Crab and Bees Matter of Britain

CRAB AND BEES MATTER OF BRITAIN by Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith. Peakrill Press

This is a thoroughly hallucinatory book. It starts like this:

It was all snakes. Nothing was straight. 

From the opening sentences we plunge into a world of myth, where stories that maybe resemble those in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century book History of the Kings of Britain, or tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table intertwine with near-contemporary linear-world characters and events. Echoes of the Flood that inundated many places at the end of the last Ice Age bump up against contemporary tales, Harold Wilson going to Scilly to die. This book confuses the centuries and mashes up the millennia, showing us how myth might grow from overheard inaccurate pub conversations. And it’s all spiced with the pungent intellectual delight of playful false etymology. 

It’s a rich cosmology. ‘The wind, the warmth, the water and the soil moved in circles, tangling with the stories in circulation’; in ‘The Origins of Colour’ we learn that things changed and became colourful ‘for no other reason than a general unevenness in all things’. ‘In some places the stories lay coiled under the ground. These are the places we call nodes or privileged points or Once Upon A Time.’  

Phrases and sentences leap out and provoke powerful memories. Of an obscure divination procedure we read: ‘Nothing that was said was very precise. Images were conjured, encouragement given.’ This took me back to a scene where, at the 1980 Mushroom fair at Devil’s Bridge in Wales, I entered a traveller bus and walked into a glowing tarot meditation that felt like truth, and was yet totally obscure. 

The writing feels careful and fine-tuned, the product of many years of practice. Crab and Bee are performers, travelling the land and delivering sometimes-locally flavoured performances, which I shall make every effort to get to now I know about them.

The tales we have in the British Isles, home to so many immigrant peoples over the millennia, are inconsistent and even contradictory. This they have in common with all myth cycles, the written words fixing in straight lines the snaky swirlings of the vocal tellings. There’s an insistent dreamlike quality to this book that reminds me a bit of Alan Garner’s recent novel Treacle Walker. Garner’s quirky, dark mythic sensibility is not so far from Crab & Bee. 

These stories, like all true myths, are realistic and not actually set in the past. The Wasteland before us is seen as the result of corporate greed, and irresponsible use of water sources leads to a resumption of water spirit devotion. 

Even our space and alien myths get a look in. George Adamski's doppelganger lives in Devon and is visited by a flying saucer.  We are told why we need aliens. Subsequently, we learn of the invention of the Earth during thick fog, while the moon shot was travelling in 1969. 

The cycle of stories ends as it begins, with snakes. ‘There is of course no end to the mermaid, serpent or selkie, but every story must wrap itself up in some way, no matter how inconclusively or inconsequentially…’ 

If you like wacky stuff do buy this book. I’ve already bought a second copy to give to a friend I know will love it.