MURDER IN FLITWICK WOODS
The start of a glittering career?
by Mark Steinhardt

(From F&F#60 Feb.2007)

A commission changes everything. It shifts the expectation, raises the bar and, most important of all, inserts a deadline.

Up to now I’ve shared my stories with friends and family, my folk club and taken part in a few small events where I wasn’t known and the audience had no reason to expect very much from me. If—as I hope I usually do—I’ve delivered something interesting and carefully put together, then that’s a bonus.

But a commission changes everything. It’s an act of trust. It means people believe you can deliver, expect you to deliver, offer to pay you something for your effort and your ability and will be inking your name into their programme. They are asking you! They want you, and you in particular.

Well my commission—my first and only so far—was not quite like that, but that’s how it felt to me. I’m a member of Fibs and Fables, a story-telling circle in Clophill, Bedfordshire, and through the group, more by default than design, I was given the task of developing a story for a local countryside fair in September. The county council provided funding for me to research a brutal murder that was perpetrated in Flitwick Wood in 1788, and tell the tale in the storytelling tent. I had five weeks. I lost one week through illness, one through the most important contact in the council being on holiday, so that was three.

Then, for a fortnight, I just lived the story. Council records, county archive, woodland survey, archaeological survey, the museum, a trip to the wood, lots of background historical reading. I took loads of time off work and thought about little else than why and how Elizabeth White, a poor lace-maker of Ampthill was murdered by her lover, Joseph Cooke, the baker of Steppingley.

With a week to go I had 10,000 words of notes and transcription and I could have produced an excellent piece of social history, but not a story. And then I had a memorable moment. Without the notes—everything important was in my head—I sat in my kitchen and started to tell myself the tale, and when I got to the central scenes where the two main characters meet in the ridings of the wood and one slashes away the life of the other, I almost cried. My eyes were pricking as I moved on through the rest of the story and I knew I had something worthwhile.

The next day I went to a workshop for all those who would be telling at the fair and showed them what I had so far. My colleagues were very encouraging and with their help I cut the mass of material to a manageable size, so that the main story could shine through more strongly.

Through the final week I practised a couple of times a night, with my partner as an attentive and critical audience, scribbling notes and timing the piece. By then I had a couple of props; a waistcoat and pocket watch and an ancient ledger, supposedly containing the court proceedings. (I’ve written in F&F before about my liking for the occasional prop, if it is an evocative object.)

I told my story four times over the weekend of the fair, to a total audience of a hundred or more. I think one telling was a little slack, a little too relaxed, but in general I was pleased. The story is simple enough, so there had to be some melodrama to make it work, and there’s some background about the wood, the social setting and so on, to give the tale its context, but at the core is this single terrible murder, described in exact detail. This aspect was important to me. All the rest of the stories that weekend were for children, but I wanted to do something specifically adult to show that storytelling is not necessarily a cosy activity for children, but can deal with powerful adult emotions and actions.

So, I have fulfilled my first professional storytelling commission, and in the process taken my craft to a whole new level. I would even go so far as to say that I produced a work of art, in the sense that I made something unique to me. Only I would have done quite what I did with that material. It brought together a number of interests—women’s history, social history generally, landscape, woodland, adult story—and I put a shape on it all.

But it cost me a small fortune! I forgot all about earning a living for those two weeks in the county archive and when the cheque came yesterday it was for fifty pounds. That probably works out at 50p an hour. Some commission! But so what? I had a wonderful time and already the archivist has mentioned another cache of documents I should look at.

And it’s the beginning of a CV. I’ve won prizes in a few writing competitions but now I can contact people and tell them about this commission and perhaps be invited to other events to tell my story and others that I have developed over the years. I may have a glittering—alright, very slightly shiny—career ahead of me. If I can afford it.

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