#2024MakeAMonster day 5: Fire

 

#2024MakeAMonster

Fire

When I took the job as a professional hermit, being keeper of the flame went with it. 

It wasn't supposed to, officially speaking. Carstanton House is one of those eighteenth-century manors built on empire money out of grey stone and NeoClassical notions: pillars and porticoes and little acanthus leaves softened with old English lichen. Beautiful in a way they never intended, I think - the lines of the place were set by people who grew up on Greek and Latin and figured the best thing to do was build in the mist and rain like philosopher-kings under a blazing Mediterranean sun. Probably it looked clean and rational when it was first created, and like good enlightened men, they kept their follies outdoors. But they built some in, because everyone needs a little whimsy - by which they meant 'everyone who can afford it'. 

The grotto used to have a full-time hermit - a man named Humphrey Pegg was the first, according to records. He wasn't a performer; the notes have him down as a 'simpleton', a man who would answer any comical questions visitors put to him with gnomic observations just about picturesque enough to keep their fancy tickled. That's if they could find him, because Humphrey was a 'shy' man, they said: he liked to keep hidden away as much as possible. His employers rather liked this; it made hunt-the-hermit more unpredictable and added to the mystery of the business. And, according to the pamphlet about him, it was 'an opportunity of employment for those who might have struggled to support themselves by other means.' 

It's a dank place, the grotto. The stone walls keep the rain off you, and the moss grows green as jewels about the steps. The trickling of the stream is pretty soothing, although if you need to pee it'll nag at your nerves. I have a ten-minute walk to the nearest public convenience, but Humphrey must have just had to go out back. There's a dip in the earth with ferns over it that might have acted as some kind of privy. And I sit in what they consider an authentic hermit-bed: piled sheepskins, some as a mattress and some as blankets. 

They don't keep you from feeling the cold, hard stone below.

But it's a job, and if you want to make it in theatre you take the jobs you can get, and they're pretty good about letting me take time off for auditions; find-the-hermit is still a game and when kids spot me I have a different password every day and if they collect it, along with a few other spots along the route, they get a sticker. 

The kids are sweet. Some of them are scared of me - I wear my hair pretty ratted and the clothes are tattered as Halloween - but mostly they just edge up and whisper that they'd like the password, please, and sometimes they even give me a hug. There was this one little guy that saw me and shouted, 'It's the mermit crab!' like I was the coolest person he'd ever seen, and leaped right into my arms. He was a crab-fancier, judging by his T-shirt, and his parents were a bit nervous about whether I'd be offended, but honestly I thought he was a great little guy. Malik, that was his name, and he was cute as a button. I reckon he had some special needs once I got talking to him - he for sure had a lot to tell me about crabs - but it was the best fun I'd had since I started there: he and I sat together, him teaching me all about coconut crabs climbing trees and enormous Japanese spider crabs and why horseshoe crabs aren't crabs at all, and when anyone stopped by I'd give them my wild-eyed hermit stare and tell them that I was busy consulting with my fellow-sage about the great mysteries of the ocean. When his parents finally told him it was time to move on Malik gave me another big hug and said, 'Mermit!' and you know, I'm good with that. I am the mermit.

People don't throw things at a mermit. Teenage boys, though, will flick bottle-tops at me to show off to each other, and I can't tell them to fuck off or I'll be fired. I tried acting outraged hermit-style at first, but it just made them do it more, so now I ignore it; I curl up in my sheepskins and pretend to sleep. Some of them even nudge me with their feet to see if they can get a reaction. It's like the Beefeaters in the Tower of London, I think, except that those guys get to be soldiers serving the King instead of an under-employed actor who sits here rain or shine and has to do it barefoot.

So keeping an eye on the flame, which is the other part of my job, I have to do when there's no one around to make jokes about the hermit breaking kayfabe. I have a pair of Crocs hidden amongst my heap of rags - yeah, I have one of those too - and in quiet moments I slip them on, creep out go to check on the eternal torch. It's just in front of the grotto, so it makes sense that I'd be the one to check it; you can't go in or out without passing it. 

What they say is that this flame has been burning since they landscaped the place, or near the end of the project. It's like the hermitage: a folly. Eternal flames are sacred in some places, and so the improvers of Carstanton House decided it'd be picturesque to include one. It's a tiny little NeoClassical shrine, shielded from the rain on three sides and under a portico at the front, with a bronze bowl holding fire. Back in the day, they had a servant to check on it every few hours, make sure it got fed and didn't gutter out. Now they've piped in gas, craftily hidden in amidst the columns, so it's not such a labour, but they like to make sure nobody's messed with it, because that's the thing: people do sometimes fool around. If they'll toss stuff at a hermit - one guy even brought a water-pistol - then there's always the chance they'll put out an eternal flame just to say they did it. 

'No respect,' Simon Morris told me. He's my manager here; he works as a docent in the house and takes heritage very seriously. One of those men who gets sniffy when people mention that some of the wealth that built this place probably came from slave-plantations - 'Well, that's how it was back then, and we wouldn't have all this without it' - and he gets annoyed if I'm too difficult to find. He hadn't much patience the other week when I told him one of the visitors tossed an actual stone at me either. 

