Children love to listen to stories and I was lucky that, when I came home from primary school and my mum was getting the tea ready and my dad was still at work, my grandmother would keep me entertained by telling stories of some of the amusing things that had happened to the family over the last few generations or snippets of folklore that could keep you safe in the countryside.
David Phelps
The last survivor of her generation, she was matriarch of an extended family that had spread not just over the southern Welsh Marches but also as far as New Zealand and Canada. Returning to the mother country they would always make a point of visiting Edith Crowe and this would be the occasion for a family get-together and requests for favourite stories. Watching these adults listening with rapt attention was perhaps the first time I had an understanding of the power of a good story.
After my grandmother’s death I, like so many others, became enthralled by the stories on the television but in late teenage these began to pall and it was then that I discovered a book, “The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire” by Ella Mary Leather, published in 1912, just as much of the information it contained was passing from public knowledge into history. For me it was like a magic spell book. Here was the extraordinary in the ordinary; the two conical hills just outside Hereford might be where Robin Hood had shot an arrow from one to the other, how the devil could be raised or where fairies can be spotted. Of course a child of the mid twentieth century might not exactly believe in all of that but it made a country walk a little more exciting, were those swaying branches really just the wind?
I must confess that I have turned into a writer rather than a folklorist and there is nothing that a writer likes more than just a snippet of a story rather than the full thing. It is something to work with. I was aware, in researching the folktales of Herefordshire, that there were many fragments of folklore out there that could be easily passed over but deserved a wider audience. So the twenty stories in this book all started as glimpses of a bigger story that I could flesh out. So the title story, “The Snow Foresters” was just a name in a tale told me by another storyteller. What were these creatures with an intriguing name and why were they so menacing? Why was a half-timbered house in the city of Hereford haunted by the ghost of an apprentice apothecary and why did the daughter of a wealthy family run off with a groom? This is what I set out to discover in the writing of these tales. I hope you will enjoy the discovery of reading them as much as I enjoyed researching and writing them.
David Phelps
www.davidphelpswrites.co.uk
