XVII

When my family first returned to North Devon in 1971 after an absence of nearly two decades, during which my parents fought gallant rearguard actions against the fall of the British Empire in Nigeria and Hong Kong, they quickly made friends with various members of the local gentry. In those days there was a remarkable range of minor aristocracy and interesting, though often impoverished, gentlefolk who lived in the area. Woolsery Manor, for example, which in later years was a hotel, then fell into disuse, and now as a derelict building has been bought by the bloke who started Bebo, was inhabited by the Count de St Quentin and his wife, a Swedish princess. They were very kind to me during my first year or two in the village, and encouraged me in my pursuits as an amateur naturalist, and wannabe poet.

They even had a private museum, which inspired me that one day I would have something similar of my own. It housed a remarkably arcane collection of disparate things including the foot of a mummified Egyptian priestess, and Marie Antoinette's christening slippers. I loved visiting them, and was very sad when they left the village for pastures new.

But there were other interesting people as well, so I was not entirely bereft. On an insignificant bend in the road, one of the most obscure lanes between Woolsery and the slightly bigger village of Bradworthy four or five miles away, there was (and is) a cottage even more tumbledown than my own. In it lived an elderly bachelor clergyman and his older spinster sister. The Rev Cymbeline Potts and his sister Britannia were a remarkable couple. Both retired from active duty, (although history didn't really relate whether Miss Britannia had ever had a proper job, or indeed any gainful employment except for looking after her brother) they seemed to do little else apart from frequent junk shops, jumble sales, and auction rooms in search of items to swell their ever growing collection of bric-a-brac.

Their collection encompassed everything from late Victorian militaria to long obsolete items of scientific and quasi-scientific equipment. They even had an epidiascope; a late Victorian equivalent to the overhead projector, which I used to play with for hours, projecting the images of my model aeroplanes onto the wall, and pretending that I was directing a remake of The Battle of Britain.

They were, in their own peculiar way, pillars of the local community, and every village fete saw the elderly couple running a tombola, or a stall where they would run a massively eccentric quiz, asking the village children a series of questions about English history that neither the children, or often their parents, had even the vaguest idea of what they were talking about. Miss Britannia would always be dressed as her cryptomythological namesake, complete with shield, robe and Graeco-Roman helmet, and their appearance always confused everyone mightily and brought joy to my adolescent heart.

Cunobeline (or Cunobelin, from Latin Cunobelinus, derived from Greek Kynobellinus, Κυνοβελλίνος) was a king in pre-Roman Britain from the late first century BC until the 40s AD. He is mentioned in passing by the classical historians Suetonius and Dio Cassius, and many coins bearing his inscription have been found. He appears to have controlled a substantial portion of south-eastern Britain, and is called "King of the Britons" (Britannorum rex) by Suetonius.

Cunobeline appears in British legend as Cynfelyn (Welsh), Kymbelinus (medieval Latin) or Cymbeline, as in the play by William Shakespeare. His name is a compound made up of cuno- (hound) and Belenos (the god Belenus).

This Cymbeline achieved legendary status in my eyes, but - although he was always very kind to me - he always seemed fonder of my little brother, and my younger, prettier friends. When a rumour went round the village that he was a convicted child molester, they cut him out of our lives completely. Or at least they thought that they did. I was a rebellious enough teenager to take the opposite viewpoint on anything that my parents did, and I had reasons of my own for suspecting that the story was not true....at least not completely so. A year or two later, when I was old enough to own a bicycle, and proficient enough upon the machine to travel around the district unscathed, I started to visit the elderly couple again, and revel in their collection of arcane junk. They always made me welcome, and asked after the rest of my family wistfully.

The Rev. Cymbaline never showed any signs of wanting to seduce me, and the only harm that I ever came to during my visits to their house was indigestion from Miss Britannia's terrible cooking. As I got older, and eventually passed my driving test, my visits to the odd couple became less frequent as I discovered girls and alcohol, and eventually left home, but I would still go and visit them whenever I came home.

In the late 1970s they acquired a maidservant; a taciturn and podgy girl in her late teens, with a hare lip and a serious speech impediment, who they called Lysistrata, although I very much doubt whether that was the name that her parents had given her. Each time I would drive up to visit them, she would answer the door with a grimace and - spraying me with saliva as she did so - would announce my arrival, and tell me that "The Master and the Mistress will see you now Sir". For some reason that I could never fathom out there was something incredibly sexy about this deformed and socially inept young woman, but my knowledge of social convention forbade me from taking the matter any further.

One day, whilst I was sitting with The Rev Cymbaline in the tiny drawing room, the subject of my parents came up, and he wistfully told me how much he missed seeing them, and asked me whether there was anything that I could do to repair the rift in their relationship. Sadly, and as tactfully as possible, I told the old man that my parents were disgusted by what they had found out about him, and that they were convinced that if they did so there would have been serious repercussions as far as my brother's safety would have been concerned.