'Now, don't exaggerate,' he said. 'A pebble's not a stone.'

'It's big enough to put your eye out,' I said, and he told me that if I wasn't happy with the job I needn't stay on, because unemployed actors were hardly hard to come by. 

Next time someone tossed a stone at me, I told Simon they'd tramped all over the no-walking grass to get it, and he reported them. The place itself is irreplaceable, he tells me.

So he doesn't like the thought of anyone messing with the flame. He resents that I get to put on shoes to check it - he's lobbying for me to be issued some wooden clogs, and if he gets his way they'll be hand-hewn and a lucky-dip of splinters on the inside - but he does want it checked. Some days I don't get a chance to check on it till evening - mostly Saturdays when it's hard to get a space between visitors to the grotto. Saturdays are the good time anyway; that's when you mostly get families and I get to be a mermit people are grateful to, and sometimes if I make the kids laugh the parents even slip me a couple of pounds tip. Not something I ever tell Simon. 

I check on it, and it bobs in the wind. Frayed edges of light rattling to and fro. On the wet days I linger to try and warm my hands for a few moments before I have to go back to the cold, damp grotto.

In the quiet moments I think about Humphrey Pegg. They called him 'Old Humphrey', when they didn't just call him 'the hermit', but he wasn't an old man. I looked it up; if there's one thing Simon knows it's where all the records are kept. Humphrey was twenty-seven when he took the job. He kept it for nineteen years, too. Nineteen years out in this little cave, day and night under sheepskins. 

He didn't quit, though. He died. He was forty-six, and it was a cold winter. After you've camped in a grotto that long, I think forty-six must feel very old. One day they came down and found him frozen to death amidst the beautiful white snows of Christmas. 

That was in 1743, according to the records. After that, hermiting became a day-job with bed and board at night in the servant's quarters. The next man who took it up was called Ned Thomas, 'a man of wit and fancy whose turn of phrase provided entertainment for many a delighted guest.' More my kind of guy, by the looks of it. A mermit, I've started thinking of us. Humphrey didn't get many mermit days, I think. 

My pal Malik came by the other day. Ran right up to me, saying, 'It's my friend Mermit!' He told me all about the cars he'd seen on the drive here, and about pea crabs that live inside oysters and the fairy crabs that look furry. It was actually really interesting, and Malik was so happy to talk about it all - you could see his parents were pleased he was having a good time, and also that they'd heard these crab facts before and felt it a bit of relief he'd found someone else to tell them to. And honestly he cheered me up. I'd been down that morning; two rejections, one of them an audition I really thought I'd nailed, and some guy had got right in my face earlier going 'Woooo...' like he thought I was pretending to be a ghost, and his mates had just stood there laughing when I couldn't ask him to back off. So it was nice sitting with Malik - I almost felt like he was protecting me, because nobody bothered us while I was obviously busy entertaining him. I mean, who bothers a special-needs kid? And it was nice to just have a chat with someone sweet. I swear, the grotto almost felt warm for once. 

After he left I went to check on the flame. There was a little placard underneath it saying that it had never gone out since it was first created in the year 1744. 

Simon was getting friendlier to me since I was looking at so many of their records. He even said he'd be glad to interview me for a docent position since I was becoming so well-informed, but he had to admit he'd look upon my application with a certain disfavour - his phrase - since it would mean quitting my job as the hermit, and he'd be sorry to lose one so popular. That was a surprise to me, since when I started all he could tell me was that he didn't want to hear complaints because I could be replaced just like that, but I supposed Malik's parents or people like them had said something nice about me. 

But it added up to the polite message that I wasn't allowed to go indoors. It was getting to winter and he suggested thermals under my hermit costume, but he wanted me out there entertaining the visitors come wind or snow. 

It's what they called an 'unfavourable position', Carstanton House. Beautiful countryside around, but it's in Cambridgeshire where they say there are no hills to break the wind between us and Siberia. 

So the other day I was in my cave doing my bit - or trying to, but in that freezing weather it was mostly staring and huddling - when a nice lady came in. Short hair, big anorak, hiking boots; the there's-no-bad-weather-just-unsuitable-clothes type, but friendly with it. She looked at me and said, 'Well good grief, you must be frozen. Here, have a bit of this.' And she took out her great big flask, cleaned out the cup with an antiseptic wipe, and poured me out a dose of hot miso soup.

I really wanted it, but I had the job to do, so I gazed at her and said, 'The winds of mystery embrace us all,' which was one of my stock phrases when I couldn't think of anything else.

'They'll embrace you all right,' she said. 'Right down to your bones. You know, there's a story in my family that a great-great-whatever-great-uncle of mine froze to death out here? Go on,' she proffered the cup, 'I won't tell anyone.'

I took the cup; I was too cold to resist. 'Was that Humphrey Pegg?' I said. I figured that if Simon heard of me breaking character, I could at least tell him I switched up to docent. 'I read about him. The first hermit, they said.'

