Mrs White ridicules him for having to believe, then, that objects in the distance are smaller than those that are close by. Peter, on the other hand, is of a more mystical bent, and has already had a vision of sorts by gazing into a crystal ball (though the Myers say it’s only a fisherman’s weight). Michael thinks Peter has “no intellectual discrimination at all”. Emma, meanwhile, keeps out of the debate. (Though Peter says “You want to believe him [i.e., Michael] because it sounds safer. But really you believe me.”)

It sounds like a set-up for an interesting exploration of scepticism and belief with regards to the supernatural, but by the halfway point Peter is proved right in his belief that “There are forces on the earth, you know there are.” “Why,” he continues, “shouldn’t a sort of life-force flow in straight lines?”, and Allen is evidently on his side, as she concludes the book with an author’s note:

“There really are ancient tracks, like Arthur’s Way, all over Britain. If you would like to know more about them and about how to discover if there is such a track in your area, you will find information in The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins and The View of Atlantis by John Michell, both published by Garnstone Press, London.”

Alfred Watkins was the first to suggest the existence of “ley lines” linking ancient and modern sacred sites through a series of straight lines. The View Over Atlantis (1969), meanwhile — “the book which”, historian Ronald Hutton says “more than any other, defined and energized the earth mysteries movement” — links ley lines to UFOs and flows of earth-energies, like the lung-mei or “dragon paths” of ancient China. This, and other post-60s beliefs, led to an alternative archaeology movement throughout the 1970s, though it wasn’t till Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy’s Ley Lines in Question (1983) that the idea of ley-lines was subjected to more rigorous and academic interrogation, and found wanting.

None of this should detract from Allen’s book, but I have to admit I felt a slight C S Lewis-like sense that here the writer was, by making their own beliefs the justification for the fantastical elements in a story, going to skimp on giving their tale that deeper sense of reaching for the truly mysterious that a less dogmatic basis would have had.

Michael, Peter and Emma climb the mountain, encounter some weirdness — including a Merlin-like figure called Aquarius who warns them away from diverting the spring, not because it shouldn’t be done but because it’s Mrs White’s Quest, not theirs — but the ending is a bit rushed. Why shouldn’t the kids divert the spring? Why should Mrs White be the one to do it, or attempt to do it? Why hasn’t she managed to do it? What would happen if she did? Or didn’t? These questions don’t get answered (nor the larger question of who’s deciding all this “meant to be” stuff), but we do at least glimpse the event that sparked off that haunted feeling in the lane (a hanged man, intense emotions, and a divergence in the straight track causing an energetic “whirlpool” where life-energies get trapped), thanks to Peter slipping briefly into the past.

There are similarities with other YA novels of the same era — William Mayne’s IT, for instance, with its need to rebalance some ancient boundaries in the land so as to lay a troublesome power — but Allen’s novel lacks the sense (in Mayne’s IT) of a redoubtable protagonist ultimately overcoming a supernatural difficulty in their own personal, if quirky, manner.

But I think that’s why it’s interesting to read the, as it were, second-rank offerings in a genre, just to find out what makes the top rank work. Garner, Mayne, John Gordon, and Penelope Lively bring in the supernatural but the focus is always on the characters first of all and, ultimately, the way they deal with these pervasive influences from the past, from myth, from the landscape: because, supernatural though they may be, they always tie in with the characters’ personalities and relationships, meaning they can be read without having to believe in anything but the story as a story. Allen’s, I think requires a measure of belief in earth-energies, and semi-human powers like Aquarius, who pop up to tell us that certain things are just meant to be this way or that way, but without any reason behind them. Not to believe means you can be left wondering what it was all for. (Though I am, of course, approaching these books as an adult. The top rank YA books can be re-read as an adult, less so the lesser works.)

David Birch is the son of a professor of archaeology currently working on a Roman mosaic uncovered during the construction of a new motorway in a small Yorkshire town. Although he’s been taken out of school to be with his father as he’ll supposedly learn more on an archaeological dig, Professor Birch is happy to let his son follow his own interests. David fixates on a local stone circle, something his father — and, it seems, just about everyone else — has no interest in at all. Standing among the Weeping Stones, though, David gets a strong feeling of fear:

“He didn’t believe that they wished him harm, only that they were dangerous, unimaginably dangerous, just as heavy machinery in action is dangerous.”

Touching one of the stones as he leaves the circle, he gets an electric shock. These things, then, have a power, but what it is and what it’s for, nobody, at first, can tell him.

He bumps into a pair of local kids of his own age, Tim and Jane. Tim wants to be an ecologist when he grows up and is, as part of a school project, checking pollution levels in the local river, both above and below the local mill. He knows that downstream from the mill the amount of life in the river declines, but keeps wanting to double-check his results, not because he’s unsure of them, but because his father works at the mill and they need the money. Jane, meanwhile, has some unspecified connection to the stone circle.