He looked at me with the saddest eyes I have ever seen on any creature except for my dear bulldog cross boxer bitch Prudence, and said: "Things are often more complicated than at first they seem, dear boy. I wish your father would understand that".

I tried to explain that my parents found the complexities of my life too complicated to deal with, and I think he understood. We sat there in silence for about ten minutes, sipping brandy and looking sadly at each other, until Lysistrata shambled in, banged a grubby brass gong and announced that the mistress wished to see us in her parlour.

It was the last time I was alone with him. I returned to Dawlish, my girlfriend, and my own complex sex life, and a few weeks later it turned out that he went into the woods at the back of their cottage, and shot himself with an antique shotgun that he - of course - had never notified the authorities about. My parents went to the funeral, and in the aftermath tried to make friends again with Miss Britannia. But she just sniffed haughtily at them, pulled herself up to her full height of just over five feet and stormed out of the church, clutching her trident, and with her rusty helmet plonked back on her head. From then on, as far as I am aware, she never had contact with any of my family again, except on the odd occasions when I would pay a visit to the ever more tumbledown cottage full of junk, where she and Lysistrata eked out a living on State Benefits handed out by an ever more parsimonious government.

Slowly I began to realise that Miss Britannia Potts was a remarkable old lady. Feeling that she and her brother had been well and truly shafted by The Church of England, she turned her back on Mother Church, and began to investigate the old religion of her forefathers. She collected wild herbs which she dug with a silver athame at the full moon and grew them in her little garden, and over the years became a very wise woman, if you know what I mean.

I got married, moved to Exeter and dramatically fell out with my parents, and so for the next twenty years or so my visits back to North Devon were few and far between. However, on the few occasions that I visited my family, I would sneak off for an hour, drive along the network of tiny lanes towards Bradworthy and visit Miss Britannia and Lysistrata. Each time I visited they would look older and more decrepit, but still basically the same.

Ten years ago I returned to Woolsery to look after my dying father, and - against all the odds - the two of us, who had been figuratively at each other's throats for all our lives, were reconciled. On his deathbed, a few weeks before the end he said to me that he wondered whether he had been too harsh to the Rev Cymbaline. I answered noncommittally not wishing to sunder our newfound closeness by admitting that I had continued to visit the old parson and his sister for years, taking them gifts of groceries, and listening to their woes.

In passing, Dad told me that Miss Britannia was still alive, and still living with Lysistrata (the unspoken nuance being that their relationship was somehow unwholesome, whereas I had always considered them two orphans of the storm who had been thrown together by cruel happenstance). Miss Britannia still refused to speak to my Father, but could, he told me, occasionally be seen trudging through the lanes, Lysistrata at her side, still clutching her trident, and always wearing the increasingly rusty Graeco-Roman helmet.

After my Father died I went to visit them again, occasionally. But usually they just would not answer the door. On the odd occasions when they did, Miss Britannia would gaze at me with cloudy eyes over which the fog of Alzheimer's had long since settled, which only occasionally gave any indication that she knew what I was talking about, while Lysistrata, still wearing a tatty and grubby maid's uniform, crouched by the side of her chair glaring malevolently at me.

Britannia is an ancient term for Roman Britain and also a female personification of the island. The name is Latin, and derives from the Greek form Prettanike or Brettaniai, which originally designated a collection of islands with individual names, including Albion or Great Britain; however, by the 1st Century BC Britannia came to be used for Great Britain specifically. In AD 43 the Roman Empire began its conquest of the island, establishing a province they called Britannia, which came to encompass the parts of the island south of Caledonia (roughly Scotland). The native Celtic inhabitants of the province are known as the Britons. In the 2nd Century, Roman Britannia came to be personified as a goddess, armed with a trident and shield and wearing a Corinthian helmet.

The Latin name Britannia long survived the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th Century, and yielded the name for the island in most European and various other languages, including the English Britain and the modern Welsh Prydain. After centuries of declining use, the Latin form was revived during the English Renaissance as a rhetorical evocation of a British national identity. Especially following the Acts of Union in 1707, which joined the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, the personification of the martial Britannia was used as an emblem of British imperial power and unity. She was featured on all modern British coinage series until the redesign in 2008, and still appears annually on the gold and silver "Britannia" bullion coin series.

The age of the British Empire, the last few years of which I lived through, was well and truly past. The Empire on which the sun never set was reduced to just over a dozen tiny island possessions of little military or commercial importance. Britannia no longer rules the waves, but I am one of the few people who suspects that she is embodied by a lonely old woman living with a sociopathic maidservant on Disability Living Allowance, in a tumbledown cottage which stank unaccountably of yeast, and because her own world had crumbled around her ears she was stoically waiting for the end of the world for the rest of her species.

My visits there had become less and less frequent, and eventually I stopped going altogether. But I now knew what I had to do next. Despite everything that I felt, it was time for me to go and talk to Britannia.