On Scary Fairies and Pandemics

On the 23^rd of March 2020 I opened my working sketchbook, found a fresh folio spread, and drew this:

‘Redcaps’ Mitch Miller, March 2020.

…actually let’s not start there, exactly. But keep the image in mind.

The 23^rd of March was the first official day of the COVID lockdown in the UK. In actuality of course, as Boris Johnson dithered, refusing to believe his Brexit fantasia was about to shatter, most institutions and organisations had taken action and many of us were already the best part of a week into sheltering at home. But on the day the Prime Minister actually did something, this is what I drew.

We sought ways to keep busy and impose some kind of discipline on ourselves. Some turned to Joe Wix, some to sourdough starters, many to that bottle of strange liqueur they’d received last Christmas and never dared to open...

My daughter was barely four months old, so I did not share this need for regimen quite so much. Nappies still needed changed and bottles made. Yes, the world was going to shit, but the literal crap in front of my nose needed sorting. And yet, after I discarded the last wet wipe and sealed the plastic bag, the mind and the hand it moved inevitably fell idle, ready to serve the Devil. So, amid the rhythms of wiping and sterilising and being terrified at the news, I opened my sketchbook and set a rhythm for myself that was just mine; a drawing a day. Anything that came to mind or caught my eye, to be posted on my Twitter once done. No theme or agenda: my mind would ramble and the hand would follow.

Or perhaps, vice versa – perhaps my hand dragged the mind? In any case a  bewildering array of subjects filled the sketchbook– multiple drawings of my daughter (as you might expect) attempts at illustrating some of my favourite novels and short stories, even an attempt at a fan-art matrix. And certain strands started to twist.

Redcaps (also known as Powries) started one of these, but I’ll get to that. As to the drawing, this shows them in classical mode, attacking some unseen victim using their preferred method of throwing rocks at their head. The aim of taking aim was to spill blood, which they would use to dip their caps into and replenish its red colour, supplied by one of the marker pens I had rescued from my studio before the complex had been shut down.

I have strong family connections to the Borders so I would love to say this notion to draw my own version of the Redcap stems from this link, some deep memory of stories telt me at my old Dad’s knee. Not I’m afraid, true. Like most other Scottish children of the 20^th century, I was alienated from such things. Like the Highland clans I needed an Englishman to sell my heritage back to me, namely Peter Usborne with his legendary children’s publishing house - or rather he, and a woman called Lynn Myring.

Founded in 1973, Usborne books specialised in non-fiction for children. The BEST non-fiction. They wedded clear, informative text that never talked down to its audience with illustrative material that still dominates my imagination today. Before anyone had heard of Dorling Kindersley, Usborne’ beautifully designed and tersely written fact-books schooled children in history, science, biology and…the Supernatural.

Well, this looks child-friendly…

I shall revisit Usborne properly another time (it deserves a much longer article) but the important thing here is that Usborne covered EVERYTHING, from hard science to remote history to folklore and belief. Accordingly, The Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World (1979) showed the same diligence to monsters (Vampires, Werewolves and Demons) Ghosts, and Unworldly powers as it did to Egyptian Pyramids, Birds of Prey or Power Stations. Written by Myring and edited by Eric Maple it boasted some of the best illustrators working in the UK at the time – Seonaid Mackenzie, Rob McCaig, Oliver Frey, Derick Brown, Pat Thornton, Elaine Lee, Terry Gabbey, Ken Stott and Jenny Thorne. The images were lavish – and unflinching, with little consideration of the potential delicacy of its young readers (I think I was about nine when I first picked up this book). Its stated policy of not talking down to its audience extended to the imagery which is gory, even haunting.

The face at the bottom left of page 41 followed me around in dreamland for WAY too long…

Children need to be scared, just enough to leave an impression that they can live with a while, think about, perhaps even turn into something else. Children also need to be scarred,  the effect of that additional ‘r’ not only thickening their hides but initiating them into more complex worlds, where things like death, and hatred and dumb bad luck exist.

