October 2023: Nick Ashton-Jones is a grandfather, an environmental scientist and an agronomist, who is also a writer. His career has involved agricultural and conservation projects. He lived for long periods in Papua New Guinea, The Philippines, Nigeria. He has special affection for Nigeria where he spent a significant time as an ecologist in the Niger Delta, inevitably drawn into the human rights issues arising from the oil industry. At one point he underwent a mock execution. This focused his mind on the question that has preoccupied him ever since: How, has humanity come to a universal state of injustice and dispossession that has ravaged the ecology and the communities of the Niger Delta and of the planet? Part of the answer, he has concluded, lies with capitalism, which has made a virtue out of the ugliest aspects of human nature, Adam Smith’s Vile Maxim triumphant.
Nick's sixth novel is published this month. It explores the inside of an author’s head with a plot that considers capitalism gone wrong through historical perspective, adolescent trauma, incest, murder, and quantum mechanics.
(5th October 2023: Have I not been rescued by the Mystic Law? The printing of the hard copy and my efforts to publish the e-version of the novel was frustrated all week. Had this not occurred, then the novel might have for ever been associated with an outrageous speech given by the Home Secretary at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. In the speech, she used the phrase 'Parallel Lives' manifestly unaware of its quantum physical connotations. Parallel Lives was my original title, for profound reasons. I am forced, therefore, to consider an alternative, which is, for the time being, MANY WORLDS. This refers to Hugh Everett's concept of a branching universe - or 'Multiverse - arising from the postulation that ". . . everything that is physically possible happens inside a non-collapsing [electronic] wave function." I stand to be corrected, even by the Home Secretary. Watch this space. Other possibilities will be described.
The flooded trenches of a first world war, four murders, if not millions and a frozen body, dumped on the driveway to a country-house fallen, the entire house culpable. Atomic investigation destroys the truth.
ADDRESS TO MY DEAR READER
I wrote Many Worlds in order to clear out ideas that were disturbing the inside of my head. I wanted to write it, moreover, beyond the circumscriptions of current literary convention. It is not, however, an experimental novel. I am past that. After decades of writing I find that the WRITING process manifested in Many Worlds is the most satisfactory way by which I can express myself, whilst also maintaining my undying respect for you, My Dear Reader, whose admiration (and connivance) I crave.
The unusual nature of Many Worlds becomes progressively evident as you read on. Please do not pass judgement until you reach the end. At which point, you may even be inspired to write your own ‘fictional’ biography. After all, your psychology, like mine, is as socially, familially and personally damaged as is that of all my characters. Your reactive life, lived and observed, is the least real thing about you. An obituary in the Times is lies. Quantum mechanics indicates that investigation is an act of destruction at best suggesting an infinity of possibilities, mutually inclusive. Hence, parallel lives. You’re here: you’re there. The shifting of an electron changes everything. A position is not real until it is described.
Each part of the novel is sufficient unto itself. The parts also interact but please, My Dear Reader, have patience. Time is not on my side. I present to you here a slightly truncated edition of Many Worlds, the last four parts indicative, the final edition due by end 2024. Please bear with me. The price, £10 excluding p&p in the UK, is reflective.
“Where they will drown in mud, be blown to bits or else be made insane by fear and bursting shells staring, gibbering, staggering idiots incapable of walking from one point to another without falling over their own feet mouthing obscenities, which is, after all, the normal state of fucked-up humanity and let us get this straight the state of being fucked-up is the state of humanity every single one of us Lord and Lady Bongbong Betty Bagshaw the film star Peter Pontypanty the philosopher and Jack Crack the politician and best-selling liar.”
“You could smell the sulphur: Smuts on the potato leaves and the apples but never the blight, roses growing lovely against a sunny stone wall. When a breeze came up from Derbyshire blowing fluffy white clouds across a high sky, you could draw a plough straight and easy across an open field the gulls screaming behind, the horses glistening in the sunshine heads held high. We watched an airplane pass over. We waved at a man in goggles. He waved back. Grinning.”
