III

Oh how times have changed. I am not talking about the Scottish independence vote, or the events in the Middle East, but - for once - for me personally. As regular readers of my blog will know I have done something unpleasant to my neck and because this unpleasant something is exceedingly painful, I am now on a complex cocktail of muscle relaxants and narcotic pain-killers, which is pretty much the cocktail of chemicals that I used to use for recreational purposes about a quarter of a century ago. The results are fairly similar (except that I am not dancing around the office to the On U sound system) and I am what I used to describe as "out of my gourd".

The weird thing is that now, instead of finding it a pleasant sensation, I am feeling mildly nauseous, very drowsy and wondering why I ever paid good money to feel like this. I wonder if I put 'The Happy Mondays' on, whether it will make the sensation any better. It always worked for me back in 1990. (I tried. Sadly, it didn't)

But as a result of this new chemical regimen, I am keeping peculiar hours, and last night, after everyone else was fast asleep in bed, I was downstairs with the smaller of my two dogs listening to music on my iPad, and reading Brandy of the Damned by John Higgs, which is an extraordinary book about which I shall be writing in some depth at another juncture. But my mind is as ephemeral as a newly hatched mayfly, and if I go off at a tangent and talk about Higgs’ book, I will never finish telling you what I want to talk about. So I won’t.

I was sitting with Archie the Jack Russell in my favourite armchair, lost to the world, when he began to whimper and cower in submission. I looked up, and Panne was standing there looking down at me.

***

My father was a strange man. He suffered from the dichotomy of being a devout Christian of the old-fashioned Anglican variety, and also having leanings towards Paganism. His mother had been a witch and had introduced several of my cousins to the craft, and whilst my father knew this and occasionally alluded to it in his conversation whilst the old lady (and, believe me, she was very much a lady) was alive, I don’t think he ever completely accepted it.

However, despite being a Churchwarden and a Lay Preacher, he could also divine water (as can I) and charm warts (which I can’t) and I will always remember one day when I was about nine. We had left my beloved Hong Kong for six weeks, and were on a family holiday on Dartmoor. My little brother (now in his early 50s and a high ranking Army Chaplain, who – I suspect – doesn’t really approve of the path that my life has taken) was unwell, and my mother and grandmother were back at the B&B looking after him. My father was saddled with the job of taking the 10 year old Jonathan for a long and brisk walk.

My father was a Dartmoor man born and bred, and he knew far more about the place than he ever let on. On this occasion we parked the little Mini Clubman that he had hired for the duration of the holiday in the carpark next to Hound Tor, where these days there is usually parked a mobile café with the greatest title of all time – Hound of the Basket Meals and walked up the narrow incline towards the tor itself. For those of you who do not know such things, the tors of Dartmoor are great formations of granite – fossilised volcanic cores – that stick out of the top of moorland hills on Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. I have always thought that they look like enormous stone cowpats, and they dominate the landscape making it look unearthly and more like something from the cover of a 1970s progressive rock album than something that one expects to find in a National Park in southern England.

My father and I walked up the hill in silence. We had always had a difficult relationship, and for some reason I had the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac in my head as it began to drizzle and we trudged on. The tor itself was seething with holiday makers and so rather and climb to the top, we walked on past it, and down the hill on the other side in a vaguely easterly direction to find somewhere where we could have our lunch.

Eventually we found ourselves in a patch of ancient woodland that I have never been able to find since. Much of the woodland that you can see if you examine the area on Google Earth is relatively modern, coniferous forest, either planted by the Forestry Commission, or by private landowners, who – in the years following WW2 – had done their best to jump on the bandwagon and turn unproductive wilderness into the location for a lucrative timber industry which usually failed to materialise, but scattered amongst these dark green and regimented fir forests were small pockets of native deciduous woodland, not as gnarled and overtly witchy as places like Wistman’s Wood, but still with their own ancient magickal vibe.

We sat down, resting against huge boulders and ate out sandwiches and crisps, and it was whilst masticating on our desert of individual Walls fruit pies (I always particularly liked the black-currant ones) when we heard a noise.

It was an eerie, low, pulsating sound unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was the wildest and most exciting noise that I had ever heard; it was recognisably music. But it didn’t sound like any other music that I had ever heard before.

“W-w-what’s that Daddy?” I asked, hesitantly, not sure that anyone but I could hear it. Even at such a young age I was aware that I could sometimes here things and see things that no-one else could, and I was always afraid to admit such a fact (although if I had done, my psychosis would probably have been treated decades before it actually was).