Like travelling on a Scottish road and having your head smashed in by a rock to satisfy the sartorial scruples of a nature spirit.

Lacking the initiation rites of our ancestors, it is media that takes up this necessary burden; The bit where the guy’s face melted on Doctor Who, the bit where the Nazis’ faces melted in Indiana Jones, the boy flying the kite near the electricity pylons in that public Information Film, a scene from Fantasm I inadvertently watched with my big brother and his friends (a finger got chopped off and the blood was YELLOW) the almost incessant news reports about nuclear holocaust that dominated an eighties childhood, Don’t Talk to Strangers, Hookjaw comics, a Dan Dare (modern era) story in the Eagle where jellyfish like Aliens ate the flesh off a whole bunch of people trapped in their cars INCLUDING CHILDREN, Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the 1989 Batman film, that AIDS advert with the tombstone… my list was long, as I was a somewhat oversensitive, doughy and daydreamy child where terrors took root easily. Such incursions into our childhood complacency nevertheless form us, allow us to grow. And as kids we generally know when to look away, even though after we close our eyes tight shut, the images and sounds are still there…

(My wife incidentally, has her own substack mostly about this very thing which is much, much funnier than mine. I am biased but it is excellent, and you should read it.)

The Guide to the Supernatural World existed in this important childhood space. Indeed, as you’ll see from the examples given above, factual communications were as much a part of childhood horror as any fiction that could be spun. As Richard Littler understood when he created Scarfolk, there’s something especially terrible about existential threats acknowledged and spelled out in sans-serif and functional graphic layouts. All of which is to go some way to explain why Myring’s book remains beloved among its past readers and still sells for a pretty penny on the second-hand market in a way some of her other works such as Rockets and Spaceflight (1982) or Lasers (1984) do not (but such versatility!)

But let’s get to it. My first encounter with the Redcap. Behold the glory…

Just…LOOK at it!

You can see why this would fascinate a child with an over-active imagination. The economy of Myring’s description is filled out by the depiction – the joyful wickedness of the smile and the bared fangs of the Redcap lets it more than hold its own among the ghastly assembly. It’s also just a superbly arranged and composed image, the flanks of the corpse-eating dragon Niohoggr ranking and organising the different entries, both a variable and an axis in an image that never feels as diagrammatic as it actually is. Whoever did this (they do not credit the artists by page, but I suspect it might have been Oliver Frey) knocked it out of the proverbial park in a volume where the entire creative team was doing that as a matter of course.

So this is how, amid the necessary ritual scarification of childhood I first learned about Redcaps. It should be said that others worked hard to fill in the gaps of my knowledge of the grittier pends an wynds of Scottish folklore, such as Mr Wilson, my high School English teacher who set the classic border ballads for the poetry component of our sixth year English lessons. Tam Linn’s terrifying Queen of Elfhame, the Birch-hatted dead sons of The Wife of Usher’s Well and the ravens of Twa Corbies, casually discussing how the corpse they are feeding on was shafted by those he should have trusted most, not only bridged that era of childhood scaring and scarring, it established a vivid sense of the grim and unforgiving cosmos prior generations of Scots fearfully regarded. No wonder we’re the way we are…

Redcaps danced amongst all that to the tune of ancient ballads that never quite left me, and when in 2020, nature shrugged and the pandemic made us afraid of the breath we shared with even our closest kin, it’s not all that surprising the Powries crept back out of my mind, skittered down my hand and moved the pencil accordingly.

