Lift this apple to your face and stroke its ruby skin, silken in your hand, dappled gold by the sunlight within. Close your eyes and smell the freshness of the earth, perfumed with myrrh. Now take a bite – cool and sweet to pump your heart and spread its wine throughout your body. As your teeth break the seal, my story can be heard.

I never imagined it would end like this. Again, in such a different setting, thousands of years after Aphrodite’s curse. I never met my father in this life, so I don’t believe I slept with him, but my choice of husband was flawed. With apparent mercy, Aphrodite allowed me all the childhood years with my beautiful son, Adonis. Only at the end did I know the cost exacted, all memory of maternal joy. Adonis had not lost me or had to miss me, so instead grew to hate me, and it is he who forced me away this time. Grief took hold, and my screams rang out. Time never allows us to retrace our steps.

The front door slam was a gavel silencing the court. The air hung, not wanting to fall. Not trusting the storm of son and father had passed. I’d stayed at the top of the stairs, gripping the banisters like bars on a window, watching for the petals to land. He had thrown the rose down and around to the glass vase on the glass hall table, trying to break it all.

He loves me not. A gauntlet declaring a duel to the death. A rose thrown at the end of the last act. Curtain down. “Take this, it’s all you are worth.” Petals were drifting, floating. It was a Blue Moon, the first cutting of our first hand-grown rose, I’d placed on his pillow to help him sleep. A faceful of edible, breathable sweet tea rose. The rose of rose and violet chocolates.

The strings of Shosti’s 2^nd Piano Concerto were floating, falling. Silently landing. The piano the asked why I’d caused my son so much pain. “Go away. Go away. Get far away from here,” its notes sang out.

Each time I have been a mother, it is without an example to follow. I showed my baby the beauty of the world. I sang him to sleep, and when he woke, I stretched his arms to reach for the top of the bed, and his soft legs to point to the end. To me, limbs were wings to lift us above pain. I breathed in the music and flew, rising, swooping, with the strings and the quiet echo of each note. All energy moved me, like water to the clouds, drawn from the earth through the tiny circle of my toes on pointe.

Emptiness filled the drive outside my study window when the roar of the car engine had gone. A robin was sheltering beneath a sleeping apple tree. The music on my phone continued to soar, now Alberto Giurioli’s Rising Above. To this I could join the seagulls high above the hedge, gliding through rainbow clouds, and out to sea.

“Help me, help me,” I pleaded to the angels. “As always, I deserve to be punished for my failures in love. It is not death I request, but to live a different life.ⁱ Let me exist in the wild, free from regret; to not be named in marriage, only to be erased. To not create a home for my family, from which to be banished.”

An arc of starlings swooped south to the shore. To the turquoise jewel colours and seaweed air of the waves, rolling forward, under, back; forward, under, back, in their eternal ceilidh, music always playing; never alone.

The wind blew me east to Beachy Head, the chalk pinnacle of this English south coast; layer upon delicate layer of fossils, falling as the oldest dissolve into the sea, then rising again. There were more birds than people on the wide clifftop plateau and I could hear each of them sing. I followed their tune and felt the music awake. A hand of rays was stroking light through the dark grey bay. It beckoned me forward from the edge, and I soared, arms outstretched, gliding, peaceful and free.

Many minutes seem to pass before my coat stroked the rocks and more hands carried me forward on the waves. A row of fishermen swept me over their heads into a cave, their greetings sung in a rousing concerto.

It is a cave of all music and all strands of time. The patrolling chaplains and speleologists will never find it through the curtain of shifting sands and tides. A constant stream of people were helped inside: fishermen in their oilskins and jumpers; lighthouse-keepers carrying their bulbs; sailors with oars. A mother with her baby’s body in her rucksack. Tourists who’d wandered unwisely along the shore and been lost beneath the Falling Sands.

I was soon able to stand and adjust my eyes. Images of animals from my youth were painted on the walls, shimmering with life. The whispers of the waves faded as I was ushered past an orchestra encircling a lake. Angels in crystal haloes directed driftwood harps. A solo violin breathed Venus by Holst, the calm after a lifetime of battles with Mars. Woodwinds blew me, soft as a summer breeze, to the pastures beyond.

