That’s not my name

In the summer of 2014 or thereabouts i was standing on a small footbridge overlooking a small river flowing into Coniston Water in the Lake District. At the time I was head of a small team of hard-working journalists providing a news service for a small company with a giant ambition. I loved it, although it was incredibly stressful, and it was around the point in my life where I’d begun to think about reorganising my priorities.

I suddenly felt like I’d been thrown back through time to a period before modern civilisation – asides from the bridge itself, there was nothing in my sight that couldn’t have been there millennia ago. I moved slightly so that the bridge wasn’t visible to me, and at that point I remembered the question: “Why?”

It had been asked earlier that day by one of those strange characters who wander into my consciousness from the back of my mind (my story engine). I’d been watching an episode of Time Team in which Dr Mike Parker Pearson had explained the idea of a double-burial in prehistoric Britain. When you died, you were left until your flesh had been returned to nature by the elements and the actions of animals. While that process was underway, it was suggested, your close family members carried on of your bones as a memorial. But eventually the “time for forgetting” came, when your remains were buried permanently.

The strange character was a young boy being asked to return his grandfather’s finger bone for interment – and he only wanted to know why he had to give up something so valuable to him. As I remembered him at the river, about 300 miles and 12,000 years away from his life, I knew who he was and how he felt about everything. He was a half-trained village shaman, who’d learned to understand the ways of the seas and the trees and the natural world, but not how to control them; and the death of his grand father, the shaman, meant his training would never be completed.

I also knew he was referred to as the Withy. It was nice: it sounded young, soft and slim – but it was a horrible word, and it already had an official meaning: a thin willow stick. The character was insistent in returning to my thoughts, so I knew I’d write about him one day, although not until I had a better name for him. 

Well, it didn’t work out like that. When the continuing archeological exploration of Stonehenge and its surrounding ancient landscape raised the idea that the multi-generational building culture had all been one individual’s idea, I realised I already knew who they meant, and that, regardless of my issue with his name, it was time to tell his story.

There are several hundred notes and several demo chapters lying around, but I haven’t found the right way to tell it yet. I’ve learned to be patient about that kind of problem. In the meantime, I wrote a short test piece, a cross-section of the concept, designed to stand alone. And it was good! I asked my talented actor wee brother John to voice it for me, in the hope I’d learn more about the character (which I did). Then when Jacob Holm-Lupo and I began our accidental, unexpected creative partnership, The Withy was the first piece we worked on.

I happened to mention to Jacob that I’d never been happy with the character’s name. When he reminded me of a fact I’d forgotten, that a willow wand was regarded as something of a magical instrument, and the willow tree itself is often thought of as a force of nature and religion, and a fact I hadn’t considered, that he’s probably best known for his work with the band White Willow… I became very comfortable with the fact that the boy who wandered into my head six years earlier was always meant to known as The Withy.