Nine seagulls on a rail on Bognor Regis pier

Nine for the Nine Bright Shiners

Since this is the ninth month of the year, I thought I might produce some incoherent ramblings related, however obliquely, to the number nine. D’you remember the Dilly Song, also known as the Apostles Song, that begins ‘I’ll give you one-O, Green grow the rushes O’? Like the Twelve Days of Christmas, it accumulates an extra line with each verse until it gets to the twelfth:

‘I’ll give you twelve, O

Green grow the rushes, O!

What are your twelve, O?

Twelve for the twelve Apostles

Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven,

Ten for the ten commandments,

Nine for the nine bright shiners,

Eight for the April Rainers.

Seven for the seven stars in the sky,

Six for the six proud walkers,

Five for the symbols at your door,

Four for the Gospel makers,

Three for the rivals,

Two, two, the lily-white boys,

All dressed up in green, O

One is one and all alone

And evermore shall be so.’

 

My mum used to sing this when I was a child. Neither she nor I knew what it meant, although I loved it. To this day, there is no consensus on what some of the numbered items refer to, but it is clear that most are either astronomical or biblical references. Some are obvious, such as the eleven apostles being the twelve minus Judas, the four gospel makers being Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the seven stars in the sky being the Pleiades. There may be some hangovers from pre-christian religions in Britain, for example, the lily-white boys. Heaven knows who the rivals, the six proud walkers or the April Rainers are.

 

Before I start wittering on about the number nine, I should mention two other things in relation to the song above. In the 1970’s or 80’s, the inspired English/Scottish comedy duo The Two Ronnies sang a version which began: ‘I’ll give you one-O. Oh no you won’t you know’. When I worked in Singapore in the 1980’s, the Civil Service Sports Council Club on Dempsey Road used to have Bingo on a Tuesday night (what glamorous lives we international jetsetters lead), and the caller would recite from the song if a number between one and twelve came up, so that eleven was not ‘legs’, but ‘the eleven who went to heaven’.

 

Nine has innumerable connotations in Norse mythology, and has importance in many other  cultures. Nine Men’s Morris is a knots-and-crosses type game which dates from Roman times. The nine-branched candlestick counts the days of Chanukah. Cats have nine lives, there are the nine bright shiners (probably the sun, the moon, five visible planets and two other celestial bodies), and if you are Scottish, there is the nine of diamonds, the curse of Scotland. This is another tradition whose origin is not wholly agreed upon, but the theory on which most of the smart money goes is that its classification as a curse derives from its visual similarity to the coat of arms of Dalrymple of Stair, which includes nine lozenges. Dalrymple of Stair was an accomplished lawyer and political machinator, who was responsible for some of the atrocious repressions of Jacobite activities, including the massacre of Glencoe.

 

As a child brought up in Roman Catholicism, an important ennead was the Nine First Fridays. The tradition goes that attending mass and taking holy communion on nine consecutive first Fridays of the month greatly increases one’s chance of salvation. This arises from the visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a French saint of the 17^th century, who had visions and promises from the Sacred Heart of Jesus, including: The all-powerful love of My Heart will grant to all those who shall receive Holy Communion on the First Friday of nine consecutive months the grace of final repentance; they shall not die under My displeasure, nor without receiving their Sacraments; My Heart shall be their assured refuge during that last hour. Our teacher, when I was eight years old, put it more succinctly: ‘If you do your nine first Fridays, you’ll never die without a priest.’ Terrific. When I am looking down that long tunnel, it will be a great comfort to have Father Dougal wittering on at me. It sounded better as put to St Margaret Mary.

 

Another interesting nine is a book by RC Hutchinson, March the Ninth. This is a fascinating tale of a rural community in Central Europe in the immediate post-war period, playing a bit of catch-up on a German commander who ordered some dreadful reprisals for resistance activity during the Nazi occupation. The retribution narrative is combined with a doomed love story involving the incidentally involved narrator. It has considerable moral power, raising issues of the ethics of side-picking when you are in love with someone on very definitely the wrong side.

 

Ray Coryton Hutchinson is hardly thought of these days, but in the mid-twentieth century he was a (deservedly) highly successful English novelist. I first became aware of him when I noticed an enormous book in the library by him, Elephant and Castle: A Reconstruction. This is a brilliant tour de force, a sprawling canvas of London in the 1920’s. The primary narrative tells of a young woman from a patrician Quaker family who for no apparent reason other than social conscience, marries a young Italian immigrant of considerably lower socioeconomic status. The social experiment ends with a murder, and a revelation of the murderer as someone other than the man who was hanged for the crime. The introduction gives the impression that this is a fictionalisation of a real crime. After considerable internet research, I can still not be sure whether this is the case or whether the whole story is fiction. In any case, the book has many other stories than the main one, and knocks the reader for six.

 

RCH had what was at one time called a ‘good’ war, serving in the East Kent Regiment, and much of his post-war fiction was inspired by his wartime experiences. He also published a collection of short stories, The Quixotes, which included some very imaginative ideas. One is a story of a prison that inmates don’t want to leave. It is revealed at the end that it is a waiting room for people to be born in France, and relates to the low birth rate in France after the first world war. Another, Every Ten Years, is about a man who alights accidentally at a London Underground station with no access to the overground world, and in which a single train stops in each direction every ten years. If you travel on the tube as much as I do, you will appreciate how frightening this is.

 

We seem to have drifted off the number nine with my gibbering on about RC Hutchinson. The ninth day of the ninth month in the lunar calendar is very auspicious in Chinese folklore. In modern western culture, we cannot escape from 9/11, the eleventh day of the ninth month, on which those dreadful aircraft terrorist events took place.

 

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Apropos of nothing, and departing from the number nine script, I have an announcement to make. I have finally started writing a novel. My old pal from university days, David Walker, has written several novels in his retirement and published two of them (google them- Blackmail and Torres del Paine, both very good). I have written a lot of short fiction in recent years, but with my impending retirement I have decided to have a go at a full-length novel. I did write one in my twenties, but it was a load of old rubbish about a young man, to paraphrase something I once read in Private Eye, with not much to say and too much to  drink. Next year, you might ask me how I am getting on with the new novel.