I’ve taken some liberties with the Redcap. This may have been deliberate, I’m not sure. In William Henderson’s Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders gives what seems to have been the ‘classic’ form of the creature:

“He is cruel and malignant of mood, and resides in spots which were once the scene of tyranny—such as Border castles, towers, and peelhouses. He is depicted as a short thickset old man, with long prominent teeth, skinny fingers armed with talons like eagles, large eyes of a fiery-red colour, grisly hair streaming down his shoulders, iron boots, a pikestaff in his left hand, and a red cap on his head. When benighted or shelterless travellers take refuge in his haunts, he flings huge stones at them; nay, unless he is much maligned, he murders them outright, and catches their blood in his cap, which thus acquires its crimson hue.” pg 255

A lot to unpack there, but obviously my version is significantly different. Leaving the Phrygian cap aside, my Redcaps are more like humanoid sharks than angry old men. I’ve conceived them more as a species than a magical being and so, accordingly, there are female Powries joining the fray and somewhere, presumably, their terrifying whelps. However, the hair is indeed grisly.

These are Redcaps as I suppose, I felt them while drawing next to my sleeping baby daughter, a literary representation if anything (speaking of which, see my ‘microfiction’ based on the drawing below), rather than an ‘accurate’ transmission of folk-culture, which is itself cumulative and changeable.

Henderson records the Redcap as it was reported at his time, reflecting as legend always does, the concerns of its tellers who, as Scottish borderers, lived in the region where the phrase ‘red-handed’ and ‘blackmail’ originated. Elves and Fairies are also of course, mutable things, shapes into which new information and data from the world is pressed and contorted in order to explain it. They serve as a vocabulary of the sublime and inexplicable, our fears and our sense of disquiet. And with words, the pronunciation and morphology of the individual components of that vocabulary - brownies, kelpies or redcaps - may well change…

…a very long-winded and no doubt pretentious way of saying ‘I drew them as suited me’. I think the core is still there. This is still a grisly tale of fashion that is literally to dye for. It is interesting though that Henderson locates the Redcap at ‘scenes of tyranny’ – castle, peel-houses and the like. Visible signs and sites of political authority. An interesting subject to take on at the very moment the UK Government had decided to lock us all in our homes.

And no, this is not some prelude to an anti-lockdown rant. Even had I not buried a mother (and almost a father and a sister) during the pandemic I would have no sympathy for peddlers of the ‘plandemic’, of vaccine conspiracy theories and those who whinged about lockdown. When I say that invoking ‘the Blitz spirit’ over the cost of living crisis, then grumbling about those ‘snowflake kids’ only to frame lockdown as the second coming of Stalin the next is vaccuous and morally stupid, that’s about as polite as I can be about it..

But…

At the same time, there is still something shocking about these moments when the State does indeed openly assert itself - more so I think, when said State(s) consistently claim it can do absolutely nothing about the depredations of corporations, endemic poverty or the tax evasion of billionaires.

So like everyone else, I was blinking in the face of wide, sweeping exercises of power. And not just the human variety: as mentioned at the beginning, nature shrugged. And we scattered and hid. Amid the detritus of our defeat, as we stayed at home baking bread and working through multi-packs of beer, deer sidled nonchalantly into empty town centres and the skies cleared. I clung to my sketchbook and like most of us, felt suddenly very small (not, it should be said childish or child-like – there is a big-ness to being a child that it is almost impossible for our adult selves to recall), but the kind of smallness only an adult can feel, a bleak understanding of our limits in a world of scaring and scarring.

And so to deal with these concerns I… drew some scary fairies? As an explanation that seems rather trite even to me. But regardless, themes and agendas did indeed emerge from my daily ritual and fairy lore accompanied me throughout. And it got a lot scarier (and scarring) than THIS. It, and my other interpretations of elves, sibhe and cunning folk form a series I now call ‘Unseely’. ‘The Unseely (‘unholy’, ‘unfortunate’) Court’ of Scottish myth was the collective name given to dark fairies, those who would assail you without provocation. (‘Seely’, its opposite, is derived from ‘sael’ (from which we also get ‘silly’) for ‘blissful’ or ‘happy’.)

It’s one of those words whose very sound and feel conveys its meaning even if you don’t quite know it, and I think it aptly describes a set of weird images made by a small, bewildered man wishing that the pandemic was just another lurid scare rendered comprehensible by the clean typeset and economical captions of his childhood reading.