But I needn’t have worried. Just one look at my father showed that he was as enraptured as I, but it seemed to be more familiar to him. Unlike me, he didn’t seem scared.

The music filled me with strange, exciting longings. The nearest that I have ever come to being able to describe it was in the lyrics to a ‘Pet Shop Boys’ song I heard a third of a century later: “IU feel like taking all my clothes off, and dancing to the Rite of Spring, but I wouldn’t normally do that kind of thing”.
I wanted to rip my clothes off and dance naked amongst the ancient woodlands, but my father was there, and of course I wouldn’t do such a thing in front of him.

So I asked for the third time, and this time he answered, in a strange, soft voice.

“It’s Pan, boy. The God of the Woods. Those are his pipes, and what you are feeling is Panic”.

I had, of course, read Wind in the Willows and my favourite chapter of it had been ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ in which Portly the lost baby otter is discovered in the care of the hornéd God of the ancient woodlands, so I knew exactly what he was talking about. I started chattering excitedly and this broke the spell, and my father’s eyes filled with an immense sadness, and I realised that I had just done something else to him that he could add to the long list of things for which he would never be able to forgive me.

In the ensuing years I have heard snippets of what I thought could have been those pipes again. But never as clearly, and I have never felt that full-blown rush of feral joy course through my veins. I have heard it in the wilder parts of England. Once I heard it in the hills of Hong Kong, and most recently, during July 2004 in the El Yunque Forest of Puerto Rico. When I was younger I tried to invoke it by dancing naked in the woods and screaming out Crowley’s Hymn to Pan but to no avail.

But, like the protagonist of the ‘Waterboys’ song The Return of Pan I know one thing beyond doubt. I know that the “Great God Pan is alive”.

***

But what was the relationship between Pan and Panne?

Even before I had heard these verses, I had always tried to follow the moral compass given:

At sea on a ship in a thunderstorm
On the very night that Christ was born
A sailor heard from overhead
A mighty voice cry, "Pan is dead!"
So follow Christ as best you can
Pan is dead, long live Pan!
From the olden days and up through all the years
From Arcadia to the stone fields of Inisheer
Some say the Gods are just a myth
But guess who I've been dancing with
The great god Pan is alive

And now I had this little goat-footed soul standing before me for the third time. This time (s)he was alone. Archie treated Panne with a respectful deference that I had never seen him do to anyone or anything before. I had already figured out that (s)he was neither human nor animal, and I didn’t feel like I was in the presence of a God. As I have tried to describe before, Panne had the slight, boyish figure of a teenaged girl, but was covered with short, wiry, chestnut brown hair which simmered in the reflexion of the light from the fishtanks in the corner of my room. I got the overwhelming impression that (s)he was not male, and not female, but whether Panne was neither – or both – was something that I have not yet been able to work out.

Back in a previous life, when I was the acting Night Nursing Officer at the long defunct St Mary’s Hospital in Axminster, I had looked after a middle aged person with a hermaphroditic disorder. This person had been raised as a woman, and I always thought of her as such, but between her legs, as well as a vagina she had a small, but – apparently – fully functioning penis and testicles. She was not only severely clinically subnormal but was dying of cancer, and was bedridden. I had to bed bath her often, and her dual physical gender both repelled and fascinated me. The fact that she sprung an erection every time she was bathed and powdered for bedsores was particularly disturbing. But this patient of mine was a freak. The psychic vibes that she gave out were of a wrongness that even surgery could never expunge. Bother her body and her soul were deformed due to a teratological anomaly and she had been doomed to a long, horrible and unproductive life in hospital, and I was relieved and happy for her when she died.

But Panne is not like this. Whatever (s)he is (and I still have no idea) (s)he is perfect and healthy and exactly the way (s)he is meant to be. And, peculiarly, I am not in the slightest bit scared of her. And the fact that (s)he had suddenly turned up in my sitting room in the middle of the night without warning, didn’t seem in the slightest bit disturbing.

I looked up at her.

“Hello Panne” I said.

(S)he looked back in silence.

“What can I do for you?” I asked, feeling slightly embarrassed at asking such a banal question under such extraordinary circumstances.

Panne stared back at me with her unblinking yellow eyes with their vertical caprine pupils.

“Have you any chocolate?” (s)he asked shyly.