The plain resembled a palace tea party, eternal as the Mad Hatter’s. Or a music festival, without rain. I was smiling and felt rested as if from a long night’s sleep. A group of white bearded Dubliners sang together beneath a rowan, from which bottles of rum were hanging.

“You’ve made it to Fiddler’s Green

Where the skies are all clear, there’s never a gale

And the fish jump on board with one swish of their tails.ⁱⁱ”

While my eyes scanned in disbelief, I breathed the marine air.

“No oar – not a sailor?” a man said, taking my hand as he slipped an arm around my waist. He scooped me up and I dipped back, imagining myself in the pampas of Patagonia, dancing an Addams Family tango with an old goucho friend.

Beyond the groups of people, beached boats and bandstands, hawthorn silhouettes were sketched white on a Wedgewood blue sky. As our tango slowed, a wood nymph appeared, draped in red and green, with a face radiating such beauty beneath copper hair, even I could not help but stare. She backed away, and pulled a blossom crown low over her eyes, her graceful hands cupping her ears. In that silent, solitary pose, part-woman, part-tree, I recognised her as Pomona, and felt her story close to mine.

From left to right, the hawthorn branches spelt an ogham offer of sanctuary. In every life, trees have incorporated me in their midst, to conceal me from father, husband; even the spiteful gods. They have accepted my feet on their roots and enveloped my crouching form in leaf mulch and twigs, disguising my pregnant torso, limbs and head. And each time, they delivered my son, safe into life, and the arms of those who would love him. No myrrh trees stood among those gorse and grasses, but an apple tree blended into hawthorns. Aphrodite might not even seek me out this time, while she pursues Adonis through the forests, trying over and over to win his love.

Groups of people were setting up stages, assigning roles and costumes, recruiting the new souls emerging from the cave. Fairies escorted goldfish back to ponds for the fishermen to dip. Sailors made me laugh as they shantied beside fiddlers, leaping off barrels like squirrels after acorns. I breathed in the bliss and let myself fold down.

Sunrise at the equinox stirred life underground. Instructions were passed through the network of fungi at each level to guide my ascent.

Cormorants, kestrels and ravens signalled the ‘all clear’, while crickets clicked and beetles stamped flamenco up on the ground. Nymphs climbed to the surface to scatter their cocoons, their species unrecognizable until jewel colours flashed and quadruple wings extended, with the same delicate lines Leonardo sketched for his human flight suits. Dragonflies, damselflies, hoverflies all hummed, their legs and wings drumming the urge to emerge.

I rose straight, vertebra by widening vertebra and twisted towards the sun. My arms unfolded into branches and multiplied; my fingers to twigs; hair into buds, and my skin greyed and ridged, to protect the sap within. Home is now this heathland, a grassland perched on the top of the world. All around me is the mist and fading blues to grey of the horizon, curving with the Earth.

My blossom will nourish bees and I hold nests for the birds. Adonis butterflies, blue as my son’s eyes, will land when the sunlight hours lengthen. Moss will soon encase this bark to withstand the storms. I breathe deep, press my roots into the chalk and excitement spreads. Waiting, waiting for the lifted finger of the very first beat. To fondu, to chasse. Where to face? Tragedy, romance, comedy? Alive.

This is my time. This is my space, pre-mother once again. A low branch raises in attitude, stretching up through the side for support, aligning the spine. As my body grows taller, my upper branches release my spirit to the clouds, swirled by leaves, to join the red kites in flight. There is no traffic, no people, just the call of these kites, and always the water – trickling through the flints, feeding my roots.

A red kite recircles, Nijinsky’s coupe jete en tournant, freed from the earth. This precious earth, feeding us music from its core to sustain our spirits. The ghostly call is joined across the downs by whistles and shrieks. This bird is not alone, and neither am I. The tears of a mother’s separation now sweeten apples.

Look for a grove of apple trees, ten minutes’ walk north of the visitor centre. None too tall, leaning slightly to the sea; rough grey bark with red buds, unfolding to pink and white blossom; covered in songbirds and swarming with bees.

My apples will feed you with music and love.

Tracey Chippendale-Gammell
Picture Nick Victor

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