It all began in my first day at college when we were asked to construct our own 'effigy' out of sticks, twine and wire! I had never done anything like this before and was also dubious about creating something that I thought was a bit sinister. So I had in mind to create some sort of twig lady with a big skirt... well! I couldn't control the way the sticks went together and they formed in their own little way!
Knowing I was going to have to draw this thing later, I tried to give it some interesting lines. After tying all the sticks together with string and ripped fabric, I then painted it with bitumen and shellac. I rather liked the bright yellow effect of the shellac on the white cotton fabric.
As I spent time with my 'effigy', I was reminded of a passage I once read in a book....
'It was a procession of boys, in clothes of some time long past, tunics and rough leggings: they had hair to their shoulders and bag-like caps of a shape he had never seen before. They were older than he: about fifteen, he guessed. They had the half-solemn expressions of players in a game of charades, mingling earnest purpose with a bubblling sense of fun. At the front came boys with sticks and bundles of birch twigs; at the back were the players of pipe and drum. Between these, six boys carried a kind of platform made of reeds and branches woven together, with a bunch of holly at each corner. It was like a stretcher, Will thought, except that they were holding it at shoulder height. He thought at first that it was no more that that, and empty; then he saw that it supported something. Something very small. On a cushion of ivy leaves in the centre of the woven bier lay the body of a minute bird: a dusty-brown bird, neat-billed. It was a wren.
Merriman's voice said softly over his head, out of the darkness: 'It is the Hunting of the Wren, performed every year since men can remember, at the solstice.'
(The Dark Is Rising, Cooper S., First published by Chatto & Windus 1973, then Penguin Books 1983)
That poignant little scene stuck in my mind and I decided to find out what it meant this... hunting of the wren.