Philip Larkin’s already put it nicely, not to mention Frederick Engels, no mean fucker himself, outraged by the trauma of capitalism gone wrong in England.
The flooded trenches of a first world war, four murders, if not millions and a frozen body, dumped on the driveway to a country-house fallen, the entire house culpable. Atomic investigation destroys the truth.
CHAPTER ONE - ONE MUST SIT SOMEWHERE
I am Alice. Driven by emotion, the masochistic tendency to self-destruct checked by useful tendency to think, for a moment, and by gentle aggressiveness. Seizing opportunity, I prove my life by achievement more than calculation.
She is confined only by satisfactory design. Something built contrary to expectation, wisdom having been achieved.
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Prototype leader of men. Lowly birth. An outlaw back home on the North German plain. He has the charisma and ability to lead a few adventurers and their families across the North Sea to somewhere near the Humber. Having crossed lawless country, his desperate bravado takes an abandoned Roman villa estate holding a few bewildered Britons. Slaves of coward bolted. We want a boss under whose protection we can farm in the knowledge our crops won’t be pilfered.
A scallywag leader who has the nerve to call himself Heard, which means brave and hardy. The best part of him. He bravely leads a dozen hardy men driven to ferocity by a desire to survive along with wives and children in lawless times. They follow their man, Heard, or as he is better known, Hard, proud to be feared as Hard’s people.
Hard approaches a powerful lord, Romanus, whom the slaves indicate has some military control of the surrounding country. You’d better make peace with him, or else he’ll make mincemeat of you. I’d like to see him try thinks Hard, but keeps his mouth shut. A show of humility to a superior lord will do no harm.
Romanus is a man who knows what’s what and who has contacts with other powerful lords. Oh master, says Hard having reluctantly got himself on his knees, let me have the bit of land I’ve described, and for which I am prepared to fight to the death because I’ve nothing else. I’ll be your man. I’ll supply you with fighting men. I’ll lead them into battle under your flag.
Hard and Romanus look into one another’s eyes. Each reasons, I can use him. Make him my man. Oath of mutual loyalty sworn at feast witnessed. By others. Who have also sworn fealty to Romanus. Hard’s men, on lower tables, are impressed by Hard’s association with other powerful lords. We are part of something big. Three cheers for lord Hard. Have another drink.
Back in the camp, Hard’s men take a similar oath of loyalty, to farm the estate under a lord’s protection, ready to fight for him. We are Hard’s people – Hardingas or Hardings – the ancient estate becomes known as the place of Hard’s people: Hardingston.
The Hardings settle, for safety, on top of a small hill above the valley of a river the Britons call Stor because in flood it flows dangerously fast. They repair the old circular embankment, large stones scattered inside, useful for making the hearths of the rudimentary buildings they erect, most significantly the meeting and feasting hall Hard and his family use as a residence. He’s the lord after all. It needs to show or else our neighbours’ll think we’re a hopeless lot. The place, as a fort, becomes known as Hardingston Byrig. Settled into the countryside, the Hardings will desert the byrig for the lower slopes. Their lord remains on top.
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Hardington is on high ground, Harbury higher still. The estate is small, the soil less productive than in the wooded valley below. Hardington, in the end, is a place from which people are more likely to flee than to be drawn. The wind can cut.
A couple of tough winters about the time Norsemen are being talked about. Ground rock-ringing hard for months. Sky blinding, country frosted bright day after bright blooming day dying for Spring. Hard’s descendant, Golda by name and tenth in the line of declining lords, takes his family of motherless children, wild but notoriously hardworking, downhill settling the hundred acres or so of his remaining demesne. Having left the place of one’s birth, he said, in the end, one must sit somewhere. Though the view’s more limited we’re sheltered by the summit upon which we once sat. The weather’s less friendly than it was. Were there not once trees on top? An easy-going man easy to persuade but appreciated by his neighbours who maintain symbolic fealty because he’d help when asked nicely ignoring advantage taken.
Golda was soft.
