With the witches

A long way to go

On the weekend, I ran 45 miles around the Pendle Way, overnight, with my clubmate Liz. I’d been training for months, and for once actually done my training, but I was nervous about staying awake. I like to sleep early; I like to nap. I like my sleep. In fact staying awake was the easiest part because adrenaline is a powerful thing and I had plenty of it. The race is called Pendle Way on a Midsummer’s Night, and when I have told people that I was going to run it, plenty said they had never been to Pendle Hill, which we had to get up in our first mile or two. Or if they had heard of Pendle, it was only because of witches.

We saw a lot of frogs throughout the hours of darkness. Beautiful dappled creatures sitting on trails and footpaths as if they owned them. We saw a heron, and bats, and heard crickets. We noticed the birds and the flies go to sleep and then wake again towards 3, when the light grew stronger in the east and I realised how much a new day feels like a blessing.

We also saw a lot of witches. Every fingerpost for the Pendle Way features a witch.

Witches are big business around Pendle. Early on we ran through Newchurch in Pendle but I’m glad I didn’t spot this shop:

The shop’s website describes its location as being at the bottom of “spooky Pendle Hill.” What’s spooky about a hill? It has never felt spooky when I’ve been trudging up and down it while running the Tour of Pendle, even when the weather looked like this:

Anyway the “witches” were hanged in Lancaster, nowhere near Pendle Hill.

I find the witch business unsettling because the witches were mostly just inconvenient women (and two men). Some of the denouncers were also women and girls, most famously the nine-year-old Jennet Device, who denounced her mother Elizabeth, her brother and her sister. Jennet had the misfortune to live in the time of James 1, who was mad about witches, enough to write a whole book about Daemonologie, in which he exhorted his people (the Scots, at that point, as he had not yet taken the English throne) to seek out and condemn witchcraft. Unsurprisingly, local rivalries were involved in the Pendle witch denunciations:

The story began with an altercation between one of the accused, Alizon Device, and a pedlar, John Law. Alizon, either travelling or begging on the road to Trawden Forest, passed John Law and asked him for some pins (it is not known whether her intention was to pay for them or whether she was begging). He refused and Alizon cursed him. It was a short while after this that John Law suffered a stroke, for which he blamed Alizon and her powers. When this incident was brought before Justice Nowell, Alizon confessed that she had told the Devil to lame John Law. It was upon further questioning that Alizon accused her grandmother, Old Demdike, and also members of the Chattox family, of witchcraft. The accusations on the Chattox family seem to have been an act of revenge. The families had been feuding for years, perhaps since one of the Chattox family broke into Malkin Tower (the home of the Demdikes) and stole goods to the value of £1 (approximately the equivalent of £100 now). Furthermore, John Device (father of Alizon) blamed the illness that led to his death on Old Chattox, who had threatened to harm his family if they did not pay annually for their protection.

From this website.

The Pendle witch trials were unusual in that the clerk of the court, Thomas Potts, wrote a book about them. You can read the whole Discoverie of Witches on Project Gutenberg. (And if you don’t know Project Gutenberg, get to it right now and wallow in its riches.) Potts was not exactly objective. This was his description of a nine-year-old child:

A more dangerous tool in the hands of an unscrupulous evidence-compeller, being at once intelligent, cunning and pliant, than the child proved herself, it would not have been easy to have discovered.

He thought the “discoverie of witches in the countie of Lancaster” was “wonderful.” Keep these women down. The harridans, the harpies, the hags, the witches. The powerful, the menopausal, the land-owners, the widows. The non-men.

Witches are not gone. I don’t mean that there are pagans and good witches though good for them. But I mean: Paris Mayo, 19 years old, imprisoned for 12 years for killing her newborn baby while her parents were upstairs. A child as troubled as Jennet and as scared, who lashed out like Jennet did, and caused harm like Jennet did. I am struggling to feel that she did not deserve punishment, but not 12 years of jail. Keep these women down.

