“Once upon a time…there was the Weald. Much of the Weald was smoke and flame – a place of blast furnaces and molten iron – and the mine pits; still, deep, dark cooling pools, from which would come the hiss of steam when white hot iron was plunged in.
And scattered throughout the Wealden forest there were those charcoal burners’ enclosures – the hut and the kiln, the piles of cut limbs and branches, and the solitary, wrinkled charcoal burner.
And when the charcoal burner died, as often as not his body rotted away in solitude and there was no-one to miss him, as the forest retook the enclosure – and the hut and the kiln subsided back into the ground. Sometimes bits of body were collected – no-one knew by whom.
Someone dark. Someone with a book. Bits of body were fixed together – bits of this, that and the other. Higgledy piggledy wiggledy. A brain animated by a spark of fire from a bloomer – an ancient blast furnace; a clay chimney – or fluxed into awareness and motion by an organism usually associated with rot and decay – the body jerked into some sort of life...”
Here begins the story of Link, a cryptid, a knitted-together Piltdown Man, whose pilgrimage takes him up the South Downs, staggering along the A27 and the M27, through Southampton, through Amesbury, past Porton Down, to Glastonbury, Dartmoor, the west of Cornwall and Brittany.
Mike O’Leary has been a professional storyteller for 25 years and his post-fairy tale vividly knits together the knuckers, hags, wisht hounds and dragons of folklore with more contemporary concerns of roadkill, hitch-hiking, migration and abuse. The result is a very adult story that investigates the whole idea of story in our lives and in our search for meaning.
Mike O'Leary has been a professional storyteller since 1995; this means he is more used to telling stories than writing them. He says: "For me, telling a story is more fundamental - the exchange between people, the swirl of patterns and motifs underlying the words, the effect of sounds and smells and light and dark as the story is being told, the questions and changes taking place that make each storytelling session different. I remember being told fragments of stories about hollow hills and sleeping warriors on a farm in Fife during the 1950s, when I was a small boy. It isn't just the focus of the story I remember, but a warm breeze, the smell of hay, and the Doppler effect sound of a jet aircraft as it flew into nearby Leuchars aerodrome. My writing, though, attempts to explore the telling. There may be a contradiction in that. I worked as a greenkeeper and a gardener before taking a degree, mainly focused on geomorphology. Afterwards, in my forties, I became a primary school teacher. Becoming a storyteller seemed to be to adopt the only profession for which all those things could be considered an apprenticeship. I have lived in Southampton since 1978 and remain there, possibly more out of inertia than anything else. We don't always choose where we end up and where our roots go down - and when we try to we invariably kill the place we thought we loved. Southampton chunters along, it functions, and I feel the locality. I wander away from it frequently, though, and talk to people, and listen to them, and gather up fragments of stories, and wonder why we do it - why we string experiences together to create narrative." My job, being a storyteller, involves words and music - and told stories are not separate from, not contained in a different box than, a song; there are repetitions, choruses, rhythms. I can be found on www.michaelolearystoryteller.com and on Facebook: @MikeOLearystoryteller.
