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65 f


Shells found here are hair combs for these sirens. Ruth collected her tale The Sea Mor- gan’s Babyfrom a woman in a Watchet teashop on a wet day during World War I, and her song Morgan’s Pantry, used to sum- mon storms at sea, was collected from here in 1905, together with an adamant warning for it to be sung “with great caution.”


Now seamen set sail; there’s green hair afloat / And eyes underwater follow the boat / But no one goes looking whoev- er they may be / No one goes seeking the folk of the sea.


There’s no question why 7-year-old Ruth was bewitched by this special place, only accessible at low tide, and enshroud- ed in mystery. Nowadays, this part of the British coast is a focus for environmental concerns – amid plans to harness the Bris- tol Channel’s tidal energy and the creation of nature reserves up the coast to displace the floodwaters, the nuclear plant at Hink- ley Point stands against the bay, a 21st- century leviathan of the coast. For cen- turies, the latent menace of the Bristol Channel, with its racing tides and miles of treacherous mud have held the low-lying Levels poised on the brink of natural disas- ter. Like a sea mist that might creep into Bridgwater and across the floodplains of Sedgemoor, these themes infiltrate many of the songs and stories in Ruth’s collec- tion, jeopardising her characters.


From a convalescing soldier called Dick Garland (which was not his real name) she learned On Sedgemoor (The Marsh Fever), a song about death prowling the marshes of the Somerset Levels looking for his dead in the mist. It is believed on Sedgemoor that mist that rises above the level of the knee will kill any man who tries to work in it. This same soldier also gave her Langport Town or The Water Witch, which refers to the tidal river Parrett turning herself into a water-witch willow and strangling and drowning belated travellers. Its haunting chorus goes like this (‘Ellum’ here is the grieving elm tree):


All on a summer morning she went to Langport town / But she never comed home again, she never come home again / She never comed home again, when the moon it went down / Oh Ellum do grieve, and Oak he do hate / But Willow, Willow, Willow, Willow do walk if you travel late.


A lot of these more sinister songs are ominous, beguiling and nagging; they fol- low you around and whisper through your hair, they lurk in your peripheral vision and worry your dreams. “Too good to be true,” many listeners and singers have said of her collection, probably fakes or fabrications of Ruth Tongue’s making.


Nowadays, the legitimacy of the songs and stories gathered by Ruth Tongue is to be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt, and the scepticism surrounding her authenticity as a folk song collector is not unfounded. Frustratingly, she refused to credit any of her sources by their real names, saying that “We Somerset people resent our names being mentioned to strangers” and she has “out of respect for this feeling and those of friends and rela- tives, substituted other names for those of the singers described.”


batim. Rather suspiciously, a Ruth Tongue song is melodically and semantically easily recognisable and her account of their sources is often extremely vague. One young fisherman who is credited with composing a beautiful love song The Lazy Wave was lost at sea in the first world war. Ruth recollected this song from the age of 8, when she heard it being sung one night in Weston-super-Mare. “But then again,” she admits in her book, “it can quite easily have been a dream.”


S


Biddy Rhodes says, “She recreated herself all the time. She was a thespian through and through.” Ruth was quite appalled when Halsway Manor first opened a folk centre, expecting it to throng with middle-class folk anoraks with microphones destroying the confidence of the community that she had spent a life- time building. “Eventually, however, she did develop a strong relationship with the place, setting herself up as the grand old lady of Halsway Manor and becoming a bit of a legend there.” It has even been point- ed out that she was not in fact a true Chime Child according to her definition of being born on a Saturday morning in Som- erset (she was in reality born in Stafford- shire on a Monday).


In any case, whether self-made fabri- cation or not, the legacy of words and


he would change and embellish the songs with every perfor- mance, and many were recalled from the early years of her life, and were not remembered ver-


music that she left behind after her death in 1981 is still of immense value and imbued with the lore of the Somerset landscape. Her book The Chime Child is an enchanting collection of songs and well worth a read. Although not many of the songs have yet made it onto recordings on the open scene, there are some wonderful versions by The Furrow Collective, Emily Portman, and Faustus among others, and a wealth of untouched material just waiting to be revived, many to be found in Biddy Rhodes’ book The Songs And Stories Of Ruth Tongue.


As I head back up the cliff path from


St Audries Bay, turning my back on the enticing chorus of ill-wishing sea morgans, and the perilous clutches of an incoming sea mist, I see my home county of Somer- set through a new, otherworldly lens; my new vocabulary of the countryside. A primrosen land full of missels, ruddicks, colley-birds and moldiewarps, forlorn spunkies and marshy zogs…


A Somerset Glossary:


‘primrosen’ – covered in primroses ‘missel’ – mistle thrush ‘ruddick’ – robin ‘colley-bird’ – blackbird ‘moldiewarp’ – mole


‘spunky’ – the ghost of an unbaptised baby, a will ‘o the wisp ‘zog’ – marshland


Kitty Macfarlane has recorded Mor-


gan’s Pantry on her debut album Namer Of Clouds, reviewed elsewhere this issue. F


Ruth Tongue (left) accompanied by Mrs Alice Pyne attending a wedding at Crowcombe,1969


Photo: courtesy Halsway Manor


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