A Christmas tradition enabled winking serfs made devious by lordly deficiency to present a chicken, a rabbit or a couple of eggs nestling in a bed of moss. Relic feudal dues. Brought up to the ancient, thatched hall exchanged for a night of disrespectful rabble-rousing, the rough oaken door remade as a trestle allowing the entry of cattle. Convenient barn until roof falls in one empty night, sheep sheltering from the cutting wind in the lee of a crumbling wall. Golda and his wild children build a barn indistinguishable from others built by vassals nominal, nearby, caution the better part of valour in uncertain Viking times, an outlying farmstead a liability.
Village cluster in the making.
Destiny defined appearance of another proto-lord no less desperate than earlier invocation. Because there’s no room back on my native heath. In any event I crave something more significant upon which to make an impression. On the way I have collected half a dozen ruffians the presence of whom usefully causes consternation amongst those I would oppress. Indeed more likely to use fists than reason before mumbling apology. Of sorts besides we’re hungry.
So Golda fed the men.
The man explains. My name does not signify. I came from over a sea defines him as much as a tendency to have one eye only I lost the other in a confrontation less significant than this is likely to be. He touches the orbless depression affectionately. So does limited vision synchronously catch one wide eye of Golda’s middle daughter who resolutely shuts another against better sense. She is a lass not quite a woman but near enough in those limited days. Determined to survive. Willing to offer the man, whose complexion she admires, the benefit of her father’s doubt. Mess around with him if you must but I will not be made part of a bargain. I come on my own terms. The man becoming familiar is astonished, his fiery blondness enhanced by fire-light expressing an imitation of consternation. Clueless clenched fists nonetheless willing to accept guidance. If only it will come.
She is embarrassed by the silence her father offers. They may kill us but I don’t want them to think we are more foolish than we are. Her open eye looks at the depression she would exploit. What you want then? She suggests, wondering who are the bigger fools. A potential husband is willed to use the few words he has picked up on his inland journey. One must sit somewhere. She looks at her father who bows down before her wisdom. Upon this reasonable argument her father nods.
But do not sit upon us.
She opens all her eyes. I’ll show you a place she declares herself.
With Golda’s woollen cloak thrown over her shoulders she sticks her feet into her father’s leather boots, warmed by a dying fire. And, taking up the best iron cooking pot, walks out the door. One Eye follows acolytes trailing. She’ll be the making of him and, therefore, of us.
Beside the fire they have made, her forefinger explores the depression in his head, feels his wild, wiry burning hair, traces the ruddy lips to a gentle smile discovering a solid set of teeth with her tongue. Nonetheless she keeps her peace. She does not cry out with joy. She is dark and slim and sensible and she screws back her raven hair that is held in place by the wire brooch her mother left. Behind.
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Together they establish a flock of sheep. The production of wool and the weaving of cloth. An industry founded. The Hardings accept a new lord. Does not that brood of silent sons contain our blood? The top of the hill is satisfactorily re-occupied. An island of strength. A refuge when required. One-Eye’s Farm is known as Eatonby, Golda’s place, below, in time, Golden, a place where grain is grown.
The Eatonby pastures are part of the grazed landscape where sheep nibble hill, dale and any slope that’ll have them. A wide view as familiar to marching Romans as to desperate Danes and Norman soldiers of fortune. For a thousand grassy years England contained no more than three million people, never less than ten million sheep. A million cattle also for the draught oxen required to cultivate ten million grain acres necessary females generating an incidental dairy industry. Horses for war and for carrying the rich (the rest of us walk) say a hundred thousand. Since farming began on the British Isles six thousand years ago there evolved a livestock agronomy that maintained the arable soils. Livestock carried fertility from the hills and from the rough grazing areas of the lowlands where they grazed fallow arable land, manuring it in the process. Shit was money. Inevitably the manuring of land around settlements was the most intense. Walking the hills of upland Britain today, abandoned farmhouses below are strikingly surrounded by an acre or so of rich green inby. Stands out. A mile.
