A bunch o’ Wild Williams...

Who doesn’t remember seeing a hazy purple blue carpet of bluebells at some time or other during their lifetime? These, hidden in a little spinney not far from us in North Wales, were discovered by my daughter and her friend Rob, who took the photograph, out on one of their adventures last weekend.

In a good year the hills around our cottage turn iridescent purple blue with them, but this year it’s a little patchy – I hope it isn’t global warming. Fifty percent of the world’s bluebells grow in the UK – they like the cold and damp. The common bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta is a spring-flowering bulbous plant and has been a protected species in the UK since 1998. So it isn’t as common as its name suggests and it’s illegal to dig them up in the wild or to sell them. The bluebells for sale at the garden centre are Spanish bluebells, lighter in colour, nowhere near as vivid and shunned by any self-respecting faerie.

I remember the bluebell woods of the Chiltern Hills when I was a small boy. On Sundays we’d take a drive over to the hills in my dad’s old back-firing car and walk deep into the beech woods, picking bunch after bunch our hands made sticky by the slimy clear fluid that wept from their green stems in protest at their snapping. I could hear the stems snap loudly as I picked them - the soft, white, fluffy looking inner dribbling poisonous sap onto my hands and making them itch and rash for days.

When we were very young my sisters and I used to look for fairies in the bluebell woods. It was such mysterious and dangerous place, full of shadows and light and faerie tales - bad things could happen in the bluebell woods, after all it was like walking in another world, a magic world.

My Granny Roberts called bluebells "witches thimbles". She used to warn us that the bells of the flowers would ring at midnight calling to the fairies and that if anybody heard the bells ringing then they’d be dead by morning. She told us about old Tom James, a local farmer who heard the bells at midnight and was found dead in his bar on a bed of bluebells by his cowman the next dawn. She said that the cowman went looking for the faeries but couldn’t find them, he looked and looked until he went mad and they carted him off to Stone (the Buck’s County lunatic asylum in Aylesbury). She told us to keep away from the bluebell woods and never wade through a carpet of them for fear of disturbing the spells that the faeries had hung up on the flowers to dry. Terrible things would happen to you if you disturbed the fairy folk. Their spells would stick to you, bringing you bad luck, driving you mad like Tom James’ cowman – or even worse.

She taught us to recite all the old bluebell names - Auld Man's Bell, Culverkeys, Jacinth, Ring-O'-Bells, Wood Bells, Nodding Squill, Wood Hyacinth, Chimney Bellflowers, Bats-in-the-belfry, Gramfer Griggles, Witches Thimbles, and of course her favourite - Wild Williams. I can still hear her asking to be brought back a bunch o’ Wild Williams and to be mindful where we were clomping.

“Don’t step on them faeries." She’d say. ‘They has a terrible temper and will prick out your eyes with a long black thorn while you’s asleep if you worrit them – and then you’ll never see those Gramfer Giggles no more.” Granny Roberts had gypsy blood, she taught us this rhyme to remind us to be careful.

If you go a’looking for Bellflowers blue,
Be sure your heart be good and true.
Ask before picking your Culverkeys posy,
For fear of the little ones getting too nosy.
You mustn’t pick the Jacinth blue
Without that permission granted you.
For if you steal their Auld Man’s Bell
Sweet faeries will take you down to hell.

Granny Roberts - she had such a way with words…and children.