PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
The witch woman
Some time ago, I regularly travelled 25 miles, near midnight, by train and a witch woman always came aboard at an intermediate halt, having spent the evening, I imagine, summoning the dead or trysting with vipers. She appeared to be 70 or thereabouts and she was incredibly ugly. She would come aboard, clanking her bottles, and the regulars, their faces frozen into neutral shapes so as to mask the horror beneath, would wait for her to descend. Often as not she descended on me and on a television executive, who would immediately crack up under the strain and begin to mumble and bumble in a corner, his eyes swivelling in mute appeal.
"Woddaddyastaringat?" she would shriek. "Garngiddoutovit," followed , by a wild dance. Occasionally, on her tour of the train, she would collapse on some sleeping stranger. Legend has it that she was white.The television man took to locking himself in a lavatory before her arrival, but she sought him out, beating the door and calling for him probably, I imagine, so that she could turn him into something. He would bleat for help but no-one moved. The old woman would throw the odd bottle or two down the corridor before abandoning him. Occasionally, for diversion, she would plant her face between those of two young lovers (of whom we always had an abundance). She would leer at them without a word.
"I'II kill her," said a theatrical gentleman who always made that trip. "I'll strangle her and put her under this seat." He never did. It was probably not the act that appalled him but the need for physical contact. A newcomer to the train, sleeping soundly on weak city ale, once awoke to find the witch woman staring at him from a distance of six inches and yelped wildly, reaching for the nearest door handle, though we were travelling at all of 60 miles an hour. "What was it?" he said when we calmed him down.
She was, meanwhile, inspecting the rest of the train, cackling, rolling from side to side, the bottles clinking in some vast cavern of the black cocoon that enshrouded her. A bank official afflicted by her swore that wild rumours about the incident ruined his chances of further promotion. He had got into polite conversation with a young dancer and they were discussing Lionel Bart. "He's after you, love," said the witch woman. He'll be following you when you get off and doing a damage. Look at his eyes. You can always tell." "Now look here,," said the bank official, stiffly, and it is as far as he got. She stuffed a bottle of stout between his parted lips, cackling, and covered half his shirt front with the fluid. I often wondered how he explained that at home.
I once met a do-gooder on that train. He had never heard of the witch woman. "You," he said, pinning me into a corner, "are in an excellent position to HELP people, being a writer. There is, I after all, little enough we can do in this life but be of service to others and your calling enables you to do more than most."
I agreed with him at once and, when we were alighting, led him in the direction of the witch woman. "Look at that dear old lady," I said. "all alone at this hour in a dark town and in need of help, I shouldn't wonder."
"Indeed," he said, his eyes aglow with righteousness, and he leapt towards her, grabbing for her elbow.
Half a dozen Saxon words later, he was reeling back, his eyes on stalks, and she was cackling and waving her bottles, inviting him to repeat the experience. For him, a lifetime of principles squirmed in the dust and I could see his little heels bobbing away beneath his raincoat as he faded over the horizon. The witch woman annointed a porter with half a bottle of stout in passing before dancing her maniac steps through the booking hall, howling as she went. (Always on these occasions, it was possible to observe the policeman on duty peering from behind pillars, only the eye visible, the rest having disappeared, complete with helmet, into the woodwork.)
In the early hours of the morning she was to be seen loping silently and alone on a raised garden in the town centre, like a living hallucination. She had no home, so far as I know, and in my wilder moments I doubt whether she existed at all except as a phantom of tthe night, or the common image of a mass hysteria.I would just like these facts fed into the computer because I feel they would have some relevance in any subsequent decision on the need for the line. All the regulars on that train seemed to retire early, or buy cars for commuting. I went one better. I moved house and neighbourhood. I am not an heroic man. But given the choice of Changi jail or the witch woman, I would be aloft and heading for foreign parts within the hour.
Geoffrey Mather © 2004
3 March, 2007