The Lady Eatonby serves her lord with advice he’s ready to take. You’ll have to swear loyalty to someone. Who’ll vouch for you in turn. Possession’s the law. Who’ll object? Not my dad. You make him feel safe. Does not my freedom prove his claim. Immemorial to the land upon which he sits Hardings there have always been but every man must have a lord. By this eminence you are my father’s lord now seek your own. Best if he calls himself a king. He’ll crave you as a fighting man. Her lips, therefore, fondly touch the orbless depression. She inhales the rainy smell of the man. Push him: he stands his ground. She looks at him sleeping. She releases the wire brooch in her hair. He has taught me how I can love a man by thoughtlessly accepting my love that grows as a consequence.
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Thus are the Lords Eatonby sokemen. Free men who hold their land directly from the king who by this time is the Dane, Canute, the Anglo-Danish kingdom part of his North Sea empire. The most organized part. To be treated with care because it yields the Danegeld. The tax that maintains the empire. The upland sokemen are not the wealthiest in the land but free men loyal to a king who guarantees their freedom. Do we not protect the productive lowlands farmed by the bovine Saxons who pay their taxes without complaint?
The Lord Eatonby is a fine man come from a fine line. He tells us he serves a Saxon king of whom we know nothing except that Harold is his name.
Alice, Adalheidis, Ada, daughter of the sokeman of Enderby sometimes Underbury. The canny lass married back into the Golden Hardings. Just in time. I’m no lord gov, said the winking man her husband, thumbing back at the hall on the hill, look to him up there. So a Norman knight with a bunch of Norman thugs desperate for a piece of landed booty to present his lord turned out the last sokeman as a traitor or, rather, for having backed the wrong side. The Hardings hang onto their corn-growing land, claiming also, as the good servants of a Norman lord, a bit of the hillside pasture above, where we winking Hardings have held the rights to graze our sheep since time immemorial. The eminence upon which sokemen sat is lumps and hollows marking a place occupied by King Arthur. Fitted for sheep lost in drifts of January snow, pathetic bleating echoing through frosted night.
Medieval Hardings are valued as men who can plough the Golden land blind. Bovine is the man Ada takes. Truly one with his team of obedient oxen. A man born beside the calf with which he grew. Toddler sits astride bullock’s neck, guiding and calming it with confident, childish legs. The one emboldens the other. Castrated beast forgets wild instincts, cleaving to growing boy. Who gives it a name. Freondli. Together they learn the land. Tough clay pulls back iron-tipped mould that slips too easily through lighter gravelly soil on top. If you let it. Cut deep and turn. Slow and steady’s the way. Mind and body also. A hundred thousand such men with a million cattle shape the land the sheep smooth over.
Ada married the man Harding because he had a hundred-acre virgate. Needed a wife. A sokeman’s daughter’s a catch this one’s a beauty. Dark, slim, sensible, her raven hair held by the wire brooch her mother left. Behind. Also, a canny lass.
Harding ploughed thirty to forty acres a year, depending on weather. Conditions. Fifty good ploughing days required before winter sets in. A wet Autumn holds things up. A later Spring sowing gives lower yields. Harding’s little herd of cattle make a plough team of four, six, eight oxen, the lead beast lumbering Freondli. You love him more than me, says Ada. Her husband admits the fault. Then pulls her to him. Clinging tight. I need you both, he murmurs. An honest man. The three sleep in the same space. Freondli providing inspiration. With each child, a calf is added. Four survive. A plough girl’s as good as any boy is Ada’s maxim. Harding agrees. Ada’s ideas make him rich.
Help your neighbour softly. Unless he’s dying of the plague. Harding takes his wife’s advice. The farm survives taking in the land of a neighbour. A family wiped out in the Black Death. Sit tight the family motto. Copyhold becomes leasehold becomes freehold. A golden stone farmhouse is built a couple of generations after the monasteries fall. Two hundred arable acres and grazing rights on the hills by Alice’s time but. Brothers inherit.
CHAPTER TWO - ALICE ALONE
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