---

On the run, we ran out of water. That wasn’t really our fault: we were both carrying plenty. But because the race is normally run in the other direction, and because it is very difficult to find people to man checkpoints overnight, the last provisions were at Earby, 20 miles from the finish.

We could have stopped to find a newsagent in Barrowford I suppose, but by then we were desperate to finish and it was still early. I have not been that thirsty for a very long time. In fact probably never. It was chilling. I could think of nothing but water. I looked at the grass in a field we were going through and wondered whether if I chewed it I would get some liquid. Thirst is overwhelming. It leaves no room to think of anything else.

At the finish, the race organiser Jamie said, well done! here is your memento! And although it was a lovely laser-cut wooden coaster with a witch on it (of course) we couldn’t have cared less.

Yes, whatever, BUT FOR GOD’S SAKE GIVE US SOME WATER. When my partner Neil arrived — he had been standing outside to watch us finish — we were nowhere to be seen. “Kitchen,” said Jamie, and this is the sight that greeted Neil.

That cup of orange squash tasted like the best thing I had ever ever drunk in 53 years.

(Yes, that is a quiver! For carrying running poles.)

How do I feel now, two days later? Tired. Bone-weary. But otherwise in good shape. No blisters. Some chafing, including a nasty scrape by my sports bra which I didn’t even notice until I had a shower. And weirdly, I had hardly any appetite for about 48 hours. I was so puzzled by this, because whenever I’ve done long runs, I’ve wanted to eat everything within about two hours of finishing. But my long runs in the past have been at the most 33 miles. This was 45. We were on our feet for nearly 14 hours. Apparently, though I didn’t know this, we were producing an exercise-induced metabolite that suppresses feeding called “lac-phe”, an ugly shortcut for N-lactoyl-phenylalanine. I don’t know when the cut-off for producing lac-phe is — 34 miles? 12 hours? — but I do know it’s a thing. And very peculiar.

---

Animal hero of the week: Pigeon USA43SC6390

After last week’s account of Tyke/George, Shevonne wrote and told me there was a pigeon exhibit at Bletchley Park. Brilliant.

On the backyardpoultry.com website where I found this photo, it is captioned “wall of heroic pigeons.”

So this week’s hero is GI Joe, a pigeon in the US Army Pigeon Service, ID Pigeon USA43SC6390. GI Joe was a dark checker pied white flight cock, born in Algiers in 1943, trained in the US, then posted to Tunisia, Bizerte and then to Italy. In 1943, the Allied liberation of Italy was underway, and on 18 October a request had been filed to bomb German positions in the village of Calvi Vecchia north of Naples. But the village was liberated by British forces on the same day, and for some reason those British forces were unable to radio a message to US troops to call off the raid. 100 British soldiers and the villagers were about to be bombed by Allied bombers.

GI Joe was released (though I’m not sure what a US pigeon was doing with the Briitsh troops) and flew 20 miles in 20 minutes, reaching Allied lines just as the bombers were about to depart. “If he had arrived later,” wrote Otto Meyer, former Commander of the US Army Pigeon Service, “it would have been a different story.” That mile-per-minute flight was judged “the most outstanding flight by a USA Army Pigeon in World War II.” General Mark Clark, commander of the US Fifth Army, estimated that GI Joe “saved the lives of at least 1,000 of our British allies,” according to Otto Meyer.

I don’t know what his message read though. “Please don’t bomb us, there’s a good chap”? If you know, please tell me.

GI Joe was awarded the Dickin Medal by the PDSA in August 1946. There’s a whole damn brochure about him.

GI Joe was the first non-British recipient of the Dickin Medal.

After his retirement, GI Joe lived in a loft at the Detroit Zoo. He died in 1961 at the age of 18 “and now resides in the U.S. Army Communications- Electronics Museum at Fort Monmouth.”

“Resides”? Stuffed, again.

---