The Gnostic Corpse (1972) and The Piping of Summer Elves (1979)

 (NB - Click on images for soundfiles)

One of the things Miranda and I loved most about Medieval Catholicism (is there any other sort?) is its obsession with mortality as a source of an essentially anti-human neurosis. Basic fears and concerns are stripped to the bone and personified in a multiplicity of imagery from Transi Tombs to the foliate face of The Green Man and other 'memento mori', all of which serve to underline the belief that this life is but a gateway to the next, thus justifying all manner brutality and atrocity in the name of religious truth. Death features as a character in The Durham Pilgrims; the medieval landscape is strewn with corpses of the victims of crime, pestilence, poverty, war and hostile nature, of winter and wolves. He joins them in this opening scene in which a gibbet looms ominously out of the mists on an otherwise deserted shore...

Hermione Harvestman - 2003

Stage direction by Miranda Hardy:

Scene One : A group of Pilgrims come upon a gibbeted corpse on a bleak blasted foggy headland. Though severely decomposed, the corpse begins to speak, urging them to turn back from their journey and make the most of life, the aftermath of which is assured oblivion.

Pilgrims! Listen to one who knows!
There is no heaven, nor even God;
This life is all; and this earth is hell, or heaven
as you choose.

The Church is corrupt, unworthy of your time and devotion.
So go back to your loved ones e'er time slays them
The time you waste in devotion is far better spent in love.

Love is all that life allows. There is no greater joy
than the warmth of the living flesh.
So Husbands, go back to your Wives;
Mothers return to your Children
Least they be as I am when you return!

Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus!
As I am now, so you must be; as you are now so once was I!

Several are convinced by the corpse's pleas, and begin to turn back; seeing this THE PRIEST insists they take the gibbet down from the gallows and burn it as a heretic. As the pilgrims look on, the corpse howls in the flames: Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus! Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus! until all is consumed and silent once more whereupon the they go on their way - only now DEATH is one of their number...

As a child I saw elves I'm sure. They came out on summer evenings, in the wild places I frequented in a state of perfect joy and innocence, entirely untroubled by the business of the human world back in the house which I never much understood or cared for. I confess to being heavily under the influence of Rackham, whose vivid illustrations convinced me of the reality of the Little Folk as much as did the stories they attended, or not, as the case might be. I grew up immersed in such lore, be it in book form, or on the lips of the various storytellers who worked below stairs, keeping me entertained with the truth of their vivid recountings, though that wasn't, of course, their main vocation.

Our cook was particularly wise in such matters, as was a rather pretty young scullery maid called Dinah who spoke of The Piping of Summer Elves, which she likened to birdsong only with a more human melody to it. I suppose the outbreak of the war changed that world forever, however much I clung to it for the duration, but by 1945 I was fifteen and had other things on my mind. There are times it has returned to haunt me, and over the years I swear I've heard their piping of a summer evening as something rustles in the monochrome Rackhamesque twilight, though I often wonder what Dinah meant by 'a more human melody'. Perhaps it was the otherworldly notes of the Lydian Mode, played F to F on the white notes of a piano, on on the synthesiser, as I do here, communing with my inner child who once heard such things without asking.

Hermione Harvestman (Notes to Self, 1999)