It’s not until David meets John Westwood, though, that he learns anything more about the Weeping Stones. John is, in the eyes of about everyone else in the book, just “some elderly hippie”. He’s fascinated by the stones, and has embarked on a fifteen-year-long project of self-education so he can understand them, a syllabus that not only includes history, archaeology and geology, but astrology and folklore. He believes the stones are associated with the moon, and tells David’s father the mosaic, when uncovered, will show that the Romans knew this too. When the mosaic proves to be of Diana, though, Professor Birch shrugs it off:

“I’ve come across them before, these people. The world of what you might call Alternative Archaeology is full of them. They give up everything of real value in their lives to prove something they believe to be external. In fact it’s all inside their own heads…”

“Or it could be,” David counters, “that he’s being true to himself. He’s given up all the things society thinks are important…” But David also starts to doubt Westwood when Tim and Jane’s father says the old hippie is into drugs, and doesn’t want his kids having anything to do with him. When David asks Westwood if it’s true, he says:

“I began to use drugs about five years ago in the hope of finding a short cut to the knowledge I was looking for… I met strange and magical things, but the only knowledge I found was this—that illusion blurs the perceptions even while seeming to heighten them… Now… I try to approach the truth as it should be approached, with directness.”

But, he admits, “the drugs I used are using me. They have left my mind just a little clouded…” When Tim and Jane’s father sees his kids with Westwood again — even though they’ve only bumped into him by chance — he gets the police onto him, and Westwood is taken away. Sure that he was onto something about the stones, David goes through Westwood’s papers (they were staying at the same boarding house) and comes to realise the stones do have a sort of power: they were created long ago to draw water up from deep in the ground so as to replenish the river in times of drought. Back then, they’d be activated by singing to them, but now it seems the sound of the machinery at the mill is providing a constant vibration of exactly the same note, and the stones are set to flood the town…

Judy Allen’s The Stones of the Moon (1975) is a very short novel, chiming in with some of the folk-fantasy themes of the day, as well as the belief in “Earth mysteries” that took off in the 1960s, before going into flying saucer overdrive in the 1970s. As a YA novel, it doesn’t quite have the toughness of Alan Garner or the quality of Penelope Lively, but it does hit a few of the same notes. Tim, for instance, taciturn throughout most of the novel, at one point bursts out with an “it’s all right for you” type of speech about how it’s easy for middle-class David to talk about shutting down the mill to stop the stones from destroying the town or polluting the river, but his working-class family needs the income. But some aspects of the novel — such as Jane’s odd link with the stones, which never gets developed (I was expecting to find she was possessed by Diana, or something), or the fact that Westwood never gets his “I told you so moment” when the town is flooded — made me feel this isn’t quite as strong a work as the real classics of the era. (It was re-released in paperback in 2000, though, so it evidently had some staying power.)

What was most interesting to me was the attitude it takes to Westwood. It’s one of my fascinations with the culture of the early 1970s, how it deals with the aftermath of the late-60s upheavals not just in social change, but in imagination. The hippie era dumped a whole lot of weirdness into the culture, and suddenly everything, from aliens and UFOs to magical stone circles, ley lines and paranormal powers, not to mention psychedelic weirdness generally, were seeping into the mainstream.

Here, Westwood is dismissed by everyone as a slightly crazy hippie, mixing astrology with archaeology and using it to come to conclusions no one in their right mind would accept. His one-time drug use is latched onto as an excuse to dismiss him entirely. Even David, though drawn by his enthusiasm, starts to doubt him, comparing drugs, and the ideas they conjure, with the notion of the “fairy food” of folklore:

“In every story it is made plain that eating the fairy food is an irrevocable move, and that those who once taste it pursue it to the detriment of their lives, right to their lives’ end. It is never a beneficial or nourishing food; it is a teasing food, and it changes the personality.”

“So did the fact that Westwood had made that mistake [taken drugs] invalidate all his ideas?” It’s as though we’re also being asked, “Did the fact the hippies believed in so many crazy things mean that nothing they valued — all the social changes, and so on — is worth holding onto?”

Ultimately, in this book, Westwood is proved right, but, as I say, he never gets his “I told you so moment”, as though to keep his right conclusions at some distance from his unsound methods. Once he’s been carted off by the police, he’s not seen again — which is, perhaps, a symbolic ushering out of all that suddenly seemed slightly embarrassing, naïve, garish, or just plain wild-and-weird about the 60s, by the harsher side of reality. David is the one who’s left with Westwood’s ideas, to try to sort out what’s right and wrong, just as (it seems to me) Children of the Stones-era kids were perhaps being handed all that Earth-mysteries/UFO/psychic-powers craziness of the 60s as though to say: we don’t know what to make of it, you sort it out.

I thought I had read all the Louise Lawrence books that initially grabbed my fancy, but when I happened upon the premise of this, her second novel, I had to read it because it sounded so bizarre: a girl is bitten by a rabbit and gains the destructive “power of the stars”. I was sure, from my recent reading of Lawrence’s Wyndcliffe, Star Lord, and The Earth Witch, it couldn’t be as radioactive-spider ridiculous as it sounded. It turns out to fit very much with the kind of late 1960s/early 1970s YA novel I’ve covered on Mewsings before — things like Alan Garner’s The Owl Service and Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy — so that, in the end, I found The Power of Stars (1972) interesting for its preoccupations, even though I didn’t think it quite worked as a novel.

