“
My father was a man of iron will. He had a red beard and eyes like caves. He married my mother sensibly for the triple joy of her widowhood, the three estates, but he was concerned - as an English country gentleman and an epitome of the chivalric virtues - with the making of a son.
Having heard well of the giant's child-inspiring powers, my father takes my mother by the hand and leads her up to him the night before their wedding. It had been a hot day, the hottest day that any man could remember, the skylarks swooning in the sticky air, milk turning sour in the cows' udders. At the end of that hottest day now it is suddenly Midsummer Eve and the giant stands out bold and wonderful and monstrous on his long green Dorset hill, the moon at the full above his knobbled club. My father lays my mother down on the giant's thistle, in the modest shade of Mr Wiclif's burgeoning fig tree.
'Dear hart,' he says, taking off his spurs and his liripipe hat, 'I shall require an heir.'
If ever widow woman blushed then my mother blushed hot when she saw my father unbuttoned above her in the moonlight. 'My womb,' she says, 'is empty.'
My father engages the key in the lock. It is well-oiled. He turns and enters and makes himself at home.
'I have been told,' he says,
'that any true woman,' he says,
'childless,' he adds,
'who lies,' he says,
'on the Cerne giant, - my father
takes a shuddering juddering breath -
'conceives without fail,' he explains.
My father goes on, without need of saying.
It is sixty yards if it is an inch from the top to the toe of the giant of Cerne Abbas. The creature's club alone must be every bit of forty yards.
'O Gog,' says my mother eventually. 'O Gog, O Gog, O Gog.'
'I do believe,' says my father, 'Magog.'
Now, in the moment of my conception, as a star falls into my mother's left eye, as the wind catches its breath, as the little hills skip for joy, and the moon hides her face behind a cloud - a bit of local history. When St Augustine came calling in those parts the people of Cerne tied a tail to his coat and whipped him out of their valley. The saint was furious. He got down on his knees and prayed to God to give tails to all the children that were born in Dorset. 'Right,' said the Omnipotence. This went on, tails, tails, tails, tails, until the folk regretted their pagan manners. When they expressed their regret, St Austin came back and founded the abbey, calling it Cernal because he was soon seeing his visions there - from the Latin, 'cerno', I see, and the Hebrew, 'El, God. That's enough history. I prefer mystery.
”
”