'That's him,' she told me. 'Poor Uncle Numps. That's what we call him, Uncle Numps. He was a bit eccentric even before they hired him - that kind of stayed around, there's a lot of characters in my family - but it really was sad. The family legend is that his cousins asked the Carstanton House lot to let him live indoors for the winter, but they said there was no reason he shouldn't stay out here and be fine if he just set a campfire. There's a spot for it there.' She pointed to what I'd thought was the privy; there was a tunnel of stone open above it, that must, I saw, have been a kind of chimney. 'But he couldn't do it. He was afraid of fire. Of course they had fireplaces in the houses, but even in a stable or a room without a grate he'd probably have been all right. But they wouldn't have it. They said if he didn't want the job he could leave, but what else was he going to do? There weren't many jobs for a forty-something eccentric. So he stayed, and then there was a snowfall and he froze, poor Uncle Numps.'

'That's - awful,' I said. 'I kind of feel like I'm troubling his grave now.'

'Oh, I'm sure you're all right,' she said, and topped up my soup. 'Goodness knows he understood a body has to make a living, if nothing else. And they say he was a nice man. Though I couldn't blame him if he died angry.'

I drank the soup, and I felt the cold in the place. Even in summer, it had been cold, and it wasn't summer now. 

When she'd gone I had to go check on the flame. It was still burning. It had been burning sicne a few months after Humphrey Pegg died in here. 

I looked up some more records. It seemed that the house had changed hands quite suddenly in 1744, just before they built that flame shrine. The old master had been found dead in his bed. He was only fifty-three, and he hadn't been in bad health. They said a nasty draft must have got into his room somehow, although the windows were closed, because it looked like nothing so much as hypothermia. 

A couple of days later Simon told me he'd had to ban a family from the house. He said they had a 'disturbed' little boy with them who'd had a screaming meltdown, and it endangered the furniture. He felt very justified about it, and quite angry that the boy had been allowed in in the first place.

'What was he so upset about?' I asked.

Simon shook his head at me. 'Who can tell with children like that?' he said. 'They're just lucky they're still allowed in the gardens. That's political correctness for you.'

He wasn't the only special-needs kids who visited us by a long way, but I knew before I saw them again that it had been Malik. There was a Dutch still life in one of the rooms with a crab served up boiled on a plate, surrounded by other seafood. I'd been hoping he wouldn't see it. 

But he must have wanted to come back, because they braved the gardens again. Malik ran in to see me saying, 'Mermit! Mermit!' and jumped up to give me a hug. He was all warm and toasty in his winter jacket.

I wanted to tell the parents I was sorry they'd had trouble in the house, but that's the kind of thing I could lose my job for, and besides Malik just wanted to tell me about crabs. It would have been very nice except a bunch of guys came in who thought they were funny. 

I'd seen them before; they were the ones who liked to shoot a water-pistol at me. I'd asked Simon about banning them, but they're not the kind of people he sees a need to ban. But when they saw Malik chattering to me, they started laughing again. Not just laughing, but copying how he talks. He has a bit of a speech impediment, or maybe just a funny way of pronouncing, but he mumbles some of his consonants and they were imitating him, saying back the things he was saying.

Malik looked pleased. He thought they were joining in, and repeated himself again. 'A group of crabs is a cast,' he told them, and they chanted back, 'A group of crabs is a cast,' and he said again, like he was playing a game, 'A group of crabs is a cast.'

And suddenly I realised there were some things not worth the job. I stood up. 'All right, lads,' I said. 'You've had your fun. Time to move on.'

Well, they just kept laughing. 'He doesn't mind,' they said.

I could see Malik's mum was trying not to cry, but I could see, too, that she and his dad weren't going to start a fight. It would have scared Malik.

So I had to respect that. I changed tactic and started doing my hermit act. I did full on Lear-on-the-heath, crying out, 'Blow winds, blow! Rage, Uncle Numps! And thou, all-shaking thunder!' They thought it was funny enough that Malik's parents were able to take him quietly out while those guys stood around laughing while I mimed being a crazy man who they could pay to laugh at.

After they were gone, I waited just a little time before I went up to the shrine. All I had to do was cover it with a damp sheepskin for a couple of minutes to douse the flame.

I still have my job, though I've got some auditions coming up I'm more hopeful about. I got a callback for a touring production of Lear, actually; they said I did a good Fool. And I'll have a solid reference, no blame attached for that one little incident when the flame went out - I told Simon those guys probably squirted it with a water pistol. And as to why they froze to death on an ordinary country walk, well, who knows? A little eternal flame in a pretty bronze bowl wouldn't be enough to keep a park warm, after all, and its absence wouldn't change the weather. It'd only make a difference to someone who couldn't pass it because he was afraid of fire.

It's not as cold in the grotto any more. They say it's pretty freezing in the house, though. Nobody lives there, so it doesn't do too much harm. I just hope Uncle Numps is warmer than he was. They're doing what they can with the central heating, and after all, nobody these days would be rash enough to light an open fire in a stately home.