The setting is the borderland mountain region between England and Wales, and the cast is that old Owl Service/Earth Witch formula, the bickering trio of teens (two boys, one girl) with added class tension (two are working class, one is middle class). The girl is Jane Bates, 15 years old and the poorest of the three, who lives with her Granny as her mother abandoned her before moving abroad and breaking all contact (as with Owen in The Earth Witch). Walking home from school with the local lad she’s known all her life, Jimmy Keir, and an English boy, Alan Grant, whose divorced, soon-to-be-remarried mother has recently moved to the area, all three, separated in the dark of the village countryside, are distracted by a strange, powerful brightness in the stars. They hear a weird scream, but it’s only a rabbit, caught, somewhere in the dark, in a trap. The following evening, the three are again walking home when they find the poor thing, still alive, though out of the trap. (They find the trap, which seems to have been hit by lightning — it’s just a lump of molten metal.) Jane picks up the rabbit, intending to take it to a vet, and it bites her, deep in the wrist. Uncharacteristically for a rabbit, it hangs on, as though to make sure she’s thoroughly bitten. Jimmy flings the rabbit off her, and they take her to Alan’s stepfather-to-be, Dr Nick Mackenzie, who, once Jane has been taken to A&E, seeks out the rabbit, thinking he might find something unusual about it because of its behaviour. He and Alan bump into local oddity Marcia Cotterel, known to the area’s kids as the Batwoman, because she’s a scientist studying bats (also, they think she’s a bit crazy). Her dog, it turns out, was also bitten by a rabbit — perhaps the same one — and she’s also trying to find it, to see if it was infected by some odd new disease.

Things tick along for a while, with the trio of kids bickering lightly but constantly, in the way of bored teens, when two odd things start to occur with Jane. First, she seems to have gained a new fear of machines — though only at night, when the stars are out. Second, if Jane is particularly worked up, those machines suddenly fuse, or melt, or even blow up, as though hit by a blast of intense energy. Afterwards, Jane will usually be found alone in the dark, staring up at the stars, drinking in their light.

It turns out Jane has been infected by a sort of alien life-form, an intelligence that exists as tiny, neuron-like protozoa, simple on their own but somehow forming, together, a sort of intelligence. And it’s an intelligence that feeds off starlight and hates machines, perhaps because (Dr Nick suggests) they might have once become too reliant on machines in their own, more advanced, society that self-destructed, and now they’re trying to save us from the same fate, using Jane as a focus. (They also use her to drink up the experience of embodied life, something they’ve evidently been missing since becoming space-bound protozoa. That, and music.)

This hatred of machines, combined with bouts of the irrational need to destroy them, reminds me of The Changes. The BBC series came out in 1975, but Peter Dickinson’s trilogy of novels the series was adapted from were all out by 1970, and I can’t help wondering if Lawrence wasn’t proposing an alternative explanation for those books’ outbreak of irrational anti-machine violence. (Star-bound protozoa with a beef against the mechanical is a little bit better — though only just — as explanations go, than Dickinson’s Merlin-on-drugs.) But the idea of a rabbit bite infecting Jane with an alien life-form is less about scientific plausibility, I’d say, than a sort of imaginative pressure on the author to bring together the two archetypal forces that come out again in her later novel Star Lord: the science-fictional force from the stars, and the ancient forces of nature, only here they’re united, rather than being inimical as they are in Star Lord.

This is Lawrence’s second novel — her second published novel, anyway — and I thought it perhaps showed in a couple of structural weaknesses. The lengths she goes to in order to ensure her trio of teens are out at night (under starlight) in a machine (Alan’s car), far from home, near the climax of the novel, felt a bit too much like an author over-thinking things (they run out of petrol, then a tyre blows). And the chapter where Dr Nick and Miss Cotterel theorise on the nature of the neuron-like protozoa that have taken up residence in Jane’s brain relies a bit too much on some far-fetched guesses being taken by two scientists as the only likely explanation.

But it’s a short novel, and I enjoyed it for how much it fits in with the other books of the time. The constant tensions between the characters have that post-Kitchen Sink era air of gritty social realism, as do their goodnatured but cranky attempts not to give in to class resentments (Alan always has money, Jimmy never does); the writing style has that poetic terseness writers on the literary side of late 60s/early 70s YA seem to slip into (Garner eventually taking it to the extreme, but it’s also there in John Gordon and William Mayne); and there’s another theme of early 70s YA, broken families and the added emotional burden this places on adolescents who not only have to deal with puberty, but some sort of supernatural/science-fictional menace as well. (And Jane’s “power of the stars” feels very much like that horror trope that became increasingly prevalent in the 70s, of what I might call Teenage Telekinetic Breakout Disorder, or Carrie’s Syndrome.)

It’s perhaps more interesting when read as part of Lawrence’s own body of work and her development as a writer (I now want to read her first novel, the more purely SF Andra), or as one more part of early 70s rural fantasy (folk fantasy, as it might be called), so I wouldn’t recommend The Power of Stars as a first read if you’re interested in Lawrence, but it’s by no means a bad book. I’m still not entirely sure about the rabbit, though…