Part 33: (1985 continued)
The March winds had been strong the past few years and the huge, arched, corrugated iron roofs of the Dutch barn opposite us had been warped and loosened to the point where they shrieked and groaned in the night as strong gusts blew across the fields from the north. And when one started rising up and down like a great broken wing the farmer decided to deconstruct it, leaving just eight, black, iron girders sticking out of the ground.
Without the barn in front of the house Bone Orchard with its ancient apple trees and the fields beyond were now more visible from the upper floor of the house where I spent much more time than I wanted to, writing letters, smoking, watching and waiting… wondering how long all this could all go on for. Something had to happen.
It didn’t seem like a major event but one thing that did come into my life was a piece of guitar music that Justin created that we all liked a lot. He said it made him think of the sound of the distant church bells that we could sometimes hear coming across the fields from one of the villages between us and Worcester when the wind was blowing in a certain direction.
With that in mind, I started thinking of a legend our neighbours had told us. They said that in ancient times there used to be a chapel there in Bone orchard that had a silver bell in it’s bell tower but the chapel had fallen into the ground and the bell was buried there somewhere amongst the roots of the trees.
When I wasn’t sitting there at the window, thinking about silver bells and beating myself up about ruining our chances of working with the ‘Days in Europe’ tour agency, I continued working at the pig farm.
Most of the work was feeding and mucking out, but sometimes I helped with other jobs like castrating the young boars. My role was chasing them around a barn, catching one by a back leg then holding it while the farmer swiftly removed it’s balls with a scalpel and thew them to the waiting Rottweiler who would catch them in midair.
We all did whatever work we could get - Steven was working in a record shop in Redditch, while Nick and Justin got some work in Warwick at the county archeological office, mostly drawing ’small finds’ from the various digs that were going on, pot shards and metal objects.
Our lives were still dominated, almost to the point of obsession, by working on the album, but the business and non creative side of being in a band started to drag us down and we, and our record label sank into a demoralised slump. We were the main band on ‘Reflex Records’ now so when they went on their monthly trips to Rough Trade, in London, for meetings with their ‘label manager’, ‘And Also The Trees’ would be the main topic of discussion.
The turnover of label managers was frequent and apparently when Chris and Joanne asked the latest one for advice on the next steps AATT could make before the release of our upcoming album, he suggested we should “cheer up” and said that we might want to change our image as “a lot of the new bands now are wearing shorts and colourful Hawaiian shirts… that kinda thing”.
Chris and Joanne relayed this fantastically inappropriate advice to us with great caution and admirably straight faces. We were predictably horrified and felt like giving up there and then.
The summer came and we had a few days when it got warmer and the sun shone, but it rained a lot. I got extra work on the farm emptying a barn of waterlogged and rotten bales of straw and there was excitement in the archeological office when someone found a human skull in a lake, which was apparently a severed head from the 16th century.
When Justin and I were children we used to walk the fields of Morton Under Hill after they’d been ploughed to see what we could find. What we liked best were the ‘church warden’ pipe heads made of white clay. Sometimes they were quite decorative, occasionally even with a face shaped on them. We imagined the old ploughmen smoking them, then throwing them aside when the long, slender stems broke. There were oyster shells too which also showed up white in the dark earth. Small glass bottles, iron hooks… bolts and rusted chains.
All the fields had names. One was called ‘Town Meadow’ because, the farmer told us, many bits of pottery and tile came to the surface when ploughed and he’d heard that long ago there used to be a whole town there.
With Justin and Nick now working with archeologists, we wondered if they could give credence to any of what we’d been told. So one evening we went to Town Meadow, picked up some pot shards and the next day Justin took them in. He was told that some of the shards dated back to Roman times, but that Morton Under Hill was almost certainly a DMV (Deserted Medieval Village) probably deserted or decimated at the time of the Black Plague.
All of which started to fall into place in my mind as I listened, again and again, to the piece of music that Justin, Steven and Nick had written. The chapel, the bells, the deserted village and the black plague. Obvious really.
’Town Meadow’ or ‘Plague Meadow’ didn’t sound right - then a word that I’d heard before, but at the time wasn’t commonly used in the UK, came to mind - Virus.